An extremely hearty and simple soup for a wintry day

 Making my Vaguely Italian Bean and Greens soup tonight! The contents are extremely variable, the results are always really good.

Start with browning some crumbled sausage in olive oil. Using Italian sausage tonight, but could be turkey sausage or plant-based (which I haven't used so can't advise). You can also omit the sausage and substitute diced onions or carrots.

Add minced garlic to taste, and a hearty dollop of basil pesto.

Add a can of diced tomatoes (fire-roasted, chilies added, whatever you like) and a can of beans (cannellini today, could be roman beans or navy beans or whatever you prefer).

Add enough broth or water to make consistency you prefer -- I like a nice dense soup. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer.

Then add shredded greens. Anything goes. Marcella Hazan's simpler cookbook version of this soup uses Swiss chard, which is excellent. I've used spinach, arugula, kale, escarole, whatever; tonight it's shredded Tuscan kale.

When the greens are done, serve forth! Enjoy with grated Parmesan cheese and lots of crusty bread, and a bottle of wine.

I'm pretty sure I first made this soup before I saw the Hazan version, but I've no idea where I got the idea from. Probably a food magazine? Hazan's version is much simpler, without the sausage and tomatoes, really a variation on classic escarole and white bean soup, which is also delicious.

My Goodreads Reading Challenges, part 1: 2020

 A few years ago, the end of 2018 to be precise, I thought I would have an easier time reading and finishing many of the many, many books in my To Be Read pile. The reason was, I was no longer a full-time employee anywhere, but freelance, and given my lazy approach to finding work I thought this would mean more time to knit, more time to read, more time to Do Things that were not directly employment related. For example, I finished writing a second novel, and kept working on my third and fourth! And started cleaning out our crowded apartment of superfluous things. And pampering my plants.

As for more time to read? Once upon a time I read short stories voraciously, subscribed to all the SFF mags and bought collections and anthologies. But my tastes shifted over the years, and I began craving longer and longer stories practically to the exclusion of true short stories. The quality of available reading material had nothing to do with it. Just personal taste.

Things didn’t happen quite the way I imagined. During 2018, when I still commuted an hour each day by bus, and often spent lunch time at my desk, and we flew on lengthy trips several times, I read a lot of books. Seventy two! Same as 2017! And back in 2016 I read 77, perhaps an all-time personal best. I’ll write about those books some other time. (And yes, I’m using Goodreads to track all that.)

In 2019, I made the same modest goal of reading 50 books that I had for years past. And read 55! I blamed it on shorter bus rides, not traveling by air as much, and having generally more stuff to do.

Then…pandemic. Surely, even the distraction of having Spouse home all day working from home could not prevent me from continuing to tackle my book-reading goals head on. Surely I’d get lots of knitting done, lots of reading done. I once again set a goal of 50 books, which seemed eminently doable.

But I read only 39 full books in 2020. Many were but novellas, or even shorter. Graphic novels, with not much dialogue. I know now, that between pandemic and politics I wasn’t alone in struggling to concentrate enough to get through some very anxious periods. I thoroughly enjoyed what I read. But I worried about my aging brain, and set the same goal of 50 books for 2021. Which I missed. By a lot.

(I will report that thankfully neither I nor Spouse actually contracted Covid that year. Nor since, so far.)

2020 books included:

The Death of the Necromancer, by Martha Wells
Rogue Protocol, and Exit Strategy, and Network Effect, by Martha Wells
The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders
Paladin’s Grace, and A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher
Life of David Hockney, by Catherine Cusset
Stormsong, and Midnight Bargain by CL Polk
Gideon the Ninth, and Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow
Beneath the Rising, by Premee Mohamed
The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djeli Clark
Color, by Victoria Finlay
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
Blackfish City, by Sam J. Miller
The Empire of Gold, by SA Chakraborty
The Vinyl Detective: Low Action, by Andrew Cartmel
Rag and Bone, and Slippery Creatures, by KJ Charles
Storm of Locusts, by Rebecca Roanhorse
The House of Sundering Flames, and Of Dragons Feasts and Murders, by Aliette de Bodard
Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh
A Pocketful of Lodestones, by Elizabeth Crowens
The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels
Daemon Voices, by Philip Pullman
The Physicians of Vilnoc, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Girl Genius: Queens and Pirates, by Phil & Kaja Foglio

(I am omitting several things I read mostly for research purposes for my own writing.)

TO BE CONTINUED...

Welcome to My World: The Magpie Prince Tales

Books help soothe us, inspire us, inform us, distract us, thrill us, terrify us, amuse us. Etcetera. I love to read all sorts of stories. Turns out I like to write all sorts, too, all within what I'm calling The Magpie Cycle, or Tales of the Magpie Prince. 

SEVEN FOR A SECRET, the first novel I finished a couple of years ago, is not soothing. It's a story about trauma, hubris, psychological abuse, misuse of authority, the urge to violence, and the terrible burden of trying to love one's family no matter what. The characters are nearly all demon-bred witches with varied magical powers, none of which keeps them from making terrible mistakes. There is bloodshed. Children suffer PTSD. It's set in 1955, in postwar northern England, and things that happened during WWII are still fresh in people's minds. The story is narrated by Gerry, the child most affected by events in the books, describing events from the perspective of an older man looking back.  

I don't think I realized quite how nasty all that was, when writing it, but it felt right, given the set of characters I'd created. They are likeable and also dangerous. Some of them have done terrible things but it's brushed off by those who love them, owing to social expectations. It's okay if this person has done terrible things...the results were worth it! They did it for the best reasons! And children take that in, and some of them learn to also accept it, and others do not and never will. 

This is the descriptive for the sales sites:

Gerry Llewellyn's mother is teaching him death magic, and his grandmother thinks he might help their family take over the world. He's eight. 

Waning magic in their land, and a legendary curse, meant British demon-bred witches were unable to enter the Otherworld, source of their strongest magic, for 200 years. Gerry and his father are the first seventh-born witches in all that time, a signal the curse may soon end, heralding a new era of greater power for them. But even his family can't agree whether this is a good thing. They have peaceful lives, blending in with the rest of humanity, doing much as they please in the more tolerant postwar years of the 1950s. Are vague promises of fabulous divine gifts worth upending that?

Already scarred by family secrets and politics, precocious Gerry hates being treated as a miracle child. And now Gerry's eldest brother is getting married, so the Llewellyn children have lots to do besides dealing with their emotionally damaged parents, death demon siblings, and a sundry lot of fractious relatives.

They are all about to learn that seventh sons are special all right, but it's their mothers you really need to watch out for...

THE RAGE OF CALIBAN is, I think, more amusing and inspirational.

I won't include spoilers, but will explain a bit. The book takes place ten years after SECRET, and includes many of the same characters. SECRET is set in 1955, CALIBAN in 1966. Lots and lots of things have happened to those characters since then, both good and bad. Gerry, the narrator of SECRET, is mentioned as “Morgan’s baby brother” but not by name, and does not actually appear. That was deliberate, as Gerry tends to take over a room. His brother, sisters and father are major characters, however, and his Manchester aunts and uncles, and even his grandmother. 

CALIBAN's main character, Phoebe Starwood, marries Gerry's older brother Morgan in 1964. She alludes to the wedding having been a bit of a disaster because of Gerry, but they remain happily coupled and now have an adorable and very loud infant daughter. 

I’m working on what may end up being three VERY long stories that happen between SECRET and CALIBAN. All are told from Gerry’s POV, and document his adventures between 1960, when he turns thirteen, and 1965, when the massive mess he’s made of his life really catches up with him. LUCKY THIRTEEN, GIRLFRIENDS AND BOYFRIENDS AND OTHER BAD HABITS, and HELLHOUND ON MY TRAIL will show up…eventually. Most of the story is written, but not properly stitched together. I'm writing as fast as I can. 

Phoebe and Morgan’s wedding takes place in GIRLFRIENDS. Other characters in CALIBAN, including Lizzie and Daphne, show up in HELLHOUND. Saying anything else would be spoilers…

I'm also working on a related book that takes place at the same time as CALIBAN, with other characters we see in Gerry's stories and who are mentioned in CALIBAN. I'm tentatively calling it THE STINK OF MAGIC. 

My explanation for my (extremely fictional) demon-bred witches is that long ago, demigods (offspring of humans and godlike beings, see many ancient mythologies) kept mating with mortal humans gifted with a certain amount of fortitude. Some of those offspring went and did great deeds in the mortal realm—both good and bad—while others withdrew to the Otherworld of wherever they lived, and marinated in magical power and became what many mythologies think of as demons. A lot of magically gifted people ran into all sorts of trouble, and over the centuries their numbers rose and fell and rose. They learned to escape persecution, they developed new cultures within their families and clans, and now and then mated with demons to bring fresh magic powers into their blood lines. Non-human magical beings also exist, but are largely unseen by non-witches. I have a lot of fun with this idea.

I do also have a LOT of fun designing my book covers. Art school had to be good for something. 

The Rage of Caliban: NEW BOOK FROM ME!

The world is burning down. Other people have terrible, true stories to tell. I am astonished I have the nerve to write fiction and try to finish it and hope other people will like it. 

 I bloody well did it. I finished a second novel. I have self-published it as an ebook on all major platforms available. I am very bad at marketing and self-promo, but I'll do my best. 

Available: Kindle Amazon, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, Apple iBooks, Scribd and some library apps. 

"Never, never ever make a witch annoyed with you. Just…don’t.

Painter Phoebe Starwood-Llewellyn is struggling to create an art career despite specializing in portraiture, which simply wasn't fashionable among mid-sixties English art critics. A young woman, and a mother, she is also a witch, part of an ever-growing tribe of people with demon ancestry and inherited magical powers.

Phoebe doesn't consider herself particularly skilled in magic, but a wealthy art collector tempts her with a lucrative if morally questionable challenge requiring spells her fellow witches think impossible. She becomes determined to see if she is up to creating a version of one of the most famous pictures in English fiction: The Picture of Dorian Gray.

As you may already know, there’s never any telling what a witch might do."

No spoilers for my own book, duh, but I'll say there's LGBTQ characters, an adorable and very loud infant, adult smooching (no graphic sex, which simply didn't belong), and stuff about painting, art critics and art collectors (hey, I was an art major). Phoebe was a lot of fun to write. She is quite level-headed for an artist, probably has a touch of ADHD, and just enough self-confidence in her talent to make a serious art career. The question was, did she have enough confidence in her magical abilities to meet a mad challenge? 

THE RAGE OF CALIBAN is, I think, more amusing and feel-good than my first novel, SEVEN FOR A SECRET, which is kinda violent and filled with traumatized kids.

I'll discuss the relationship between SEVEN FOR A SECRET and CALIBAN in greater detail in another blog post. Suffice to say this book contains many of the same characters, but ten years older, taking place in 1966. CALIBAN also alludes to things that happened in SECRET, and to things that are still unpublished in the greater cycle of Magpie Prince Tales, the story of Gerry Llewellyn and his large family. Phoebe was a relatively minor character, aside from marrying Gerry's older brother Morgan, but I always knew she was an artist. 

I truly appreciate who read this and liked it, and those who helped make it better, and 

SEVEN FOR A SECRET is also available from all major ebook sources:
Kindle Amazon, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, Apple iBooks, Scribd and some library apps. 

Reading is Hard

 I used to read something like 50-60 books a year. 

I never thought I would burn out on reading. Or just find it difficult 

I have burned out on knitting, a couple of times, for varying lengths of time...once for nearly two years, more recently for about a year. Odd, how that coincided with my reading burnout. But I'm not alone, in that people who have taken the pandemic seriously have often found it hard to concentrate on things that were once enjoyable pastimes. Many of my friends have complained they can't focus on reading fiction anymore, or finish simple knitting projects, or paint, or...whatever they do. My plant growing friends seem to be an exception: the plants need care, and abandoning them seems cruel. Um, likewise. My orchids are doing pretty well. New shelf arrangements, new light fixtures, new plants via online order. 

The knitting is still going v e  r   y    s   l   o  w  l  y  these days but my once-a-month knitting group helps a bit, I actually made progress on a new piece the other day. And I'm nearly done with a super-super simple garter stitch shawl I only work on during long phone calls. 

But finding myself unable to dig into books properly, and read for several hours on end like I used to, is a whole other world. I began hitting a few roadblocks several years ago, even before pandemic times. I started to fall asleep while reading. Didn't matter what book, what subject, how fascinating...after about 20 minutes, zzzzz. Self hypnosis? Annoying as hell, whatever the reason. I get plenty of sleep! I don't work in an office, I sleep late if I need to! 

I used to read a great deal while commuting to/from work, on city buses that often got stuck in traffic. Yay, more time to read! Tore through a lot of paperbacks that way, then started to read ebooks on the move instead, with the Kindle app on my phone. If I wasn't knitting knitting knitting on a longer trip, I was reading reading reading.

Then something happened. Was it writing my own stories that absorbed all my reading desires? Was it just a shift in mindset? I still WANT to read. But starting a book...stopping after a few pages...not returning to it for days...that just wasn't ME. And the sleepiness thing often curtailed my stubborn attempts to dig into a new book. 

I came up with strategies. Read shorter books! Read novellas! Fortunately several favorite authors (Ursula Vernon aka T. Kingfisher, Premee Mohamed, CL Polk, KJ Charles, Martha Wells) are also prolific authors of shorter works. Other faves came out with new books I absolutely had to read (Becky Chambers, SA Chakraborty). I caught up with several rock musician memoirs, finally started tearing through the Johannes Cabal books (Jonathan L. Howard), finally read The City We Became (NK Jemisin), Piranesi (Susanna Clarke), Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller) and some older novels, as well as some pretty interesting non-fiction. I tore through both of Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb novels as soon as they were released, so there's that, too, and hope the third will be equally easy to devour. 

So I'm feeling a bit better now about my reading pace. It's MARCH dammit and I only just finished four books so far this year! Two of which I started LAST year! 

The two big things on my reading plate: The Tyrant Baru Cormorant (Seth Dickinson) and Perhaps the Stars (Ada Palmer). Tyrant is third in an incredible trilogy, a masterpiece of worldbuilding and character development, and I TORE through the first two books. This one is still sitting moribund in my Kindle queue. I haven't been confident enough to attempt it. But I will. 

The Palmer book is fourth in a series. I hardly ever buy hardcover fiction, but I made an exception for these books. The long wait between each one was no obstacle, for the first three. But now...I opened the new book and my heart dropped. I'd FORGOTTEN everything. I couldn't remember the salient details of what happened in the third book, or the others. I read five pages in a total fog, and realized to my dismay I'd have to go back and at least partially re-read the third book. That's fine, as I loved it. A lot happened in it. But oh, the delay in gratification...

Shelf-Stable Goods

I visited the NY Botanical Garden with my BFF yesterday, whose special-needs kids will likely be home for weeks so I won't get to see her for a while. They won't get educational therapy while they're at home, so she despairs of keeping them entertained while trying to get work done.

The orchids were very pretty. There weren't many people around. We had lunch in the sit-down restaurant, overpriced but tasty; the place was more than half full.

I went with my friend to the Aldi on Broadway in the Bronx. The lines wrapped up and down the aisles, and she later reported the shelves weren't being restocked because the cashiers are supposed to do that. I didn't need anything from there so I went home; I had a shopping list for my own neighborhood, as Spouse started working from home today.

The express bus passed the Met Museum, where fewer people than usual were lingering on the steps. I felt heartsick for the street vendors who won't have thousands of tourists thronging their carts for weeks and weeks. I hope they can survive.

As I rode a bus home, my iPod offered up, in a row:
The Weeping Song, Nick Drake
I Wanna Be Sedated, the Ramones
Bad Medicine, Bon Jovi

THEN the supermarket all-70s muzak offered up OH MY MY by Ringo Starr. "I called up my doctor to see what's the matter, He said come on over, I said do I haveta..."

THANKS UNIVERSE.

I bought a lot of durable groceries this week, to supplement the stuff we already had: rice, pasta, ramen, canned tomatoes, butter, cheese, potatoes, turnips, carrots, hummus, peanut butter, crackers, chocolate, cookies, frozen sausage, frozen veggies, matzoh, popcorn. Hot sauce for all the rice and beans in our future. WINE. Got a hunk of corned beef for the weekend and a head of cabbage, enough to share with Spouse's elderly aunt whom we are still planning to visit on Sunday.

(We already had beans, coconut milk, jam, canned soup & shelf-stable broth, corn chips, pumpkin, couscous, bulgur, cornmeal, coffee, tea, cereal, raisins, nuts, granola bars, chutney. Ordered more Birds & Beans coffee the 2 of us usually drink 3 cups a day total.)

Eggs keep for over a month in the fridge. We eat a lot of eggs. I bought a lot of eggs. There were plenty in the stores.

The supermarket has lines, as does the gourmet market, but I've seen worse on just regular weekends. Shelves were being restocked all week. The usual stuff was flying out: paper goods (we have plenty), bread (we have enough), Clorox wipes (we have LOTS). I did buy extra laundry detergent and dishwashing liquid. Gourmet market coffee was partly cleaned out today -- a lot of people won't be going to Starbucks next week as usual.

I got good at prepping due to 9/11, Hurricane Sandy and various big blizzards. I know how to cook meats and veg nobody else seems to bother with. Today I got oxtails that I can freeze, and make stew whenever, same as I did during Sandy when more popular fresh meats were scarce. The freezer also contains random sausages, a package of ground bison for chili, and a roast chicken carcass for soup.

Pretzels don't seem popular with food hoarders, while chips & popcorn go fast. Judging by what's gone first, I suspect a lot of the folks emptying the shelves don't actually cook very much, and aren't entirely sure what to buy or how much. They aren't buying things to eat NOW -- fresh fish or fresh produce, only fresh meat, so maybe they're freezing all that chicken? First rule of prepping, don't eat the storeable goods until all else is gone!

I should've bought fish for tonight's dinner but I forgot as soon as I had ground lamb in hand, so oh well, so much for my own advice...

NaNoWriMo 2019 OMG

WHAT HAVE I DONE

I wrote 40k words of a NEW NOVEL in one month. I did THE THING.

National Novel Writing Month has become quite a phenomenon among young writers. I do NOT say would-be writers, as all writing counts. I don't care if you only write fanfic for personal consumption, or share it on AO3. I don't care if you only write blog posts twice a year. I don't care if you have dozens of short stories that still haven't sold, or have sold only one story of those dozens. Writing is writing. Art and self-expression matter. If you're not a writer, maybe you draw or paint or knit or sew or bake cakes or sing karaoke or dance or weave or make your own soap or take pictures of birds or collect cat figurines. If you're not hurting anyone with your art -- including yourself -- then enjoy it.*

And even if I didn't already believe that with all my heart, meeting a lively group of fellow NaNoWriMo participants last month would convince anyone. These were terrific folks who love to read and want to write but need some extra incentive to sit and commit words strung together into stories. Some were doing NaNo for years already, and had never finished anything, or worked on their novels the other 11 months. That's ok. Others had finished novels of varying lengths but hadn't done the cleanup necessary to try and find an agent or publisher.

Some of these folks are incredibly busy working and raising kids and managing elder care and facing all sorts of other challenges. Some are just young and still finding their voice. Others are trying to find the right idiom for their expression and aren't thinking about being published.

All of it is good. NaNo is a great challenge to just SIT and WRITE and get a story told. I'm glad more and more people take the challenge. Now, I do hear that agents and publishers get absolutely inundated with barely-finished, sub-par 50k novels every December and January -- that a lot of NaNo folks feel their stream-of-consciousness masterpieces are DONE once the calendar ticks over to December 1. Well, those folks are unfortunately delusional, and are cluttering up the lives of publishing professionals with unprofessional work, and that's a shame.

Very few people who write ever get published. That's a fact. That's why there are millions of self-published stories and novels out in the world now (hey, including mine). Publishing is a very weird business and not everyone can stand the weirdness. Lots of writers have one published novel and then are never heard of again -- sometimes its the publisher's fault, sometimes the agent's, sometimes the writer just can't produce more good work, sometimes the next work gets rejected. It's disheartening to hear the stories writers can tell about this.

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE. Here's what I did: I took what I thought was a pretty good short story, took my writing group's advice on making it much much better, and then started looking at SFF genre short story markets. They are incredibly hard to sell to. There are thousands and thousands of really good writers selling short fiction and I've realized I'll never be one of them. I don't think in 1000 - 10,000 word bursts. I'm one of those elaborately wordy bitches who can't build a world or a story that short. The story I wrote, "The Rage of Caliban," takes place in the same world as Seven for a Secret, with many of the same characters (now about 10 years older). The group thought it was a great opening for another novel. NOOOOOOO. I was already working on three other novels in that story cycle!

But I thought about it for a few months, and ultimately gave in. So in September I started expanding the existing 8000 word story, and by November 1 I had 23k done. I plunged into NaNoWriMo with great enthusiasm. It seemed the ideal way to approach just getting the whole darned thing done.

And it worked! I fell short, I only achieved 39k on the scoreboard. Tacked onto that original 23k I ended up with 62k of a nearly-finished novel. I've kept going, I have no intention of NOT finishing this sucker. The Rage of Caliban will probably end up around 80k, a respectable length. I've started back-editing as a way of correcting some continuity issues, and shuffling characters around,

Seven for a Secret is about the angst of a young demon-bred witch boy born into an impossibly damaged family confronting an impossible situation. Gerry's not a "chosen one" among his people, he's the thing that allows someone else to do the thing a chosen one customarily does. And that's much worse, from his point of view.

The rest of his story cycle -- four more novels and novellas, if I'm dogged enough to finish them -- takes Gerry on his life journey towards adulthood. He's not nice. He's scarred, selfish and arrogant, thoroughly an asshole, though he tries to be better. He loves deeply and hates fiercely. He makes some terrible mistakes that ruin other people's lives. Everything good he tries to do goes wrong. The people around him try to forgive and forget -- he was born special, after all, and they can't quite shake that -- but eventually the mistakes pile up and force him to humility and responsibility. This arc covers 1955-1965, mostly in northern England. The cast of characters is bloody enormous, and I refuse to apologize for that. It's still smaller than that of Game of Thrones. I also really enjoy all the British Invasion blues and rock research I continue to do.

The Rage of Caliban takes place in 1966, with Gerry's older brother's wife as the focus. (Gerry doesn't appear in the story at all, except for a couple of mentions.) I adore Phoebe Starwood, I created her years ago but didn't do much with her--mainly, she stood by rather helplessly as Gerry and his girlfriend unintentionally wrecked her wedding. I knew she was an artist. She liked snapping pictures of family events and travel scenery, and made the best of having fallen in love with a member of the most notorious (and dangerous) coven in Britain. When a story idea popped into my head, I knew she would be the POV character, and would deal with the situation with stubborn intelligence. I knew I would really enjoy torturing her! It was also really fun to get myself out of Gerry's head, and into hers instead. Unlike her terrible brother-in-law, Phoebe is not an asshole. 😁

I really hope I can finish Rage by the end of December...I'll definitely do a new round of agent queries with this one. Wish me luck.


*"Harm" takes many forms. Endorsed bigotry and racism and misogyny in a story is harmful, as opposed to your narrative making it clear why those things are bad and have bad consequences. Harming yourself or people around you can happen if you begin to ignore the real world and its responsibilities, and possibilities -- you might start acting like a dick without even realizing it or getting therapy or other help. Don't be a dick.

Melodious Blend, the Bestest Blend!

HWAET! I come to inform you of the wonders of TJ Melodious Blend.

If you are a Trader Joe’s fan, or even an occasional shopper, you almost certainly have a wagon-load of favorite, staple items that you’ve come to love, depend on and feel bereft of when out of stock or out of season. I have a couple of dozen such favorites in my pantry and freezer.*

Melodious Blend is in the frozen foods, and like many TJ packaged goods it is a godsend when you don’t know what the f-word else to cook, want a leguminous meatless or nearly meatless meal that isn’t just opening a can of beans again. Not that I lack for recipes that include opening a can of beans of pretty much any variety. (Note: Spouse and I Do. Not. Like. Tofu. It is not part of our diet. It is not something we’ll ever heartily embrace unless every mammal, bird and fish on the planet goes extinct in our lifetimes—in which case soybeans and humans are probably doomed as well.) (Well, we are probably doomed, but it’s my fervent hope that enough vertebrates outlast us to kickstart evolutionary diversity again in a few hundred years.)

Anyway. Melodious Blend. As you see from the package, it’s pre-cooked and only needs heating to make it savory and delicious. You COULD choose to believe the TJ copywriters, or you could believe me instead. Without a bit of additional fuss, MB is tasty but bland. Not that some people don’t enjoy that. But it’s pretty easy to make it a bit more interesting. I will use today’s dinner as an example in several easy steps, as today was nasty and cold outside and I decided that cooking from the freezer and fridge veggie bin was better than going to the store. I mean, this is WHY I even have MB in the freezer.

First step: note that the ingredients of MB are primarily green lentils, red lentils and green chickpeas (which are just regular chickpeas cooked before being dried). It also includes olive oil and some tomato. This last part is technically accurate but honestly, a bit misleading. Cooked by itself, MB’s seasoning is barely barely detectable. Legumes are tasty but they do need significant seasoning--witness pretty much the entire world's cookery. So while I ordinarily go along with the vaguely Italian seasoning, you could in fact concoct Indian, Middle Eastern, French or pretty much any other flavoring you enjoy. Plan accordingly. 

Second step: decide which fresh or frozen veggies need to be used up. Canned are OK too if that’s what you have. Pretty much anything goes, at this step. Choose any two or up to six, at which point this becomes too much work and doesn’t get any tastier.

Possibilities: Bell pepper, jalapeno pepper, summer squash/zucchini, winter squash/butternut squash, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, bok choy, cabbage, kale, spinach or similar greens, carrot, turnip, parsnip, peas, potato, green beans, okra, leeks, fresh or sun-dried tomatoes, olives…you get the idea. The legumes in MB are bland enough to go with pretty much ANYTHING. Mix up whatever combo you like. Precook or parboil whatever you feel needs it, though my methodology includes that step and will work for most root veggies.

Third step: heat a large pan with a good glug of (olive) oil, and chop a medium-sized onion into coarse dice, and fling it into the pan. Add some smashed or minced garlic too. Add salt to get things started. Meanwhile, prep and chop your chosen veggies, and begin adding them in order of necessary cooking time. Tonight, I added the zucchini, butternut squash and eldritch (Romanesco) broccoli as the onions were starting to color a bit, along with some water, and covered the pan to get those veggies good and steamed. 

I also sometimes add diced sausage of one type or another. Picture above is a single link of (frozen) Aidell's Andouille. Pretty much anything goes. Crumbled Italian sausage is really good, as is BACON I mean, bacon, or ham. Any plant-based sausage you might prefer would also be good, or tofu, or tempeh. 

I have a  jar of Mystery Hotter than We Thought herb/spice seasoning (from an upstate NY supermarket no less) and it went great with the veggies and Andouille sausage. The vague ingredient mix has only the obvious items; someday I'll figure out what the heck else is in that mix. Hasn't killed us yet, though. 

I haven't tried it yet, but I'm pretty sure MB would be a good coconut curry base. Use coconut oil for sauteing, use Indian (curry powder, cumin, coriander, turmeric, etc.) or Thai (lemongrass, cilantro, lime, fish sauce) seasonings and add coconut milk to make a nice gooey sauce. 

Fourth step: it is optional but conventional to prepare a starchy side and turn your effort towards the Rice and Beans spectrum. We always do this, but you needn't. Pretty much any grain or pasta you like will go, with whatever veggies you've chosen: rice of any kind, bulgur wheat, quinoa, couscous, etc. You could also incorporate your starch into the dish and turn it into a kind of pilaf. Your dinner, your choice. 

Fifth step: Once the veggies are nearly cooked, add the MB. DO NOT THAW IT FIRST. DO NOT RINSE IT FIRST. Just open the package and dump the contents into the pan. There will be ice crystals. Don't worry. Just break up the lumps, add a bit of water (depending on how much liquid is already in the pan with the veggies), stir it all a bit, and cover. Stir it again after about 3-4 minutes. Add another glug of oil if you want, maybe more liquid. (Doesn't have to be water, could be broth or even a bit of wine.) Cover and cook another couple of minutes. Done! 

We added more hot sauce anyway. Hot sauce is yummy with legumes; there's a REASON most cultures that have both always combine them. Anyway, a nice Gewurtztraminer was also a nice accompaniment. 

Hope you're feeling more inspired on your What Do I Cook days! 

*Dark Chocolate Covered Cherries, Dark Chocolate Covered Blueberries, Almond Chocolate Chunk Cookies, Chocolate Almond Spread, frozen Vegetable Masala burger patties, frozen Sweet Potato Gnocchi, frozen Palak Paneer and Vegetable Biryani, frozen Paratha bread, frozen Scallion Pancakes, various granola bars, Greek yogurt with almond butter, Greek yogurt with coconut, quick-cooking brown Basmati Rice, Inner Peas, Movie Popcorn, organic raisins...ETCETERA. 

How to Rescue Wrinkly Grape Tomatoes

We like tomatoes. We like tomatoes A LOT. We mostly do without in the winter, except for sales on pints of organic grape tomatoes. If they're not tossed into a salad, they're delicious with hummus and cucumbers as a snack.

In summer, unused tomatoes tend to rot. I buy mostly heirloom tomatoes, and even when kept out in the open, treated tenderly (just short of being coddled in cotton batting), a few will over-ripen and split and ugh, the smell is usually my first warning that the bottom tomato has given up.

In winter, in our house, unused grape tomatoes tend to dry out. Weird. Kept in their plastic pint container, in cool temperatures and fairly low humidity, they slowly turn wrinkly and slightly leathery. When I notice this happening, I usually slice them in half and add them to a stir-fry or saute -- nice juicy little nuggets of faux summer in my otherwise (mostly) seasonal dishes.

I had an entire pint go wrinkly not long ago, as I simply forgot about them. It happens. The wrinkly tomatoes were still juicy inside. I was in an experimenting mood, so I sliced the lot, put them in a baking dish, sluiced them with olive oil and a bit of salt, and roasted them. I was baking a pie that day, anyway.

I think the oven was set to 350F or 375F. I stirred the tomatoes every fifteen minutes so they wouldn't stick. Forty-five minutes later, I had a baking dish full of what tasted very like sun-dried tomatoes, but much squishier. Sweet, savory, chewy, with charred notes that were beyond delicious.

A few days later, these little flavor bombs became a homemade pizza topping, Mushrooms, anchovies, lots of shredded mozzarella, and fresh-made dough from my local gourmet shop, and behold. A thing of wonky well-meaning and very tasty beauty.

BTW sliced chorizo -- another wonderful product of the same gourmet shop -- is another revelation when roasted. The next time I made pizza it was chorizo, roasted tomatoes and "Mexican cheese mix" from Trader Joe's. There was space around the edges of the foil-lined baking sheet (yeah, no pizza stone in this house) so I laid out six spare slices to cook. SPICY BACON BEST EVER THING OMG.

Seriously, do the tomatoes thing and also the chorizo thing. Totally worth the trouble.

Too Much Yarn, Part 2 -- A New Hope

Learning to RESIST yarn emporium emails and catalogs is actually therapeutic. The hoarding shows all claim that learning not to accumulate stuff requires repeated exposure to the things you normally can’t resist. They might be right! I’m really enjoying “shopping” my stash and not adding to it.

I mean, damn. Lookit that.

That said…a whole bunch of the yarn that I’m most eager to play with needs winding. A whole bunch. Four skeins just for WIPs (where I wound half the skeins and decided to wait to wind the rest). GAH. Winding is BORING. 

Everything needs winding.

Everything.

EVERYTHING.

SO MUCH GODDAMNED WINDING.

What's worse than winding? FROGGING. Ripping apart something you worked on for possibly hours and days, because you completely failed to notice something was deeply wrong and just kept going. Because you really liked the yarn but got the gauge wrong. Because you really meant well to make a baby blanket but didn't have enough yarn and nothing else to do with it. Because halfway through you realized you were totally sick of making even one more chunky wool sweater you'd never wear. 

I recently frogged a hat I’d created in great enthusiasm, because a) kept screwing up the pattern, but mostly b) 100 stitches is way too big for my head even in fine sock yarn. How is it possible so many hat patterns use 100+ stitches for the headband?? I have a fairly average-sized head and that’s too much. So I cast on again with 80, the next size down, and I hope it will go better now.

Don't be fooled by the cute doggie button.
This stupid thing needs frogging too. It's big enough for the Jolly Green Giant.
Anyone want to ask him if he needs a blue hat?

If you catch it in time, though, and you have enough yarn, an overly large hat can become a nice cowl.

Nice cowl, even if it started out as a beret.

I had fun re-organizing the pattern stash and WIPs while prepping for a four-day trip during which I knitted for HOURS each day. Every year we go to our favorite science fiction/fantasy convention, Readercon, which is heavy on books. It’s like attending grad-level lit courses for 3 days, which really is fun if that's your idea of fun. All those panel discussions are full of people knitting, crocheting, needlepointing, spinning and embroidering. It’s fabulous. We also had 5 hours riding in the car each way, so I brought 4 projects (3 WIPs and 1 new) and ACTUALLY worked on all of them. Didn't FINISH any, but made lots of progress. 

Organizing the stash takes time, that might be spent knitting instead, but it's not a bad thing to play with the yarn and re-engage with why I bought it in the first place.

Except for all the freaking winding.

Too Much Yarn, Part 1

I overdid buying yarn last year. And the year before that, and before that. And at the beginning of this year. One night not long ago, I realized that I’d forgotten to enter a whole 2-gallon bag of yarns from late 2016 into my Ravelry stash. (I knew they existed, but not being on Rav they weren’t ready to be claimed by queued Rav projects.) I wasn’t a very good girl January, February and March of this year either…but I’ve been good ever since. I HAVE TO BE.

No regrets for these final skeins. None at all. 

Digging into more neglected parts of the stash in order to log them properly, I found myself seriously wondering WTH I was thinking on some occasions. Just 1 ball of Lion Brand Kool Wool?? I gave it away. (Along with a bunch of other odd skeins not worth combining with others in a project.)

One thing struck me very hard, as I was hunting for a couple of skeins for a new project.

All those storage bags and bins of yarn I have -- eight or nine, packed pretty full -- represented dreams and POTENTIAL when I bought that stuff. Potential new sweaters, new shawls and hats and scarves. SO many pretty things -- so many patterns! I locked myself into a yarn shop of my own desires. At my present best rate of usage -- about 12000 yards a year -- I’m set for the next ten or fifteen years of knitting. And I’m in my mid fifties.

Mild regrets for this stuff.
I'm sure I'll love the sweater I'll make 5 years from now. 

Giving away the excess yarn -- something I’ve been doing for years anyway -- is becoming an even bigger goal than just knitting it up as fast as possible. I give a few bags to a friend for charitable knitting every year, some to a women’s shelter. I sell some on Rav. I give some to friends who are down on their luck but love to knit. I'm keeping only what I really love. 

But even if I give away more things than I keep, there’s still only so many sweaters my spouse and I can wear or stuff into drawers. Only so many scarves and hats. Only so many throws to pile on the sofa. I surprised myself by giving away a shawl I spent weeks and weeks working on; I didn't love the colors once it was finished, but my friend had been admiring it so now it's hers. 

I like piling up small projects like hats, cowls, scarves, simple shawls and baby sweaters to give away. It’s entirely win-win. I get to enjoy the yarn for a while -- or not, as sometimes happens. I get to try another new pattern. I get near-instant gratification of a finished project. And I get that yarn out of the house entirely! So back in April, I decided to make a game out of my goal, similar to plowing through a book a week, to cut my To Read list down a bit each year. I decided to knit a hat or cowl every week for the rest of the year, in addition to the usual scarves and shawls that I work on while I commute. Depending on the gauge, it takes me 3-5 days to make one.

This one took 2 sessions watching TV.

To speed things up a bit, I organized the stash better, and made a bag of "ready-to-knit" skeins that don't need winding (thank you Big Yarn Companies) or I already wound. Imagine my joy when I dug into one bag and came up with a bunch of Deep Stash skeins I'd forgotten about, all set for hats and stuff! I’m capable of whiling away a whole evening browsing my pattern printouts and fondling bags of stash instead of actually, you know, KNITTING. But I hit a new realization, as I was digging in the bag of Ready To Knit skeins a little while ago.

Like, What the hell was I thinking?

Noro at its worst...

While it feels good to have rediscovered some yarn I once loved -- I quickly made a giveaway hat and planned a few others -- I have to curb that impulse a bit. Because my stash is vast and life is short, I need to -- I deserve to -- knit the yarns and patterns that I love the most first. Not just stuff that happens to be easiest to access because it’s sold in pull skeins. Good thing I already wound a bunch...

2016, A GREAT Year for Life Birds, Part 1

[I'm more than a bit behind in my posting! Here's where I finally catch up on all my bird posts that should've been made in 2016 but weren't.]

As of the first week of February 2016, I already added 7 new birds to my life list -- as many as I added in all of 2015.

The last Saturday in January, I finally saw a Common Merganser on the Central Park Reservoir. It was definitely bigger than the more usual Red-breasted Mergansers,

On the last Sunday in January, we enjoyed an Audubon Society Eco-cruise of New York Harbor. It was a picture-perfect day of bright sunshine, blue skies, calm water, near 50 degrees. The 2-hour cruise took us past the shores of Brooklyn, Governor's Island, Ellis Island, Liberty Island and Bayonne, and down to Hoffman and Swinburne Islands, two small man-made islands on the eastern shore of Staten Island. There are ducks out there, ducks and loons and gulls that don't come inland to the Central Park Reservoir and only occasionally visit the East River or Hudson River for easy viewing.

Clangula hyemalis. Accept no substitutes.

Lots and lots of gulls and cormorants all over the place.

Familiar Herring Gulls, Ring-billed Gulls, Greater Black-backed Gulls, Double-crested Cormorants, Mallards, Black Ducks, Buffleheads and Red-breasted Mergansers were abundant along the shores. Spotting the unfamiliar Bonaparte's Gulls and Common Loons was the challenge!

There are seals too! Harbor seals like to sun themselves on the rocks and sandbars around Swinburne Island. They tend to hit the water when the boats come close, and stared at us from the waves.

So freaking cute.

So on one cruise I got Long-tailed Ducks, Common Goldeneye, Great Cormorant, Bonaparte's Gull, Red-throated Loon, and this Surf Scoter that was an unexpected bonus bird:

That is totally a Surf Scoter. Yay!

It hardly bothered me that my erstwhile spouse had already seen several of these birds elsewhere around New York City waters. I'm just not as eager to go chasing a critter that might have flown off by the time I got there. I figure I'll get them eventually...and often do.

In mid-February we went to Florida, with intentions of birding at Laxahatchie and Green Cay reserves near the Everglades. We visited a friend whose home is on the shore of a small lake and surrounded by a moat, and he likes to post photos of white ibis and wood storks gazing into his living room windows while the indoor cats lose their minds. Well, it was all true.

That's in the next post.

I Have a Tumblr

Ha, even old ladies like me can eventually figure out stuff like Tumblr! IT CAN BE DONE. Laugh all you want, kids, just not on my lawn!

And so now Tales of the Magpie Prince is a Tumblr thing, and I will update it fairly frequently with musical, magical and folklore asides that add some background to the story: stuff about magpies, British blues music, seventh sons, counting rhymes, totem animals, potions, and other things I encountered in the course of my research.

I knew in elementary school that I wanted to be a writer someday. I wrote a bunch of Star Trek fiction in high school and college. That was how I discovered that RESEARCH is like the best habit to develop in school for being a writer. Good thing I was good at it.

Also, and this is important, if the research isn't engaging and absorbing and totally fun to do, then DON'T WRITE THE STORY. I discovered this when years ago trying some sci-fi world building for a (terrible) story idea I had. There are now books on how to do this, but I went about calculating planetary orbits and climates and food and animals and putting a whole world together...and didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would starting out. The parts I enjoyed most were inventing food plants, recipes and clothing styles for my aliens. Never stuck with it anyhow, but I suppose I could still salvage that story with an emphasis on cookery...

Seven for a Secret: My book, it is ALIVE!

Seven for a Secret on Amazon Kindle.

Seven for a Secret on Apple's iBooks.

Seven for a Secret on Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Seven for a Secret on Kobo.

Seven for a Secret on Scrib'd.

Seven for a Secret on Inktera/Page Foundry.

Thanks to the miracles of our modern digital age, I was able to get my book published to several major ebook markets in just one evening! Still waiting for notifications from a couple. But this is pretty cool, I have to say. I was able to check the Amazon Australia site and provide a link to a friend down there. Amazing. Love it!

And, the book is also on Goodreads already, which totally surprised me. I intend to find out which market caused the entry to be generated.

Now I have to catch up posting reviews of my friends' books on Amazon and Goodreads! And return to my read-one-book-a-week attempt for the rest of the year. I was doing OK with that until I hit a few big ones...looking at my to-read pile of actual books, and the huge Kindle queue, I think I'll try to get to the shorter ones first!

Knitting Up Rhinebeck 2008: Bamboo Silk

I was never much of a fan of one-skein projects before I discovered handpainted luxury yarns. Ever practical, for years I preferred to buy yarns in bulk and make sweaters. Anything left over could become a scarf. I really didn't make hats, and I never made a shawl. I do remember buying massive amounts of rainbows of acrylics to make huge afghans and throws when I was in high school and college, but that ardor cooled...cos really, how many of those do you really need?

My current yarn stash began in the mid-to-late 90s, when I took up knitting again with a vengeance. At the start I once again thought in terms of sweater projects instead of mini projects. Now and then another scarf or hat experiment. The only yarn I regularly bought in small amounts was to make stuff for my friends' babies and kids.

The combination of Ravelry and Rhinebeck blew my attitudes out of the water. Hats! I wanted LOTS of hats! Well, I needed some anyway, my old ones were a bit old after all. And new scarves! I'd only made a couple in the past 10 years and one of those was so massive (imagine a fuzzy fluffy overly warm gray Tom Baker Dr Who scarf...) I hardly ever wore it. Rhinebeck got my mind percolating. "I'll make hats and scarves and shawls and who knows what else!" I fingered skein after skein of yummy colorful expensive stuff, and bought things I really had no idea what to do with...but I had to have them. Like the stuff picture above.

Maple Creek Yarn bamboo silk blend. OMG. Soft, silky, drapey, shimmery, sweet beautiful colors, but the price! I couldn't make a garment from it. Maybe 2 skeins? No, just one. I came home with just one. And what to do with it? Well, a skinny little scarf, I figured. Something light and springtimey. Lace. It took 2 years for me to actually get around to it, but I did it. Happily, it even turned out to be useful! This little Moebius loop scarf I made drapes perfectly to cover...um, the deeply plunged necklines of several sweaters I made while I was not working 9-5 in an office. Not too warm to wear indoors all day, and it feels nice against my skin. What more could I possibly want?

Knitting up Rhinebeck 2008: Creme Brulee

This is the yarn that I grabbed first at my first Rhinebeck Sheep & Wool Festival. It was a gorgeous crisp sparkling blue-sky autumn day, and the plentiful maple trees were in fantastic color all around the fair grounds. I wandered into this building with straw on the floor, flooded with sunlight, stuffed with amazing yarn. I found myself in the booth run by Decadent Fibers, and I wanted ALL OF IT.

I settled for 2 skeins from them. The absolute first choice was this hank of Creme Brulee, because the color was going to be my souvenir of the day. The yarn is absolutely a perfect reflection of autumn leaves, so I had to make something "leafy" out of it.

Merino, silk and mohair blend in a soft, chunky gently twisted strand...it cried out to be a beret, even though I had some fear of itchiness. I invented a circular leaf-lace pattern suitable for a hat, then added the mitts and scarf using a standard Barbara Walker leafy lace.

Lemme tell ya, inventing a lace beret pattern is HARD. I frogged the darn thing at least 6 times because I kept making it too big. It's really hard to measure something scrunched up on a tiny circular needle! Especially as it was only the 2nd beret I'd ever made. I finished the beret in 2009, but only wore it when winter was nearly over! The mitts and scarf waited even longer. I only finished the scarf in early December 2010.

The other thing that was hard was letting this yarn take me out of my personal color comfort zone. I've never been a huge fan of orange, and never thought it looked good against my skin. But there are enough complicated color changes in this yarn to allow me to ignore that small issue.

Ada Lovelace Day Blog Post!

I'm grateful to my parents for many things, but foremost might be that they never once told me there was something, anything I could not do just because I'm a girl. They might've been horrified if I took up football or skydiving or international banking, but it wouldn't have been because "girls don't do that." ("Sane people don't do that" would be more like it.) Dad was an engineer, he worked for the telephone company for years and knew how to climb telephone poles -- still could at 62 and how cool was that??! -- and spent WWII and the Korean War in the Signal Corps. Mom was artistic, wanted to paint and loved to sew, but she also could take apart radios and wield power drills.

So I took after both parents, and ended up a graphic designer using Adobe PageMaker and InDesign and Photoshop. I was pretty good at math, in 10th and 11th grade, and by then I'd heard of Basic...so in college, in 1980, I took my first computer programming class even though I'd already declared an art major. PL-C. Piece of cake! Assembler was a bit less cakey...and I stumbled blindly through Fortran hating every minute of it. No more programming classes. Painting and printmaking, much better. I still liked computers though. I admired a college screenwriting teacher who admitted she wrote several novels so she could afford a computer and printer in order to write more novels. (Is that tech-ie? Maybe...)

So I learned to use word processors, and bought my first (Radio Shack) PC (no hard drive) in 1986. Bought my next one (30 mb hard drive) in 1987. Cruel irony had me doing both DBase IV programming and PageMaker classes for a job. And even crueller irony that in a corporate role as a graphic designer/business communications guru I now and then ended up using my old nemesis Fortran on the VAX system to gather data. Irony complete when I, a designer on PCs, married a man who programmed on Macs. I'm writing this blog entry on my 7th lifetime owned computer.

But all this is everyday stuff. I'm just a geeky, nerdy female human who is not scared of math or technology, and make use of computers my everyday life. I admire everyone of my generation, and older, who has done this, same as I admire everyone who incorporates art in their everyday lives (by playing music or drawing or writing or taking pictures or dancing, whatever moves them).

I'm dedicating this (uh, mostly autobiographical) Ada Lovelace Day blog post to ladies of my personal acquaintance: Dr Margaret McMahon (rocket scientist) and Lori Bechtold (aircraft engineer). Fellow alumni of Hunter College High School, class of 78/79. We bonded over a mutual love of science fiction. They do stuff I can barely wrap my brain around, and they do it well, and I am extremely glad we live in a world where they and other women like them were encouraged and able to make the most of their talents and interests. You rock.

And also honorable mention to Barbara Krasnoff, who writes so well about techie-computer matters and makes it accessable to many other people over the years. And who also entered my life through interest in science fiction. And, Happy Birthday, Barbara!

May all of us be so fortunate as to find their bliss and follow it.

Whole Lotta Ho Ho Ho

I heard on the news that the Post Office has declared this holiday season "cancelled." Nobody's mailing anything. Are they right? I was in two of my local POs twice this week, thanks to brisk ebay sales. Last year at this time, a week before Christmas, the lines were out the door at both locations. This year, not so much. In fact, I only waited in line as long as I do on any reasonably busy day. And only a few people were burdened with parcels, the vast majority had only smaller items or Priority Mail envelopes.

What's up, I think, might be that everyone who is doing gifts this year decided to go for bargains online and had those retailers ship directly. Saves effort, saves $$, what's not to like? And some of us are doing charity donations in lieu of material presents. And e-cards and Facebook hugs instead of paper cards.

All of this is fine with me. Our holiday cheer is in short supply this year. I might buy an evergreen bough for a vase on the table, and I desperately want a bottle of Sams Serious Eggnog (from the Waterfront Ale House), but that's about it. As good as I feel about the new regime in DC, this country is still so seriously f**cked-up that I'll save my cheering for January 20. And hope my friends seeking jobs will find them. And hope someone will buy my book...

I did have a personal Awesome Moment yesterday thanks to ebay: I had the rare privilege of mailing an item to North Pole, Alaska, and enjoyed the look on the clerk's face. We agreed Santa obviously really does buy stuff on ebay to re-gift.

And a Hey Lookit! moment today: 2 fire trucks bearing Santa, elves (rather fat ones) and fire fighters in Santa hats, whirring along at 86th and 3rd Ave. Awww!