Kat Dancing

... oh, yeah. Blogging. That thing I have time for now and am yet not doing....

*cough*

Look! A purple rhinoceros!

More seriously, I'm on part-time now, and yes, I have tons of free time. Most of which I've been wasting. But I've also been doing other things, things I should have been doing all along. Working on web stuff for the farm. Going to the gym. Cooking. Writing.

The cooking and the writing have been the fun part. I joined matociquala's Novel in Ninety Days challenge, and to my surprise, it's working. No surprise that publicly declaring my wordcount helps, of course -- I've always been a sucker for peer pressure -- but it looks like 750 words a day, for this book, at this time, is about the perfect pace for me. Most cool. I haven't always met the quota, but I'm keeping up, and I've written at least a few words every day since the challenge started.

Behold the power of mock!

As for cooking, one of our coworkers gave Dan a Russian cookbook called Please to the Table, and I have been having all manner of fun with it. Including the cornmeal Jell-O monster (aka mamaliga), this incredible sour cream pastry, and a savory pie that I should perhaps have paid more attention to the quantities involved before I made it. But hey, we ate it all! Eventually.

I've also been experimenting with curry, which led to my borrowing my mother's Hot and Spicy Cookbook. The results have been a thing of great joy for Dan especially. I'm thinking I may have to buy a used copy off Amazon sometime, as this one was a gift to my mother from my great-great-aunt and as such I have to a) be careful with it, and b) give it back.

Next up, one of Mom's Italian cookbooks. I love having time to experiment with new recipes.

And at some point I will get around to blogging about the books I've consumed in my off-time, but for now I leave you with:

Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 691
Comments: So far. Yes, I know that's not quota, it's just where the damned chapter ended. I'll write more later, okay? Shutup.
Crappy Writing Skill De Jour: matociquala is mocking my transitions. Deservedly.
Snips: I am snipless today. All the clever things would take far too long to explain.

So we spent much of yesterday wending through itty back roads and complicated directions to get to Ayer's Orchard, where we picked roughly 35 pounds of apples: Staymans, Fujis, Granny Smiths, and a few Golden Delicious even though I am in principle opposed to Delicious because these were, in fact, quite yummy. We loaded them all in the car and were about a mile from home when Dan said, "What is it you're planning to do with all these apples, anyway?"

"Make applesauce," I said, a little surprised.

There was a silence. One of those silences. Then Dan said, "I don't like applesauce."

Note to self: improve communication skills.

So tonight's dinner was baked apples (and tartiflette), and I just pulled a pan of apple bread out of the oven, and Dan's downstairs planning to make apple fritters as soon as he finishes his Sarah Zettel novel, and for most of yesterday and today we've been snacking on, oh, let's see... apples.

That leaves us with about 33 pounds.

Anyone who has recipes for putting up apples that aren't mushy like applesauce or apple butter? Please step forward now.

It's a good thing apples keep.

Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 1,150. Woo!

Comments: Absolutely ghastly workweek meant I got very little done, and didn't get much made up on my weekend off either... but I am finally through chapter three. The big three chapters; the stuff agents and editors will see if and when this thing is ready to submit.

*looks at words* Hmm. I was expecting this bit to be over at about 10K. I may be looking at a longer book than expected.

Damn.

Crappy Writing Skill De Jour (An idea which I stole from Irysangel, because I thought it was cool):

Dear writerbrain:

I let you talk me into reading the dictionary for fun all those years because I thought there would eventually be a payoff. Now I am struggling through pages of writing, using the same stupid word ten times in a row because I can't think up synonyms, and you're off on a beach somewhere drinking pina colada. Please pony up.

Cheers,

Me

Snips: And lo, we have met Gwen, and Gwen is a snarky bitch.

"Well," Elliot said, recovering his balance, "you must admit it's somewhat unusual...."

"I never confine my activities to the usual," Gwen said. "It lacks scope."

Five Things Kat Hates About Cooking:

- Supermarket Recipes. Yes, I realize that 99% of the English-speaking world gets its veggies and meats at the store in nice plastic wrappers, but some of us don't. This leads to me thumbing through recipes muttering, "Yes, yes, yes, beef tenderloin and chicken breasts, and what is it you expect me to do with twenty pounds of stew beef and all these drumsticks?"

Seriously. I have half a cow in my freezer and several books of recipes for the prime cuts, which, believe it or not, make up a very small percentage of half a beef. I substitute, of course, but it gets old.

- Fire Alarms. I never had to deal with these things when I lived at home, because my mother's first act upon moving into a house was to gut them. I'm starting to see her point. It doesn't matter if I turn the fan on, open the back door, and do the Dance Of Smoke Ousting, the damned fire alarm is still going to go off every time I cook. And it's got this shrill, piercing, I'm-saving-your-life-pay-attention thing going that reminds me of nothing so much as right-wing Christians, radical Libertarians, and all the members of the middle class who told me my tattoo would Ruin Me For The Job Market. I don't take that kind of attitude from people: damned if I'm taking it from the inanimate.

It's not like I'm even burning anything. It's food, for God's sake. It's supposed to smoke like that.

- It's Not Clean, It's Not Dirty, WTF? I swear my cutlery has it in for me. I must have spent twenty minutes wandering around looking for stuff that was neither put away nor in the (massive) stack of dishes nor in the dishwasher. I know I own this stuff. I can see it in my head. Why must I spend twenty minutes wandering around looking for the scissors or French chef knife or colander making vague snipping, cutting, or pouring-away-pasta-water motions with my hands before I can actually FIND it?

It doesn't help that when I do find the damn thing it is invariably a) somewhere stupid that leads to a fight over who put it there, b) in the fridge full of food, meaning I can't use it, or c) right in front of me, where it has been the whole time. Unless it really just vanished into a nether dimension for long enough to drive me batshit crazy. I have my suspicions.

The contents of the pantry are in on the thing too, but their trick is to vanish until I buy a replacement.

- Doing Things NOW. I should make it clear at this point that I love cooking. I love chopping and kneading and stirring and smelling all the lovely food smells, and I will putter around quite happily doing all of this. What I hate is that point -- and there's one in every recipe -- where the writer of said recipe has dropped a tab of acid and is imagining that you have four more hands than is the usual. I mean, one minute I'm wandering about doing my chop-knead-stir routine, and the next it's OMG the noodles are done and I have to pour them in while stirring slowly and the butter is burning and I haven't chopped the onion ohshitohshitohSHIT!

What is with this? Either the master cooks who write these kind of recipes are super-organized, or they've learned to balance pots in either hand while working the whisk with their teeth, or (as I suspect) they've had little peons running around doing the menial crap for so long they've forgotten about chopping things themselves. But I do not react well to pressure, and I wish they'd stop.

- Dishes. Yup. You've just finished your masterpiece. You're looking around the kitchen, experiencing that warm glow of accomplishment and anticipated gustatory satifaction, when your eye falls on the one fly in the ointment, the one cloud in your sky:

THE DISHES.

Maybe there are people out there who can cook a meal without creating an ungodly pile of dishes in the process. I am not one of them. In fact, the downstairs sink is creaking under the load as we speak. And I hate doing dishes. It's not like cooking. It's dull, it's icky, you get strange stuff under your nails, and when you're done do you have a delectable meal for your trouble? No! You simply have a lack of dishes. My Zen is not strong enough for me to appreciate an absence of something.

My first boyfriend and I had an agreement: I cooked, he did the dishes. We were happy with this agreement. I got to make a mess and have it cleaned up, and he got food that didn't come out of a can or say "Kraft" anywhere on it. Sadly the rest of the relationship did not achieve the same happy balance, and Dan, while a dear in most ways, has shown resistance to the I-cook-you-clean plan, on the grounds that he likes cooking and dislikes cleaning as much as I do. So, until that glorious day when my Robot Friend arrives pre-equipped with a soap dispenser and a towel, I am doing my own dishes.

Bugger.

On the other hand, I have cooked, and now I have food. Mmm. Food. Food makes everything better. Even dishes.

A few days ago I made tartiflette, which is a decadent potato and cheese dish that my mother had while she was in France. Unfortunately it doesn't really exist over here, and so to make it we were forced to cobble together one bad recipe and one badly-translated one. Here is my version of the process, for my reference and your potential amusement:

Tartiflette

1) Wake up Dan and make him explain how much a kilogram is.

2) Boil a kilogram of unpeeled, uncut potatoes until they are just short of being done - basically you can stick a fork in them but there's still a vague sensation of crunchiness when you do. Drain.

3) Dan is still asleep and has the blanket rather pointedly over his head, so figure out how much 200 grams is by logic and Internet. Then figure out that "lardons" means diced smoked bacon. Dice 200 grams of bacon and slice an onion, then gently fry them in butter. The recipe does not specify how much butter. Decide 2 tablespoons sounds good. They aren't supposed to brown, apparently, just turn slightly transparent.

4) Burn the holy hell out of your fingers - nope, potatoes aren't cool yet. Run cold water over them while nursing fingers, then peel and slice thickly.

5) Clean up before Dan wakes and finds out just how much of the kitchen can be covered in sticky potato peel.

6) Add potatoes to bacon and onions and cook gently for about 10 minutes. They are not suppose to brown either. Nothing is supposed to brown. It just sits in the pan cooking gently and experiencing a sense of warmth and well-being.

7) "One large glass white wine"? What the heck kind of measurement is that? Decide 3/4 cup sounds good, then discover that we only have 1/2 a cup left. Add this to the potatoes and simmer until reduced, which is not long.

8) The recipe calls for one reblochon, but we use Grayson on account of my mother makes it and there's oodles laying around. A strong-tasting washed-rind cheese is what you're looking for here. Cut the rind off whatever it is and cut it in thick slices - think "slab". Layer some potatoes on the bottom of a greased baking dish, then layer some cheese, then the rest of the potatoes and the rest of the cheese. The recipe calls the four tablespoons of cream "a bit excessive", but I put it in. As far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as overkill with dairy products.

9) "Moderately hot"? Now, I don't know how you French do things, but we English pigdogs have numbers on our ovens. Set the oven to 350 and put the baking dish in.

10) Bake about 20 minutes, until the cheese is thoroughly melted - don't overcook or you will get puddles of grease. Tempt Dan into waking with the promise of food. Eat.


My methods are sometimes eccentric, but the results are good. Honest.


Writing Progress:

18,331 / 50,000 (36.7%)

Today's Progress: 1,215 words
Comments: No one is hiring me as a speechwriter. But I'll fix it on the rewrite. It sure wasn't worth loosing two days to writer's block.
Snips: No. It is an icky speech. If the king were real he'd have my head for giving him a speech this bad.

I've been making bread since I was ten; one of my early memories is my mother smacking my hand because I was squeezing the dough through my fingers rather than kneading it properly. I like cooking - okay, really like cooking - but I love making bread. There's just something about it - the way dough feels when it's right and you should stop adding flour, the way it smells when it's done rising - that makes me feel happy.

But bread is, at the end of the day, bread. I'd gotten used to having people say, "mmm, nice", and then going on to lavish praise on my brother the dessert-maker. People just don't get that excited about bread, I told myself. Live with it.

Imagine my surprise when I got not one, but two lavish and excited bits of praise over the same bread, within the same week, and realized that all these years I've been feeding the wrong ethnic group.

I should have been giving bread to Russians.

Russians - Eastern Europeans, I should say - appreciate bread, it appears. First it was Dan practically begging me to make a specific bread and then making soul-satisfying noises when he consumed it. And then a Ukrainian friend of his that he'd apparently shared bread with stopped me in the halls to tell me what good bread I made, and that he hadn't had bread like that since he left home. He expanded voluably on the subject of how you couldn't get good bread in this country (the hand gestures explaining just how much store bread one had to eat to get full are something I won't forget in a hurry) and proceeded to ask, rather plantively, if I could make him a loaf of his own?

All this adds credence to a theory of mine, namely, that people in the English-speaking, British-settled countries have a below average appreciation for food. Having lived in Britain - where I watched in horror as, day after day, my hostess mercilessly boiled innocent potatoes, vegetables, and meat until they expired horribly or, as she put it, "were done" - I can understand. We are just not culturally programmed to enjoy food. We consume it, but we don't think about it or consider it worthwhile to expend time or - God forbid - money to get good food. We respond only to the strongest of flavors: really hot food, really salty food, really sweet food. Staple foods and subtle flavors pass us by, barely registering on our palate because we're trained to think of them as "just food."

I think that's a shame. Not just because I'm a cook and like having my work appreciated, and not just because my mother makes homestead cheese and I'd like her work to sell, and not just because my country is sadly obese and a lot of it comes from not paying attention to what it puts in its mouth. But because I like food. I really do. Eating good food is a pleasure and a joy, one I'd like to share with more people.

Really. You guys don't know what you're missing.


Revision Progress: 326 pages (of 385)
Changes: I'm finding a pattern to these "burst of inspiration" pages. They are, plotwise, characterwise, bookwise, very good; I don't have to make any big sweeping changes. It's technically that they suck. I seem to forget, in the throes, that writing one word is better than writing three, that repeating myself is bad, and that adjectives and adverbs are the sugar of the English language and must be used sparingly lest they overwhelm the writing. And don't even get me started on how bad the transitions are. So loads of little changes but no big ones.
Up Next: The news spot leading into the next chapter sucks; it's got "hmm, not sure what to do here, let's write something stupid and move on" all over it. It Must Go.