Last Thanksgiving, Maureen asked me if there was a side dish I’d like to bring, and, feeling rather adventurous, I volunteered to bring quinoa (pronounced keen-wah). I had never had quinoa, but I’d seen it described as having a nutty flavor. In my mind, quinoa would be about the same size as barley, and would have a flavor halfway between an oat and a pecan. Therefore it seemed like a good base for a Thanksgiving side dish.
Turns out, quinoa is nothing like that. It is …
Jessica (jess_ka) made several beautifully-decorated miniature rooms, and she let me stop by the other day and photograph them. Each room is built inside a box, and they have an astounding amount of detail for how small they are (it’s hard to tell in the photos, but I’d say the boxes are between 10 and 20 inches tall). I had a lot of fun playing around with the lighting and the post-processing.
Jessica did a lovely post …
I’m in Olympia this week, visiting family, and tinaconnolly came to visit me. We made shortbread cookies:
The cookies have rosemary and thyme in them. We got the recipe from a post on Maureen’s blog. The recipe says to press the cookies into flat rounds on a baking sheet, but ours were kind of crumbly so we pressed them into a square pan instead. After making the recipe version, we tried a couple variations:
I know at least one person who doesn’t like the end-o-year statistics posts, so I’ve hidden mine behind this cut (also, the post ended up being rather long):
I’ve snagged an invitation to have Christmas dinner with Maureen, and am using it as an excuse to make my first ever attempt at homemade candy. (After all, I’ve only eaten dozens and dozens of cookies…obviously what I need is more sugar!) Candy is tricky, but I think it went pretty well.
I made the candied orange peel yesterday:
It came …
Sugar cookies are a holiday tradition in my family. I’ve frosted them many times, but I have never made them start to finish before. But I got the recipe from my mom, and decided to give it a go. I made a batch of dough and let it chill for a couple hours in the fridge.
These were nice easy drop cookies. I like the combination of the craisins and the white chocolate, and the oatmeal makes for a nice chewy cookie.
I tasted a couple of these this morning when they came out of the oven, just to make sure there wasn’t anything wrong with them (can’t bring defective cookies to the cookie swap!). Because the cookies contain both oatmeal and fruit, they are part of a healthy breakfast…right?
When I was a kid, my mom baked cookies every Christmas. Not one batch of cookies, or two batches of cookies. My mom made double batches of several kinds of cookies which we arranged on red and green paper plates and took to all the neighbors. They were extremely popular — just yesterday a friend of mine dropped me a note saying that she was thinking about making the sugar cookies my mom always made at Christmas time (and we haven’t done the neighborhood cookie distribution for years). Everybody had a different favorite cookie — date/coconut balls, chocolate chip cookies …
I’ve currently got thirteen stories out at various markets. This is an all time high for me, so I’m pretty pleased. In case anybody is curious where the stories go, here’s a list of the markets I have stories at right now:
Abyss & Apex
Asimov’s Science Fiction
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Coyote Wild
Fantasy & Science Fiction
Flash Fiction Online
Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD)
Hub
Interfictions II anthology
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
Les Bonnes Fees
Realms of Fantasy
Talebones
(This isn’t an all-inclusive list of markets I submit …
Yesterday it was over 70 degrees outside. It was toasty warm. I wore a tank top. Today, at 3:30 in the afternoon, it was 32 degrees. I went out to run some errands and practically froze to death. (I wore a sweatshirt; in retrospect I should probably have also worn a jacket.) The overnight low tonight is 27. Texas weather is weird.
(While I was out running errands, I dropped a story in the mail, which gets me up to twelve submissions out at market. This is the most subs I’ve ever had out at the same time, so I’m …
