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Weekend Blog: Bread-Kneader

Jan23

I have been thinking about bread.
🍞
Cal and I were discussing honorifics, which led to me remembering hlÇŁfdige, (See here), the word from which lady derives.

I first encountered this word in Parke Godwin’s Beloved Exile, a tale of Guinevere after the fall of Camelot. (That’s an awful cover; I much prefer this one: here). Memory provides a slightly different spelling for this and hlāfweard, but since I don’t have the book at hand and can’t find the text online, the general will have to suffice for now.

Hlǣfdige, loaf-kneader (loosely, don’t shoot me). I like that. I made a pretty standard loaf this weekend, changed only by having a really long ‘fridge rise time (because I started it Thursday night, kneaded it Friday night, and baked it Saturday around noon). I’ve been baking bread every weekend since it started getting cold — nothing all that exciting, but I like the routine of it, the kneading, the long rises, the shaping, the smell of the house as it bakes.

Hlǣfdige didn’t mean just the woman who makes the bread, of course — it referred, I’m told, to the woman in charge of a household with maids, etc. But I like the idea of being Lady Lyn, the loaf-kneader.
🍞
And if that makes my husband the hlāfweard, the guardian of the loaf… well, the cat does have a habit of eating it on occasion.

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Weekend Blog: The Smile Game

Jan17

Nobody who really knows me would deny that I’m an introvert (Except my mother, who somehow thinks it’s an insult). I like people, sure; I’m not a misanthrope (most days), but I’m perfectly happy not leaving the house for days at a time.

(Caveat: I DO get a little antsy if nobody’s online for a while. I get a lot of my social interaction via electrons)

But I am, despite social anxiety and a habit of hiding in my cave, gregarious, and there’s a little game I play when I am dealing with strangers.

Strangers in service positions, specifically — retail sales people, delivery guys — people I might encounter over and over again but with whom my relationship will almost always be cursory.

I like to see if I can get them to smile.

And, in cases of repeat visits, I like to see if I can make enough of an impression that they smile when I walk in.

Sometimes this takes a long time. At my last job, we had a paycheck-delivery person who was The Grumpiest. But I’d bounce down the stairs and grin at him and say “Hey! My favorite guy! You bring the money!”

Eventually, he smiled. After even longer, he smiled before I said anything.

It’s fun. There’s that thing where if you smile and mean it, it’s not only easier to get other people to smile, but you feel better – and sometimes I could really use the reminder to give myself a pick-me-up. There’s sometimes added benefits, like the extra appetizers my favorite Thai place sometimes slips in for me. And there’s the awesome feeling of someone smiling when they see you not because they have to, but because they remember you.

I’ve finally gotten our bulk-store guy to smile when he sees us. This makes Saturday errands just a little bit sweeter, and I can grin back at him with a private sense of triumph. I won the game!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1234830.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

January By the Numbers Nine: Baking (blog Post)

Jan10

January by the numbers continues (still a day off~)!
From [personal profile] anke‘s prompt “baking” – a blog post.

I love baking in Winter!

I like baking in summer, too, and it helps that the way our house is laid out, you can run the oven in the kitchen without really heating up the living room or our offices too much, so I can bake bread and cakes all year round if I want to.

Mostly, though, in the summer I bake cookies.

I have been making bread every Sunday for a few weeks now, and I find I like it. Start the bread with a sponge the night before or early Sunday morning, and then by 2 or 3 in the afternoon everything’s ready to go, and we have fresh homemade bread for the week (anything left over and gone stale, or the bread experiments that didn’t quite work, get dried in the oven and frozen for stuffing or bread pudding).

But I like baking cakes, too, pies, crisps, biscuits, cookies… Small Batch Baking, although it has its flaws as a recipe book, was a really good start for me. If I make a cake, a lot of the time it’s somewhere between a mug cake and a small batch recipe in one of my tiny pans or ramekins (I have a tiny bundt pan. It is the world’s most adorable bundt pan). That way, we have cake for a day, just enough frosting, and then it’s gone, poof.

Last night, I made a Small Batch Banana—Pecan bread pudding (forgot the pecans), with, as above, the ends from a few weeks of homemade bread (Since homemade bread stales a lot faster than store-bought). If you’re going to make banana anything, my suggestion is: wait ‘til the bananas are black or nearly black, and then halve the sugar the recipe calls for. You get full banana taste that way! (Also, much easier to mush up).

Honestly, I could talk all day about baking. My husband does the cooking… but I do (almost) all the baking in the house, and I love it.

And it makes the house smell so nice.

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Weekend with Project Expansion

Jan9

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsI want to talk about project expansion.

You know, when you think you’re going to knit something and realize first you need to ball the yarn and find your needles (and lock the cat in the bathroom) and figure out this pattern and oh hey it’s bedtime.

Or you’re just going to put the trim on the door but it turns out the threshold and the inner frame need repairing and the door strike is a mess and… wait, where did the weekend go?

Or if you’re going to put the new trim up, you really ought to put a new coat of paint on the room and replace the light and insulate the ceiling and… oh. It’s November? Oops.

Or you just want to do a small test book to remember bookbinding, but wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a brand-new story in there and, hey, maybe it could be like those he said/she said flip-the-book-over YA romances, and do I need cover art and maybe I need to drive 2 hours to Syracuse for the nearest Dick Blick and while I’m there I should look at bathroom wall panels and a new chaise lounge and maybe go to Dinosaur BBQ… Maybe that’ll get done this spring.

You might get the feeling that I have a lot of experience with this concept. 😀

This weekend, I thought, “Hey, I should make an image for Patreon, to thank new patrons.”

“Hey, I’m not great at art, but I’ve been practicing these banner designs. I could do something with that…”

“…over a map! Not just any map, a newmap!”

“…Where are the split peas?”

“Well, if I’m going to all this trouble — hey, I need a new brown pen — I should really practice my lettering, or find something nice to trace, because my handwriting isn’t great.”

“So, I have a map, what’s this world about, anyway?”

…300 words of worldbuilding later, I have a new setting, a map outline (with scale!) and, uh, I need to do some practice lettering.

*cough*

…and figure out what to do about this world.

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January By the Numbers Six: Swishy Skirts

Jan7

January by the numbers continues~
From [personal profile] anke‘s prompt “Swishy skirts;” a blog post.

This one has to be another blog post, it just calls to me too much.

I once had a boss’s boss (the Dean, to be specific) call me nunnish. Me. I have not gone through some sort of huge personality change; that was me as started writing Addergoole as what was supposed to be bondage-and-d/s porn. I wasn’t nunnish then, I’m not nunnish now.

But I love skirts that hit my ankles or, better yet, nearly the floor. I love layers of skirts, and have gotten positive comments more than a few times from co-workers for the nice “layered look” of my skirt, only to have them be rather surprised that it’s just two thin maxi skirts layered to make one warm pretty skirt.

I remember being teased in middle school for looking like “Little House on the Prairie.” Okay, granted, I was teased in middle school (in my district, this was 6th-8th grade, ages 12-15, or the most awful, horrible awkward years I can ever remember existing) for just about everything. But the skirts were definitely up there.

Didn’t stop me. There’s a picture of me at my 18th birthday party (writing this now, it seems unlikely I was ever 18), and I am wearing what had to be my favorite swishy skirt ever. My mom bought it for me from one of the Hippy Stores on Hippy Row (Monroe Avenue, downtown Rochester, at a point when it was head shops, hemp-clothing stores, tie-dye and organic recycled shoes), tier after tier after tier of super-thin patterned rayon. I wore that thing until every seam in the bottom 6 tiers had ripped out at least a little, and just tied knots in them to keep them from dragging on the floor.

If you handed me that skirt, new (in my size) today, I would wear it till the seams all ripped out again. Swishy skirts are my thing. They’re as much a part of me as writing.

Bonus: three of them layered over leggings is way warmer than jeans. And I get a kick out of walking for firewood in my carhart, barn gloves, and skirts to my ankles.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1226829.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

New Year, New Goals, New Everything…

Jan3

It’s a new year! It’s an arbitrary marker, of course, but I find I like arbitrary markers. I like resolutions. I like clean slates.

(This is starting to sound like the piece of fiction I wrote for January-by-the-numbers Day One).
I’m going to Do Things in 2017. Lots of things. Well, okay. I’m going to do a reasonable number of things.

I’m going to get my 365-day streak in 4theWords, because when you do that, you get fancy wings. I’m at 50-something now. I can do that.

Cal & I started our new project, so that’s a daily writing goal for me – which is conveniently just about a streak-making wordcount on 4thWords.

There’s other writing, of course: Edally and the novella thing, Patreon and all the little long-running stories here, the January By The Numbers posts (and so on and so on and so on and…)

I’m back on the weight-loss wagon, because I really want to do this. Which also means walking every day that I can stand to. T’s been looking at fountain pens (my 15-lbs goal) a lot lately, so that and my backsliding in Nov-December is really getting me geared up to do this, really do this.

Which means keeping track of everything, so hooray just starting a brand new bullet journal.

On pretty paper. With pretty pens, and banners, and all the whole shebang.

(tis a Mnemosyne, with very nice paper, a little smaller than I wanted but quite nice. Here’s a blurry picture).

I want to get the house tidy and keep it that way. I want to actually DO things in spring for the garden.

I want to work actively and consistently on the house.

I want to take a vacation, actually go somewhere. Probably the Adirondacks.

I think it’ll be a good year. I think I’m going to try for monthly goals rather than yearly, small, reachable mobile targets.

What about you? How’s your 2017 shaping up?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1223865.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

January By the Numbers Two: Oregano (blog Post)

Jan2

January by the numbers starts here!
From kelkyag‘s prompt “oregano;” a blog post.

This one’s all me.

When we moved into our second apartment together, T and I — and a friend of ours, and a friend of his, and so on — we acquired a whole bunch of stuff-left-from-previous-roommates, thus starting a trend that would continue (with a couple pauses) for the next decade-plus: dishes, pie plates, for a little while a doll cabinet.

But back then, one of the first things we got was a collection of far too much grocery-store oregano. I think there were three containers of the stuff. And the thing is… we didn’t really cook with that many spices and herbs back then. We were in our early twenties, I barely cooked at all and T. was just starting to work on his cooking.

We ate oregano in everything for a while. And the thing is, old grocery-store oregano doesn’t taste like much and I didn’t have much of a sense of smell, so I’m not sure it added much more than a sort of dusty green color. Still. Oregano. Everywhere.

We started gardening maybe 5 years later, but it is not until three years ago that I actually started growing oregano.

This stuff, I can smell. I can taste. It’s pretty good, actually, although when it comes to herbage I much prefer parsley and sage.

But the thing about oregano is, it turns out it’s part of the mint family. (I find this weird. I’m not sure why I find this weird, but I do). And it’s a perennial. And, well, it acts like it’s in the mint family, which is to say it’s determined, invasive, and durable.

And the thing grows nearly three feet tall. Every year, without me doing anything. And the bees love it.

And we still don’t cook with oregano.

Want More?

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Christmas and Traditions

Dec29

This past weekend was Christmas, and, if you hadn’t guessed by the number of Christmas reposts I’ve been putting up, I’m kind of fond of the season. It’s a lot more work than when I was a kid, of course – that shift between primarily being a recipient of gifts and being a giver of such (Which, in itself, might be a nice metaphor for adulthood…) – but I am one of those people who gets a blast out of people liking the gift I gave them (And, luckily, so is T), so it’s a different sort of the same warm feeling.

(I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m an only child; I still get pressies. This year was long-sweaters and leggings a la 1989, warm socks and scarves and a long down jacket. We live in the frozen North!)

There was vegan cake (possum-free!) and vegan soup (and tasty bread) for mom and dad, spices and breadpans, warm hats and flashlights. There were dogs helping, because they do that. And for a moment, when I walked into my parents’ living room and saw the tree all lit up and the presents underneath, I was a kid waking up on Christmas again, and Santa had come overnight.

Christmas traditions have shifted over the years for me – when I was young, it was Maternal Grandparents’ in the morning and Paternal Grandparents’ place in the afternoon. When I was older, it was just Maternal Grandparents. And then, after my maternal grandparents had both passed, it was – well, that’s when I started doing Christmas Eve with my parents and my husband.

I like traditions. I don’t particular like change, if I’m being honest. And so when something we did once, twice on Christmas, thrice and it started turning into a trend, I held on to it like a tradition.

Movies on Christmas. I can’t remember what movie started it, but I know that Sweeney Todd and Emperor’s New Groove were a couple of the more memorable Christmas-Day movies. Back in Rochester, sometimes we’d go out to Denny’s or some such – someplace willing to be open on Christmas, someplace we could sit and chat, someplace with free coffee refills.

We moved down to Ithaca, and movies-on-Christmas-sometimes-with-friends became movies, the two of us. We skipped a year or two, but it felt wrong. Like Christmas wasn’t right anymore, without a movie.

This year, we put of seeing Rogue One for a couple weeks so we could see it on Christmas. We went to the sushi place across the street from the movie theatre. We drank free ea refills and ate maki rolls, and all was right with the world.

When I was little – three years old, five years old, fifteen, when my grandma was still alive – the kids would pass out the presents and everyone would dig in. My cousins have kids now, older than we were when that tradition started…

But on Christmas Eve, T & I meet Capriox at Tim Hortons (the one in the plaza where I went grocery shopping with Grandma as a kid), and we open presents with my parents and my parents’ dogs (I still pass them out), and on Christmas Day, we watch a movie….

I guess what I’m rambling around about is, I miss my grandma. I always will, I think. And I miss the way Christmas felt when my grandma was telling me about Santy Claus, when I knew I’d get a new ornament from Grandma and a new National Geographic book from my Aunt. But I’m pretty fond of my new traditions, too.

Now all I need is a cute red dress for next Christmas.

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Weekend Recipe-testing: Now with Vegan Possum

Dec20

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//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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Weekend with Merit & Merit Badges

Dec15

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsYep.

That was Sunday.

Our kitchen sink leads out – via at least 2, maybe 3 right turns – to a dry well (covered by, I shit you not, a Bell Telephone manhole cover (rather like this)), which means that when it clogs (which it does, on average, about once/year), it’s easiest to snake it from the outside (less turns).

So there I was. In the snow. Snaking a drain.

There really ought to be merit badges for things like that.

“While baking bread” is a little disingenuous; the bread was rising at the time. My first time without a recipe, and I think the only real fail was that the molasses I used to sweeten it overwhelmed the amaranth I added in as a test flavor. It’s a hearty, half-wheat-flour loaf with little amaranth crunchies, quite nice.

This was one of those weekends: haul firewood, wash dishes, snake the sink, bake some bread. T made a pressure-cooker (InstantPot) ham-hock soup with yellow lentils and black/white Urad Dal, which was super tasty with the bread. The house smelled of bread and soup all day Sunday, which is just about the most awesome way for the house to smell.

It’s nice, sometimes, just hunkering down and staying inside – or, at least, at home. You come in, you stand in front of the fire for ten minutes, and you’re all warm again.

And Merit – our feral cat, or at least the one who started that way – clearly agrees. Sometimes in the winter, you can see her look outside and remember what the outside was like when it snowed or rained. Then she curls up by the fire, too, everything in her body language saying It’s good to be inside.

It’s good to be inside. With the bread baking and the sink draining properly. It’s that sort of winter.

*purrs*

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