Rind-up

This pie, cake really, was great. So delicious and moist . . . . The recipe came from Cooks Illustrated, which has to be the most enjoyable cooking magazine, whether for pleasant perusal or serious study. Bon Appetite has pretty, glossy pictures, but Cooks Illustrated has art, not to mention actual articles to accompany each recipe, sprinkled with good advice and culinary science. The cake itself is harder to find than cook, in the index it's not called "Boston cream pie" but something like "wickedly delicous boston cream pie," which can throw off even the best index skimmer. There are three parts to this delight: cake, cream, and glaze, and I cannot wait for an excuse to bake the cake all by itself. It's that good.

If you click it, it expands.

The cake was for Easter, which was delicious thank you, but even before that blessed day arrived I managed to check off one of my culinary goals: the watermelon rind pickle. I found this recipe in The Woman's Home Companion Cookbook, which was published in the early forties, and also in The Foxfire Book. If you have never heard of The Foxfire Book (I believe it's derived from an old magazine series, but I haven't actually looked it up) than you are missing out. Such useful information lies within their covers. Everything from building a log cabin to slaughtering a hog. There are even pictures.  My copy of Foxfire comes from my misspent childhood, when I went around reading The Black Stallion, My Side of the Mountain, and Stalking the Wild Asparagus*. Now I read Heyer. Oi vey.
      Anyway, the idea of pickling rind, an hither to useless substance, tickled the remainders of my childhood fancy. Especially since the recipes called for cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. And yes, the two sources provided nearly identical recipes. So last Monday the Geekette came over and helped me boil them into existence. The Geekette has been a co-conspiritor of mine since before we really care to remember, and is responsible for such experiments as fried angel food cake. With her help we combined the ingredients and managed to make the sweetest pickles I've ever had. We used the rind of one watermelon, which yielded about one quart of thin, unevenly proportioned, white squares. We left out the slacked lime, because for some reason we were out ( I'd also never heard of it before out side of historical fiction, which I make a habit of not learning from. Can you buy this at the grocery store?). The result was a slightly gummy confection with a bite only slightly reminiscent of bread and butter pickles. The squares were deep brown, mostly because we used ground spices instead of their whole counter parts. In fact, the ground spices were such a bother that we had to rinse off the pickles before eating them in order to avoid covering our tongues in cinnamon paste. Blech. Even though these pickles were peculiar I'm definitely going to make them again. Especially since I found a use for the left over juice.
             See, the Geekette and I deemed actually pickling the pickles to be a waste of resources, since it wasn't like we had a whole truckload of them. So there I was, with a whole bucket of christmas scented syrup in my fridge, wondering what to do with it. Mouse? Ice cream?  Delicate lemon squares? The last was the clear winner. When I was a child it seems my mom made desserts all the time, every other memory is about us beating egg whites for meringues – innocently called kisses throughout my whole childhood – or sniffing at the lemon scented air as mom pulled a pan of yellow goodness out of the oven. I haven't had lemon squares in ages now, so recreating them with pickle juice was a lot of fun. The best part was my family didn't touch them. Score for the pickle bar.


In other news, I am now the proud owner of a Honda Fit, and Doctor Who has started up again. Oh, and I discovered how to make my dad's camera zoom and focus. Like, at the same time.

Wow, it's been quite a week.

Be blinded by the cake, ignore the absence of pickle pictures! 

*Speaking of Euell Gibbons, someone I trust and admire deeply told me they had made wisteria fritters before. Wisteria. Fritters. Oh my, imagination overload.

A Change of Sorts

Okay, I've got those creative itchies again. I've been making shrinky-dink jewelry all morning, and now my finger are a little sore from closing wire rings without pliers. Luckily I have something to post, to give my poor fingers a little rest. I was staring at my computer screen a few nights ago, thinking "ugh, now I have to go to bed," when my desktop caught my eye. It was pretty boring. A few weeks ago I had changed it, hastily, to a reminder to pray for Japan, but I had kept all my Desktop goodies from my last make-over. The result was haphazard and utilitarian, which describes half of my life (the other half is haphazard and just for show).  I was staring at this rather pathetic surface when an idea came to me. I had just taken a hundred pictures of a teapot, because my life really is that exciting right now, why not use one of those as a springboard for something tranquil and efficient? So that's what I tried to do.


Although, efficient might not have been the best adjective.

This is where my real skills come out, because finding all the components for this is little more than researching, and that's what an English Major is all about (and you thought all we did was read. . . ). I knew I wanted a vintage feel, I'd been siting on the Faber Castell pen and Gramophone icons for a while and the hazy image of used tea leaves called for something elegant and old world. So that morning I went in search for some complementary icons for the other things I keep on my dock and desktop. I also downloaded this interesting app, which converts pictures to .icns. Nifty. It means I no longer have to worry about downloading png. files. Most of the icons on my dock come from Babase's Old School set, but here's the run down on the rest:

Hardrive: Teacup

Random Folders: Vintage folders (I normally keep these folders off my desktop, but the vintage folders just had to be used, so I pulled them out)

Misc. Pics Folder: Old world camera

Safari: Samurai compass

Firefox: Wooden tablet

iTunes: Gramophone 

iPhoto: Antique Camera

Textedit: Faber Castell

Booxter: Fedora  . . . . or not, but equally cool. 

Numbers: Baking Containers (I thought they looked like the graph bars on the standard icon)

iTaf: Coffee pot (iTaf wakes me up every morning – I thought coffee was an appropriate symbol)

As for the other goodies on my desktop, I'm using the Bowtie theme "Geeky 2.0" by Laurent to keep track of iTunes. The rest is all Geektool. I thought the sunrise shell was a cool idea, and I'm  so happy to finally have found a weather script that actually works. I can't make these scripts myself, but I can copy and paste like the best of them! Halfway through this project I tried switching to Geektool 3 (which I didn't even realize was out. Sadness) but . . . shell text can't have drop shadows? Eh? Besides, somehow in the switch my words from 2.1 were stuck on my desktop. Saved, but not transferred to 3.0.  So I just switched back and pretended nothing happened. 


Changing my desktop is the closest I can get to rearranging the furniture in my room, which is what I did in college whenever I needed a change. There's something soothing in looking at a space, sizing up your resources, and making something new out of the two. So soothing that I actually zoned out for a while on it, working from seven 'til ten without even realizing how much time was going by. Today I'm going to try to cut out some fabric pieces (test run of project runway 2848, in a blue cotton knit), and make some decisions regarding a car. Looking at this background I can believe that it's all doable, especially if  I stop to brew a pot of tea first. 

On knitting

                                             

I don't knit.

I know how to knit. I belong to knitting websites and live a fiber filled life vicariously through knitting bloggers. I stalk sweaters. I keep a mental list in my head of what I want to knit.  I buy yarn. I cast-on to knitting projects. But I don't knit.

Sometimes when life is really bleak and gray, when I seem to be stuck in the first fifteen minutes of The Wizard of Oz, I'll yearn for yarn and pattern. Sometimes when I'm tired, or when I'm full of energy and need something to occupy my hands, my fingers will itch for the feel of merino and the smooth, solid rainbows I use as needles. I stifle these feelings whenever I can. Because I don't knit.


But sometimes the longing to be, not just a partaker in beauty, but an orchestrator – a crafter, not a user –sometimes that desire is too strong to silence. And sometimes the need to be useful, to produce something, to say "see, I have accomplished," sometimes it threatens to break forth into the world. To do something truly impulsive. When my dreams of beauty and ability combine, then I forget. I forget that I do not knit.

And so, I cast-on.

I delve into my basket of  WIPs (works in progress).

And I start to knit.


And it is beautiful. And it is calming. And, somehow, even though it's enjoyable, I feel it means something.  It's not like I'm watching TV, reading Heyer, or composing a poem about the sky. Those are ways of consuming time. But knitting, knitting is using time. It's taking it and making it into something else. The sticks in my hand click together, catch the yarn, pull it through, and in that instant also catch a bit of time as it hurries past, and so the time I spend knitting is saved. It remians with me for as long as the knitted object does.

But the more I knit the less time I capture.

Before long I am lost. I'm rereading charts, counting stitches, checking deffinitions for common terms (K2 tog,  ssk, psso). I'm not knitting. Not anymore than a drowning man can be said to be swimming. At first I try finding the source of the problem. I tink, unknitting my project stitch by stitch until I reach an area unaffected by my confusion.  I frog, pulling out my needles and ripping back two or three rows with a grim enthusiasm. I'm not knitting. I'm tinkering. I feel doubt creep up on me. Maybe this project really will never get finished. Maybe this yarn is a bad choice for this pattern. Maybe I'll just go bury this out in the yard and pretend it never happened. So, in an attempt to salvage my urge to create, I take short cuts. I decrease redundant stitches, create necessary ones out of thin air. I stubbornly ignore the instructions in order to stay in pattern. I am not knitting. I am fudging.


Eventually I reach a point where the ideal world of knitting becomes worse than real life. It becomes a world where everything I touch falls apart, gets knotted, felts. A world where I can't do anything useful or productive. Where trying to make things better only makes things worse. At this point I lay down my needles, stuff the yarn back in its cubby hole, and vow to pick it up tomorrow when I've "calmed down." But I never do. I leave it there, gathering dust, until I've forgotten that I don't knit. Until that world of intense focus wrought by missing stitches and mis-crossed cables starts to look like peace again.


In the 'tween times, when I am sane(er), I remember: I don't knit.





But maybe I sew.

This picture isn't as blurry on Flickr

Syfy, or what we can look forward to

A dear friend and I often lament the fall of Sci-fi. Televised sci-fi, that is. Now that Stargate has ended (sob) there dosen't really seem to be anything left in that genre. The shadow kings of the entertainment industry managed to kill star trek with a single season of Enterprise, and Josh Wheddon's Firefly was forced to use alternative media options, like comic books and movies. Even Heroes, which was more syfy than sci-fi, was helped, limping, off air a few years ago. Where have all the good plots gone?

Well, the same friend has emalied me a list of possible upcoming T.V. shows, and I thought I might use it to show the world that hope might not be that far under the couch cushions. Out of the seventeen shows listed, I thought five of them sounded like fun. Not necessarily "Where have you been all my life," but at least "I'd like to watch your pilot and see if you're as nutty as you sound."

Once Upon a Time

This show sounds like Eureka. Only with fairies. That's right, faries. I'm a little shocked by how many of the shows mentioned on the list featured fairies. They're not like witches, vampires, or zombies - edgy and badcore in mass-marketable ways. They're, well, they're fairies. I'm wondering if this show (and the other shows that plan on featuring them, like Grimm) will be using fairies from fae, or fairies á la Eion Colfer's Artemis Fowl series. At any rate, I'm not really interested in watching this show. Eureka was fun, but it's format was too limiting for any ground breaking plot. Once Upon a Time will probably also  have a new catastrophe every week, but at least it will have to be creative when it does. Eureka could call on aliens, hidden nukes, and clones whenever it needed some excitement. What is Once Upon a Time going to do, delve into necromancy?*

17th Precinct

      Again with the fantasy. Here Civil Servants, of some sort, will have to operate in a world where magic trumps science. But this comes from someone well steeped in Sci-fi, Ronald D. Moore: Klingon specialist and Battlestar Galactica re-imaginist. . . .  Re-imaginer. . . .

Developer.

Though I've never watched Battlestar Galactica myself, I've been coerced taught to respect it. It's deep people – that's what I've heard. So even though I'm so over the whole police thing I'm really curious about this show. May Mr. Moore follow the example of Diane Wynne Jones and make a method for his magic.

REM

    This show looks painful. In a scripted way. But it is actual sci-fi, complete with dimensions. No namby-pamby fantasy creatures here, instead the main character finds himself jumping between two different realities, one in which his son is dead and the other in which his wife is, well, dead. Talk about a rock and a hard place. I can't really see myself watching this all they way through, because I like sunshine and rainbows in my cup of tea, but I'm assuming that this show is actually going somewhere. You know, plot-wise.

Locke & Key

      Definitely the winner of the Cute Tittle award, according to blastr the main characters in this show are a coupe of siblings. Add in an uncle, an old house, and the discovery of  a few "special doorways" and I'm thinking this one might actualy hold my attention for a whole season. Maybe it's just my age, but I love stories with kids in them, and I don't think there are enough of them on T.V., unless you count youth programing, which of course I don't. The doorways sound hopeful, but I do have to wonder if this show will be Narnia or Bridge to Terabethia. That is, knowing the kids have gone through some ordeal, can we really assume these doorways are real?

Touch
     I guess, technically, this would be categorized as sci-fi.  Clairvoyance goes either way, but since in this case the prophet is an autistic child, fake science seems to be in play. With the dad as a peon for an airport, I'm not sure how the writers are going to pursue the inevitable "imminent demise of the planet/ country" plot-line successfully, but I'm sure they have a plan. My hope is that this show will be better than Dead Zone, which managed to keep it's psychic visions modest until near the third or fourth season. I wish directors would realize that once apocalypse begins nothing else really seems important (i.e. we no longer care about the drama with your girlfriend,  the fact that your cat has gone missing, the death of the local baker, etc.). If the characters are going to be in a panic over a perceived threat for half a season it had better be really scary-bad, with long-lasting results, if it's going to happen at all. An apocalypse that no one seems to remember next season is going to be forgotten by viewers too. Or worse, they'll remember enough that they won't care when the next one comes round.



There, those are the pilots I would watch. I'd like to note, again, that only two of these even remotely resemble a really good sci-fi show. And those were the major sci-fi players out of a list of seventeen. It would be equivalent to wishing for a pony if I hoped for a show as well done as Babylon 5 – which was novel in that it had a well-developed plot which spanned multiple seasons, but was beautiful because it gracefully folded itself away when the plot ended –  I'd be happy with a second Voyager at this rate. I don't know guys, you read the list and then tell me what shows you think will pan out. Better yet, tell me what sci-fi shows you've enjoyed watching in the past. If the networks decide not to carry anything decent we might be stuck with reruns this fall.



-----------------------------------
*That sounds disturbingly close to werewolf/vampire/witches to me, though, and they better not mix those with fairies. Let's keep our unrealities separate, okay?