Lynn Strong

Designed with WordPress

Category: Disabilities

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

    by

    , , ,

    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!

    by

    , , ,

    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.

  • Cozy Fantasy sale, birthday wishes, and a bouquet of beverages

    by

    ,

    I got a week mostly off this week, which is pretty astounding. I have been so burned out at work that it’s coming out in my writing– I’m currently writing about the priests of Upaja, one of whom is so ferociously devoted to his calling that it took, in the words of one of the junior priests, “both an actual conspiracy and an act of God to get him to take any time for himself.”

    (Yes, I do resemble that remark. In my case the act of God was a hurricane. I am not unaware of irony.)

    So I was absolutely delighted to discover Karryn Nagel’s next Cozy Fantasy sale is July 12 (tomorrow when I’m writing this), because it also happens to be my birthday.

    What are you going to do for your birthday? a lot of my co-workers asked.

    Many people do know I’m disabled, but not how much. Like Rahat, I do have years of experience in masking.

    So I borrowed Ashar’s skill in telling the truth through exquisitely angled language that doesn’t mention the words you can’t afford for some people to hear.

    I told them I was going to unplug from everything and curl up with a lot of really excellent ebooks.

    Which is also, conveniently, entirely true!

    And I know what they picture is nothing like what I live with. I tell my life stories that way intentionally. Like Ashar and Rahat, there are some things I just can’t afford to have spoken aloud in some people’s hearing.

    Karryn knows me better than many of my co-workers at this point. When I told her I was struggling with the PDF from the original sale in April, she asked how it could be more accessible.

    Hark, I hear my calling, I said.

    (Well, no. That’s what I wish I’d said. What I actually said was more along the lines of “so I am actually certified in accessible information design, I live and breathe WordPress 40 hours a week, and I’m 98% sure we can make you an author-managed accessible responsive category-filterable website for free in a subdomain?”)

    Karryn said, Awesome. Let’s do it.

    (Pretty sure she actually did say that.)

    So we did it!

    Tomorrow I am eagerly looking forward to putting my phone in airplane mode, uninstalling everything Microsoft ever made, shutting down all the notifications on my tablet, and, I hope, getting one blissful day of peace to browse alllllll the cozy fantasies.

    (One of my friends did the Great Unplugination for a week, and found the police breaking down his door on the third day because everyone he knew was so used to being able to ask his time and attention any hour of the day or night that they thought if he wasn’t immediately answering their every need he was either having a medical emergency or already dead. I learned from his experience to warn people before i turn off my own over-a-dozen always-on ping streams. The more you know! …did I mention how burned out I’ve been at work? Hahahahawhimper.)

    The Bouquet of Beverages

    My family knows I can’t read most print anymore and need dark mode with a lot of magnification, so they regularly give me Amazon gift certificates to help me convert my print library into ebooks I can read. And mostly I do get ebooks with them.

    But then I spotted the 14-flavor sampler of floral simple syrup concentrates were back in stock.

    When “this was out of stock for weeks before your birthday but just came back in stock” intersects with “no really I can officially use this for Research, I need to know all the flower flavors for rahat-al-hulqum recipe reasons, it is Research” intersects with “ooh pretty bottles” intersects with “birthday gift card” … yes, I am weak.

    My only regret is that it wasn’t back in stock in time to arrive by tomorrow for the Designated Day of Cozy.

    I am planning to try some of them in tea, some in seltzer, some in rahat al-hulqum, and some in microbatched sharbat that I will probably be acidifying with either an eye dropper or a 1/32 measure.

    Some of them do already have citric acid in them, though, so be careful not to use them in milk or lattes.

    I mean, not unless you want to experiment with homemade floral tea-cheese or coffee-cheese blends. I am an experimental cook but not quite that experimental!

  • Neurodiverse fantasies and Sahar’s Misty Evening Chai Latte

    by

    , ,

    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

    by

    , ,

    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!