Entry tags:
How am I attracted to you? Doesn't matter. I am. Go.
Normally I look forward to Fridays, but this week I was looking forward to Thursday, because today is the pre-screening of The Martian! Wheeeee! Should be fun. We've been told that there will be no snacks provided. Boooo, what sort of ghetto screening is this, amirite? What they should do is give us cold, raw potatoes to eat, just to keep it real (on Mars). ;)
=======
Speaking of eating, my mom and I have been trying to eat at home more often. She really dislikes cooking, and I don't have time to cook, so we end up eating out a LOT, which is both expensive and unhealthy. Anyway, there are some dishes she makes that I always liked as a kid (she does traditional Chinese cooking, usually), and since I'm a more adventurous cook than she is, there are some dishes I've made that she's never attempted. I really liked what we had last night!
There's only two of us, so we keep things fairly simple -- rice, soup, a meat dish, a veg dish, and maybe a third dish.
Usually we make brown rice, because we're trying to cut down on our white rice intake, but I'm not really a fan of rice, period, so it's sort of a chore to have to make it -- washing it, dragging out the rice cooker, washing the implements afterward, etc. And brown rice is more of a pain because it takes more prep work with soaking and a longer cooking time.
One thing we're doing is cooking a dish with the rice. It's convenient because you open up the rice cooker as it's just about done but still has water, then you place the dish on top of the rice in there to steam with the rice as it finishes cooking. (Obviously, you have to use a dish that is small enough to fit in the cooker, but it also has to be small enough that you can conveniently get it out while it's really hot. We use a small, square Pyroceram dish.) still Since you're already making the rice, you get an extra dish out of it with minimal effort, and you're not trying to cook three things at once on the stove. There are two dishes we like to make in this way: Japanese eggplant or salmon bones. With the eggplant, we just slice it thin, about half an inch pieces, then sprinkle with salt and drizzle with sesame oil. With salmon bones (preferably salmon neck, but we haven't been able to find this cut on its own in the Seattle area... more common in LA), just salt the crap out of it. My mom thinks it tastes best really salty -- you ARE eating it with rice -- but I like it slightly less salty. It does need to be salty, though, as that's what really brings out the flavor of the salmon. It's surprisingly tasty for being such a simple dish. No oil necessary because the salmon itself will exude oil, and the resulting flesh is super silky.
Our veggie dishes are usually really simple... quickly blanching greens of some kind, or stir-frying broccoli or the like. Blanching is simple, fast, and convenient. What we do depends on how the meat dish is being made. If it's a braised dish, or made in the oven, then the veg can be stir fried. If it's a dish that needs the wok, then we blanch. This is so that we can have all the dishes ready around the same time, as they're not competing for the same resources. (Last night we blanched broccoli.) The veggie is then sparsely drizzled with oyster sauce (my mom likes this vegetarian mushroom kind that's actually a decent substitute for real oyster sauce).
The meat dish last night was beef with bitter melon in black bean sauce. Made it using the guidelines from this vid:
This guy is a retired chef, and I have enjoyed many of his videos. :D Anyway, the dish came out fantastic. I sliced the beef a little too thinly (my mom told me to!), but the flavor was otherwise authentic/outstanding. Next time I might steam the bitter melon a little longer so that it gets a little softer. Also, while eating, after awhile it got to be too bitter for me. My mom loves bitter stuff so she kept going.
Finally, there's the soup. It not an absolutely necessary component to the meal, but it's a very satisfying way to end the meal, and it lasts days. Basically my mom makes a big pot of brothy soup (usually using pork bones or chicken or some combination of the two -- ox tail is my favorite -- along with cabbage of some kind, carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, etc.), and it's really a nice coda at the end. The soup lasts a few days, so the work that goes into it (long simmering plus prep work) at least doesn't need to be repeated every time. The funniest thing with this last soup was that we didn't have any cabbage, so my mom used Brussels sprouts instead, because they resemble little cabbages, so she figured it was at least similar. I told her I didn't like mushy Brussels sprouts -- somehow they are terrible that way, and yet delicious when stir fried -- but she thought I was exaggerating. I choked down four of the little mushy suckers, because she gets ultra sensitive about perceived criticism these days, but they were horrible. Then she finally had a bowl of soup, and after taking one bite of a Brussels sprout, she set it aside as trash!!!!! She was like, how are they so terrible?! And I could only say I TOLD YOU SO. It was pretty funny.
Her: But soft cabbage is so delicious!
Me: Brussels sprouts aren't cabbage!
Her: They look like it.
Me: Just because they look like little cabbages doesn't mean that that's what they are.
Meanwhile, mushy Brussels sprouts is probably why they get such a bad rap. They should not be cooked too long!
=======
My piano finally arrived! Can't remember if I said that already. Anyway, here's a picture of it sitting in the basement:
I hope it's going to be okay there once winter hits... so cold and damp. :/ In a couple of weeks, after it's had time to acclimate, a piano technician is coming out to tune it. It probably also needs a good cleaning, which I'm hoping he'll be able to do at the same time. I thought about putting it off until I moved to a new house, but who knows when that'll be. And I'd like to tinker around on it, but am a little afraid of playing it right now given all the delicate parts and knowing there's prob a ton of dust and crap on the inside. So might as well just get it tuned/cleaned and do it again later when/if I move.
=======
I have run into another snag with the story I'm working on. It's not necessarily a bad snag, but... See, last year, I was working on this YA novel that I really cranked on. At some point I got frustrated with it, didn't know how to end it, felt that the conflict was too superficial, etc. So I stopped working on it until I could "fix" it. But many, many moons passed (possibly even a whole year), and I recently set out to revamp the whole thing by coming up with a new outline. It was basically the same premise, but I changed a lot of the scenes/beats. I would try to reuse as much as I could, but it was basically going to have to be rewritten from scratch.
The other night, I went to my old draft to grab a scene that I could rework... and found myself completely engrossed with the story I'd written before. I loved it! It had been so long since I looked at it that it was all new to me, as if someone else had written it. And I didn't know what it was that had so bothered me about it. So it had a superficial conflict... so what?! Problems that I thought I had with the characters and their interactions, I did not feel at all on reread.
So... I'm not sure what's next. I really like the outline I came up with the second time around, but now I think I'm going to try and rework it so that I can reuse almost everything from before, only give it a little more structure, change some details I want changed, and write a few more new scenes (and scrap a couple of the old ones). It's work I did not expect to have to do, but at the same time, it also means that the story, once I've done all this, will be way more written than I had previously been thinking, which means less heavy lifting on the writing side. Which is AWESOME.
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jade_okelani asked if the two stories were different enough that they could just be two different stories, but the answer is no. The premise is exactly the same. But now one is basically an AU of the other. :))) I just have to make it now so that they are in the same U.
=======
Subject line: Jake Peralta to Amy Santiago in Brooklyn Nine-Nine 3x01
=======
Speaking of eating, my mom and I have been trying to eat at home more often. She really dislikes cooking, and I don't have time to cook, so we end up eating out a LOT, which is both expensive and unhealthy. Anyway, there are some dishes she makes that I always liked as a kid (she does traditional Chinese cooking, usually), and since I'm a more adventurous cook than she is, there are some dishes I've made that she's never attempted. I really liked what we had last night!
There's only two of us, so we keep things fairly simple -- rice, soup, a meat dish, a veg dish, and maybe a third dish.
Usually we make brown rice, because we're trying to cut down on our white rice intake, but I'm not really a fan of rice, period, so it's sort of a chore to have to make it -- washing it, dragging out the rice cooker, washing the implements afterward, etc. And brown rice is more of a pain because it takes more prep work with soaking and a longer cooking time.
One thing we're doing is cooking a dish with the rice. It's convenient because you open up the rice cooker as it's just about done but still has water, then you place the dish on top of the rice in there to steam with the rice as it finishes cooking. (Obviously, you have to use a dish that is small enough to fit in the cooker, but it also has to be small enough that you can conveniently get it out while it's really hot. We use a small, square Pyroceram dish.) still Since you're already making the rice, you get an extra dish out of it with minimal effort, and you're not trying to cook three things at once on the stove. There are two dishes we like to make in this way: Japanese eggplant or salmon bones. With the eggplant, we just slice it thin, about half an inch pieces, then sprinkle with salt and drizzle with sesame oil. With salmon bones (preferably salmon neck, but we haven't been able to find this cut on its own in the Seattle area... more common in LA), just salt the crap out of it. My mom thinks it tastes best really salty -- you ARE eating it with rice -- but I like it slightly less salty. It does need to be salty, though, as that's what really brings out the flavor of the salmon. It's surprisingly tasty for being such a simple dish. No oil necessary because the salmon itself will exude oil, and the resulting flesh is super silky.
Our veggie dishes are usually really simple... quickly blanching greens of some kind, or stir-frying broccoli or the like. Blanching is simple, fast, and convenient. What we do depends on how the meat dish is being made. If it's a braised dish, or made in the oven, then the veg can be stir fried. If it's a dish that needs the wok, then we blanch. This is so that we can have all the dishes ready around the same time, as they're not competing for the same resources. (Last night we blanched broccoli.) The veggie is then sparsely drizzled with oyster sauce (my mom likes this vegetarian mushroom kind that's actually a decent substitute for real oyster sauce).
The meat dish last night was beef with bitter melon in black bean sauce. Made it using the guidelines from this vid:
This guy is a retired chef, and I have enjoyed many of his videos. :D Anyway, the dish came out fantastic. I sliced the beef a little too thinly (my mom told me to!), but the flavor was otherwise authentic/outstanding. Next time I might steam the bitter melon a little longer so that it gets a little softer. Also, while eating, after awhile it got to be too bitter for me. My mom loves bitter stuff so she kept going.
Finally, there's the soup. It not an absolutely necessary component to the meal, but it's a very satisfying way to end the meal, and it lasts days. Basically my mom makes a big pot of brothy soup (usually using pork bones or chicken or some combination of the two -- ox tail is my favorite -- along with cabbage of some kind, carrots, tomatoes, mushrooms, etc.), and it's really a nice coda at the end. The soup lasts a few days, so the work that goes into it (long simmering plus prep work) at least doesn't need to be repeated every time. The funniest thing with this last soup was that we didn't have any cabbage, so my mom used Brussels sprouts instead, because they resemble little cabbages, so she figured it was at least similar. I told her I didn't like mushy Brussels sprouts -- somehow they are terrible that way, and yet delicious when stir fried -- but she thought I was exaggerating. I choked down four of the little mushy suckers, because she gets ultra sensitive about perceived criticism these days, but they were horrible. Then she finally had a bowl of soup, and after taking one bite of a Brussels sprout, she set it aside as trash!!!!! She was like, how are they so terrible?! And I could only say I TOLD YOU SO. It was pretty funny.
Her: But soft cabbage is so delicious!
Me: Brussels sprouts aren't cabbage!
Her: They look like it.
Me: Just because they look like little cabbages doesn't mean that that's what they are.
Meanwhile, mushy Brussels sprouts is probably why they get such a bad rap. They should not be cooked too long!
=======
My piano finally arrived! Can't remember if I said that already. Anyway, here's a picture of it sitting in the basement:
I hope it's going to be okay there once winter hits... so cold and damp. :/ In a couple of weeks, after it's had time to acclimate, a piano technician is coming out to tune it. It probably also needs a good cleaning, which I'm hoping he'll be able to do at the same time. I thought about putting it off until I moved to a new house, but who knows when that'll be. And I'd like to tinker around on it, but am a little afraid of playing it right now given all the delicate parts and knowing there's prob a ton of dust and crap on the inside. So might as well just get it tuned/cleaned and do it again later when/if I move.
=======
I have run into another snag with the story I'm working on. It's not necessarily a bad snag, but... See, last year, I was working on this YA novel that I really cranked on. At some point I got frustrated with it, didn't know how to end it, felt that the conflict was too superficial, etc. So I stopped working on it until I could "fix" it. But many, many moons passed (possibly even a whole year), and I recently set out to revamp the whole thing by coming up with a new outline. It was basically the same premise, but I changed a lot of the scenes/beats. I would try to reuse as much as I could, but it was basically going to have to be rewritten from scratch.
The other night, I went to my old draft to grab a scene that I could rework... and found myself completely engrossed with the story I'd written before. I loved it! It had been so long since I looked at it that it was all new to me, as if someone else had written it. And I didn't know what it was that had so bothered me about it. So it had a superficial conflict... so what?! Problems that I thought I had with the characters and their interactions, I did not feel at all on reread.
So... I'm not sure what's next. I really like the outline I came up with the second time around, but now I think I'm going to try and rework it so that I can reuse almost everything from before, only give it a little more structure, change some details I want changed, and write a few more new scenes (and scrap a couple of the old ones). It's work I did not expect to have to do, but at the same time, it also means that the story, once I've done all this, will be way more written than I had previously been thinking, which means less heavy lifting on the writing side. Which is AWESOME.
jade_okelani asked if the two stories were different enough that they could just be two different stories, but the answer is no. The premise is exactly the same. But now one is basically an AU of the other. :))) I just have to make it now so that they are in the same U.=======
Subject line: Jake Peralta to Amy Santiago in Brooklyn Nine-Nine 3x01