Nicci Thematic photography

Spirals and textures

Leanne Cole did a great video on how to add textures to your photos. However, I have to leave my art self-education efforts out of my daily agenda right now.

While I don’t get to draw, paint and do photo enhancement at the moment, the concept of texture and shape has been on my mind for a while and a few items have entered my photo collection. There’s some texture but it wasn’t added, it was just there. Really what I’ve been thinking about doing is turning these into canvases, something I invented in Corel Painter Essentials. I will show some examples sometime.

A shell (white balance and color enhanced in GIMP):

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This is a drain in the Champs de Mars park (where the Eiffel Tower is) in Paris. Decided to leave the photographer’s sneakers in there for a little more texture. 😉

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This is a Nothing Bundt Cake, white chocolate and blueberry:

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Yes, it was good!

Nicci Thematic photography

Dinner from the garden

Using this recipe: Eggplant green curry, by Garrett McCord, and substituting this overgrown yellow squash from the garden for the eggplant:

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and switching out the coconut milk with coconut water, cornstarch and a little soy milk (more healthful), we made this:

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which we enjoyed (relished) over brown rice.

Details of modifications:

Also added a few carrots and some broccoli. The broccoli, carrots and squash get cooked the longest.  The recipe has you pre-cook the eggplant for 3 – 4 minutes, which definitely works for eggplant but not for our rock-hard gourd, the carrots or the broccoli. These items needed to be cooked for half an hour. Sear them first, then lower the temperature, cover and simmer until soft. You can see how hard the squash was above, needed a heavy steel cleaver to get through it and to hack off the skin.

To make the coconut water substitution, use 2 cups of the coconut water to get the boil going. Only add the slurry of a couple heaping teaspoons of cornstarch at the end, drizzling the slurry around evenly over the pot, stirring constantly so it doesn’t make lumps. Then pour in a little soy milk, if desired, about a half a cup, to make it a bit white and creamy.

We used 4 Thai dragon peppers from last year’s garden and kept frozen. The heat was a bit off the charts, not for the faint of heart.

This was a delicious, low-cal, vitamin-rich, and satisfying meal. Where’s the protein? you ask. (If protein is important, as it is for me right now as I’m trying to build muscles at the gym using Lou Schuler’s New Rules of Lifting for Women program, which has you up your protein levels to 30%, which I track by using myfitnesspal.com.) Have some nonfat, Greek yogurt with slivered almonds for dessert.