It’s icy and snowing. Love snow.
Here’s a recipe we worked up that’s dirt-simple if you like curry.
Needed: sour cream, curry powder, chicken strips or leftovers of chicken, pork or beef. Rice. Broccoli, raw, your discretion.
Cooking rice: One hour before dinner: put 1 level measure of rice into the pot. put 2 level measures of water. Bring to boil until froths. Remove from heat, let set for an hour. Doesn’t matter what measure of rice you use, teacup, measuring cup, etc. The ratio for white rice is always 2x the water as you have rice.
The sauce. Steam broccoli in small saucepan with chicken, pork, beef strips, leftovers, etc. (Omit broccoli if you have no broccoli. you can also use green beans or any ‘quiet’ green veggie like peas, snow chestnuts, etc)
Have a very little water (one tablespoon) left. You may have to pour some off. Add slightly heaping tablespoon of curry powder, any flavor; add half a cup of sour cream. Cook until bubbling. Pour onto rice in individual dishes.
Voila. Curried chicken, pork, beef, whatever. Curry comes in Vindaloo, Madras, yellow, red, green, etc. Take your pick. You can also add nuts, even citrus fruit, raisins, sky’s the limit.
Counting that rice cooks unattended, you can start with cooked rice, whip up the sauce in five minutes and have it ready in five more.
Hmm, I’m not sure I have sour cream on hand. I’ll save that for later. I tend to use brown rice, the same rice to water proportions. My curry powder is some generic curry powder from one of the big spice selling companies. (Spice Island, maybe.)
That sounds great. Mango or oranges might work for a fruit addition, diced. It sounds good as given, though.
The bit about omitting the broccoli reminds me of the Cowboy Bebop episode where Jet fixes “beef with (bell) peppers” and Spike complains, “But there’s no beef. How can it be beef with peppers, when there’s no beef?” (Paraphrasing.) We don’t know from the show if Jet did anything but stir-fry the sliced bell peppers; bouillon or flavor packets, for instance.
I’d just fixed pinto beans with a little curry powder and a can of mild Ro-Tel tomatoes with chilis on Monday, cooked down just shy of refried beans (frijoles refritos). Good stuff! Though I couldn’t taste any hot/spicy from the chilis, and I’m not a chili head. It might’ve been fine with a can of hot Ro-Tel, even for my taste, with the beans offsetting that.
Dean, knew I should’ve gotten some sour cream at the store today. 🙂 Thanks, will try this before Christmas.
fat flakes of fluffy frost falling…..okay, okay!!!! Robert Frost would not appreciate the alliteration, either.
Curry powder tastes far better if it is cooked in a little oil before adding to the mix. The hotter cooking in oil releases more of the flavors.
True. So you can add it while the veggies-chicken are in, and add the sour cream in due time.
heheh, I’m making a specail trip to the store tomorrow so I can get what I don’t have. I get to brave the weekend-before-the-holiday grocery shoppers. I think I need an outfit like the guys in Hatari before the monkeys in a tree scene. 😉
…Or I was. Nope, rescheduled for Monday, on account of my cabbie had a fare to Baton Rouge last night. He claims. Might be. If so, he could use the money. Heh, as long as I get to the store again to get what I’m out of, I don’t mind. At this rate, chicken curry might be my entrée for Christmas dinner. Not that I’d mind that.
BCS, if you like curry and can’t get out to the store often, next time pick up a couple of cans of coconut milk. It gives curry the same creamy consistency with a little more exotic kick, and you can keep it around until needed. Curry over rice = YUM! In our house, sour cream usually disappears as soon as DH brings home a new bag of chips!
It’s also real good with hot chili over spaghetti with sliced pickled (ie in a jar) jalapenos. (The fresh ones can be pretty hot.) Sour cream takes just enough fire out. Add melted cheese…one of Jane’s favorite dishes.
I have at least one can of coconut milk on hand. Might end up using that. There’s a neat Cargo Bay Rice and Beans recipe from Firefly fandom that uses it:
http://www.shinyfiction.com/recipes/chapSideDish/cargo-bay-rice-and-beans.htm
You’ll want a big pot for that. It feeds plenty of people and can be adjusted as needed. I think I noted I use extra coconut milk, because the liquid is absorbed so much.
My regular cabbie isn’t so regular these days, and I’m expecting to have to look for an alternate, though I still want to gibe him business when I can.
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I reached a milestone with one of the fonts I’m working on, but I discovered it had never taken one of the crucial settings when I first set up the file. Ouch. The automated method to fix this won’t touch the Template layer and gives wrong (and fractional) scaling factor results. Double ouch. So I get to go in and scale things manually for each and every glyph on two layers (Outline and Template). Oh, how I wish I’d discovered this earlier! 279 characters. Better than starting from scratch and redrawing it all. At least it’s before I did the Latin Pro and Small Caps characters, or tried the Greek and Cyrillic sets. So…I have hours of work ahead before I can get back to start kerning and spacing the font, and before I can start on the other characters needed for a modern font. But still, I’m making progress toward my goal. I still might be able to submit it for review in January.
There’s a critical review process where they look over the font for anything that needs to be corrected or could use editing. Once it passes that, it can be made available for sale. So there’s a waiting period for review, then initial payment, then another wait before you receive a minimum disbursement of income. So in that sense, it’s a little like novel writing, feast or famine, until you have a steady income going. There are fashions in type design and usage, and people’s tastes vary for what is useful and looks good. In other words, you could have a font that sits there on the shelf and sells once in a while, or you could have a steady potboiler, or you could have a new workhorse, or it could be a fad, or a wild success that stays popular after the initial run. So…we’ll see. I really need a stable, increased income. Really, really.
I’m working on other designs, on the theory that if I do a few fonts with one or two styles, display or special use stuff, while working on larger font-families with several faces, then this gives me my best chance to get a steady flow going. Also because I have a backlog of ideas and drafts, and might still be able to find a usable backup of my old files from the 90’s. Maybe. Not likely, but maybe. I get plenty of ideas, but I’m only now nearing the point of getting my first two or three designs into the review process.
I will let folks know how things are going as I make progress. When I have things further along, I still may need to ask a few people to give some opinions and do some real-world test runs to see how the drafts do, before they go out into the world at large.
My tastes run to readable, legible type. If you have to guess what letter that shape is, the ordinary reader (or font buyer) won’t like it or find it as useful. There’s room in that for stately classics as well as wild, fun, hip, flashy designs. Gotta have a range there.
What I anticipate doing, in order to get things out there, is to do the basic OpenType Standard character set, 279 characters, which gets most Western European languages. Then I’ll have a version upgrade to the OpenType Latin Pro character set, probably including Small Caps, maybe including Greek and Cyrillic, since those two are so related to Latin letters anyway. That’s a jump from almost 300 characters to over 800. However, it’s so wanted / needed today that I’d consider it a free upgrade to people who get the first version, as an incentive. I also know from my own experience what I’m willing to pay for fonts, such as a large font-family. So I know about what price level I want to use. I’d rather get more sales, popularity, and usage by making them affordable.
So…well, a setback, but still making progress. Not sure yet how long it’ll take to power through scaling and adjusting each of 279 characters in 2 layers. It might go quicker than I think. Sure hope so. Man, that’s gonna be tedious, a pain to do. But once I get that done, I can get back to working on the next milestone with it, kerning and spacing the basic set, then producing the extended Pro glyphs. But whew, this takes a lot of work, even if you’re fast.
Progress, progress. Eyes on the Prize, I’m telling myself.
Ugh, that was far longer than I thought it was going to be. Er, in future, I’ll post something like that to my own blog and post a link. Yikes. Apologies, esteemed hostess and fellow fans.
No problem, bcs. Jane and I went through this when we designed the font for the second Ivrel graphic novel. Interesting process! You should have seen us pasting hte lines of print onto the artwork—you notice that your partner has a line of pithy dialogue—picked up when one sat down. OTOH, we were wearing chemical masks because of the glue, so vision was impaired.
The Christmas Cancan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E-47VmFopE
Oh wow, that is Awesome! Hahaha! Their “Let It Go” is good too.
Hmm. They really, really need a version with guys and girls lined up actually doing the can-can to that! Hahahah!
Heheheh. Oh, the joys of pasteup and art boards. Sitting behind me, with a cluttered half-height filing cabinet in between, is a large light table / drafting desk with a hot waxer brayer. Hmm, I need to clear the clutter. I hardly ever use the waxer anymore and probably ought to put in in drawer. I can imagine art boards spread out all over for the book, with fiddly bits of dialogue for the balloons awaiting pasteup. The glue or wax can come unglued for various reasons, mostly heat or paper absorption. LOL, at the prospect of finding pithy dialogue pasted to the partner’s derrière. — Comics and manga and graphic novel designers have lettering artists who specifically write in the dialogue into the balloons. Then they moved to either that or typing it with computer fonts they created from such calligraphy. Now, they tend to have the artwork scanned or created directly on the computer, and fill in the lettering there. For ebooks, these are usually artwork pages viewed under zoom magnification. As far as I know, no one has tried putting in alternate content with actual text in a matrix of panels, as though it were the script to a play on a storyboard, though that seems like an obvious solution. — Very interesting stuff. (By the way, Blambot and Comicraft are both font studios run by current lettering artists who’ve done some great (and fun) work.
I took the night off, but then woke up during the night. So I worked on the font scaling. It went faster than I thought. It took only three hours to do all but the composite characters, which are the accented letters, anything where components don’t overlap or touch, which would cause unsightly problems, if, for example, the font is outlined / stroked. I estimate a little less than three hours to adjust those. The base components are scaled. Now I have to go into each composite character and make sure the accents are properly aligned over/under the letters, everything’s spaced right, and change the set-width (how much width the letter and its side bearings would take up on the page). I was dog tired after last night, woke up this morning, but fell back asleep and just now woke up. So around 12 hours continuous sleep. I can’t remember the last time I’ve slept that much. I’m generally lucky if I get four hours in a row, even now. So, I estimate less than three hours, and I’ll have the composites done, and then I’ll be back where I was, ready to kern and space what I’ve got.
I still have to figure out how to add “alternate glyphs,” where you have, say, the single- and double-bowled a and g, angled and h-like y, right-angled versus C-curved E, and so on. There is no straightforward way to add alternates within the font editor. It relies on an external file that’s linked in. But that file must list everything. So I still have to hunt down how to do this properly. I’m part-way there.
I’d actually love to try doing the Greek and Cyrlllic letters. You’re halfway there anyway with the Latin letters and the few math/science Greek letters in the basic set. And besides, they’re beautiful and it’d be fun to do. — Note, the Irish accented letters are in the extended Latin Pro set, but so are the Slavic (Central European) letters, and other, more exotic ones. I want to do those, but now I’d rather get this basic set into the review process and do an upgraded character set as a next stage.
There is something awe-inspiring when you are drawing out letters that were first written on pottery and monuments and scrawled on walls, carved into wood and metal, written on papyrus and parchment, all the way from Cadmus to the Trajan Column to rune-staves to Bede and Beowulf and Chaucer. Who would’ve ever thought we’d still put in digamma, san, koppa? — Or yogh along with wynn, eth, and thorn, the latter two of which are still used.
In the mid-1980’s, when the Mac first came out and I was in college, there was a scholarly catalogue in the university bookstore by the software, which showed obscure special fonts for things like polytonic Greek and Cyrillic and Devanagari, among others. Now, it’s becoming expected for new fonts to support the full European / Latin set with all the accents you can throw at it, with often all of Greek and Cyrlillic for ambitious, adventuresome designers. At least one Indian design firm is producing English and Indian support in their fonts. It’s amazing to see this. — It’s amazing because people need this and expect it now for global communications, for marketing and writing and news reporting, and just for being able to write easily to friends, family, business colleagues…. It’s a sign we’re moving toward a more connected world without such barriers…and maybe sneak that past the ones who don’t like such things.
Good stuff out there that goes mostly unnoticed among all the bad news.
Ray Larabie has done a font for the Canadian government that supports First Nations languages. (The story has an image of the character set.)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-150-typeface-supports-english-french-indigenous-languages-1.3372468
Is that related to the Cherokee ideographs, or is it completely different? I only know that the Cherokee language has its own alphabet and not well enough to see if there are commonalities.
No, the Cherokee alphabet is unrelated. I’d need to look up the official nomenclature for the Canadian symbols. However, those were developed by linguists and native speakers. The Cherokee alphabet (actually, it’s a syllabary) was created solely by Sequoyah. He’d seen English books in a white settler’s personal library and came up with a writing system for the Cherokee language. It was a landmark in alphabetic and linguistic history. It’s unique in having the longest continuous history of an active written record of native people in their own language, including the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, still published today. A white missionary, whose name I can’t recall, helped with the creation of fonts of Cherokee type, establishment of a printing press, the newspaper, a translation of the Bible, and publication of other books, and was adopted into the Cherokee nation as a result of his lifelong efforts.
The Canadian symbols were created, if I recall correctly, in the early 20th century, by linguists and native speakers, to represent the many sounds of a large number of native languages in Canada. I don’t know how widely used it is. My impression is that the Latin alphabet is more commonly used. But I haven’t seen enough on the system. There’s a Wiki article. I’ll see if I can find the name. If I recall, it’s syllabic too, rather than alphabetic. Plus, there are a number of flavors of consonants and vowels to account for. The system has a logically planned structure so symbols are related phonetically.
Via Wiki: The official names are the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabary, the Inuktitut Syllabary, and the Cree Syllabary. The Cree version was apparently the original, then modified for Inuktitut, and then unified. Nunavut, Canada is the region or location for government and is listed as having source texts. From the articles, one system dates to the 1760’s, the Cree Syllabary by James Evans in the 1830’s or 1860’s, and the unified revision dates to the 1970’s. The article on the Cree Syllabary shows a different variation, so these may be two or three separate but historically related systems.
Source Cited:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut#The_Canadian_syllabary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cree_syllabics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut_syllabics
Very interesting.
The Cree alphabet offends my (mathematically influenced) sense of symmetry. While the top middle letters invert, v^, the lower letters mirror, qp.
These languages seem to follow the pattern of Polynesian languages in having no trailing consonants in syllables. Japanese has, I think, only -n; but actual pronunciation varies, for example, the common suffix -shita turns to -sh+ta. I wonder if some linguist has written a lay explanation of the evolution of language from mainland Asia to the Americas.
Unicode seemingly is trying to include everything, including Chinese, Japanese Kanji and Korean, the CJK Unified Ideographs. But problems seem to always crop up, such as whether you want ascenders and descenders on Arabic numerals, such as in the font Georgia. In theory, you ought to be able to choose them in any font, but Georgia is the only font I’m aware of that defaults to them.
While I’m all for the preservation on languages and cultures, having a standard lingua franca is very useful, whether it be Latin, French, or English.
That is a neat article, PJ, thanks! Ray Larabie (and Typodermic Fonts) have been around a long time, with some early free fonts, updated over the years, and fonts for sale via his company and other font vendors. Another notable indie designer is Nick from Nick’s Fonts. Also, Michael Everson of EverType is a Cherryh fan. He’s very active in Irish font design and in linguistics.
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I spent about three hours redoing the composite characters. It was quicker than checking where the accents were and adjusting them. I also spent about an hour and a half making some changes and adding a handful of characters. I still have some adjustments to make, I’m sure. There are details on a few letter shapes that don’t feel / look right to me. One thing about this is that what is geometrically right according to plan doesn’t always look right visually. Those are usually related, but sometimes, you have to make adjustments so it looks right.
A printout test shows, hmm, what I have may or may not be lighter than most book-weight fonts. I’m going to do a comparison with a fwe common fonts to see.
Hah, the spacing and kerning on this raw draft, though, is awful. I have a lot of work ahead to get that to look right.
Overall, I’m happy this didn’t take as long as I’d feared, and the results are good. Not bad for a day’s / night’s work.
Aha, I do have a can of coconut milk on hand. There may be another. I’ll use it for the chicken curry.
My not so regular cabbie didn’t show or call this morning. When he called now (noon) he gave a plausible reason…except I think he told me that once before, and that can’t happen twice in reality. So…I’m not sure what’s up, whether he’s covering for something or whether it was genuine.
I’ve made an appointment for next week. At this point, I expect to have to look for a new regular cabbie. I want to cut him some slack, but this keeps happening. I’ll continue to use him if possible, but…dang.