C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 62

blackberries, crumbled and plucked

I was faffing around on Saturday trying to convince myself to get my act together enough to Make The Apple Pie, and mumbled, “Or maybe I could just make a blackberry apple crumble, that’d be easier,” in the vicinity of our guest, who said, “I didn’t know that was an option!!!”, thus indicating I should do that. :)

I poked around the internet and couldn’t find a recipe I really liked, so I kind of invented one. It went like this:

Kit’s Blackberry-Apple Crumble
1 oz butter
1 oz sugar
4-5 green...

a friendly moment of panic

A friend of ours is visiting and working on her thesis. Early yesterday evening she came downstairs with the look of one martyred and suffering nobly for her cause and handed me her phone so that she couldn’t check Twitter or FB while she was supposed to be working on her thesis.

Several hours later, just before bedtime, she retrieved the phone and went into her bedroom. Moments later she came back out saying, “Catie? *CATIE*?!” in increasingly alarmed tones. Ted ran out to see what was wrong...

Kitsnaps: Golden Graveyard

Golden Graveyard

Sunrise over an old graveyard turns the stones to gold in Athy, Co. Kildare, Ireland

I love photographing graveyards, especially if there’s some kind of Weather going on. Sunrise turned out to be good Weather at the old graveyard in Athy, Co Kildare, Ireland. Best of all, it was January, so sunrise wasn’t even at, er, the crack of dawn… :)

The post Kitsnaps: Golden Graveyard appeared first on The Essential Kit.

Kitsnacks: Blackberry Jam

I’ve been going out and getting nettle-stung in search of the wild blackberries that are growing in our garden. (Nettles offend me mightily. Plants do not try to kill you in the land of my people, at least, nothing but Devil’s Club, and Devil’s Club looks like it wants to kill you from forty feet away.) Anyway, I’m apparently too easily taunted by blackberries and when I see them I feel obliged to get them immediately instead of preparing myself sufficiently against the nettles, so it’s this...

Kitsnacks: Lemon Curd

You would think I would know by now not to post “I made this” food stuff without also posting the recipe. :) Someone asked, so here’s my recipe:

Lemon Curd
2 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
3 oz (6 tbs) butter, room temperature
1 to 1.5 cups sugar
the juice of 3 lemons (1/2 to 3/4ths cups lemon juice, depending on the size of the lemons; adjust sugar accordingly)

Cream butter & sugar until fluffy. Add eggs & egg yolks & mix again. Slowly add lemon juice. The mixture will look curdled when properly mix...

strawberry rhubarb deliciousness

Iiiiiii have made an aaaaaaamaaaaaaazing batch of strawberry rhubarb jam.

Ted, who likes zingy strawberry/rhubarb jam, thought there wasn’t enough rhubarb in mine generally, so I did half and half instead of favouring the strawberries, and it’s rrrrrrrrrrrrrreeaaaaaaaaaallllly good.

I used jam sugar because I didn’t have enough regular sugar, and I thought I might have a little too much s/r for a kilo of jam sugar, which is often soft anyway. So I took what I’ve learned about unripe apples an...

perchance to dream

I dreamed I was trying to deal with our book collections, and found not one, but *two* copies of author Robin McKinley’s (obviously, from 1. the well-read condition of the books, and 2. their (differing) covers) 1980s-era fantasy novel ONCE UPON A TIME, and the fourth, interstitial (it fit between books 1 & 2), book of Pamela C Dean’s Secret Country trilogy.

*grabby grabby grabby hands* I would pay good money to go back into that dream and read those two books cover to cover…

The post perchan...

much better, thank you

I am, for all of you who have asked, much better today, thank you. Muuuuuuuuuuch better.

Apparently I alarmed my poor husband, because he did come home to get Indy from school, and when he arrived home I was sleeping on the couch and he couldn’t remember the last time I was sick enough to give up trying to push through and just went to sleep on the couch. Evidently he went back to work and told people I’d been sleeping on the couch and they said “so?” and he was like, “no, you don’t understan...

Writing Wednesday: Patreon patronage

A while ago I was muttering about how I wanted somebody I *knew* to have test-run a relatively new distribution opportunity for self-published writers, and one of my friends said, “Er, Catie, you’re the one who does that. You go charging off the cutting edge and we all wait to see how it works out and then follow, having learned from you.”

I said “!” because I didn’t know that was a thing I was perceived as doing, but since it apparently is, I’m gonna talk about my experiences with Patreon no...

i has a sick.

I’ve had a cold sneaking up on me the past couple days, but today it decided to land with both feet. I feel tired and faintly ill if I’m holding still, but if I move at all I cough. Climbing the stairs requires a ten minute sit-down to recover.

I’ve spent a lot of time lying on the couch today. :} I was so wrecked from bringing Indy to school that I asked Ted to come home from work long enough to *get* him from school. And that was after we deliberately left early because I knew I wasn’t goin...