I am the master of mayonnaise!

No, really, mayonnaise is just about this easy:

• 1 tsp dijon mustard
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 cup of olive oil
• one tbsp lemon juice or sherry vinegar

Now, the trick is that you need the following tools: a hand-blender with whisk attachment and accompanying scaled cylinder container, and an emptied clean soy sauce bottle.

Fill the soy sauce bottle with olive oil. Put the egg yolk and the mustard in the bottom of the hand-blender cylinder, sit down and hold the cylinder between your knees, because when it starts to stiffen it's gonna kick. Start blending the yolk and mustard, and as you do so add the olive oil. The soy sauce bottle won't let you add it very fast, so it's safe just to tip it in and watch it vaporize against the spinning whisk.

At first, it'll seem liquid, but as you add more the miracle of mayonnaise will happen and you'll get stiff, delicious stuff. The moment you're out of olive oil, tip in the acidifier (the lemon juice or vinegar) and the mixture will turn from yellow to white, indicating that it's ready to go.

It's so mind-bogglingly easy, I don't get why it scares some people.

Another whipped thing: whiskey-kissed whipped cream.

Whiskey-kissed whipped cream appears in a story I wrote many moons ago, and I've always wondered how to make it. I've had it in desserts before, but only at restaurants.

Last night, I figured it out. The secret is cold.

Measure out a half-shot of good bourbon whiskey and a quarter-cup of heavy whipping cream. Put the whipping cream into a metal bowl, leave the whiskey in the shot glass.

Put everything in the freezer for ten minutes.

After taking it out of the freezer, immediately start whipping the cream with a hand-blender. Just as it starts to form soft peaks, put in the whiskey. Whip it for quite a while; the chemistry of alcohol and milkfat will take a while to overcome, but the cold inhibits the reaction that causes the structure to break down and become liquid again. Eventually, you'll get set peaks, and you can whip it as dry as you want.

It will still break down, just not as quickly once the whip has set, and it's got quite a kick to it. Yum!

Big Red chewing gum now has aspartame!?

The last gum that Omaha could safely chew has now gone the way of evil. This afternoon, while shopping for supplies, Omaha went looking for chewing gum and we discovered that Big Red, the last of the Wrigley's chewing gums that was all-sugar, now has a message: "May contain aspartame or acesulfame."

Well, crap. So much for that.

How mind-boggling is it that Mexico, once derided as the place where cheap, often low-quality food comes from, is now regarded as the place from which to get better chewing gum and soda products? (Mexico doesn't allow corn sweeteners or aspartame in their food products; Mexi-Coke is regarded as a superior product to the Coca-Cola sold in most groceries.)

${SEASON} Feast!

The real point of all this cooking and buying and mixing and whipping is that the groaning plate of food for the Seasonal Feast has come and gone. I made cookies in the shape of cats and tried to decorate them to look like something from Erin Hunter's Warrior series; it came off okay, but the darkened cookie and pale frosting made it look more like a photographic negative than the actual illustration.

Omaha cooked six pounds of Dead Pig, very yummy in the final result (and the next day, mixed with said home-made mayonnaise, perfect in sandwiches with beefsteak tomatoes, red onions, and lettuce), along with pan-sautee'd potatoes and parsely, steamed broccoli, a blackberry-and-mustard sauce for the meat, and finishing it off with pumpkin pie and the aforementioned whiskey-kissed whipped cream.

Lisakit's mother came over, ate dinner and watched Star Wars (a family tradition!) with us. She's a charming woman, and she made us all feel quite at ease with a somewhat stranger in the house.

Gifts were handed out. Given our dire economic straits, not much was exchanged, but Kouryou-chan got a ton of clothes from her grandmother, books, and stuff. Lisakit made everyone something crocheted; I got the most amazing fingerless gloves just perfect for late-night hacking. Where anyone finds the time and skill to make something like that, I have no idea. I'm very happy with them all, though. Omaha and Kouryou-chan got gorgeous scarves.

Annoyed at myself for being annoyed at myself for being annoyed at myself…

The other day, I was reading one of my own Journal Entries, trying to remind myself of why I wrote them and get back into the groove of writing them again.  Now that I’m doing freelance work, though, I don’t have as much time to write as I used to.  I have to produce value, and people pay me more to write code than stories so, well, there you go.

But as I was reading, the love scene started and the characters got into positions and suddenly it turns out, completely unremarked-upon before this, that the woman in the story is black.  I was at first annoyed by this revelation: how did the idiot author let the story get this far along before dropping this little bombshell?  And then I recalled, annoying myself further, that that had been part of the point of the damn series.  Bombshells like that were the fun stuff of the Journal Entries.   I had enjoyed tweaking the audience by doing exactly that: dropping in details that the characters themselves wouldn’t have cared about until it mattered, not bothering to announce the color of another character’s skin as an identifier but rather as a source of pleasure, an aesthetic quality independent of personality, or culture, or expectation.  I was pleased to note that the trick had worked.

Then I became further annoyed with myself for feeling tweaked by my previous self.  I wonder what other annoyances I’ll have to grind away at in the future, to get back to my former egalitarian gorgeous self?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

The Lead, And How to Swing It

Insanely prolific blogger and book reviewer James Nicoll has a contest entitled Because My Tears Are Delicious To You. James has a lack of patience for exceptionally bad SF, along with a notoriously long idiosyncratic list of things in SF that especially set him off, and is challenging people to write the ultimate “make James cry” opening sentence. (Really, don’t participate unless you know what makes James cry.)

I wanted to participate– some of them are real groaners.  Much to my frustration, I found that I couldn’t.

Here’s the real truth: I haven’t written anything new since April.  Mostly, that’s because, as I wrote in my previous post, people pay me more to write code these days.  But there seems to be something else going on.  I’m not sure entirely what it is, but it bugs me.  I sit down to write and nothing comes to the fingers.  I do what I’m supposed to do when that happens: I write anyway.  I write crap.  And I mean, real crap. (Okay, some of you might actually want to read a scene involving Wish, a Sterling Y, and a bit of llerkin nobility, but the dialogue there sucks, people)

And many of the novel ideas I had to work with just seem to be equally dead.  A retelling of the Superman story as STL warfare between back-to-the-soil types and posthumans?  Completely hung up on the “just another Anglo writer” complex.  Moon Sun Dragons?  Not enough ideas for a book, not enough eyeball kick for a movie.  Caprice Starr?  Boring.  Automatic Sweetheart?  “Steampunk is so last year.”  The Last Year of the Cat?  “Nobody will ever take catgirls seriously, no matter how much Sarah Waters, Camille Paglia, and Bram Dysktra you throw in there.”  Janae?  “Too obvious.”

Bleah.  Someone find me my mojo, ne?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Rails re-affirms my love for Django…

I have a contract that I’m working on that requires I work with rails.  That, in itself, isn’t so bad.  But I think what bothers me most about rails can be summed up in one word: partials. For example, let’s say I have the following:

render :partial => 'employee', :collection => @employees

What this means is that the files _employee.rhtml, using the internal variable employee, will iterate multiple times over the collection employees. The “magic” here is that the internal variable and the partial name coincide. This is called, in rails, using convention over configuration.  And while it makes perfect sense, it is in some sense straitjacketing.  Yes, I know, people will tell me that the internal variable name can be changed with the :as symbol; that’s not the point.  Ruby is such a malleable language that rails almost seems anathemic to ruby in the first place: why use what is just about the most flexible language in the first place, and then create a set of conventions which must be memorized in order to make the thing go?

I kinda like ruby and rails, but they don’t seem to belong to one another.   It feels very much like a marriage with a mail-order bride.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com