serakit

We failed at making danishes and therefore made blintzes instead. Also Mathfiend is my favorite human and Wintersweet is my favorite cookbook.

This started last week with Mathfiend suggesting that we could make more interesting things if we planned far enough ahead that I could pick specific things up at the grocery store so we weren't bound to pantry staples. (Which, not coincidentally, decreases the randomness of what I bring home from the grocery store and increases the likelihood I will eat something regularly in the coming week; my resistance to wasting anything we've cooked together or that he's cooked for me tends to overcome the executive function problems I attach to meals.) I was flipping through How to Bake Everything when we were having this conversation, and landed on "Let's make cheese danishes!" (Sidenote: my internet osmosis is such that even though I do not watch and do not like Big Bang Theory, I cannot think of cheese danishes without thinking of this genuinely funny clip of Sheldon and Amy playing Counterfactuals.)

I did not read the recipe all the way through before purchasing the ingredients. This was a mistake.

Because as we went to start on it today we realized that it has several steps that are "Do thing. Chill for half an hour," and a rising step-- and I do not think failing to anticipate a lengthy rise on a dough with no yeast it in it was unreasonable of me. Mathfiend's weekly visit tends to last several hours, but not that long, especially when on a day when we didn't jump right into baking. (Yes, I did look at the estimated time. What I did not realize was that the estimated time for making danishes starts from the assumption that you have already made "1 Recipe Danish Dough," which is itself a prolonged multi-hour process. Once you've done that the actual danishes aren't unreasonable, and I do think time estimates in cookbooks should call out explicitly that it's going to be longer if you're starting from the very beginning if it calls for one of some other recipe in the book.)

That plan having failed, we turned to my cookbooks for a plan B that would include most or all of what I'd bought (cream cheese, ricotta, and a lemon) while also being modifiable to my food issues. Finding nothing in How to Bake Everything, I turned to my beloved standby Wintersweet, which has a cheese chapter.

By percentage, Wintersweet probably has the highest proportion of recipes I either make regularly or realistically see myself trying out of all my cookbooks-- especially impressive when you consider that half the chapters are focused around ingredients I straight-up can't have. Almost every recipe in it that I can eat (or can modify) is on the to-make list. It's not the one I use most often-- it's mostly a strictly focused dessert cookbook with a few forays into fondue-- but it is far and away my favorite. And it came through for me once again in the form of two recipes. First, a cheese danish recipe that is considerably less ridiculous than How to Bake Everything's but still takes some time, which we will be making next week since it was getting late by the time we found it, using the cream cheese. And a Ricotta Blintz recipe using the ricotta. Since you top it with whatever fruit jelly I can't have, we made vegan lemon curd to go on top, which is getting less tapioca starch next time but still tastes good even if it is very thick. (Mathfiend: "It's a little too sweet for me, which means you're probably going to love it." He was not wrong.)

This also took longer than it was meant to, mainly because I had a dizziness flare-- my first in a while; it's been a really long time since we had to modify our plans around that. This meant that while I managed to mix the crepe batter, we could not do the intended plan of me making the crepes while he made the filling and lemon curd, and he wound up making all of it. (Have I mentioned Mathfiend is my favorite human?) They are delicious and now I have breakfast for a few days.

I did manage to participate somewhat in cleanup, which is good, because this recipe uses a lot of dishes and I don't have a dishwasher. (Desired things in next apartment: larger kitchen with more flat surfaces and a dishwasher.)

I'm in an anthology! Forest Avenue Press put out a call for speculative stories by disabled writers, and I offered up what is possibly one of the most New England stories I've ever written, a dark fantasy about the things that lurk in cranberry bogs... and what happens when you start noticing that there are things lurking in the cranberry bogs. What happens when you ice skate on a cranberry bog with things lurking in it? (People I've mentioned this story to think I'm making that part up, but cranberry bog ice skating is in fact a thing people really do. I think it's less common now as cranberry farmers have gotten more concerned about liability-- but I did it as a child.)

The anthology doesn't have a title or a cover yet, but the table of contents has been announced here. Even just the story titles draw me in and makes me want to read everyone else's contributions, so I will definitely keep you updated as things progress.

The impetus for it in the fic I was reading is actually quite tragic, but on an abstract level I'm really amused by the notion of the birds and bees talk being bad enough but much worse than that is when every single adult in your life, apparently without having consulted each other, separately sits down to have a brutal heart-to-heart about the dangers of magical oaths.

(Without providing any of the context for why they felt this was necessary--it was hellish and none of them like to talk about it--so from his perspective it just looks like everyone is really weirdly emphatic about this subject.)

I saw someone making a comment about how Jonathan Sims would have done dropped into Jonathan Harker's place and OH SOMEONE PLEASE write this fic. Or Trevor and Julia encountering Dracula in England. Or Harker coming to the Institute to make a statement. Adelard Dekker meeting Van Helsing.

There are SO MANY CROSSOVER POSSIBILITIES HERE. AO3 has NONE OF THEM. I'm hoping Dracula Daily results in more Dracula fic. But seriously, I want this crossover!

Yes, I know, you have to timeshift one of the two to make it work. Someone write this fic anyway.

("But Kit," you say, "are you not a writer? Should you not set the example?" "Yes, I am!" I reply. "But I am in the middle of writing an epically long fic for which I wrote a 20,000-word outline in the span of approximately three days before any of this happened and I am also writing original work to submission deadlines. Thus I do not have time to do this thing just now!")
 
Also there are a lot of people saying that Dracula's obsession with England marks him out as a proto-SuperWhoLock, and I do not know enough about SuperWhoLock to write that one, but I would totally read "Dracula gets into fandom." Or "Dracula crosses over with Doctor Who or Sherlock." (I was never a Supernatural fan.)

What might I eventually write? The "except where the doors are locked" Dracula/Bluebeard crossover. Mainly because I've been trying and failing to write Bluebeard stories for years.

(Yes, I am going to be posting a lot about Dracula for a bit. Almost I am tempted to get a Tumblr so I can participate in the squeeful memery, but there are reasons many and good that I am not there. Dreamwidth, alas, does not appear to have a community for this.)

(There are also a lot of people suggesting what book we should do next, after Dracula. And someone suggested Dangerous Liaisons. I am SO THERE for other people joining me in fervent Dangerous Liaisons fandom. SO THERE.)

So there is no King Arthur AP flour in the Market Basket. Now, this sort of thing is why I have a big plastic bucket filled with extra baking supplies-- I am looking for AP flour because I just moved a bag of it from that into the plastic "in use" container, not because I am about to run out. This is not going to keep me from baking just yet. But I offer it up as a shortage data point if anyone's collecting such.

Also, the correct time to go to the Market Basket is apparently 11AM on a Thursday.

Ann Reardon is a delight in general. She's a food scientist who is famed on the internet for her debunking of various internet hacks and videos about channels like Five-Minute Crafts (which has given me a disinformation talking point: non-political disinformation exists), but she does other cooking things online too, and now she's gone and baked an AI generated cake recipe, which you can watch here. This was just too good not to share; I laughed so hard at the cake recipe. Like so much AI stuff, it reads like it was written by someone who kind of had the idea of cake, but no practical experience with it.

And the cake manages to be notably easier on her kitchen than the internet food hacks; at no point is there an explosion all over the inside of her microwave. (It is a running gag in the debunking videos that they are very rough on her microwave and she always winds up having to spend a lot of time cleaning out the inside of it, sometimes multiple times if she needs to try something with several different starting conditions.)

It is super funny; go check it out.

Jowl bacon is delicious.

I mean, I wasn't actually expecting to get an entire 2-pound whole pig cheek when I ordered it, but it worked out very well-- for once I planned ahead what I was going to defrost for Mathfiend's visit and bought avocados ahead of time and made sure I had potatoes, and then he brought tortillas and scallions and limes and we made tacos. And I have lots of bacon in the fridge and freezer and between that and the frozen meat pies I am probably doing okay as far as meals for a bit. I mean, I still need to bake some bread so I can have bacon-and-avocaodo-toast with my remaining avocado, but that's easy.

It's very good bacon, significantly better tastewise than any other bacon I have ever had. We did some thin cut on the stove and some thicker cut in the oven.

I also had not considered limes as seasoning, but dripping some lime juice over the tacos really did add a lot, and I'm now looking forward to trying the limeade recipe in Lemonade with Zest. (A cookbook I got out of the library thinking I was going to look at it, think it was cute, and shrug and be done with it. This is not what happened. I now own a copy I can't wait to play with.)

And the not missing a beat line of the day: "Once I've moved and I'm not a ball of anxiety anymore--" "I'm going to hold you to that!"

But the actual thing I was suggesting we do after I've moved is actually try some of the recipes from A Cowboy in the Kitchen, which we haven't done yet because altering them so I can eat them is going to be a tremendous amount of work. We kept it even though there's not a single recipe I can eat without heavy modification because they all looked good enough to be worth the effort... so we should find the time to actually make the effort. (I mark up my cookbooks a bit as is, but that one is likely to wind up significantly more heavily annotated than I usually do.)

Interesting writer milestone: having enough accomplishments under your pen name that you bite the bullet and mention it on a job application, because for this particular job the writing and podcast experience are actually major qualifying factors without which you'd have a hard time demonstrating that you're a competitive candidate.

So that's new and different.

And now they're "deporting" civilians to Russia. While they're already committing war crimes. And they may have poisoned a Ukrainian peace negotiator.

I said it before: Crimea was Sudentenland. Ukraine is Czechoslovakia.

We're going to find out they're torturing and killing those civilians.

Our world leaders will be remembered as Chamberlain, as "peace in our time."

And we see what "never again" is worth, as the world stands by and lets Russia go down a path that very clearly ends at it happening again.

Yes, I am suggesting we put troops on the ground. I am suggesting we enforce that no-fly zone. Because the alternative is appeasement. The alternative is the occupied regions become North Korea. Russia has vast quantities of natural resources and there's no way China sides against them when they want to use this as an excuse to go after Taiwan. And there's no way Russia stops with Ukraine when they can achieve what they want by destroying it with missiles-- "killing everybody" works just as well for Putin as actually controlling it. And they won't stop at Ukraine, unless we stop them at Ukraine.

The only choice here is how many people we let them kill before we take an actual stand.

I've mentioned Sharon Astyk on here a few times before-- and I'm definitely paying attention to her feed far more for her essays than the links she shares. And today she's written this horrifying essay on the subject of what Putin's actual endgame is.

It is terrifyingly plausible. And, well, just flat-out terrifying: essentially, that Putin is playing the really, really long game and banking on the Russia having "we endure horrible things" baked into their national mythos so much that if he can damage the global economy enough-- and sanctions on Russia are damaging the rest of the global economy, and as long as China will still trade with Russia, Russia can actually survive that-- Russia will pull through the chaos on that austere-tradition-and-endurance thing while the rest of the globe falls into energy-crisis-and-famine chaos and eventually come out on top in the end.

Really, click through and read it.