Caroline M. Yoachim

Cranberry-Orange Cheesecake

I’ve managed to snag an invitation to have another Thanksgiving dinner with Maureen and her family, and she said I could bring a dessert*, so I decided I’d make cranberry-orange cheesecake**. It has a gingersnap-graham-cracker crust, and swirls of cranberry sauce flavored with orange zest. The swirls came out quite pretty. Sadly, the cheesecake cracked rather extensively. I consulted with tinaconnolly, who had made cheesecake before, and she assured me that cheesecakes crack all the time, and that it should still taste …

Squash! Now in soup form!

I roasted up some of the squash from yesterday’s photo session and made squash soup. There is a reason most squash soup recipes call for butternut squash. Winter squashes are all hard to hack up into manageable sized bits, but at least a butternut squash has a fair amount of edible flesh inside. Dumpling squashes, while cute and pretty, have a much higher work-to-flesh ratio. There’s hardly any squash in there at all once you get the seeds out! (The dumpling squash does taste good, …

Squash!

For Halloween, my grocery store was selling little bags of decorative squash. After Halloween, the decorative squash went on sale (and with good reason — some of it had started to get moldy, which was disgusting). In addition to the (non-edible) decorative squash, I got a couple dumpling squashes and a carnival squash, which will hopefully become squash soup sometime in the near future. IMO, the edible squashes are prettier than the decorative ones (but the decorative ones do make nice filler).

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Food and Flowers

stale sourdough bread + leftover maple pecan butter + eggs, milk, and orange zest =

Orange-Maple-Pecan French Toast

So this week is already off to a better start than last week :) After appointments with two docs and an occupational therapist last week, and a weekend of rest, my wrists are starting to do a little bit better. Thanks to everyone (here and elsewhere) who sent me sympathies! Peter got me some roses last week to cheer …

Not Many Posts Lately

Warning: This post was written for the express purpose of me venting.

I have this incredibly frustrating cycle where almost every time I have a sustained productive period with my writing, the extra computer time puts too much strain on my wrists. I managed to explode them again on Monday, so rather than getting work done on the three revisions I have going, or on the new story ideas I have floating around, I have been going to a series of doctor appointments and trying to rest my wrists. GRRR.

So I haven’t been blogging much lately, and will probably …

Sale!

Squee! I found out this weekend that “The Best Last Choice I Ever Made” will appear in Issue #38 of Talebones Magazine. Judging from the table of contents my story will be in excellent company!

Last Observatory Post!

One of the perks of going to visit the observatory with an astronomer is that I got access inside the telescopes, and also to the walkway outside the dome (which is about three stories up, and an excellent place to take sunrise/sunset pictures). I put a few shots from inside the telescope dome up on flickr, with notes about the equipment. The third photo in that series shows the little tiny holes in the mirror of the Harlan J. Smith telescope from when one of the telescope operators got disgruntled and shot the mirror with his gun.

Also over …

Rained Out

The first few days we were at the observatory, we had tons of rain. The weather alternated between thunderstorms, rain, and thick clouds.

Most of the time the weather was so bad we didn’t even want to leave the lodge (which meant I got lots of writing done!). But every now and then the clouds would part, which makes for some nice dramatic sky pictures:

Everything is bigger in Texas…

I know not everyone likes giant spiders, so I put the pictures behind the cut….

Good Morning!

Sunrise was at about 7:15am, and I managed to wake up early enough to set up and take photographs three times during the trip. This shot shows the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (in the hills on the left side of the photo) just as the sun peeked over the mountains. A few of my other favorite sunrise photos are up on flickr.