incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Chad made the bread recipe and the first loaf was eaten in about five minutes by all four humans in the household.

Some links, first follow-ups or things I know some of you will be interested in:

• Etsy :: hansigurumi :: Where to buy the patterns for the awesome knitted cephalopods, and other cool things besides.
  (tags: knitting)
• "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," Ted Chiang -- Fantasy and Science Fiction :: Read the Nebula-nominated story free online.
  (tags: sff)
• Gundam: How Much Would it Cost to Make a Life-Size Working Gundam? :: For the GW fans I know.
  (tags: anime)
• TackyChristmasYards :: Hey, some of our neighbors still have their decorations up . . .
  (tags: pictures wrongness christmas)

( some more behind the cut )

And a recipe for pan-roasted potatoes, cribbed from the TV show America's Test Kitchen. At present, a Google cached page contains a summary, but it doesn't have times and may go away:

1. Get a bunch of baby potatoes (the recipe calls for Red Bliss). Halve or quarter them (cut pieces should be roughly 1 to 1.5 inches).
2. Heat some olive oil in a big flat nonstick pan. The summary calls for high heat; just over medium was ideal on our electric flat-top stove.
3. Put the potatoes in the pan in a single layer, cut side down, and cook for five minutes, or until the potatoes are nice and brown.
4. Turn over and cook on the skin sides for another five minutes, or until the skin is darker and wrinkly.
5. Drop heat to low, cover, cook for another five minutes.
6. Stick a fork through to test doneness. Tip out on to paper towels (something I'm going to try next time). Serve.

These are so easy but have the perfect roast-potato nature. They made me ridiculously happy earlier in the week. (We haven't had the leftovers yet, so I don't know how they reheat, but if they don't, we'll just make less next time. Simple.)

Finally: the Patriots won, the Giants won, the Colts lost, the Packers won, and T.O. is crying on the recap show. A good football week.

I don't suppose anyone out there has a jar of Dickinson's Premium Cranberry Relish and would like to tell me what's on the ingredient list?

(We had it last year, and it was a huge hit, but it's not being stocked anywhere around here this year. It appears fairly simple to make homemade relish, but it would be nice to know the main ingredients—apples, for instance, or just oranges? (I didn't have any; I like the canned stuff.))

The most important news first: I'm an aunt! Six weeks earlier than expected, but the daughter of my brother and his wife appears to be doing well regardless.

Much cookout food the last two weeks. We held one here last weekend, at which the dog ate a piece of pineapple (from the ground) and half a piece of bread (from the hand of a small child, who would wave it in front of her face); people ate all of the mac and cheese, again (I keep thinking it's not a summer food and being proven wrong); people ate orzelc's spiedes and lbmango's over-bourboned pies; and I ate way too much baklava and contemplated learning how to make it myself. Yesterday we went to a cookout hosted by someone at work, at which the food was quite good but not nearly as interesting as my coming within twenty feet of a doe. Oh, and in-between we had deep-fried mozzarella sandwiches, among other tapas-y things, at Cella Bistro. If you live in this area you really need to be eating there.

And as Chad already said, we saw Richard Thompson perform live and electric last night. Impressive show, even though I don't like Thompson nearly as well as Chad does.

In non-weekend news, I have finally started working on learning a bit of Japanese, and can recommend the audio lessons at JapanesePod101.com (the audio is free; extra material requires membership, though you can sign up for a free trial). I find it a lot more appealing than my half-remembered college language lessons, and am planning to work my way through the "Survival Phrases" series. Someone here may well have recommended this, so thanks.

So, learning survival Japanese, doing a lot of Worldcon reading, eating a lot of cookout food. There was a disc of Princess Tutu in there too, but that's a separate post. And as always, I feel like I'm forgetting something, but if I am, how important could it have been?

Food in Review:

• Oatmeal raisin cookies are definitely better with half the cinammon (replaced with an equal amount of ginger), but they still need something more; I'm thinking of increasing the brown sugar (and decreasing the white) and increasing the ginger and vanilla.
• The baked potato soup tasted a lot less like chicken stock on reheating, so while I still intend to reduce the chicken stock relative to the milk, I won't need to do it as much.
• We attempted rosti this weekend and last. We'd had a fabulous version in Québec City, all melty creamy cheese-potato goodness with a lovely brown crispy crust, and I tried recreating it with the leftover potatoes from soup. Unfortunately all-purpose potatoes are very definitely not the way to go for this, but Chad's attempt tonight worked a lot better.

  ( Something like a recipe )

Sports in Review: speak not to me of football. I am strongly contemplating hiding in the bedroom with a book during the Super Bowl.

Work in Review: very hectic, though thankfully moving past the stuff that had me feeling flayed for much of the last two weeks. I was called for jury duty and rescheduled it for next week before things got crazy; I'm not needed on Monday, and I suspect I won't be needed for the rest of the week, which is kind of too bad because I'd like to serve on a jury, but is probably for the best because of the timing.

Health in Review: I have had a remarkable amount of medical stuff lately, all minor things, but it does add up.

Entertainment in Review: I did fit some reading in, and have a couple books to log. Also, I've put Genji on my Palm and got through the next chapter that way; post to come. (Anyone else want the .pdb file, let me know.) And the next episode in the Dresden Files was just on the background and didn't suck.

Weather in Review: it's been really freaking cold, I can't seem to find any satisfactory winter boots, boo hiss winter.

Clearly, I need to go to bed.

• YakTrax are terrific lightweight easy traction-givers. Wearing them means you never have to worry whether that shiny patch ahead of you is water or black ice.
• Does anyone have a nice thick potato soup, something like the one you get at Panera? Nb. it should be a recipe will not be harmed by omitting onions and garlic.

It's cookie season again, and my old link for "the best cookies ever!" (according to Chad's students [*]) has died, so for your information: Skaarup’s Almost Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe (you may need to scroll down).

Edit: that link appears to omit the [starred] substitutions, which are: for butter + butter Crisco, either 7/8 cup melted butter, or 1 cup butter Crisco; for 2 teaspons baking powder, 1 teaspoon baking soda + 1 teaspoon corn starch. (I've never tried either of these.)

Edit again as note to self: dark brown sugar is better than light brown.

As you know if you watched that Good Eats episode, the shortening, the brown sugar, and chilling the dough means that these are poufy, dense, and a bit soft.

(I personally like a #30 scoop rather than Alton Brown's preferred #20, which gets me 32 cookies, but I concur with Alton Brown that parchment paper is better than the recipe's suggested wax or foil.)

[*] People made nice noises about them at the party yesterday, so it's not just starving students who like them.

Lost my temper over not one but two online discussions, which is the first time that's happened since I can remember. Only SHOUTED in one; I'm not sure if, in the other, it was apparent to anyone other than Chad that I was truly angry.

I did come up with a ten-second theory on the predominance of women in fanfic, which is that it's more socially acceptable for men to channel those impulses into gaming. Over at Chad's blog, a commentor offered the same explanation, so if it's loony, well, at least I'm not a lone loon.

In other news, a new restaurant in Schenectady, Cella Bistro, is seriously yummy. Chad had, as an appetizer, mussels with a huge heaping of french fries, and as dinner, duck done two ways; I had two appetizers for dinner, filo-wrapped baked brie with greens and pear-Chardonnay sauce, and jumbo crab claws. They also have a tapas menu, which I am going to have to try just for the apple & brie panini. Mmmm, melty brie and fruit.

It's an odd location for an upscale restaurant, kitty-corner from a decaying strip mall, so, like Karavalli in the Quality Inn in Rotterdam (which I appear to have not written up: great and wide-ranging Indian menu, branch of a place in Latham that we really like, not near anything and almost always empty), we'll have to go there often to keep them open. Oh, the hardship.

Also, Animaniacs is brilliant, and I'm very glad that it's out on DVD now. Nevermind Tiny Toons, it's the true heir to Looney Tunes as far as I'm concerned.

Things I failed to do this weekend: write up the next chapter of Fellowship; booklog four books; draft the "you may not discuss copyright unless you can pass this test" list; read Inda; convince the dog that she need not bark before 7 a.m. on weekends, truly.

But I did get some work done, and now that I've dashed this off, as Yakko says—g'night, everybody!

Chad was away last weekend on a debauch, and I took the opportunity to eat a lunch buffet at an Indian restaurant. I had lentil doughnuts (medhu vada, judging by the menu; surprisingly good), and something unindentifiable that was very much like a crepe with a dollop of mashed vegetable curry in the middle, and grilled stuff, and naan, and rice kheer (nice thing about a buffet, I could take just a taste), and then I rolled myself back home to lie in the backyard and read.

On the way to the restaurant, I saw two striking things: a wild turkey winging its way across the road directly in front of me—they seem even bigger than they actually are (which is not inconsiderable) for being so ungainly; and a truck that had replaced the knob below the license plate with a chrome skull, with red LED eyes that lit up when the brake lights did.

Chad got home around 2 a.m. Sunday (delayed flight), and of course the dog woke up when he came in, but she went back to sleep surprisingly quickly; I actually laid awake for about twenty minutes expecting to hear her start crying after him. Chad's theory is that she thought it was a dream, which would explain why she was so amazingly excited when I let her into the bedroom the next morning. She frequently orbits the living room and dining room, running full-tilt in as wide a loop as possible; but when her orbit expands to include the bedroom and the stairs (and she is not good with stairs), well, that's an excited doggie. It was ridiculously cute in a way that probably only other dog owners appreciate.

Chad's folks were up for dinner Friday night. It started inauspiciously, when I opened up the cabinet for plates and saw a house centipede scuttle away in that freakishly quick way that they do. Everyone else helped hunt it down, as I quietly quaked in the other room with the dog; Chad's dad gets credit for finally killing it. However, Chad assures me that this time, my freakout was justified, as the thing was huge, as big as his thumb.

On a more serious note, I was sorry to hear that a great-aunt of Chad's had passed away; though not surprised, since it had been about a year since she was given three months to live. I understand it was a good year, but she was a cool person and will be missed.

After that, though, dinner went fine. We were puzzled to learn of the existence of fat-free half-and-half, which Chad had grabbed unknowingly for the fettucine alfredo; I wouldn't have thought such a thing possible.

We went to the library book sale today, just on a whim, and found ourselves faced with a swarm of literary locusts. It was their bag sale—$2 for a brown paper grocery bag, which you could fill up as you liked—and people were filling those things up like there was no tomorrow. It was kind of heartening, in a way, that so many people wanted books! but it was also frantic and rather claustrophobia-inducing.

We picked up a few random things, and also two hardcover copies of John M. Ford's The Last Hot Time—they had four, which made me sad, so we rescued two of them. sloanesomething, you need one of these; do I have your address somewhere? The other free to whoever asks first.

And then we read in the backyard some more, and I booklogged a bit crankily, and watched an intense episode of Homicide ("A Doll's Eyes"), and now it's time for bed.