Janine Ashbless's Blog, page 112

Eyecandy Monday

 
She's back in my ... er ... arms!
Pinterest censored this pic from my account back in March because of the bare bum, much to my distress. I had no other copy! But now Nym Nix has refound it for me months later, just from my text description! Praise the Interweb!
And praise and thanks to the mighty, the wonderful Nym Nix!

To a Scrotum

There's nothing like some Celtic poetry on a Sunday afternoon...
Jo sent me this link, for which I am very grateful :-)

(Although I am now slightly alarmed by the number of references I'm hearing these days to ballsacks stretching with old age. Just when I got used to the idea of greying pubic hair...)

Chelsea Flower Show

I got lucky last week - a friend managed to get hold of some free guest tickets to the Chelsea Flower Show, and I was invited along :-)  Chelsea is the biggest, most prestigious annual flower show in Britain, held in a very upmarket bit of London, so I thought I'd give you an idea of what it's like.

Treebeard says, "Hrooom, don't be hasty... especially in the queue for coffee."
First of all, it's CROWDED. Really, really crowded - you pretty much have to punch some pensioner cold to get a seat when you want to eat your insanely overpriced sandwich - and everyone's trying to see the show gardens featured on the TV coverage. Some of those are really nice and you want to take them home and have a barbeque in them...

The SeeAbility Garden

Some are awesomely modernist ....

The RBC Blue Water Roof Garden
Some  are beautifully traditional....

An Alcove (Tokonoma) Garden
And some are really cool but don't look a whole lot like gardens...

The Sound of Silence Garden
There's a WALL of people around each of the gold-medal winning gardens, and you have to shuffle in slowly, take a pic and run. To be honest, you are better off watching the telly. You will certainly see more.

I prefer the plant displays inside the giant marquee, actually. Easier to see, and just as impressive:


This temple display from the Thai government, I believe
Elite-level flower-arranging
I think this is part of the Jamaican tourist board display
But the most photogenic stuff is the mad-ass garden sculptures on sale. From the sublime to the ridiculous, via all points in between:

Slate art. Love it.
Okay, the neighbours might start to look at you a bit askance...

£20,000 for something that'll be compost in a couple of years? Nicely understated, I feel!
Because what every garden needs is a Dementor.And finally, conclusive proof that shitloads of money cannot buy you good taste:

This is about 10ft across and comes on a 20ft plinth. Your neighbours will hate you forever.I bought something at Chelsea! I did!
Here it is:
But I really wanted a Fat Naked Woman on a Dinosaur

Smut by the Sea

There are many fun things to do in Scarborough. You can flash your legs on the beach:


or explore the medieval castle:


 or make yourself violently sick with candy-floss while on the funfair rides:

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But on the 22nd June you can also come along all day and listen to erotica authors reading smut at you for FREE!


Victoria Blisse, irrepressible editor  of the Smut by the Sea anthologies, is hosting an adults-only event at Scarborough Library. (Do the local council know this? My mind is boggling...)

I'm not in the books, but I am taking part in the June event and will be trying to find something to read that won't get me banned from the donkey-rides forever.

All event details here

So do come along! It'd be lovely to see you beside the seaside, beside the sea...

Eyecandy Monday - Hairy Chests

I do like a hairy chest. I just can't decide which sort I like better ... This kind:


Or this kind:

Nessun Dorma

Well, my week is not going as planned. Obeying Jo's instructions, I was all set to escape dogs and Facebook and go into my usual retreat to write. But the Travel God had other ideas.

On Thursday they cancelled all short-range flights out of London Heathrow.
On Friday I tried to get on my rescheduled flight, only to find that the 40-minute road trip to said airport was in gridlock. After 2 hours on the road I accepted that the gates had closed and we were still 5 miles away.

So my plan is now to go sit in the garden and write. Well, worse things happen at sea, eh?

Nettles yseethed

 I spent last Saturday helping cook our annual medieval banquet, and decided to entertain myself by having a go at a stinging-nettle dish, something I'd never attempted before. After all, I figured, it's hard enough to get people to eat veggies at a feast - why not go the whole hog and serve something they're actually frightened to try?
;-)


Here's the recipe I made up. It is heavy on the calories and fat, and believe it or not it's delicious!  Funges and Nettles yseethed in Cream, upon Sops:  Sufficient fancy-ass crusty white bread (french loaf or pain du campagne or bruschetta bread) for a slice each per diner.ButterSingle or double cream. Delia Smith says soured cream will curdle if boiled, so use fresh cream.Mushrooms - chestnut or exotic woodland varieties, or little field mushrooms, or a mix as preferred.Salt and pepper.Stinging-nettle tops - a plastic shopping bagful will feed about 20 people. Dry white wine - about a cupful. First, pick your stinging nettles. You want to wear heavy gardening gloves for this bit, and thick trousers and long sleeves. You want the only top whorls of young, fresh growth - not the older leaves. And try to find tall ones that dogs won't have peed on.Switch to rubber gloves and wash the leaves thoroughly. Pick out all the more fibrous stems. Toast the slices of bread on each side until golden. Keep warm. In medieval meals, "sops" (stale bread used to soak up juices) were a staple.Wash and dice the mushrooms. Set aside.Slice the leek finely and fry gently in lots of butter until soft.Add wine to the leek.Add nettles to the leek. They will collapse down as they cook, just as fresh spinach does:  a huge panful will reduce in a couple of minutes. And they will stop being painful to touch at this point!In a separate frying pan, start frying the mushrooms in yet more butter, gently.Salt and pepper the greens. Add cream and bring to a simmer, for about 3 minutes.Before anything is reduced to mush, plate up a slice of bread each, topped with butter-fried mushrooms, topped by a slop of creamy nettles. Serve it forth. Yum. Here's some more pics of the banquet food, btw:  Roasted cockatrice.
The "subtlety" or "conceit" - a display piece in which the food is made to look like something it is not. In this case, sugar and marzipan made to look like a snow-scene. Sadly, I cannot take credit for this gorgeous artistic creation!

Sneaky Peek - Cover Him With Darkness novel

Statue of Lucifer from the Cathedral of Saint-Paul de Liège, in Belgium. Picture from Wikipedia.
Want a sneak preview of my work-in-progress novel, Cover Him With Darkness ? There's an excerpt up on Sexy Reads today!

Thanks Kevin Mitnik-Blisse!

Eyecandy Monday

Hmmm. There's a story I wrote for Wild Enchantments that I think now I will have to take out and replace. It's just not right for today's female-friendly pseudo-romantic market - not being at all friendly, as it were, to females. Or indeed to anyone.

And at 8K too damn long for most anthology calls, sadly. Humph.

This is getting to be a serious problem

:-(