What to do with stale bread? Or bread that is about to go stale and getting hard? I recycle my homemade bread into croutons. If you have no homemade bread lying around, use the best quality bakery bread you can get.
Ingredients:
- Almost stale bread
- Olive oil
- One garlic clove, peeled and cut in half
- Sea Salt, to taste
- Oregano, to taste
Cut your almost stale bread into cubes. Put it on a plate on the counter to dry out for a day or two. Take a ceramic baking dish or a cookie sheet. Rub each bread cube with the garlic. Coat the bread cubes with a layer of olive oil. Sprinkle with sea salt and oregano (or your favorite dried herb). Throw in the remainder of the garlic, and bake for about 20-30 minutes.
Even my kids like these. Maybe you could eat them while watching the Super Bowl?
…and then it all turned to rain.
I discovered a photo blog of a local friend, Mason Resnick. So for some fun, I am linking to some of his posts with Highland Parkers. I found one of my friends in two different photos.
He told me that this is one of his favorite posts: Uh, Mr. Adams You Can’t Take Pictures Here.
Mason likes getting comments, so be sure to leave a comment on his blog. Tell him we want more local pics!
It’s cold and grey outside. We have no snow, but it has been wintry cold. Maybe you will enjoy my new garden show?
I confess that I stayed up last night working on this slideshow. And then some more time early this morning. Is this how a mom with three kids spends her “free” time? Well, that’s my habit, anyway.
So for those of you who like the technical details, I did this in Actionscript 3. The pictures are all external to the Flash (.swf) file. They are listed in an XML file, as are the captions, so if I feel like adding or subtracting one more pictures, I don’t have to touch the code. It worked fine on my computer, but then when I uploaded it to my web server, not too surprisingly it needed a preloader. I put in the most basic preloader I could find. That’s those little numbers (and “images coming…”) you may see on the screen before the winter pic comes on.
So here’s a list of stuff I might add if I wanted to continue with this project:
1) fancier preloader
2) something more interesting at the end than “the end”: menu? redo? “the end” typewriter style? a fade out?
3) fun with tweens — meaning fancy effects
My last attempt with tweens in Actionscript 2 didn’t go so well. Some of the tweens worked, but some failed in Firefox, for some reason that I will probably never know since I am now delving into AS3. I do hope I get some mastery over AS3 before AS4 shows up.
4) Maybe get that frog that I drew really quickly for Parshat Vaera to jump through the garden? Or let the user control how it jumps? Or hide the frogs in one of the pictures and see if the user can find them? Time to do some more skill building…
All the photos are taken by me of my garden, except the tulips are from my neighbor’s yard.
My 5 year old daughter and her friend’s reaction? Beautiful pictures, but boring.
Well, I gotta learn some more Actionscript 3 before I do anything terribly interesting with it.
My favorite section of my website is called Pics of the Month. My intention is to put up new art, photos, Flash bits every month. OK, maybe I should call it Pics of Every Two or Three Months. But that would be a weird title. I captured some beautiful fall leaves recently; I intend to put them up soon. Yesterday, the weather looked pretty bleak out there, all the fall leaves had turned brown and bunched in a corner, whatever snow fell soon turned into a wet crunchy crust on the sidewalk. I see in Boston it snowed yesterday. We had a lot of very wet sleet here in Jersey.
Getting back to the pics…I haven’t had much time to do canvas or paper-based art lately. I’ve been busy with work (more about that in a different post) and designing this blog. I use Pics of the Month to build up my Flash skills, and I would like an alef-bet Flash movie to appear there soon. My daughter has been rather alef-bet challenged, meaning she can’t understand why in the world she should learn those funny characters we keep drawing for her on pieces of scrap paper. For a treat, here is one of my fall photos (look for diagonals and movement— are those two trees talking to each other? One is mine, and one is my neighbor’s):
