Cod and potato

Cod in a blender.

Microwaved potato pushed through a ricer.

All that starch locked in there, the microwaved potato, no more glue is needed to hold it together again, anything additional that's gluey for the purpose of gluing is going to add gluey-ness without contributing anything that's necessary and just end up a big gluey mess.

I really thought about an egg, I'm down to my last egg and I might have an egg emergency before I get around to replenishing them. So these potato cakes are incredibly light. Like potato cod clouds.

The side is a handful of dry garbanzo beans boiled ferociously under intense pressure where they quickly submitted and absorbed flavors included, bay, peppercorn, chile flakes, salt crystals and butter and garlic which also submitted in there. Then frozen lima beans tossed in to cook through.

You can make noodles out of this too by forcing the potato-cod through a piping bag into simmering water, use egg and flour in that case, but what are you going to do with a pile of potato-cod noodles that isn't done better in potato-cod patty form? Have a novelty I suppose. 

This is delicious as it is. There is butter in the beans and the potato-cod already through and through, a lot of it for one little potato and one little cod and one little handful of beans, and that is half a dressing throughout the whole thing, essential lemon completes it, all attention on lemon to pick up the flatness like tent poles lifting up the entire mass poking it up with pikes from underneath and sustaining it elevated. Lemon does that to fat. 

Win.

I want to say something.

I used this lens, Nikor 18-200, a nice broad zoom that really extends zoop zoop how every kid loves and it does a very nice job at extremes and all random points in between. It's impressive and gets very good reviews too. But Nikon buyers are notorious known for justifying their purchases. And it creeps, the weight of the barrel when mounted on a tripod, and good as it is, it's still the least excellent of four so I stopped using it. Just now picked it up again after a rather long hiatus and the creep stopped by itself! And the other lenses forced me to learn different things since then. So now this one is better than ever, but best of all is that it's the only one with stabilization which means I can be jittery and it will help. So no need for actual tripod. But sadly, even if I do use a tripod with this lens, and even though it nails it to the pixel, being a zoom it is not possible to have the fidelity at a broad range of focal points that dedicated fixed lenses have at one. And that's a shame. So the thing I'm saying is I'm having fun with this neglected but capable carefree lens.

Okay two things to say.

Check out the slop with the beans and the depth of field. My food designer self is interacting with my photographer self and messing up my chef / consumer self. I fussed over the beans, if Mum saw me she'd whack my hands and tell me to stop playing around with my food, the beans just so at the edge, pushed with chopsticks, moved and arranged so they looked naturally slopped on the edge, wouldn't do to look labored. Mum does not like that fussing around with food.

One time I walked into a club and a fellow I don't know very well and has never been all that nice to me approached me and said, "Great looking hair."

!

Reaching for the most droll response I could think of said, "Thanks."

||

"I was going for a precise tossed and tumbled carefree look that can take a good hour or so to achieve."

Beans too.

The depth of field is so shallow that nearby beans are blurred causing sharp-focused bean to appear to jump forward. Or at least move forward. I'm like'n that real hard right now. Usually you want a deep depth of field so you can see everything and you get that by having a tiny aperture. So the opposite of that for shallow depth of field, usually an undesirable thing, is to have the aperture more wide open, base the whole number decision things on that, and change everything else, shutter speed, ISO, external lights, filters, reflectors etc.,

By filter I mean a mint plant or dishtowel and by reflector I mean refrigerator.