Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 120

Farmers Market Month, Day 1: berries, coconut, salmon, acini de pepe

At today's farmers market, I bought so much stuff that I had to call it quits early as I could literally carry no more. I now have berries (rapidly diminishing, they are PERFECT), kale, Chinese broccoli with edible yellow flowers (broccoli rabe), mandarin oranges, goat cheese, apricot kefir, pickled daikon, tempeh (for snacking - it's Korean style and very tasty), six eggs (white, brown, and blue-green), golden beets, sweet potatoes, onions and garlic, green garlic (garlic sprouts), and salad greens (which got so squashed that I decided not to make a salad tonight).

At the market, I bought and drank a green coconut, ate half the meat, and took the rest home. Not at the market, I ate a mango pastry I'd brought back from Tucson and warmed in the microwave. It was delicious. So were the things I made for myself:

Blueberries and raspberries in a coconut half:



Broiled soy-garlic salmon (an old stand-by) on a bed of acini de pepe, with capers, pickled garlic, and kimchi. Elderflower cordial.



Salmon from freezer. Acini de pepe from pantry. Let me explain the acini de pepe. I had a box of it which I bought a while back on a whim. It's rice-sized pasta (pastina). I decided to use it up in lieu of rice, since it's been sitting in the cupboard for ages. I have never cooked the stuff before and thought it would make about two cups. It made something like eight cups. Or more. I now have a giant bowl of acini de pepe that I need to make use of.

I'm thinking "in lieu of rice" and... um... maybe a grain-based salad? Heat with butter and maple syrup for breakfast? I believe it's normally used in soup, but I don't feel like making soup. Will take non-soup ideas if you have any. Especially if they involve any of the ingredients I already have. I also have Chinese sweet sausage I want to use up - maybe I could make a sort of fried rice with it, and eat with stir-fried garlic greens and/or Chinese broccoli. It's perfectly nice, neutral pasta, just... there's a lot of it.

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The Winged Colt of Casa Mia, by Betsy Byars

Betsy Byars was a very well-known writer of children's books when I was a kid (the 70s-80s). She wrote The Pinballs, The Cybil War, The Nightswimmers, Summer of the Swans, The Midnight Fox, etc. If you're around my age, you probably remember seeing her books even if you didn't read them. They were out of print for a while, but now many of them have been reissued as ebooks.

This one was written in 1973, the year of my birth. Unusually for a kids’ book, it’s narrated (in first person, no less) by an adult.

Uncle Coot, the narrator, is a former horse riding stuntman who retired after a tragic accident in which his beloved stunt horse was killed. (All the bits where he talks about stunt riding are very much “some things change for the better,” even though I don’t think that was Byars’ intent.) His young nephew, Charles, who is dumped on him by his mother because she’s not interested in being a mom, hero-worships Coot and wants to learn everything about riding, despite a near total lack of aptitude. Coot is not happy about any of this.

When a winged colt is born, Charles falls in love with it. But they have no way of teaching it to fly…

While the general arc of the story is predictable, the individual events are not. I expected this to be much more about Charles and the winged horse than it actually is; it’s more about Charles and Coot’s relationship as catalyzed by the winged horse. It’s a good story and the horse doesn’t die, but I wanted more human-animal bonding and flying horse coolness than I got. For a story about a flying horse, it’s distinctly on the understated side.

The Winged Colt of Casa Mia[image error]

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Dear Hurt-Comfort Exchange Writer...

Thank you so much for writing for me! H/C is my favorite thing, so I'm very excited about this exchange and I really look forward to whatever you create for me.

( General Loves )

( General DNWs )

( The Passage (TV 2019) )

( The Punisher (TV 2017) )

( The Umbrella Academy (TV) )

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Farmer's Market Month, Day 0: Beer (Bread) Bad

I just got home from an absolutely wonderful Tucson trip this afternoon and my first farmers market is tomorrow, so I'm only partially counting this as a day (hence Day 0.)

For those who missed my earlier post, I'm experimentally spending a month eating only what I buy at farmers' markets, certain cooking-necessary staples not found there like flour and milk, and anything already in my pantry. Also, I am trying to bake bread for the first time in my life, so I attempted that tonight via this beer bread recipe.

Beer bread was very disappointing: nice cakey texture, and a flavor which combined extreme blandness with a slight weird/unpleasant tang. I didn't care for it even fresh out of the oven and with butter, and had rice with garlic and Chinese sausage for dinner. Maybe I should not have used Budweiser? That was the only beer I could buy as a single can at the corner store.

ETA: Oh wait. I just checked my flour, and it says it's best by April 2018. That may have had something to do with it. I will buy yeast, better beer, better and also new flour, and try again.

ETA II: Also failed to add the salt - I misread the recipe regarding to do and not do if you are using self-rising flour, which I was not.

Considering the multiple things I did wrong (old flour, no salt, possibly inferior beer) I have hopes that I could do better if I just use better ingredients. And also remember to put all of them in.

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Tucson Book Haul, Part I

I bought a lot of books in Tucson, which is blessed with many bookshops. In fact, I bought so many that I had to mail three boxes back to me (Layla mailed one back to herself), and this is not even the complete list of what I bought. It does not, for instance, include any of the books from Bookman’s, a huge used bookstore. The register had Trump’s book Art of the Deal standing up. I turned it over so I wouldn’t have to look at his face. The woman at the register righted it, explaining apologetically that she’d get a bonus if she managed to unload it on someone!

From Book Stop, a used bookstore which proved to be a treasure trove of children’s books, some from my childhood which I lost and then never saw again for 30 years:

Haunting of Cassie Palmer[image error], by Vivien Alcock. Ghost story recommended to me on DW.

The Fire Eaters[image error], by David Almond. Magical realism, I think. I really liked his novel Kit’s Wilderness.

Project Cat[image error], by Nellie Burchardt. Kids find a lost kitten. I hope it doesn’t die.

Winged Colt of Casa Mia[image error], by Betsy Byars. FLYING HORSIE. I hope it doesn’t die.

Katie John[image error] and White Witch of Kynance[image error], both historicals by Mary Calhoun. She wrote two of my favorite children’s books, The House of Thirty Cats[image error] and Magic in the Alley.

The Lost Star[image error], by H. M. Hoover. (On Kindle.) I’ve never read anything by her but lots of people have fond memories of her books. Her books all seem to be on Kindle now.

Veronica Ganz[image error], by Marilyn Sachs. (On Kindle.) Written in 1969, I remember this book as a serious look at bullying from the perspective of a girl bully, but what I was mostly interested in was the then-current but by my time of reading (early 80s) now-historical details of daily life.

From Antigone Books, a new indie bookstore:

The Chicken: A Natural History[image error], by Joseph Barber. A gift for my step-mom, who raises chickens, but I’m going to read it first.

Pirate's Fortune (Supreme Constellations Book 4)[image error], by Gun Brooke. They had a shelf of F/F romances by Bold Strokes Books, which I don’t often see in their print incarnations, and I was so excited that I bought three of them.

Notorious pirate and mercenary Weiss Kyakh works as a reluctant double-agent for the Supreme Constellations. Her mission is to infiltrate a cutthroat band of space pirates along with a sentient bio-android, Madisyn Pimm.

Hopefully the books in this series are standalones because I have not read books 1-3. The prologue had Madisyn waking up in an android body and begging for death, but I’m guessing things look up from there.

Cool in Tucson (A Sarah Burke Mystery) [image error], by Elizabeth Gunn. A mystery set in Tucson which Layla recommended; heroine is a cop.

Ghost Trio[image error], by Lillian Irwin. An F/F Gothic! With a somewhat less-than-scary mansion name.

Lee Howe, a professional pianist, believes that if she can see the site where her beloved Devorah met her death, she will begin to accept that she must move on with her own life. Devorah Manikian had been rehearsing for a starring role in Carmen and was living in Eggerscliffe, a 1920s-style pseudo-castle belonging to wealthy and eccentric impresario, Annajean Eggers. Devorah was gone only a few weeks before Lee was notified that she was dead—killed in a tower fire at Eggerscliffe. But as Lee stands alone below the castle, she hears Devorah singing...

Endurance: My Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery[image error], by Scott Kelly. A space memoir by Gabby Gifford’s husband.

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South[image error], by Michael W. Twitty. The bookshop person said the author had done an event there and was really nice.

You Make Me Tremble[image error], by Karis Walsh. F/F romance.

Animal rescue worker Iris Mallery thinks she has created a stable and secure home for herself, but when her small town is battered by an earthquake, Iris needs to rebuild not only her own life, but the lives of the displaced dogs and cats now filling her shelter.

The last book I read by her inspired me to go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and I had a wonderful time. Hopefully this one will not inspire an earthquake.

Anyone read any of these and/or have opinions on what they’d most enjoy seeing a review of?

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Our Tucson trip

sholio has written an account of our Tucson adventures, which so far have featured the common fanfic tropes of Mistaken For A Couple, Trapped By A Flood, and Only One Bed. This makes a nice companion piece to my previous-this-month adventure with sartorias , Snowed In.

Tucson is beautiful and delightful. I had a friend I used to stay with there, but I hadn't been back for something like fifteen years, and expected that it would be built up and very different from how I remembered it. In fact, it is exactly the same as I remembered it: extraordinary, almost alien-looking natural landscape full of life and saguaros exactly as depicted in movies, artsy bohemian townspeople interspersed with rather less bohemian types (we spotted many leftist signs and one very large, very angry BUILD THE WALL, though to be fair that one was actually in Tubac.)

This morning, to our immense relief, the hot water had been turned back on and we were able to take much-needed showers. We went to a cafe with a beautiful outdoor patio with two trees, which thanks to the previous day's hike we could recognize as a mesquite and a palo verde.

Behind us, a man in a heavy wool red coat, red pants, a black wool Santa-type hat, and a black eye-patch was discoursing to his female companion: "It is the time of Me Too... Scorpio, the sign of sexual energy, is ascendant... The Great House is in Jupiter..." There was a pause, and she said, "Um... You mean the planet?"

Refreshed, we went to Antigone Bookstore and purchased a baseball cap with an embroidered quail (Layla) and a bat (me) and way too many books (both of us.) I additionally acquired a plushie hedgehog. We observed, but did not buy, a lot of unicorn, narwhal, and sloth memorabilia. This seems to be a recent thing, as it was all over LA too. I still await the unicorn sloth.

Then we drove to Gates Pass, where we hiked and scrambled up some hills with fantastic views and a whole lot of cacti. We spotted lots of beautiful wildflowers, including a red-blooming ocotillo. And now we are back in the AirBnb, checking email (both of us) and icing our ankles (me.)

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Chicken Run: A Letty Campbell Mystery, by Alma Fritchley

Letty Campbell inherited a chicken farm in Yorkshire from her aunt. Two years later, she’s got her hands full with an obstreperous rooster, an ex-girlfriend with a too-good-to-be-true financial offer, a librarian who’s coming out late and needs Letty to show her the lesbian social scene, and the librarian’s straight niece who loves cars.

The chicken farm is a great setting though occasionally under-researched, the 90s lesbian scene in England is also a great setting that clearly didn’t need to be researched at all as it has the distinct ring of lived experience, and Letty is a hilarious narrator.

What could possibly go wrong with this book? Well, after 168 pages of hijinks in a book that’s 177 pages total, we suddenly get this (not offensive, just bizarre): ( Read more... )

96% delightful romantic comedy with a fun setting and charming cast, 4% OMGWTFBBQ mystery/action plot that comes 100% out of nowhere. I can’t help suspecting that the latter was inserted to make the book more commercial, but it is incredibly obviously not where Fritchley’s heart is – so much so that in the wrap-up, Letty mentions that if we want an explanation for the action plot, we can read the newspaper. No we can’t, this is FICTION!

I enjoyed this a lot overall and there are definitely worse flaws a book could have than a sudden swerve into “Oops, I guess this needs a mystery plot, who cares if it makes any sense?” However, I have been tipped off that my favorite supporting characters are only in the first book, so I’ll probably leave it at that.

Chicken Run (Letty Campbell Mysteries)[image error]

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Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon

A better-than-average “I did a weird thing for a year” book, which is a low bar to clear as 99% of those are absolutely terrible no matter how cool the weird thing is. That being said, I enjoyed this one.

Smith and MacKinnon are journalists living in Vancouver who were disturbed by an article they read about the length most food they eat travels, which causes a lot of pollution. So they decided to spend a year eating only what they already had in their pantry and food which came from no more than 100 miles away from where they lived.

I initially thought this would be very difficult given the limited local produce in winter, not to mention the lack of some usual staples. Those do indeed cause problems, which in some cases are ameliorated by the resources they bring with them (MacKinnon, a very skilled amateur chef, creates a gourmet “sandwich” entirely made of turnips.) In other cases, not so much: after a lot of fruitless searching, they find a farmer within 100 miles who grows wheat. Not only that, but it wasn’t profitable for him so he offers them whatever they can carry away for free. They’re delighted until they discover it’s all contaminated with mouse turds.

Their challenge parameters are somewhat arbitrary, but they’re upfront about that, as they are about the unusual resources they start with, such as MacKinnon’s cooking skills (WAY beyond mine both in terms of technique and inventiveness – his recipes are intriguingly non-obvious) and the fact that they own a cabin in the woods. Mostly they call attention to local food resources that could be eaten more, but often aren’t, and celebrate paying attention to what’s already in front of you.

It was worth reading for me as it inspired me to try a one-month challenge of eating just from my pantry and from farmer's markets, plus a few non-ready-to-eat staples I don't already have. (Easy mode: I live in California.) I'm not bothering with geographical distance as that would drive me and the vendors around the bend. I will chronicle this here for your enjoyment.

Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet[image error]

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Hurt-Comfort Plot Generator

We now have a hurt-comfort plot generator!

Under-Negotiated Kink
...leads to...
Comforter Is Purposefully Bad At Being Comforting

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Bad BDSM Etiquette Causes Tentacle Accident

The Hurt-Comfort Fic Exchange Tagset has freeform tags alphabetized in sets of 30 or so, and the top-level listing is the tag range indicating what tags are in the group. For instance, Explosions → field medicine. This updates every time new tags are added.

The formatting with the arrow suggests that one thing leads to another, which suggests many amazing stories. Here are a few of my recent favorites.

Setting Yourself On Fire → Soulmate AU - Broken Soulbond

I can see how that could happen.

Sea Creature Attack → Sex with Amnesia Victim

Yikes.

Subdrop → Temporary Hearing Loss

That is some extreme subdrop.

Temporary Loss of Divinity → Trapped in a milking/breeding machine with tubes in every conceivable orifice

That's one hell of a comedown from Godhood!

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