Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 191

Recipe: Gluten-free Vegie Burgers

Hint: if you want to eat a gluten-free vegie burger, do not do as  girliejones did and eat this with bread. Not even gluten-free bread, because gluten-free bread is horrible.

1 big/2 small sweet potatoes

1 packet of frozen spinach

1 can of chickpeas

1 tsp curry powder

potato flour, for rolling

Dice sweet potato & steam until soft. Thaw spinach. Drain liquid from chickpeas. Put all ingredients in a bowl and puree roughly (having some pieces of chickpea/potato still whole is desired).

Roll...

Christmas comes with musketeers

It's insanely early, and I've been awake for an hour already. Apparently this is the year that Raeli is old enough to wake up before 6am, open her stocking, drag us out so she can open her presents ( girliejones is still blissfully sleeping). She's also old enough to spot that if presents are wrapped in the same paper that mummy uses, they're probably not from Santa. On the other hand, she has an activity garage with a slide which mysteriously appeared out of nowhere (she hasn't figured out a...

Indulgences

Spending the day talking nonstop with  girliejones

Receiving presents from our girls' various grandmothers all day (Raeli has had way too much sugar and scored a giant elephant puppet)

Chocolate chocolate chocolate

Gingerbread, shortbread, Ashgrove cheese and crackers, olives, cream cheese-stuffed peppers, apple cider, basically anything we saw in the supermarket and could justify because 'it's Tasmania, so Alisa needs to try it'

Entirely failing to make cupcakes, the one actual thing I had...

Halls Decked? Check

Wow, so this domestic thing. People do this every day? I've been spending the last 3 days predominantly on housework, and I'm definitely over it. Still, the house is clean and tidy for Christmas, we're way better organised than we were last year, and apart from the tree randomly falling over and the second batch of shortbread being sniffed at suspiciously by my daughter, there have been no catastrophes.

(ah, the gingerbread house fail of… too many years to count, ahh the Christmas I was 8...

More on Multiple Women in Fantasy

For the record, I didn't intend for yesterday's post to be particularly negative! I was hoping for more evidence that there were in fact whole slews of fantasy fiction which centres around more than one female character, and their interactions. Thanks to comments here and on LJ, I have a few more to add to the list:

Thoraiya Dyer reminded me that while big chunks of the Mists of Avalon are about Morgaine-Arthur-Lancelot-Gwenhyfar with the women being the only ones not really having a...

Daughter'd

After a year of dragging her feet and go-slow protests, of "whyyyyy daycare" and "I like school more than daycare" and my personal favourite, as the mother of a new baby: "but I need more rest," Raeli woke up this morning, dressed herself in her uniform including knee socks and shoes, not the sandals she's always fighting for, but proper sneakers, and came in to show us. She then went to the toilet, had breakfast and cleaned her teeth, all efficiently and calmly. I didn't have to nag once, ...

Lone Princesses and Girly Books

I've had a tab open to this post by Jim C Hines on Girly Books and gender stereotyping all week, pretty sure that I wanted to say something about it, but not sure what.

I understand his bafflement at male readers being hesitant to pick up his new books, the ones with girls on the cover. I remember the almost physical blow I felt the first time an acquaintance told me to my face that he wasn't going to read my books because he didn't read anything with female protagonists. (ten years later...

Dancing about Architecture

We seem to be on track for Christmas – only more house cleaning and food shopping to do. I woke up this morning with the excellent news that Arsenal beat Hull 3-0 and promptly demanded a celebratory sleep-in. Well more to the point I was up for too much in the middle of the night and needed a sleep-in, but whatever. I haven't had one in a very very long time and Jemima was bizarrely compliant, allowing me to sleep for most of the morning. Raeli was less compliant, of course.

I'm trying to...

Pop Women

One of the cool things I will remember about the blogosphere in 2009 was the amazing response to the TripleJ Hottest 100 of all time, as people across Australia responded to the gaping (and for many of us, quite shocking) lack of female representation in that list by celebrating women's music. The conversation that spanned across so many blogs and Twitter accounts was layered and fascinating, and went a long way to making up for some of the more jawdropping kneejerk reactions/excuses for so ...

Gingerbread Personages (gluten and dairy free)

So a few people have asked for my dairy and gluten free gingerbread recipe – I feel a bit guilty about posting this, because I'm pretty sure I don't have the recipe right yet. It's very much a work in progress. If you try it for yourself and add any tweaks that improve on it, please let me know! In particular I think the mix of flours could use work…

Gingerbread Personages (gluten and dairy free)

Dry Stuff:
1.5 cups potato flour
2 cups rice flour
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1-2 t...