Lynn Strong

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Tag: Beverages

  • Pumpkin Spice Season and Conference Season

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    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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    A pitcher for a party like Haroun’s:

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

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

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

    Chill until you’re ready to serve.

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

    Decorate the pitcher or glasses with mint sprigs if desired.

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

    For sharbat concentrate to save and dilute later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    For a sugar-free alternative, individual servings:

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

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

  • Cozy the Day Away and Lassi Nog

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    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.)

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

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

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

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

    I really needed that. I still need that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Najra’s Crimson Witch’s Brew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    If your jasmine is blooming:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Neurodiverse fantasies and Sahar’s Misty Evening Chai Latte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sahar’s Misty Evening Chai Latte

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

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

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

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

    Helpful hardware:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Happy Book Release Day (and Discount Chocolate Eve)!

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    The Wyngraf Valentines Edition is available now!

    I can’t say I’ve been working towards a day like today for 50 years, because I’m 50 right now. However, considering the first “book” I wrote (and illustrated) was when I was 3, I can say it’s been 47 years in progress.

    The character who became Ashar showed up in my head in 2018, and Rahat showed up in 2019, and I had 80% of the first draft done in 2020, and then I put it on the shelf with the rest of my scribbles because the notion of cozy fantasy as a publishable genre outside some corners of fanfic wasn’t really a glint in anyone’s eye, especially not back in 2018.

    And then between the global pandemic and billion dollar climate catastrophes and Trump, suddenly a lot of people decided they’d lived enough apocalyptic horror and would really not mind reading some fantasy that wasn’t grimdark anymore. But I still had no idea any of my scribbling might be publishable until I saw one of Nathaniel’s posts in the Cozy Fantasy Reddit last summer. I remember fighting with writing an ending around the 4th of July and being absolutely mortified that an autocorrect had autocorrected the last word of the last edit wrong!

    And Nathaniel very patiently did not laugh at me when I sent a frantic “what have I done, I know you wanted it to be well edited before I hit submit, I’m so sorry” email, assuring me that one typo would not make or break the acceptance of the story.

    Gmail gives preview of messages, and I knew writers got a lot of rejections, so when a few weeks later I got an email starting out like “we couldn’t fit your story into the summer edition,” I thought I knew the rest. And then I opened it, and if I hadn’t been sitting down I’d have fallen over when Nathaniel went on to say that he’d like to buy it for the Valentines Edition.

    He’s been absolutely fantastic to work with, kind and cheerful and infinitely patient with editing exchanges that occasionally went like:

    Nathaniel: “Rahat’s actual name can’t start with H for very good structural reasons.”

    Me: (12 hours of historical research on the lineages of both the Mughal and Safavid dynasties to come up with name and title patterns that were plausible followed by writing 15,000 words of sequel in order to find out how Kamil thinks of Rahat inside his own head and realizing the syllable he’d have started with that Ashar needed to interrupt was the first syllable of the title ‘shahzada’)

    Nathaniel (probably not used to someone writing 15,000 words of sequel to figure out how to change one letter of manuscript): “Sure, shahzada works!”

    I wish I was better at short story ideas as opposed to ridiculously long story ideas, because 15,000 words is way outside Wyngraf’s limit, but I’d absolutely love to write for Wyngraf again!

    In the meantime, in honor of Discount Chocolate Eve, here’s the Has Spoons edition of the hot chocolate recipe I mentioned in Priye’s preview. (True confession, today I did not have the spoons to make it. But tomorrow is Discount Chocolate Day, so maybe I can make it then.)

    Spoonful Hot Chocolate of Decadence

    (Occasionally called Secret Ninja Master Hot Chocolate by my friends, except no longer quite so secret.)

    Equipment:

    • 16 oz. microwave-safe mug
    • Small whisk or hand held milk frother

    Ingredients:

    • 12-14 oz. milk (or your preferred alternative)
    • 2-4 Tbsp semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips (depending on your preferred richness level)
    • Optional 1-2 Tbsp sugar or honey (if you have bittersweet or bakers chocolate)
    • Tiny pinch of salt (don’t forget this!)
    • 1/8 tsp-ish vanilla
    • Flavor twists as desired:
      • 1/8 tsp-ish rose water or orange blossom water and/or
      • 1/4 tsp-ish cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and/or chai masala
      • Optional shot of liqueur of your choice if it has been One of Those Days

    Step 1:

    Half-fill the mug with milk and add the chocolate chips, any desired sugar/honey, and the pinch of salt.

    If your additional flavor notes involve any dried spices like chai masala, add them here so they meld in with the hot liquid and aren’t raw at the end. (Liquid flavors are more volatile, so save vanilla or rosewater for the final step.)

    Step 2:

    Microwave for 30-45 seconds, then whisk or froth a little with the little frother. (Don’t worry if the chips are still hard.)

    Step 3:

    Microwave for another 30-45 seconds, then whisk or froth again. (At this point the chips should be melty enough to blend through nicely and turn the milk a lovely light chocolate color.)

    Step 4:

    At this point you’ll know about how much volume the frothed milk and hot chocolate are taking up.

    Add more milk to better fill the mug (but leave half an inch or so for final frothing).

    Microwave another 30-45 seconds to heat the new addition of milk, then froth. (Adjust time to suit your own tongue.)

    Step 5:

    Add any liquid flavor notes like vanilla/rosewater after the chocolate is warm enough to drink, so the vanilla flavor doesn’t evaporate during the heating and frothing. (Taste testing is handy.)

    Add any other liquid flavor notes desired at this point and stir through with the frother.

    Step 6:

    Drink. Purr. Repeat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Priye’s Brindle Kitten Chocolate Orange Ginger Chai

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

    Lynn’s Low Spoons translation

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

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

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

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

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

  • Asharan’s Rose Chai

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

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

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

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

    A masala-chai scented with roses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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