Hi friends,

It's catch-up week! I've written three blog posts since I last sent a newsletter, so instead of including the full text of all of them in one email, I'll include a short excerpt from each with a link to the full post. If you don't need an excerpt and just want to read them, these are the three recent posts:

• Herding cats: Clicker training with my cat
• Watercolor botanicals
• Idli obsession: On a mission to make the deceptively simple South Indian breakfast

By the way, if you think there's someone who would enjoy my blog, please feel free to forward them the newsletter or share a link to my blog. While I might not always remember to publicize it enough, my blog is not a secret. Knowing people read it is my reward and motivates me to keep writing.

Thanks for reading and see you on the internet!

AK

Herding cats: Clicker training with my cat

The joke is that you can't train cats, but actually, you can, and most cat owners probably already have trained their cats. Training isn't about getting an animal to obey commands. It's about getting the animal to associate a certain behavior with a reward so they do that behavior, even if it's not something that would be inherently rewarding for them. In that sense, pretty much everyone who has a cat has trained it. If your cat hears the sound of the treat bag rustling, does it come running? There's nothing instinctual about responding to plastic rustling. You've trained your cat that the sound of the treat bag means there's likely a reward. Read more

Watercolor botanicals

There's a beautiful hydrangea bush in my back yard, and I've been trying to paint it with watercolors. At first, I tried to use the same kind of wet on wet and layering techniques I learned in the landscape painting class last month. It just looked blurry and ugly, though part of that might have been the foggy afternoon. As I experimented, it became clear that I'd need to try some different techniques. For one, I might need to sketch a bit to get the shapes of plants and leaves, both for practice and perhaps as a guide for painting. Additionally, I'd need to try other watercolor techniques. Using layers of washes and letting them dry between applying layers seems to be particularly common for botanical painting. Read more

Idli obsession: On a mission to make the deceptively simple South Indian breakfast

Idli are an everyday breakfast food and anytime snack in South Indian cuisine. They're small disks of white fluffy dough, about the size of a person's palm and convex on both sides. The flavor is mild, a little bit tangy like a delicate sourdough bread. They serve a role kind of like bread or tortillas; certainly tasty enough on their own but you'd usually eat them with some kind of topping or dipping thing. Read more