Her cravings MUST be satisfied!

I've been thinking about sweet sesame soup for days. When I was at Uwajimaya's last night, I looked for some prepackaged versions, but everything had lots of sugar in it. So instead of working in the studio today, I dug out the Chinese snacks cookbook and made myself some black sesame concoction.

You see, I can never follow recipes. To start out with, I never seem to have the right ingredients. The recipe asked for white sesames; all I have on hand is black. And on my way to the page with the sweet sesame soup recipe, I saw the sweet peanut soup recipe, and since I did have some peanuts, I decided to combine the two. And since I have some red dates, why, might as well throw those in too.

Mike thinks it looks like a bowl of mud with lumps in it, but I think it looks more like a bowl of tar. The project actually took a few hours -- the raw peanuts had to be blanched and the skins removed. And peanuts skins don't come off as easily as almond skins do.

I really did spend a little time in the studio, working on the gocco samples book. The new prints are signed and dated, and I'm amazed that the top layer of black is still feeling a little bit on the sticky side, so they're still on the print rack. I'm thinking about my next print, which will be a revisit of another image from a couple of years ago.

The new printer is plugged in, and now that I'm looking at it, I realize that it's not a flatbed copier/canner, which I suppose is ok, but I won't be able to copy/scan anything in the sketchbook, the pages will have to be torn out first. Sigh. AND, although the spec said it's 'network capable' (them tricky words), apparently, you need to buy a slightly different version to have it come 'network ready'. Bummer. But Mike says we can get around that fine.

The movie tonight was Becoming Jane, basically the Pride and Prejudice story with Jane's life plugged in. Not sure how biographical it really is, but it was a sweet movie.