So this post has been a while in coming, but on the other hand, the Hello Fresh boxes have just stopped coming (there may be one more…?) so I suppose it’s just on time.
We tried Hello Fresh, which is one of those meal-ingredient delivery services, and found it, overall, perfectly cromulent. Continue reading
As I was blending up a tomato soup today, I was thinking about basic tools that I, well, can live without but would rather not.
This is obviously not an exhaustive list but includes things I’d buy first if I was rebuilding a kitchen from scratch.
Power Tool
An immersion blender with whisk attachment. Blend, puree, whip – they generally come with a small food processor attachment too.
Mixing, scraping
A thin but firm metal spatula
A fisk – or whatever tool works best for you for getting lumps out of sauces.
More rubber scrapers than you think any two households need, or at least two you really like
Microplane for zesting, grating nutmeg, and more
Bamboo scraper/spatula
Bowl! This is 100% personal preference – my favorite mixing bowls are a type by Rubbermaid that aren’t made anymore
(note: I get super sensitive to noises, thus the non-scraping-noises scraper and wisk-tool) Continue reading
In apple season, we make this an average of once a week. As a matter of fact, we just diced up a whole bunch of apples, dipped ‘em in lemon-juice-water, and stored them in the freezer (Chinese soup containers) with the sugar needed for four of these cakes.
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Originally posted March 10, 2013. In Vas’ World, in the “First settlers” era.
A continuation of Holy Fuck, it’s Snowing.
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The snow kept falling.
The clear-sky thing hadn’t lasted for more than a few hours; now the sun struggled to be seen through thick layers of cloud cover, and the flakes fell and fell and fell.
“That hairdo took a long time,” [Shahin] told [Baram], sounding blandly irritated, “and you’ve messed it all up.” It gave her time to peel off a glove – the long sleeves of her widow’s weeds would still cover her wrists – and rest her hand on his forearm.
Read On!
Oops… catching up!
Two Chapters!
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Chapter Fifteen: Being Childish
Nimbus woke the next morning from a sleep sounder than she could remember having. Her hands tingled slightly at the poultices Cartwright had wrapped around them, but most of the pain was gone, and she had slept long and heavily in the leaf-down bed.
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Chapter Sixteen: The First Man Down the Stalk
Cartwright had moved this and that around while they packed up, such that Nimbus now found her pack more comfortable to carry while she was fairly sure she was carrying more than she had been. They walked along under the shade of Aereaxera, the birds and lizards chirping at them in the early-morning haze.
Originally posted Oct. 31, 2012
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November, Year 11 of the Addergoole School
(This is a prequel to the Baram’s-Elves stories)
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“Going to celebrate Thanksgiving?”
The girl who worked the desk at the shop was chatty, always chatty, even with Baram. He shrugged at her. He didn’t bother smiling. Nobody thought it was friendly.
It’s not really a recipe, more of a formula, so I’m offering it here free.
Ever weekend for several years, T. & I have been making this oatmeal. A few months ago, we actually settled it down to weights, because it was getting kinda variable in size.It’s not really a recipe, more of a formula, so I’m offering it here free. Continue reading
We have been experimenting with bread, now that the warm weather has subsided a bit (well,it had. It appears to have come back with a vengeance but… hey).
The current experimentation is breadcrumbs.
The thing about homemade bread is that it goes stale far more quickly than store bought bread, so if you have a couple days of not eating bread, you have a rock in your fridge. Good for breadcrumbs or bread pudding or stuffing… but there’s only so much of that you can eat, and Igo through maybe one tube of breadcrumbs every five years.
So… mixing bread crumbs back into bread. The first experiment was ¼ cup to a 2-cups-of-fluid recipe, and you could barely notice any difference. The bread was a little crumbly in texture — but that could have been the lackadaisical kneading. (I am not all that good at making all variables the same, but OTOH all variables are never the same over a stretch of days.)
The second bread was one cup of breadcrumbs into the same 2-cups-of-fluid standard House Thorne bread recipe. This one, I kneaded with the machine, and I also had a longer (overnight) sponge period — both of which build gluten.
Super chewy bread! The breadcrumbs made a nice texture in the bread without interfering with the crumb or the structure. Hooray!
Next: cup and a half. That’ll be this weekend, if we finish the second loaf before then…
…or maybe we’ll end up turning yesterday’s loaf into breadcrumbs for tomorrow’s loaf.
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If I had been made to make a list, back in the times Before, of people I would most like to be stranded on a desert island with, he would not have been on the list…
Open to all Patreon Patrons!
Originally posted January 2013
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“There’s a problem with the second restriction.”
The country of Foros had a lot of gods, and, like any good nation with a lot of gods, it had a lot of priests.
This is another recipe that is more than half technique, modified from an online recipe.
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Sometimes you want a few pancakes, sometimes you want a lot. Sometimes you want a Just Right Amount, right in the middle.
When I posted The Gardener I was asked (and now I can’t find where, sigh) about Damkina and the apocalypse. So here is Damkina and the apocalypse, considerably longer than I’d intended. 🙂
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The sky was black and red, and in the distance an unearthly howl echoed through the city. But the squash would not forgive her skipping their bug treatment and the weeds in the pepper garden were unseemly.
Damkina muttered wards against bugs as she slammed her hoe into the ground with more force than was strictly necessary.
It was, as fairy gifts went, rather strange.
As wedding gifts go, it was even odder.
It was hot so the ganache frosting melted and my food photography really needs work, sorry!
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When baking chocolate things in my household, there are two things that we almost always do to up the chocolate flavor, and two more we do as we remember to:
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This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1327550.html. You can comment here or there.
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I’ve mentioned a couple times that my parents are going vegan. For my mom, this isn’t all that much of a stretch – she’s been lackadaisically vegetarian my whole life – but for Dad, well, this is all new.
So I’ve been trying out vegan recipes for them. For the last three, four years we’ve been making Mom a jar of soup (I don’t know why Dad doesn’t like soup, I really don’t, but soup is for Mom & cake is for Dad), and then a dessert for Dad as part of our Christmas presents to them. Part of the gift is perfecting a recipe so Mom can make it later, if she likes it.
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Originally posted February 16, 2014. Set in my Faerie Apocalypse setting.
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“I don’t think we can, exactly, call him ‘Old Man Winter.’”
Giselle was feeling argumentative. Of course, Giselle was often feeling argumentative.
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1232945.html. You can comment here or there.
put frosting outside to cool to the right texture…
went to get it and there's a possum sampling it.
— Lyn Thorne-Alder (@lynthornealder) December 18, 2016
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There was a possum eating my chocolate frosting.
— Sam T.C. (@samttc) December 18, 2016
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsSo yep. That was my weekend: possum frosting.
(Turns out, if you google possum and chocolate, what you get isn’t a whole lot of good information on if possums are able to eat chocolate. You get mostly possum recipes. Oops.)
We were testing vegan frosting to go on a vegan cake for a vegan Christmas present for my vegan father (help I can’t vegan stop). The cake turned out great, actually — a Depression-era “crazy cake” recipe with no eggs and no butter or milk (“no eggs no butter, no flour no sugar” says the woman on the bus whose parents probably remembered the Depression). And the frosting — once we scraped off the top where the possum had gotten his nose into it — that turned out surprisingly tasty.
This week is all the vegan food-testing and making: soups for mom, cake for dad, and the bread might not be vegan but it’ll be tasty too. It’s the time of year where I’m making a lot of bread, trying new recipes or just throwing stuff in the mixer and seeing what happens (“either not enough molasses or too much” last week; this week turned out pretty good). Bonus of all the baking: it heats up the far end of the house, where the wood stove’s heat doesn’t really reach. Bonus of making soup in the winter: cooking it on the wood stove and making the whole house smell like soup.
The weather outside is frightful — by turns freezing and raining, snowing and blowing — but the fire is burning hot and the candles are lit in the windows. I’ve got silk poinsettias for my vases and bandanna-patterned wrapping paper for my presents, cookies for the baking and fresh bread hiding in the microwave (Otherwise the cat eats it).
Happy Holidays, my friends. It’s a wonderful life here in West Nowhere, NY.
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