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Happy Sunday, happy campers!

I have six Dreamwidth codes that cageyklio was kind enough to ask if I'd distribute on her behalf. I think I may owe one or two people codes but I'm seriously disorganised, so I'm holding two back in case those people poke me and want their codes. But that means I still have four codes to offer! First-come, first-served, drop me a comment. :) First four claimed! I'm holding the other two for 24 hours, if I offered you a code and haven't followed through, please also comment :D Otherwise I'll release them into the wild.

ALSO: If you have codes you'd like to offer, please feel free to use this post as a clearinghouse -- drop a comment with the number you have to share, and people can comment to your comment to request them. MAKE FRIENDS! :D

It's Good We're Not Religious Types.

Oh, Sunday morning in quarantine. Oddly relaxing. There's something very restful about being absolutely unable to go outside or do -- anything, really.

Jack has decided the populace is not panicked enough about the Swine Flu, and has locked down the Hub. I admit that linking him to a photo of a dog in a gas mask (for Max!) may not have helped any. Still, we have plenty of food and supplies and, given it's the five of us plus Max, I gathered up all the cushions and cots and things and rigged us quite a cosy little home-from-home with blanket cocoons for everyone. Ordinarily the fact that Gwen's a cuddler is not top of the list of reasons I like her, but I think everyone had a nice evening curled up together drinking and watching films. And I did not weep at all even though Tron was Tosh's favourite film and we used to watch it and throw popcorn at the really truly technologically stupid bits.

By the way, I've been meaning to mention that someone sent us all virtual gifts! Thank you very much for the coffee.

And now it's Sunday morning, which means breakfast. I've laid out a virtual buffet of tinned delights to top one's pancakes with: peaches, pineapple, baked beans, mushy peas, stewed tomatoes, and of course butter and syrup (not tinned).

OI. LAYABOUTS. UP AND AT 'EM, PANCAKES ARE GETTING COLD!

Max, stop sleeping on Gwen's face, it's impolite.

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Food food food food!

I have prepared potatoes for mash, made sushi vinegar, and washed the rice. It's soaking now. Here's a question, rice-fanatics: if I am making one experimental cup of rice to start with (ie, one cup of dry rice to 1 1/4 cups water) do I still do the covered-cooking thing for ten minutes, or do I cut it to say, five?

I'd just check it at five but apparently an evil god emerges and eats your face if you lift the lid to check it.

Yesterday I made quesadillas and also butter pudding with bananas; today I'm making mashed potatoes, sushi, and sloppy joe. Oh! And I'm trying out a "clone" recipee for Durkee's Famous Sauce, because apparently you can't get it outside of the south anymore.

My kitchen gods (not the evil face-eating one) are very confused. :D

As an aside, I love the smell of vinegar, so it's a shame I don't cook with it more often. One of my earliest memories is of a toy my parents used to make for me: you put some vinegar in a coke bottle, fill a balloon with baking soda, and fit the balloon over the neck of the bottle. The baking soda falls into the vinegar and forms a gas that fills the balloon. They would draw faces on the balloon so that when it inflated A FACE APPEARED.

I am afraid of balloons (shut up) but apparently I once was a tiny fearless thing, because I can distinctly recall shrieking with delight at this. So the smell of vinegar and the sensation of home and comfort are forever linked in my mind.

I keep being tempted to write a YA novel about cooking and magic, but I'm not sure what I'd write. All I have is the opening:

"Cooking is just alchemy," his father used to say to him. "The transmutation of one thing into another. It is the simplest of things: chew a raw potato for long enough and it becomes sweet, nothing else needed. Mix flour and water with yeast, and it expands. There is no mystery to alchemy that is any greater than the mystery of the kitchen."

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Who's your sushi daddy? OH THAT'S ME.

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I wanted to chill the maki before I tried cutting it, so I have just sliced it up and eaten a bit and I declare it a SUCCESS!

I'm not really confident in my ability to find fresh enough fish for real sushi, so I bought a little tin of cooked wild-caught Alaskan salmon and used that. One roll has salmon, cream cheese, green onions, and spicy mustard; the other is just cream cheese and spicy mustard (Trader Joe's Garlic Aioli Mustard, actually). I know, I know, very inauthentic, but it was cheap stuff I knew I'd like, and this was a test run. It tastes GREAT, and I am super-proud that tomorrow I am taking a BENTO BOX to work and it will have SUSHI in it instead of what it usually has, which is half a sandwich and some chips or sometimes a bit of pizza.

I may take some Durkee's sauce to dip the rolls in, just to thoroughly blaspheme. I have no idea if the sauce I made tastes like Durkee's at all, but it is DELICIOUS and was easier to make than I thought -- this is the recipe I used and I didn't even bother with a blender, just whisked it vigorously. It thickened nicely and tastes pretty unique. It made a crapload of sauce, though, way more than I'm going to use before it goes bad.

I'm afraid to offer some to R -- it uh, does look like slightly off chocolate pudding. I'm not sure if he'd recoil in horror or eat it with a spoon. On frosted mini-wheats.

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Despite all the cooking and the epic post of Dreamwidth Codeness (see what you started, cageyklio? Super karma points for you!) this has been a pretty mellow weekend for me. It was nice, after the madness of Big Bang and the nervous breakdown over Nameless, to realise that every time I was freaking out it was over nothing, that I had no deadlines to meet.

I need to figure out what I'm going to do next, ( creatively... )

And of course in the background there's my studies in Extribulum, which I may codify into a realio-trulio thesis with a structure and a four-chapter pedagogy and everything. But that's not creative, not in the same sense anyway -- it's a synthesis of information, and the creative thinking is more "how do I fit these bits together" and less "I'm gonna make up some bits!"

I'm not going to rush. I'm going to take a while to think about all this. Next weekend I'm going to Texas for Mother's Day, and two weeks after I'm going camping, so May is fairly busy and in some respects that will help me, because I'll prioritise what I want to do most, and that will help keep me going. It's an exciting time; I feel like I'm really, finally finding my feet as a writer outside of fanfic. Not that I don't love fanfic, but I've always felt crippled by an actual inability to go beyond it, and now I'm overcoming that.

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Who's a posting fiend today? I AM.

HIYA CAFE, LET'S COOK.

never_ender wants to make onigiri, after all my talk of sushi today. These are the things in her cupboard. WHAT CAN SHE FILL IT WITH?

( Onigiri me, baby )