The Aviary

I am off work today, because it is the first day of Winternights (as I celebrate it) and today I am making a cake!

One of the frustrating things about being a solitary pagan in a non-pagan culture is that we don't really have any cultural holiday traditions*, which can leave one feeling somewhat adrift when the holidays come along. A cool thing about being a solitary pagan in a non-pagan culture is that I get to make up and customize my own holiday traditions so that they suit me.

So I am making a honey spice cake and, if it turns out well, I can keep the recipe and declare that my honey spice cake is now a Winternights honey spice cake and make it every year. And then I get to have a tradition and a delicious cake.

Also! I bound off a new shawl last night (have to block it today) and my non-cake plans are spinning and watching Critical Role and maybe walking to the graveyard to give some cake and pomegranate seeds to the local dead population.

It is going to be a good day.




*There are certainly cultural holiday traditions for Halloween, which happens at the same time but Halloween does not equal Winternights (or Samhain or Dia de los Muertos or any other holidays that happen around this time). I love Halloween, but it is a separate celebration.

There is a special kind of frustration that comes from really wanting to cook something you don't have ingredients for and can't get for several days.

I made baked oatmeal this evening, planning to have that for breakfast for the next several days. (I'm doing an experiment where maybe I eat something other than a bagel for breakfast every day.) I had been planning to just pour milk on the oatmeal when I reheat it, but it occurred to me while I was making the oatmeal that, actually, the perfect accompaniment would be rømmegrøt*, which I haven't made since last winter.

I do not have the ingredients to make rømmegrøt tonight and will not be able to go to the store for them till Sunday. That is far too long to have to wait for pudding.

Maybe I can make it to the store on Saturday.





*Rømmegrøt is a Norwegian sour cream pudding. Traditionally, from what I understand, you eat it by itself with butter and cinnamon but it's also really good stirred into oatmeal or granola. Of the foods I have learned about due to living in an extremely Norwegian town, it is my favorite, though brown cheese is probably a close second.

Good Things:

- I took a mental health day on Thursday and spent much of the day at the Point No Point beach, aka my favorite place in the world. It was misting but not raining and I brought a waterproof blanket, tea, a sandwich, and some knitting and just sat in the grey outdoors listening to the rain for a few hours. It was incredibly soothing.

- Yesterday, I started a new solo D&D game, wherein I am playing through Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. This book is, basically, one big huge dungeoncrawl, where each level of the dungeon is designed for a successively higher character level, taking you from level 5 all the way to level 20. I'm playing a level higher than the book recommends and making a few other tweaks so that I can run it for myself with just two characters: I have an aarakocra figher and a kenku alchemist because if you can be birds, why would you not be birds? It's pretty great.

- In other rp news, today my sister, sibling-in-law, and I had session 0 for our Beam Saber campaign! It is not set in the setting we designed with Microscope because our Microscope game turned out too nice and heartwarming to contain a Forever War, so Sean has designed a new setting full of monsters and weird space magic that I'm super excited about. It's going to be very cool.

- Also today, I put flannel sheets and extra blankets on my bed because it is Autumn and it's chilly and I'm so very happy.

- If buying specialist equipment turns an activity into a hobby, I am now a hobbyist breadmaker because I bought myself a pain de mie pan. (I make a lot of bread for sandwiches and am constantly annoyed the the sandwiches in the middle of the loaf are bigger than the ones at the ends. Square bread is the solution!) It should arrive before next baking day, which is great, because I have a new-to-me recipe for Icelandic rye bread that I'm excited to make using it.

- I have convinced my parents to watch One Cut of the Dead with me this evening, which is an entirely delightful Japanese movie I watched last week and immediately fell in love with. If you, like me, have a love for charmingly inept horror movies, you should definitely watch it. Try not to read anything about it first, though - it's more fun if you don't know much about it going in. (For folks who are sensitive about horror: this movie does have zombies but is not scary and all the gore is extremely fake-looking and very goofy.)

I made bread this morning, and the bread recipe that I make has a step where you divide the dough in four, then roll out each quarter, fold the sides in, roll it out again, and then roll it up into a nice little spiral ball to tuck neatly into the loaf pan. Mostly, this makes the bread look pretty when you take it out of the pan.

Today, I sprinkled a quarter teaspoon of advieh into each wee bread roll before rolling it up and now I have a loaf of bread that is subtly spiced throughout and tastes fucking amazing.

So I'm going to have to do that every time I make bread now.

THERE WAS YEAST AT THE STORE THIS MORNING!

I haven't been able to make bread for weeks now* and now I can again and indeed started to do so the minute there was yeast in the house and I have never been more excited about baking.

Before the stay-at-home order, I made bread about every other week and when we started this, I thought to myself, "Oh, I'll just make bread every time I get to the end of a loaf - as long as I have the ability to make toast, I am reasonably happy." And then I ran out of yeast and fell into a despair.

I have made quick breads and Mom has made biscuits in the interim but they are Not The Same.

Yay, bread!





*Yes, yes, sourdough, I know. The thing is a) I have tried to keep a starter before and we have never properly gotten on and b) I have a One True Bread recipe and I don't want to fuck it up trying to convert it to a sourdough recipe.

A thing I like to do on vacation is take a food item that I want to try but haven't eaten before (or have eaten before but want to re-evaluate). This allows me to try things without people staring at me* and, if I hate them, I don't feel bad about then eating something else.

On this trip, my food-to-try has been anchovies.

You guys, anchovies are fucking delicious and I am now extremely angry about every piece of cultural white knowledge that I've absorbed which told me they were gross. I could have been eating anchovies my whole life! Why did I have to wait til I was 37?




*A pro tip for people who are friends with picky eaters: trying something new or re-evaluating something is stressful. Please don't make a big deal out of it. For example, I recently learned that rice is not intolerable but I still can't eat it around my family because they all act shocked and stare at me. It's awful. Don't do that.

Making pumpkin peanut butter soup and putting pumpkin honey in it, fuck yeah.

Some of the craft* things I do, I enjoy both the process of making and the object I've made. Like spinning, or knitting, or baking bread. And there are others, where I enjoy the object but find the process tedious or unpleasant.

Today, I have discovered that making jam** is definitely in the latter category. I love having homemade jam - not least because I can make things like melon jam, which I can't buy - but man, making jam sucks.

At least I do have a jar of homemade jam at the end.





*I'm using this word very broadly here, probably. I suppose my definition of craft is "something you do by hand to produce something useful".

**I already knew this about canning in general. Having homemade pickles in the pantry is delightful. Canning those pickles is the worst.

Today's experimental cooking has been:

- a gooseberry shrub! Because there were gooseberries at the grocery store and I've never eaten one before. Now I have! And I am making a vinegar beverage out of them!

- habenero-infused honey! Which bubbled over very badly on the stove, making a huge sticky mess, but now I have a jar of very spicy honey!

Also I made bread and granola bars and cauliflower soup, but those are all things I've made lots of times and thus are hardly experimental at this juncture.

Still! I feel very accomplished. And also very tired.

Today, Megan is coming over to watch Good Omens - I am tremendously excited about it - and in preparation, I am making an apple cake.

What I like about this apple cake is...well. A lot of time, you make something that says it's an apple cake and what the person designing the recipe means is "a lightly spice cake that you might possibly be able to spot a chunk of apple in". Not this cake. This cake is all "You wanted apples? How many apples do you think we can fit in a single loaf pan? How about you chop up three entire apples to go in the cake and then slice another to put on top?" There's a batter but that's really only so that a) you can still call it a cake and b) there's something to hold the apples together. It is 80% apple.

It is a Scumble Cake.* Good Omens is not Discworld, but Scumble Cake still feels appropriate.






*I mean, the cake is non-alcoholic but it is made from apples. Well...mainly apples.

Friends, I bought myself Unusual Honey and it came in the mail today and not only are the two varieties I ordered delicious but they sent me an entire extra third bottle I had not ordered at all!

I don't know if this is standard procedure or if I just got very lucky but I am definitely going to order honey from this place again.

...After I use the 24 oz of honey that is currently on my honey shelf.

Time to make some tea!

So, my dad's off on a business trip and my Mom had been planning to spend yesterday and today in Seattle, so I took those two days off so that someone would be at home with Granny. And also, as a mental health break. It has been great

Yesterday, I did all my laundry, made bread, and built a wee paper dollhouse.

( Wanna see my wee paper dollhouse? )

Today, I have caught up on correspondence. I owed four penpal letters and a birthday card to my sister, and now all of them are in the mail. (Well, not one of the letters, because it is actually a penpal journal, where we mail a notebook back and forth. That means I need a mailer, which I don't have, and need to go to the actual post office. And it is raining really hard and I don't want to go outside past the mailbox, so it will get mailed latter. But it's written, at least!)

Now I am going to go make fancy hot chocolate* and catch up on my comicbook backlog. Today is a day of accomplishments.





*Friends, have you always thought that hot cocoa wasn't rich or thick or chocolatey enough? Do you have 20 minutes free? Go and make that thing. You will not regret it.

Okay, weird experiment explanation time. I drink a lot of tea, as you may have gathered, and I drink my tea with a lot of sugar. This is not ideal, as I sometimes feel that I consume more sugar in the course of the day than I would wish. But I can't drink tea without sugar - it's gross.

Then I thought "What if I made herbal tea from savory herbs? My brain won't expect that to be sweet, so drinking it unsweetened will be okay." So I've been trying that, and I also bought some things from the weird bulk tea section of my grocery store to experiment with: clover, and dandelion leaf, and dandelion root. Parsey tea is good, and so is sage.

All of this to say that today I made dandelion tea with a pinch of salt. And it tastes distressingly like drinking milk.

I have nothing against drinking milk when it's actually milk. But weird herbal tea that mysteriously tastes like milk instead of plants is kinda freaking me out.