If I don't post things, then they just build up and build up in semagic until it seems insurmountable. Today I have decided to say "fuck that" to that problem, so here are ... a bunch of misc and unrelated things, some of which have been in semagic for months.

1. We made lots of awesome food for American Thanksgiving which was like three weeks ago now, but this text has been sitting here for most of those weeks so I'm posting it anyway. I might forget how to make these tasty brussels sprouts by next fall! ( More details about the recipes under the cut to spare you guys )

2. I'm currently going to PT threeish days a week for hand and wrist and knee and ankle and etc joint pain, and I still have partly immobilized hands. It makes me cranky and anxious, especially because nobody seems to know what's wrong, and why this problem is worse than the previous ones. ( Blather about doctors )

3. ( Some things I forgot about when I was doing yuletide nominations, so now I'm putting them here for next year )

3a. It is a sad state of affairs when your yuletide story notes are long enough to be posted to the archive. *pokes at file* Now, if only I had a story...

4. ( Some random things I have learned from kink_bingo )

4a. This isn't a random thing that I learned from kink_bingo, ( it's a true story from planning last year that I've always meant to post so I won't someday forget it )

5. I want a firefox extension, and I can't find it! ( Here's what bugs me )

THERE. Now I have a completely blank update field. And I'll add some stuff from today to make sure it stays that way:

6. This Penny Arcade strip pretty much explains the way I feel when people say things like "you're just watching it to hate it."

7. Oh my god, lj, seriously? You're seriously going to make gender a mandatory field and make male and female the only options within that field? Seriously? I just. Fuck that shit. I can't put words to my RAGE.

Operation Cranberry Sauce* On Cheese Taste Test Commences:

Option A: Cranberry sauce on mediocre brie. (Co-op, please to be buying better brie.)
Option B: Cranberry sauce on amazing local raw sharp cheddar.

Bite from A. Result: Mmmmmm
Bite from B. Result: MMMMMM
Bite from A. Result: MMMMMMMMMMMM

Conclusion: cranberry sauce makes everything tastier, even mediocre brie. Best cheese-toast EVER.

***

* I make cranberry sauce with only fruit sugar. Basically, eight ounces of fresh cranberries, 3/4 of a small container of concentrated orange juice, simmer, eat. It is very tart and very tasty.

I ask google for an answer to this question all the time, but google is untrustworthy, so.

What is your favorite brownie recipe? My ideal brownie is fudgey, not cakey, and very chocolatey. It can have nuts, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, whatever, I'm good as long as it's basically a fudgey, chocolately brownie. But my success rate in finding a recipe for same is pathetic; many of them come out dry, or cakey, or dry AND cakey, or aren't chocolatey enough. Thus, I ask you! Because you are awesome.

kthxbye,
eruthros

1. Cooked! A lot. I made apple-pear crostada and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and mashed yam with oranges and rum and pecans and salad and other things as well that I've forgotten. m_shell made kick-ass apple-cranberry-turkey sausage stuffing, and was responsible for cooking the turkey. (Turkey is scary.) It was all quite good, even if we did have a minor pie crisis (for unknown reasons, it took an hour to cook instead of thirty minutes -- baffling). Also, we then ate leftovers for days.

2. As a corollary to #1, I did a lot of dishes. Because I have only three mixing bowls, I washed them about every thirty seconds all day Thursday.

3. Taught m_shell to knit. Go me! She picked out some yarn and everything, and is knitting a hugemongous scarf, which she had time to practice because...

4. ... I watched the entirety of the 2005 series of Doctor Who since Friday. We'd both sit here with our knitting, and then I'd pause it to explain Daleks to m_shell, and then we'd agree that Daleks were creepy, and then we would watch more Doctor Who. Um. Yeah. It ... didn't feel like thirteen episodes?

5. Knit. A lot. (See #4.) I finished a scarf and am halfway through a purse made of sari silk.

6. Discovered that I live in a town where you can buy pony carts on craigslist and the police need to remind people to lock their doors when they leave for a month. A month. I cannot deal. It was a front-page story in the local paper: attention! lock your doors! Where is reality from here?

This is one of my favorite cookie recipes; it's easy, fast, and the cookies come out moist and thick. The original idea was from allrecipes.com, but m_shell and I make them way more... well, way more everything. These are moist, thick, studded with chocolate chips and almonds, and mildly coconuty.

I'm making them right now for a potluck we may or may not have tomorrow.

( Behind the cut )

We have a lot of vegetables from our CSA, so it's easy to just make some sort of stir-fry, and that's what we were going to do last night. Tofu, napa cabbage, sweet soy sauce and tamari and toasted sesame oil.

Except, as m_shell is cutting cabbage, I turn to her and say, "Hey, we keep not making curry, and you've been wanting curry. We have coconut milk." So she pauses, because cabbage would go into a curry last, and says, "Yes, I want curry, but I don't want to wait for brown rice." So I try to think of things that are faster than brown rice, and I say, "We have couscous, I think. How about that?"

Poking through the cabinet of dry goods results in a consensus on whole grain bulgur wheat. (Partly because I can't find the couscous.) So I start bringing the bulgur to a boil while m_shell puts the cabbage to the side and starts chopping onions.

Current state of dinner: yellow coconut milk curry on unflavored bulgur.

I'm sauteing the onions and telling m_shell about a particular essay on lotus-eaters that made me want to write speculative fiction, create dust-swept stone cities on alien planets, all because the descriptions of Djerba and of food in said essay were so lush. In fact, I say, even the included recipe for masfouf (sweet date and nut couscous) was richly written. So I fetch the book out of my bag and, still stirring, read the recipe aloud: essence of orange blossom; pillows of couscous strained through the hand until soft and billowing; almonds heated gently, until they are warm and fragrant; faint dustings of cinnamon. And m_shell says: you're right, that's an incredibly sensual recipe. And then: Why don't we put some cinnamon in the bulgur?

So I put cinnamon in the bulgur.

And I'm sauteing onions and potatoes (we have a lot of potatoes, and anyway I like potatoes in curry, even with rice) and pondering other vegetables. "Do you want to put anything else in?" I ask. "What else would we add?" m_shell asks. "Well, let's see... we have beets, and carrots, and eggplant, and ..." I don't finish the list, because m_shell says, "Beets? Beets in curry?" And I say, "I was just listing off vegetables from the CSA. I don't know. Maybe?" And when I turn around m_shell is washing beets.

Current state of dinner: cinnamon bulgur and a curry that is now more peach than yellow; it's picking up pink from the beets and beet greens.

Of course, after you've added beets to your yellow curry, there's nothing stopping you from further flights of fancy, so we throw in several tablespoons of cinnamon when we add the coconut milk and tofu. But the flavor still needs more depth, so we add some powdered cumin, to bring out the sweetness. And of course, at this point, it needs extra tamari sauce. And we have to remember to put the cabbage in at the end; after all, it's already chopped. And then, because we're still thinking of the masfouf recipe, m_shell says, "What about raisins?" (We don't have dates.) And she pulls out the almonds without asking.

We assemble the curry, if it's still a curry, in bowls: a layer of heavily cinnamoned bulgur and a ladleful of pink-peach curry, topped with a handful of raisins and chopped almonds. The potatoes have soaked up so much color that they look like yams, but the color from the turmeric penetrates further, so when I cut a steaming chunk of potato in half with my fork, it is a deep pink-orange on the outside, lined with a thin edge of bright turmeric yellow and finally the pale yellow of the potato itself.

Result: a sweet and spicy curry. Spicy-bitter cabbage, sweet raisins, richy, crunchy almonds, tofu, and potatoes. And beets, it turns out, meld with curry quite well.

As we're eating dinner, I turn to m_shell and say, "You know what would make this better? Next time? Dried apricots in the bulgur."

Or, what to do with not quite enough rhubarb for a pie.

I adore rhubarb. And rhubarb pie, which I can eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Especially really tart pie with melting ice cream on top -- mmmmm. And we got rhubarb in our CSA! But only a few stalks of it, nowhere near enough to effectively make a pie. (Joy can say it only takes 4 cups of rhubarb if it wants, but I beg to differ -- rhubarb pie should be thick and filled to the bursting.) So I had to think of something else to do with said rhubarb, and this is what I did:

Preheat oven to 450*.
Chop rhubarb to about 1/2 inch pieces (I had about 4 cups)
Put in bowl along with:
1 cup concentrated orange juice
1/4 cup flour
1 Tb butter (melted)
Mix until gooey and let sit for a few minutes. Then pour into a 9x9 pan.
Cook rhubarb at 450* for ten minutes, then turn down oven and cook at 375* for twenty minutes or until soft.

While the rhubarb is cooking, make your favorite quick-rising coffee cake recipe for a 9x9 pan. (Mine is from Joy, 'cause I'm lazy. I can provide it if anyone wants one.)

Pull out the rhubarb... puddingish thing and let it cool until it's stopped bubbling. Stir a bit to loosen the thicker sauce at the edges. Cover the top with the coffee cake batter, and pop back into the oven at 375* for 20 minutes or until done.

It came out really, really well. I served it like upside-down cake, with the rhubarb on top. The rhubarb and juice thickened enough the make a really nice layer, and it's not overly sweet. (It would be a good dessert if served with vanilla ice cream, though.) It's sticky and rhubarby and also more filling than pie. And very, very nummy. *goes and eats more*

This last weekend, I cooked my absolute favorite ten-minute pasta sauce for fiatlouis and J. This is a recipe I invented two or three years ago, after having a just fabulous smoked-and-fresh-salmon tomato-cream sauce at the cute Italian place a block from the Dakota Street house. I wanted something that would taste about the same, but only get one pot dirty (no making bechamel!) and not call for ingredients I rarely have (no heavy cream).

So. eruthros's famous ten-minute smoked tomato cream sauce. Put on a pot of water before starting and, if you're swift with the knife, it should be ready about five minutes before whole-wheat pasta has cooked, or about the same time as Boring Pasta.

1 can fire-roasted tomatoes, diced or whole (I've actually fire-roasted fresh tomatoes, but it's winter, so... no)
1 can fire-roasted tomatoes, crushed
2-4 onions
2-3 cloves of garlic, minimum
sploosh of vodka
1 lb fun vegetables (we typically use some combination of green beans, zuchinni, or summer squash, but many other things would be good as well; my mom's made it with white beans, even)
2-3 Tb of cream cheese (we use organic neufchatel, because it's what we have around)
fresh-ground black pepper and salt to taste
optional - leftover fresh salmon and/or sexy smoked salmon. mmmmm.

Chop and saute onions in olive oil or butter with a sploosh of vodka. Add minced or crushed garlic. Saute until everything's transparent. Add veggies at an appropriate time -- green beans late, summer squash earlier. Add crushed tomatoes. Strain diced tomatoes and add, or strain whole tomatoes, chop, and add. Stir on high until vegetables are nearly done, adding seasonings to taste. Turn down heat and add cream cheese -- stir in carefully, because it'll want to clump initially. (Different brands are different thicknesses, so add in increments until sauce looks or tastes creamy enough.) If adding salmon, fragment and add at this point. Serve over pasta. Top with grated hard cheese.

Yummy and oh-so-easy.

Made some pretty fabulous banana bread yesterday to an extremely modified recipe. We had these really ripe bananas, see, and needed to bake to heat the house, and didn't have any brown sugar, or a lemon, or many eggs or anything.

Banana Bread:

3.5 c whole wheat pastry flour
5 t baking powder
1 t salt
Sift together and set aside

1 c of white sugar
drizzle (approx. 1-2 T) of blackstrap molasses
5/6 c unsalted butter (this is one 1/4 c stick plus 1/3 c from another stick)
Finely-grated zest from one orange
Mix until creamy; then beat in:
5 medium-sized bananas
1 egg
Juice from that same orange

Slowly add flour mixture to liquids. Beat in as many toasted pecans as you like. Bake at 350* in bread tins (approx. 1 hour) or in baking tins (approx. 40 min).

Final product is very banana and orangey, and is very good when hot.