Cooking: Pear Pie

If there was one thing I was determined to make with our pears this year, it was a pear pie. Maybe that was just because I'm a Pushing Daisies fanboy (*sob*), but with the latest Bombcast playing on my MP3 player, make one I did, and it turned out great, even without the mood-enhancing homoeopathic drugs. :D

I used the pie recipe here and I got a recipe for the crust from here. For some reason, pie dishes seem pretty hard to come by locally, so I busted out a new 9-inch silicon baking tin instead. It's not too deep, so it wasn't a bad substitute. I stuck fairly close to the recipe , but I didn't have any lemons at hand, so the peel wasn't an option and reading over it again, I see that I didn't dot the top of the pie with butter either (doh!). It turned out really well either way with a crumbly, buttery crust and a lovely, surypy, fruity filling. Damn, I'm hungry again now.

How Not to Photograph a Jack O' Lantern

While we're still on the subject of jack o' lanterns, here's a selection of my botched attempts to take a decent photograph of one two years ago. I was making do with a crappy Vivitar camera at the time, which was always terrible in low light situations. When I couldn't take a decent shot with that, I resorted to the camera in my mobile phone. Why do you need to know any of this information? I have no idea. :D

Jack-O'-Lantern Time

It's that time of year again, or at least it was a few days ago. Here's my latest attempt at pumpkin carving. I was sort of making the design up as I went along and you can really tell. :D Hope everyone had a fun Halloween!

Cooking: Pear Crumble

Autumn's just passed which means the mounds of apples and pears from the fruit trees outside are just about gone. This year I thought I'd try a few different things with the pears, beginning with a pear crumble. I got the recipe here, which usefully allows you to scale up or down the quantity of ingredients according to the number of servings you want. I scaled it up to four servings, grabbed some pears and got cracking on it.

I cut up eight smallish pears, which I thought would be about the same as six regular ones, put them in a casserole dish and mixed in the lemon juice. After I'd made the crumble (without nuts, which I didn't have :D), it was pretty clear that the crumble mix wouldn't even cover the pears fully, so I doubled the amount of everything in it. Well, except for the spices, I just put in a teaspoon of each in total. Once I had the crumble on, I popped the dish in the oven and hoped for the best.

The first batch was really tasty, but I thought the crumble was a bit too sweet, so I reduced the amount of sugar to half from then on. I've also tried adding some vanilla to the pears instead of the lemon juice, which was quite nice. I've yet to try adding the nuts back in, but I'm kind of sceptical about them adding much to the dish.

deviantArt Update #2

Disperse

by JiliK - Oct 21, 2009

Another DA upload. This time it's a new wallpaper I inadvertently made while messing around with an image in Paint Shop Pro.

deviantART Update

Spray Guy

by JiliK - Oct 20, 2009

As well as adding the Arty Screensaver to my DA Gallery today, I put up this little guy, who I doodled in MS Paint with just the Airbrush tool around Christmas 2006. I've been trying to do something with him for a long time, but I finally gave up and decided to put up the original image. He kind of reminds me of a lecturer I had at the time actually. :D

Arty Screensaver

TL;DR Version: I've remade a screensaver from my old site, get it here.

Back in the Spring of 2000 I was in the middle of finishing up my Junior Cert. art project. The theme I'd picked for it was "Summer Memories", so in the run-up to doing the final painting, graphic design, 3D and craft pieces I was cranking out practice drawings and paintings of flowers, butterflies and the like as well as design ideas for my final project submissions.

In the Summer of that year I took some of those drawings (and some other stuff) and made them into a little screen saver. I called it the Artwork Screensaver and uploaded it to my old web site on the soon-to-be-closed-down GeoCities.

A couple of months ago, I set about remaking that screensaver with higher resolution images and lots of new screens. I put the finishing touches to it a few weeks ago and popped it up on my web site, where you can grab it, should you feel the need to do so.

After I'd finished, I thought it would a nice idea to go through the saver screen by screen and give a little background on the bits and pieces of feeble artwork it contained. And that's exactly what we're going to do. Hey, come back!



Screen 1: How abstract. This comes from a not-so-great design I entered in Telecom Eireann's Design a CallCard competition in 1997, in which I was one of many, many runners up. Seriously, there were about seven in our school alone. For the original screensaver I scanned in a photocopy of the design (TE kept the original), cropped it to this and messed about with the image a bit in a program called Repligator, I think.



Screen 2: Two flowers I drew one day at home while I was messing around with some pastels. I'm pretty sure I was finished with the whole art project at that stage, so I guess these were done on my own time.



Screen 3: A little drawing I did sometime early in 2000. After having seen this documentary on a modern artist one night, I decided that anyone could crank out the type of stuff he was doing. Within the next few days I set out to draw something as arty and pretentious as possible and this was what I came up with. I really liked the drawing so it got included as the third screen in my super-pretentious Artwork Screensaver™. I think they call that "hypocrisy"