TIDESONG cover process

First off, an enormous thanks to Erin Fitzsimmons and Andrea Vandergrift, the designers who worked with me on creating this cover and who have been shepherding my artwork throughout the whole process of making this graphic novel. Everything is going to print so beautifully thanks to their expertise.

A number of things went into consideration as I was sketching out ideas for the TIDESONG cover, namely:

• It should be bright, colorful and cheerful

• It has to have kid appeal

• The main character has to be featured

• The main themes of the story should be visually implied— the ocean, for one, since the title of the book is literally TIDESONG! But also the text placement on the cover.

• I definitely wanted the text to be wavy and tilted to mirror the effect of ocean waves

With that, I went into creating several colored sketches for the Harper design department and marketing to consider:

These sketches are a bit more detailed than what I would draw as a layout for a comic panel or page, because I really wanted to communicate as clearly as possible to everyone who would be appraising the sketches. The pink was my favorite, and I’m glad everyone agreed! So we then went to refining that pink cover and shifting a few things around, and ended up with this as the final idea for the cover and back cover.

So with this refined sketch approved, I went ahead to create the final front cover, which you can see below. The hand-drawn text treatment is by Erin, as I liked her lettering way more than mine! There’s a lovely waviness to her text that I could never quite approach in my attempts! My name is lettered by me though… for some reason, I couldn’t get the title placement lettering right but I got my name right.

And finally, the cover is complete! This is the CMYK version, in case you were wondering about the colors looking a bit funky compared to my sketches and time-lapse— my art program, Procreate, works best with RGB colors, so the design team converts my files to be print-worthy, and we had a chat when I first began creating the palette to make sure I was using colors that would print correctly!

not-cassoulet recipe

Adapted from Design Mom

Okay, for all the clowning (“no ma’am, I will not be having salad with this stew!”) I actually found this a very helpful and informative recipe, a cassoulet for beginners. After making it the first time, I’ve made a few adaptations that I think is a little more forgiving and less finicky. This is best made in any kind of stovetop to oven cookware— I am using a 3 quart dutch oven.

But first, the meat.

The base recipe suggests sausage & bacon, which I love! But I had a bunch of Yunnan-style preserved pork lying around from when I made a huge batch of it in October, and I’ve been using it instead of bacon. I learned how to make it from this video. Pork belly is boiled with ginger, a bit of salt, and Shaoxing wine & then sliced & tossed with: more salt (a lot of salt, it’s going to be preserved), chili oil and toasted rice flour. I personally cannot handle the level of spice that they eat in Yunnan (like it will literally send you blasting off to the moon) so I halved the amount of chili oil and instead made toasted garlic oil— mince a head of garlic in the blender and fry it in oil until fragrant. The ratio of toasted rice flour I personally used was about 3/4 cup for 4.5 pounds of pork belly.

fresh-mixed!

if you want to eat it straight, to reheat, steam it on cabbage and put it on rice.

After everything is sliced and mixed, cram that porky goodness into a mason jar and let it hang out on the counter for a week. I was really leery because I had never preserved meat before, but it keeps remarkably well. I moved it to the fridge after a week. I have a jar labeled 10.23.20 that I am still eating from!

My mom also cures her own meats, so she gave me a lapcheong (Chinese pork sausage) she had made, which I used for this recipe. I highly recommend you use any kind of lapcheong for this! Okay, on to…

THE BEANS

White beans are a huge part of this stew, and one of my favorite things to eat! I ate a lot of beans in 2020. Super easy. You will need in addition to beans: a few tablespoons of fat (olive oil, schmaltz, bacon grease, whatever), 1/2-1 lemon, 2 bay leaves, salt, oregano, cumin, at least 3-4 cloves peeled garlic & whatever other herbs you want to use (I used a bunch of parsley for my most recent batch, but I’ve used sprigs of rosemary and thyme when I’ve had them), and vinegar for the very end.

• soak about 1-2 cups dried beans for at least 4 hours in cold water (there are boiling water methods of rehydrating beans too, which are easily found with a quick search!)

• cover your soaked beans 2 inches with water. Let it come to a boil. Skim off the foam. Add a tablespoon of salt— I salt the beans as I go. Turn the heat all the way down to low. Add the fat, lemon, herbs, oregano, and cumin. Let it cook at a very small simmer for about 45 mins to an hour— keep tasting them. Add more salt towards the end if it’s not enough. Add a glug of vinegar (I use Chinese black vinegar). You can stop this instant and just have beans for your meal, they’re that good. Put an egg on top, dip the bread in it… HOWEVER, if you want to make the cassoulet—

In addition to CURED MEATS & BEANS IN BEAN LIQUID the following are unskippable (I’m using a 3 quart dutch oven for this so my measurements are adjusted to that):

• 1/2 pound pork belly/shoulder, sliced and/or

• 2 chicken thighs

• 4 more cloves sliced garlic

• 2 small onions, minced

• bay leaves

• 2 black cardamom pods. you can order them online or find them at the Asian markets. These are unskippable because if you’re not using smoked meats (I wasn’t) they lend a delicious smokiness to your finished stew.

• tomato paste

optional: more sprigs of thyme/rosemary; white wine or sake, for deglazing. But honestly, deglazing with the bean broth works just fine. You won’t need additional salt in this recipe, the cured meats + bean cooking liquid is sodium enough. I really liked using my cured pork belly because it’s been coated with rice flour, which comes off while cooking and adds a nice thickness to the stew! However, I am getting ahead of myself.

Of the cured pork I made, I used the equivalent about 2 strips of thick-cut bacon.

Mis en Place:

• Oven preheated to 400

• Cured pork, cut into small pieces.

• lapcheong, cut into small pieces— maybe 1/2 cup worth. Eyeball it, nobody ever said extra sausage was bad.

• pork belly, cut into small pieces.

• sliced garlic & minced onion on one plate

• beans. I’ve made this dish enough times by now that I just have the pot of beans in broth on the other burner, but if you want to separate your broth from the beans to measure more accordingly, you can do that. Definitely take out the bulky herbs/lemon pieces if you’re using. LEAVE THE GARLIC.

• chicken thighs, if using. I use skin-on thighs. It doesn’t matter a whole lot whether skin-on or off.

• cardamom pods, bay leaves, herb sprigs within reach.

• tomato paste tin, opened.

Cook:

Here’s where I find this stew to be super forgiving. The order of operations don’t matter a whole lot here, but you have to make sure to deglaze periodically with liquid so that all the good flavorful bits get stirred up. If it helps to scoop up each element after it’s done cooking and put it in a container to the size while you deglaze, that’s fine. Just make sure to deglaze! That said:

• Sear the chicken thighs on high heat, skin side down, about 5 mins per side. Take them out, put them on a plate. If there’s stuff stuck to the bottom of the pot, deglaze a bit now with either wine or broth.

• Turn the heat down to medium. Toast your spices for a bit. Stir black cardamom and bay leaves in the hot oil. Keep them there.

• Still medium heat: Cook the cured meats. As the bacon crisps, I add the onions & garlic, but you can also take out the meats and put them into a bowl before doing your aromatics. Add other pork belly. Cook onion & garlic until soft. At this point, take everything out of the pot and deglaze it again. Add a little extra broth this time, because:

• you’re going to add about half of a small tin of tomato paste. Stir it around, and then add your beans. Add the meats and garlic & onion back. Add enough broth to cover everything. Nestle the chicken thighs in the beans. Put the pot lid on and put it in the oven for 35-40 minutes.

Pre-oven pic. Chicken seared nicely, sometimes when I try to take the chicken off the oil all the skin comes away lol

You can get fancy and after 40 mins in the oven, take off the lid and top with toasted bread crumbs and put it under the broiler for a few minutes. Or you can just eat it as-is. Eat it with bread!

fancy panko topping

2020 retrospective

this was my first full year being self-employed.

I got hundreds of pages of comics drawn: an illustrated interview, 1/2 of TIDESONG fully finished, a webcomic off the ground, four short comics published ranging from 5-70 pages:

not pictured: “Cuttings”, a very tiny comic about a god of houseplants that I published on Twitter.

Yet what became my saving grace this year was to look outside. to go outside, when I could. Learning to forage in Prospect Park, to grow seeds in an aquarium, reading & learning about fungi & moss & other small, hidden things in the natural world... my perspective has been altered forever.

I didn't consider myself a cynical person, but being online a lot (especially in the first few months of 2020 when we were all in lockdown) compounded with the news and noise that we become flooded with when we’re on social media feeds really leached away a sense of hope or wonder. Taking the time to step back and learn and read about nature and interact with folks who have made it their life’s work to be HOPEFUL about nature and what it can do— that brought back the feeling that there were still beautiful things in this world, however small, however invisible to our human eyes.

When I was in school, science as a subject felt unwelcoming, alienating and cold. The focus on dry lab reports and taking measurements and most of all, MATH (which I was never good at) completely turned me off to the whole field as a potential place to work. I had never heard of “citizen science”. I thought Science was something you had to have an advanced degree to work in or appreciate (another turnoff, because while I enjoyed parts of school, fact memorization and exams were never my strong suit either).

Reading books like Lab Girl, Entangled Life, Braiding Sweetgrass, Gathering Moss, and Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art helped me realize that science and art are not so separate from each other, after all. I knew this as an intellectual fact, but harmonizing research and anecdotes, humor and warmth— through the words of science writers, I was inspired to take more time to slow down and observe the world around me and to find magic in the everyday. That is what I am most grateful for this year, and what I will carry into 2021 and beyond.

make some dingdang soup (& other food thoughts)

I just got back from a week with my mom and sister in the small town where I grew up. today I almost felt like I forgot how to cook since I was by and by large banned from the kitchen all week unless it was to help fold dumplings (which I have gotten quite good at) or bao (they will never hire me at din tai fung, let’s put it that way). today at 6:45 I realized I actually had to make something or we would have no dinner. so: soup.

pork miso soup

Just One Cookbook has a great primer on tonjiru and my recipe is modified from hers.

here’s what I used:

• 1/2 pound pork belly, sliced thinly (I got a big hunk of it from a chinatown meat market hanging out in my fridge, sliced is okay too. I like cutting it myself though, a slightly thicker cut of meat is nice!)

• 1 small onion, sliced thinly

• 1 small knob of ginger, minced.

• 4 .5 cups of dashi (I added water and then some powdered dashi stock, didn’t have time to make it with bonito flakes today! The powdered stuff is a bit salty so definitely taste your soup before you add the miso if you’re using this).

• 1/4 cup red miso (I love sodium, you might want to do 3 tablespoons and adjust it accordingly)

• 2 potatoes, chopped up

• half a bag of enoki mushrooms (I cut the mushrooms into 3 parts)

• about 1/4 a korean radish, sliced thinly.

• 1 chopped green onion (cilantro, if you have any, is really nice in this in place of green onion)

• 1/2 block medium-firm tofu, added in the last 5 minutes

• 1 baby bok choy, leaves split off, each leaf cut into three pieces vertically)

• a handful of snow pea leaves (I love these, they add such a nice and unique flavor and they go perfectly with any fermented bean product— miso, bean curd etc)

heat: medium to start, then to a simmer

I start off by putting 3 small pieces of fatty pork into a heated dutch oven to cook off and then adding the remaining pork and ginger. when the pork is mostly cooked, I add the sliced onion and stir it around for a few minutes before adding the root vegetables and mushrooms (the greens go in last). I stir everything on medium heat till the edges of the potato are a bit translucent and the mushrooms have wilted down, and then add the dashi stock. When the soup comes to a boil, skim off the foam that forms and discard it down the drain, then lower the heat to simmer, cover and cook for 15 minutes. Uncover, add the tofu, & cook for another 5 until the tofu’s floating. Then turn off the heat, incorporate the miso, add the greens and cover for another few minutes until they’re nicely wilted. Then eat! I like a bowl of rice and some of my homemade pickles with this. There’s already so much stuff in the soup that it’s a substantial meal on its own.

some other food thoughts:

One of my favorite books this year (and now, of all time) is BRAIDING SWEETGRASS by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and bryologist. To very clumsily paraphrase, she writes about appreciating the gifts of the earth. I’ve gone foraging a lot this late summer and fall, and when I decided to make a batch of spiced pecan cookies today, I remembered I had some spicebush berries in the freezer. Finding them nestled in saran wrap, a reminder of autumn past, really did feel like a gift. It’s been really nice this year to eat food I’ve harvested myself, whether in nature or, lately, things I’ve been watching grow in my planted tank. I have a few little hydroponic experiments going with sprigs of herbs and some wasabi mustard microgreens. I am grateful for all the hands who harvest our food, and I’m grateful I get to eat uniquely delicious things— putting spicebush berries into my cookies or using foraged peppercorn to make Chinese style fish feels like a special secret between myself and the friends & family who eat my food.

hm.

My good friend Hannah Vardit let me know that Squarespace has a blog function, which I didn’t know about! Gonna be making a few changes to this page. I have major social media burnout. I am a shy person by nature and hearing about the instagram algorithm’s ways of manipulating users just makes me feel sick and sad. So perhaps it’s time to try something else in 2021. I’ve played with a Substack, which I was TERRIBLE about updating. But I’m going to try to keep this one going in whatever way feels okay to me.