zonkered.net

I do actually eat things other than soup and various cake like items, honest. Just…not a whole lot.

Soup’s so easy, and hearty, and it’s getting to be that time of year when easy and hearty are pretty much how I eat. (In summer, it still has to be easy, which explains the many feta and mushroom pizzas and salad sandwiches that I consume from May to September) Anyway, I decided that I was in the mood for black bean soup this week. Given that I 1) get home at 7:30 and 2) am epically lazy, it was going to have to be in the crockpot. So I searched for crockpot specific recipes – there are a lot, but none of them were calling to me.

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My mother’s reaction to what I was making for dinner was the skeptical “…onion soup?” that a lot of my food experiments get. Not sure why, as onion soup (particularly the French variety) is a standby in every Applebees and TGI Friday’s across the country. I think she’d be pleasantly surprised by this one, as it’s reminiscent of potato soup except, you know, without the potatoes.

It’s based mostly on Kayotic’s recipe with a couple of modifications: I only used two onions because one of my Spanish onions was approximately the size of my cat’s head, dill rather than thyme because dill is the best thing ever, and a shot of light cream towards the end, because that’s never a bad thing. Top with crumbled herbed goat cheese and you’ve got a pretty awesome dinner.

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I had epic plans for Halloween this year (by which I mean that I had plans at all for Halloween), but the need to actual buy plane tickets to go home for Christmas has stymied them. Damn you, adulthood! Damn you!

Let’s all pause for a moment to mourn the Vaguely Gothic Fairy costume that I was going to march down Sixth Avenue in. On the plus side, the parade’s at 8:30 pm on the last day of October, and I probably would have frozen my ass off.

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The whole Roman Polanski bullshit is giving me a splitting headache, and it gets worse the more and more names of actors and writers and directors are added to the goddamned petition to leave poor Mr. Polanski alone. I mean, he totally couldn’t pick up his Oscar in person! Hasn’t he been punished enough?

What the hell-ass, people. Kate Harding says it more eloquently than I could, but let’s take a look at the facts:

1. Roman Polanski drugged and raped a thirteen year old child both vaginally and anally.
2. She testified that despite being drugged, she said no several times.
3. He pled guilty and then fled the country.
4. Roman Polanski drugged and raped a child. Oh, did I say that already?

Frankly, I don’t give a shit that the man is an acclaimed director. I thought The Pianist was good too, people. I think he’s done some good work artistically. I also think his crimes are inexcusable, and I’m disgusted by the tide of public opinion in his favor.

I have to wonder: how many of these artists would feel the same way if this had happened to their teenaged son or daughter? Would it be all good because the rapist was an artiste? Somehow I doubt that.

Crate & Barrel is having a sale on Wustof open stock knives at the moment, which normally wouldn’t actually have me spending my lunch hour trooping up to 59th and Madison, but my cheap as shit Henckels Eversharp chef’s knife is a pain in the ass to clean.

I spend way too much time getting food out of the little serrated teeth. Way too much time.

Naturally, I chose the BIG one.

Am gamely resisting the urge to brandish it menacingly at irritating consultants.

For somebody who bakes as much as I do – I made orange sour cream cupcakes last weekend, and should really post that – the fact that I don’t, or didn’t have a Reliable Brownie Recipe is downright weird. So I spent the last couple of days looking for one, and now I have a Reliable Brownie Recipe.

Score.

This is a slightly modified version of the King Arthur Flour fudge brownie recipe, and its rich, moist, chocolatey, and not too sweet. I didn’t add the chocolate chips they called for (used pecans instead) and I’m glad, because I think that would have been too much chocolate for me.  This makes a square pan, which is more than enough for me; the original makes a 9×13 pan’s worth.

1/2 C (1 stick) butter

1 1/4 C sugar

2 large eggs

3/4 C dutch process cocoa

1/2 t salt

1/2 t baking powder

1/2 T vanilla extract

3/4 C AP flour

1 C chopped pecans

In a medium-sized microwave-safe bowl, or in a saucepan set over low heat, melt the butter, then add the sugar and stir to combine. Return the mixture to the heat (or microwave) briefly, just until it’s hot (about 110°F to 120°F), but not bubbling; it’ll become shiny looking as you stir it.

Crack eggs into a medium-sized bowl and beat with cocoa, salt, baking powder and vanilla until well combined. Remove sugar mixture for heat and add to cocoa mixture, beating again until the batter is smooth.

Add flour and nuts and combine, then spread into a square pan and bake for 30 minutes at 350°F, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

Highly recommended with vanilla ice cream or a tall glass of milk.

Today was a day of sitcomesque kitchen disasters. Let’s recap, shall we?

We began with the goal to bake Smitten Kitchen’s Pound Cake. As you can see, this is a cake with a hell of a lot of steps I’m normally not willing to make. From the outset, I’d already made adjustments – cake flour sifted once instead of AP flour sifted three freaking times, amaretto liqueur instead of cognac – but I fully intended to do everything else by the book.

Ahahaha. Yeah.

The first crisis came when I preheated the oven and discovered that oh, hey, it was smoking. So it went off, I put my sifted dry ingredients aside, took the racks out and scrubbed the bottom. Put the racks back in, went back to the recipe.

Break 8 eggs trying to separate four of them before finally decided to fuck this shit and just put the eggs in whole rather than beating the whites and adding them to the batter at the end.

Despite all this crap, the cake actually turned out really well – moist with a delicate crumb and a rich lemon-amaretto flavor. Definitely a keeper.

Fuck This Shit Cake (Or, Lemon-Amaretto Pound Cake, if you insist)

2 C cake flour, sifted
1/2 t baking powder
Sea salt
1/2 lb butter, softened (2 sticks)
3/4 C + 2 T sugar
4 eggs
1 T amaretto liqueur
zest of 1 lemon

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Sift together flour, baking powder and a generous pinch of salt. Set aside.
3. Cream butter, then add sugar and beat until blended. Add eggs and beat until smooth.
4. Add amaretto and lemon zest.
5. Beat in dry ingredients in batches. I did two batches, because I’m essentially lazy that way.
6. Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake. The length of time will depend on your pan – the original recipe called for 35-45 minutes, but it took closer to 50-60 minutes in my silicone pan.

Later today I plan to make a raspberry-balsamic sauce to pour over the cake. I’m going to assume I’ll meet with less disaster this time.

Got up this morning and after paying the bills (always a grump-inducing activity, and I still have to mail the rent check, too), I click on my beloved Newsgator and finally notice that I’m being kicked off at the end of August – because I’m not an enterprise user. My options at this point for RSS readers seem to be going back to Bloglines, which I abandoned almost three years ago after months of it not working, and Google Reader, which I was singularly unimpressed with when I tried it.

Sigh.

I mean, I’ve already imported my crap into Google – it’s not like I had much choice in the matter – and I realize that Web 2.0 companies need to make money just like everyone else, but it’s a little wearying that every single web app I use and like is eventually either made enterprise-only or dies or is sold to Google, at which point it’s Google-ized. The first time I remember it happening was with Writely, now Google Docs, but in the intervening years it’s happened again and again, at least a dozen times. At this point I’m just wondering when Twitter is going to go enterprise-only, and what Google-owned microblogging service will be recommended to us poor schlubs who aren’t enterprises, just normal people.

(And before someone from Google comes over and perkily evangelizes Reader – I’m sure it’s better than it was. But I hate change, I’m stuck in an airless, humid, stuffy apartment and can’t open the windows lest the dumbass cat I live with decides to jump from the second floor, I just finished the temper-inducing endeavor of paying my bills, and – because it’s worth repeating – I hate change.)

On another note, WordPress. Please. Could you send me my fucking comment notifications. Jesus.

Bitch Magazine has an interview with Sarah and Candy of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and it’s pretty awesome.  My favorite quote from it is, undoubtedly:

MV: Why should feminists read romance novels?

SW: It’s a 50-plus-year-old industry comprised mostly of women writers operating their own businesses and producing a genre about women’s self-actualization, pursuit of autonomy, and acquisition of sexual agency for an audience made mostly of women, who buy over $1.4 billion dollars worth of books a year. No, no, nothing feminist or even subversive about that.

If more people thought of it in these terms, maybe romance would cease being viewed as the most sexist, anti-feminist literary genre out there.  It’s not even close to being that; science fiction and fantasy, in my opinion, wins that one hands down – this is, after all, a genre where its acceptable for Harlan Ellison to grope a female author on stage and pass it off as a joke.

There’s also some interesting discussion of Mandy Van Deven’s use of ‘smut books’ to describe romance novels.  I kind of agree with people who don’t really like the use of that term, but in my case it doesn’t have anything to do with the ‘derogatory’ connotations of the word – I use smut myself to describe my own erotic/pornographic writing.  My problem with it is that it’s…not accurate.  For one, does any novel with explicit sex count as pornographic now?  If so, I have a long list of more ‘literary’ novels that I’ll now be referring to as smut.

And there’s a second problem with the use of the word – not all romance even fits into Mandy’s own definition.  There’s more than one subgenre where the sex is either nonexplicit or nonexistent.  Where do these books fit?

But all in all, a really awesome article, and I’m glad to be seeing coverage of romance in the feminist press, if only so that the next time the fact that I admit to reading Claudia Dain and Sherrilyn Kenyon, I can have links to send to feminist friends who roll their eyes and accuse me of being counterproductive to the cause.

Yeah.  It happens.

So it’s that time of year again.  Another crop of prospective library school students have been accepted to their programs, and in between trying to find affordable housing in Madison/Urbana/Ann Arbor/Austin/Pittsburgh/LA/Seattle/every other hipster-y enclave in the US, they’re worrying about how hard library school will be.

And people are agreeing with them.  Seriously.

Okay, I’ll admit this much: I did, in fact, pull my very first all-nighter while at Madison for graduate school.  Did I spend it putting the finishing touches on my network design project? No.  Did I spend it improving my grasp of the Library of Congress classification system? Nope.  Finishing my paper on the use of MCSH and LCSH in periodical indexing? Not that either.

Did I spend it writing epicly overwrought Prince of Tennis fanfiction? Um, yuuuuup.

Here’s the thing, people: you will learn things in library school.  Cataloging may well cause you to pull your hair out.  Your practicum supervisor may well drive you insane.  Job hunting will be pretty much hellish.

This will not be the hardest thing you do academically.  By a long shot.  Compared to my undergrad, grad school was like a very expensive, two year long break.  Yeah, I had classes.  Yeah, I had to work – two jobs at once for most of that time.  But I was never stressed over the school part.  Ever.

Entirely unrelated: WORDPRESS.  TELL ME WHEN I HAVE COMMENTS IN MODERATION.  In other words, Ealasaid, your comment’s been approved.  Finally.