Lynn Strong

Designed with WordPress

  • Pumpkin Spice Season and Conference Season

    ,

    Anyone else remember the old Looney Tunes “Wabbit season!…. Duck season!…. Elmer season?”

    Somehow I have pulled off the posters and found “Pumpkin Spice Season and Conference Season.” And for the love of mercy, someone needs to thin the herd somehow!

    I don’t think I’ve ever hit a schedule of 9 conferences in 5 weeks before. Flights of Foundry was two weeks ago, Rainbow Space Magic was last weekend, HearthCon and Cozy the Day Away are this weekend (I’m both presenting and running tech support), next week is WordPress Global Accessibility Day, the weekend after that is the Self-Publishing Advice Conference, and that’s before I start listing off the too-personally-identifiable conferences at my university.

    I’ve just finished making the “In case of excessive virality, break glass and transfer the load to Google” emergency backup spreadsheet of book links for the Cozy the Day Away sale, because previous sales have caused the Bluehost server to struggle under the weight of thousands of cozy fantasy fans wanting at 90some books… and this time we’ve got 160 plus the attention of the entirety of HearthCon!

    So if the server says “help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” I can throw out the spreadsheet link. The spreadsheet is not beautiful and filterable and personalized by each author… but Google can take the kind of load hits most other services can’t and keep on ticking. Still, here’s hoping cache tuning and view size reframing will buy us some breathing room? I am not actually a server admin, I am a user interface and metadata structure person. But I’ve hung out with enough server admins to have a vague idea of which words to look for in case of viral-necessary tuning?

    Anyhow, I should find a recipe to post with this!

    I have been vastly amused by the Cookbook Diss Tracks being laid down between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. Ishaq al-Mawsili’s grudge chased Ziryab from Baghdad to as close to the far end of the continent as he could get without falling into the ocean… and then Ziryab turned around and set up cultural court in Cordoba and laid down the culture and etiquette and personal grooming and fine dining standards that have lasted most of the next thousand years. But that needs to be a future blog post, because I have now formally Pumpkin Spiced Myself FOR SCIENCE.

    Self, I thought, how can you call yourself a cozy fantasy writer if you have not tasted Starbucks’ own legendary Pumpkin Spice Latte? You should do that for HearthCon.

    Self, I also thought, you have not previously done this because your body really, really hates coffee. Do not do food sensitivity-adjacent biological experiments during a two day convention where you’re also tech support.

    So, last weekend and not this weekend, I turned myself into my own lab critter.

    The lab notebook annotations include:

    🎃 “Pumpkin spice” as a spice doesn’t technically have to have pumpkin itself in it, but yum! Very much nutmeg-forward on the spice blend, or else the sprinkle on the top was. I’ve been contemplating how I might add pumpkin-per-se to my own chai and reading up on how different folks recreate the pumpkin-having parts of Starbucks PSLs and came up with the variations below.

    🫠 Really, Starbucks? 21 different modification dropdown menus with over 100 options for a single beverage? My low vision self made brain-frying noises trying to navigate through the system and I just hit the “default order” button on the iced pumpkin spice chai, because there was no coffee in it (theoretically).

    🍦Have you ever accidentally melted Culver’s pumpkin ice cream and then drank it anyway? The default-settings iced pumpkin spice chai tasted very much like that to me. 

    😵 Some mistakes were made. I’d wondered if Starbucks might have enough Ambient Coffee in their water system for my food sensitivities to protest? Some empirical experimentation later: 

    🤭 Yeah it was a good thing I did this the weekend before HearthCon and Cozy the Day Away tech support, because my body went into full-on “As per my LAST EMAIL…”

    🔬 Still. Food science has been scienced, complete with accidental biohazards. For SCIENCE!

    If you’re not from the land of home-baked pumpkin pies…

    The overlap between the ingredients in chai masala, poudre douce, and what you get in a jar of McCormick’s pumpkin spice mix are pretty high. Generally speaking, you’ll take out the black pepper and cardamom and add more nutmeg, but here’s what you get in a jar of McCormick’s pumpkin spice (which does not include pumpkin itself):

    • Cinnamon
    • Ginger
    • Nutmeg
    • Allspice
    • A sulfiting agent

    Compare that to versions of poudre douce from Le Menagier de Paris:

    (One version)

    • Cinnamon
    • Ginger
    • Nutmeg
    • Grains of paradise
    • Sugar

    (Another version)

    • Cinnamon
    • Ginger
    • Cloves
    • Bay leaves

    And then compare that to the simple base and complex variations of atraf al-tib from Kitab al-Tabikh:

    • Cardamom
    • Ginger
    • Cloves
    • (optional) Bay leaves
    • (optional) Rose petals
    • (more options if you like them) Nutmeg, mace, black pepper, spikenard…

    I haven’t seen bay leaves or spikenard listed in a chai masala blend, but all the rest of it, including cinnamon and black pepper, have made appearances in different chai masala variations I’ve seen.

    I currently live in the state that produces more pumpkins than anywhere else on the continent, and lived downwind of a pumpkin packing plant for quite a while. Somehow it smells much better coming out of the can than it did going in, and I don’t know what alchemy is necessary for that to happen. But as a result, there have always been cans of pureed pumpkin available year round in my area.

    If you don’t have that available? Acorn squash or butternut squash make pretty good substitutes when you sweeten them and puree them and toss in some of the aforementioned pumpkin spice.

    Or if you enjoy egg custard, the relationship between custard tart spice and pumpkin spice is pretty high too. And an American-style (sweet) pumpkin pie is much closer to a sweet custard tart than to a savory quiche.

    When studying in the UK, the hosting university tried very earnestly to throw us a Thanksgiving feast complete with “pumpkin pie.” It was, yes, technically a pie containing pumpkin. But it was a savory pie containing slices of roasted pumpkin, skin and all, and — spoiler alert — you can’t roast most large orange carving-style pumpkins skin and all the way you could do with an eggplant. The big carveable ones have been bred to be tough enough to stand up to both overenthusiastic kids with serrated knives and squirrels delighted by the newfound entrance to the juicy meats inside, once that annoying candle in the guts burns itself out.

    So a can of pumpkin puree and a pastry pie crust is how most folks start their pumpkin pies around here. But if you don’t think you can use a whole can of pumpkin puree, or if your neighbors are avid gardeners and you haven’t locked your porch/patio/garage/car trunk/anything in which a box of squash may be “helpfully” deposited and you’re desperate for something to do with the overflow?

    Homemade pumpkin or other squash puree

    For additional Starbucksification of your hot caffeinated beverage, should you so desire.

    (The low spoons way for me to do this is to buy a can of puree, but that may not be as easy elsewhere, so…)

    • A squash or two
    • A baking dish which will hold them both when cut in half
    • Enough water to fill about 1/4 inch of the baking dish for extra steaming

    Preheat an oven to 350 F / 175 C.

    Halve your squash and take the seeds out.

    Put about 1/4 inch of water in the bottom of your baking dish.

    Put the squash cut side down on the baking dish. The water should help it steam rather than brown and glaze.

    Roast your squash for about 45 minutes to an hour, until soft when poked with a fork.

    Let it cool enough to handle, then scoop the innards away from the skin.

    Mash it up with forks, a potato masher, or a blender, your preference.

    If it’s a stringy squash you might want to press it lightly through a wire mesh sieve to extract the pulp and leave the strings behind.

    You can either spice it to taste now or add spices later. I tend to add the spices later once I know what else is going into it (eggs and cream for a pie or tart, or tea/coffee for a beverage, or maybe I would make a big bowl of Carmarthenshire Welsh stwmp with as many mashable root vegetables as I could lay hands on, in which case I’m not going to want it pre-sweet-spiced for lattefication.)

    Refrigerate until ready to use.

    Imitation Starfaring Beverage with Pumpkin And Spice

    • Pumpkin puree (as above or from a can), about 2 Tbsp per beverage
    • La Lechera squeeze bottle (easy mode) or a can of sweetened condensed milk, about 2 Tbsp per beverage
      • Avoiding cow milk? Nut or soy milks plus some sugar will be thinner but taste similar
      • Egg nog flavored non dairy creamer can also bring a very similar spice profile, in which case you probably won’t need as much pumpkin spice
      • If you aren’t using sweetened condensed milk, you may want honey or simple syrup.
    • Pumpkin spice blend (McCormick or home-blended to taste), about 1/4 tsp per beverage
    • Hot beverage of your choice (coffee, masala chai, hot milk, hot milk alternative…)
      • Making tea or masala chai? You may want to brew it stronger than usual to stand up to the extra pumpkin and milk-or-alternative.
    • Ground nutmeg to dust the top with
    • (Optional) Whipped cream or alternative
    • (Optional) Whichever of the 100some other Starbucks additions makes you happy!

    For a 12-16 oz mug:

    • 2 Tbsp ish pumpkin puree
    • 2 Tbsp ish sweetened condensed milk (squeeze bottle or can)
      OR
      Non dairy milk and sweeetener to taste
    • When preparing the hot beverage, stir the dry pumpkin spice in so that it gets a chance to cook along with the tea leaves (or the milk simmering or coffee brewing).
    • Fill most of the rest of the mug with your hot beverage.
    • Stir vigorously to blend together, and taste test to check the sweet-to-spice balance before topping.
    • (Optional) Apply whipped cream or whipped non-dairy alternative to the top of the hot beverage
    • (Optional) Dust with nutmeg

    Sip, purr, repeat.

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

    , , ,

    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!

    , , ,

    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

    ,

    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.)

  • Paperbacks and Pickles

    So, uh, it’s been…

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

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

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

    The paperback news:

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

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

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

    The Cozy the Day Away Sale May 16:

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

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

    The recipe: Quick pickles

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

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

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

    The general idea:

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

    The process:

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

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

  • Cozy the Day Away and Lassi Nog

    , ,

    So, wow, it’s been a year, hasn’t it. I’m still trying not to think about 2025.

    If anyone else out there is in need of an introvert break between big holiday events, I think Karryn was pretty brilliant with the timing of the last Cozy the Day Away sale this year, which is happening tomorrow when I’m writing this (aka Dec. 29)

    In the general lull between big events? Check.

    Introverts wanting recharge time before the next round of big energy events? Check.

    Some folks with gift cards they’d like to find joy with? Check.

    Some folks in need of respite for the soul after too many sharp edged family or other encounters? Hoo boy, check.

    So yeah, if you need a bit of escape time on the 29th, check out the sale.

    I also sold another story that’s coming out next July! And I’ve got about 42,000 of what I’m guessing will be about 60,000 to 80,000 words written on the first book of the trilogy, with some wild ambition to try to finish a first draft in January. Not sure if that’s going to happen, but knock wood?

    When putting together the playlist for Shai Madhur’s mouse party with Emily Goss on Bluesky, I encountered the notion that it’s possible I’m the first person to put together the idea of egg nog and lassi? I’ve found egg nog, eggless nog, and, uh, I wish I was kidding about celery nog.

    But egg nog was hard to find this year — it looks like electing an orange fascist actually does nothing to miraculously lower the price of eggs, increase the availability of egg products, or solve the avian flu pandemic spreading among agricultural birds and cattle, go figure.

    I can still find yogurt, though. And people who are less allergic to corn than I am could have easy mode eggless nog with Bird’s custard powder. I do miss Bird’s, it was delicious when I could still eat it.

    So for folks who can handle either egged or corn-starch-having eggless nog, Ranveer Brar has a video with both varieties.

    Here’s my egg-free and corn-free lassi nog for the rest of us.

    Lassi Nog

    For each cup:

    • 1/2 to 1 cup sweet vanilla yogurt (or regular yogurt plus 2-3 drops vanilla and simple syrup to taste)
    • 1/8 tsp cinnamon
    • 1/8 tsp nutmeg
    • A few threads of saffron
    • A few drops of rum extract or brandy extract if you want familiar flavor without the alcohol
    • 1 Tbsp water (plus extra water or milk to thin the texture… or a shot of brandy if you prefer)

    Start the saffron soaking in 1 Tbsp water while preparing the rest.

    Put some yogurt in a container with spare stirring room and stir until soft and blended.

    Add in your cinnamon, nutmeg, and chosen extracts or alcohol, then stir through.

    When the saffron water has turned golden, stir it in as well. (Usually I would recommend grinding saffron into sugar for hot chai, but I’m not confident the sugar would dissolve well in cold yogurt. If anyone tries it that way, let me know.)

    At this point, assess the drinkability of your beverage and decide if you’d like it thinner (more water/milk/alcohol) or thicker (more yogurt).

    If you’re patient, refrigerate it for a few hours to let the cinnamon and nutmeg meld in.

    When ready to serve, grate a bit more nutmeg on top of the glass.

    I am not patient and it smells delicious, so I drank mine straight away. (Clearly I will need to experiment with larger batches for leftovers.)

  • Book Launch and Mouse Party!

    , , ,

    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

    ,

    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.

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

    ,

    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!

  • Midsummer at the House of Jasmines

    , ,

    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?