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still rainy
Hello again! I notice that in my last post, made almost a week ago, I mentioned that it was raining here. Well, it's been rainy and cool almost every day since then, which is really really weird. But nice in a lot of ways--the longer the summer heat holds off, the happier I'll be.
As usual I have been reading and cooking, and also re-watching a lot of Person of Interest (the first two seasons really were much better than S4, although some of that original magic depended on the slow reveal of backstory, which is something that's hard to recapture the second time around when you already know).
Reading: I've just started I am Radar, by Reif Larsen. It's too early to tell if all the weirdness is going to turn out to be interesting or just pretentious.
I've checked out from the library but not yet started Hanif Kureishi's The Last Word. This despite having given up on Kureishi after Intimacy, when it began to seem as though he'd forgotten how to write books that weren't about middle-class white heterosexuals having boring personal problems. The back cover description for The Last Word sounded different enough from that to lure me, plus, well, My Beautiful Laundrette will always be close to my heart and I can never really give up on Kureishi.
I want to read some sf/f but can't find anything that appeals. Anyone have suggestions? I've already read the Radch books and Station Eleven.
Related to both books and cooking, I had to give Jerusalem: A Cookbook back to the library (someone had put a hold on it) and I miss it very much. When I can check it out again I'm going to type out all the interesting recipes and save them. (This is a thing I do, because my appetite for cookbooks is much larger than my budget for cookbooks.)
Cooking:
I have successfully made my own yogurt! Quite easy and a moneysaver.
Last week apricots were on sale for cheap, so I bought a couple of pounds. With some of them I baked this crostata, which is very nice. Because I'm an incorrigible tinkerer I made a couple of alterations: added lemon zest to the crust and lemon juice and a bit of vanilla to the fruit, and because I don't have whole wheat pastry flour I used half pastry flour and half "white whole wheat" flour. I'd never made a crostata before but I think this may be the first of many: it's less intimidating than a pie, somehow, and it produces an amount that's more reasonable for one person to eat in a few days before it can go bad.
The rest of the apricots, I poached in syrup, and those were awfully good for practically no work. I made a simple syrup with 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water, to which I added 3 Tellicherry peppercorns, 2 crushed cardamom pods, and 1 star anise. I brought the syrup to a boil and then let it cool down to room temperature to infuse the spices, then added the halved pitted apriots and heated it all up again. The spicing is gentle but definitely there, and that plus the sweetness gave the rather bland supermarket apricots a big boost. It turns out that the leftover syrup makes a nice drink if mixed with sparkling water, too.
I've now succeeded in making myself hungry, so I should probably go home and get some dinner.
As usual I have been reading and cooking, and also re-watching a lot of Person of Interest (the first two seasons really were much better than S4, although some of that original magic depended on the slow reveal of backstory, which is something that's hard to recapture the second time around when you already know).
Reading: I've just started I am Radar, by Reif Larsen. It's too early to tell if all the weirdness is going to turn out to be interesting or just pretentious.
I've checked out from the library but not yet started Hanif Kureishi's The Last Word. This despite having given up on Kureishi after Intimacy, when it began to seem as though he'd forgotten how to write books that weren't about middle-class white heterosexuals having boring personal problems. The back cover description for The Last Word sounded different enough from that to lure me, plus, well, My Beautiful Laundrette will always be close to my heart and I can never really give up on Kureishi.
I want to read some sf/f but can't find anything that appeals. Anyone have suggestions? I've already read the Radch books and Station Eleven.
Related to both books and cooking, I had to give Jerusalem: A Cookbook back to the library (someone had put a hold on it) and I miss it very much. When I can check it out again I'm going to type out all the interesting recipes and save them. (This is a thing I do, because my appetite for cookbooks is much larger than my budget for cookbooks.)
Cooking:
I have successfully made my own yogurt! Quite easy and a moneysaver.
Last week apricots were on sale for cheap, so I bought a couple of pounds. With some of them I baked this crostata, which is very nice. Because I'm an incorrigible tinkerer I made a couple of alterations: added lemon zest to the crust and lemon juice and a bit of vanilla to the fruit, and because I don't have whole wheat pastry flour I used half pastry flour and half "white whole wheat" flour. I'd never made a crostata before but I think this may be the first of many: it's less intimidating than a pie, somehow, and it produces an amount that's more reasonable for one person to eat in a few days before it can go bad.
The rest of the apricots, I poached in syrup, and those were awfully good for practically no work. I made a simple syrup with 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water, to which I added 3 Tellicherry peppercorns, 2 crushed cardamom pods, and 1 star anise. I brought the syrup to a boil and then let it cool down to room temperature to infuse the spices, then added the halved pitted apriots and heated it all up again. The spicing is gentle but definitely there, and that plus the sweetness gave the rather bland supermarket apricots a big boost. It turns out that the leftover syrup makes a nice drink if mixed with sparkling water, too.
I've now succeeded in making myself hungry, so I should probably go home and get some dinner.