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oursin) wrote2025-12-10 07:10 pmWednesday went for the annual eye-test
What I read
Finished Saving Suzy Sweetchild, which has our protag not only dealing with the usual movie hassle but being called in to deal with the papers of a suddenly deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances academic, as well as (with the usual cohorts) trying to work out what exactly the game is with the apparent kidnapping for ransom of child star, who is beginning to age out of cuteness. We observe that the classic sleuths may sometimes have had two mysteries on their hands but very seldom had to multitask like this.
Some while ago I read an essay by Ursula Le Guin on the novels of Kent Haruf: I fairly recently picked up Our Souls at Night (2015), which is more or less novella length, as a Kobo deal, and it was well-written, and unusual if very low-key, and I daresay I might venture on more Haruf but am in no great rush to do so.
Then on to Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953) - perhaps not quite as good as the earlier entries in the series - some of it felt a bit info-dumpy - Lanny and his friends who are promoting peace face the problem of Soviet Stalinist Communism in the Cold War era. I can't help contemplating them and thinking that they are probably going to be sitting targets for HUAC in a few years' time, because they are coming at the issue from a democratic socialist perspective and I suspect their Peace Program is going to be considered deeply sus by McCarthyism. Also, Lanny jnr is going to be of draft age come the 1960s....
On the go
To lighten the mood, Alexis Hall, Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot (Winner Bakes All #3) arrived yesterday.
Up next
The new (double-issue) Literary Review
Also (what was in the straying parcel last week) Dickon Edwards (whom some of you may remember from LJ days?) Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1.
sasha_feather) wrote2025-12-09 12:51 pmUpdate on my life
Last year in June I moved back to Minnesota to look after my dad. My mom was in the hospital for a month and then moved to a nursing home with sudden-onset dementia (B1 deficiency) secondary to cancer.
I intended to support them temporarily but decided to make it a more permanent move to support them and their many animals. I struggled and kept expecting other family members to step up, but they did not.
I was hospitalized in May 2025 after a seizure. (Two seizures in 3 years means a new diagnosis of epilepsy.) I am missing about a week or 2 of memories from directly after that experience, so I don't know for sure what happened. I was busy looking after my dad and the animals, and then coordinating a move for my parents into assisted living, which I mostly did myself, While recovering from a seizure, with a broken rib.
I don't know why-- again, I don't remember (likely from medication side effects), but no one from the family came to help me directly after the seizure. My dad (who has dementia) and I did it alone. I'm angry about it and need people to know.
I supported my family for a year and half and did not receive any funds, no salary, very little emotional or logistical help from my brother, his wife, or his 4 healthy teenage kids. There is a wider extended family and they didn't show up either. We got some occasional visits but it wasn't enough.
Since moving my parents into assisted living, I have continued to support them in many ways, including looking after their farm and animals, again with no funds.
This week I asked my brother to help me advocate with my dad, to get me some money. He said no. He believes we should sell the farm (where I am now living). He made no mention of any provisions for me.
I'm obviously very upset, but the anger is at least helping me communicate about what is happening. I am reaching out to friends and various family members and trying to raise the alarm to protect myself.
I am safe for the time being but it is not the best idea for me to be living alone. I had intended to find roommates to come live here with me, but there are some barriers, including me not being the property owner, and the house being a bit of a mess. My next step is to directly talk to my parents about this situation. They both have dementia but I think they are capable of understanding my position.
I am currently unsure what the best course of action is moving forward. But I at least want folks to know what is going on. It's been very helpful to talk on the phone with friends who are affirming to me that this is a fucked up way to be treated. It's been a bitter pill to swallow, realizing that my family is exploiting me.
Warm thoughts, mail, messages are all helpful.
oursin) wrote2025-12-09 04:00 pmTidying up some tabs
London Pride has been handed down to us:
Busiest Thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the World - review of book on the history of The Strand.
Over 250,000 images of London from the collections at The London Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery
***
Heritage endangered:
The Royal Society of Medicine is putting some of its rarest books and photographs up for sale at Christie’s this month. Is this a case of medical negligence? Screaming. The GMC should strike them off.
Rare piece of Australia's Indigenous history captured on camera in the desert
According to a local anthropologist in Broome, the photos were taken by a nurse who was volunteering at the La Grange mission.
In his opinion, the images are extraordinary — one of the rare moments of "first contact" on the Australian continent to be captured on camera.
The originals were donated to a Catholic Church archive, which is not accessible to the public.
But it turns out there are copies. On a dusty CD buried in the boxes of an elderly author.
I have a lot of questions here about disinterring the original - I have very cynical thoughts about the church 'archive', as probably a storeroom in a basement somewhere - and in general things which are literally hidden in the (unprocessed, uncared for) archives of some institution.
And at this I can only fall on the floor, weeping and going 'the horror, the horror': [S]ome AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Bard and others) may generate incorrect or fabricated archival references.
***
Gender and learning:
The Real Way Schools are Failing Boys - though possibly, just de-emphasise competition, for starters???
Estrogen levels predict enhanced learning (at least in rats....)
oursin) wrote2025-12-08 03:34 pmNot the only one having those visions, Margaret....
Margaret Atwood seems to be claiming some kind of unusual prescience for herself when writing The Handmaid's Tale:
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Atwood said she believed the plot was “bonkers” when she first developed the concept for the novel because the US was the “democratic ideal” at the time.
Me personally, I can remember that the work reading group discussed it round about the time it first came out - and I remarked that it was getting a lot of credit for ideas which I had been coming across in feminist sff for several years....
I think the idea of a fundamentalist, patriarchal, misogynist backlash was pretty much in people's minds?
I've just checked a few dates.
At least one of the potential futures in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).
Margaret O'Donnell's The Beehive (1980) .
Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984) and sequels.
Various short stories.
Various works by Sheri Tepper.
I'm probably missing a lot.
And assorted works in which there was an enclave or resistance cell of women embedded in a masculinist society.
I honestly don't think a nightmare which was swirling around at the time is something that can be claimed as woah, weird, how did I ever come up with that?
I'm a bit beswozzled by the idea that in the early-mid 80s the USA was a shining city on a hill, because I remember reviewing a couple of books on abortion in US post-Roe, and it was a grim story of the erosion of reproductive rights and defensive rearguard actions to protect a legal right which could mean very little in practice once the 1977 Hyde Amendment removed federal funding, and an increasingly aggressive anti-choice movement.
oursin) wrote2025-12-07 06:31 pmCulinary
This week's bread: Country Oatmeal aka Monastery Loaf from Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno's Bread (2:1:1 wholemeal/strong white/pinhead oatmeal), a bit dense and rough-textured - the recipe says medium oatmeal, which has seemed hard to come by for months now (I actually physically popped into a Holland and Barrett when I was out and about the other day and boy, they are all about the Supplements these days and a lot less about the nice organic grains and pulses, sigh, no oatmeal, no cornmeal, etc etc wo wo deth of siv etc). Bread tasty though.
Friday night supper: groceries arrived sufficiently early in the pm for me to have time to make up the dough and put the filling to simmer for sardegnera with pepperoni.
Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe, 4:1 strong white/buckwheat flour, dried blueberries, Rayner's Barley Malt Extracxt, turned out very nicely.
Today's lunch: savoury clafoutis with Exotic Mushroom Mix (shiitake + 3 sorts of oyster mushroom) and garlic, served with baby (adolescent) rainbow carrots roasted in sunflower and sesame oil, tossed with a little sugar and mirin at the end, and sweetstem cauliflower (some of which was PURPLE) roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds.
thistleingrey) wrote2025-12-06 11:46 amalso recent reading
Sonali Dev, Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, The Rajes 1 (2019)
Recipe for Persuasion, The Rajes 2 (2020)
Incense and Sensibility, The Rajes 3 (2021)
Beyond the pairwise romance ostensibly cranking its plot, the first book is a love letter to third-culture kids whose lives have been bent by contradictory familial expectations, and an acknowledgment of bits of the wreckage wrought by postcolonial aspiration. Light touch, relatively, but I appreciate that these books say some of the quiet things aloud about costs and---better---that several characters encourage each other to speak to someone specific.
"Raje" isn't ordinarily a surname, which makes it a good choice.
Perhaps the most important feature of the setting, as a fix-it, is that when the kids who figure in these books as adult characters were growing up, several older relatives were local. I also appreciate the queer side-character situationship, whose arc suits the books' setting.
Anyway, four books total---none for Mansfield Park, which I think would be tough to fit. The fourth is The Emma Project (2022), which I've begun.
oursin) wrote2025-12-06 03:57 pmDeth of Siv, etc
What is this that this thing is, when, okay, one is aware of all the woozing and grumbling about the various delivery services, but here is the ROYAL MAIL being pretty bad.
Yesterday I had an email saying they had delivered a parcel.
There was no parcel.
I looked at the proof of delivery and behold, that was Not Our Front Door they were sticking it through, it was the wrong colour and one could see the corner of a glass panel (ours is solid wood).
So I went on to their site to try and delve a bit further and, my dears, it is HORRENDOUS, one suspects it is designed to make people Just Give Up.
For example, the 'contact us' link, that actually goes to a 'Help and Support' page that lists a whole range of possible contingencies that one has to sort through to discover one that matches the occasion.
And once I had come across the Advice relating to item (presumably) misdelivered to wrong address, advice was, to contact the sender.
I have no bloody idea who the sender was being as how I was not even expecting a Royal Mail delivery, have been back over my emails and texts and no, I did not receive any previous message involving that particular tracking code.
There is a passing allusion to possible scanning errors.
The only means of contacting them is by phone, and when I tried, and had made my way through the menu options, the wait to speak to a person was 50 minutes.
I am leaving all this pro tem in case a) it was misdelivered and gets put back into the system b) it never actually existed in the first place.
But, really.
And in other, perhaps more minor (?) annoyances of Modern Life, what is this thing that this thing is of 'Cooking Instructions on Back of Label'? that you then have to detach, in the hope that it will actually come off in one piece that one can actually decipher....
ETA Parcel has now turned up, either in today's post or popped through letter box by neighbour to whom it was delivered in error.... Is friend's book I was in anticipation of.
thistleingrey) wrote2025-12-05 02:24 pmrecent reading
2. Stephanie Brill and Lisa Kenney, The Transgender Teen: A Handbook for Parents and Professionals Supporting Transgender and Non-Binary [sic] Teens (2016)
Continues from Brill's Transgender Child with Rachel Pepper (2008, rev. 2022), which I haven't read. Kenney was (till 2020) the executive director of Gender Spectrum, the nonprofit visibility org that Brill founded almost 20 years ago.
Turban's Free to Be lays out several case studies supported by others' research, intersperses stylized parts of his own journey, and lets the reader decide how to read them, albeit over his shoulder. Brill and Kenney go like this:
We will help clarify the issues at hand so that you are able to refocus your attention on the whole of your child, and not just their gender. We will help you move from a place of concern, disbelief, fear, confusion, or wariness to a place where you can become an effective ally for your child---no matter where they may lie on the gender spectrum. We want to help you move to or return to a place where your teen knows they can count on you to support them, to love them, and to help them through the rough patches of life, both in these years and the years to come. (pp. xi-xii)
To save my hands, though I was given a paper copy, I bought and read epub.
oursin) wrote2025-12-05 11:01 amLarge, contain multitudes, do not wish to brag
People asking me last night 'what do you/are you working on?'
Duh. I flannelled and gave the general field, rather than saying: I completed my PhD over 30 years ago, I have published 6 books, 3 co-edited volumes, and getting on for 70 articles and chapters, have done assorted meedja appearances, have lost count of the reviews I've done -
Not to mention the website, the blog, the assorted things that fall into the category of other -
'My Deaaar, it's all a long story and rather complicated' and my most recent publication was not even in my field, it was being a sort of Litry Scholar.
Thing is there were some persons of maturer age there who were, I gathered in conversation, getting back into the academic swing, so I might have been doing that, rather than trying to get back up out of something of a trough?
Did mention, apropos of cute cuddly spirochaete, that I had worked on History of Loathsome Diseases of Immorality: but gee, I am large, I contain multitudes, and I have been going a long time.
ETA
Not that I consider the organisers of 'prestigious World Conference on Women’s Health, Reproduction,and Midwifery, scheduled for 08-10 June 2026, in Paris,France' to really Know Who I Am since they are begging and pleading for my attendance on the basis of my 'remarkable work' a recent review of a book on the history of abortion.
Okay, they do offer partial support for accommodation and registration, and brekkers and lunch at the conference (this implies, o horrors, breakfast sessions).
ursamajor) wrote2025-12-04 05:24 pm
don'tcha wanna dance, say you wanna dance, don'tcha wanna dance
I'm most nervous about the Magnificat, of course, never having done it; how many trills can you possibly fit into 45 measures? ALL OF THEM, says Bach. But the Hallelujah Chorus is old hat. The new arrangement of Break Bread isn't too difficult, aside from some truly weird close harmony chords in the third round; I do need to record that with a keyboard before this weekend so I can send it out to the sopranos.
And then the Whitney Houston stuff is easy, at least to me, at least partially because these are childhood car radio songs for me, especially the finale medley of So Emotional, Where Do Broken Hearts Go, and I Wanna Dance With Somebody. I mean, I even sang the last of those three for the third grade talent show, and can still get just about every nuanced ad-lib at karaoke today; restraining myself to the choral part is gonna be the hard part here, hahaha. (The tenors and basses get to do the DANCE! spoken word at the outro, though,
hyounpark is gonna be so stoked.)Speaking of, right now, he's in Boston (well, okay, he's about to get on his plane back from BOS), and I'm a little jealous, even if it is for the most last-minute work thing possible and it's not like he got to see anybody but work people, though he did squeeze in dinner at Abe and Louie's. And turns out Boston hasn't quite yet gotten the snow, though Western Mass did, so at least I don't have to be jealous that he got the first snow and I didn't. (Him: "You can have all the first snow you want, I've had enough for a lifetime!")
And he got his Flour sticky bun, so all is well there. :) He tried to pick up their Bakers Gonna Bake sweatshirt for me, but they didn't have any in stock at Clarendon which was his closest option, though they don't have that much room for merch (Central Square is much bigger).
He did manage to stop by Burdick's and pick us up some drinking chocolate and chocolate penguins or mice, so that'll be good for the truly frigid nights we've been having lately (I know, I know, by Bay Area standards). I do need a slightly more windproof solution for night biking; when I was biking home from choir last night, I had a fleece on over a puffy vest over a wool sweater over a long sleeve top, but my arms were still chilly. It wasn't quite cold enough to require pulling out the puffer (which, admittedly, is showing its age because it dates from Eastern Mountain Sports still being an intact company); I think I really just need a windbreaker shell. We'll see.
*
Note to self for Thanksgiving next year: PEANUT SAUCE FONDUE. I mean, it might not wait until next year, peanut satay is a regular guest at the table chez us, but the reminder that we could make a vat of it and do it all fancy banquet style is a good one. :)
oursin) wrote2025-12-04 08:03 pmDeck the tra-la wassail etc
So, the Esteemed Research Institution of which I now have the honour to be a (jolly good!) Fellow sent an invite last week to come along this arvo and decorate the Christmas tree in the common room. Bringing, if one so desired, some bauble, perchance alluding in some way to one's research interests.
My dearios, I realised I had The Very Thing! Some Years Ago I acquired a mini-Giant Microbe syphilis spirochaete, the adorable cutie, and though I say it myself, this went over a treat, with people taking photos and so on.
Had social converse - though a certain sense of Don't You Know Who I Am, though there is no reason why people who don't work in my area/s should know, it is a long while since I have been on ye meedjas.
***
Feral wallabies have featured here on previous occasions: apparently there are now 1000 on the Isle of Man: and
[T]here appears to be a continuous population across southern England, with a few hotspots. There have been regular sightings in the Chilterns, plus in Cornwall, where they appear to be breeding.
And apparently there are people who have them on their farms: whence they escape, since they can both jump and burrow.
thistleingrey) wrote2025-12-03 01:46 pmcurrent stitching, and
For trying to restart weaving: spent some time with old notes and recent reading/viewing. (No new notes. For example, Long Thread, a magazine publisher, lets influencers rent ad space in their newsletters, but they're never useful (delete, delete) when they repackage info from older practitioners and researchers who're still active. If one knows about the latter, it's better to visit the source.) Besides Susan Foulkes, whose blog I've read almost since its start, off the top of my head there's Laverne Waddington, Liz Gipson, Annie MacHale, and Linda Hendrickson, for expert weavers and reliably clear teachers who've shared info generously.
I will never want or need to do this, but check out Hendrickson tablet-weaving with wire.
I've checked my yarn stash for something warp-suitable---similar yarn weight to the scraps for Sundial, but with a different tension requirement. Years ago, tiny skeins of cotton yarn were sold in sets of a few colorways, the fingering-weight equivalent of worsted-weight dishcloth yarn. They were marketed ten years ago (when big-box craft stores still walked the earth in my region) for fingerweaving or basic knotting as "friendship bracelets"; narrow bands are exactly what they're intended to become. Lion, the manufacturer, makes some sets from acrylic yarn nowadays, but a couple of all-cotton sets are still sold. The two packets in the kitchen craft drawer are plenty for playing with before I try hemp or wool.
One reason to restart weaving: another way to use up yarn scraps from knit and crochet. :)
(TIL that Lion bought Quince the yarn company in 2023. Not surprising that something would've; could be worse.)
oursin) wrote2025-12-03 08:24 pmWednesday managed a short walk besides attending symposium online
What I read
Finished O Shepherd, Speak! - as ever, Lanny manages to find himself at major historical events. A particularly fascinating thing considering that news story about Hitler's DNA - he is admitted to the bunker and takes a slice of bloodstained sofa-cover.... In the aftermath of WW2, he has been left money to work for World Peace and he and friends are working for this. One thing I do find a bit curious about Lanny's generally progressive line is that the civil rights question (was it being called that in the 30s/40s?) doesn't seem to feature: maybe because he was brought up in Europe and mostly lived there? His focus on the World Stage???
Val McDermid, The Skeleton Road (Inspector Karen Pirie #3) (2014): not sure this was really doing it for me - there was a point where it just seemed to be going on and on.
Have plunged into a re-read of Barbara Hambly's Silver Screen mysteries (getting myself back up to speed on the series with a new volume forthcoming): so far Scandal in Babylon (2021) and One Extra Corpse (2023). Possibly one reads for the evocation of Hollywood at that era rather than the actual mystery plots, but good, anyway.
On the go
Saving Susy Sweetchild (Silver Screen #3) (2024)
Still dipping into Some Men in London, 1960-1967.
Up next
I am feeling the siren call of The Return of Lanny Budd.
I also realise that I have managed to sign myself up for 3 bookgroups meeting in January, 2 online (Pilgrimage, first meeting, Dance to the Music of Time, concluding volume) and 1 in person (fairly) locally - have managed to fight off suggestion that we read the Mybuggery wot won the Booker, but am now committed to the extremely LOOOOONG new Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
***
Further to yesterday's mysterious email from Academic Publisher, have received a further and more official-looking email today:
You may recently have received a message from us with the subject line "Welcome to [redacted] GCOP".
This email was caused by a system error. You can therefore ignore it and do not need to take any action.
Apologies for any confusion the message may have caused.
***
my thread here
ursamajor) wrote2025-12-02 05:20 pm
- asian american thanksgiving,
- choir: bach magnificat,
- choir: hallelujah chorus,
- choir: let us break bread together,
- choir: whitney houston,
- holidays: thanksgiving,
- recipes: cheesecake: truffle basque,
- recipes: chop shop pork belly,
- recipes: cornbread: custard-filled,
- recipes: cranberry asian pear chutney,
- recipes: deviled eggs,
- recipes: kaddo bourani,
- recipes: pie: liliko'i chiffon,
- recipes: potato: soy sesame mashed,
- recipes: sesame salt greens,
- recipes: stuffing: oyster kimchi
thanksgiving 2025: the calm in the eye of the storm
Me: "AHAHAHAHAHA."
Mom: "I still remember the year you did the Peking duck. That was stressful."
Me: "We learned our lesson. Outsource cooking the bird.*"
* unless it's roasting a chicken, something either of us could do in our sleep
Happy Asian American Thanksgiving, year ... uh, whatever it is since we've been doing this formally, composing our Thanksgiving banquet menus to be primarily if not entirely recipes by Asian American cooks and chefs. Year 8? But we've been perfectly happy to give up on the turkey and just eat something yummy and celebratory, along with a bounty of sides.
- Main: Knowing both that Leonard and Sara were doing their own experimental turkey roast and planning on sharing if it worked out, and that there would be at least one additional meat sauce option on the table, we went with pork belly again. This time, we did Kristina Cho's Chop Shop Pork Belly, from her Chinese Enough cookbook. Lovely crispy skin on top, succulent meaty bottom, served over jade pearl rice (which was pretty and interesting and just a little sweet to balance; I'd be curious about making a horchata out of it!), and it paired incredibly well with ...
- Cranberry Sauce: Kay Chun's Cranberry-Asian Pear Chutney, always and forever. (Forgot to pick up mandarins to make another version I've been meaning to try, but I'll probably do that later this week.) This year's amusing highlight, though, was that the last time I bought raisins, they were "giant" ones from the bulk bin at Berkeley Bowl. Leonard: "Um, Lynne, are those grapes in your cranberry sauce?" Me: "No, they're raisins, I swear!" Said giant raisins rehydrated enough in the cranberry sauce to look like full-on grapes.
- Stuffing: Mandy Lee's Red Hot Oyster Kimchi Dressing has been on my bucket list bakes forever, and now I'm mad at myself for waiting so long. "Oh, but I have to get oysters, and I really want to do it with the gochujang bread, and what if some people think it's too spicy?" Everybody loved it. We will be repeating this before next Thanksgiving, maybe as soon as Christmas. Maybe even with oyster kimchi to make it extra oyster-y. If you haven't had oyster dressing/stuffing, with or without kimchi, this recipe has completely convinced me of its deliciousness. Even the Chron had an oyster stuffing recipe this year. Time to bring it back!
- Orange Veg: After several years in a row of squash soups, it was time to shake things up; we called on our old fave, kaddo bourani. Sweet pumpkin echoing the sweet potato casseroles of our younger days, tempered with a meat sauce full of warming spices and a garlic-mint-yogurt topper.
- Potatoes: Likewise, with the potatoes, I wanted "not cheesy scallion, not maple miso, make something up, we're both Asian American, it'll still count for Asian American Thanksgiving!"
hyounpark took that decision off my plate, thank you dear, and made mashed potatoes with toasted ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, soy sauce, and sesame oil. It tasted good, but note to our future selves: when you run out of regular soy sauce, substituting dark soy sauce is going to result in mashed potatoes the color of gravy, just be warned. :)- Green Veg, Cooked: Made Andrea Nguyen's Sesame Salt Greens again (from her cookbook Ever Green Vietnamese). This time, with collard greens; probably should've cooked them a little longer, but that's okay.
- Green Veg, Raw: Leonard and Sara brought a salad with pomegranates and persimmons from their tree and it was exactly the right balance to all the other heavy stuff on the table.
- Dessert: the triumphant return of Alana Kysar's Liliko'i Chiffon Pie (from her cookbook Aloha Kitchen) to the table. We get our arm workout in every year making the passionfruit curd, but the results are well worth it. Even when yours truly realizes at 3:30 pm Thanksgiving Eve that actually, we *are* out of gelatin powder, and I'm going to have to go Brave The Grocery Store. Didn't find gelatin powder, but did find gelatin sheets, and learned a new thing, so it worked out!
*
Things that did not make it to the table this year, but hopefully will next year:
- Cornbread. I really did want to solve the custard cornbread problem. I was trying to de-dairify the custard-filled cornbread that used to be on our Thanksgiving table every year until our collective lactose intolerance got to be too much for even Lactaid to help with. But having talked to
ladyjax's professional chef spouse, there may not be an alternative milk out there that's going to behave the same way heavy cream does from a chemistry perspective, alas. I made two batches and both were big enough fails we weren't going to inflict the results on anyone. One used coconut cream, the other used A2 cow milk cream. In both cases, the cream that was supposed to sink below the top layer chocoflan/impossible cake style, forming its own transverse plane surrounded by two layers of cornbread in the vertical center of the cake? Pooled in the center of the pan like creamy lava in the horizontal center of the cake, with a ring of perfectly normal cornbread around the outside. It tasted fine, but the texture was obviously wrong.
I'm going to go back to basics and try making the original recipe with bog-standard commercial heavy cream to make sure even the original still works, sigh. Maybe in a few weeks. When I can stand to look at cornbread again.
The cornbread part itself came out just fine, though! I've wanted to make a cornbread with the same flavors as Betty Liu's lemongrass corn soup; I added lemongrass and shallots and scallions and used coconut milk as a base for our cornbread, and that part was great.
- Deviled eggs. I forgot I was going to use up most of the eggs on the chiffon pie, so didn't follow through. But I want to put chicharones on my deviled eggs the next time I make them! Just trying to decide what else should go into the filling or as a topping.
- Cheesecake. Following up on my successes with burnt Basque cheesecakes, I wanted to try to make one with the truffle cream cheese from one of our local bagel bakeries. I will in fact do that, and probably bring it to coffee ride this week! But the pie was enough for everybody.
*
Ten days out from Break Bread, trying to cram the Bach Magnificat into my brain, somehow having never performed any part of it before in four decades of choral singing. This is a CRAPTON of trills, peeps. At least I already have one of the Whitney Houston songs we're singing down flat (I can absolutely get up on stage right now and sing I Wanna Dance With Somebody from memory, and could have done so any time from 1987 on), and the same with the Hallelujah Chorus. Which leaves three other newer songs to learn quickly. Tis the season!
(We survived Verdi, but that's another post entirely!)