Lobster Pot Pie

This is not a recipe blog although sometimes I wish it were. I have hundreds that are mine and they're good! But today I'm posting a link to a YouTube video of the IQUE BBQ team preparing lobster pot pie for their Chef's Choice entry at the Jack Daniels BBQ Championship in 2005.

Here's the link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9jPDFLsJIQ

I put together this video to show the team in action. Andy Husbands brought his video camera and everybody took a turn at recording the events of the day. I assembled this 5-year old video into this short presentation to show one of our typical non-BBQ entries.

Enjoy.

Garden time

Spring has sprung here in New England. We've had almost a week of pleasant weather after two weeks of heavy rains.

At the beginning of March I started my seeds in my cellar. I have an old 25 gallon aquarium that's perfect for seed cultivation. I added a cheap heating pad from Walmart, several blocks of one inch thick Styrofoam and two 4' fluorescent light fixtures. I also put a remote thermometer inside next to the plants to make sure it's warm enough.

The foam blocks are stacked to hold the trays of seeding close to the lights and the heating pad is placed under the starter tray to keep the soil warm for fast germination. The lights just fit on top of the aquarium and are connected to a timer to turn them on and off on a 12 hour cycle. Most of the seeds are up and doing well.

I took time outside yesterday to survey my vegetable garden. The soil is now dry enough to work it a little. It was a real chore to turn sand into garden soil. I've turned truck loads of manure, compost and seaweed into the garden to help make the soil rich and productive. It's working. Last year even after six weeks of rain and colder than normal conditions everything grew as planned.

It's time expand the garden. I've decided to make the flat, rectangular area into four 16' long raised beds about 4' wide. I plan on adding two foot wide walkways between the beds. I bought the lumber yesterday. I'll post photos after I start the process.

Two new videos are ready for download

Two years ago this month I went to the Netherlands and to Germany with Jim Elster, the owner of Scenic Express. We visited the farm where all the SuperTrees are grown (along with a lot of the potatoes that Frito Lay uses for their "crisps.") and then headed south to Munich, Germany to visit Albert Rademacher, the man who invented Silflor and owns Mini Natur. We also went to the Noch factory to see how their scenery products are produced.

During our visit with Albert he demonstrated his techniques for building dioramas using Styrofoam, craft paints and his Silflor products. I recorded a lot of what happened on video tape. It's been sitting on my hard drive just waiting to be edited.

Well this week I taught myself Final Cut Express HD for the Mac. This is video editing software that treats video like Photoshop handles still images. You can do about anything to video, do it fast, and produce professional looking video.

I started by assembling my European video and before I knew it I had three programs with more video still on the drive. I've uploaded two of the videos and the third is still being edited. The two videos are ready for download through the downloads page on my web site.

The first video is called Building a Foam Diorama Base. It's an eight an a half minute video that features Albert demonstrating his techniques for building a diorama base using Styrofoam. He show how he plans the diorama, cuts the pieces, and then disassemblies it, so each piece can be shaped separately. A good teaching tool for any scenery builder, beginner or expert. Price $5.95, 48.6MB download.

The second video is Carving & Painting Foam Rocks. It's a 14-minute video where Albert shows his techniques for carving rock faces in Styrofoam blocks and then painting them to get realistic results. He also shows how he "carves" stonework in flat foam surfaces. This video will help anyone who is building scenery on their model railroad, military display or structure diorama. For beginners or experts. Price is $5.95 - 14-minutes, a 77MB download.

Check them out.

Painting a background

I have a 30' cycloramic backdrop around the area of my workshop I use for building models. It makes photographing models a lot easier because I can just point and shoot.

The backdrop is painted with a sky-blue color in the top half graduating to white at the bottom. It was really a quick and dirty paint job done when I installed the backdrop.

In the next few months I'll be building a sugar train railroad based in the Caribbean. It'll be on some fictional island surrounded by lush jungle with evidence of past volcanic activity. The display will only be about 8' long so I built a frame in front of the backdrop to set it on. My plan is to make the train display 2-sided, with equal amounts of detail on both sides. It can be turned on the frame so both sides can be viewed and photographed.

I wanted a "south seas" backdrop behind the display. Something simple, showing high clouds and steep volcanic peaks. I started by repainting the sky blue areas at the top of the backdrop and worked down to white at the bottom.

1 - I added the distant hills using the sky blue color mixed with a lot of white and a little hookers green.

2 - For the second and subsequent layers I added more hookers green to the palette.

3 - Between each background hill layer I sprayed flat white auto primer to dull the colors and add a haze effect.

4 - For the closer hills I used black, hookers green, unbleached titanium white, and green gold - as you can see on my palette.

5 - My brush is a 1.5" China bristle, sold for $.49 at paint stores. The older the better because the bristles soften after repeated washings and are perfect for painting trees.

6 - My technique is really nothing special. I mix the colors on the palette and apply them to the backdrop in a stabbing motion. I try to get a mixture of all the colors on the brush to get an interesting light and shadow effect.

7 - For the closest trees I put medium green, burnt sienna and the titanium white on the palette and applied them with a fan brush.

8 - The last step was to mist-on more flat white spray paint to bring everything together and to dull the colors slightly for the illusion of distance.

Turbo Tree Demo

At the Amherst Railway Society train show in Springfield, Mass. Hal Reynolds of Atlantic Scale Modelers was at the table next to me. All day he would demonstrate making trees with his new tree-making devise, the Turbo Tree. Here's a video of his demo. Check it out.

When we delivered the Nantucket Railroad Display to the Whaling Museum on the island of Nantucket, Mass. Hal Reynolds set-up his Canon digital camera to record the assembly process.

The camera is sold with software that allowed us to take over 14,000 still pictures at 12 second intervals. These were loaded into iMovie. I edited the stop motion video to almost 6-minutes, added titles and music, and saved it in Quicktime format.

Here it is, enjoy!

The new Elk River Ry. & T.I. too!

Many years ago Bob Hayden and I built the HOn30 Elk River Ry. It was featured in eight articles in Railroad Model Craftsman magazine. The little railroad was a test bed for the new (at the time) Mini Trix trains. These were HO scale trains that ran on N scale tracks making them "narrow gauge."

The layout was very popular and got us thinking about what other HOn30 projects we could build. I like the waterfront and Bob likes the 2-foot narrow gauge railroads that ran in the state of Maine. So we combined our interests and created Thatcher's Inlet, an HOn30 waterfront railroad, with a Maine 2-foot theme. It was also featured in a series of articles in RMC.

These two little railroads launched us into bigger and better HOn30 model railroads. But times changed...

Jump ahead 30 years. Bob decides it's time for an O-gauge version of the Elk River with a waterfront section similar to Thatcher's Inlet. I travel to his workshop to help build the frame and to paint the backdrop. The next year, while in Bob's workshop to make a video, help him build and paint the waterfront. Bob rebuilt many pieces of Bachmann rolling stock to look more like the Maine 2-foot trains.

So here we are today. A new model railroad based upon the old.

Photo by Bob Hayden with his new 12mm lens.