Cooking Video - The Best Tacos

Recently I have been taking a Final Cut Studio video editing class. With all the new technology built into today's camera it is a natural extension to move from photography into some amount of video capture. Just like using Photoshop in photography, post processing video can improve the quality of final product.

I've had some video clips that I took with my Flip HD camera a few months back while my friend Angelica and I made her recipe for tacos. I think these are the best tacos I've tasted so, using my newly learned skills I cobbled together the video below. This certainly is very rough with some choppy moments and some miscues but I'm happy with the progress that I am making and I learned a lot by forcing myself to try and make this a completed video. By the way, the music is from www.friendlymusic.com which is a site that provides a one time license for a song for two bucks, so I don't have to feel guilty about stealing someone's musical work.

Uraguay

My friend Tim let me know about an article that was in the Real Estate section of The New York Times this week on Uruguay.

My fascination with this country started about ten years ago when, as I was working for a company that financed older aircraft, and I attended a few conferences that were put on by Bob Booth. Bob was born in Brazil, but raised in Uruguay and he was and is an endless promoter of Latin America, but particularly Uruguay. He would talk so enthusiastically of the beaches and great food, that I always wanted to visit. Last year while I was visiting Argentina, I went for a day trip to Colonia, which is directly across the Rio de la Plata from Buenos Aires. Colonia is far from the beaches off the east coast of Urugauy so no beachtown and surf for me, but I was impressed by how friendly the people were and how developed the country seemed to be. Both Argentina and Uruguay are known for their beef, so the food was very good and relatively inexpensive (at least at that time last year). The country also has a stable democratic government and demostrates a progresive streak by requiring all its citizens to vote under pentaty of a tax and by the outlawing of bull fighting early in the 20th century. (Nearby there is a photo of an abandoned bullring that I took during my daytrip.)

I think a trip to the east coast of Uruguay in on the agenda for 2009. With the dollar weak, Latin America is a much more reasonable place to travel these days. Perhaps I'll even find a new home there, well, you can always dream.

KiZake Shoot

I got a chance to go to a great little restaurant last weekend. My freind Chase invited me along to take some pictures of this new place. KiZake is located at 98 West Boston Street in the heart of a revitilizing downtown Chandler. The restaurant has a great vibe to it, which is supported by the terrific and really fresh sushi put together by the chef, Hiro Taniguchi. I highly recommend the spicy tacos, which is spicy tuna on a tortilla chip, served over a green salad. The owners, Ron and Maki are the type of independent business owners that do everything with quality and originality. It feels good to support these types of businesses in a city that is dominated by corporate franchises and strip malls. Ron and Maki also own 98 South and 56 East, two Eclectic American retaurants also located in Chandler. Now if they would only open somthing in Downtown Phoenix, I would be really excited.

Give me a BLT

The FDA lifted the restriction on tomatoes this week so what better way to celebrate than to have a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. Well actually I did not have any bread so I used a bagel instead, it was still very good though. I will share the recipe with you some other time, it's a family secret.