Lee.org

After the wildly successful bread classes at IUH, Maker Faire, and WhatWillYouLearn, I’m having another bread baking workshop. Sign up and put on your calendar!

Real Bread in 10 Minutes, Saturday June 25th 2011 10am-1pm
Learn how to make fantastic home made bread that is easier, less expensive, faster and better than going to the store!

Sign up by sending me an email at “Lee at Lee dat org” or sign up on Skillshare.com

Update: I’ve added a second date to the class, for weekday people!
Real Bread in 10 Minutes, Tuesday June 28th 2011 7pm-10pm

Real Bread in 10 Minutes on Skillshare.com

About the Class
Making bread is easier, faster and more flexible than you thought. You can make fantastic bread every day inexpensively with less than 10 minutes effort, including cleanup! In this class, you’ll learn techniques to minimize the ordinary and maximize the extraordinary parts of making all kinds of bread at home. We’ll talk about things like: instant yeast vs sourdough, refrigerated dough, crust, crumb, shaping, amendments, the chemistry and biology of bread, and the thousands of varieties of this staple food. Once you have the foundations, you’ll see bread recipes as suggestions instead of steps to be followed. The sky is the limit! While our bread bakes, we’ll make our own specialty butter! You will eat and bring home what we make in class.

Teacher
Lee Sonko
San Francisco, CA
Website
Lee Sonko is an entrepreneur, educator, machine artist, organizer, hacker, geek and baker. Those attributes often team up in his life to help explore the world. He is a founding member of SWARM, a San Francisco based mechatronic art robot group. He is also a member of the Flaming Lotus Girls and is the Head of the Kinetics and Electronics Department at The Crucible in Oakland. Lee’s love affair with good bread goes back as long as he can remember. Making and eating bread is his daily reminder of the simplicity and purity of the experience of creation.

Wherein The Nebula Crew form alliances and someone is voted off the island.

Oh my Oh my Oh my Oh my Oh my!
Art. Engineering. Drama.

It will take nerves of nylon coated stainless steel to pull this one off.

Nebula video – Part 3 of 4.

Watch parts one and two first!

The Flaming Lotus Girls BBQ Shindig

World-renowned fire art sculpture mavens the Flaming Lotus Girls are pleased to announce an afternoon & evening of art, music, and fun to unveil the design for their newest piece,  Tympani Lambada! Come heat up the summer with the Flaming Lotus Girls, SATURDAY JUNE 4^th,  at The Box Shop, 951 Hudson Avenue, SF, 3:00 pm — 10:00 pm.

Check out where the Flaming Lotus Girls work, play and make hot metal magic come to life! See the latest plans for FLG’s grand new sculpture,  Tympani Lambada, headed out to Burning Man 2011.

The women and men who brought you  Serpent Mother, Mutopia, Soma, and many other breathtaking works warmly invite you to join them for a BBQ Shindig to help us complete our grandest sculpture yet. Every donation supports the creation of stunning fire art and helps this female-driven group continue their tradition of innovation and inclusiveness.

Enjoy tasty sizzling bites from Catherine and Rosa Anna, DJs Smoove (NewsBreakz) and others, and, of course, some fire art!

Best of all — the evening is open to one and all, with no cover charge! Yes, that’s right. It’s absolutely FREE, and we want YOU to come.

Hang with the artists, pick up some classic FLG schwag, treat yourself to some savory food and dance the night away to some of the Bay Area’s preeminent DJs. You’ll have a fabulous time with the pleasure of knowing you’re supporting unique and extraordinary art.

The Flaming Lotus Girls BBQ Shindig
Saturday, June 4, 2011

3:00 pm to 10:00 pm

The Box Shop, 951 Hudson Avenue in San Francisco

Free to attend (donations encouraged)

More information:  www.flaminglotus.com

BBQ Magic by FLGs Catherine & Rosa Anna

Sonic backdrop by:

DJ Smoove (NewsBreakz), and others

Show your support for local artists! Your generosity will help us raise essential funds required to see this monumental work come to fruition.

With love and lipstick kisses,

Flaming Lotus Girls

http://www.flaminglotus.com

Another successful Real Bread class. There are 4 more people in the world ready to go out and make some friggin bread!

And darn it, the home made specialty butters came out terrific! Cinnamon butter is surprisingly awesome.

This class came by way of WhatWillYouLearn.com which is gearing up to be something supremely cool.

My class sat between “Sequence Your Own DNA” and “Introduction to PCB Layout” on the calendar, which is pretty rad!

It's neat seeing "Lee's Kitchen" on the calendar next to all those other great spaces

I went to the “Foodia is Chocolate” event Friday night with Erika. We tried chocolate from Fearless Chocolate, Madecasse, Vice Chocolates, and TCHO. The clear winner: Fearless Chocolate’s Cherry Bomb gnosh (ugh, how do you spell that?). The taste experience was like watching Macho Man Randy Savage and Hulkamania duke it out on a terrific roller coaster… on the moon… in 3-D… In. My. Mouth! Awesome.

And their basic chocolate bars all had a vivid, sharp taste that had us wanting more!

Madecasse: too much of a heavy cream action in all their samples
Vice Chocolates: I don’t recall, there was something not perfect… (sorry)
TCHO: a solid stand-by

The classes at Maker Faire went splendidly. The 30 minute format required me to tighten everything up dramatically to get the message across. The students didn’t get all the info I wanted to give them but they certainly got the spirit, and some laughs! Afterward, I received email comments like this:

I was lucky enough to catch your talk at the Maker Faire this afternoon… I really enjoyed your “organic” way of approaching baking… Your teaching style was also excellent, a little humor goes a long way in education.

– James Peters

Lee,
Thanks for teaching us how to make bread at makersfaire! It came out delicious the first time and we shared it with our neighbors. It was a fun way to bring the whole apartment building together!
Cheers,
Sarah and Evan

Here is video part 2 of 4 showing Reuben Margolin’s Nebula.

Wherein there is much talk of how to actually ship and put together 12 tons of kinetic art. Having built big art, I can say that this is a very real depiction of what goes on.

Reuben Margolin’s Nebula video – part 2

Go back and see part 1.

Here’s one more photo for the journal. This is from last night’s Electronic Controlled Flame Effects class. That’s my hand holding the cutest little double-poofer you ever did see. This was terrific proof to the students that a 1lb cylinder produces just as powerful a poof as a larger one, just not for as many times before freezing up and/or running out of gas.

It made a fireball that by gum nearly touched the 30 foot high ceiling! It would be more accurate to call it a fire “jet” owing to the 1/8″ nozzle on the pipes.

Flame effects at work

Please note that the man’s head obscured by the fireball was not, in fact blown off by the force of the blast.

Here’s some photos from recent travels. Click to enlarge! Better yet, mouseover each image briefly to preload, then click when you want to view.

Creative forklifting at NIMBY. Not sketchy at all.

Brunch in Alameda. Quite a nice spread!

Charlotte brings my touchstone, Joe's O's in her new measlecar

Look at the name of the school. Just look at it! Yes, this is a real school in Alameda.

Erika straps in to receive an automated randomized religion reassignment tattoo at the amazing ArtPadSF event at the Phoenix Hotel

Tada! Now she's a Jew!

Building a new poofer at Center Hardware!

Building the poofer in Electronic Controlled Flame Effects class!

An aerial performance at the NIMBY BBQ!

I've got a bad cold. Aunt Dorothy's caps will help make me better!

I’m teaching another bread baking class on Sunday, from 3-5pm in the Mission. Sign up at wwyl.net/bread!

Here are some emails I got this week about last week’s Maker Faire class:

I was lucky enough to catch your talk at the Maker Faire this afternoon… I really enjoyed your “organic” way of approaching baking… Your teaching style was also excellent, a little humor goes a long way in education.
– James Peters

Lee,
Thanks for teaching us how to make bread at makersfaire! It came out delicious the first time and we shared it with our neighbors. It was a fun way to bring the whole apartment building together!
Cheers,
Sarah and Evan