Categories
Food

Holiday Baking

Last night was my last chance to make a big batch of cookies before my early Christmas with Eric and family, so I seized it. I’m proud of my sequencing– though I should have taken pictures, I’ll add some in later.

I began by mixing up the snickerdoodle dough, because it has to be chilled before use. By making it first (and baking it last), I was able to make the cookies with thoroughly chilled dough, which made rolling them in the bowl with cinnamon and sugar quick and easy. (BTW, that’s my reminder for next year: bowl, not plastic bag. You can roll it easily and don’t have it stick to the bag.)

Once I made up the snickerdoodle dough, I kicked it into a container and tossed it in the freezer, scraped the bowl and used again it for the Toffee Bars. It’s a real simple toss everything in one bowl and mix recipe– so I did so. Then it goes in a pan in the over for 15 minutes. When you pull it out, toss chocolate chips on it and cover with baking sheets to keep the heat in, melting the chocolate chips and making it easy to spread. (Note: the 1/2 cup the recipe calls for is too little chocolate to cover the whole pan, particularly in the 10×15. 1 cup works much better.) Last night, the chocolate spread fine but didn’t cover everything, so I tossed it back in the over for two minutes with more chocolate chips, then smeared them throughout for a nice consistency. (The one drawback was that I’d already added the nuts, so the second spreading of chocolate spread over/through them, and it may clump.)

While the Toffee Bars were baking, I mixed up the persimmon cookies. I didn’t soften the margarine, which made the creaming take a little longer, but it eventually worked out. The 1 cup of persimmon pulp is almost exactly one persimmon’s worth, which is easy and convenient. [Also: Persimmons are peeled– I don’t have a note for that in the recipe, and probably should.] The first batch was made with rounded teaspoons full of dough– the result was small, resulting in persimmon bites. The remaining two batches I kicked up to very rounded 1/2 tablespoon– probably 1 tablespoon leveled.

When the second two dozen persimmons came out of the oven, I got the snickerdoodle dough out of the freezer and made my first two dozen slightly rounded 1/2 tablespoon balls. I popped them dough back in the freezer between batches. When they came out of the oven, the cookies went straight to a rack, I grabbed the next dough container from the freezer and made the next 2 dozen balls. When the new batch came out, I moved the racked cookies to a big ziplock, the sheet cookies to the rack, and made the next batch. At 1/2 tablespoon cookies, I made 8 dozen snickerdoodles.)

[Now with pictures below the fold.]

Continue reading “Holiday Baking”
Categories
Books

Child of Fire by Harry Connolly

I really enjoyed this novel, despite my feeling of overexposure to modern supernatural books. Ray is a very believable main character, edgy but still sympathetic. He’s just learning the rules of magic in this world– while his relationship with his boss, Annalise, is tense.

Over the course of the book, we learn a few more rules for magic and the society, but all the way to the end, the situation remains hazy. The book is a good stand alone novel, though it seems to be the first book in a series. (Given the ending, followup books with the same characters are very likely.)

Categories
Books

Accelerando by Charles Stross

I wanted to like this novel, and liked many of the characters, but it never came together for me. Reading it felt dutiful, not pleasurable. I liked the future history angle– as a thought experiment, and in retrospect, but didn’t look forward to reading it in the evening.

Categories
Food Misc Trips

Good things recently

Off to San Fransisco for They Might be Giants at the Fillmore. Then off to the Exploratorum, which had us both fascinated for hours.

Thanksgiving at Aunt Mary’s– cooking with Chuck, then the whole family tries out Jennifer’s new longboard.

Making cioppino with Eric and Tonya… though I forgot to take pictures from about halfway through. It was tasty though!

Decorating the tree with kids… and Mocca exploring the decorated tree. He enjoys the new platform and dangling cat toys…

Categories
Books

Small Favor

The most recent book in the Dresden Files, this follows White Knight. I wouldn’t advise that anyone start the series here– while it works out fine, there are a lot of relationships and context that make sense only if you know what went on before. While it makes sense in the context of the book, Murphy fans will miss their heroine– she shows up, but much less than several of Harry’s other relationships.

The plot is a twisted and scheming thing in the background, with Harry’s understanding much simpler and more direct. As it goes on, it’s interesting to see how the other takes are valid and often have better grounding. The blasting rod sub-plot was very interesting… and was something I didn’t notice until it was pointed out.

All in all, another worthy book in the series. If you’re still reading, the story keeps rolling on. It’s not the finest stand alone, but it’s a solid entry in an excellent series.

Categories
Books

Myth Adventures by Robert Aspirin

This is a hardback collection of the first four Myth Books: Another Fine Myth, Myth Conceptions, Myth Directions, and Hit or Myth.

The book was tremendous fun when I first read it, and it made great comfort reading while visiting Grandpa and spending long hours in the hospital. There are a number of puns, but less wacky than most of Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels. I prefer them– and they vanish at quite a clip as the hours pass by.

The whole series is listed here.

Categories
Books

Ariel by Steven R. Boyett

A surprising first novel about a boy and his unicorn… it’s an interesting and meaningful look at a fascinating world. The world has undergone “The Change”; five years ago many forms of technology just stopped working. The social order collapsed; non-functional cars line freeways everywhere, and the remaining people are fewer and much more inured to violence. Along with the technology crash, magic and supernatural beasts returned to the world. Many kinds of critters returned– manticores, gryphons, and unicorns.

Our hero, Pete, has a bond with a unicorn. They are good friends, talk with each other and are perfect companions for the road. Their relationship is strong and well described throughout– Ariel is never a horse with a horn, but is never traditionally human in thought or deed either. Their bond feels real and is strongly forged; they’ve gone through a lot together, and go through a lot more in this book.

I’m looking forward to reading the same-world sequel, Elegy Beach, soon.

Categories
Books

Yes Means Yes!

The full title is: Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape, Edited by Jaclyn Friedman & Jessica Valenti.

This was a very interesting book, with a wide variety of authors and essays. The loose theme was describing a world running right, with a wide variety of interpretations and depths. Some describe small tweaks required to get us to an acceptable tomorrow, some leap forward and describe the end result, and many walk the line between the two and describe both– or the path from here, to better, to best.

Several essays were solid but didn’t grab me beyond the intellectual level; most of these were expanding the idea of good sex in various directions and breaking down preconceptions. There was a lot of intersectional analysis in these essays, where the social constraints of being female are amplified by being fat, black, disabled, transitioning, and so on. These were good at keeping me grounded and reminding me that there are a lot of moving parts within feminism and desire. I particularly appreciated how many articles emphasized the internalization of norms, where very smart people intellectually knew that they deserved love, but advertising and culture kept knocking them down, telling them that any form of happy ending wasn’t destined for these splinters.

Several articles had me deeply interested; I was very tempted to write a post detailing my own experiences after reading a couple of essays (particularly about nice versus “nice” guys), the vision of “what do we imagine as a good first experience” and detailing the ways the stereotypical “good” was still short. The most persuasive, most useful, and deeply necessary discussion throughout revolved around the concept of enthusiastic consent. Getting that one thing right would help knock down the low standards of “no means no” and seeking a mere absence of resistance, and encourage sex to be an almost uniformly positive thing. It’s easy to get right once you begin with that as the expectation– so we have a job ahead of us, redefining what sex, pressure, and relationships should look like. An article on a very similar topic diagnoses much of the problem as our predator/prey descriptions and expectations for sex– sounds like a good place to start.

Categories
Misc Roleplaying

A bit of everything

Comics: Too Fat to be a Rockstar (Weekly), Guilded Age (MWF), Math Comics

Chris Chinn’s Blood and Ink gathered– http://bankuei.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/blood-ink-play-guides/
Quick: Character webs– http://www.rpggm.com/blog/2009/09/25/building-better-npcs-iii-character-webs/
Picking the price of success– http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/2009/10/20/the-little-things-in-life/

Mouse Guard AP#3– http://rpg.brouhaha.us/?p=1884
AP #4– http://rpg.brouhaha.us/?p=1920

Cool D&D Stuff: Bendy Dungeon Walls– http://www.dark-platypus.com/bendy_dungeon_walls.htm

Looking out for the story leads to constipation at the table. Story does not need to be preserved or looked out for. It is not a just hatched chick that needs everyone to be careful lest it is trampled. Just play the damned game, make choices that are brave. Look at your character sheet, let your character surprise you and story will just happen. — Judd, http://githyankidiaspora.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/the-myth-of-story-preservation/

Hardening WordPress– http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/oct/23/wordpress-exploit-scanner-hardening-hacker

Men/Women– http://www.rpggm.com/blog/2009/10/19/unintentional-sexism-in-rpgs-even-women-do-it/
http://www.dungeonmastering.com/tools-resources/character-sheet-cross-dressing

Categories
Books

Sorcery and Cecelia

Sorcery and Cecelia, The Enchanted Tea Pot, by Patricia C Wrede and Caroline Steevermer.

I really enjoyed this lighthearted correspondence. It’s a great world, with intriguing main characters and an interesting cross between nineteenth century manners and fascinating magic. I really enjoyed the whole concept, and could feel the fun the authors had in building their world together.