Three Winter Solstice Drawings

Knight Town (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencils and ink)

It is already the winter solstice.  What with the Christmas rush and year-end business at work I have not had time to pick out a suitable theme for the longest night of the year.  But my subconscious has not been so quiescent.  Here are the three most recent drawings in my little book.  I suddenly notice that each of them takes place at night.  Above is a knight in jaunty paisley wandering the streets of a nocturnal city.  Dinosaurs grapple as a glowing lizard glides down toward the warrior.  A little glowing plant man and a strange luminous crystal add interest.

Bar in Alphabet City (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil and ink)

Here is a scene at a bar in alphabet city.  The patrons were jostling and squiggling pretty vigorously (which made them hard to draw), but I think I caught the milieu.

Fallow Hill (Wayne Ferrebee, 2015, colored pencil and ink)

Last is my most recent piece, which somehow looks like it something from a heavy metal album.  I have no idea what is going on here. Demons and ghosts are gathering around a terrible haunted face growing up out of the fallow fields.  A hellish glow pervades the horizon.  No more horror novels before bedtime.  The great thing about the winter solstice is that it will keep getting lighter from this point on. Although admittedly the coldest times of winter lie before us, the darkest times are passing.  And they aren’t even that bad…well, not as bad as this horrible undead scarecrow thing.

Dried Shredded Squid (the perfect bar snack!)

Dried Shredded Squid

So, I grew up in the middle of the United States (and sometimes along the East Coast) and salty snack foods were invariably cheese doodles, chips, or pretzels—or maybe peanuts or corn chips if you were somewhere fancy). This is why it was a huge revelation when my Korean-American friend introduced me to dried shredded squid—a favored bar food in Japan and Korea.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, dried shredded squid consists of squid which has been shredded, dried, and salted (although sometimes the dried cephalopod is actually cuttlefish). The flesh comes away in little strings which one then pops into ones mouth with mayonnaise or hot sauce (particularly at a bar or while drinking pre-dinner drinks like whiskey or beer). None of this sounds especially appealing—and indeed, at first glance, the salted dried squid does not inspire the casual snack enthusiast with much hope. Squid and cuttlefish dry to an unappealing color somewhere between bone, mummy, and woodear, while the aroma bears a faint hint of decaying estuaries (with perhaps a touch of Cthulhu).

Yet, when one actually eats the dried shredded squid, it goes through a wonderful metamorphosis: it is exactly the right combination of chewy, salty, and umami. In Japan, shredded dried squid is known as “atarime” and is considered a otsumami (a bar food) whereas in Korea it is regarded as a bar food or sometimes a banchan (a small side dish). Whatever the case, it is excellent as a before dinner snack (especially with a beer) and I heartily recommend it to everyone—even if you are a bit wary of eating dessicated sea creatures.  Furthermore, the packaging tends to be very droll with all sorts of cute cartoon squids (as you can sea in some of these photos).