Lynn Strong

Cozy fantasy and beyond

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Tag: Jasmine

  • Charmcraft’s release and a jasmine meditation

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    By the time you’re reading this, I will (or won’t) have gotten through the 25-pages-and-4-spreadsheets launch plan for Chai and Charmcraft.

    If you haven’t ordered it yet and are interested, this week (May 1-8) is a good time to do that, because the preorder 50% discount lasts through the May 8 Cozy the Day Away Sale and it will go from $2.99 to $5.99 at some point after that.

    (The other Catsprowl books will also be on sale on May 8 — along with over 100 other books! I tend to open a gazillion tabs at the start of the day, go do the day job, and come back and read the details in the evening, because if I get sucked into the book shinies at the start of the day, I might be late for work.)

    I… have had better weeks than this one. This is a strong contender for “top five worst weeks of my life,” between a treasured friend in the ICU, multiple tornadoes resulting in stacked migraines and power outages and most of my local friends group having refrigeration failures at the same time, day job work being aggressively too much, all the way down to completely trivial things like the lack of refrigeration meaning I couldn’t do a housebound mini book party or even have a tablespoon of milk to make a fresh cup of chai with.

    The big stuff is big and hard. But I was under the delusion that surely I would be able to do something about the small stuff, right? I got instant chai packets and ordered a tin of baklava because it wouldn’t need refrigeration, except I was so tired I nearly dropped the baklava, except the adrenaline jolt from nearly dropping honey pastries all over the floor meant that I didn’t get sleep for the second night in a row… The world was already Way Too Much, and the petty stuff stacking on top of the major stuff is even more Too Much Stuff. I’m in the land of being afraid to move because I’ll drop something or break something because the universe is clearly not done saying Ha in absolutely any way it can.

    But the show has to go on. So I’m trying to sound coherent on 3ish hours of sleep in 3 days and also feeding the coolest bits of foodie research I can find into the Bluesky repost game. Latest bit: a fascinating (to me, anyway) look at how the medieval cookbooks’ instructions to smoke a container with incense before filling it is still in use today!

    And Siavahda’s review is giving me life. Seriously, every time I start crying at how much too much everything has been this week, I go reread parts of that, and I try to find the shining faith in humanity that Sia saw in it.

    There’s some cosmic balance in that Charmcraft helped Sia through a rough spot and Sia’s review is helping me through a rough spot too.

    I’m not doing 75% of what an indie author “ought to do” when releasing a new book. That 25 page list would be a lot longer if I were capable of facing down Meta’s Eye of Sauron on top of the pile of marching Murphy’s Law beasties sticking claws in this week.

    I can’t do the classical book launch with a couple hours standing around mingling over canapes at a local bookstore or library. My low key, safe from red-hatted family, and disability friendly version is that Bluesky thread of lots of fun history and food research details, likely with a lot of cat videos thrown in.

    (I am delighted that I get to call both pet-grooming videos and delicious-street-food videos “research time.” 😸 Also I need to go add Pyaari to the thread because I hadn’t met her when I started writing but she looks exactly like what I imagine Sahar to look like.)

    So of course I need a recipe to go with the book launch blog post, and a character to talk about… and I did think about Shai Madhur’s sticky date balls, but really, I need something to be very, very, VERY simple in my life right now.

    So does Irfan.

    Irfan is Faraj’s extremely harried hajib / chamberlain / really-not-a-vizier, on account of how word association with “vizier” usually unearths “evil,” “scheming,” or “backstabbing” within a few guesses to speakers of English who have been exposed to Disney’s Aladdin et al. (I very nearly named him Jafar, because I feel so badly for all the perfectly decent people named Jafar who have to survive that cultural baggage, except that I knew my small indie self was not going to armwrestle the Mouse’s cultural legacy into reconsideration; it was much more likely that people would see Jafar and think I meant a villain.)

    I really hope that people don’t read Irfan as the villain. If people read him as a villain, I’ve failed him as a writer. If this book wasn’t a cozy fantasy, he would likely have been the hero. The trope expectations of an epic fantasy would have meant he was absolutely correct in his fears. (Still utterly delighted that Sia saw that too!)

    Since Irfan doesn’t have his shahzada‘s type of prophetic foresights, he’s got to be even more cautious than Faraj if he expects to intercept the trouble before the trouble makes its way into Faraj’s life. And Irfan is the variety of neurodiverse that takes chaos as both an affront to the way things ought to be and a personal failing. After all, it’s literally been Irfan’s job for decades to prevent as much chaos as he can, before his dear prophet catches troubling foreshadows of whatever chaos Irfan didn’t manage to avert in time.

    (In Katayef and Kittens, Irfan is getting a break as much as Faraj and Ashar will be. I thought I owed him that, from early readers’ feedback!)

    In bookworld, I haven’t pinned down whether the outside-the-Empire trade connections extend as far as China and Japan, or whether the Zen Buddhist tradition has an analogue here. I’m inclined toward yes, I just haven’t written anything that needed a formal answer further afield than “kashmiri goats exist in this world because Varsha-auntie deserves the softest fiber arts to play with.”

    Likewise, Irfan deserves the simplest, calmest possible recipe for a man who thrives on calm, simple order that’s in short supply for both of us right now.

    (I really am sorry I surrounded you with such catful chaos, Irfan!)

    Chameli ki sharbat / mogra ka sharbat is what you make when you have time and ingredients and a kitchen and boiling pots and sterilized jars for storage and …a fair amount of fuss.

    I don’t always have that much time or that many spoons in my life. But I discovered between last year and this that I didn’t need that much time, and sometimes a sip of jasmine-scented bliss helps refill the spoon shortage. Sometimes the simplest possible solution is an exquisite grace of its own.

    On the flip side, there really isn’t a substitute for the luxury of fresh, clean, fragrant blossoms here; it doesn’t work the same way with dried jasmine blossoms, and dried herbs don’t float away from a sip the same way, and I’m just not fond of a mouthful of dried herbs in water, and if you have a jasmine tea bag, you’re getting jasmine tea, which is a delight of its own but not caffeine-free for all day enjoyment.

    If you would like your own blossoming jasmine plant, and you have a pot and a sunny window, they’re wonderfully gratifying plants — sometimes so fragrant they kick off my allergies! There’s a reason I specify only three blossoms below. But you can do it with just one, if you’re patient.

    I don’t live in a jasmine-hospitable climate. I didn’t plant it in the ground; I carry the pot indoors in the fall and outdoors in the spring, and I’ve done so for nearly 20 years. So if you think fresh jasmine blossoms are for other people but not for you… Charmcraft is a book about how lovely things that other people can have are also for you too. So I’m here to encourage anyone to try a jasmine plant in a pot wherever you are. And if your windows don’t get much sun, I have loved these plant halo lights for several years.

    A Meditative Jasmine Infusion

    Three fresh jasmine blossoms

    A beautiful cup with a lid or a saucer

    Cool, crisp water

    Fill the beautiful cup with water to three quarters full. Float the three jasmine blossoms (stem side down) in the cup. Cover it between sips.

    The space between the water and the lid will fill with a remarkable fragrance, and the blossoms last all day in cool water.

    (You can also try this with other fresh, fragrant, un-sprayed flowers or herbs, such as damask roses, lavender, or your own favorite edible flowers or herbs.)

  • 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?