potato wedges - easy peasy

I'm not a good cook. I boiled my first egg in my junior year of college ... after asking my roommate how to hard-boil an egg. Seriously. I'm not even kidding. My mother is a fabulous cook, but maybe when I was little I burned myself one too many times on the stove, because I don't like that thing!


The oven, however, is my friend. One of the things I make way more than I oughta is potato wedges. Why? Because potatoes are cheap, I've never been one to turn down starchy goodness, and potato wedges are easy to make and easy to eat. It's pretty forgiving so it's impossible to make them wrong unless you leave them in the oven for hours and burn them to a crisp. Sometimes I use red potatoes and sometimes I use baking potatoes ... whatever I happen to have or whatever's on sale at the grocery store.

Scrub the potatoes clean, slice them into wedges, and pour on chili powder, paprika, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and/or whatever else. Then pour in some vegetable oil and mix it all so that every wedge is coated with enough seasoning and oil. When you think it's good enough, line them up on a baking sheet and stick them in the oven at 350F (or thereabouts) and let them bake for an hour (or thereabouts). Potato wedges don't take much preparation or thought. They are, in a word, ideal.

new year, visiting an old project

It is now 2013! 2012 proved to be very lackluster in terms of me posting on this blog, but we'll see what the new year brings. Since it's the holidays, I'm back at home, and once again forced to go through my old stuff from architecture school and weed out the weak (in other words: clear out all my junk at the strongly-worded request of my mother).


In one bag I found a bunch of rectangular pieces of laser cut matboard, and I realized that they were extra pieces from a model I built in 2008. It was for a construction class, and the project was to build a partial model of a building facade, so the rectangular pieces were the exterior cladding elements.Why I kept them for almost five years ... I have no idea.


I also found little packages of some of the smaller construction elements, all laser cut from white matboard as well. And looking at some of those beams ... goodness gracious I can't believe I spent so much time gluing those little pieces! And they didn't even get used! I definitely laser cut way too many. Either I was really wasteful, really worried that I'd mess up, or just really bad at planning.


The building my partner and I chose was the Ricola Storage Buiding (1987) in Laufen, Switzerland, by Herzog and de Meuron. This is a detail of the completed model, which only exists in pictures since it was thrown into the trash shortly after completion due to lack of space. Well, now its spare parts are in the trash as well. Sadness. But hey, it's 2013!