stuff other than work
Sep. 29th, 2015 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI haven't been doing much in the kitchen, because with all the job stuff going on, I gave myself permission to not cook for a while unless I feel like it.
This past weekend I did end up making some choux buns. The original plan was for eclairs, but I decided I didn't want to buy chocolate (for the topping) because it was so hot, and it turned out that the pastry-bag substitute everyone says works great (snipping the end off of a zip-top plastic bag) does not work great. So I ended up with a certain amount of wasted choux paste, and some buns. They were rather nice when filled with cinnamon horchata ice cream and drizzled with dulce de leche. The ice cream was storebought; I sort of made the dulce de leche, if it counts as "making" something when what you do is empty a tin of sweetened condensed milk into a pan and stick it in the oven, in a water bath, for an hour and a half. Anyway, regardless of its homemade status, it's tasty.
Also last weekend I made a pizza using a batch of dough I'd made a while back and frozen. I topped it with roasted cherry tomatoes, some slivers of salami, and mozzarella.
The weekend before that I baked scones from Paul Hollywood's recipe, which were quite good except that I overbrowned the bottoms of the first batch. I still have some in the freezer, which is the good thing about baking as a single person.
Other than that I've been living on pasta and more junk food than I really wanted. The eventual plan for the work/cooking balance is to cook big batches of things on weekends. But the sort of foods that take well to this method are mostly stewy, and it's been too damn hot here. Not super hot (today it got to 86 F or 30 C), but hot enough that I don't want to make stew. It's the end of September, why can't the weather be autumnal?
In non-food related amusements, I've been watching the Danish police drama Rejseholdet, which aired in Britain some years back as Unit One. I recommend it, with a couple of caveats, if you like police procedurals: it has good writing (especially the dialogue and character stuff, not always the plots so much); interesting characters including a three-dimensional female lead with agency and nuance; excellent acting from everyone, including Mads Mikkelsen, later of Hannibal fame in the Anglophone world; and two highly slashable relationships, one between squad leader Ingrid Dahl and her friend and colleague Gaby, the other between Allan Fischer (Mikkelsen's character) and his friend and colleague Thomas LaCour, played by Lars Brygmann, a fine actor who is also exactly my type.
There are some less good points: it's dated in its attitudes towards queer people and towards certain gender-related issues (for example there's an incident of domestic violence that's not well addressed); less seriously, the characters have too much soap-opera style personal drama for my taste. But overall I like it a lot so far--I'm partway through series 3--and will almost certainly request it for Yuletide.
It's available to stream from Amazon in the US, widely available in Britain I believe, and findable around the internet.
This past weekend I did end up making some choux buns. The original plan was for eclairs, but I decided I didn't want to buy chocolate (for the topping) because it was so hot, and it turned out that the pastry-bag substitute everyone says works great (snipping the end off of a zip-top plastic bag) does not work great. So I ended up with a certain amount of wasted choux paste, and some buns. They were rather nice when filled with cinnamon horchata ice cream and drizzled with dulce de leche. The ice cream was storebought; I sort of made the dulce de leche, if it counts as "making" something when what you do is empty a tin of sweetened condensed milk into a pan and stick it in the oven, in a water bath, for an hour and a half. Anyway, regardless of its homemade status, it's tasty.
Also last weekend I made a pizza using a batch of dough I'd made a while back and frozen. I topped it with roasted cherry tomatoes, some slivers of salami, and mozzarella.
The weekend before that I baked scones from Paul Hollywood's recipe, which were quite good except that I overbrowned the bottoms of the first batch. I still have some in the freezer, which is the good thing about baking as a single person.
Other than that I've been living on pasta and more junk food than I really wanted. The eventual plan for the work/cooking balance is to cook big batches of things on weekends. But the sort of foods that take well to this method are mostly stewy, and it's been too damn hot here. Not super hot (today it got to 86 F or 30 C), but hot enough that I don't want to make stew. It's the end of September, why can't the weather be autumnal?
In non-food related amusements, I've been watching the Danish police drama Rejseholdet, which aired in Britain some years back as Unit One. I recommend it, with a couple of caveats, if you like police procedurals: it has good writing (especially the dialogue and character stuff, not always the plots so much); interesting characters including a three-dimensional female lead with agency and nuance; excellent acting from everyone, including Mads Mikkelsen, later of Hannibal fame in the Anglophone world; and two highly slashable relationships, one between squad leader Ingrid Dahl and her friend and colleague Gaby, the other between Allan Fischer (Mikkelsen's character) and his friend and colleague Thomas LaCour, played by Lars Brygmann, a fine actor who is also exactly my type.
There are some less good points: it's dated in its attitudes towards queer people and towards certain gender-related issues (for example there's an incident of domestic violence that's not well addressed); less seriously, the characters have too much soap-opera style personal drama for my taste. But overall I like it a lot so far--I'm partway through series 3--and will almost certainly request it for Yuletide.
It's available to stream from Amazon in the US, widely available in Britain I believe, and findable around the internet.
