Lynn Strong

So, uh, it’s been…

yeah, it’s. Uh. Insert the thousand yard stare here.

Setting aside the dumpster fire… I seem to have a finite capacity for word generation, much of which has been soaked by work, organizing efforts, required social media, and required newsletters. Oh, and also in April I lost my restraint and kinda wrote 50,000 words in 8 days. It doesn’t look like it was chosen for the pitchfest I was hoping for, but I have a first draft and hope that I can polish it enough to get it out this year? It’s not Chai and Charmcraft, that one seems to be requiring all three books to be written in unison in order to make the prophecies work. But it’s got familiar characters from Chai and Cat-tales, and I sincerely hope that I can get one or the other published by October?

Anyhow, I am scraping the bottom of the spoon drawer more than usual. So here’s the current bookish news and the recipe!

The paperback news:

Chai and Cat-tales now has a paperback edition available from Amazon thanks to Joan Grey’s kind Seeing-Eye Human services of cover wrangling!

I’m sorry it’s only Amazon, in the current situation, but Amazon continues to be 98% of my sales. I have not sorted out the complex interdependencies needed to get paperbacks available in other locations, but the ebooks cdo ontinue to be available everywhere. I’m doing as much as I can, I promise. But I figure more people would rather have a new book written than to have the rest of my spoons going into small business bureaucracy.

(Celia Lake has a helpful explainer on the ins and outs of indie publishing in various venues. The short form: The more venues you add, the more micro-differences you have to manage, sometimes one at a time, sometimes via different stacking platforms’ dependencies. I added itch.io under pressure a month ago and still can’t get paid from there. And the time I spend on juggling infrastructure is time I’m not making or editing new words.)

The Cozy the Day Away Sale May 16:

Looking for more cozies, whether ebook, paperback, audiobook, or cuneiform tablets* ? The Cozy the Day Away sale is back! On May 16, check out https://cozyfantasysale.promisepress.org for at least 70 and possibly over 100 cozy fantasies on sale in as many formats as we can manage.

(*Note: cuneiform tablets not yet dug up, but who knows, weirder stuff has happened this year already, I am not counting anything out at this point)

The recipe: Quick pickles

I have lost track of which of the historic cookbooks I first saw “oh wow, that looks like my mother’s pickle recipe” in, but when scratching my brain for something to quick-recipe for a blog post, quick pickles made the top of my list.

There’s a fundamental difference between quick pickles (meant to be refrigerated and eaten within a week-ish) and preservation pickles (with sterilized jars and sealing and carefully calculated chemistry). I sure don’t have the spare wattage for carefully calculated chemistry and pressure canning right now, but quick pickles of many species are delicious, and they’re all over the world.

I learned the basic version at home when I was about 8 and we were having summer picnics with the cousins, but every time I look around I find more variations on the same theme, ranging from Mediterranean areas like Lebanon and Jordan and Turkey to Vietnam to Japan, and bouncing back and forth in time.

The general idea:

• One part vinegar
  (white, apple cider, and red wine may benefit from dilution; rice vinegar probably wouldn’t need diluting)
• Zero to one part water depending on how sharp you like the liquid
• A pinch of salt
• Sugar if you like a sweet note in your pickles
• Additional spices to taste: Sumac, black pepper, lemon rind, mustard seeds, anything that sounds tasty

The process:

• Chop up a bunch of vegetables
  • Cucumber and onion are classic together
  • If you use a red onion, sumac, and/or a pre-pickled beet you can get a lovely pink color.
  • Carrots, radishes, daikon, and cabbage have all seen use in various places and times
  • If you’re feeling fancy, you can heat up the brine to pour it over and soften the vegetables, or you can blanch the vegetables and put them in the cooled brine
• Throw them in your vinegar brine.
  • You want enough brine for your vegetables to be covered in a glass jar or to float in a bowl. Depending on how many veg and how big a bowl, your “one part” measuring unit could be one to three cups of vinegar and water.
• Leave the vegetables in the brine for at least half an hour if your intended meal is that day, but overnight in the fridge lets them mellow together.
• Eat within a few days. Refrigerate when not eating.
• Bonus mini-recipe: A half cup to a cup of your brine with a couple tablespoons of olive oil and a couple of sugar makes a tasty pasta salad when you add cooked pasta and cherry tomatoes to any leftover quick pickles.

Sorry for the delay, friends, this year has been A Lot. I’ll try not to let it go six months between posts next time…