It Started with a Journal

Welp, I have reached the stage of my cold that I dread the most... wherein I cannot smell or taste anything. :( Sadly I did not discover this until I was in the shower, using some of the awesome Lush stuff that adelagia got me for Christmas. What a waste!! I held my loofah to my face and was like, "LET ME SMELL YOUUUUUUUUUUUU" but even inhaling as deeply as I could, I smelled nothing. Cry.

In positive news, my sense of melodrama is as healthy as ever.

13oct, I have not yet tried your onion and honey thing. Mostly because it sounds really disgusting. But now that I haven't got a sense of taste, maybe it's time.

So. Whipped feta. How come I never knew that's a thing? I love Mediterranean food, and Greek fries, but until the other night at Vios, I'd never heard of or had whipped feta. It was AH-MAZING. It came with their bucket of fries. I don't know how they get it to be that consistency (almost like ranch dressing), while retaining a lovely, strong feta flavor. Recipes I've searched for online typically call for mixing feta with cream cheese or yogurt, and I actually tried it with Greek yogurt today, but it didn't work. It was just too thick. With 4oz of feta, I should have used maybe 2 tbsp of yogurt... but that hardly did anything to turn it into a spread, so I used a whopping 6oz of yogurt. I even tried to add extra liquid using olive oil and lemon juice, but nothing worked. :/ And the result was something that was far too tart (even with my muted taste buds, I could tell), and still thicker than what I had the other night. I don't see how cream cheese is going to help with the consistency, though this does look pretty damn good. Anyway, now I have what basically tastes like a very flavorful sour cream, which isn't bad, but it's not the whipped feta I was aiming for. Sigh.

You know what's oddly satisfying? Frankenstein soap. You know all the little odds and ends of soaps that you've used down to a small sliver, then couldn't be bothered to use the rest and opened up a new bar? When those slivers (and sometimes I get lazy before the sliver point) reach critical mass, I like to soften them up, then smoosh them into one super Frankenstein soap, which makes it big enough to use again, and has all sort of interesting scents (if you use different Lush soaps like I do!).

Another cool knife tip that has nothing to do with chopping or maintenance: You know how, after you mince garlic, your fingers totally smell like garlic? For hours? And no amount of soap or scrubbing makes it go away? Try this: Rub your fingers on the non-blade section of your knife for a few seconds. The smell will be GONE. It's crazy. Mataio told us about it after we chopped some garlic, and I was like, "No way, that is not even a real thing." Except IT TOTALLY WORKED. So. bizarre!

The other day, Cookie Mule said to me, "Hey, do you know so and so? Apparently he makes his own bacon, and if you know him well, he'll even give you some." Well, I took this statement as a personal challenge. Make my own bacon? Of course it's occurred to me. I have all sorts of cookbooks, including Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing and The River Cottage Meat Book and Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, so the thought has definitely crossed my mind once or twice. However, like pasta, while it looks incredibly simple, I've still never done it due to the preconceived notion that it's difficult for the home cook to do. However, Cookie Mule's comment spurred me to action (and maybe I'm still feeling good about conquering pasta), and yesterday I bought myself two fatty slabs of pork belly. I made a dry cure, and in 7 days I should have myself some honest to goodness bacon. I'll let you guys know how it goes. ( Edit: The pork belly in question! )

I'm rewatching Downton Abbey S1. I started watching S2 and realized that I had no idea who most of the characters were anymore or what had happened to them the previous season. One thing that came back to me immediately upon rewatching episode 1 is how much I loathe Mary. Also, I didn't notice as much the first time how often the "downstairs" folk ask stupid questions they'd probably actually know the answer to IRL, so as to tell the audience what's going on. I did notice some of it the first time around, because I already knew the answers from a) reading Jane Austen/historical romance novels; and b) watching Gosford Park, but this time it seemed like it was every other sentence.

Country, like rap, is one of those music genres that I generally don't care for. There are exceptions to every rule, so there are some country music artists/songs that I really enjoy, but they are very few. So Lady Gaga once again proves how awesome she is (to me) that she can make me LOVE a song like You and I, a rock and roll song but with strong country influences. The first time I heard it I didn't even know it was her. I just heard this AWESOME song and was like, what/who is this?! I was as stunned as I was back when I learned that The Edge of Glory was Gaga too. Long may she reign.

I. am. EXHAUSTED. I think it's from a general lack of sleep as well as the big Indian feast last night. ( Griping. )

After dinner, we played Bananagrams, which is a variation of Scrabble in which everyone does their own individual crosswords. I actually like it better than Scrabble, which I suck at, even though I love almost all other word games.

I'm looking forward to tonight, because at long last, it's time for our long-awaited fried chicken dinner at Spring Hill. Yes, K. is going to break her dietary restriction for this one night because we have been planning this for so long. You can only get this dinner by reservation, and it's intended for 4. We have: me, my mom, and K., then D. and the kids will count as our "fourth" because between all of them they'll probably eat one person's worth, since the kids don't eat much and D. won't eat the chicken.

Weather wise it was really lovely this weekend, and my indoor seedlings shot up. It might have been too late for my outdoor plants; even the tomato starters are looking iffy, and the basil is long gone. If the tomato plants die I will have to go back to Flower World and get more, because I really would love to have Sun Gold tomatoes. The weather's gone back to being crappy though, and according to weather.com's 10-day forecast there are still a lot of clouds and showers in the future, sigh, so who knows when I can actually plant any of the seedlings in the bed.

I know about the big shitstorm about fanfic resulting from some posts I guess Diana Gabaldon made in her blog, and following that, GRRM's comments, which I've actually read. I have a lot to say about it, but don't know yet how to put thought into words. I'd like to respond in a coherent manner that might actually bring SOME understanding for what is, to them, completely inexplicable. I enjoy both of their work (well, I enjoyed DG's Outlander, but the sequel to it left me rather indifferent to the rest of the books) and though it shouldn't, the idea that they're both out there reviling fanfic bothers me. Maybe because, in the case of GRRM, I fear that he'll be even LESS motivated to finish ASoIaF, if he's resentful of/wigged out by the idea of people taking his characters and universe and making it their own. Most importantly, it's a reflection on ME as a fanfic writer. If I don't say anything, if I can't articulate why I think it's a perfectly legitimate form of expression, then it'll be like I agree that it's wrong and yet I do it anyway. I DON'T think it's wrong. I don't think it's necessarily cool to do if an author has expressly said that they don't want people writing fanfic of their universe(s) -- I would say to respect those wishes -- but that still doesn't mean it's inherently wrong. I just don't think that authors who oppose it, especially those who oppose it as vehemently as DG and GRRM do, really understand it or why people do it.