The Mono

Today I realized I still had a half-dozen butterflies in the freezer from when I caught them a year ago -- they're not supposed to stay frozen that long, as they dessicate and become impossible to pin. But I had the itch again, so I figured I'd give it a try.

I started with the common ones, and though I shredded one skipper that was too dry, I managed to mount another skipper (I think it's a blue of some kind) and spread two cabbage butterflies as well. I'm a little rusty, but that's why I try to practice at least once a year, so I don't lose the skill. Cabbage butterflies are great for practice because they're large enough to get a grip on, they're as common as dirt, and they're pests so I don't cry over killing a bunch just to hone my skills.

I still have a (tattered) sulfur butterfly and an unknown one which is subtly beautiful in pastels, which are thawing out now... I always wanted a sulfur butterfly in my collection. We'll see whether they're still hydrated enough to spread out properly. If they're brittle, I can try steaming them like I did with the others tonight, that seemed to help.

I don't know why I like this hobby so much, but I do. The killing part I'm not so fond of, but the mounting and display, that's fun. :)

"Hmm, I feel like some rhubarb cobbler for dessert."

Go downstairs, get shoes and flashlight, head out to the garden. Pull a good double handful of rhubarb stalks. Bring them inside, wash and trim them. Cut them into 1/2" pieces, as the plant variety is such that peeling is unnecessary.

Pull out a small casserole and dump the pieces in. Look up a rhubarb pie recipe for the flour:sugar ratio, eyeball the amount of fruit, and estimate amounts. Pour the flour and sugar mix on. Toss some oatmeal in a bowl, add a half-handful of brown sugar, a dollop of flour, and a few tablespoons of butter; mash it together. Cover the top of the fruit with it.

Look at a few more recipes, set the oven to 425F, toss in the casserole dish, and set the timer to 35 minutes as a first guess. Head back upstairs. Watch old TV shows while the aroma of cobbler wafts up the stairs. Go down and pull it out. Watch some more TV until it's cool enough to touch. Eat dessert. Elapsed time since the rhubarb was pulled off the plant: 90 minutes.

I can cook well enough I don't need recipes for everything. I have a garden which provides us with something we all love, year-round, 24 hours a day. I have an hour in my evening which I can devote to combining the two.

This is the life I'm slowly working toward, and I love it.

Before this was dubbed Veteran's Day, it was a day for us to remember that even after the bloodiest war, one which claimed countless lives, we could still find peace.

The red poppies of Flanders Fields were watered with human blood, but on November 11th, soldiers were finally able to emerge from their foxholes and walk upright, in peacetime, like civilized men rather than as fodder for the war machine. They gazed across the fields strewn with their fallen comrades and saw the true cost of war.

I am grateful to all our living service-members and vets -- I know quite a few, by now. Your service has enriched this nation. But today isn't about you; it's about striving for a time when no one has to be sent to fight and die on foreign soil. It's about the hope that follows the blackest night, when the dawn finally comes. It's about war's end, and remembering that no matter how long and how horrific the fighting may be, we can hold to our hope for armistice, for truce, for peace.

Veterans, I salute you. Let's all hold hope for the end to every war.

Thanks (in a tangential fashion) to pecunium's recent musing about fish, I seem to have found a decent substitute for canned tuna, in taste and texture if not convenience. I'm happy about that.

( cut for the uninterested... )

When I was in Whole Foods the other day, I discovered purely by accident that Weetabix has spun off a whole-oats version. (Yes, it is called "Oatibix".) I gleefully snatched up the box before I thought about what I was doing. I'm now nearly halfway through a surprisingly heavy box of edible brillo pads, and looking forward to the rest. God only knows why. I missed Weetabix more than I realized, despite the fact that the substance it most closely resembles is particle-board, and it has a little less flavor than Cheerios. With a pinch of brown sugar it's pretty decent, though, and I've been toying with ideas for how to toast the pads without a toaster oven. They'd shed horribly in the toaster.

I've been looking for a gluten-free version of shredded wheat for years, and I've never found one. That's another cereal that many people have to be forced to eat, but which I actually miss. I have no idea what process is involved in making it, but I'm a little surprised that in the sea of gluten-free wafer cookies and gluten-free pretzels, there's nothing at all like Triscuits or shredded wheat. I'm sure it's technically feasible.

I'd adore a wheat-free version of Grape-Nuts, too. I know that malt is an essential part of the flavor, so getting rid of the barley (and thus gluten) is out of the question, but I could eat it so long as the wheat vanished. I miss it perhaps most of all -- crunchy, soggy, it never really mattered, I ate it anyway. I've always preferred things like Kix and Chex to Lucky Charms, even as a kid... I also miss the dark flavor of a good raisin bran, as apparently oats and rice don't have that depth of flavor (or light crisp flake, even). Sigh.

Maybe when I'm done researching bread I'll go into the cereal business. :)

Edit: The Internet to the rescue. Complete with barley malt, which most recipes lack.

Why oh why do I let people dump 60 pounds of fruit on me every autumn?* First pears, now feijoas. Still working my way through the backlog (I'm glad they're keeping so long). Boy.

In other news, I harvested sweet potatoes larger than my two fists; the total usable crop fills a six-gallon bucket, with only one split one. It was a good year. Fortunately, sweet potatoes actually like neglect...



*Hint: it's because they're tasty.

I've been avidly following the news about a possible link between Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV). It's good and bad news -- good that I may have something I can point to as a cause, bad because it's a retrovirus. Do I have it? Will there be any viable treatment? Could I have exposed my partners to it? We don't know exactly how it spreads yet, though sexual transmission is thought to be possible, and tests for it aren't readily available. The thought that I might have exposed people I love to a virus which causes cancer is frightening.

While reading this NYT opinion piece*, however, I learned something about the debut of CFS to the medical consciousness:

The illness became famous after an outbreak in 1984 around Lake Tahoe, in Nevada. Several hundred patients developed flu-like symptoms like fever, sore throat and headaches that led to neurological problems, including severe memory loss and inability to understand conversation. Most of them were infected with several viruses at once, including cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr and human herpesvirus 6. Their doctors were stumped. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s presumed bulwark against emerging infectious diseases, dismissed the epidemic and said the Tahoe doctors “had worked themselves into a frenzy.” The sufferers, a C.D.C. investigator told me at the time, were “not normal Americans.”

When, by 1987, the supposed hysteria failed to evaporate and indeed continued erupting in other parts the country, the health agency orchestrated a jocular referendum by mail among a handful of academics to come up with a name for it. The group settled on “chronic fatigue syndrome” — the use of “syndrome” rather than “disease” suggested a psychiatric rather than physical origin and would thus discourage public panic and prevent insurers from having to make “chronic disbursements,” as one of the academics joked.

An 11th-hour plea by a nascent patient organization to call the disease by the scientific name used in Britain, myalgic encephalomyelitis, was rejected by the C.D.C. as “overly complicated and too confusing for many nonmedical persons.”

This makes so much sense -- and makes me so angry. It shows how preconceptions in the medical field can ruin lots of people's lives over decades (Chronic Lyme is another example). Patients have been dismissed, doctors have been flagged as quacks, research simply hasn't been done because this wasn't a "real disease". We're decades behind where we should be in finding causes and treatments for it.

I'm glad researchers are finally really looking into it, but the body count has been horrendous. I hope the investigation into XMRV yields something useful, and I hope that the search for other causes and factors continues as well. We need answers.


* Requires a login or Bugmenot.

For victims of sexual assault who are denied coverage afterward.

I'm not a big coffee drinker. I suppose it was inevitable that when I went to the Pacific Northwest for college in the mid-90's, I'd pick up latte drinking, though. I've kept with the occasional cup since then, mostly to warm up or relax after a stressful class... I got a home espresso maker for Christmas one year, the kind that steams milk and yadda yadda, and used it occasionally. The last time I pulled it out (I was having a bad day), the pump quit. $100 for repairs? sigh. I don't drink them often enough to know who the good barristas are around here, which means that just going out (hard at 2am anyway) results in expensive undrinkable coffee half the time. I managed to fix the last latte from Panama Bay, but it took some doing.

I looked around, and didn't like the idea of paying $60-80 for a newer machine I'd only use once in a while, but all the stores had were basic coffeemakers and professional-style espresso machines. mactavish made the offhand comment that her espresso maker works on the stove, and that made me curious. So I went looking.

It turns out that, while such macchinettas are quite inexpensive ($10-20), and effective enough that the design has stayed the same for most of a century, no brick and mortar store carries them west of Manhattan. So I took a chance and ordered one, and waited 10 days for delivery. It came yesterday, and I played with it today.

After brewing and throwing out two rounds of coffee (to break in the aluminum finish), I made a mocha with the third. I have to say: it brews fast (2 minutes), it's easy to clean, it's quiet, it fits neatly on our smallest stove burner, and it's quite cute. It also makes very good coffee. I like my lattes and mochas to taste like premium coffee ice cream, the sort that has coffee grounds in it, without bitter or sour notes... this has a very slight bitter edge, but I suspect I can solve that by lightening the coffee blend a little. Otherwise it's at least as good as anything I've paid $3 for at a shop. I can brew good decaf rather than what the shop has on hand, sweeten it exactly as I like it, add chocolate or molasses (or not)... with no more hassle than the other machine gave me. Less, actually, as I don't have to worry about whether I've tamped it so firmly it'll burn.

So, all in all a good purchase. Thanks for turning me onto it, mactavish. :)

Does anyone know a good silversmith who does lost-wax casting? There's a pendant I want, but it looks like I'll have to have it custom-made. (Relatively) inexpensive would be a definite plus.

Edit: Looks like this one will have to get put on hold. Commissioning a pendant would run me at least $250. Crucible classes cost $350 or so. I can get precious metal clay (thanks unseelie23) for $25, but I have no way to fire it, as I doubt I can get a consistent temp of even 1300°F for 20-25 minutes (they say you can do it on home gas stoves or with torches, but how do you hold it in place, let alone make sure the temperature is correct?) so I'd need access to a kiln. Which I don't have. Sigh.

Everything costs too much.

Anybody familiar with patent law out there?

Never mind, I'm pretty well convinced that a patent isn't what I want. Carry on... :)

I spent the day trying to make puff pastry -- the stuff croissants and turnovers are made of.

I gave it five or six turns (I lost count), rolled it out to a quarter-inch, and cut it into rough squares. It was my first time, I wasn't going to get neat edges. :) Then I put apple-pie filling into the squares, folded them over, and baked until golden brown.

Not one of the books and websites I've consulted on puff pastry said anything about providing drainage while baking. Yow.

Despite the impressive amount of clarified butter that ended up on the pan, these things are RICH. Not greasy, fortunately -- but when I eat one, I can feel my stomach getting a bit uneasy because of the sheer amount of oil I'm dumping on it. They're still good enough that I ate two, and I'm eyeing a third, but I really don't want to be ill tonight. It's a good thing my metabolism is so resilient -- these are diet-busters.

I would say that this was a success, in that I believe it was (once again) a lack of technique rather than a recipe failure which kept them from being perfect turnovers; the edges are very crispy and flaky, and the interior with the apples is moist and comes apart in sheets. BUT... The recipe would need a minimum of two more tests to make it out of my house, and I'm afraid I would not survive eating the results. Even if I stretched out my attempts across a couple of months, still... damn. Maybe if I made the squares/croissants really small, I think they freeze okay after baking...

I made flour tortillas for the second time tonight. Of course, in my world, first attempts usually don't fail as much as second ones. So...

Lessons learned about making tortillas:

- The skillet needs to be hot, but there is such a thing as too hot.
- Use metal spatulas. (oops.)
- A two-inch ball makes an 8" tortilla.
- The tortillas can be rolled only once; re-rolling them after a flop results in a placemat.
- Roll them until they refuse to be rolled any thinner - yes, they will stop at a certain point.
- Use a flat griddle, not a skillet.
- If using a skillet, put the tortilla on a flexible cutting surface, then curve the surface into a half-circle to ease the tortilla onto the skillet. Don't touch the sides (bzzzt!)
- Count the thirty-five seconds per side, don't try to estimate.

The first two attempts were placemats. Then I started getting better, and the last two were eased into the pan perfectly once I learned the way to coax them off the cutting surface. Then I found the griddles, which should make my next batch even easier, without stressing the seasoning on my cast-iron skillet. Five good tortillas from this batch, though -- that should make fajitas tomorrow night quite pleasant. :)

The skillet also ended up doing a sort of "self-clean" cycle -- it got so hot the accumulated lacquer around the edges flaked off. Not a bad thing to do every eight to ten years. However, I think a heat-sensor gun might be a good tool to have for this sort of exercise...

I guess it's sort of a compliment to CSI: Vegas that it went 199 episodes before coming up with a script that was so badly written I actually couldn't finish watching it. I'm pretty lenient in my standards; I'll cope with potboilers, I only cringe a bit when people act out of character, and I find cliches amusing. But boy howdy, the "200th episode special" defeated me. At least it wasn't false advertising: that one was, indeed, "special".

Bahahahahaha!

As some of you know, I'm writing a cookbook. Unfortunately, while I know a great deal about gluten-free bread, I know next to nothing about submitting a manuscript to publishers and evaluating potential offers. I think that if I'm at the point of putting "pen" to "paper" on this, it's time I start considering what format a publisher might want, and how to make it appealing to them.

So I ask my multi-talented friends list: Have any of you been involved in getting a how-to book (anything from how to do Europe on 3 euros a day to how to make your own siege engines to, well, a cookbook) from handwritten material to hold-it-in-your-hand book form?

I'm hoping that someone out there might be able to, if not offer some advice on the workings of the publishing industry, at least offer the name of a good book on the subject. :)

Thank you!

I go without for a long time, then catch up all at once. For those unfamiliar with the strip, here's a good example which requires no knowledge of the characters involved, yet offers a good example of the humor and the art. There are also running plots with a full cast, for those who like sagas, but the punchlines do come quite regularly.

I really should read it more regularly, now that I have the time... that and xkcd are about the only ones which have kept my interest over the years (aside from Casey and Andy, which is done).

I woke up about an hour ago. I'm going to go cook my breakfast, then I will go out and work on the front strip (after two years of delays, I'm finally ready to put in irrigation lines) until it's either too hot or I'm too tired. Then, I will come inside, eat lunch, and work on my bread book. Perhaps I'll bake, perhaps I'll write, perhaps I'll play with the desktop publishing program I picked up.

Today is my reward for sticking it out through three years of stress, deprivation, and doing things I couldn't care less about -- if I didn't feel active hatred for them -- day after day. Today, and tomorrow, and next week, and next month.

Delayed gratification actually works sometimes.

This year's Burn was more satisfying than the last in a lot of respects. That said, there is still room for lots of improvement next year.

( a basic rundown, though not day-by-day )

I'll see about posting pictures once I pull them off the camera. I don't have everything, especially since that little $60 camera didn't handle darkness really well, but I have some good shots that represent my experience out there.

I understand that others decide whether they'll go based on time off and money available, but I can't imagine missing it, even if I have to panhandle the ticket money. I guess I'm a Burner to the core.

I got approved for Planned Educational Leave for fall quarter. I just need to sort things out with financial aid before the 21st and I'm set.

And now? I sleep. A lot.