Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

the perfect potato process

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I often bemoan that I don’t especially enjoy baking things because I can’t tweak a recipe to taste as I go like I can while cooking on the stovetop, but the real problem is a matter of kitchen chemistry.

Case and point: roasted potatoes. They’re delicious, they’re easy, and we love to eat them, but I hardly ever made them before the past few months. Getting the taste just right isn’t the problem. It’s all down to one factor: crispiness. No matter how tiny I diced my potatoes or how high temperature I roasted them, I’d still get the same soggy, saggy wedges.

Perfectly Crispy PotatoesI cracked the code back in November with the help of some tips from RachelCooks.com. I wasn’t getting anything wrong about the temperature or size of my potatoes. It turns out that the magic of crispiness is a matter of chemistry, and it all comes down to the prep work. You’ve got to soak some of the starch out of your spuds, plus dry them thoroughly and space them out on the pan.

With Rachel’s tips on my side, my roasted potatoes when from flaccid to super-crispy in three attempts!

However, now I have my own tip to add to the mix. If you want delicious, savory roasted potatoes, mincing an onion isn’t going to get you there. What you need are shallots.

Shallots have a much subtler spiciness than onion, and a sweet undertone that comes out when they’re roasted. I’d go with one to two of them to match Rachel’s recipe in lieu of the onion. I used to dice them by hand, but lately I just drop them into the food processor along with a quarter cup of grated romano cheese and a tablespoon of minced garlic from a jar. I add that mix to the potatoes along with salt, pepper, and olive oil, but otherwise follow Rachel’s instructions to the tee.

The result? Perfect, restaurant-quality, super-crispy potatoes, every time.

(Sadly, we ate them all before I could snap a photo to go with this post!)

Spring Thing: The American Helicopter Museum

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When I first began my stay-at-home time with Little Miss last year, Lindsay recommended that we check out the local library’s selection of museum passes, to which I replied, “huh and the what now?”

As it turns out, many library systems have passes to local attractions like museums, aquariums, and zoos that you can request and check out just like a book! After Lindsay carefully explained it to me as if I did not speak English, I checked out our library catalog.

Lo and behold, they had tons of passes cataloged – and, not just obvious stuff like the zoo or the Franklin Institute, but smaller, local museums too – places that probably benefit from the foot traffic generated from turning up in the library search!

One such place that struck my fancy was “The American Helicopter Museum.” I might not be a guy who digs a lot of heavy machinery and I’m the farthest thing you could meet from a mechanical engineer, but I am certainly not going to turn down the chance to see a few dozen helicopters up close!

I filed the museum away in my head for future use on a rainy day. Luckily, most of our Adventure Days in the past year haven’t been rainy – and, when they were, we hit one of the city museums early before they could be packed with school field trips. I never had to pull the Helicopter museum out of my bag of tricks.

Then, a few weeks ago, EV6 and I were at an impasse in our weekly Adventure planning. We had fallen into a bit of an Adventure rut of hitting the same places repeatedly (please, no more Please Touch Museum, I beg you), and neither of us were too excited for a repeat. Struck by sudden inspiration, I asked her, “Do you like helicopters?” (Noise aside, what kid doesn’t?) When she nodded in assent, I showed her the photos on the museum’s website. She was instantly sold.

As it happens, yesterday was not a rainy day at all. It was a stunning bombshell of gorgeous Spring t-shirt weather when we pulled up to the museum. It’s located at 1220 American Boulevard, West Chester, PA 19380 in an otherwise unassuming office park, but it’s easy to spot due to multiple helicopters parked on its lawn. [Read more…] about Spring Thing: The American Helicopter Museum

New For Patrons: Definitive Guide to Animal Man

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Launched just moments ago to my Crushing Comics Club Patrons is a guide to my favorite New 52 hero, Animal Man!

I feel like I’ve always been aware of Animal Man, but had never read a single issue of him prior to Jeff Lemire’s wonderful run in New 52. Putting this guide together was an eye-opening experience about Animal Man’s history, and about ultimately how much of a blank slate he became in the decade after the end of his famous Vertigo series launched by Grant Morrison. The guide includes his every appearance, with brief descriptions of his action to accompany nearly every issue.

Want access to this guide? Right now this guide is planned to be available to the general public in May, but Patrons at the Crushing Comics Club level have access right now!

New Comic Guide: A Guide to DC’s Gotham City Titles

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Today is the third week of my Bat-themed new guides, except this week’s guide isn’t for a character – it’s for a place…

The Guide to Gotham covers every DC book with “Gotham” in the title. Some of them are Batman ongoings, but others aren’t – like Gotham Central, Gotham City Sirens, and Gotham Academy.

I know that’s a slightly odd choice. The guide came about as I struggled to map Batman’s universe of ongoing titles as well as decide where to place some of his most important supporting books. After a lot of puzzling things together, I decided the best approach would be one page of Gotham titles, another (still to come) of his ongoing series (other than Detective, Batman, and LotDK), and a third to capture outliers and act as an index to everything.

These Gotham books tend to be fan-favorites and are frequently met with critical acclaim, which just speaks to the richness of Batman’s city as a setting.

I’ll be back with one last Bat Guide in this sprint next week – The Definitive Guide to Robin! I really enjoyed putting that one together, and I’m excited to share it with you. Then we’ve got a few big releases. I’d call them “universal” in size, each for a different reason.

Comic Book Review: X-Men Gold (2017) #1 by Guggenheim, Syaf, Leisten, Martin, & Petit – The X-Men Are Good (Guys) Again!

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There is a recurring theme in today’s X-Men Gold #1: “past is prologue.”

It’s a theme I lean into heavily in my every day life. Being obsessed with data and truth tends to emphasize the impact of the past on the present. Most fresh starts in life consist of actors with past track records of behavior, models of behavior that have previously been described. They aren’t really that fresh

That’s part of why everyone loves a sudden success story, whether that’s an indie movie or a hot new start-up. It’s not just the success we’re celebrating, but the subversion of trends and predictability.

When you swim in the data of a thing all the time, it’s really hard to be pleasantly surprised by those fresh starts. I looked at the return order probability of hundreds of start-ups. There was no novel return curve to discover. After the first few dozen, everyone snapped into a story I had seen before.

Comics can feel like that, too. It’s a tiny industry where the most read book never even approaches a million eyeballs (and I’m counting individual eyeballs here, not pairs).

Marvel and DC are creating most of their stories with characters who have been around for over 25 years. Most of them have been combined into the same teams before. Most of the writers and artists are part of a crowd that flip flops back and forth, with stops at Image or another indie to take a breather. Most of the world-changing stories just echo back and forth between the big two publishers, copies of copies of copies of big ideas that have already been had.

Past is prologue. We’ve seen it before, so we know what we’ll see. And, like in the rest of life, we’re pleasantly surprised when we get something truly novel…

…and then we want more and more of that novel thing, until it’s our new past and becomes our next prologue.

When Marvel or DC say they are launching something “new,” it’s with the caveat that a seasoned reader already knows the introduction to this story.

The question is: does that mean you can predict where it will wind up?

X-Men Gold #1 (digital)

Written by Marc Guggenheim with pencils by Ardian Syaf, inks by Jay Leisten, colors by Frank Martin, and letters by VC’s Cory Petit.

CK Says: Buy it! Bottom Line: Guggenheim’s new take on flagship X-Men feels familiar and maybe a bit fan-service-y, but that doesn’t stop it from being remarkably fresh as it achieves its back-to-basics aim: the X-Men feel like heroes again.

Marc Guggenheim takes his second swing at the X-Men in three years, and this one is a solid hit. X-Men Gold is a delightful first issue with hints of many past teams, but it has a fresh outlook that’s intent on minimizing the recent past as leaden prologue weighing the series down from the start.

The X-Men’s past being prologue isn’t something you’ll often hear me lament, X-Men_Gold_2017-0001-interior-002as a studied X-fan of over 25 years. I’m all for continuity-dense mining of years of history, but Guggenheim -the successful creator of CW’s Arrow – was wise enough to know now isn’t the time.

What’s X-Men Gold all about? The story’s title says it all: “Back to Basics.”

The X-Men are back to being a team who scrambles the Blackwing because they hear someone is in trouble – mutant or not. Or, at least, that’s what newly-minted leader Kitty Pryde wants them to be, which is how we wind up in medias res with the team facing down Terrax, whose previous X-book exposure comes solely from Dazzler.

Why are they fighting him? Because The Avengers and The Champions didn’t show up and the X-Men are heroes. [Read more…] about Comic Book Review: X-Men Gold (2017) #1 by Guggenheim, Syaf, Leisten, Martin, & Petit – The X-Men Are Good (Guys) Again!