Gothic Granola

The old woman nodded as she listened to the soft, bubbling words [of the spirit of the well].  Then she went back to the cottage, her eyes bright with resolve, her step firm with courage. She took water from the sieve and sprinkled it over the doorstep.  When she got inside she saw a cake, dark reddish brown and unappetizing to look at, on the table.  'They didn't even wait for me to come back with the water,' she said to herself.  'They were greedy as well as wicked.  But thanks to the spirit of the well I know what is in that cake.' Geoffry Palmer and Noel Lloyd, "The Horned Witches," Nine Witch Tales, ed. Abby Kedabra (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1998), 13. There were a few magical things about this cake I baked for my birthday: I still had the book from which the above quote is excerpted and the cake actually  worked this time.  

National Chocolate Chip Day is another one of those made-up holidays that must have been made just for bloggers. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's been around since before the Internet since most sites about it seem to reference the original chocolate chip cookie . NCCD is 15 May, and my post is a day late. I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road on Thursday (the other day I usually blog) and didn't decide what to bake for NCCD until yesterday afternoon.

...For when you have cranberries, but sauce seems like too much of a project and pie or bars or muffins are really too much of a project. Juice is also a project. But you have to eat breakfast, right? Why not make a smoothie?

National Cookie Day is 4 December, which also happens to be an important date in the novel I've been writing since 2006. If you know me in person, you know that I like vampires: old-school, bloodsucking, remorseless, Dracula, Carmilla, The Vampire Lestat type of vampires. None of this Twilight wishy-washy stuff, a little Charlaine Harris (haven't read much of her work, but from what I hear...). Some Hemlock Grove as well, though that book (and excellent Netflix series) is about werewolves, which are cool, too. Back to the point. We need food for the brain as much as we do food for the body. Creativity for me (writing, beading, recipe R&D) feeds me, too. And I like vampires.

This year, I avoided my annual crying jag while driving down I-95 for one reason this T-gives & X-mas of 2013: I didn't go home. Why?

Happy Boxing Day! Because Audrey, Jr demanded sacrifice, the sourdough starter ended up in the traditional Christmas morning breakfast: Mile-High Cinnamon Roll Bread. Coincidentally, my friend from Colorado enjoys the Mile High Cinnamon Roll bread immensely (the capital Denver is the Mile-High city). He chooses to violate it with cream cheese while I like it with Earth Balance. Whatever floats your boat, man. I like my green juice from a pilsner glass; some people prefer mason jars. All together, now...

Happy Solstice! Wishing you a delightful return of the light on the year's longest night, Q Please perform all sacrifices responsibly. :-)

Cooking with Gas, Part 1B This series is about cooking with hard liquor. The  vodka quinoa muffins  were the first post. This recipe is related by virtue of being alcohol. I used the last of the crappy (for this beer cannot be mentioned without being ridiculed) Redbridge I bought in April that sat in a cooler behind the Abbey for several months in a loaf of beer bread about a week ago. Then I fed the bread to my coworkers and GF friend. Talk about curse reversing...or dispersing. They all said it was dry, and I do not wonder why (besides the obvious, that teff is a very thirsty flour) . Dead hypotheses' dessicated limbs, to use a little William James terminology, break under the weight of live friends. CryptiQue will keep these things in their crypts.

Fluffy Bunny, Curse Reversed "For what has been, thanks! For what shall be--yes!"  --Dag Hammerskjold What doors are you going to keep open, once opened? Premise: I don't like marshmallows.

This year, I am grateful for learning the following lesson, and all the people, places, events, and things that taught me it. If I don't enjoy certain things with certain people under certain circumstances, I oughtn't write it off. Being open to try it again under different circumstances with different people can reverse the curse.  Thanksgiving is one of those things.

After a long search for a vegan pizzelle recipe last year, and a pile of fail at de-glutenizing them this spring, I present to you a recipe that passes muster.

Remember that old New Jersey tourism slogan, “New Jersey and You: Perfect Together”?  Can you be a tourist this holiday, observing but not being of them?  Granted, there’s also the tourist philosophy of, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”  My family’s not from Rome (Naples and Sicily, thank you very much).

Hey y’all.  When I first saw this recipe, I ran to my aunt and said, “I can make that.”  So I made it for Thanksgiving.

The title of this post is not intentionally misleading.  The pie itself is time-consuming, as is all pie, but I managed to have time to bake it and read forty or so pages of American literature for class tomorrow.  Now I’m writing this and listening to the strange turn my Rammstein channel on Pandora has taken, featuring classical arrangements of alternative songs.  I may eat this pie for breakfast since I have yet to make lunch and breakfast for tomorrow.

I’m back at school.  My room is double the square footage of last year’s 87-square-foot closet.   The kitchen is in the same building, which is convenient.  The oven in this kitchen does not have a timer.  Tell me that’s not a safety hazard in a dorm of absent-minded undergraduates.  Go on, tell me people are responsible.

My mom used to make these pasta nests for Christmas Eve dinner.  I made a tahini soup without garlic and onion earlier this summer, and its lemony flavour reminded me of pasta nests.  Seeing as how the original pasta nest recipe was glutinous, cheesy, and eggy, I took a stab at making it fit my nutritional and ethical specifications.  Since the lemon juice curdles the tofu, the cheezy sauce has an eggy texture.  I think my updated version tastes similar, if not better, than the original. Fighting words, I know.