ProTip: A stainless steel baking sheet in a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes can cause 2nd degree burns rather easily.

And, for the record, first aid for a mild 2nd degree burn (redness plus blisters) is NOT to put butter on it. Think about it: butter is fat, and fat can be used at very high temperatures to cook food–not exactly cooling. Aloe, however, is good for minor burns and, of course, commercial burn creams (if you can still get Silvadene in your area and aren’t allergic to sulfa drugs, it’s the best). Cool water and a well-wrapped gel pack are a good idea (if it’s very bad or very large, seek immediate medical attention) and your preferred pain killer (Ibuprofen, Aspirin, Tylenol) because it probably will hurt.

Especially if it’s along a muscle that flexes when you hold a pencil to draw with.

I was pretty disappointed in myself when I did that Saturday night and even more dismayed when it seemed like it was going to seriously impede my drawing progress that evening. But I managed (thank you ibuprofen!) to draw the last 5 pages of Little Shop of Tapas that night. Sunday I inked the lettering for chapter 1 after laying out and pencil-lettering the comic for chapter 2: Spoon! After today, the first 4 pages of Spoon! are complete. According to my calculations, I’m 29% through the required penciling.

Three day weekends are awesome. I only wish there were more of them to be had. Too bad it’s back to bed by 11 tonight and business as usual for the rest of the month. But I’m encouraged by the progress.

Spoon! is the story of a small island nation that is alternately ruled by two neighboring islands, each occupying in shifts. Only now, one of the factions doesn’t want to leave, they want it all for themselves. Jud and Ami begin this chapter separated, each dropped into a different faction but they meet up soon enough, befriend the natives and help them to overcome their would-be rulers.

If that story sounds familiar, it should. This is the foodie version of Dune–the Hunters and the Gatherers fighting over Spice Island. I think it’s a fitting opener to our chapter on Soups, Stews and other Stove-top items. Spices are something that can make or break a dish. Used well, spices enhance flavors and enrich a dish. Used ill, they can render a dish absolutely inedible. Time to get to know your spice cabinet a little better.

Until I realize that I’m only 16% through the comics.

Crap.

But hey! There’s a holiday next Monday and I WILL make the best of that day drawing my fingers off. And as much of this week as possible (I spent a lot of Sunday blogging for the week so I could be freer in the evenings to draw; we’ll see how that pays off.) I can’t believe how much harder it is to draw a page of a completely fictional story compared to the pages I’d draw, ink and be done with in a night (or less) for my own comic about my life. It’s tough to pull these worlds out of your head, didn’t you know?

Well, neither did I.

So the webcomics will remain on hiatus for September and I’ll see how things look at the end of the month as to whether I can resume them in October. I miss telling the other stories, like friends who are on vacation, but this is the way it needs to be.

And because I haven’t posted a scan recently, here’s a couple of panels I’m really proud of from the last few pages.

Panels from Intro, Page 5

Panels from Little Shop of Tapas, Page 7

Back to the drawing board–literally!

Even though the physical demands of this week weren’t horrible (far from it!) it all boils down to routine.

I am a creature of habit. My habits were trashed this week.

Which is why I feel like complete and utter noodles-for-brains tonight. I described it as being in limbo on twitter. Todd calls it blah. It’s all correct and why tonight is going to be an early one. I’ve got a page in progress that I want to finish up then I’ll probably call it.

Oh, and school (both local and college) started back today which means traffic hell and needing to get up earlier to compensate.

What was that about routine?

Mom had surgery Monday morning and, first things first, everything went well. They were able to do things the “easy” way (laparoscopic-robot-laser stuff) so she was home the next day and is mending very well. It also helped that my aunt came into town to be there at the hospital and for the week following which, I admit, took a lot of the pressure off us as far as after-care went. But it was also a massive week at work (which usually happens every month around the 10th, it’s when we pay bills and usually when the bulk of jobs to be invoiced come to me, as well–whee!) so I was dragging every night, very little time to mentally compose during the day while dealing with paperwork, etc. Just a rough week.

And we’ve been keeping Molly, Mom’s French Bulldog, since last Sunday night. Thankfully Todd has been doing most of the doggy care.

So what am I complaining about?

Nothing, really, but I was feeling a lot of expectant pressure at the beginning of last week. Brain drain.

But enough about the past!

This week… well, it actually might not be so hot, either. Sure, work has calmed back down to normal levels (knock on wood!) and Todd’s still taking most of the Molly-chores, but Aunt M is back in Jersey so I’ll be stopping by Mom’s each evening to check on her. Not that it’s a problem or an imposition or anything (don’t want to rack up bad-daughter points!) it’s just that it puts me getting home later and who knows what THAT’s going to do, you know?

The up side? Because there definitely is one: all 16 pages of the Chapter 1 comic are laid out and lettered. Page 1 is even drawn to tight pencils because the costume ideas finally clicked as I was laying it out (love it when that happens–it also shows how much whim goes into my projects–tons of advance planning, yes, but also a lot of last-second decisions)!

Chapter 1 is the Appetizers and Snacks chapter and the comic is titled Little Shop of Tapas. If you think that sounds a bit like Little Shop of Horrors, well, you’d be correct! I did mention I was doing parodies of movies for each comic story, yes? Well, instead of a flower shop we’ve got a diner. Instead of the man-eating plant we’ve got a Beholder-like window in the swinging door with lots of little mouths that are very, very picky eaters but only when it comes to repetition–they don’t like the same things more than once. So our trio has to help the employees figure out how to satiate and, eventually, obliterate the monster.

It was originally going to be set in a 50s soda shop/diner but then I read Fix the Pumps (by Darcy of the Art of Drink blog) and learned a bit about the original 1800s soda fountains and the cover was all steampunk/mad scientist and, yeah, it’s now set in a steampunk soda shop/diner. Time unimportant. They’re only going to be there for 16 pages, after all.

This week will concentrate on the hardcore penciling of the remaining 15 pages of this story. I’m not saying I’ll get them all penciled this week, but I’m certainly going to make the effort! Thursdays post is still up in the air–I have something brewing in the back of my mind for it, we’ll see if it ferments.

Oh, and I mentioned that there were some other things that just *had* to get done last week? One of them is this: Cocktails for a Cure, my small part of the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Walk fundraiser this year. Please check out the Cocktails for a Cure page over at Sips & Shots for the full details, but I’m offering cocktail prints as well as a portion of sales from Character Cocktails donated to the cause.

The rest, well, I’m still trying to do too much (quelle suprise) but there’s just a few things I need to get taken care of and life is being life, but work continues apace. No worries there!

When measuring ingredients you can do it by one of two ways: Weight or Volume. Which you choose depends on what kind of ingredient needs to be meted out.

Weights are, obviously, done with a scale and you can pick up a decent digital scale that does both grams and ounces/pounds for not too much of an investment.

Greetings, Liquid Measures

Liquids will (almost) always be measured by volume. They have this pesky habit of not holding a shape that makes them tough to pile on a scale.

The smallest unit is an ounce (abbreviated oz.) and, yes, that’s a shot glass in the picture to the left. It makes it a cinch to measure ounces and the fractions thereof.

8 oz. (sometimes written as fluid ounces of fl. oz.)=1 cup
2 cups = 1 pint (pt)
2 pints = 1 quart (qt)
4 quarts = 1 gallon (gal)

If you need more than that, well, you’re dealing in serious quantities and why do you need this lesson?

They can also be measured by teaspoons and tablespoons (3 tsp = 1 Tbsp, 1 Tbsp = 1 ounce) but you usually get into this with extracts and specialty oils.

Oh, and the above? That’s all Imperial measures, what we use here in the US and every other place that hasn’t gone Metric. Metric uses that nice base-10 systems where everything can be broken down infinitesimally from their main unit of a Liter. Maybe we’ll do Metric another day.

Let’s march on. In an Imperial fashion.

Measures with a Dry Sense of Humor*

Dry ingredients can be measured by volume–in cups–or by weight–ounces and pounds or (Metric) grams.

So, if you can measure both liquids and dry bits in cups, why do you need two different sorts of measurers?

Simple: the flat-topped dry measures allow you to scoop the flour, sugar, etc. into the correctly-sized cup and then, with a straight implement of some sort (the back of a butter knife, your finger, whatever) scrape off the excess. This gives you an exact cup (or whatever). Liquid, on the other hand, has that tendency to spill over edges plus doesn’t tend to form a flat top. In order to accurately measure liquids you need to be able to see through the vessel (which is why so many are glass or clear plastic) at eye level to see exactly where the curve is in the center–that’s the actual measure of what’s in the glass (technically known as the meniscus).

That, and using the big liquid measures for dry invites the habit of shaking and, thereby, compressing the ingredients within. Something you generally don’t want to do.

Now, what’s the difference between fluid ounces (liquid) and weighted ounces (dry)? Isn’t a cup a cup no matter what?

Nope.

If you were to weigh the amount of flour that a single cup of the dry type contains, it’d actually be closer to 4 ounces in weight, not the 8 ounces of volume you’d expect. See the problem?

Let’s go back to our cheese example from last week: an 8 ounce (weight) block of cheddar will, when shredded, yeild 2 cups (volume) or more. And not even food related, just imagine how much more of, say, feathers you’d have to have to weigh a pound compared to, say, lead. It’s sorta like comparing a pound of pork to a pound of raw baby spinach–there’s a BIG difference.

If it’s a dry ingredient (or at least not liquid–moist, like brown sugar or shredded pork, still coints as dry) and it says ounces, weigh it.

Finally, is there any time you can substitute volume for weight one-to-one?

Yes–water and things of similar ilk fall to this little ditty:

A pint is a pound the whole world round!

A fluid pint is 2 cups, 16 ounces. A pound is 16 ounces. This is one of those times when they are, truly, equal. So on the rare chance your making something that calls for 2 pounds of water (or similar liquids–cream is heavier than water, but skim milk is pretty close to the original: thicker is denser is heavier) you know you can use 2 pints or half a gallon and you’re golden!

Intro Pages 1-3

True, I’d hoped to get more than 3 pages this week but, well, Monday night’s not exactly done, either. But I wanted to get the update out before I got distracted by panels and pages again.

Recipes to the Rescue

Something came in today’s mail that you might find interesting. Seems Better Homes & Gardens thought a comic book-ish cookbook wasn’t a bad idea around 2000 and put one together. I found my copy for under $5 on eBay but there are plenty of copies of Recipes to the Rescue: Thrilling Kitchen Adventures…Just in the Nick of Time? for similar prices via Amazon’s Marketplace.

It’s quite full of the bright colors and exaggerated drama about needing dinner or snacks in an all-fired hurry. By my count it contains 73 recipes all with short ingredient lists and quick prep times. Plenty of overly concerned faces grace the pages but there’s no pictures of the food. And I was pretty cool with the ideas they were presenting until I came across the Fish Fillet Muffuletta.

The hell?

Now, I’m all for new twists on old favorites but there are some things that, if you change their basic components, they are no longer that thing. A muffuletta is one of them.

If you’ve never had this classic New Orleans sandwich, it’s made of salami, ham, olive salad, cheese and garlic all on a round loaf of bread. Frozen fish planks, coleslaw mix and salsa–salsa?!–cannot possibly compare.

Fish-plank sandwiches might be quite tasty… I think it’s just a stretch to call it a muffuletta.

That egregious lack of judgement aside, the rest of the recipes look fairly simple and tasty, worth checking out even if just for the novelty factor.

~~~oOo~~~

Speaking of novelty factor, I finally have a new episode of my podcast ready for consumption. Travel-themed music for your listening pleasure at randomactscomics.com/radio!

You might be looking at me like I’ve got a balloon whisk for a head but I do have a point, here. The more you cook, the more likely you’ll run into subtle variations in written recipes that can make a difference in the finished product.

There’s a way to read a recipe (preferably before you chop your first vegetable) that will prepare you for making a dish the right way the first time and never having to call for take out due to user error.

Once you’ve read through your recipe fully to make sure you’ve got all the ingredients and tools you need and find out if it’s going to take 2 hours in the oven or only a few minutes on the stove, look a little bit closer at your ingredients list.

There’s an order of operations that takes place with some ingredients that should be noted. For instance

1 cup flour, sifted  vs 1 cup sifted flour
1 cup cheese, shredded vs 1 cup shredded cheese

The things that happen after the comma happen after you’ve measured the ingredient in question. In the case of flour, settling occurs during packaging and shipping and sitting on your shelf. Some recipes (mostly baking, in the case of flours) are so fine-tuned that the difference in weight or volume between a cup of sifted flour versus the same cup of flour straight out of the bag can change the end results in not good ways.

The cheese is a little different but easier to see. If you buy a block of cheese to save money (you pay more for pre-shredded, after all) and remember reading somewhere that 1 cup equals 8 ounces, you might go and grate that whole 8-oz block of cheddar thinking you’re in the clear.

If the recipe called for 1 cup shredded cheese you’re going to end up with twice as much cheese as you need! Why? Magic.

No, not really–shredding cheese spreads out something that was very tightly compressed and it takes up more space.

Does food always grow when you break it down?

Nope.

Cubed bread into crumbs in an excellent example of how much certain items can compress when it’s shredded or ground. If the original state is light and fluffy or groups of them don’t fit together perfectly (nuts, I’m looking at you), breaking them down into smaller units allows them to fit together more tightly and get rid of all that trapped air.

And let’s not even start on rice. Read carefully, my friends, because 2 cups of cooked rice is very different from 2 cups rice, cooked. (We’re back to the expanding thing, again, if you weren’t sure.)

Next week we’ll talk about weights and measures and when conversions can be safely made! Until then… have you ever had a recipe mishap or seen something you just didn’t understand? All comments welcome!

Still, despite the schedule-shift I’ve got the first 6 pages laid out, lettered and loosely penciled. A slow start but one that will be built upon this week and continuing. For a fleeting moment I thought it would be feasible to finish the comic art in 6 weeks–sounds okay, right? Until I realized that it would mean 15 pages a week and, well, I’d have to quit my job and invest in mega wrist braces to manage that. So we’re looking at at LEAST through September before the art will be complete.

Not that I’m not going to try and speed things up! I’ve even given up sleeping in on weekends to allow more time for drawing! This may not seem like a whole lot but, well, I love my weekends when I never see the a.m. side of noon. It’s what gets me through the week! But I’m committed to this project, even if it means losing my luxury lie-ins.

Another thing we haven’t seen around here, lately, is a Food & Game Pairing. There’s a reason for this: they take time to research and prepare. I have the next one picked out but it’s probably going to wait until I’ve cleared some other things from the to-do list. In the mean time I’m going to be putting up some posts on basic recipe skills, pantry basics and must-have kitchen tools to get you ready to explore your kitchen. For instance, do you really know how to read a recipe? Know what should be weighed or measured and when conversions are equal and when they are not? Do you know what that tool does?

Stay tuned…

Another round of high-5s, gang: the scripts are finished!!!

The last 3 are longhand in my go-everywhere red notebook but they are finished. Come to think of it, there should have been more celebration involved when that last word was written.

Except that the work is far from over.

Sure, I’ve got scripts but now I’ve got to actually draw them. This week I’ll start laying out the first 6 pages, the prologue. Funny thing, the chapter stories are all 16 pages long. So much for my 6-12 estimate! With a 3 page epilogue that brings us up to 89 pages of comics alone! Plus title pages, techniques and all the other stuff we’re talking over 100 pages to draw.

Guess I’d better get busy!

In the interest of sharing, here’s my usual process:

1. Scripting. I used to do this with my weekly comics but it’s absolutely imperative with long-form. For instance, I didn’t determine one of the necessary kitchen features of the prologue until halfway through the prologue–major bummer if I’d had to go back and redraw pages because of that little detail.
2. Layout. Some of my scripts are very specific about how many panels per page and others are more free-flowing, writing down the beats that need to be hit and the dialog and I make the panel decisions when I actually get to the page.
3. Lettering. I hand letter. One reason is this keeps me from drawing stuff in a panel that’s just going to get covered up by words (working smarter, not harder!). The other reason is that I think hand lettering looks more organic with the page than even a font created from my handwriting would. It helps that I have good handwriting (being obsessive about my homework in high school paid off, folks!)–it’s not for everyone.
4. Pencils. I do tight pencils. That means a lot of detail. It’s what I’m most comfortable with–I’m never as happy with my inks if I leave the pencils too loose and I’ve been known to prefer my pencils to my inks.
5. Inking. This goes in two parts. Again, I start with the letters. Mostly because it requires different pressure on my hands than drawing figures. Same pen, different grip. It also goes faster. Figures are last and can take quite a while, switching to a smaller pen for the backgrounds. All told I probably draw everything 3 times. Then I spot any solid blacks there may be. I’m thinking of going to brush again for some of the lines, we’ll see when I get there.
6. Scanning. Hello, computer. Depending on the size of my originals, I might have to scan them in parts and stitch them together in…
7. Photoshop. See what I did there? I do very little work in Photoshop for my comics. Mainly I adjust the levels to drop out any pencil marks that made it through the scanning step (erasing is one of the worst jobs–if I had an intern that’s one of the things I’d make them do), adjust any glaring errors and resize it for print or web depending on the application.

When working long-form I like to work through each step through the whole work. In this case, 90 pages is a lot to do each in turn, so I’ll work through inking the lettering on each story chunk but hold off inking the figures until everything else is done so that there’s not a drastic style-difference between pages 1 and 90. Covers come last and, by then I should have my illustration list made up for the individual techniques and recipe spots.

And if you want a photo-peek of one of the techniques for the book–making gnocchi from scratch–check out the recent post over at Nibbles ‘n Bites!