There are some times when life opens up the box in which you’ve been thinking since…since you’ve been thinking. Last week, that happened to me. It wasn’t earth-shattering or life-changing. It was a small, simple idea about a small, simple thing. I love moments like that.
Last week, I wrote about consommé and received a comment from my friend, Iron Chef Leftovers, over at the Cheap Seat Eats blog. He mentioned how his stock never got cloudy because his stock never boiled.
When I read that, I guffawed. Literally. I guffawed. Reason? Because no matter how assiduously I oversee my stock while it’s coming up to the simmer, and no matter how much attention I give it during the long process, it always comes out cloudy. Even when I succeed in keeping it below the boil, there’s always a cloud of particulate matter in the stock.
But this is beside the point, and this was not outside the box of my current thinking. The thing he said that stopped me mid-guffaw was this:
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Posted in Food, Recipes | Tagged beef broth, beef stock, chicken broth, chicken stock, cooking, cooking techniques, cooking tips, healthy living, making stock, recipes | 1 Comment »
All Saint’s Day. All Hallows. All Hallows’ Evening. Hallows Even. Hallowe’en. Halloween.
Not my favorite…well, you can’t really call it a holiday…not my favorite festival. Not even my second favorite. To be honest, my least favorite, which is to say, I really dislike it. A lot.
Growing up, it was just another example of social stratification, another peer-review spotlight that illuminated my inner nerd. You must understand that, back then, at that age, carrying a violin to school on a regular basis did considerable damage to one’s street cred. So did liking to read. Wearing glasses didn’t help. Neither did being sports-deficient. So, being a scrawny, gawky, four-eyed kid who walked to school, a violin in one hand, while reading a book with the other…it pretty much guaranteed that I was going to peg the lower end on the Cool Scale.
Halloween just rubbed it in.
There was only one time where Halloween and I got along. One night. In college.
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Posted in Culture, Seattle | Tagged college, concert, halloween, halloween costume, Music, rain, Seattle, trick or treat, viola, violin | 3 Comments »
The world changes quickly, and as I get older, I start to feel the current move faster than I am. Slowly, inexorably, I’m being left behind. This is something I work hard against; I try to keep current, but I never was “edgy” or “cool” and I sure as hell don’t expect to start now. I suppose this makes me a member of the Curmudgeon Party. I’m pretty happy over here. I can rant and rave, piss and moan, and no one is surprised when I do it. So, don’t be surprised. I’m going to do it again.
Last night—on an October night—I voted in a general election. My wife and I sat in the living room, discussed each of the initiatives and reviewed the candidates, colored the little bubbles on our computer-ready form, and stuck them in envelopes to go out in the morning’s post. Washington State now has a wholly mail-in election system.
And I hated it.
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Posted in Culture, Low Tech, Politics, Seattle | Tagged election, election 2012, election night, general election, mail-in voting, politics, voting | 3 Comments »
Well, that two week’s vacation went by in a blitz. It was very productive, with the last two books of the Fallen Cloud Saga hitting the streets, but boy, could I have used another week…or month.
Now that the hardcopies are available, I realize I have made a classic mistake. It’s all part-and-parcel of the difficulty in switching from my author hat to my publisher hat. The author in me just wants to get the book out there and get it into reader’s hands. The publisher (an admittedly weaker part of me) wants to get the best release, the best buzz, and the best notice which helps get the book into more readers’ hands.
So, this classic mistake is to rush “to print” at the detriment of any sort of planning and release strategy.
But all is not lost.
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Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Writing | Tagged amazon, Beneath a Wounded Sky, CreateSpace, creative writing, ebooks, Fallen Cloud Saga, FC:V, Kindle, novel writing, release strategy, self-publishing, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips | Leave a Comment »
(All the puns I could have used to title a post on stock, consommé, and au jus are terrible, so I refuse to pain you with them. Besides, you’re hearing them all in your head right now, anyway.)
Egg whites and I have a long, antagonistic history. I don’t “get” them, and they don’t do much for me. It all goes back to my attempt, at the age of about twelve, of making an angel food cake, from scratch, while my family was out for the day. “Whip the egg whites until they form peaks,” the recipe said. So, bowl in arm and whisk in hand, I beat them until my wrist was ready to crumble. What’s a “peak” anyway? How does one judge”peakiness”? I poured the resulting froth into the cake pan, presuming it would rise during cooking (don’t all cakes rise during cooking?) I took it out of the oven just as my family arrived home. The resulting half-inch high hard-pan custard…jerky…would forever be known as my Angel Food Flop. Egg whites and I have never gotten along, since.
One of the things I’ve always wanted to be able to make is a nice, flavorful, crystal clear beef stock. A consommé, to be precise. Years ago, I went to my copy of La Varenne Pratique to find out how to do it. Great. Egg whites. I tried again and again, and all I got was cloudy stock and a couple of wasted eggs. Or worse. Enter Julia Child.
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Posted in Food, Low Tech | Tagged beef stock, consommé, cooking, Food, french dip sandwich, Julia Child, mastering the art of french cooking | 8 Comments »
I am not a procrastinator, in general, but I do indulge in what some might call “creative prioritization.” You know: the fun stuff first, the not-so-fun stuff next, the tedious and boring bits dead last. I can euphemistically refer to this as putting the “most bang for buck” items up front or go all corporate and say I’m going for “the low-hanging fruit” first, but I’m not fooling anyone, least of all myself.
I’m just delaying the inevitable, and in editing, the inevitable includes the dreaded, stupefying, and largely useless practice of Spell-check and Grammar-check. I’d skip the whole damned process if it consistently came up with nothing, but it doesn’t.
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Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Hi Tech, Writing | Tagged Beneath a Wounded Sky, creative writing, editing, Fallen Cloud Saga, FC:V, novel writing, self-publishing, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips | 6 Comments »
Yesterday (okay, very early this morning) I submitted the final content for FC books IV and V to the CreateSpace “submission review” process. As I’ve mentioned before, this process finds a lot of formatting errors such as text beyond margins, low-DPI graphics, unembedded fonts, and so forth. It’s a good review process, and it encourages the author—through feedback, easy-to-follow help guides, and forum discussions—to submit the highest quality work to achieve the highest quality product.
Up ’til now, I’ve assumed this was a mechanical review process, but after the response I got today, I’m not so sure.
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Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Hi Tech, Writing | Tagged amazon, Beneath a Wounded Sky, CreateSpace, creative writing, editing, Fallen Cloud Saga, FC:V, novel writing, publishing, self-publishing, Writing, writing tips | 4 Comments »
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