Ruth Miranda's Blog, page 7

Fourth aniversary on this blog - an English fruit cake and self praise

So, this last Sunday we had a bloversary here and I totes forgot about it. But this blog has been going for four years already. Might not seem like a lot to some, to me it's a wonder I keep at it, seeing that lately writing and self publishing have been taking so much of my time and most of my passion. But the truth is I love food, I love to eat, I delight in cooking and in setting the scene for a photoshoot here, so I go along with it. Provides me with another creative outlet that is significantly different from writing novels, although I try to tell a story in both cases. I try to tell a story of food, here, sometimes I feel like I fail completely. It's still a learning curve, like writing is, like self publishing and all the marketing and promotion. All the non stop, exhausting self promotion.

It's actually something I believe blogging and writing have in common, the need for self promotion. Whether I'm wearing my blogger cap or my novelist one, I have to put myself and my work out there, or else how are others gonna know? But I always feel so self conscious about this, as if I am a fraud trying to play int the big league with no right. I always feel like I'm on the other side of the "You can't sit with us" line, know what I mean? So self promotion becomes a bit of a chore, a bit of a shame. Because deep down I'm constantly thinking 'who the hell do you think you are to praise your work and push it to others?'. But in all honesty, my work's not bad. Ok, so this blog has come down from hundreds of daily visits to about ten pageviews a week, so my novels don't sell and I have been refused reviews on account the books don't deserve more than a two, three star review, and that's pushing it, so I am not being very sucessful in any of my creative and professional endeavours.

But I believe in what I do. I believe in the quality of my work. Some days the photos will be ugh, or meh, others they will look amazing. Somedays I will write nearly 6000 words of which I have to cut two or three, the writing being just so good; others I will struggle to get 500 on paper and all of those will suck. But in the end, and despite the thematics constantly being the same, both for my pics and my stories - the dark mood, the broodiness, the thing with the occult and the witches and all the magic and the vampires - I do believe I tell a very good story in both cases. Like this cake, here. There's a story in there, and I do feel it's a good one, I do feel the photos do it justice. It's a story of colour and texture and hunger, a story of glutony and desire.

I mean, I look at that cake and I want to eat it. Those little crumbs on the side, I want to pick them with the point of my finger and lick them off. I want to relish on that slice, all the fruits and the moistness making my mouth water. It's a story of a cake so good, it can stand on its own, no need for props to embelish it. It's also a story of a cake baked in the deep of Winter, when light is hazy and cold and drapes a blueish tinge over everything, when days are short and nights are long, and roaring fires warm the body and the soul, when cakes are made to last long, and yet end up half eaten hours after they have come out of the oven. It's a story of how one day, someone sat down at her laptop and decided to take a plunge, take the risk, and embark on a new journey, forge herself a new adventure. It's a story of resilience, of self motivation, self love. It's the story of this blog, yes, and also of who I am, of the talents I never knew I hid inside me, of the will I never believed I could have, of how I am my first and foremost admirer and of how I can suffice myself to keep going.

For all that, congratulations are in order, and the cake is just what I would want to celebrate myself and this blog, these four years of learning, working hard, pushing forward, believing in myself and not letting the echoes of whatever goes about shake the foundations of who and what I am. Because we never truly know others just from what we are allowed to see through their social personas, and we never truly know what goes on, deep down. This cake is for all those who have so many undercurrents the world around you chooses to ignore, pinning you to an image they chose and of which they refuse to unmould you from. You're more than what others make of you. You're you. Happy anniversary to this blog, and may I find the will to keep it up for my sake alone.100 gr candied fruits50 gr raisins100 gr walnuts100 gr apricots 1 1/2 cup flour1 tsp cinamon1 thumb fresh ginger, grated1/4 tsp salt1 tsp baking powder1/4 tsp nutmeg8 tbsp butter1 1/4 cup dark muscovado sugar4 eggs1 tblsp orange zest1 tblsp lemon zestjuice of an orangeSeep the fruits in one cup dark rum for at least half an hour. Turn on the oven at 190º and line a loaf tin with baking parchement and set aside. On a bowl, cream the butter and sugar - use a stand up mixer for this, please - and start adding the eggs one by one, alternating with the flour+ baking powder. Add the lemon and orange zest, the spices and the orange juice, mix well. Finally, pour in the walnuts and fruits, with the rum they have been seeping on and blend well into the dough, use a wooden spoon now. Pour into the tin and bake in the oven for one hour or until your skewer comes out nice and clean. I do advise you enjoy this over a piping hot cup of VERY milky tead, though!!

The ideal work day - a humble mash potato bowl and the joy of doing what you love

This morning I was confronted with a question Kimberly posted on her Instagram feed, about what would be our ideal work day. The truth is, I didn't have to think much on that one. My ideal work day, and it has taken me years to find this out, is precisely the type of days I currently exist in. It's not always perfect, it's not always great, it's not always joyful and boastful and amazing. But it's always my idea of a perfect job. And I am still amazed that I get to do this every day. My ideal work day revloves around writing and styling and photographing - along with lots of editing and tweaking and playing about. It is a kind of work day that leads to immense isolation, and I do feel that my rapport with other human beings is gettig worse and worse - I just don't know how to socialise anymore - but after so many years working underpaid and humiliating, agressive, stress-inducing work environments and jobs, I do thrive on the solitude and the silence. And I love writing. I had actually forgotten how very much I love to write.  I had lost my heart and my soul and didn't even know it. It took a twist of fate to have them back again, and for that, I give thanks every day.

I'm priviledged in that I get to do this, precisely this, which is what I love the most. My job is writing. Being a novelist, actually, as blogging comes along as a hobby and a way for me to pursue other creative endeavours. But I do write for a living, and that is something I would never even have considered while growing up. I was always under the impression it was very difficult to do this professionally, and for normal people like me it was something that belonged to the realm of dreams. For years it never even crossed my mind to try and pursue this career. I even stopped writing for quite a lot of my adult years. But life does tend to happen in ways we didn't expect, nor saw coming. For me it was this: the sudden chance to sit down and write. I can claim it as a series of unfortunate events that have led me down this path, but in the end, and as worrisome as it was at the beginning when I could see no light at the end of the tunnel, not even a tunnel, it all panned out, and I give thanks everyday that I get to do what I am most passionate about. For a living. This is now my work, my job, my profession. This is the only type of work that fulfils and makes me happy. Nothing else would do, actually. So I am one of the lucky ones, yes.

And yet, it is with an enormous amount of guilt that I admit to this, my ideal work day is sitting down to write. It is with an immense sense of shame that I concede this is what I do for a living. Because I don't do much of a living out of it anyway, so I feel I am not worthy of this amazing opportunity I have been given. I always feel like I'm squandering away the chance I was granted of doing what I'm most passionate about, what I most love, professionally. I always feel that this is wasted on me, and I am unworthy. My books don't sell all that much, and so it plays in my mind that I must not be sufficiently talented. And If I'm not sufficiently talented, then I don't really deserve to get to sit down and work on what I love. Because I'm not making anything out of it, I feel rather useless. Years and years of being told how useless and unworthy I am have hammered the thought into me. But being stubborn as I am, I persevere, and I write, and I blog, and I cook and style and shoot and edit, always believing one day I will make it, one day I will be worthy and good enough, no, spectacular. I am very ambitious, contrary to common knowledge about me, but not in a financial way. So I work very hard for a sliver of success. And am grateful that my husband is OK with this, and that we manage to get by on his meagre salary alone. Yes, he works very hard to provide for us, but I work very hard too, not just on my job but around the house. So he can focus on his work. And then I can focus on mine too. I have been harshly criticised for this, but it is our life in the end, our choices. It's not a spectacular life, and we do by without so much, but we make do. And work hard.

It's like mash potatoes. They never sound or look spectacular, do they? They have all this humble feel to them, this uninteresting, unappetizing appeal. Atleast for most people I know, mash potatoes is just a sad little thing to serve. Not for me, as I am a sucker for it! And I do believe mash potatoes is worthy of grandeur too. At least mine is, and this is how I cook them:3 to 4 large potatoes -I prefer starchy ones for thismilk, butter, nutmeg, pepper, salt, chives, allspice

Start by peeling and washing the potatoes, dice them and boil on a pan with plenty of salted water. Once they're cooked and falling apart, drain them. Using a masher (is that a thing? I call my thingee a masher, but don't know the correct term. It's for mashing potatoes, so it's a masher), reduce the potatoes into a purée of sorts, adding splashes of milk along the way, for consistency sake. Now, I will leave the consistency point up to you, some folks prefer runny mash, others a thicker one, you have to see what works for you. Bring the pan back to the stove and on a low heat, add a good knob of butter and mix in well. Check the salt, add more if needed. Season with allspice, nutmeg and black pepper to taste, bring out of the heat and scatter chopped fresh chives over it, as well as a dash more of all spice and pepper. Serve warm with dishes that are thick on gravy, it's the best way to eat mash potatoes, I think.

Of biting more than you can chew - oven baked fruit for a sweet, healthy treat

I do believe I tend  to bite off more than I can afford to chew. It's a lesson I keep having a hard time learning, and a mistake I keep plunging myself into. Right now, I'm juggling and the balls are all falling off my hands. Well, no, not really, they are not falling off my hands, but I catch them by the barest nick, know what I mean? Along with keeping this blog up, beta reading for one very talented author, cooking, styling and shooting for an instagram challenge that is meant to up my whole photographic game; I have been working on a new series for a while now - I hadn't yet finished writing The Preternaturals Series when this one popped into my mind - and already have one book written and the second one almost done. And still, I am unsure if I'm going to publish this one. For starters, the main subject is one that has seen a lot of versions, both on paper and on screen. It's like, everyone's done it. It's like I'm late for this ball, as usual, and it will only feel like I'm hopping on the band wagon, tailing after everyone else.

But then again, I am doing my own take, so of course it's different from the rest. It differs not only in the fact that I am me and not the rest, but on many other things too. That's what scares me about it. About the readers' reaction to it. It's not an outlandish idea, I did research into it and some currents defend the location I set the story in as the real one in a legend that has crossed the whole world. I did do a bit of my homework in there. But I know there's a lot more people who disagree with this current of thought then there are those who believe it to be the only possible truth. I fear people will only bash it around because of that choice, of not going for the common belief where it comes to the setting of this legend, and the general belief of the parts each and every character had in it. I fear people won't even bother giving it a chance, offended as they feel for my daring to change something that, well, quite honestly does not even belong to my culture, and to which I am not entitled. And then again, that's not quite what has me on tenterhooks about this work. It's because I'm keeping to the same genre.

I often read that a good writer can work in just about any genre, and should even strive to do so. I seem to have a real hard time with that. I like writing in one particular genre, and that is the paranormal/supernatural/urban fantasy. This time with a dash of historical fantasy thrown in. But yeah, it's vampires and witches again. That's what kind of makes me shirk from publishing the books. I already have so few readers, if I push out another series of novels in the same genre, I won't attract new readers and will probably end up losing the ones I already amassed. But I can't seem to write anything other than witches and vampires. Enter the novella I embarked upon and here I am again, going for the same thing. Despite believing my novels tackle a bit more than the old run of the mill vampire/witch dicotomy. I try to broach other, deeper issues too. Abuse, homophobia, violence against women, incest, betrayal, unbriddled ambition, the evil that men do, I try to tackle it all. Maybe you can't tell. Maybe I'm not doing it well. This novella I'm writing, it ties in with both the previous series and the other one I'm working at. A faint thread, yes, but it's there. And the genre is still the same. But it deals with so much more than just vampires banging a witch or two or killing for blood. It deals with addiction, with body shaming, with violence, domestic abuse, child abuse, bullying. It's all there, but it's still vampires and witches, in the end.

Because that's who I am who I am as an author. I like what I like. And the stories in my head, maybe all of them feature vampires, witches, Fey, can de loups. Maybe I will ever only write in one genre. It is who I am, so I should go with that. It's something I have been learning also through Kimberly's from The Little Plantation Instagram Winter Challenge. I am who I am in my photography too. Dark, moody, broody. I have been pushing myself in this challenge, but mostly remaining faithful to what actually moves me, the dark table mood food photography. Like these, which were taken for Week 2 of this challenge. So here is one of my favourite desserts, should these images wake inside you a craving for something so lush as I tried to make this look. All you need is:1 small pineapple, peeled, de-cored and chopped4 medium sized russet apples, peeled and de-cored, chopped2 pears, peeled, de-cored, chopped1 cup of frozen cassisgenerous pinch of cinnamonToss all the fruit into an oven proof dish and mix in the cinnamon, allowing it to coat the fruit. Bang in the oven at 190º until the fruit looks golden and is bubbling. Serve still warm, it needs nothing more, but if you're in an indulgent mood, well, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, double cream or greek yogurt will do the trick. Enjoy, and have yourselves a great weekend!

A tiresome week - pan roasted nuts for a speedy and delicious snack that will revive your mood, if not your energy

This week has been a rough one. I've been feeling so tired, and having insomnia, don't know if it's the cold or if my energy levels have dropped for whatever reason, but I have been havig a very hard time sleeping and focusing on anything other than reading. Even my cooking has been down to throwing stuff into a pan and letting it cook by itself on the stove, it's easy and tasty and healthy, plus, hardly any worked involved and right now, that suits me just fine!

The one thing I have been having loads of fun with is Kimberly's from The Little Plantation blog Instagram challenge. I talked about it last week here at the blog, and I have been racking my brains over certain themes, to the point that just this week I had all the images for the second week challenge ready and chosen, but was unhappy with one of them. Still, I couldn't come up with another idea, so I let it rest, even though I was cringing at the thought of posting said picture next week.

Enter thursday morning and I am faffing around my living room, waiting for kiddo to get ready for school, when I suddenly notice the light that hit the little corner where I normally photograph for this blog. It was so moody, so dreamy, so dramatic even, I just knew I had to photograph under it. Enter this wild idea in my head for a photo to use in said challenge, and there I am, running off after props and things so I can bring to life what my brain constructed in my mind.

After I finished, I was really happy with the results, and now I am not cringing at the thought of posting that particular photo this upcoming week. It reflects me, I believe, and my personal style, it also feels so organic and raw, and it took a single dash of light falling in from the window to immediately salvage something I thought was lost! What a rush that was. Much like I felt when I photographed this recipe, I was very stoked with the light, and in the end, felt that these photos really did justice to something so good and yet so simple.

This is my kind of snack. Nuts. I usually eat them raw and unseasoned, but I wanted to try something out, and just plunged right in! My son and husband adored it, and now I know I will have to do this again pretty soon! Here's what you need:1 cup raw cashews and almonds1/2 tsp salt1/2 tsp cayenne pepper - or a bit more if you like it hot!Bring a non stick pan to the stove and warm it up in high heat. Throw in the nuts, swirling them around the pan, allowing them to gain some colour and start releasing their oils. Once they begin to blush a little, add the seasoning and cook for a few more minutes. Serve warm or cold, keep in a lidded jar, and try to resist the urge to eat them all in one seating!