Tag: kitchen magic

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Whimsy

Late-night baking & other adventures

I decided to bake things at 22:40 Wednesday. Why? Because it was the end of a long day with little word progress, I craved sweets, and the dessert cupboards were bare. Yes, my first and last instinct facing that crisis was to make something from scratch, not to hop in the car and drive 5 minutes to a store. Draw what conclusions you will.

Problem was, I had neither eggs nor butter in the house. Thanksgiving hibernation emptied the pantry, and I’ve been procrastinating the shopping hellsperience. So I nosed around the available ingredients and did some improvising.

Result:  night nibbles. That’s what I have dubbed them. I could call them fruit shortcakes or sweet drop biscuits or come up with some other fancy name, but whatever the label, they’re chewy-caky-sweet-tangy bursty deliciousness. And since they’re low on fat as-is, I can pair them with ice cream or butter or whipped cream if I’m feeling particularly decadent. And have butter. Or ice cream. (I did have whipping cream, oh, yes.)

Now the recipe, so I don’t forget it, because I am hella-sure I’ll be making these again since I’ve already made a second batch with frozen blueberries:

  • Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees
  • Put parchment or baking mats on 2 cookie sheets
  • Sift together:
    • 2 1/2 c. flour
    • 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
    • 1 tsp salt (or less)
    • 1/2 c. sugar
  • add 1 c.+ small fruit, dried or fresh.  I used dried cranberries, but dried cherries or apricots would do too (diced, in that case) or frozen blueberries, cherries, or raspberries…etc.  Note: when I was using wet fruit, I would add it after the cheese/yogurt.
  • Work in with fork or hands until completely mixed & crumbled with the flour:
    • 4 oz Neufchatel cheese or cream cheese (half a block)
    • 2 heaping spoonfuls plain Greek yogurt (about 1/3 c?)
  • add 3/4 c milk and stir until mixture forms a gooey dough

Scoop by spoonfuls onto cookie sheets & bake 15-20 minutes/until tops brown & toothpick comes out clean. Ones made with wet fruit may require longer bake than dried ones.  Makes 12 big rounds or 24 nibble sized ones.

There. That was my big adventure.

In other Other Things:

Reading: I have embarked on a Elizabeth Boyle reading spree. Solid mystery-lite Regency fantasies with some tropes I don’t like (True Love excuses all bad acts, saving the damaged man, bad guys are wimps or cowards…) but also some I love, plus lots of snappy dialogue and humor. Non-fictionwise I’m reading dog training material because the protagonist in my new WIP has a dog. Because dog.

Viewing: Thor 3 was a hoot. Finally I got a movie with the Thor I met & fell in love with in the comics.  Also Valkyrie. Whee! Punisher was punishing but well-done. Stranger Things. I have complicated feels about Season 2. It was mega-problematic in ways ST1 was not. but hey, I  know how to be a fan of problematic things. I’m still loving Madame Secretary & Supernatural, much to my surprise. NCIS & Lucifer are on the chopping block.

And I finished writing Heartwood! (get used to me mentioning that every post for a month or three.) I discovered Word statistics and learned I wrote 60k words of it in the last 12 months. Since the whole year was a struggle to get back in creative shape after the Year-Plus Of Caregiving Focus, I’m declaring it a victory.  Some scenes/themes prolly need expanding and I might need to add an action first chapter to hook readers, but maybe not. That will wait until feedback.  Cleaning up the text for beta readers now.

And that is that for this installment of my life.

 

 

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Where does the time go…

I’m going through one of those phases when the amount of time passing feels vast in comparison to the activities spent filling it. (I call these phases “days of the week with names ending in y.”)  And so I list what I have done as a way to pin down the belief that I did SOMETHING.

Books read: 

Gates of Tagmeth (Kencyrath Book 8) P. C. Hodgell.  I treated myself to the latest in this series as a reward for finishing a Particularly Difficult Scene.  Am now working my way backwards through the series (as one does. What, doesn’t everyone do it that way?) Anyway.  I’ve now also re-read Sea of Time (7) and Honor’s Paradox (6)  and I’m halfway through Bound in Blood (5)

Some hours disappeared down the rabbit hole of ebook formatting research. ‘Porting all the ebooks legally-purchased over a decade into my currently-preferred reading device… was a bit of a challenge. Blame various technology changes. The internet came through once again.

Television viewed:

I caved in & started watching Marvel’s Defenders. I want to punch Iron Fist in the face every single time he’s on screen.  Otherwise, I’m not hating it.

Sportsball Sunday Afternoons is an autumn event here in Chez Herkes. Because it’s soothing and silly. Who’s playing? Not really important. Two teams. A bunch of sports announcers. Unintentionally entertaining events are guaranteed.

Movies:

Beauty & The Beast The live-action Disney remake. Watching it reminded me of listening to a virtuoso musician perform etudes. It was amazing from a technical perspective, gorgeously executed and brilliantly made, but in the end it felt like an exercise.  I did learn that live-action musical numbers with studio sound affect me the same way as uncanny-valley facial animation. They both bug the shit out of me.

Kung-fu Panda 3. BECAUSE PANDAS, THAT’S WHY.  I don’t know enough about the mythology or culture it hypothetically shows to speak on possible problematic elements. I do confess I loved the sneaky choral rendition of “Kung-Fu Fighting” playing in the background of fight scenes. I wondered if I was hearing things, but no. The whole song with words played during the credits.

Oceans Rising. It looked bad sci-fi, so of course I was tempted into viewing it. What a wreck. A total monstrosity of cinema from start to finish. I enjoyed every minute. The movie equivalent of gorging on generic chips & dip. World-spanning disaster movie filmed almost entirely inside rooms with no windows.  I also learned a bit about inertial navigation systems . From Google, not from the movie, which (unsuprisingly) got it wrong.

Things Written:

I’m not sharing numbers. Measuring progress by word counts gives me hives. (Not judging. It works for folk! It’s fab! Count & post away. I won’t see it. I avoid looking the way I steer clear of scented dryer sheets, and for the same reason.) But I digress. Suffice to say I am pleased as punch with my progress. Especially since I did it despite doodling away half a day and more on pretty autumn pictures and other detours into visuals.

The hardest set-up scenes in Heartwood are done, I’ve laid in all the remaining chapter titles, (it’s a new weird thing with this book. I can’t write scenes until I have titles for them) and I did hours of unnecessary research finding the perfect name to re-name a character. The rush-to-conclusion plot avalanche is in full flow. On track to finish before my self-imposed arbitrary deadline. I know that’s asking the universe to derail me. Don’t care. I’m flaunting my happy progress dance.

Away I go to keep up the momentum.

Not tired of my words yet? My published works are available on Amazon and all the other usual online retailers. 

Science-fiction thrillers, science-fiction romance, and science fantasy, full length novels and shorter works. So many choices! 

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Whimsy

I made some things.

So today I decided to bake a bunch of things and cook other things that would make the kitchen steamy. OF COURSE I DID. The high today was 93 degrees, about 20 degrees above normal for late September, and the humidity was through the roof.  Baking and boiling things were an act of defiance.

(I also wrote a few hundred words the yesterday, read a couple of books,  dove deep in a bunch of other projects, and tackled the overgrown  garden before it produced triffids, but that’s another post. Whew. Just writing all that was tiring. No wonder I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck….)

ANYway.

I’ve been feeling the baking itch for a couple of weeks but had to wait until flour went on sale. Why, yes, I AM that much of a cheapskate, thanks for noticing. Spouseman was happily estivating in the basement with the air conditioning at Arctic Circle levels, so I pulled out the supplies and went to work.

The first batch of dough didn’t rise well, a common issue when I use fresh honey, old yeast and not enough of it, and impatiently mix all the ingredients up together instead of following the proper fussy rituals of Yeast Placation. No worries!  I whipped up a second batch of yogurt-boosted basic rolls and turned the honey dough into honey-cinnamon bread after it basked outdoors in the heat for a couple of hours.

I haven’t worried about bread “not coming out right” since the day I forgot to add yeast to the bread machine I used at the time… and the gaming group wolfed down the whole (flat, dense, chewy) loaf  before it even had a chance to cool.  If it bakes, it eats.

The apple sauce cooked down entirely without drama. I had a few too amny apples to safely boil down without boiling over, so I sliced ’em up, coated ’em in sweet batter and tossed them in to bake with the bread.

Total for the day: 3/4 of a gallon of applesauce. 8 pseudo-sourdough rolls. 1 loaf honey cinnamon bread. And a whole pan of apple pudding.

Here’s the official photo:

This will be breakfasts and desserts for a few days easy. For tonight  I’ll toss some romaine withdressing to go with the rolls, slice up some tasty Wisconsin cheese, pour myself a nice heffeweissen, and call it a day.

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Writing again

Other-other things

Last Friday was St Patrick’s Day, or as my dear, dead friend used to refer to it, “Amateur Night.” How did we celebrate this oddball holiday of glitter shamrock hats, rude tee-shirt sayings & excessive consumption of radioactive-green beer here at Chez Herkes?  Decadently.

Spouseman had an extra nap, it being his max-fatigue day at the end of the radiation treatment week. I made soda bread, sort of.

For background, you should know I can trace ancestors to both the North & South of Ireland, I wore orange on March 17th most of my childhood, and I was raised to know that American celebration of this “Irish” holiday has as little to do with Eire as Easter does with bunnies. Possibly less.

Nevertheless, I can get behind any excuse for indulgence in the gray pre-springtime. Even a pseudo-holiday is sufficient permission for baking experiments.

I found a delicious recipe on Smitten Kitchen for Soda Bread Scones and promptly messed with it to a) use ingredients I already had, and b) NOT require using a mixer. Here’s the result. I blame my friend Tess for the booze part. Her soda bread recipe involves whiskey. I wanted part of that action, but the mini-loaf recipe I cribbed didn’t have any whiskey in it. Enter ingenuity.

Not-Really-Irish Soda Bread for the Not-really-Irish Holiday

Step 0. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F  and put parchment on a half-sheet baking sheet. Or two smaller ones. Or four teeny ones…you get the picture. The main thing is the parchment. Or cooking spray.  Non-stick. That’s the thing.

1. In a small bowl, dump 1 c. cranberries* to soak with a splash of hot water and a hefty splash of sweet whiskey–Irish, bourbon or blended, maybe rum, NOT SCOTCH OH GWADS NOT SCOTCH. I have a lot of bourbon lying around (long story)  so I used that.

2. Sift together in a Really Big Bowl (I’ll explain later):

  • 3 1/2 cups-ish of all purpose flour
    • NOTE: I wish I’d been taught to bake using a scale but I wasn’t, so I don’t have the reliable flour-by-weight measures for you. I start with 3.5 cups and set aside a half-cup for putting on my hands when kneading and in case the humidity goblins are mischievous and the dough is unworkably sticky.
  • 2 tsp baking powder (which is baking SODA plus cream of tartar, ICYWW)
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/4 c. sugar

3. Add in and work into dry ingredients with fingers or pastry blender or fork :

  • 1/2 stick butter (aka 4 tbsps)  diced into bits.  Keep at it until it’s throughly worked in. “Like coarse meal” the cookbooks say. Whatevs.

4. Mix together in any large-enough receptacle:

  • 1 egg or egg white ( I can taste yolk in baked goods and leave it out any time I know it won’t affect the baking chemistry. Like here. Your choice.)
  • 3/4 cup  milk.
  • 1/2 cup plain yogurt  (See, no need for buying WTF “buttermilk” or curdling milk with sour, nasty vinegar… ew. Yogurt. Plain.)

5. Tip the wet ingredients + the boozy fruit into the dry ingredients and stir — gently, scraping from the outside of the bowl and scooping up from the bottom —  until everything is just mixed enough there’s no dry flour showing and the fruits are decently distributed.

6. Now….this is where every other recipe said, “turn dough onto a floured work surface and knead five or six times to form into a flat round.” NOPE. I am FAR too lazy to scrub countertops before and after, so this is where the Really Big Bowl comes in. I flour up my hands and knead the dough in the bowl. Easy-peasy.

This kind of “kneading” is not an exacting process or a long one.  Work the dough until  you can just make it hold a proper shape. Too much kneading and the baby goes blind. Er, I mean the dough toughens up and you get scones like hockey pucks.

7. Cut the dough round into eight wedges with a sharpish blade (yes, in the bowl)

8. One by one, mush the wedges into rounds you can glob onto the baking sheet. You can tell from the phrasing this isn’t going to be more sticky than neat&tidy, right? Right.

Cut crosses in the tops if you want them to look fancy. It works. I was impressed

9. Bake 20-ish minutes (I set the timer for 18, ended up being 22 total, parchment slows baking time a bit.)

If you really want to get fancy, melt some butter, swish in a bit of whiskey and drizzle the combo over the tops of the cooling mini-loaves. I didn’t bother. I was too busy eating one of them still steaming hot from the oven.

They were tasty. Lovely bite of bitter soda and tart tang from the yogurt, bourbony-cranberries sweet enough without overwhelming the dough. Yum. They keep for a couple of days and toast beautifully.

*Yes, cranberries. I despise currants, the traditional fruit found in soda bread. Spouseman loathes raisins, the traditional sub-in for currants. We both like cranberries. You could leave out the boozy fruit & sugar entirely and the bread still would be scrumptious.

Anyway.

Happy experimenting.

Postscript:  remember, when I’m not massacring recipes, I’m writing books. You can buy my books on Amazon & other online retailers. Or order paperbacks from your local bookstore or library, even.  I even have links here on the blog. Go figure.