Love In The Asylum

Hahaha so much for my quiet lazy Sunday. This was really an exhausting week - aside from the new job, I had some catastrophic computer problems that finally necessitated wiping my hard drive on Thursday night, fun times - and I had really, earnestly intended to do nothing all weekend but watch silly k-dramas and play video games. But nooooo, somehow I decided that what I actually needed to do was cook ALL THE THINGS. Here is all the things I have made this weekend:

a humongous batch of tomato sauce (using this recipe doubled - I froze most of it so we'll have tomato sauce for weeks)

cranberry-orange scones (because it's not like I could eat toast and eggs for breakfast or anything...)

three loaves of sourdough bread (I've been perfecting this recipe for awhile, but this time I burned the crust. Way to forget to turn the oven back down, me.)

Kimchi (This recipe - I love all her recipes so much! And this is the first time I've had Korean red pepper flakes instead of NM chile powder, so I'm excited to see how it turns out.)

Pork and kimchi dumplings (This recipe. Because I needed to use up the last of the last batch of kimchi left in the crock so I had somewhere to put the new batch. Really delicious, and I have some left to take in my lunch tomorrow, yay.)

Oh, and I also cleaned the bathroom, cleaned and vacuumed my bedroom, did my laundry, did five sinkfuls of dishes (because I kept making more!), and visited my grandma. I had a semi-important project I really wanted to work on tonight, and some best practices guides to go over from work, but eeeeeeeh so not going to happen. Deep Space Nine and cookies seems like a much better option now. AND NOT MOVING.

Feeling super accomplished today. Not only did I clean the bathroom and the kitchen, vacuum the living room, and read 50000 words worth of Star Wars AU fic (OMG help me I'm starting to ship Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan), but I baked a cake! From scratch! With no cake mix or canned frosting! Seriously, I have never ever done that before. But we got the first couple of eggs out of our chickens this week, and I wanted to use them for something a little special, not just throw them into an omelet or whatever. So cake it was. colourofsaying sent me an awesome recipe for a dark chocolate cake, and then I adapted another recipe to make a sticky dark chocolate honey icing, and the whole thing turned out way better than I was expecting, given my lack of dessert baking expertise. I am really tempted to start experimenting now. Except that this cake used up all of our butter.

Since it's Wednesday, that also means that it is RPG night! We're still playing with the training wheels on, but honestly I appreciate that. It would be a ton of information to take in even if I wasn't pretty shy about role-playing in front of other people, but I feel like I'm slowly starting to get the hang of it, and getting a little bit better about thinking on my feet. And the actual gameplay so far is great - last week we focused on the storyline I had started, and L and A helped me to rescue a girl who had been abducted and forced into prostitution as a pleasure-droid. This week all our characters were at a Halloween party and we spent half the night playing blackjack and liar dice, but I did get to schmooze some information about a crime ring out of some smugglers. I even tried to stay in character the whole time! The more I get used to being my character, the more I like her. I'm thinking of starting some 5 Things lists, just to get a little writing in and nail some scenes in her backstory. Could be fun.

I'm alive! More or less! Geez, what a week though. I've been - okay, a couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I was really stuck on my first story for my Levinthal tutorial? I finally got a draft done YESTERDAY. So the last week and a half has been an ongoing drama of my tutor sending me increasingly pointed emails asking if she's ever going to see this story, and me staying up all night to write and still, somehow, not producing any actual words. I don't actually remember much of anything that happened since Tuesday (aside from brief flashes of Margery of Kempe, which would be hallucinatory on a good day), and I'm now in that post-writing stage of obsessive "oh god this was the worst, most pointless story ever written, my tutor will hate me"-ness, but! The important thing is that I finally got it written. And I've taken today off to recover from the whole mess.

Here are some things that are making me happy today:

1. This part of my story where I got to make up an anecdote that was not in fact directly inspired by anything my family has ever done but still sounds perfectly like something my father would have done. I may hate the rest of this story passionately, but I do love this whole paragraph.

“The summer I was seven,” she says steadily, “Dad decided one day he needed to teach me how to fish. So he stole his buddy Charlie’s extra rod and threw his tackle box in the back of the pick-up and we drove up to Cochiti. Dragged me out of bed at three in the morning, drove 50 miles to get to the lake, and we can’t catch a damn thing. He’s sitting there, pounding back Coronas and getting more and more pissed, and I’d rather be playing in the mud, but he’s going to teach me to fish, damnit.”

She pauses. It’s always hard to get the inflections right on this part of the story, to convince whoever she’s telling that it’s actually supposed to be funny. She’s had a lot of practice at it, though.

“So finally he just loses it. He stands up and looks at me and says “fishing this way is for pansies,” and takes Charlie’s pellet gun out of the back seat of the truck and just starts shooting into the water, at all those fish he’s sure are right there. And that’s how we got banned from Cochiti Lake.”

2. The Sherlock/Tumbling fusion AU colourofsaying and I came up with the other day. In which John is the captain of the boys' high school rhythmic gymnastics team, Sherlock is the anti-social but gifted ex-thug/newcomer to the team, Lestrade is the well-meaning coach, and Mycroft is Sherlock's mom. TEEN!SHERLOCK IN A SPARKLY PINK LEOTARD, TELL ME IT WOULDN'T BE AWESOME. Or, you know, made of crack, which is almost as good.

3. Everything about this post on arsenalbbs. This shouldn't really come as news to anyone, but Thierry Henry is pretty much the most flawless human being on the planet. I am constantly amazed that the universe has been able to fit that much sexy into a single Frenchman in a suit. Of note in the comments: crazy!Jens Lehmann, Leo Messi running into a tree branch, and a Pepsi commercial where Cesc Fabregas blows Thierry Henry a kiss. I swear, sometimes I love this team so fucking much.

4. As soon as I post this, I'm making double fudge brownies. :)

Thank you very much to everyone who replied to my last entry - I'm doing my best to get caught up on replying to comments, but in the meantime it just means a lot to me to know that other people are thinking of me and my family right now.

I'm doing okay, I think. It's hard for me to tell - I lost my maternal grandmother and my cousin when I was in high school, but I didn't really know either of them well. This is the first time I've lost someone close to me. And this was something that was both expected and unexpected; he's been sick for a long time, and gradually getting worse, and I think we all knew that and had been preparing ourselves for it, but none of us really expected it to happen now. I'm having a hard time convincing myself that this is really happening, that it's not just another crisis for him to get through like he has before. But I'm dealing, I guess. And trying my best to be there as much as I can for my dad and my grandmother, especially my grandmother, because I know how much more difficult this has to be for her.

Mostly I'm just trying to keep myself busy. I'm still working on my Yuletide, although I got enough of a story thrown together by Monday night that I didn't have to default. If I manage to get in all the scenes I want it's going to be a lot longer than I planned for. And a lot more full of old blues references. Monday and yesterday I baked all the cookies in the world. Triple batches of cranberry-pistachio biscotti, chocolate-peppermint sandwich cookies, and pumpkin chocolate chip. Double batches of vanilla-almond sugar cookies and oatmeal cranberry cookies. You can't even see our kitchen table right now, it is nothing but baked goods. Tonight we are icing, and tomorrow taking things to the girlfriend's apartment so she can box them up as gifts. There may be emergency additional baking required at that point, although I'm really hoping not, because 30 dozen cookies is more than enough baking for me.

Three Things About Wednesday:

1. I hate having arguments where both of you know that the thing you are arguing about is irrelevant - it could just as easily be radio stations or cake toppings as the state of the bathroom floor - and you are just displacing a different argument onto something less fraught. I got into two separate screaming fights with my dad today, one about dishes (although that was mostly an 'I don't like your tone, young lady' kind of fight) and one about chili sauce. I'm not even sure what we were actually arguing about. On the other hand, as arguing topics go for me and my father, those were pretty innocuous. We've certainly had worse. I didn't even have to cry to get him to apologize to me.

2. I made the most gorgeous loaf of bread ever today. I haven't even tasted it yet, it was too pretty to eat. It was almost perfectly round, and better risen than I've ever pulled off before. Normally my round loaves go out instead of up and end up like giant crusty pancakes - not bad tasting, but only good for very narrow sandwiches. I am getting better at this! I am also optimistic about how this one will taste. It has toasted cornmeal and lard in it, I have high hopes.

3. I'm finally finishing up season 4 of Supernatural. Yes, I know I'm horrendously behind. Life got complicated and stressful and I couldn't emotionally handle a show where the main characters routinely sell their souls to demons to stop each other dying. I'm really liking it now though! Although apparently I missed the memo that this is the season where Sam goes ABSOLUTELY CRAZY, because wow. I mean, I was aware of the whole sexing up a demon, drinking demon blood, using weirdo psychic nosebleed powers thing. But it wasn't until the episode with the Lost Winchester Brother that it really hit me how completely and utterly his frame of mind has shifted from earlier seasons. Dude is fucked up. I LOVE it.

Someday, I will be mature enough to make chocolate chip cookies without in the process eating enough raw cookie dough to make me sick to my stomach.

Someday, but apparently not this day. Urgh, that was a mistake. A delicious, chocolatey mistake.



I've been reading Mark Reads Harry Potter for ages (and if you haven't read it GO DO THAT NOW because he is both insightful and funny as fuck and his Twilight reviews are made of snarky win), and all of a sudden it has made me really want to read Harry Potter fic. Particularly Percy/Oliver fic. I guess because the last few chapters he's mentioned a lot how much he hates Percy and...I get that, I do! Percy is an arrogant, short-sighted, stubborn, stick-up-his-arse little git who needed a good dose of sense knocked into him.

Buuuuut at the same time, I've never been quite happy with how the books treated Percy. I don't see what's so bad about having personal and professional ambitions, or in being uncomfortable being poor and having other people perceive you in a certain way, or being quiet and bookish and not inclined to push the rules. That doesn't make him a very exciting person, maybe, but it doesn't make him a bad person either. He made some bad choices, undoubtedly, but I do wonder how the Big Weasley Family Rift would have gone down if the rest of the family didn't denigrate his accomplishments (telling your son with self-value issues that he only got the promotion he's so proud of because his boss wants to use him as a spy and so now he's a traitor? that will end well) and the twins didn't bully him so badly (I love the Weasley twins dearly, but that doesn't change that a lot of their jokes cross the line into mean-spiritedness, especially when Percy is involved). Like I said, it's not like Percy isn't a jerk. But I don't think it's as clear-cut as the books maybe want it to be. And I still love Percy, like, a lot.

Anyway, it really makes me want there to be fic set during the War, in that weird place in-between place where Percy's realized he screwed up but isn't ready to face his family and apologize. So instead he gets drunk and randomly shows up on Oliver's doorstep because he doesn't have anywhere else to go and his boss would curse him as soon as look at him but if he leaves the Death Eaters will definitely kill him and he hasn't talked to his parents in months and no one knows where the twins are and everything is a terrifying mess and he just...can't. And he ends up sleeping on Oliver's couch for, like, weeks at a time. Which Oliver doesn't really mind because Percy's cute and a good cook, but it does involve a lot of hugging him and reassuring him that people will eventually forgive him for being a prat.

...trust me to take a fairly straight-forward pairing and fill it with emotional trauma. I may have to actually sit down and write this one. As soon as I figure out how to reconcile a couple different pieces of canon and head-canon.

Somehow this ended up being a very baking-oriented week, I don't even know. So I figured a baking log would not be remiss, just for posterity's sake.

Saturday: orange-cranberry-honey scones. The orange-honey combination is my favorite variation on my standard scone recipe so far; it's very tender and just a little sweet, and the orange flavor isn't strong at all. This time I threw in some tangerine zest, because I was eating the tangerine anyway, which made the flavor a lot brighter, and also a couple handfuls of dried cranberries, because dried cranberries are one of the greatest things ever invented. This was technically a house-warming present for the friend we were supposed to help move, but made enough for me and my mom to have some for lunch with apricot preserves. I don't know what it is about scones that makes me actually like jam, but it's weird (if delicious).

Wednesday: honey-wheat batter bread. God I go through honey so fast lately. This was...pretty good. I don't know if it's the weather, or the recipes I'm using, or some bizarre personal failing, but the last couple weeks I've had a hard time getting my bread the shape I want it. I just want a proper loaf shape, is that so much to ask? But slightly squashed shape notwithstanding, this tasted fine. I love whole-wheat bread, especially since I make peanut butter toast for breakfast quite often, and nothing makes better toast. All nutty and chewy and whole-wheaty, mmmm.

Today: hamburger buns. Roommate Guy is starting treatment for a fairly serious, seriously un-fun medical condition, so we decided to have a bacon cheeseburger party for him + the girlfriend and her kid. Last time I made hot dog buns, I screwed something up and they didn't turn out that good, but this time everything went perfectly. I never cease to be pleased by how excited people get by the idea of homemade buns - it's not actually that difficult, especially since I use the bread machine, and they act like I just invented sliced bread.

Also Today: bagels! Man, this recipe is a pain in the ass. The sponge has to rise for ages, and then there's all kinds of weird stuff with shaping and testing the dough with water and retarding it in the fridge overnight. And bagels are really dense, so it uses up a ton of flour. But sometimes you just need bagels and cream cheese more than anything. At least this time I probably won't be bageling at 1 in the morning.

I'd say I'm ready to be DONE BAKING, but that would be a lie. I've already got plans for a buttermilk bread for next week (in my defense, when my dad buys bread he only buys wonderbread, which is revolting, so I offered to bake every week instead so we have bread to use for sandwiches, breakfasts, etc. IT WAS THIS OR WONDERBREAD). I hope I'll be able to keep this up - maybe not quite this much baking, but a decent amount - when I get back to school. I find it really relaxing, and it's a lot of fun. And I have delicious baked goods to eat!

At least I don't have to worry about affording groceries this quarter. I just got my tuition bill for autumn, and because I am not paying for a meal plan this year, for the first time my financial aid actually exceeds my tuition costs. Theoretically this is a stipend for buying food for myself, but there is no way I could spend $1200 on food in three months, even if I didn't have a job that will cover most/all of my grocery bill. I guess I know where the money for my graduation tattoo is coming from. :)

PS: is anyone else watching the Bundesliga? Please tell me I'm not the only one who was so bereft at the lack of hot Germans after the World Cup ended that she followed them back to the club leagues? Not to mention that football has somehow fallen into that extremely narrow category of sports that are actually entertaining to watch, even on television (hockey, on the other hand, is my favoritest sport ever live, but I cannot watch five minutes of it televised).

...go Bayern

Now, I'm the kind of person who, if you told me I could only eat one kind of bread for the rest of my life...well, I'd probably tell you to drop dead, because that's an impossible choice. I love all kinds of bread! But sourdough would definitely be high on my short-list of breads for which I'd forgo all other breads. I love a proper crusty, chewy, tangy sourdough.

However, I am also the kind of person who is way too lazy and indecisive to want to keep a sourdough starter on hand all the time. I don't like the idea of being tied down to making some kind of sourdough bread every week so my starter doesn't go bad; I have too much fun experimenting with other kinds of bread that don't need it, and between my and my dad, we just can't eat more than a couple loaves a week. And I don't want to have to toss half my starter when I'm done and waste it. So when I'm picking a bread recipe for the week, I tend to skip over the sourdough in favor of breads that aren't such a long-term commitment.

I was super-excited to find this sourdough recipe in one of my mom's bread books, because it is perfectly made for people like me - it takes a few days to get going, but you use up all the starter in the dough, so then you can be done with it altogether and move on to something else. Also, it is really good. :)

San Francisco Sourdough (from the Wooden Spoon Bread Book)

( Om Nom Nom Sourdough )

I have a new roommate! Well, a new future roommate; I don't think Freshman Roommate is going anywhere in the next few days. But come September she will be off to Crothers (with, uh, every single other freshman in my dorm, I swear), and I will have a new roommate, hereby known as Apartment Roommate. Because we are sharing an apartment!

Playing Roommate Roulette is always a bit risky, but at least drawing into an apartment gives me a little more margin of error - since I have my own room (OMG), I'm willing to excuse a lot, so as long as she isn't growing alien lifeforms in the bath or scheduling drunken orgies without telling me, we'll probably be able to work things out. She seems nice, though!

Ha, I'm really embarrassingly excited about the prospect of having a bedroom all to myself, and a bathroom I don't have to share with an entire floor and all their drunken friends, and a kitchen. YOU GUYS I GET MY OWN KITCHEN JUST LIKE A REAL GROWN-UP. My dad even said he would let me take the bread machine back to school with me, since he never uses it when I'm not home. I have plans for some seriously Epic Baking next year. :D

Baked goods achieved today by yours truly:

6 dozen Linzer cookies with raspberry jam (I hate this dough very much, because it is so soft and sticky, but the cookies are pretty delicious)

4 dozen lemon wreath cookies with pistachio nuts (OM NOM NOM LEMON)

2 dozen chocolate sandwich cookies with a peppermint cream filling (so good looking they almost make me forget I hate peppermint)

Tomorrow we - by which I mean I, my dad being mostly relegated to doing dishes and taking things out of the oven - are baking another batch of the linzers, another batch of the sandwich cookies, chocolate-raspberry/other jelly filling thumbprint cookies, and peanut butter cookies. And we may do another round on Wednesday/Thursday after we've given cookies to all his clients. I have never baked so much in my life.

For now though I am back to work on my Yuletide fic, which is about 850 words in and maybe a quarter of the way through the actual plot, so with some hard work put in tonight might actually be something approaching done by the deadline.