Saturday, March 18, 2006

BARBECUE!!!!!

After all that warm weather we had the past week allowed me to clear off my deck and set up the barbecue. Yep yesterday I had the first barbecue of the year. I baked a whole chicken, and although it was not rubber like this....



.....But it did have that warm, brown colour. So in light of yeaterday's event, I thought I'd impart a little culinary expertise. I am no chef, but I do consider myself a good cook. With this place being the Savageland, what better place to learn how to cook meat...

Fist off if you plan to bake or barbecue a chicken, this is one of the easiest, cheapest, and quickest things you can cook. Some of you may be thinking "fast! easy?!" Well allow me to explain. If you shop for groceries planning the next few days meals like I do, grabbing a small whole chicken is great. They are usually very cheap compared to the boneless breast meat, so you are getting a big bang for the buck. So when you get this home, plan to bake the chicken the next day. After you've put away your groceries, put the chicken in one of those monster zip lock bags, along with whatever marinade you want, and this can be as simple as a little salt, sugar, and pepper (I also recommend that whatever you put in also add a tablespoon or two of vegetable oil. This acts like the butter you normally use to baste a chicken and turns the thing a nice brown colour). Throwing all this in a bag takes no time at all, it's practical for even the most time stretched worker. One suggestion, if you use the double lined zip lock bags, they will be harder to clean and reuse. Plastic lasts a 1000 years, re-use it.

Now all you have to do is throw the bag (put the bag in a bowl just in case the bag leaks) in the fridge and forget about it. Next day when you get home from work just turn on the oven on to 350, and when it gets hot chuck that chicken in for an hour or an hour and a half, depending on how big the chicken is. It does take a long time to cook, but the great thing about baking is that you can do something else while it is cooking. So the actual work required is very minimal. It just depends on whether you have an hour to kill before dinner is ready.

If you can barbecue the chicken, you get the best results by cooking it with indirect heat. This means you put the coals on one side, or only turn on one side of the gas grill, and put the chicken on the other. With the barbecue lid closed, the heat will cook the chicken, and it will not burn because it's not sitting on the fire.

For best results, make sure that when you take out the chicken, cover it with aluminum foil and let it rest for about 15 minutes. You see whenever you cook meat and remove it, there is still enough heat permeating the meat to cook it, and it will keep cooking for some time. So if you immediately start cutting into it, the juices and all that flavour will leak out. It's much better to let it sit, and cool down so that all those juices cool down. When you cut it, the flavour will be retained in the meat because the juices are no longer liquified. This is why you don't want to cook meat until it is completely cooked, you want it to be just a little bit rare, because it will finish cooking during the resting process, and you will end up keeping some of that flavour without draining it away by overcooking it.

Here is the marinade that I used. It's basically the recipe for those chinese barbecue chickens you see hanging in store windows. It's very easy.

2 tablespoons of soy sauce, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of sugar, and 1 tablespoon of canola oil (if you are cooking a small chicken, only use half this amount of marinate), 1 or 2 chopped garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon of chopped ginger, some pepper.

Enjoy the feast...

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Bring On The Ladies....

Well my last post was a couple of beasts, so I thought I'd post some beauty. Some of them are a little raunchy, so turn away if you are faint of heart... or a kid.


This character was drawn a couple of years ago, but I still like it.


Played the video game God of War and had to make up a character with those cool blades.



Boy, could Russia use a Commie super soldier right now. I always love the campy stuff...



Again, this is an old drawing, but still one of my favourites. As you can see, she can telelport. A useful tool come tax season...




This is one of my latest. Who doesn't like the idea of a sexy Genie. You know because the lamp is so useful when it is dark out.




Well this is one of the raunchiest. Dabbled in a little photo reference for this one. I thought it turned out well.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

TIME TO GO APE!!!!

I have always been a big fan of movies like King Kong and Planet of the Apes, though they both degenerated into some pretty awful sequels (with the exception of Mighty Joe Young <1949>, and Escape From The Planet Of The Apes <1971>). It is worth looking at the original films because they still stand up, especially Planet of the Apes. Great film. Having said that, I would naturally I would have drawn some ape characters over the years.

Here they are.

This dude is something I did a couple years back. It's not supposed to be Planet of the Apes, but I am honest about the influence.




And this guy is my 16 foot tall ape hero. He again isn't supposed to be Kong, but hey let's face it. Every ape movie since 1933 IS a version of King Kong...

Monday, March 13, 2006

Super Hero Pictures

Hi there. I'm an Ottawa based artist that primarily works in Animation, though I have dabbled in directing, producing and writing as an independant filmaker. My last name is Savage, so this Blog name is accurate. I just have to work on getting that doctorate so that I really can be called Doc Savage!

Been doing a lot of drawing this past week. I haven't used a brush to ink my drawings for a while, and I forgot how much better it is to use than the brush pens I have been using for the past year. Real brushes are a bit of a pain. They dry out, you keep having to dip for more ink, but the results are so much better than anything I have ever done with a marker.

Let me know what you think...


This guy is a were-lion dude. One of my favourite pics...



Had to come up with a two fisted Mountie hero. It's the patriot in me...



This is a new picture of an old idea. He can duplicate himself, so I always imagine this super fast nut flying around like a


I know this guy looks like Spider Man, but I don't really care. Sure he's athletic, shoots swing lines, and has the same eyes on the mask, but that's about the only similarity. Thunderbolt gets his name becasue he can run at supersonic speeds...




One of my latest and favourites. She's a kind of old school kind of super hero. I'm beginning to think she ought to have an emblem on her chest...


Well that's it for now, I'll have more up later...

Doc Savage.