"Out Of Ambit": Diane Duane's weblog

Weblog

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Dr. What??
Okay, here I was all ready to blog about how I saw the first new Dr. Who episode the other night and liked it a lot. How I really liked Christopher Eccleston in the part, right away -- a little unusual for me: it normally takes me a few episodes or so to settle into a new Doctor.

And now he's quitting?? After just one season? Because he was afraid of being typecast??

(mutter) [northern]I'm annoyed now, me.[/northern]
posted by Diane: 3/31/2005 08:00:00 AM | link to this post

Monday, March 28, 2005

And not a moment too soon
Google in Romansch.

(See the Googleblog for details.)
posted by Diane: 3/28/2005 10:33:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Four o' clock
Did I mention something about an omelet earlier? That never happened. I'm getting a wee bit peckish now.

To my complete delight, the cake comes out of the gugelhupf pan without no complications whatever. Nothing to do now but sift some confectioners' sugar over it by way of decoration. I touch base with Mary and check that the lamb isn't giving her problems, then wash some more dishes and feed some more cats. The sauce for the pork has been reducing nicely: it can stop doing that now and get poured into a container for travel. The pork is ready to go too -- nothing further to do to it except slice it, when we get where we're going, and heat it through with the sauce.

Pickup is in an hour and a half. Peter, finished with the green beans, heads for the showers. I do a last few dishes.

As they say in Private Eye, "That's enough blogging. Ed."

Whatever everybody's doing today, I hope you very much enjoy it. I, meanwhile, intend to really enjoy eating this stuff after working on it all day...
posted by Diane: 3/27/2005 05:50:00 PM | link to this post

The three o'clock jump
As I come downstairs, showered and changed, increasingly noisy cats start to appear, responding to the aroma of the pork. Meanwhile, the cake is ready: it comes out of the oven and goes off to one side to sit for a little before being upended onto the baking rack and provoking the eternal question: is the bloody thing going to come out of the pan cleanly this time? The pan's nonstick coating has become increasingly non-nonstick over the last few months: I think it's reached its planned-obsolescence date.

The pork comes out of its pot and gets put to one side. The sauce, which looks so very ugly I can hardly believe it, has the stick-mixer taken to it and in a matter of seconds becomes a smooth and comely thing. I really love the stick mixer.

Peter's carrots are done steaming: the hot orange zest on them smells wonderful. Mary now turns up to take the lamb away, followed by complaining cats. Feeding them cuts down on the noise a little....but only a little. Peter is now steaming green beans while frying up speck to crumble over them when they're done. He gets his shower next. Meanwhile we wash dishes at a great rate.

Wow, we're almost done. What a production...
posted by Diane: 3/27/2005 05:37:00 PM | link to this post

The following events occur between 2 PM and 3 PM...
(There you have it: the obligatory "24" joke. I do love that series. I came to it late, but I like it a lot.)

Time to make the Canary-style potatoes. Two batches of little new potatoes get boiled. While this happens, the dressing gets made. Cumin seeds, some flaked chilies, and some smoked paprika get ground together. Garlic and Maldon salt are pounded together in a mortar and added to the cumin/chili/paprika mixture. About a quarter cup of olive oil, half a cup of wine vinegar and half a cup of sherry vinegar are mixed together, and the spices are dumped in, and the whole business is whizzed with the stick-mixer into a vinaigrette. The potatoes are drained, then halved or (in the case of the big ones ) quartered and dumped into a tureen. The vinaigrette is poured over them and they're tossed in it: then most of it is drained off and put in a separate container, since it's not good to leave them soaking in it until dinnertime.

Peter meanwhile finishes up with the carrots and gets busy peeling the potatoes that will go around the roast lamb. He uses the zesting tool to rough them up so they'll get nice and crunchy in the oven. Then he finishes work on the braising liquid for the lamb (lemon juice, olive oil, white wine, water) and puts it in a little container so that Mary can pick the whole business up in about half an hour, take it down the road to her own oven, and shove it in.

I start creaming the butter and the sugar for the buttermilk cake. The voice says from the next room, "You should go have your shower and get dressed."

Clothes? I'm supposed to wear clothes to this event? -- is the first thing I'm tempted to say. But if I say it, events might start to occur which could delay the cooking. I keep my yap shut for the moment and then start to wonder what's scorching. It turns out I've been preheating the wrong oven, the one with the grill in it. Doors are opened and much smoke comes out of the house, hopefully not frightening the neighbors. I finish mixing the cake while buttering and flouring the gugelhupf tin and then dusting it with cocoa as well. The correct oven is now heated: in goes the cake.

I go upstairs for my shower: I have twenty minutes before the cake needs to be checked. I open the bathroom door, and no one hiding inside jumps out and shoots me, so this plainly cannot be an episode of "24"....
posted by Diane: 3/27/2005 05:21:00 PM | link to this post

The silence of the lamb
(A slight in-joke. If you live around here, one thing you know about lambs is that they are Not Silent: just not.)

Meanwhile, various bastings of the pork with its supremely gross-looking sauce ensue. The lamb has had a little while to marinate and now gets seriously stuck all over with a really sharp small knife. Thick slivers of garlic get stuck in each slit, and then sprigs of rosemary in about half the slits, until the lamb looks like an all-foodie re-enactment of the Martyrdom of St. Stephen.

Squeak now reappears with the mouse (now mercifully gone to whatever award awaits badly used mice) and starts meowing in a way meant to convince me that he caught it and should therefore be rewarded. Unfortunately, since I saw Beemer come through the gate with the mouse in the first place, this excuse doesn't wash. He gets no reward. He sits around and complains loudly anyway.

Around this point Peter surfaces and starts dealing with the garnish and sauce for the lamb -- with much zesting of lemons -- and after that, with the carrots. He suddenly decides against the Moroccan salad treatment and decides to just steam them as a normal side dish. Oh, well, whatever.

(2 PM follows. Wow, where has the time gone?...)
posted by Diane: 3/27/2005 05:02:00 PM | link to this post

10 AM, etc: mice for breakfast and other issues
10 AM: the things that were supposed to happen now are rescheduled for a little later in the morning, Beemer brings in a very, very alive and affronted mouse and turns it loose in the kitchen. I spend about ten minutes getting it out of various hiding places -- finally catch it in a glass and turn it loose outside. All the cats except Bubble (presently sleeping hard after a busy night out killing things) run out to either deal with the mouse or watch it being dealt with.

10:30ish: A brief sitdown to consider the finer points of what to do with the lamb, and have another cup of tea. Another point comes up for consideration. What if there's not enough ice cream for eight people? Okay, but I still have some cocoa, and I have buttermilk: and I have this recipe.
MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
 
      Title: Chocolate Buttermilk Cake (Buttermilchkuchen)
 Categories: German, Chocolate, Cakes, Baking
      Yield: 4 Servings
 
      3 c  Sugar
      3    Eggs
    250 g  Margarine
      4 c  Flour
      2 c  Buttermilk
      2 ts Baking soda
     50 g  Cocoa
 
  Mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl.  Add the wet 
  ingredients, mix well, and bake for about 20 minutes at 
  400F/200C.
  
  After turning out on a rack to cool, dust with 
  confectioners' sugar / icing sugar.
  
  (Translated from a posting to de.rec.mampf by 
  Christine Rommeck  )
 
MMMMM
That should make the ice cream go a little further. I'll take care of that after the lamb is ready to go.

11 AM: Some rapid sautéeing of thinly sliced speck and some chopped onions is followed by the searing of the pork and the addition at the last moment (so it won't scorch) of four chopped cloves of garlic. When the garlic's just beginning to color, in go some torn-up sprigs of fresh oregano and a liter of hot milk. The milk immediately curdles, which is normal; this whole sauce will be going through the mill or blender at the end of this process anyway, so it won't look so gross.

12 N: And now the lamb, or stage one of it, anyway. Sainsbury's sells a very nice lemon-infused olive oil. The lamb gets rubbed with a mixture of this and some herbes de provence. The rosemary and garlic will come a little later on, before I have to peel the potatoes.

1 PM: Lunch. Some cottage cheese, a few savory crackers, and a glass of wine. Later I'll think about an omelet.

(2 PM follows...)
posted by Diane: 3/27/2005 01:25:00 PM | link to this post

The Sunday schedule
Cooking, mostly.

The ice cream for the big Easter dinner at Pat and Mary's is all done. Now on to the main courses and side dishes...

7 AM or thereabouts: Wake up to the sound of Farah Mendelson (of the UK's Science Fiction Foundation) gently trouncing the host of the BBC's weekly obituary show, Brief Lives, on the subject of Andre Norton (Goddess rest her):

Dotun Adebayo: Was [her] science fiction for kids, or if you like, young adults? Who were her readers, boys or girls?

Farah: Well, her readers were young, but it's quite obvious that adults were reading it too. In science fiction and fantasy, there's very little divide between the adult and the children's books.

Dotun: Well, nowadays, because of Harry Potter and so on --

Farah (firm and ever so slightly fierce): There never has been. Let's not go to Harry Potter. (Laughter, a little uneasy on poor Dotun's part...)

(chuckle) ...So satisfying. I've been thinking so much about Andre for the past few days: there are few writers who have mattered more to me. Since I first started reading SF at age eight, or maybe before, she was there: she was always there. It's hard now to believe that she's gone...and I look forward, in a couple of days, to having time to sit down and reread Year of the Unicorn, probably my favorite.

(sigh) But I have to cook first.

8 AM: The usual. Feed cats, shower, tea. Assemble recipes. Look them over.

9 AM: The pork has to be prepped first. This one is going to be slowly braised in milk. It's always in danger of being a little too bland. So from the freezer I get out some speck (the heavily smoked, airdried bacon of Germany and Switzerland) and start it thawing. Then make a marinade for the pork loin: olive oil, balsamic vinegar, a little rose wine, some juniper berries. Halve the loin (otherwise it won't go into the pot), turn it in the marinade and get on with other things.

posted by Diane: 3/27/2005 11:25:00 AM | link to this post

Thursday, March 24, 2005

Distracted from three ice creams
So we're doing Easter dinner with/for our friends Pat and Mary who live down the road. Dinner for eight. I said to Peter, "Okay, let's not get too far out into culinary left field on this one...", since in about half the guests' cases we won't know for sure how their tastes run, whether they like to get experimental at a holiday or whether they're willing to swing out a little. "We'll keep it fairly traditional. Lamb."

"Pork," says Himself.

"Lamb and pork," say I. So we're agreed. Leg of lamb in the Greek style, with a lot of fresh rosemary, fresh oregano and lemon: rolled loin of pork done in a northern Italian style, braised in milk, with herbs.

Then we start in on the side dishes. After some discussion, we decide on:

Mashed potatoes.

Canary potatoes, aka Patatas bravas (a sort of hot potato salad using new potatoes boiled in very salty water -- it would be sea water, in the Canaries -- and a spicy vinaigrette).

A Moroccan carrot-and-orange salad.

Green beans cooked in some as yet unspecified manner.

Mary and Pat will be handling the other salads, and the wine / beer / soft drinks end of things, so all we have left to worry about is dessert. And at this point I know just what we need.

My "double Valrhona gold" ice cream, using both Valrhona solid single-estate chocolate and Valrhona's cocoa.

My "triple vanilla" ice cream with Madagascar high-potency vanilla extract, vanilla beans, and vanilla sugar. And:

Peter's "Baileys ripple" ice cream. (He's not making the espresso ice cream that we usually refer to as "Nessun dorma", because after eating it, "none shall sleep": wouldn't be kind to the dinner guests. They may not want to see the dawn that much.)

So I'm in the middle of hauling out the ice cream maker and getting the chocolate prepped when the mail arrives. Besides a bank statement regarding one of our accounts which has a truly tiny amount of money in it, there are two Very Important Looking Plain White Envelopes. One for P., one for me.

I open mine and discover...oh, wonder of wonders! Some nice marketing people in Dublin have sent me checks for, like, ninety thousand Euro or so! And all I have to do to claim them is call this nice phone number that costs €2.40 a minute!

(snort) I'm sooooooo excited. I bet that if you do call them, they keep you on the phone for about half an hour, minimum...and if by then you haven't figured out that this is a scam... (sigh) And probably lots of people never do...or not for a long, long while, as they spend more and more money trying to "claim" this "prize...".

Gonifs!! How do the people who do crap like this sleep at night? How do they justify it to themselves?? Argh!!

Oh well...back to the ice cream, and to concentrating real, real hard on not eating the chocolate.

(mutter) Gonifs.
posted by Diane: 3/24/2005 01:11:00 PM | link to this post

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Okay, this is different...
"Index page of YoungWizzle one of two official fansites fo` reada of Diane Duane's 'Young Wizards' series. I started yo s**t and i'll end yo' s**t. To YoungWizzles Home where the sun be shinin and I be rhymin'..."

Someone has "rapperized" Google. Oh my...
posted by Diane: 3/17/2005 09:05:00 AM | link to this post

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Wiki wiki wiki wiki
We've just finished moving all theErrantry Concordance entries into wiki format, and I'm in love. The entries look better...everything about the Concordance looks better. And it indexes itself.. People can even get XML feeds to let them know when pages are added.

Woo!

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

posted by Diane: 3/15/2005 09:07:00 PM | link to this post

Saturday, March 12, 2005

The annual snit
As the user stats over at European Cuisines start to scale upwards -- as they always do, about a week before The Day That's In It -- the referrer stats from Google and so forth are starting to show that dread search string again.

Yes indeed, it's time for the annual Corned Beef Snit. If you missed it last time out, now's your chance to watch me get cranky.

(Oh, and don't miss the Irish sushi page, either. There's even corned beef spice in that.) (urgh...)
posted by Diane: 3/12/2005 10:21:00 AM | link to this post

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

In the "Serious bemusement" department...
The business of how best to structure the Errantry Concordance as the entries start to pile up a little has been on my mind the past week or so. Suddenly my Google searches have begun to feature such weird (and mostly ineffective) phrases as "Glossary organization software". Sitemap and menu construction is suddenly a real issue. The study of things encyclopedic, and how to build them so you don't have to spend hours and hours maintaining them, keeps coming up when I really have other things to do (like deal with all the Rihannsu running around here screaming and yelling and carrying on).

So I've been stirring around looking at people's online glossaries and wikipediae (is that a plural? It is now...) and so on. And then what do I stumble across but this.

Just look at the entry on Adolf Hitler. Egad.

And then you get moments like this:

A constructive flamewar is where you build up pages of irrelevant information and add topics to distort the truth to your side, rather than edit pages supporting the other argument. When doing so, please do not use bots, or copy and paste the same page over and over again. This is abusive. What you can do, however, is create many bizarre articles that relate to your point. This is a constructive flamewar, which contributes rather than degrades from Uncyclopedia. You are encouraged to write about completely unrelated topics to push your agenda, but please do not revert/edit out topics that oppose you.

(mutter) Just what I needed. Another site to read every day. Ah well...
posted by Diane: 3/09/2005 01:04:00 PM | link to this post

Monday, March 07, 2005

Giant space marmots
In case you need one. (Flash animation. I can't think of any circumstances under which this wouldn't be work-safe, though.)
posted by Diane: 3/07/2005 09:54:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, March 06, 2005

Comfort surfing
Those of you who've looked at the length of the various blogrolls off to the side will have gathered that I websurf a lot. This would be true. Sometimes it's about work (honest): sometime's it's for research: sometimes it's just random curiosity.

But some of my surfing is for comfort. There are websites I love to visit because they just make me feel happy. This would be one of them:

NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown.com

It's about tea and the things you have with it. There is comment, but not terribly trenchant, by and large. Mostly it's Nice. And sometimes it just makes me laugh. This next quoted bit did, for example. (I have to quote it because they don't seem to have permalinks.)

Its Cake Jim, but not as we know it

(A NiceCupOfTeaAndASitDown special report)

Mars is nearer to us at the moment than at any other time in the last 60,000 years, and so we are marking the occasion with this special report into 'Universal Cake Theory'. Is there life on Mars? Well probably not but here at NiceCupOfTeaAnASitDown we are more concerned if there is cake on Mars and somewhere for a nice sit down out of those 200 mile an hour winds that are prone to whip around the red planet.

So what is 'Universal Cake Theory'? Well its my theory that cakes must be universal. Where there is intelligent life in the universe they probably make and eat some kind of cake. It's obvious really. I like to think that when Carl Sagen was wandering around his dodgy colour separation over layed spaceship in his epic TV series 'Cosmos' pretending to look at nebulas and stuff in awe and listening to Brian Eno, that he was thinking 'the vastness of the cosmos and cakes, there must be a connection'. Well of course if he had of thought that then that would have made two of us.

Now I know what your all going to say, 'What about silicon based life forms Nicey! Or beings composed of pure energy or those who inhabit places where the laws of physics preclude the formation of cake, or even flapjack?'. Well, the silicon based life forms probably would be quite at home with Iced Gems, or maybe an assorted selection of Spanish biscuits, which whilst not cakes are quite similar to rocks. As for those beings composed of pure energy, they probably would have something a bit like a cross between a Swiss roll and Duracell battery. The folks that live where the laws of physics preclude the formation of cake, they want to get with the plot and move house.

We know that man has baked cakes from the earliest times, infact in the 'Epic of Gilgamesh' earliest known written story ever dating back to nearly 5000 years ago, there is a bit about flour or something. Cakes have deep cultural significance, and are baked and shared at important events in our lives and across many different cultures. Now if I was Eric Von Daniken, I would probably attribute this to visiting Space Aliens in our distant pre-historic past who introduced us to baking and probably had some form of advanced technology like a fan oven ideal for getting tricky sponge cakes to rise evenly, and non-stick cake tins. Of course we would have to wait until we sent men to the moon before we discovered how to make non-stick cake tins using space age teflon.

(chuckle) Oh, and don't miss the page about the taxonomy of biscuits.
posted by Diane: 3/06/2005 09:47:00 PM | link to this post

Friday, March 04, 2005

Want! Want! Want!

Sharp's new Kitchen Composter.

Only available in Japan right now...but they have the same voltage as we do. (runs to make note on Tokyo 2007 shopping list...)

(Yes, I've tried regular compost heaps with earthworms, etc, but for whatever reasons I've had no luck with them. Over time all kinds of things have happened: the cats get into the heap (chasing mice who're there after the warmth, I think), the core temperature never gets as high as it should and nothing happens, we're away from home too long on one business trip or another and the thing "dies"... For someone who's a good baker, and seems to have an understanding with most kitchen yeast, I just have no talent with the outdoor types of fermentation. At which point I become happy enough to bring in a machine to do the job.)

(Out of Treehugger via Boing Boing)
posted by Diane: 3/04/2005 12:14:00 PM | link to this post

And one other thing...

Wizardry powers Blogger. But you knew that!