The Aviary

I often browse recipe blogs while I don't have anything to do at work, trying to decide what my meal prep recipes are going to be for the upcoming weekend. I ideally like to have decided by Thursday so that I can make my shopping list/do kitchen inventory on Friday and then go shopping on Saturday and cook on Sunday. It's usually a good system and I do a pretty even mix of new recipes and standbys I've made a million times.

However, occasionally I'm browsing and I get stuck on a recipe that doesn't work for meal prep - usually because it doesn't keep well or doesn't scale well to making a large amount - but that suddenly becomes the only thing I want to eat in the world. And then I have to figure out how to fit that into my schedule so I can get it out of my system.

Today, it is this recipe for oyakodon. I don't know why this has happened; I don't even like eggs that much. And yet.

I'll have to make that for lunch on Saturday, I think.


ETA - I did make oyakodon on Saturday and it was delicious. Plus, despite halfing the recipe to make a single portion, it made enough for me to eat for two lunches. I'll have to add that to my weekend lunch plans more often.

Hello, friends. My travel tumbler came open in my bag this morning and now all my possessions are damp and lapsang souchong scented. This has happened three times in the past two months - my locking tea tumbler does not reliably stay locked when in my bag.

Do you have a travel tumbler you like that is around 16-20 ounces and by god stays locked? Please tell me about it.

Important fact I learned yesterday:

If you are planning to make cauliflower soup and you find a purple cauliflower at the store and get really excited about the idea of colorful vegetables, you should be aware that, in the process of cooking the soup, the purple color will leech out of the cauliflower and into the broth, making the broth purple. (The cauliflower will remain purple.) If you then add milk to the broth, it will turn a light but vivid lavender color. And if you add cheddar cheese at the end, the broth turns ever so slightly pink.

And then you will have a big pot of soup that tastes very good but looks a bit like some sort of fruit-flavored pudding dessert and it's going to be disconcerting.

(The soup also has orange cauliflower and broccoli, which makes it more colorful but did not affect the color of the broth as far as I can tell.)

So far, this week is better. Here are some good things:

- I put the Votoms theme on my going-to-work playlist and it is an excellent driving song.

- This week, I made miso butter salmon with mushrooms and garlicky roasted broccoli over buttered pasta for my lunches and it's so delicious, oh my god.

- Also I made caramelized pineapple for the first time in ages and it's also delicious.

- Yesterday, all the patrons I interacted with were really nice and friendly and I was able to help them and it was fucking great.

- Pokemon continues to be a complete delight.

- I am ahead of schedule on my gift crafting, which means extra time for my own projects. I am nearly done with a big fancy shawl that I started a while ago and I'm hoping to finish it before it gets to warm to wear it.

One of the things that's not great about being a pagan is the lack of established food traditions for holidays. I like having special food to mark special occasions. So this year, I decided that, okay, I am a solitary practitioner, time to invent my own food traditions.

I like baking, and a lot of my family's holiday food traditions revolve around baked goods, so I'm picking some baking recipes I like that are a little more work than I'd usually do (so I don't make them often), and assigning them to holiday. There's also some recipes that I haven't made before that I'm going to try this year, and keep them if they work.

Disting is this week, so today, I made saffron buns. (Because Disting is the beginning of the end of winter, so it feels appropriate to eat something that's yellow and smells like citrus, for the sun.) I haven't made these before but they smell amazing and I'm very much looking forward to eating them.

Important update: the salmon paste is delicious.

So that's exciting.

So, I get a monthly tea subscription box from tearunners.com. (I've gotten other tea subscription boxes over the years, but I like this one especially because they let you customize your box before it gets shipped to you - so you sign up for a particular box and they send you a list of all the things that will be in your box and also all the other boxes, so that if there's something in your box that you know you hate, you can swap. Which is nice, as there are some fairly common tea types (Earl Grey, most spiced teas, teas that contain hibiscus) that I really don't like.) So once a month I get four sample-sized packets of tea, usually enough to make five or six cups. It's cool, because it lets my try teas that I'm curious about but not curious enough to commit to a larger amount, especially of something that might be a little pricey.

This month, one of my samples was a pu ehr tea, which is a tea variety that definitely falls into the above category. Pu ehr is one of those things that, when you read about it online, you get a lot of people telling you that it's an acquired taste and it's not for everyone, which makes you a little wary. But hey, sample size - if I hate it, it's no big deal, right?

I got six little discs of compressed tea, each individually wrapped in paper. The tea brews up extremely dark, almost black, and has an underlying earthy funk to it - I can see why it might put people off but you guys, I absolutely love it. It reminds me, more than anything, of buckwheat honey. Which is another not-for-everyone food and the only thing I've ever had the proprietor of a farmer's market stall warn me about before buying but that I also really love. I'm really happy to have found something else that weird "this kinda tastes like dirt and I'm really into it" niche.

So now I have to buy some more pu ehr tea, I guess.

Things:

- I'm currently working on this shawl, which I'm enjoying very much. It is complicated in a different way than a lot of the complicated things I knit, in that it's all stockinette instead of being lace or cables, so the complexity is in the actual shaping and construction of the shawl. But the way it works does mean that I occasionally have to pick up and knit something like 179 stitches along the edge of something which is...tedious.

- Sunday morning is cooking time, so I have spent the morning cooking. I was trying a new recipe and it turned out to be awful (especially since the cabbage I bought turned out to be off, which I only discovered too late in the process to remedy), so I had to switch to a backup tried-and-trusted recipe that I already had most of the ingredients for. Ah, well. This is also loaf cake weekend, so I made a coconut and lime cake and that, at least, turned out fine.

- Last night, I finished the first adventure in my newest solo D&D game, so I'm figuring out what's going to happen next. I have an Adventure Crafter sheet for the next adventure, so I have some ideas, but a fun thing about playing solo is that if I want to spend a session or two having my character explore a new city via random oracle rolls rather than jumping straight to Danger and Excitement, I can do that. I also get to do exactly the amount and kind of worldbuilding I want, which means that I have no idea how the government of this city functions at all but I do know about the city's textile industry and the different kinds of street food you can buy.

Update to the earlier things:

Along with the aforementioned wee chicken potpies, I also made a jar of pineapple pickles this weekend. This is the first time I have made pickled pineapple. I opened the jar to have some with dinner and you guys, pickled pineapple is amazing.

( Here is a recipe, in case you also want some )

This week, I started an experiment where I basically meal prep all my meals for the entire week on Sunday and then never actively think about food again. I'd been wanting to do this for a while, but had been reluctant due to my dad's historic insistence that a) Family Meals (Mostly Dinner) Are Important and b) Family Meals Only Count If We Eat the Same Things. I am fine with a) most of the time but b) is honestly silly, especially considering my long and absurd list of food aversions that make any shared meal where we eat the same things an often unsatisfying compromise. I presented the change to him as "I feel physically better when I eat a smaller meal so I'm going to try this for a while" - Dad is a dinner-is-the-largest-meal guy and also more sympathetic to food changes for reasons of health/wellbeing - and this explanation seemed to assuage some of his Feelings about having us all eat the same things.

So far, it is going great. Mom and Dad get the freedom to cook more things that I absolutely will not eat, I get to eat stuff I actually like at every meal, and I never have to have those terrible "what do you want to do for dinner?" conversations because I already know. The way I do things relies extremely heavily on my capacity to eat the same thing every day for days at a time, so it wouldn't work for people who want more variety, but it is working well for me.

It's not even a huge amount of Sunday cooking, really. I make one family-sized recipe for lunches - usually something like a soup or a stirfry to put over noodles or something else that keeps well in the fridge - and pack it into containers, and then I bake either a loaf of bread or a loaf cake on alternating weeks. Occasionally I make pickles or something. And then the week is:

Breakfast - still a bagel. Has been a bagel since I was 13. I see no reason to change this now.
Lunch - the aforementioned prepacked meal, almost always a small portion of raw fruit or vegetables, and a piece of cake.
Dinner - bread and butter/toast, raw fruit/vegetables, and small portions of one to two of the following: cheese, anchovies/sardines, nuts, pickles.

Again, only a week in, but I'm really enjoying not having to expend any mental energy on food beyond "do I want smoked gouda or almonds with my toast this evening?" I'll re-evaluate after a month or so and then determine if it's going to be a permanent state of affairs.

Things:

- It's not actually going to snow tonight - the forecast says the snow isn't going to start here till tomorrow evening - but that isn't stopping me from still hoping something will happen and I'll have a snow day tomorrow.

- Every year, I do this stupid thing where I have Yule and it's a big deal and then it's over and I say "okay, I'm taking a couple days off from religious devotion" and then fall out of the habit of devotion entirely. This year, to the point that I entirely missed celebrating Disting. (Oops.) But today I did some devotion revamping, so I think I'm back on track for a while. (Till summer, which is the other time when I traditionally just kinda stop doing religious stuff for a while...)

- I have a new fun solo rpg tool that I'm really enjoying using - it's the Location Crafter. (Made by the same people who made the Adventure Crafter, which I also really enjoy.) I'm getting better at planning cool stuff for my solo games while also working in stuff that's going to be a surprise or that I can discover in play and the Location Crafter has been a fun tool in that regard. It's designed to randomly generate a location to explore, which is already cool and has the potential for surprises. You do this by making a few lists of things that might show up that you can then roll on, and it has options to include some random elements that you can discover in play. I'm also experimenting with putting short phrases on the lists without knowing what those phrases mean. In the one I'm using for my Ironsworn game, I have a location listed that's just "the black ash tree". In my tiny rpg, there's an encounter listed with "the Crying Child". I don't know what either of those things are or why they're significant but I'm excited to find out.

- The lemon cake I made this past weekend is extremely good. It's not quite as moist as I ideally want but it is lemony as hell and I love it. I also have several other lemon cake recipes to try in my quest to find the perfect lemon cake. I'm very excited about this continuing experiment.

Things:

- I am currently experimenting with putting less sugar in my tea. Tea is approximately 95% of what I drink all day every day and though I drink it hot (mostly) I was raised in a southern sweet tea tradition and therefore consume a probably unnecessary amount of sugar that way. Right now, I am adjusting to putting about 3/4 of my normal amount of sugar in my tea. It's not too bad so far.

- I recently started a new Ironsworn campaign and you guys, every time I pick up Ironsworn again, I am amazed at how good a game it is. Plus, I have a nice new notebook to record my game in that has fountain pen friendly paper, so every time I play I get to pull out a different pen from my collection with different ink and it's just such an enjoyable writing experience.

- In other solo rpg news, I recently realized that my tiny rpg is an excellent tool for both generating and continuing Stories*. I made up a couple of characters and a basic setting about a month ago and used The Adventure Crafter to give me a preliminary starting plot. I tell myself my Story the way I normally would throughout the day, but I occasionally pull out the dice roller on my phone (which has an option to make dice with a custom number of sides, so I can also use it for the oracle) to figure out what happens next. And when I had used up the plot points from the starting plot, I used the Adventure Crafter again to generate the next bit of the story. It's great - I still get to run through the emotionally pleasing bits as many times as I like until I have wrung them entirely dry of good brain chemicals (as is my way) but I don't get stuck trying to figure out how to get to the next good emotional scene because I have dice. Triumph, Galatea!

- The way the library works right now is obviously completely not ideal but I will admit to experience a certain smug pleasure whenever I get to tell someone that no, we are not accepting donations at this time and we will not take the 5 boxes of books you brought with you in your truck.







*I really need a better term for "my ever-growing collection of stories that are sometimes fanfic but sometimes about original characters; that I think about basically whenever I'm not focusing on something specific; that occupy my thoughts for anywhere from a month to upwards of 2 years depending on how long I can get those particular characters/scenarios to continue to produce enjoyable emotional content; and that, when I don't have one, I experience a sort of pervasive low-level depression," but I don't have one so we'll just go with capital-S "Stories".