Lynn Strong

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Category: Characters

  • Book release: “Haroun and the Study of Mischief” Gets Unleashed!

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    Or at least it does if I have correctly flipped all the switches and clicked all the clickables!

    Haroun’s book is really personal for me. I share disability spectrums with both Shai Madhur and Haroun, and I have a lot of friends who share intersectional communities, so the afterstuff is longer than it was for Chai and Cat-tales, but the story itself is also well over twice as long even before I added in 50-some pages of recipes.

    I am also drowning in small business minutiae on very little sleep; please pardon typos. Yesterday (9/6 as I’m prewriting this), I tried to do the marketing grind and also port my whole mailing list to a new provider because the current one decided this was the perfect month to halve their free tier and start charging more than I earn in an average month from book sales. And my brain just would not cope. Neither would my body or my eyes. So instead of being on the laptop juggling spreadsheets and logins, I was flat on my back with my tablet two inches from my nose, gleefully chatting zucchini/courgettes with Lacrima Mundi, QuiteBrief, Matt Mason, and Steve Hugh Westenra.

    QuiteBrief and I both live in what I colloquially refer to as zucchini country, meaning the part of the world where at certain times of year you know you must lock your car, your porch, and/or your garage to prevent drive-by depositing of boxes of tomatoes and various gourds of a size that double as blunt instruments which were discovered under overgrown leaves by avid gardeners.

    I have had to deal with 20 pounds of assorted squash in an entirely too short time window, and so zucchini bread, many soups, many stir fries, and mad fusion crossover food like potato-zucchini fritters and Carmarthenshire Welsh-meets-Korean variants on stwmp have made it into my experimental recipe collection. Matt has some delicious looking Greek variations in that thread and QuiteBrief’s chocolate zucchini bread also sounds intriguing.

    We also bonded over a mutual appreciation of shiso, which features prominently in both Japanese and Korean food, and it makes a delightful substitute for mint with a delicate pink color (even when you use the green shiso variant) in sekanjabin. Unfortunately it doesn’t dry very well, but it’s essential in Japanese umeboshi pickles (at least in my opinion). Sekanjabin uses up a lot more of it than umeboshi do, though. I’ve also considered a shiso pesto sort of notion to blend shiso leaves with an olive and sesame oil blend and freeze in ice cubes for later use. (At some point I’m going to blog the medieval form of za’atar from Haroun’s bonus recipe collection, which is basically pesto made with thyme and walnuts instead of basil and pine nuts, and this is a note to future me to come back and link this in.)

    I confess the chat did not make my small business obligations any shorter but it was a joy and a relief to just talk about food nerdery because I wanted to, not to grind more social media marketing performances because I was obligated to.

    And since I have 50 pages of not-yet-blogged recipes from Haroun to choose from, here’s one of them! One of these days I really will get around to the mega-post about sharbat, sekanjabin, shrub, switchel, and various international variants on “sugar + acid + flavoring = beverage,” but in the meantime, here is a sweeter version of Najra’s Crimson Witches’ Brew.

    Grandmother’s Karkadeh for Good Boys, Good Girls, and Good Folks

    Technically karkadeh could be made as a sharbat, like the shahzada’s fragrant almond, khus, and sandalwood sharbat from Chai and Cat-tales. But Najra’s Crimson Witch’s Brew is at the other end of the scale from a sharbat even though it’s based on karkadeh. A sharbat is a sweet syrup with a particular flavor used to make drinks and sometimes dressings, karkadeh is a sweet hibiscus drink, and Najra’s Crimson Witch’s Brew is the sourest combination of hibiscus and other tart things that you’re willing to put in your mouth.

    There are folk tales that the pharaohs also drank karkadeh, but unfortunately I haven’t found any references more concrete than “everyone says”-type marketing materials. I wouldn’t be surprised if hibiscus drinks have been made and consumed for that long – I just can’t document it.

    Here are three variations based on whether you’d like to store sharbat concentrate and dilute to taste when you want to drink it or whether you’d like to make a cup at a time.

    A pitcher for a party like Haroun’s:

    • 1/4 to 1/2 cup dried hibiscus flowers
    • Up to the same amount of sugar (optional but customary)
    • 2 quarts of water
    • Optional: A lime or some lime juice
    • Optional: Some rose water and/or mint sprigs

    Simmer the hibiscus flowers and sugar together until the liquid is bright red and the sugar (if you’re using it) is dissolved, usually 5-10 minutes. (If some people in the party want sugar-free, you could also make the tisane without sugar and serve a container of simple syrup on the side for folks to use or not use as desired.)

    When the color and flavor are as strong as you like, strain the petals out of the karkadeh with a sieve or cheesecloth.

    Chill until you’re ready to serve.

    Taste when cool, because temperature makes a taste difference. You might want to adjust the tartness with lime and/or simple syrup at this point. Add any rosewater after chilling, so that the flavors won’t evaporate with the steam.

    Decorate the pitcher or glasses with mint sprigs if desired.

    (If you plan to serve it with ice, use less water in the simmering to start with, so it will be less diluted by the ice melting.)

    For sharbat concentrate to save and dilute later:

    Low spoons? Monin sells a tasty hibiscus syrup that’s likely intended for tea shops, but I drink enough chai to be my own tea shop. So if you need any encouragement to become your own tea shop too, go forth and brew with all the tasty benedictions!

    Making your own: Instead of making the sugar 1:1 with the hibiscus, you’ll want sugar 1:1 with water (or 2:1 with vinegar for some sharbats), so that you have a condensed syrup that you dilute to taste later. Unfortunately, I don’t know of a no-sugar alternative for this type of syrup.

    • Up to 3 cups sugar, separated
    • 2 cups water
    • 1/4 to 1/2 cup dried hibiscus petals (or, if you have them fresh, as many as you can wilt into the pot)
    • (Optional) Juice and zest from 1-2 limes, about 2-4 Tbsp
    • (After cooling) Rosewater and/or mint sprigs if desired

    First, simmer the hibiscus petals and any optional lime zest for 10 minutes or so, in order for the flavor and color to be extracted. Use a sieve to strain out the petals and give them a good squeeze with the back of a spoon to extract all the liquid into the simmering pot. (I recommend removing the petals before adding the sugar because of how thick the syrup will be; you’ll lose a lot of syrup if you let it cling to the petals.)

    After the petals have been removed, while the hot hibiscus tisane is still simmering, add 2 cups of sugar gradually, stirring so that the sugar dissolves. This will be a thick syrup when cooled.

    Once 2 cups of sugar are dissolved in and the liquid is clear, adjust the sweetness/tartness with the lime juice.

    You can taste test with a tablespoon of sharbat in about a quarter cup of cold water to assess whether you’d like it stronger or sharper. Don’t entirely cool the syrup until you’re sure you have the balance you want, though; you might overcorrect the tartness with the limes and need to dissolve some of that third cup of sugar in.

    When you’re satisfied with the sweet-tart balance, cool the syrup. If you like rosewater, add a splash of it now. Store in the refrigerator until ready to use.

    When serving, plan for one part syrup to three or four parts of cool water, more or less. (Again, taste testing is your friend! I use a couple tablespoons of syrup per cup of water. If you use carbonated water, you have your own karkadeh soda.)

    For a sugar-free alternative, individual servings:

    • 1-2 tsp dried hibiscus petals
    • 1-2 cups hot water
    • (Optional) Sugar-free sweetener of your choice
    • (Optional) A slice of lime or sprig of mint

    I do like hibiscus tisane without any sweetener in it as long as I don’t stack too many other bitter-makers into it. Everyone’s tastes vary, of course! You can also make a sugar-free batch at the pitcher size and offer simple syrup on the side for those who partake.

  • Oh My Dog… two weeks to unleashed!

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    So, uh. Note to future me:

    Don’t schedule three sales on your existing book, cover finalizing on two more books, final book generation on a ready-to-launch book, and writing the last 2-3 chapters on the first piece of a trilogy for the same week as the start of the university semester ever, EVER again, got it?

    (The whimpering sound you hear is the faltering remnants of my coping mechanisms.)

    I have probably gone off the wall with fifty pages of bonus recipes in the back of Haroun. But there’s a whole marketplace full of delicious nibbles, and Upaja’s cauldrons, and Grandmother’s karkadeh for good boys and good girls who are much too innocent to drink her kumiss. I wanted a lot of fun stuff to counterbalance the less-fun parts of the notes about living with multiple disabilities and how that informs both Haroun’s method of navigating a world he can’t see and Madhur’s method of navigating a world without motor vehicles when he owns very little other than his priest-cloths and his walking stick.

    Anyhow, I’m trying to wrap up the business-and-advertising pieces with my three-hours-of-sleep brain in order to unplug everything and force myself to finish off the three chapters that have been fighting me since June. It’s tricky to figure out exactly where to land Chai and Charmcraft’s plot plane when it’s the first book of a trilogy, you have to leave certain connections unresolved for the next two books to have launch points, you also have to have a satisfying-for-this-book pause point, and your main character is a prophet!

    So, if the universe does not laugh too loudly (I say while knocking on both wood and my skull to avert mishaps), I’m hoping to release (or unleash) Haroun on September 13.

    That’s if the proof prints come in acceptably and if I haven’t too badly bolloxed up the existence of both an Amazon paperback and a Draft2Digital-to-many-places-and-it-might-try-to-horn-in-on-Amazon-I-don’t-know-yet paperback with different ISBNs which I have heard both “it’s fine” and “you have set yourself up for an irretrievable and expensive identity hairball” about from different sources?

    I would very much like to make paperbacks available to libraries who won’t buy from Amazon! But if this all goes sideways, the non-Amazon edition is going to be what has to go. 95% of my sales come from Amazon, and less than 1% of those are paperback. So if I get caught in the middle of Dueling Paperbacks, 1% of 5% means I’m unlikely to sell more than one non-Amazon paperback every five to ten years, and at that point it’s not worth the bureaucratic combat.

    So, a pickle recipe sounds very, very appropriate for the current situation, wouldn’t you say? Somehow “pickle” is turning out to be frequently associated with “paperback complications” in my life!

    Salted Lemon Pickles

    Salted lemon pickles are a staple ingredient across much of the lemon-producing swathe of the world, from California to Africa to Vietnam. We find recipes from the tenth century onward, and I’m pretty sure they were making them before anyone wrote it down in a copy that survived.

    Nawal Nasrallah’s Treasure Trove’s recipe 607 in the Google Scholar preview is very like Daniel Newman’s Sultan’s Feast recipe 226, and these are very similar to how I’ve seen modern bloggers describe the making of salted lemons: cutting them in quarters and covering with salt and lemon juice and then topping with olive oil (or otherwise making sure the jar is full and airless).

    Out of spoons? You can buy jars of salt preserved lemons online as well!

    The Sultan’s Feast recipe 226 says: “Score lemons crosswise and fill the cuts with salt. Layer the lemons on a platter and weigh them down with stones. Cover and leave for three days [Kanz 607 says two]. Then take them out, put in a large glass jar and take the liquid. Dye it with saffron and take out the pips. If you want [more] lemon juice, add some. Then tightly pack everything in a jar, making sure [the lemons] are immersed. Seal with good quality olive oil, put a lid on top, and store.”

    Some key details here:

    • You need a lot of salt. Probably more salt than you’d guess. Kosher salt or sea salt is better than iodized salt for this purpose; medieval cookbook writers didn’t have iodized salt.
    • You need a lot of lemon juice too. They really do need to be submerged. A pickling weight can help keep them under the surface. (You can get the extra juice from standard lemons since you won’t be eating the peel of those.) Because the peels are included and most Western recipes assume you aren’t eating the lemon peel, you may want to look for organic lemons to avoid pesticides and preservational waxes applied to the surface of standard lemons.
    • If you can find doqq, boussera, or Meyer lemons, which are generally small and round they’ll have thinner pith and more flesh than the longer and pointier varieties of lemon.

    Christine Benlafquih of Taste of Maroc has an excellent article with helpful photographs of both homemade and market-bought salted lemons at different lengths of pickling. I admit I’m one of those not-in-plastic purists, though, and a pint or quart Mason jar is easier for me to calibrate by than “whatever your nearest empty container happens to be.”

    For one quart or two pint jars, ideally sterilized before use:

    • 6-12 Meyer lemons or similar round lemons, preferably organic
    • Additional lemon juice from whatever’s handy, possibly a cup or more
    • A couple cups kosher or sea salt (non-iodized)
    • Saffron if you’d like Even More Yellow
    • Optional but helpful: Two nesting glass or ceramic bowls that fit together neatly, or two plates with a lip to catch juices, very clean
    • Optional: Olive oil to separate the lemon juice from the top of the jar(s), if the jar lids are metal rather than glass or plastic

    Wash and dry your lemons thoroughly to remove any contaminants from travel.

    Cut your lemons in quarters, not quite all the way through.

    Scatter a couple tablespoons of salt in the bottom of your bowls if you have them, or your pickling jar(s) if you don’t.

    Coat every surface of your lemon with salt, including stuffing the insides of the cuts.

    If you have nesting bowls or plates and want to try the Sultan’s Feast edition, spread your to-be-pickled lemons among the salt in the lower bowl, then place the upper bowl on top of them and weight with a couple cans (or rocks). Keep in a cool, clean place (refrigerator recommended) for a couple of days.

    When your weights have pressed some juice out of the lemons into the salt, transfer everything – lemons, juice, salt, and all – to your pickling jars.

    (If you don’t have the nesting bowls / plates arrangement or want to get things refrigerated sooner, just begin the whole process in the pickling jars, in which case skip straight to the step below.)

    Layer salt and lemons in the jar, pressing down firmly as you go to compress them and remove empty air. Add more salt and more lemons until you can’t fit any more in, but make sure the last lemon is below the surface of the jar so that it can be covered.

    If you’d like to add Even More Yellow, this would be a good time to sprinkle a few saffron threads in.

    Pour over as much lemon juice as is needed to submerge the lemons.

    If your jar lid is metal rather than glass, you’ll want to separate the acidic lemon juice from the jar lid somehow. The Treasure Trove suggests topping the jar off with olive oil, but then you can’t move the jar much until you plan to use it. One modern recipe suggested using a piece of waxed paper to separate the lemon juice from a metal lid. Some glass jars come with swing top glass lids and rubber gaskets that wouldn’t need the acid protection, but air is your enemy here, so you do want the jar as airless as possible until you decide to use your lemons.

    Refrigerators didn’t exist in the Middle Ages, but they do now, and they’ll buy you time to eat through your lemon stash. Because they’re so tart and salty, you may want to rinse the salt off before eating them. Some people dispose of the flesh and mince just the rind for use in cooking.

  • Ranveer, The Next Book, and The Dagobah Swamp Ramen

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    I’m working on getting Haroun and the Study of Mischief ready for publication — that isn’t the book I thought was coming next! But it went from 0 to 60 in 8 madcap days over spring break for the Cozy Quill Pitchfest, and then I had a finished standalone book! And I’m still figuring out what to do with its existence now that I know more of what I should have done before Chai and Cat-tales.

    (Chai and Charmcraft is still coming! It’s just probably not coming first.)

    So I was chatting with my editor Dove this morning, and we got to talking about the implications of italicizing non-English words, what happens when different characters speak or don’t speak multiple languages, and Ranveer.

    The conversation about italicizing non-English words gets extra complicated when you have native speakers of at minimum three different languages as narrators! If you’ve noticed that I italicized court-sourced words like shahzada and phirni and habibti, but I didn’t italicize chai and dal and haldi and sahib? The reason for that is that the “common” language of Tel-Bastet considers those words native to itself. And on the other hand Rahat is speaking the court language when he calls Ashar ya majid, ya rafiq, ya hasan. From Ashar’s point of view, he doesn’t exactly know what those courtly poet-words mean either, but he knows chai, and he knows dal.

    And then we get to Ranveer, who speaks the common language, has frantically studied spellbooks written in the court language, has probably never heard it spoken, and didn’t actually realize that the court wizards didn’t write down the minor details like vowels in their spells or their records.

    Ranveer is the self-taught student of life who can’t afford a university, who’s trying out the word “visionary” for a job title on the business cards that don’t exist in Tel-Bastet. He already discarded “alchemist” when his landlady threatened to end his lease if his acid pots gnawed any more holes in her floors or ceilings or building foundations. And “inventor” has the unfortunate implication that people would expect the things he creates to actually, you know, work.

    Ranveer is as close to a teenaged self-insert as I’ve ever come in fiction. In this day-and-time he would absolutely be a queer theater kid who loves cats and books and magic of both the theatrical and the literal kind. He would have improvised his flight spells by running the magic-and-court-language lyrics of “Defying Gravity” through Google Translate and coming up with something that he knows can’t possibly have the right number of vowels in it, but he can’t translate the spellbook for himself and he doesn’t know any fancy court-trained magicians and he really desperately wants to know so many things he hasn’t got a teacher for.

    That’s how I started osmosing Japanese five years before I had access to lessons, and how I started cooking things I’d read the descriptions of before there was an Internet, let alone any English language authentic cookbooks (as opposed to the 1950s-housewife-with-extra-Jello don’t-worry-it’ll-be-fiiiiiine cookbooks) that would be available in my small rural area. The thing I invented that I thought was supposed to be something like yakisoba was actually more like lower-fish-sauced pad thai. I didn’t know that for several more years, until I finally got the chance to see and taste the real thing.

    But on the culinary front, my all time winner of the Honorary Ranveer Prize for Jumping Up And Down On The End of the Loveseat Hanging Out The Fifth Story Window and Figuring Out The Flight Spell On the Way Down? That wasn’t the burnt Kool-aid, because the burnt Kool-aid was never technically meant as food. The Honorary Ranveer Prize Winner was Dagobah Swamp Ramen.

    I feel like I can poke fun at Ranveer more than my other characters because I have been there and done that. Before there was commercial Internet, I wanted to know things from other places so badly, and there wasn’t a way to get there, and there wasn’t a way to find a teacher in the tiny rural nowheresville town I lived in. So I had books. Sometimes they were in languages I didn’t read. So I taught myself how to read languages I couldn’t speak in order to read more books, because the library usually had starting language-learning books for languages that we didn’t have teachers for — and remember, this was before the Internet, this was before YouTube.

    Now it is so much easier to learn languages from real people who speak that language! Now it is so much easier to meet people from around the world from wherever you are! Now it is just a few clicks to watch other languages’ media and have them translated and start osmosing the way the language works! But as a queer, neurodivergent, theater-kid outcast in the 1980s in the middle of uber-conservative rural nowhere? I didn’t know that queer and autistic (and even not-conservative) were things I could be. I just knew that I didn’t fit anywhere with anyone, and not even the teachers were safe.

    So I had books. On paper, without a search function!

    Throughout history, education has been hard to get. And for many people it’s still hard and expensive to get formal education, even if the informal education for the dangerously self-motivated like Ranveer and me has gotten easier.

    So, here and now with the resources I have, I am all about talking to real people who live different lives and have different experiences. And while I was physically able to do it, I was also all about experimental archaeology: learning what it was like to sleep in a tent made of cloth held up with sticks instead of super modern ultraengineered performance plastics, learning how long it took to weave your own clothes and cook your own food, learning the hard way how likely it was I would have died before I turned 5 thanks to the array of lung problems exacerbated by camping in canvas tents that were likely mold vectors. Learning By Experience “like you do,” right?

    I remember being Ranveer. I remember that if I had had a way to stick a loveseat out my bedroom window and escape, I would have done it even if I didn’t know whether the flight spell was going to work until gravity took hold and I was on the way down. I remember being that hungry for knowledge, that hungry for freedom.

    I only made it about 40 miles, but that was far enough to get to a university with a community and friends that have changed my life.

    Dagobah Swamp Ramen is the product of the first year in that university town, where they had six international grocery stores! And dozens of international restaurants! And eight libraries! And so many books I had a crisis of the soul knowing I could never manage to read them all in my life.

    I was free for the first time in my life. My life was my own for the first time ever. But I had never been the only person in charge of my life before, either. I had never lived alone in an apartment with no meal plan, bills in my own name, no savings, and no one to ask for help when the oven broke and your landlord refused to fix it.

    (The landlord refused to fix it for the next decade. I moved out before he fixed it.)

    I was a theater kid with more intellect than common sense, and admitting failure would mean I had to move back in with the family of magats and do the socially expected thing for the gender I was assigned at birth, and so failure was not an option.

    So I taught myself to rewire the broken electric stove to get one of the burners working. And it didn’t catch fire, which was a win!

    And I bought a rice cooker, because I knew Japanese food didn’t depend on ovens. I lived for ten years with one working burner and a rice cooker and all the ovenless Japanese recipes I could try to recreate.

    During part of that ten years I actually had a foray into semiprofessionally teaching cooking classes, as in people paid me to teach them how to make things you could eat. After all, if I could make things edible with one burner and one rice cooker, I could probably help university students feed themselves in similarly disreputable apartments (with possibly the same landlord).

    Dagobah Swamp Ramen is what happens when you go to an international grocery store where everything is labeled in the appropriate language for its country of origin, and you don’t read enough of that language yet, because a lot of it was Korean rather than Japanese. And you kind of guess based on what you can see through the packaging, and you buy things that you think you might know what they are, and you take it home to try to figure out how to make it edible because the restaurants were too expensive for everyday and the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. (This is also how I lived on lima bean not-quite-curry not-quite-salad for several weeks.)

    Oh, and the key part: Dagobah Swamp Ramen is what happens when you recognize that nori is seaweed from having seen it on sushi. But you do not recognize the difference between nori and konbu. And you did not know that more than one kind of seaweed was edible. But you had your bag of groceries and your rice cooker and one working stove burner, and a whole lot of determination to make it work somehow.

    I’m still really hella motivated to make it work somehow. If you need help figuring out how to make food suit what your dietary needs are and your physical capabilities are, I am what happens when you combine really wild ingenuity with really limited capacity, so let’s brainstorm.

    Dagobah Swamp Ramen*

    *Honestly, not recommended.

    But I guarantee Ranveer would have made this if he lived in an era with university students, grocery stores, ramen, and nori.

    • One package of some kind of noodles that you can’t read the label on, but which look like they’re about the right thickness and waviness?
    • One package nori — you can’t read the label on this either but it’s got a picture of being wrapped around rice, that’s gotta mean it’s seaweed, and seaweed is seaweed, right?
      • If this is a small rectangular package of nori in Korean, it might even have sesame oil already applied! Flavor bonus!
    • Some green onions or chives if you can find them, no worries if you can’t
      • If you have some dried or frozen small-cut vegetables, this is an opportunity for ~*~*~nutrition~*~*~ too
    • Flavor splurge: Some sesame seeds or a container of sesame oil that is actually labeled in a language you speak**
      • **and also does not have a picture of a chili pepper on it, speaking of Learned By Experience
    • An egg, if it’s not too expensive
    • Some soy sauce — this does come labeled in a language you can read, probably, and might be left over from a restaurant takeout
    • A sugar packet or two, possibly left over from having ordered tea with your takeout
    • A bouillon cube maybe?
      • Or maybe your noodle packet has something silver in it, and when you open it and sniff it it hasn’t burned out all your nose hairs?
    • One working burner
    • One pot
    • One bowl, spoon optional
    • ~*~*~Determination~*~*~

    Get some water boiling in your pot on your burner.

    Cook the noodles and any available vegetables until pulling a noodle out and blowing on it and tasting it suggests it’s cooked.

    If you’ve gotten hold of an egg, crack it in and stir it through so it will kind of cook and shred on the way. (It will not look attractive. There is a reason we have called this Dagobah Swamp Ramen.)

    Eyeball the difference between the size of your pot and the size of your intended bowl, and tip out some of the boiling water so it’s reasonably likely to fit.

    Add a spoonful or so of soy sauce, a sugar packet or two (otherwise known as 1-2 tsp), and whatever tastes right for any variety of sesame you may have acquired.

    Stir and taste.

    If it needs more flavor, cautiously sprinkle or crumble in your bouillon or ramen packet until you hit a good balance between flavor and oh-my-gods-salt-lick.

    Brace yourself.

    Open the package of nori.

    Crumble some of it into the soup pot, and watch in horror as it disintegrates into green slime.

    Apply contents of pot to bowl. Make sure the burner is turned off.

    Eat, and taste ~*~*~determination~*~*~.

    (It may taste better with your eyes closed.)

  • Book Launch and Mouse Party!

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    Whew.

    (If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the Big Parties this time of year, you’re not alone. Here’s a very Small Party for whatever level of ambition you feel like.)

    I’m both delighted by Chai and Cat-tales and also exhausted before the marathon even properly starts.

    I severely underestimated how much small business bureaucracy, research, form filling, and other administration would be involved in not just publishing a book but in fighting my way through at least a dozen sets of “yes this is actually me” autoresponse systems when trying to claim an author identity with a common name. I have not conquered all the paperwork, but I have gotten the essentials through.

    So, it’s available now!

    I am slowly assembling the trappings of a small business professional, also known as social media presence, a contact form, a newsletter, and a wide array of advertising venues that want me to pay them exponentially more money than I have taken in at this point, which, hahahaha oops.

    Someday I’m going to need to break the habit of feeling like I need to post a recipe with every blog post! But that day is apparently not today, because I would also like to squee about how much fun I had making the chapter art for Chai and Cat-tales.

    ETA, I also just found the chef Shai Madhur needs to hire for his tiny mouse festivals. Tiny katori and kadai and thali! Tiny charcoal cook stove! Tiniest fryer for papad and puri! Approximately one tablespoon of dal and a spice container the size of a pillbox.

    I am very weak to tiny adorable things…

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uZUiFadIWCI

    Since I can’t see well enough to use a pencil anymore, and since the thought of AI art or writing makes my soul break out in hives, my on best bet for art is what I can remember of Photoshop from about 25 years ago, plus a Depositphotos standard license for art that authors and creators are allowed to remix and use professionally. This particular image came from assembling about 5-6 pieces of licensed stock line art over several hours of squinting at previews and careful composite editing.

    A delighted mouse squeaks with enthusiasm for Shai Madhur's mouse-sized feast of rice and treats on a banana leaf with a little walnut shell diya lamp burning.

    In “The Potter’s Dream,” one of the three novellas in Chai and Cat-tales, Shai Madhur is tasked with trying to keep the mice out of the grain, and despite the fact that he lives in the Temple of Bastet, he’s just not good at un-welcoming anything, even the mice. So he prayed over a festival meal for the mice and made a little mandala of grain and pigments to see where they went afterwards.

    The mice, of course, very helpfully left brightly pigment-colored footprints all over the grain sacks once they’d finished receiving his blessings and his festival meal.

    In a different fantasy, the mice would have been obediently willing to go the other direction. But I’ve had a few too many difficulties convincing mice that no they really did not want to be in a house with both me and a cat who grew up wild and still had no qualms at all about mouse-hunting.

    (I had qualms about his mouse-hunting. For many years my cat seemed determined to repeatedly and not-very-patiently teach me, his clearly hunting-impaired provider of dry crunchy cat food, what was necessary to do to turn mice into juicy tasty food. The mice were persistently stupid enough to keep providing my mighty little hunter with educational materials for his hunt-reluctant human.)

    My mighty hunter has since crossed over to hunt the mice in kitty heaven. But I’m still as little inclined as Shai Madhur to hurt the mice myself. (And I adore that mouse in the art beyond all reason.)

    So I’m crossing a couple streams here with the intersection of Japanese furikake and onigiri and Middle Eastern za’atar, because I think the temple mice would approve.

    The Mouse’s Festival

    • Either 3/4 to 1 1/2 cups (1 or 2 rice cooker portions) of uncooked rice, or leftover rice from takeout
    • Shai Nanda’s lemon-rubbed cheese, if she will give you the recipe, or some feta sprinkled with olive oil and lemon juice
    • Any additional protein of your choice (beef, chicken, falafel…)
    • Your choice of any convenient and tasty mezze: hummus, baba ghanoush, tabbouli, dal, olives, dates, dolma, whatever you enjoy
    • Your choice of za’atar, furikake, or mixed herbs
      • If you don’t have pre-made za’atar at hand, but you do have sumac, thyme, oregano, and sesame seeds: Mixing about 1 Tbsp of each of them together and toasting them for a couple minutes in a warm dry pan, then adding a sprinkle of salt, gets you za’atar. But Penzey’s za’atar is also tasty and I like supporting the Resistance.

    Rice:

    • If you want to shape your sushi rice, you’ll want to cook short grain sushi rice fresh. It will hold together in filled balls with ingredients tucked in the middle and/or sprinkles on the outside.
    • If you don’t care about shaping it, you can use long grain jasmine or basmati, or anything leftover from takeout.

    Other ingredients:

    • If you have finger bowls or katori from thali or other cute small containers, plate up your protein and mezze with them. If not, you could use lettuce leaves or nori squares or just dot them wherever you like.

    Time to eat:

    • If you have a banana leaf, set it out.
    • If you don’t, get a fancy plate or bamboo mat or something that makes you feel festive. Small bowls are fun and mouse-friendly too.
    • If you like rice balls filled with tasty stuff, take fresh-cooked sushi rice and tuck your protein in the middle and shape it. (If your hands are heat sensitive, you can get an assist from a quick swipe of olive oil in a teacup, then use the teacup as a mold. If you feel particularly festive, you could use silicone muffin molds or even flowers.)
    • If shaping rice balls is too much fuss, cook or reheat whatever rice you’ve got. You can entertain your inner mouse with teacups of rice covered with assorted nibbles and sprinkles with less hand scorching.
    • Sprinkle your za’atar or furikake on your rice and anything it looks tasty with, for a nod toward the mouse dance party.

    Other delicious stuff to do with za’atar:

    • Sprinkle on Greek yogurt for quick simple and tasty veggie or bread dips
    • Blend with olive oil and toast on pita or saj
    • Sprinkle on pizza (especially when there are olives and grilled onions involved)

  • Coming in December: The Childless Cat Lady’s Tale, and a new book

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    The night before the election, when I hadn’t slept for two days from pain from both the literal stormfront and the pressure of what was hanging over the world, I asked my friend Celia Lake for a sanity check on how crazy it might be to try to publish a book before the end of the year.

    I thought she’d say “settle down, that’s not realistic.”

    Instead, Celia thought about it for a minute, and said, “I think you could make that timeline if you have the text by Thanksgiving, and I could format it for you in about half an hour.”

    I really needed that. I still need that.

    (Celia, if you see this, thank you so much for giving me something to hold on to.)

    I knew when Biden dropped out in July that Kamala wasn’t going to win.

    I’d hoped for a few weeks that the country might surprise me. That the mad red hatters wouldn’t actually all crawl out from under the rocks to make sure the smart, joyful, competent brown woman lost to a doddering, demented old fascist because they were all going to put the uppity woman in her place.

    There have only been two other times in my life when I’ve wanted so desperately to be wrong about what I saw coming.

    Unfortunately, I was right all three times, no matter how badly I’d wanted to be wrong.

    (I really feel for Rahat, who is the type of prophet who foresees the dangers that other people don’t see, and who can’t always stop himself from knowing things he doesn’t want to know.)

    I did not have time to write an entire novella of cozily vindictive witches-vs-the-patriarchy wrath in a week where I was numb with grief and scrambling to keep it together and also organizing a whole conference.

    I didn’t have time or energy to spare but it came pouring out of my hands anyway.

    I didn’t want a brown woman’s victory over the forces of the patriarchy to be the most unrealistic part of a fantasy with cursed spellbooks and flying carpets and shapechanging cats. But here we are.

    And I love Najra. She’s the smart, scheming, ambitious, asexual, book-loving witch-archivist part of me has always wished I could be. (If it weren’t for the fact that I’m also much more like Rahat, soft and fat and anxious and not at all neurotypical and fretting over whether or not I’ve kept the required mask in place well enough for the necessary public performances. Not to mention the foreseeing things I really wish I didn’t. )

    So Najra is going into the book, and Priye is going into the book too, and so is Shai Madhur, the gentle priest who feeds even the granary mice, because everyone is welcome.

    I’m hoping to set up a pre-order for December 21 or 22, and then to be able to tie in to Karryn’s cozy sale on the 29th.

    I’m going to see if I can post about each of the novellas between now and then too. If nothing else, I’ve got to polish the blurbs. (And, since this is me, shorten them too.)

    Also since this is me, here’s a recipe.

    Najra’s Crimson Witch’s Brew

    • 2 cups hot water
    • 1 tsp dried hibiscus flowers
    • 1 tsp dried rose flowers
    • 2 green cardamom pods, cracked open and the black seeds pulverized
    • (Optional) A few drops of screwpine, which also sounds properly witchy, but if you don’t have it a few drops of Rooh Afza or rosewater will do
    • 1/4 tsp sumac (optional, but if you’re feeling exceptionally sour, go for it)
    • Simple syrup (half and half water and sugar)

    Steep the flowers and spices, covered, for about five to ten minutes, while muttering imprecations about the patriarchy.

    Taste the brew straight. Make a sour witch face as needed.

    Get determined to grab your own damn happy ending, at least for this cup.

    Add 1/2 tsp at a time of your simple syrup, stir, and taste again.

    When you’ve determined what level of sweetness brings you joy, note it down in your spellbook.

    Or if you hate everything in the universe (including sharp-edged tisanes) right now, go pour out the cup over a weed you’d like to kill. Then consider opening the nearest bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon instead.

  • Midsummer at the House of Jasmines

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    It’s Midsummer, the longest day of the year, and my jasmine plant is loving it. I, meanwhile, am looking for simple but cooling drinks when the lowest temperature for 3 weeks is 88 F and hot chai sounds much less appealing.

    I’d originally planned to write up a detailed history of sharbat and its descendants shrub and squash and switchel, with wanderings through syrup and sekanjabin and so on. But it’s been a crazy week at my paying job, with 8 of 10 people out at one time or another, and making up a proper sharbat takes more standing over the stove than I’ve been able to accomplish since before I became disabled. So I started looking for something that fit into today’s spoon drawer.

    Roughly speaking, sharbat involves making a thick flavored syrup with some acid and diluting it to taste. Sharbat e sekanjabin is one of the oldest, with mint and vinegar and sometimes cucumber, used either as the base of a beverage or as dipping sauce for lettuce in its thick form. Rose and pomegranate are both popular, saffron and sandalwood are both documented too, and once the notion made it to Europe you start getting into everything from basil to watermelon to carrots (no, really — they’re sweet!) If someone has made a trendy lemonade of it, there’s a good chance someone has made sharbat of it too.

    …well, maybe. I made shiso sharbat e sekanjabin the year the perilla tried to devour my whole garage. I don’t know if anyone has made shiso lemonade. But aside from that — sharbat, lemonade, and Kool-aid are all built on the same chassis: sugar, acid, flavorings, and no alcohol.

    This is me, and I named both Asharan bir Chameli and his House of Jasmines after my 20 year old Maid of Orleans jasmine plant. Which is currently vividly flowering! I picked a dozen flowers this morning while watering it.

    But when you’re going to make chameli ki sharbat / mogra ka sharbat / whichever jasmine varietal you have sharbat, you need a basket, not a cupped handful. One of the recipes I saw started with a unit of measure that was “about 3 gajra of mogre.” In other words, go buy three strands of freshly tied hair-ornament jasmine sambac (hopefully without preservatives or pesticides) and unweave them, and use that much to make your syrup. I’m estimating 250g of flowers is at least a hundred.

    So here’s my lower-spoons versions. These don’t start with “step 1, have hundreds of fresh jasmine blossoms all in bloom on the same day.”

    If your jasmine is blooming:

    • A dozen jasmine blossoms, picked when unfurled (often at night or the early morning)
    • Either 2 cups water or 3/4 cup water and some ice
    • 2 tsp white sugar (ish — more or less sweet depending on your preference)
    • Optional: A couple drops of lemon juice if you have a lemon open (but I didn’t, and it turned out quite nicely even without it)

    I have a little water heater which makes 2 cups of water hit 150 F in about 90 seconds. For this application, I didn’t want the water fully boiling; I trust my plant and my keeping of it and wasn’t terribly worried about needing to sterilize the flowers the way you would for jam or most sharbats. So get your water up to green tea temperature.

    With a heat safe teapot or large mug, put in the sugar and the jasmine blossoms.

    Pour the hot water over it, stir it until the sugar melts, cover it, and let it steep for at least 15 minutes. (In my case, that went ‘get pulled into a string of meetings for several hours,’ by which point it was both nicely cooled and very fragrant.)

    I mostly prefer room temperature drinks to cold ones, so the 2 cups hot water cooling to room temperature was fine for me to have a cooler-but-not-cold drink.

    If you prefer it colder, here’s the iced variation: Stir your sugar and flowers into 3/4 cup hot water, let steep for a few, and then pour the still probably warm liquid over ice. (You want to add the sugar while the liquid is hot even if you cool it later.)

    I’ve refilled my cup twice this morning and the flowers are still sweetly scenting the infusion and my room. I don’t mind gently sipping around floating flowers. If that’s a challenge for you, though, using a teapot and pouring through a strainer should take care of it.

    If you don’t have a blooming jasmine at hand:

    The recipe above isn’t technically a sharbat; it’s kind of a sharbat shortcut. Instead of making and then diluting syrup with acid, I just made it at the drinking concentration.

    But you can buy jasmine syrups, though not as many as there used to be.

    My former shortcut favorite, Monin, stopped making their cane syrup jasmine a few years ago and replaced it with honey. I have nothing at all against honey except that in this case it’s letting them shortcut on the flavor, which is now more like honey and less like jasmine itself. But if honeyed jasmine sounds great, or if Monin is what’s most accessible to you, have at it!

    I haven’t yet had a chance to try Floral Elixir or Amoretti’s jasmine syrups. From the prices, I suspect that’s why Monin shifted to honey.

    If you like sparkling water, using either a homemade sharbat or a syrup will get you to jasmine soda much more readily than my more dilute version too.

    I haven’t done the brand research to see if there are any jasmine essential oils that I would consider food safe, and they’re so concentrated they’re really not an easy substitute for cooking extracts like vanilla and almond.

    Let me know if you’d like the more detailed sharbat dive some time, or maybe a wander through the intersections of perfume and spice and cooking with flowers?

  • Neurodiverse fantasies and Sahar’s Misty Evening Chai Latte

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    Tomorrow (April 26), Karryn Nagel is organizing a big sale on cozy fantasy books at https://www.promisepress.org/. I don’t know what all the books are going to be, but Karryn says she’s got at least 45 authors on board and multiple books by several of them, so I’m eagerly waiting for when the sale page goes live!

    The Fantasy Romance February (FaRoFeb) team is also highlighting a collection of 8 books by and about neurodiverse folks in honor of Autism Awareness Month. Aside from being blown away that I’m on a recommendation list with some of my favorite authors (that supersonic squeal you hear might actually be coming from me), I’m honestly thrilled that folks are highlighting more varieties of neurodiversity than Rain Man and The Big Bang Theory.

    When I was growing up, “autism” was Rain Man. There was no other representation out there. So, obviously, I couldn’t be autistic, because I was literate and eloquent and not able to instantaneously count a pile of spilled nuts on the floor, even if I was painfully awkward and shy and I felt almost-physical scalding sensations if I had to make eye contact with someone who was angry with me. About thirty years later, a licensed psychotherapist said to me, “So, since you’re on the spectrum…” and after my brain got done making record-scratch noises, suddenly a whole lot of things about my life made a lot more sense.

    I knew Priye was autistic from the moment I started writing her. And I knew Rahat had a collection of neurodiverse thought patterns around anxiety and masking and social expectations and body shape expectations. But I didn’t realize he was also autistic until I was writing the sequel and he launched into a fluent analysis of the implications of different quality levels of frankincense resin and what that meant for what must have happened with natural disasters in the growing region (as opposed to piratical disasters, because natural disasters have implications for plant growth patterns) — and then he stopped himself short and said “at least I think it’s fascinating, I don’t know if anyone else would…”

    And I stopped and stared at the sentence that had just come out of my fingers, and I went, huh. Because that’s one of the language tics I’ve heard from so many autistic folks (including myself) who have been absolutely enraptured by something and started enthusing about it to a neurotypical person who stops pretending to be interested long before the autistic person stopped being excited by it, and sometimes the autistic person jerks their own reins short before the other person can. And I asked some friends on various spectrums, who took a look at some pieces, and they also went, yeah, we can see that too.

    From being autistic for a long time and talking to a lot of autistic folks over the years, I’ve noticed a common algorithm a lot of us learn for how to navigate society while trying hard to keep the Normal-Looking Mask on. It seems like the more training you’ve had in How to Act Normal, the better you get to be at learning when your own joy is an indicator that you need to stop yourself from feeling and expressing that joy because the person you’re talking to is going to be bored by it. And conversely, the more comfortable you are with the person you’re talking to, the more you feel able to let yourself relax into that joy a little longer than you would with an unfamiliar Other Person.

    As a prince, Rahat has had a lot of training in how to Act Normal. But around Asharan, he also lets himself relax into joy, until something in the back of his mind jerks on those reins and reminds him that he shouldn’t.

    A whole lot of the things I’m exploring with these two involve anti-tropes and flipping the script. I’m writing the anti-Cinderella story explicitly, but future installments involve the anti-makeover story and the coziest dungeon ever (full of cat toys and sunbeams!). And I want these stories to be cozy for people who’ve felt that it’s not safe to relax into their own joy, whether they’re autistic or queer or fat or disabled or whatever it is that makes other people frown down their noses at the way they are and live and think and feel and love.

    When the survey asked whether Rahat al-Hulqum was an “own voices” story, I honestly wasn’t sure how to respond. On the one hand, I am clearly neither a medieval prince with prophetic visions, nor a medieval bath-house courtesan with magical cat-summoning powers. But on the other hand, I am someone who understands a lot about social anxiety, role-switching, masking, and also the makings of delicious chai variants.

    I don’t know yet how many of the neurodiverse fantasies overlap with the cozy fantasy sale, but I am very much looking forward to finding out!

    And because I’m me, here, have another tea recipe. 😀

    Sahar’s Misty Evening Chai Latte

    Sahar is Rahat’s summoned cat-familiar; she is gray and soft and round and elegant, and also very opinionated, because she is of course still a cat. In one of the sequel bits, she casts a fog spell over the city. And the local coffeeshops call the less-masala cousin of this a London Fog.

    I don’t know how widespread that name is, but I liked the symbolism of a chai blended with fog-associations for both a magical gray cat who casts fog-illusions and neurospicy folks who have to spin very careful fog-illusions to shield the light of their special interests’ joys from sensitive neurotypical eyes that might wince from the blaze of our shining.

    For two one-cup servings (or one really big mug):

    • 1 1/2 cups hot water
    • Two teaspoons of Earl Grey
      • If you like bergamot, there are delicious double bergamot varieties out there too. If you don’t like bergamot but do like lemon, a nice Assam with a squeeze of lemon can get you in the neighborhood too.
    • Either half a teaspoon of dried rose petals or a quarter teaspoon of rosewater, whichever you prefer
    • A piece of crystallized ginger if you have it
    • A couple of cracked white peppercorns if you like floral heat
    • Around a tablespoon of lavender syrup depending on your preferred sweetness level
    • A couple tablespoons of your milk-like preference (skim milk froths very nicely; oat and almond milks don’t tend to froth but are still delicious)

    Helpful hardware:

    • A fill your own tea bag, fine-meshed tea ball, or cup-sieve to work your alchemy without a mouthful of tea leaves floating around the beverage
    • A handheld milk frother (I’ve used several over the years and I prefer the ones with flat bases rather than angled, so you don’t have to keep track of the stand separately)
    • If you want to lean extra hard into cozy cat-ness, consider your mug too…

    Once your water is hot, brew your tea in your preferred tea-leaf containment system before you add your milk. (Adding milk tends to slow or stop the brewing process.)

    Sweeten it while it’s still hot, then pull out the tea leaves before adding your milk or substitute.

    The frother will also make less mess if the tea containment system is not in the container where the frothing takes place.

    If you’re reading this from somewhere that’s hot, consider pouring it over ice into a blender (or getting out a stick blender, or even a kids’ snow-cone ice shaver) and making yourself a frozen latte.

    Happy sipping, and happy fog-cuddles from Sahar and me.

  • Pre-orders, previews, and Priye’s brindle chai

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    Wyngraf’s Valentine’s edition is available for pre-order!

    Here, have another cozy chai recipe, along with a preview of another character from a related story!

    I am both ridiculously excited and, at this particular moment, having a migraine. So I am doing some very low energy squee-ing. 😀

    Priye is a brindle catfolk-kitten who shows up in the sequel to Rahat’s story, in which we take a look at moments ranging from “what is the first thing an Imperial prince thinks upon awakening in the House of Jasmines with a cat walking on his face” to “what does a morning in the Catsprowl look (and smell) like” to “how exactly can a soft, round, middle-aged, and very un-parkour-suited accountant of a prince sneak back into his palace life without anything resembling a walk of shame, because it needs to be a walk of joy and discovery instead?”

    (Except that was about 15,000 words and counting, which is closing in on twice the short story threshold hahaha whimper. And if I want more stories to be submit-friendly, I need to be a lot closer to the 8,000 word limit!)

    So I thought, let’s try someone else’s point of view. And I adore Priye. She’s small and soft and gentle, and also has a lot of very quiet tortitude. She doesn’t like having to use human words because there are so many different human languages and sometimes the words aren’t allowed to go together and whichever set you choose is going to make people think things about you, and how you pronounce them makes people think other things about you, and it’s all Too Much To Cope With.

    Purrs are better than words, according to Priye. You know where you stand when someone is purring. You also know where you stand when someone is hissing. Cats are very clear about things like this — no complicated questions of whose words you use in which dialect with which accent. Purring means good, hissing means stop that, yowling air raid noises mean REALLY stop that, all nice and clear.

    So I asked her to get her slate from Elder Sister’s classroom and share a chai recipe for brindle kittens with us. She is chocolate brown and ginger orange, and she likes her coloring, so this is what she told me.

    Priye’s Brindle Kitten Chocolate Orange Ginger Chai

    • Milk
    • Chocolate (good)
    • Orange
    • Ginger
    • Chameli-sahib’s chai masala
      • Make warm and soft like kittens.
      • (Need spoons.)

    Lynn’s Low Spoons translation

    I have a Higher In Spoons edition I’m saving for the 14th, when I hope to be out of migraine land and having more energy for at least Secret Ninja Master Hot Chocolate, if not the entire half-hour production number of Asharan’s chai from the spices onward.

    But today the spoon drawer is empty. Food is complicated when you need to balance energy intake and migraine nausea and orthostatic intolerance and post-exertional malaise with a side order of weather-pain. So this is my Priye-approved 90-seconds edition.

    • 2 cups your choice of milk, water, or plant-milk, heated whichever way is easiest
    • Your favorite hot cocoa mix
      • (I used 4 tsp of Penzeys hot chocolate to make my big mug in a chai blend – if you’re making straight hot chocolate you might want double that again)
    • Your favorite chai masala powder
      • (usually my instant go-to is Blue Lotus’ regular, but I went with Blue Lotus’ mandarin – 1/2 tsp, to go with doubling the cocoa and getting orange already in the combo and minimizing the number of times I have to move)
    • A few drops of orange blossom water or shreds of orange zest
      • (if your chai masala doesn’t come with orange notes in it)
    • Half a meal shake
      • (this time chocolate, other times vanilla, usually Orgain’s vegan one because it’s the only one I’ve found without either artificial sweeteners or erythritol)
      • Use the other half to make another mug in a couple hours
    • A few bits of crystallized ginger either to chew or to put in the hot chocolate chai

    That lasted me the past 3 hours! About to go make “lunch” with the other half of the meal shake, and see whether Priye is up for more stories or just for more purring in the sunbeam.

    I hope you enjoy the low spoons variation, and that I’ll be up for the higher spoons variation on the 14th!

  • Rahat’s namesake sweets: Rahat-al-hulqum / Lokoum / Turkish delight

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    This story started with Ashar’s rose chai and the idea that there should be more Prince Charmings in the world of different ages and colors and body types and confidence levels, but I needed something for Ashar to call him other than his own name. (Ashar is still pretending that as long as he never says Rahat’s actual name aloud, there is some resemblance of plausible deniability.)

    I’m also absurdly fond of rosewater in sweets ranging from my friend Kathleen’s amazing chocolate-cardamom-rosewater truffles to ice cream toppings to medieval-to-modern confectionery like rahat al-hulqum. And while the stuff doesn’t always come in rose-reds, I loved playing with the imagery.

    As a person with multiple disabilities, though, it’s often hard to cook anymore. So I haven’t personally cooked Yumsome’s variation on rahat/lokoum, but I loved the story they told about their encounters with it throughout their life and why rose is their favorite variation too.

    For those of us who are low on spoons but still interested in tasting it, Liberty Orchards sells them in winter (though they’re currently out) and Koska also sells it through Amazon.

    The origins of the phrase go back to 9th century Arabic medicinals for sore throats, though the candy version is mostly traced to a particularly ambitious confectioner who made a viral hit long before there was social media.

    (The image here is from When Feta met Olive.)

  • Asharan’s Rose Chai

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    I originally came up with this chai recipe in 2019, for the last all-together role-playing session my friends and I had before one of us moved to Chicago.

    (And if anyone is wondering, the character I played, whom Asharan is built from, is a D&D 5e glamour bard. 😀 That’s how I’m keeping myself honest with spell power levels, and not having level 12-ish glamour bard Ashar pull off magical tricks that would be more in scale for the level 18-ish Archmage I hope folks will meet in the sequel!)

    The modern version that’s published in Wyngraf came first, and then because I am just that much of a nerd, I took my medieval spice collection from the SCA and reconstructed the way it might have been written in a cookbook from this world, complete with Arabic measurements.

    Here’s the medieval fantasy edition, lightly edited to suit Asharan’s world rather than our role-playing game.

    A masala-chai scented with roses

    Begin always with the spices whole; for while this could be done with a bit of magery in company, our company are soon to be somewhat parted, and I fear my wishcraft cannot enchant a taste of memory from half the realm away. 

    So instead, begin with the spices whole, chosen by hand of a trader you trust, and share first a cup of that trader’s family’s chai, to have also the tale of whence it came and of the family’s health; in order that the life-spark be conveyed with the spices, in a bond rooted in the earth in which it grew, through the lives of those who live by trading it from hand to hand along the spice-roads, unto those who partake of it in camaraderie, because chai is best to be taken among a company such as ours.

    In a pot of five ratl or more, take two ratl of cream and another two of clean water if you can have it, or if not three ratl of the milk entire, and set it to a gentle fire lest it burn; or if your company have need of haste, set a fiercer flame and a friend to the stirring that it not scorch.

    For that pot take from your spice-store a dirham of black peppercorns, cinnamon of the size of your small-finger, half a dirham of green cardamom pods, and the same of idrifil-i-sagir, which I believe you name grains of paradise for reasons which elude me entirely, and about which I must enquire of his Highness on some future occasion; it seems this definition of ‘paradise’ differs in some dramatic measure from my own. 

    Take an uqiyya also of ginger-root and galengal together, fresh if you have them, or sugar-preserved if not. Grate in a nutmeg until the scent please you, and perhaps a few dried cloves, but no more than a few, because of the strength of it. 

    Take an uqiyya or two of camellia-leaves, a cupped-palm, dried brown for the trade-travel, and at the end sweeten to your pleasure with a knob of gur if you yet walk the spice-roads, or perhaps honey instead if you are settled in a land of greenery. 

    Simmer it for so long as you can bear to leave it un-tasted, at least a candlemark unless your company finds some need of haste. (I once thought there always to be time to linger over chai, but I have since encountered owlbears.)

    Ladle the chai through a mesh into a beautiful pot, and sprinkle in a few drops of rosewater to scent it. Save the spices for a second infusion if it be desired. 

    And at the last, if you live in the green-realms and have nearby a jasmine or a rose of the old families, gather the petals yourself and scatter them atop the cups you serve. If they were dried instead, add them earlier that they may infuse, but a fresh petal atop a cup of chai is not to be cooked limp and then presented to honored guests. Instead, make of it an art: a joy to behold as well as to taste.