Cafe Chloe and Kensington Grill

Last weekend Cameron's parents were in town which means that we got to eat really yummy food all weekend. Sunday, we had breakfast at Cafe Chloe, my new favorite breakfast spot and bike-ride-destination. It's a very cute French-style corner restaurant in East Village downtown. The interior is kind of squished (true to European style), but there is actually a lot of seating and it is pretty comfy. I've been here for brunch once before and I got the whole wheat pancakes with cherry syrup and applewood-smoked bacon and Cameron got two poached eggs over toast with wild mushrooms, pickled shallots, and truffle oil. YUM. This time I got the poached eggs with mushrooms and truffle oil and Cameron got the Croque Madame.

The eggs were perfectly cooked so that when you punctured the middle the yolk oozed out all over the toast and mingled with the mushrooms, shallots and truffle flavors. It felt really indulgent.

Sunday night, we had dinner with my parents and Cameron's parents at Kensington Grill (home of the best pasta dish I've ever eaten). It was restaurant week, so there was a limited menu, but maybe that was better, because we had a hard enough time deciding what to eat with only a few options. I opted for grilled asparagus with a poached egg and croutons for my first course (three poached eggs in one day!), some kind of crusted salmon with polenta, squash and a pink peppercorn beurre blanc for my main course, and key lime creme brulee with a coconut cookie for dessert. Pictures below...

That third picture was Cameron's ahi entree. I thought it was pretty. We were all so full after this dinner that we nearly rolled out of the restaurant. I'm not sure the truffle tater tots and shrimp waffle starters (we shared these before the meal) helped either...

Restaurant week has been extended another week, so if you are looking for some good restaurants to try out this weekend both of these were excellent!!

Drawing Hands

 This was my drawing homework over the weekend.

Now before you think I have some serious vision deficiencies or just really terrible hand/finger coordination, let me explain the rules for this homework. Yes, RULES. Or at least I like to think of them as rules:

1) draw three pictures of your hand; 

2) draw only the contours of your hand (no shading or filling in stuff); 

3) one of the pictures has to be of your right hand--so you have to draw it with your left hand;

4) you can't look at the paper, you can only look at your hand (the posed hand, not the drawing one).

Did you catch that last one? NO LOOKING AT THE PAPER AS YOU DRAW. This is really hard to do. 

So these are my three "blind contour" drawings of my hands. What do you think? Can you tell that one was drawn with the left hand? Keep in mind that if you pick up your pencil and forget where you put it down, you are pretty much screwed and you just have to guess where to start drawing again.

Here are some more hands from drawing class that we worked on in class on Monday. With these drawings, there was more leniency on looking at the drawing. For instance, you could look to see where to put down your pencil to begin a mark, then look away as you actually drew it. Also, these were copied from other drawings which is much easier task than drawing a real hand. When you draw from a two-dimensional thing, it has already demystified how to make something two-dimensional look three-dimensional, so you just kind of copy that. When you draw an actual three-dimensional thing, you have to figure out how to represent it on a flat piece of paper all by yourself.

I've found that I really like the nuances of hands. I think I would like to draw a lot more of them. I tried to draw them very quickly so my brain didn't have a chance to over-think what they were "supposed" to look like.

This exercise made me think of Matisse because he has this exceptional ability to convey a form or gesture with just the minimum amount of information. His drawings, paintings and sculptures exude emotion, tone, energy, and form, but have very few lines. He doesn't use shading to convey form, just contour, and even his color palette is extremely simplified. Here is one of my favorite compositions of his, maybe it will illustrate it better:

Henri Matisse- The Dance

I could stare at this painting all day.

BUB

I went to one of my favorite places yesterday: the art supply store. The one I frequent is Blick on India Street in Little Italy (the photo above is some graffiti art on the side on the store that I kind of liked). There is something about aisles of pigments, brushes, charcoals, and canvases that makes me feel all tingly and giddy. I don't even know what most of the stuff is, nor how to use it. I like to walk down the paint aisle and look at all of the completely saturated hues before they've been diluted, mixed, and spread across surfaces. I also like the brush aisle because it kind of looks like a field of wheat or something with all of those bunches of brushes sticking out of various containers. They are all sorts of sizes and shapes and are really really soft to touch. (Can't you just see me wandering through the store touching EVERYTHING... like little kid?) I don't know why I like them so much; I'm really not very artistic at all. I think I'm too analytical and systematic to just create things out of just pure ...whim. I usually need more structure than that (note to self: work on artistic spontaneity). So the painting materials totally intimidate me, and when I walk slowly down the aisles staring at all of the different tools, I don't really feel inspired to create, I just like being there...

I only needed to replenish some supplies for my drawing class this semester (that tiny pencil-style eraser is still eluding me). But I always cave at the art store and buy something "artsy" that I really just don't know what to do with, but maybe, just maybe, will inspire me to spend more time pursuing visual arts. So this was my purchase this time:

It's called BUB. It's basically this slightly creepy, kind of kitschy, art-doll-thing. It's a miniature BUB (only about as big as my hand) and the box advertised a mystery prop which turned out to be a spear. It's one of several characters, the original one is called Munny. You are supposed to customize it...draw on it, paint it, make clothes or props for it... Here are some Munny's that I thought turned out pretty cool.

Yeah, the buddha one is my favorite too.

So these are a little ambitious, I'm not sure I'll get this intricate with mine, but we will have to see... I was thinking of doing a Maori themed one (inspired by recent talks with Nhu about traveling to New Zealand, and discussions about indigenous tattoo practices).

I had my first art history class of the semester today. I generally like classes that leave you with more curiosity than you came with. I think this is going to be one of those classes. Tune in later to find out...

First day of the last year of college

Maybe it's because I only have two semesters left, but I was feeling very social and nostalgic today instead of my usual first day cautious/awkwardness that keeps me from speaking to anyone or raising my hand for the first few weeks of class. I feel as though time at USD is slipping away and I'm desperately trying to wring every last drop of educational experience out of it that I can. All of a sudden I want to check in with every great professor I've ever had just to talk about life and the cool things that completely rocked my world from their classes. I spent a good hour running around campus logging every professor's office hours into my calender so I would make sure to catch up with them at some point before the semester gets too crazy.

By the way, this is real, I really am this excited about school all the time, welcome to my brain. I nearly keel over in the bookstore when I see rows and shelves of all the possible things I could be learning. Sometimes I buy textbooks assigned to other classes just because they look cool (shifty glance to book on modern architecture bought last semester because I couldn't leave the aisle without putting it in my basket). That's enough of my obsessive textbook behavior, here are my classes for this semester:

ACCT 408-- Auditing
ARTH 394-- Whitman to Warhol: Democratic Cult
ARTV 101-- Introduction to Drawing
DSCI 303-- Operations Management
MUSC 424-- Art in the Soundscape
THRS 314-- Buddhist Faith & Practices

Today I had Drawing, Art in the Soundscape, and Buddhist Faith & Practices. Awesome.

My drawing professor is pretty cool. I tried to take this course last fall, but I had to drop it because I just didn't have enough time to complete the homework. The professor has these great wrinkles and bags under his eyes that make him seem like he's thinking really hard about something, or has thought really hard about pretty much everything. He was a philosophy major, so it really works out. I want to have great wrinkles some day. I know having wrinkles is really out of fashion right now, especially for women, but I really want some good ones some day. Maybe it is because I really like old people (thanks grandparents), but I have always liked wrinkles and I think they say a lot about the person you are. Because wrinkles form from the way you use your face. Consequently, I hope that my wrinkles will be mostly smiling ones, and maybe some very pensive ones as well. Here is a picture I took in the Philippines of a man with great wrinkles.

Do you see what I mean?

Anyway, that's enough about wrinkles. After drawing I had a 4 hour break, so I went to yoga before Art in the Soundscape. That class is kind of intimidating. The reason I'm taking it is because the professor is a genius (seriously, I'm pretty sure) and Paco wanted me to because he is taking it too. I'm not sure what to think about it yet...I'm sure I will have a lot more to say after I do some of the readings.

Last class of the day was Buddhist Faith and Practice which I am taking because it is taught be a Buddhist nun (like a monk). She is bald, and old, and wears a maroon robe every day. She has written a ton of material on Buddhism and is supposed to be a very strict teacher (of course she is strict, she lived in India and had to beg for her food to live). I read an interview of her in a textbook for my world religions class and in it she said that while she was studying to become a nun in India, she lived in a mud hut that she built with her hands and during the monsoon season it would get completely wiped out and she would have to rebuild it by hand every time. That being said, she was a very happy, bubbly person, not stoic and serious like her shaved head and robe suggest. At the end of class we tried meditating for a bit which I'm kind of used to from yoga, but I'm eager to see what she has to say about it.

It is kind of difficult to meditate. You have to sit with a straight back (I sat cross-legged on the floor), hands clasped, eyes almost all the way closed, and you have to just focus on your breathing and the moment. You can't fall asleep, you have to be "mindful" of things. So here are some thoughts that popped into my head while mediating today:
-my glasses feel very heavy on the bridge of my nose, maybe I should have taken them off first
-my shoe is poking my foot, maybe I should have taken them off also
-right now I'm very close to the ground, but the ground I'm on is really in the air because we are on the third floor, so actually I'm very far away from the ground and it's like I'm floating two stories from the ground while meditating
-maybe this is how it feels to ride on a magic carpet
-maybe I am not supposed to think about these kinds of things while meditating
-I'm glad I ate before class because otherwise my stomach might growl and everyone is being silent right now

So I'm probably not very good at meditating yet, but points for trying.

Celebration Meal--Tuesday, August 31

So I have a job lined up for after I graduate from college in two semesters. I'll be working for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC (yay!). But enough about that, this blog is not for talking about accounting, and if there is a blog for that, not even I want to read it...

Mostly this blog is about whatever I happen to be thinking about, eating, drawing, writing about, taking terrible photos of etc... Today I want to talk about the best soup in my life right now: nabeyaki udon from Izakaya Masa. I had this soup in celebration of getting a really awesome job before I even started my senior senior year. Izakaya Masa is this little, semi-hole-in-the-wall Japanese place in Mission Hills that Cameron and I are currently addicted to. For starters, it is open till 1:00 a.m. every night of the week except Mondays (closed), and it has great Japanese food for cheap. When you walk into the restaurant, all of the cooks and servers yell some Japanese greeting at you which makes you feel right at home. Also, the place has some of the weirdest decor I've ever seen. The walls and bar area are just littered in random Japanese paraphernalia, posters, writings, and toys. See dragon bobble-head picture below:

Some favorite dishes are: the saba (grilled mackerel) which is perfect with just a squeeze of lemon and some rice (yes mom, I can eat a whole fish now thanks to Cameron), home made shrimp gyoza, grilled beef tongue (spelled and pronounced tangue at the restaurant haha), and the yakisoba with octopus.

The best dish by far, however, is definitely the nabeyaki udon. I pretty much can't pass it up and I order it every time we go even if it is so hot that night that the server has to lend me a rubber band to tie back my hair because I'm sweating too much (yes, it's happened). This udon has spinach, tofu, imitation squid, tempura shrimp and the best part...a fried egg.

I know, I'm drooling too just thinking about it.