worryingly jolly batman

First, a request: G/T (a local fancon for those of you from further locations) is coming up (*crowd goes wild*) and I offered to curate a vidshow themed around "Lord King Bad Vids". I might have fewer of these than I actually thought because some of my vid collection has gone missing somewhere, so I put the call out: what are your favourites? Any fandom, any pairing, any character, whatever you like.

Also, a meme.

Via a few people on my DW list:

Bold the ones you have and use at least once a year, underline the ones you use at least once a month, italicize the ones you have and don't use, strike through the ones you have had but got rid of. And (my suggestion) add any items that you have that aren't on the list:

I wonder how many pasta machines, breadmakers, juicers, blenders, deep fat fryers, egg boilers, melon ballers, sandwich makers, pastry brushes, cheese knives, electric woks, miniature salad spinners, griddle pans, jam funnels, meat thermometers, filleting knives, egg poachers, cake stands, garlic crushers, martini glasses, tea strainersbamboo steamers, pizza stones, coffee grinders, milk frothers, piping bags [actually I broke them all but I've not replaced them on the grounds that piping is not for me], banana stands, fluted pastry wheels, tagine dishes, conical strainers, rice cookers, steam cookers, pressure cookers, slow cookers, spaetzle makers, cookie presses (it belongs to the flatmate and as far as I know no-one's ever used it), gravy strainers, double boilers (bains marie), sukiyaki stoves, ice cream makers, fondue sets, healthy-grills, home smokers, tempura sets, tortilla presses, electric whisks, apple corers, apple slicers, electric skillets, meat tenderizers, mortar and pestle, pastry blenders, french-fry cutters, waffle makers, candy thermometers, stick blenders and vegetable choppers [I am interpreting this as a mandolin] languish dustily at the back of the nation's cupboards?

I have a tiny kitchen but if I could own any of these (and would definitely use them though who knows where I'd put them): a full-on food processor, a pasta machine (I love making my own pasta but rolling out is a pain without a machine so I hardly do it), a salad spinner and an electric skillet. Also I'd really like a funnel but I don't know what a jam funnel is? Perhaps a metal funnel to avoid melting plastic? (Or would metal be reactive to the heat? IDK.)

ETA in the interest of full disclosure: the cookie press may actually belong to me. Um, oops. Apparently I bought one and forgot about it (it's also a icing gun and I think that's what I was trying for. It's a terrible icing gun, fwiw).

What the hell is a banana stand or a fluted pastry wheel?

Finally, I said this on twitter about a hashtag game earlier that I'd like to preserve:

What I really like about #kishi: As a fatty, and also as a woman, I'm constantly told by the TV, the radio, my mother, my father, my boss what it's acceptable for me to wear. If I can get up in the morning and try to approach my wardrobe with a spirit of adventure rather than with a spirit of shame, a spirit of what won't make me look fat today, what won't make my mother tell me seeing the shape of my body in jeans and a t-shirt makes people uncomfortable, what won't make my boss tell me my body is distracting - if instead I can think "what's fun? What's colourful? What expresses me and how I feel today? What would make me feel better about today?" or even just "what do I like about this comfortable favourite old slopping-around-home outfit", I'm going to. -- via

For context: Claudia Kishi is a character in a 90s-era pulp series about a Babysitters' Club. She is an artist and wears unusual outfits (very!) which are routinely described by other characters and by herself in breathless tones. Much use is made of words like "chunky", "oversize", "patterned" and "funky". Claudia *always* looks fabulous, even when wearing a burlap sack. A twitter buddy of mine started a hashtag game, #kishi, in which you tweet the outfit you're wearing as if you were Claudia. Trackpants and a t-shirt? "Oversized t-shirt and billowy pants". Preppiest outfit on the face of the planet? "Chunky pearl earrings and oversized shirt". I had an argument today with someone who described the game as "ludicrous vain faux-ironic hipster bullshit", someone who felt that it seemed like a contest. Now, I have some sympathy with people who would just generally prefer not to think about what they're wearing and find the game upsetting for that reason but that's not where he was coming from and it pissed me off and that's the context for that tweet.

I didn't take photos of this or time it, but I was really pleased with how the meal I made last night turned out, so imma record it here in the hopes that I repeat it later.

( self-saucing pork chops )

Relevant to everyone's interests, today's/yesterday's XKCD was laughable in kind of the opposite way to the way it usually makes me laugh. I mean, really?

ALSO: I wrote fic! It is Nikita fic! Only one of you is in that fandom and she beta-read it for me (<3) ... but hey. Outrunning the Bear is Jaden-centric and rated, IDK, PG for swears. Spoilers through 1x09.

Up next: catch up on Nikita and White Collar. Mmmm television.

I am not by nature a frugal person. In fact I'm a bit of a spendthrift, inasmuch as someone on my budget can be. However, in one area I am pretty cheap, and that area (naturally) is cooking. I don't buy brand name olive oil, I eat canned tomatoes 9 months of the year, and I don't remember the last time I cooked a meat like steak at home (and since steak at home would be a serious event, you better believe I remember it most of the time). I save that extravagant eating for when I'm not home (even though, reasonably, that's much less cost-effective). I am the past master at substitution, I hate doing a shopping trip specifically to try a recipe and will avoid for ages cooking something that I can't make from the typical contents of my pantry.

All this being the case, it will not surprise you to hear that separating eggs makes me crazy. Yes, there are many things that one can do to use up egg whites or egg yolks, but frankly in the moment I rarely have the time or inclination to do these. Who wants to make meringues on top of whatever it was you used five egg yolks for? And egg yolks are even worse: I do like custard, but there are seasons in which it just isn't appropriate. Plus yolks don't freeze like whites do, and I have all these icing recipes that ask for one egg white. It makes me go a little wild-eyed (OK, not an unusual expression for me.) So one of my ongoing life quests is to find many recipes that pair well with each other, in glorious culinary polyphony. Here's a pairing I came up with this weekend that's going straight into my repertoire.

Summer Pasta & Chocolate Meringue Melts

I think these recipes go with each other rather nicely as a summer menu, although admittedly I think pretty much anything goes with these biscuits. It'd be a nice date meal (I think. What's dating like? It's been so long I barely remember.)

These two recipes are what I made for dinner today. I made the biscuits and then decided to do something with the yolks, which I think is a pretty convenient order. I very slightly adapted the biscuits from Brownie Points, who originally got it from Alice Medrich.

( guh-orgeous )

The pasta I MacGuyvered a bit. Yesterday I made fresh pasta for the first time in my life, inspired by these really good videos, and I pretty much made it to that recipe. I liked it because it's not focused on specific quantities, but on the right textures; use one egg for every person you're serving, salt in proportion to the eggs, and play the flour by ear. I'm guessing that, like bread, this method means that different humidity levels are easily accommodated. I also really liked that it didn't call for a pasta machine - as it happens we do have one, but I dislike the concept of requiring a machine for something people have been doing by hand for a very long time. Apart from anything, I don't have the cupboard space for a pasta machine, an icecream machine, a pastry blender, a food processor, a Kitchenaid, etc etc. Anyway, so this is what I made yesterday, and it was very very tasty, although slightly thick.

Today I was looking at my two left-over egg yolks and I thought, I wonder if you can do pasta with just yolks. I googled and hit Seven-Yolk Pasta Dough at the Smitten Kitchen (I love Deb, so should you), which seemed pretty promising. So I went ahead and made pasta with two egg yolks and two eggs. I can't give you exact quantities, but I probably started with a mound of about a cup and a half of flour? Maybe two cups? I did use the pasta roller for this lot, although I actually found that I didn't like the end result so much - I think I went a little too thin for my taste, and the pasta ended up kind of unforgivingly thin, meaning it cooked really REALLY rapidly. This was a big pain. However, the pasta itself was still delicious and totally worth the effort, and it was faster than rolling by hand. I urge you guys to watch the videos, read the recipes, and have a play; it's no more time-consuming than making bread and just as fun. I started making the pasta after 7:30, and was eating by ten to nine.

I made farfalle (bow tie) pasta, which is really super easy and looks cute, as well as some fettucine that is sitting in my fridge.

Bizarrely, I got my sauce recipe from some weight-loss forum, I guess because cottage cheese is a diet food? Apparently? (Really? IDK. It is delicious, though.)

- Side anecdote: after reading a series of posts at THM by Maia (and one or two by Anne Else, a food blogger I also love) on "Good" Food "Bad" Food (start 28 August) in which she makes the salutory point that a food by itself doesn't count as good or bad, I felt pretty weird reading a bunch of posters sent to a Labour party electoral office made by primary school students in which they thanked the LP for fruit in schools, saying things like "fruit is good because eating it makes you skinny." And not once or twice: three or four times on each of three posters, made by three different rooms - Room 2, Room 4 and Room 5. Really? This is what we want to teach our seven year olds - that "fruit makes you skinny"? That that's what important about a balanced diet? I found it pretty sickening. I am a fan of fruit generally and like every good freedom-hating liberal I'm a fan of educating people about the relative merits of different foods, but I'm not sure "it's good cos it makes you skinny" is the right message - in fact, I know it's not. The word "skinny" was specifically used more often than the word "nutrition" and about as often as the word "health". This is a bit of a problem (apart from anything else, eating fruit is not going to magically make you skinny! At all! That's just not true!) Oh well, another generation with a dysfunctional relationship to food, par for the course, I suppose. (Note: I feel like as a fat feminist I need to disclaimer this stuff: I don't think that people who are slim have a dysfunctional relationship to food and I don't partake in that "real women" bullshit. I have a dysfunctional relationship to food all on my lonesome (not the kind that makes you slim).)

SO ANYWAY. I did find this recipe on a diet site but it is a pretty delicious summer recipe and since fresh tomatoes are finally a) a decent price b) ripe in the supermarkets, I absolutely had to make it. With some variations.

Summer Pasta
Serves a very hungry 1, moderately hungry 2, 3 or 4 as a side, I suppose.

Ingredients
2 tomatoes
fresh basil
1 clove of garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 cup cottage cheese
salt & pepa
pasta

( method )

More vids! I don't think I'm going to be very talky today, though.

Day 10 - A vid that makes you laugh
United States of Pop, by llenka
Community; dance moves; warning for very fast, very highly-lit cutting that even I, who have no vision issues, find a bit difficult to watch; spoilers for the whole season
( Read more... )

Day 11 - An AMV you love
This one was tough for me because I'm not at all into anime and the only AMV I've ever really liked is Failed Experiments in Video Editing, which is really good and funny and I'm sure if you're a vidder you'd find it even funnier.

However, I don't really feel that's enough of a sample for me to rec AMVs with authority, so instead I'm going to rec a vid that I love that I could fit into one of these categories:

Big City Life, by lithiumdoll (You can get it here, I couldn't find a vidpost.)
Dark Angel; Max; spoilers for the whole show; violence.

( Dark Angel spoilers )

Day 12 - A relationship vid you love
( three under cut )

And one thing about food:

So the other day I prepared and froze some World Peace Cookies, except I stupidly left out the chocolate chips so I was like, wow, they're gonna suck. (protip: even without the chips these biscuits are still pretty great, I was just making excuses.) BUT then I was thinking about something I was reading on Debbie Does Edmonds the other day about yoyos and thinking how GOOD the icing that sandwiches together a yoyo is, and I thought - ooh, yeah. That would be awesome.

And it was.

Butter Icing

50g butter, very soft
1/2 C icing sugar
2 T custard powder - USians and other non-Commonwealthers, I believe the standard sub is vanilla instant pudding mix, although that's usually in Nanaimo bars and IDK how it'd work here.

1. Beat all together
2. Enjoy on delicious cookies.

A highly recommended combination, although you really can only eat one.

Leave a comment saying "Harmony" (or "Drusilla" or your favourite vampire name, or "Sassy" or your favourite ship name. Sassy, by the way, is the pairing smoosh for Sam/Castiel, and I think it is HILARIOUS. It goes so well with their matching bitchfaces.)
- I'll respond by asking you five questions.
- Update your journal with the answers to your questions.
- Include this explanation and offer to ask other people questions.

I got questions from sixth_light and lady_larla.

( questions from Lucy: The Real World, NZ blogosphere drama, best book I read lately, and food. )

( Questions from Tas: slebs, books again, time travel, Sarah Palin, and a seriously overworked answer to a music question. with uploads! )

That was so much fun imma do that other meme that I've never done: ask me anything. (Anon commenting is on at LJ and DW.) I don't promise to answer everything, but I'll at least think about it!