Blogroll Updated

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys is taking a week off. I'm now on my fifth day of the Worst Cold Ever, and I find myself lacking the energy to contemplate common fictional errors in 19th century British inheritance law. It'll be back next week, or perhaps the week after, since next Sunday is Easter. If I can just get my voice back by then I'll have a full day of choir, following which my husband will cook me a delicious dinner prominently featuring pork (preferably in the form of a ham).

I did, however, update my blogroll today. Please check out the new additions, especially soon-to-be-published historical mystery author Gary Corby's A Dead Man Fell from the Sky, my cousin-in-law Mary's adventures as a children's librarian, and the always amusing Unhappy Hipsters.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys will be back next week

My blog feature on British titles and forms of address will return next week because tonight I'm watching the Oscars. So far Penelope Cruz and Queen Latifah's dresses are my favorites. And this year I really need to get out more. The only movies I saw in the theater last year were Up, The Princess and the Frog, and Star Trek. Yes, I have a five-year-old, and we live far away from our extended families. Why do you ask?

Food blogging!

I restarted my food blog to track my resolution to try 24 new recipes in 2010.

Thankful

On this Thanksgiving I am thankful for:

1. Getting a new job when I least expected it. I almost didn't even apply, because the job posting listed a Masters degree as a desired qualification. I don't have one, and I figured in this economy they'd get plenty of applicants who did. But I interviewed, was offered the job the very next day, and I start 12/9.

2. Finishing a good draft of my alternative history. Time to go back to the scary but exhilarating process of submitting to editors and agents, at long last.

3. My family--a supportive and loving husband and a beautiful daughter who's loving kindergarten and having fun learning to read on her own.

It's been a long year, and in many ways a hard one. But with the new job and the completed novel, I'm looking forward to the holiday season and feeling cautiously optimistic for 2010.

Farmers market berries...

Today my daughter was caught red-handed at the farmers market:



Here are the berries she was eating, sliced to go on angel food cake after dinner. I don't think the picture quite does justice to the sheer gorgeous redness of them.

VeggieTales: Three More Days

I got out of the habit of blogging my vegetarian Lent experiences while my laptop was in the shop, but we've been sticking with it, mostly. I've cheated a few times, often involving bacon. (Oh, bacon, how I love you!)

As Lent wore on, I got less creative and experimental. After having a couple of experiments go wrong, my instincts turned conservative. Why slave over the stove for an hour with a recipe that might turn out bland or outright awful when I know I can throw together pasta with a tasty quick homemade tomato sauce or bake a few potatoes and serve them alongside a salad?

With recipes that turned out terrible, I tend to assume the problem is me, and if I like the idea of the dish enough, I might even try again. I'm not an expert or naturally gifted cook, and sometimes it takes me a few tries to get the hang of a cooking technique. But when food is bland or boring, I blame the recipe. And I want the results of cooking to match the time and effort I put into it, somehow. If I spend an hour and a half chopping and sauteeing and stirring, I want that dish to taste an hour and a half better than the baked potato I threw in the oven and walked away from for that same time period or the grilled cheese I threw on the Foreman and had ready in ten minutes. And usually it doesn't. Often it tastes worse.

Maybe I just wasn't meant to be much of a cook...

Anyway, I'll be glad to add meat back to my menu on Sunday. I think my husband is going to cook a ham. Mmm, ham. Nom nom nom. And my grilled cheeses and pasta sauces will taste much better with prosciutto back on them.

I'm glad we tried this. If nothing else, it reminded me of the pleasures of a simple baked potato and taught me how easy and quick quesadillas are. But those potatoes will taste even better sharing a plate with a steak, and a bit of shredded chicken or pork will perfect the quesadillas.

VeggieTales: Convenience Food

Tonight the husband is at a Meetup with blogging friends, so the daughter and I were on our own. There are leftovers in the fridge, but I'd already had two meals of kugel in a row and didn't want a third. I really, REALLY wanted to cheat. A chicken club from Kidd Valley sounded like the perfect meal. But I had to go by the grocery store anyway to get bread for tomorrow night's dinner, so I decided to at least look at the vegetarian options.

I didn't want a cheese pizza after my previous experience with cheese overkill, but I found a vegan pizza from Amy's that was basically just a vegetable tart. Sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, onions, peppers, etc. And it was surprisingly good, very rich and sweet-tart.

I fed my daughter a kid's meal with chicken nuggets, kinda hoping that, as she often does, she'd leave some of the nuggets uneaten. Then I wouldn't be so much cheating as just not wasting food.

She ate them all.

One somewhat surprising note: I'm up four pounds since Lent began. I realized that I've been using "no meat" as an excuse for every other caloric indulgence. I need that ice cream for protein! Oops.

VeggieTales: The Moosewood Redemption

The Moosewood's Noodle Kugel recipe is a huge improvement over its Tart & Tangy Baked Beans. So the Moosewood Cookbook is no longer Dead to Me, but it's still On Notice. I'm trying its Welsh Rarebit recipe on Wednesday, so I think I'll go two out of three.

VeggieTales: We Miss Meat

The husband and I have agreed that this vegetarian experiment would've been better performed in the summer, perhaps in July, with the Seattle farmers market runneth over and you can get local strawberries that are deeply crimson or even garnet or claret-colored on the outside and scarlet at the heart, none of that grocery store spring strawberry white at the center.

Dayum. Now I want a strawberry that does not exist in February in this hemisphere, much less this state.

Anyway, tonight my husband made vegetarian cassoulet for dinner. It was quite good, but you know what would've made it really yummy? Ham, or maybe smoked sausage.

We miss meat, but we're going to stick with it. It's just starting to feel less culinary adventure and more limitation. Which I guess is appropriate for a Lenten fast, after all.

VeggieTales Continued

I probably won't be blogging as much over the next week or so, because my daughter broke our laptop today. Fortunately my husband bought a full two-year service agreement that still has a few months left on it. Unfortunately the laptop is on its way back to its mothership, so we're down to one computer for the next week or so. That's one computer for a web developer and an aspiring novelist, both of whom are internet addicts. Sigh.

At least I can do rough drafts in longhand.

Anyway, I'll keep my vegetarian comments of the day brief, and just say that I recommend baked potatoes as a tasty and dead simple meal when salted, peppered, buttered, and cheesed, and served with a salad on the side.

More VeggieTales

So. I'm still on the meat-free wagon; I've just been too busy to post the past few evenings. And I'm still too busy. So I'll just say that the white bean & cornmeal croquettes I made last night were pretty good, though they needed more salt. And that the downside of this whole experiment is getting reminded that when I eat a lot of dairy (we've been cheese-dependent this week), I break out like a teenager. Ugh. Zits.

VeggieTales, Day 5: Bruschetta Caprese

For tonight's dinner, I toasted French bread with olive oil and garlic powder (normally I would've used chopped garlic, but we ran out last night), then topped it with sweet onion, basil leaves, tomato slices, and fresh mozzarella and stuck it back in the oven to melt the cheese. And it was pretty good. Certainly infinitely better than last night's World's Blandest Beans. Next time I'll have a better garlic product. What would REALLY taste good would be roasted garlic cloves smeared on the bread, but chopped garlic would do. Also, if I have just a few minutes more to work with, I'll slice or tear the basil--with whole leaves, you get one basilly bite and that's it. Even with those changes, I think it could use just a tad more bite. Maybe some healthy grinds of black pepper, or a few crushed red pepper flakes. Or even that great, ubiquitous condiment of our time, balsamic vinegar.

I had leftover beans for lunch. They weren't much better the second time around. I think tomorrow I'll just take Easy Mac. At least it's appealingly bland.

VeggieTales, Day 4: Full of Beans and Brown Bread

In my husband's family, you don't just say a fidgety, feisty kid is full of beans: they're full of beans and brown bread. And that's what I made for dinner tonight. Tart & Tangy Baked Beans from the Moosewood Cookbook and Boston Brown Bread from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

This is the kind of cooking I had in mind when I decided to go meatless for Lent--trying new recipes, breaking out of a rut. But I can only do this type of meal on a weekend because it's both labor-intensive, with lots of chopping and measuring, and time-consuming, with pots bubbling on the stove and pans baking in the oven for hours. Oh, and it fills the sink with dirty dishes.

None of which would be a problem if the result made my mouth happy. (That's a Japanese Iron Chef reference, for the uninitiated.) But it did not. My mouth was bored.

The brown bread was OK. At least, it tasted like I think it's supposed to. I can't be sure, because I've never had it before. But it was a little too strong, somehow. I think I'll give it one more chance, but I'll try maple syrup instead of molasses for the sweetener. The recipe listed both as options, and I had both on hand, but I went with molasses because the beans also had it, and I thought that would make the flavors complement each other.

The beans, though...let's just say I could've gotten a tastier result by taking two cans of beans, giving them a good rinse, and heating them up with a bottle of barbecue sauce, not even the good stuff but any old brand, plus maybe a sauteed onion and some molasses for more flavor. And it would've taken maybe a quarter the time and effort. This recipe had an ingredient list a mile long. I soaked the beans overnight, then simmered them on the stovetop for an hour and a half. I chopped onions and sauteed them with chili powder, cumin, dry mustard, garlic, salt, red pepper flakes, and freshly ground black pepper in what seemed liberal quantities. I stirred in chopped apples and tomatoes, plus cider vinegar, cheddar cheese, and molasses, again in what looked like ample amounts to make for an interesting dish full of complex flavors. The recipe, after all, advertised itself as tart and tangy. And the house smelled nice while it baked.

But it was bland. Boring. Tasted like something out of a can. I sacrificed half my afternoon to those damn beans, and they were BLAND. Grr. That's one recipe I know not to try again.

Tomorrow I'll have approximately 45 minutes to get dinner on the table and eat before my writers group, so I'm throwing together a sort of bruschetta/french bread pizza/melt thingy based on my own instincts and experience for what flavors work together. It'll have like five ingredients, and two of them are bread and olive oil. It might be bland or even taste like crap, but at least it won't be maximum effort for minimum reward.

VeggieTales, Day 3

As planned, I took Friday off from my meatless Lent. Mmm...bacon. Mmm...potstickers. NOM NOM NOM...

Anyway, today I was back on the wagon, and for the first time it was a bit of a challenge, mostly because it was such a hectic day and we didn't have a lot of options. Frankly, I was tempted to bag it and go by Jack in the Box for a chicken sandwich, but I stuck it out and am glad I did.

Today our afternoon was eaten up by the Democratic caucus and a birthday party for one of my daughter's preschool classmates. We hadn't had time to plan our meals for the next week and do our big grocery run yet, so last night I'd bought a frozen cheese pizza so we'd have something for lunch.

No more cheese pizzas for me. The cheese was just too heavy and strong, overwhelming the sauce, and it needed some onions, garlic, peppers, SOMETHING, to balance it out. Also, apparently all that cheese was too much for my Lactaid to manage, because I ended up with stomach cramps just before the caucus started.

After we finally got home, I did our grocery shopping, not saving as much money as I'd hoped by not buying meat. My husband made breakfast for dinner--scrambled eggs and waffles with strawberries and whipped cream. Yummy. And I need to put the beans for tomorrow's dinner on to soak before I go to sleep...

VeggieTales, Day 2 (now with added fish)

Breakfast: A muffin. Not the most nutritious meal in the world, but decent quick fuel before heading into a long meeting on my first day at work since Monday.

Lunch: Leftover pasta from last night, eaten at my desk. My big food realization of the day is that I'll only eat the fruit I pack with my lunch when I take my food to the cafeteria (where it's perfectly acceptable to bring in your own food--they even have microwaves set up). At my desk, there's no space that doesn't have papers stacked on it, so any fruit that's capable of squirting juice unpredictably just seems too messy. I also read more when I leave my desk, since there's no internet to surf in the cafeteria. So, I think I've got to stop eating at my desk. Not as good nutritionally or as a use of my time.

Dinner was my adventure. My husband likes fish. I, generally, do not. I make exceptions for really fresh salmon grilled with a good marinade, and once when politeness obliged me to eat catfish I discovered it wasn't half bad, but that's about it. So I wasn't looking forward to tonight's dinner of oven-baked fish and chips. But...amazingly enough, I liked it. The fish, beer-battered pollock fillets, didn't have that overwhelming fishy reek I associate with frozen fish sticks from my elementary school cafeteria. Drizzled with malt vinegar and dipped in ketchup, it was good.

Lenten Blogging (Veggie Tales, Day 1)

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. I'm still relatively new to observing the seasons of the church year, since I grew up in the very non-liturgical Southern Baptist Convention. We celebrated Christmas and Easter and had special offerings to support denominational mission work in the weeks running up to the holidays, but we never talked about Advent or Lent, much less Epiphany, Pentecost, and so on. So I never even thought of giving up anything for Lent until I found myself married to a former Catholic and attending an unusually liturgical Presbyterian church.

Most years I've picked tiny things to give up. I've given up buying books, which is no real hardship when your to-be-read pile is as big as mine and you're still going to the library every week. I've attempted to give up swearing, which lasts until someone cuts me off in traffic. But this year my husband had the idea of giving up meat. Which is serious. I'm from Alabama. He's from Oklahoma. We're cradle carnivores.

After brief reflection, I decided to go for it. It's difficult enough to feel like a real spiritual discipline in keeping with the season, and it's also a chance to cook and eat more mindfully after getting into a rut. And I decided to blog about it here, partly because it's such a slow reading year so far that I'm running low on things to talk about!

We're not going to be 100% vegetarian. We're taking Fridays off. (Sunday is the traditional day to break a Lenten fast, but my husband liked the idea of doing it kinda backwards, and I wanted our Sunday cooking to match what we're eating the rest of the week, since the weekend is a good time to make a big batch of slow-cooked food to have leftovers to take for lunch.) And, because my husband is using the Catholic definition of "no meat," we're allowing fish. But I've never been a big fish eater (horrible of me, living in Seattle, I know), so I'll attempt to eat it when he cooks it, but I won't cook it myself or seek it out in the cafeteria at work.

So. Anyway. Today was my first vegetarian day. I was home from work for the second day in a row with a sore throat, fatigue, and fever, so I went for comfort food that required little preparation. I skipped breakfast, not intentionally but because by the time I woke up for good it was almost noon. We had some Easy Mac around the house from our last Costco run, so I had it for lunch and enjoyed the soothing blandness.

By dinnertime I was feeling better, so I made pasta--just a pound of penne with a quick homemade sauce: I sauteed a heaping teaspoon of minced garlic and some red pepper flakes in olive oil, then added a can each of tomato sauce and diced tomatoes, plus most of a package of fresh basil. That plus spinach salad from a bag made dinner. Simple and pretty tasty.

So far I haven't diverged much from how I normally cook and eat. I make that exact sauce all the time, only I usually toss in some pancetta or prosciutto with the garlic and pepper flakes. But I've been digging through my cookbooks, and I plan to start experimenting soon--I can't live on Easy Mac and pasta for 40 days!

I'm History

Most of you are probably familiar with the American Girl series of books and toys. They're children's books featuring a young girl, I think 10 or 11 years old, living at a different point in American history. Girls who read the books learn something about growing up during the Revolution, pioneer days on the prairie, World War II, etc.

Today in the grocery store I spotted a new entry: Meet Julie. Julie is growing up in San Francisco in 1974.

1974.

According to my quick skim, Julie's story is designed to teach today's girls about sexism (she wants to join the school basketball team but is told no girls are allowed) and what it was like to have divorced parents when divorce was just beginning to become commonplace. And I suppose that's useful history for a contemporary child to learn.

But 1974 is history? I was born in 1971. I'm only 36. I have a 3-year-old, and we might have another child in the next few years. Because my biological clock still has some time on it. I have gray hairs, but not a lot of them. Who'da thunk my lifetime was already a subject for historical fiction, even for the elementary school set?

Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby (Book #71)

Off and on since 2000 or so, I've been a member of an online forum that started out as a discussion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but turned into an all-purpose international community. Now there's a book about my mostly-virtual world: Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? True Adventures in Cult Fandom (Allyson Beatrice, 2007). It's a series of well-written essays, by turns snarky and touching, on how what starts as a simple online discussion on a specific topic can turn into a real community, warts and all.

I honestly don't know how the book would read for someone who's not a part of that tribe, but I'd recommend you try. Allyson has a flair for dead-on description that make her voice a pleasure in itself. Reading it had an impact on my life: it made me decide to return to one of the online forums she discusses after an absence of nearly two years. I'd left after finding myself at the center of a kerfuffle. It was a great big mess, and I decided the only sane thing to do was walk away from it. I still think I did the right thing, but reading Allyson's book made me miss the place. These are the people I talked with on September 11, when we were scrambling for information and comforting each other and trying to make sense of our suddenly shifted world. These are the people who anxiously awaited updates when I was in labor for four days. They're the ones I shared my triumph with when I finished my first manuscript. And they consoled me through my father's terminal illness and death. So I decided to dip a toe back into the waters there and see if I still belong there in any way. It's still early in the toe-dipping process, but I'm glad I read this book and glad I decided to give it a try. Because internet communities are as real as any other kind. They're not always easy, but a good one is worth fighting for.

A complaint

Having a cold in the summer is bad enough. Being all stuffy and sore-throated and vaguely feverish during Seattle's annual heat wave (generally of blessedly short duration, but miserable while it lasts), is just unfair.

Maybe I'm a little too identified with my characters' world...

So, these days I'm primarily writing Napoleonic-era stories with British protagonists who have some degree of military affiliation. A sergeant, a captain's widow, an ambitious naval lieutenant, a general who's taken the bit in his teeth and taken over a story where he was supposed to be a supporting character, etc.

I think maybe I've internalized their mindsets a little bit too much. Tonight at choir practice our director was going over the introit for the Easter service on Sunday. He called it a 16th century English carol. I looked at the header and saw a bunch of French names, the only English name being that of a translator, and without even thinking about it said, "Actually, it looks like a Frog carol." It just popped out. And the thing is, I'm very impatient with 21st century American French-bashing, because I think most of it is stupid, lame, and displays a stunning ignorance of history. But apparently the 19th century Brits are taking over my vocabulary...