Chicken + Mushrooms Soup

A kind of chilli ramen type of broth with some peppers and mushrooms I found in the fridge.

Ingredients:

about a litre of water

2 chicken stock cubes

1 teaspoon corriander, chilli powder and garlic

1/2 teaspoon ginger

1 red pepper

bunch of spring onions

handful of button mushrooms

handful of rice

star anise

Directions:

thinly slice pepper, spring onions and mushrooms and fry for about 2 minutes. I didn't actually have any chicken meat but would probably be nice to add some in if you have it. Add the rice and stock to the boiling water and add in the chilli, corriander, garlic and ginger. Also if you have any throw in a star anise.

once the rice has started to soften, add in the vegetables and keep on the boil for about ten minutes. this way the rice is soft but the vegetables still have some crunch left in them. Season it if you want and that it done. Easy.

Blue Moon Project

After looking at some other things I thought the Blue Moon company lacked a bit of character and persona, so something with a bit of humour could be a good way to go. Got to doing a fair bit of rough sketching really quick initial ideas and presented them the other day. Also I really don't want to do a beer related, or bar object or solve some kind of problem about how to drink the beer with orange [they make a big fuss of this and it's a pain in the arse].

Durex ad using humor and also a potential promotional object even though it's creepy as fuck. I also think this is wonderfully shot.

The idea I'm taking forward is this one. "Get Out of Jail Free Card". Based on the stereotype of a guy going for a few drinks after work or something, then gets the phonecall from his wife/girlfriend. Looking at small, promotional gifts to be given to said man, to take home to "the other half". Useful, functional items, I thought essential handbag items were the most appropriate sort of thing. I'm concentrating on nicely designed, aesthetically pleasing objects with materials that reflect the Blue Moon brand. The idea of it is, the more beers you drink, the more gifts you bring home, so the less mad the lucky lady in your life will be.

Italian Sausage Ravioli + Cream Pesto

Ingredients:

250g fluor

3 eggs

lots of basil

olive oil

150g grated parmesan

200ml double cream

250g italian sausage[s]

Directions:

Right... the pasta is easy, put all the eggs and flour into a food processor and whizz it up til it makes a ball, then knead it for 10mins on a floury surface til it's smooth.

pesto... all the basil into the processor and pour in the oil while you're blitzing it. Add a handful of the pamesan and some pepper and it is done!

filling... I used pepperoni , salami and parma ham [not a sausage but italian meat] whizz all this up in the processor, if it doesn't bind add an egg yolk.

no more food processing!

cover the pasta and put it in the fridge for half an hour. After that half it and roll it out thinly, put the filling in little balls over it evenly.

roll the other half out the same and put it over the first bit, and press it down so it all seals.

for the sauce just add the pesto, cream and parmesan together, heat til smooth, and season. Boil the pasta for a minute or so until it floats to the surface then drain and add to sauce and serve.

Grolsch Swing-Tops

I haven't seen one of these bottles in ages but have always loved them. Apparently it's because only the European breweries still do it in swing tops. Came across it last night when at a product launch for the Blue Moon beer project, Blue Moon beer is also strangely delicious.

Curried Squash + Bacon Soup

I love soup. This is one of my favourites. Thick home made and brilliant on a cold day like today, i don't know the exact temperature outside but you can see your breath, that's how cold it is.

Ingredients:

1 Large Butternut Squash

1 Large Carrot

1 Small Onion

4 Rashers of Back Bacon

2 Chicken Stock Cubes

1/2 Teaspoon Curry Powder

750ml Water

chop the squash and carrots into equal sized pieces, and finely chop the onion and bacon. Then add the carrot and squash into the boiling water and crush in the stock cubes. Boil for about 20 minutes, just til the veg is starting to break away round the outsides. While it's boiling away fry off the onion and chopped bacon, add into veg when browned.

Pour into a food processor or blender and whizz it up until it goes smooth, put back into a saucepan and add in a knob of butter at the end. Season it how you like, it won't need much salt because of the bacon though.

Stir in half a teaspoon of curry powder and it's good to go.

New Project - Blue Moon Beer Branding.

After a pretty interesting weekend of ending up in casualty, and narrowly avoiding having to have a finger amputated, I returned to Art School ready to go with the new project. I knew it was about beer, shame I'll still have to wait a few days to test it out as I'm on a large amount of antibiotics for my stupid injury. The project is about promotional objects for a new brand of beer called "Blue Moon" The website it nice, check it out. Had a look at brand identity things today and promotional objects and there is a few things that interest me, mainly surrounding domestic and personal contexts, Point of Sale and things like that bore me a bit. 

• a small series of objects or some kind of collectable value to the objects
• you take different parts of the object back in exchange for more Blue Moon [like hangman in reverse] and drink your gift away
• or some kind of domestic context, I like the idea of something involving drinking or your own, whether or not it is a play on this or tries to deal with it, I have not decided yet, but probably something a bit tongue in cheek as I don't see the big deal about drinking on your own.

Here's a promotional pack for Grand Theft Auto "Chinatown Wars" presented in a Chinese Take-Away style novelty box, I like this... I know I shouldn't.

I very, very much like guerilla anything. This is a nice little piece of guerilla promotion I'm starting to see a lot of in Glasgow, it's basically cleaning parts of the pavement into letter to make an advert but is effective for me as I'm a bit of a shoe-gazer.

Fun With Message Boards...

Today I had dinner in a burger place Ketchup. I have never before realised they have these magnetic message boards, which i proceeded to have much fun playing around with like a child.

IDEO Brainstorming

This was a poster they had up in one of the meeting rooms in IDEO, London. And I quite liked it.

Bones

This was a project about articulation. I looked at the hip and leg bone and joint. I studied how the 2 bones met and the movement of the joint in the socket. This started by various sketches to get an understanding of the forms, then some realistic foam models. From this i began to abstract and made wire frames and card outline models. I had notice the way the top and bottom of the hip crossed in an X shape from the top, but also had a twist through the axis. I played around with it for a while before simplifying it all into 1 piece, with the leg bone moving in a track of the basic movements, and simplifying the twist in the hip to exaggerate it.

Another Old One - Ceramics

I've been going through all my old files and I found this one from 1st year as well. It was looking at the use of ceramics and how perceptions of things change only on the material it is made from. A plastic bottle, probably one of the most disposable items of all, is cast in ceramic to give it a permanence and make it seem a bit more precious, whilst still holding the aesthetic of the bottle. I also sort of, cut and paste parts of the bottles together as this also gave it a slightly new meaning as an object as this suggested it should be poured from like a teapot. Drinking tea from a teapot is a really nice occasion and suggests sharing, which is much nicer than the usual on-the-go use of a plastic bottle.

Sun Valley Frozen Food...

Can you still get Sun Valley food products? They did things like chicken Kiev's and all that frozen food.

Accidental Photo

This was a photo I'd try to take of my mate Marco after we'd been at a club one night. He was putting on this huge, colourful African tribal mask that he'd found in the flat, but took it off as I went to take the photo and it made this effect, which I think I prefer.

The Hold of Boredom on My Life

Boredom has a very powerful influence over my day to day activities, this particularly became the case in summer where I wasn't doing much and became obsessed with everyday things such as Febreze, and i got very involved in the Frasier TV series, making up back stories, sub plots and character analyses. It had gotten to such a point I was making relevance between real life and Frasier and at that point thought I should probably give it a rest.


Anyway one day it somehow came to this...

The Contenders : Come Dine With Me, Niles Crane, Dr Frasier Crane, Lily Allen, Heston Blumenthal

The Challenger : Febreze Classic

ding ding

The Winner: Febreze Classic

My Hero, Heston...

I really really really wish Heston Blumenthal would come back on my television.

Banoffee Pie.

So ok, it's pancake Tuesday, but I like banoffee pie.
I had to improvise the base a little as I'd used all my digestives so i chucked a couple of Penguin biscuits in instead.

Ingredients :

2 bananas
6 chocolate digestives [+ 2 Penguins later]
1 tin of condensed milk
Cream for whipping
a knob of butter
a handful of peanuts


Depending how hungry, or how much of a greedy bastard you are, this will feed maybe 6-8 human beings.

Put the condensed milk in a pan of water and bring to the boil for 10mins

Blitz up the biscuits and the peanuts in the blender for the base. Melt some butter at the same time then add together.

Mix the blitzed up biscuits and melted butter and spread firmly in tray

slice bananas and lay on base, then spread over the thickened condensed milk, whip the cream and spread on as a final layer and put in the fridge for an hour.

Leather in the Near Future - "Companions"

This is companions, a leather growth facility. It is the year 2050, I have had this leather jacket for years, I love the soft leather on it. I’ve never had anything else like it, I’ve always wanted to own other items with the same kind of leather. Then I found out about Companions, an adoption agency for cows which grow leather items for their owners for their entire lifetime.

I went to visit them, I was surprised at how happy and friendly the cows were, it wasn’t what I expected at all, I could see people feeding and patting their cows. I showed the people at Companions my leather jacket, and they helped me choose a cow which would grow a similar leather. This meant all my leather items from now on would be grown as the same kind of leather, which was what I'd always wanted.

I put my hand out to pat one of the cows, and it started to lick me, I felt an instant bond with him he was just so friendly, I chose to adopt him.

We went into the office and I filled out the form, I’ve never been good with names so I named him Daisy, I was glad to know he was mine.

The first items Daisy grew for me, as is with everyones adopted cow, was a bracelet for me and a Collar for him, taking the shape of his DNA strand. this made him seem like a pet to me and I really liked that. I couldn’t wait to see him and I was surprised to see he’d changed colour when I went to visit, I was assured this was normal and was temporary to each piece, I was just glad to see him.

Attaching the collar was quite personal and really established a relationship for me. As well as that I had a matching bracelet so it really linked us together.

I chose to have something grown there and then, I needed a tech pack to hold all my documents for a project I was doing so I thought it would be nice to have one made from the lovely leather Daisy would grow. This was all done in the office and they really let you be involved as the cow is yours. The objects are grown completely seamlessly and because of this they could grow unique forms. Also colours and textures could be applied which you couldn’t get on normal leather.

The next time I saw Daisy he had started growing the bag already. I really enjoyed going to spend time with him and see what he was doing as often as I could, even if he wasn’t growing something for me.

I particularly liked to feed him, he was always hungry, just like me, I didn’t like it so much that he always licked my hand because his breath smelled but I suppose this was just his way of being friendly.

Companions would send me photo’s of Daisy as he grew. I Liked this as it meant I could see our relationship growing too, after time this was just as important as the objects Daisy would grow for me over his lifetime.

After a while my first object was ready, I was really happy with it and it was so good to know where it came from, it was like I had a part of Daisy, and I hoped this would be the first of many beatiful leather items to come.

Each item comes with a unique tag. The tag has Daisy's name on it, and this becomes my own personal brand, as well as the growth dates and the item number, this makes each item that little bit more personal to me.