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foodandfolklore · 30 days

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Magical Recipes; how to approach an established recipe as a Kitchen Witch

Art by forestfolke on Deviant Art I think one of the most confusing things for new, or even experienced, kitchen witches is how to expand their recipe catalogue for their practice. A lot of new kitchen witches think you need to follow a recipe that has been written special for Witchy Cooking. That the regular recipes they find or use just won't have any magical purpose. But that's just not the case.

You don't need to buy special cook books with recipes exclusively for Kitchen Witches. You can take any recipe that already exists and apply it to your wants or needs. To help explain this process, I'm going to take a recipe I found online then reverse engineer it into a Kitchen Witch Recipe.

The Recipe

My Partner often donates blood, so eating foods that keep his Iron up is important to us. But I also want this dish to be emotionally satisfying Vs just eating a Steak, which neither of us find particularly appealing. I thought I'd try a Cottage Pie (also called Shepperd's Pie) because I want to find a new recipe that will help use up ingredients. Don't get me wrong, soups are awesome; but I tend to go a little light on the meat/alternatives. I tend to keep a good supply of ground meat in the freezer, so know I'll have most of the key stuff.

So I'm starting with this recipe since I don't have my own Cottage Pie recipe. Here are the Ingredients: Filling

1 lb lean ground beef

1 lb ground sausage (I use Jimmy Dean pork sausage)

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 small yellow onion , chopped

2 ribs celery , chopped

1-2 carrots , chopped (about 1 cup)

3 cloves garlic , minced

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

2 1/2 cups low-sodium beef broth

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 cube beef bouillon

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon fresh thyme , chopped (or ¼ teaspoon dried thyme)

1 teaspoon fresh rosemary , chopped (or ¼ teaspoon dried rosemary)

2 bay leaves

½ cup frozen corn

½ cup frozen peas

Topping

2 1/2 pounds Russet potatoes , Yukon gold or russet potatoes

¼ cup sour cream

½ cup milk

4 tablespoons butter

salt and pepper , to taste

½ cup freshly grated parmesan cheese

½ cup shredded cheddar cheese , for topping

So let's start with the topping since it has less ingredients to worry about. For those unfamiliar with cottage pie, the base of the pie is mostly meat and Veggies, and then it's topped with some mashed potatoes before baking. It's common to just use leftover mashed potatoes. So, I'll just use my mashed potato and cauli recipe. In short, it's half potato and half cauliflower with roast garlic and seasonings. Both Potatoes and Cauliflower have protective properties. Since this is the protective top layer of the Pie, I thought the symbolism carried itself further. The Cauliflower will also work well together with the Garlic to Banish any negativity from the pie, as well as from those who consume it.

Now let's break down the filling. Starting with the largest Ingredients. Ground Beef and Ground Sausage. Ground meats in general are fantastic for grounding energy. I'll probably sub the ground beef for whatever ground meat I have on hand, so the grounding aspect is what I'll focus on for now. Potatoes are also good for grounding. This is over all is going to be a very down to earth, hearty meal. Next, the vegetables. Onion, Celery, Carrots, Peas, and Corn. Corn is not something I use on the regular, but it's has a good use in Kitchen Magic as a power multiplier. Similar to Rice. Carrots have heath and energy properties, something I want in a dish for improving Iron Levels. Though I never particularly enjoyed peas, I'll use them for their health and abundance benefit. Green Peas are also high in Iron. Celery is great ingredient to add to a dish to add lasting happiness and satisfaction. Which I defiantly want so when the dish is consumed, you don't feel disappointed. Onion will add onto the Protection and Health. But Onion also has good cleansing properties, so I have the habit of adding it to my pan first to cleanse my cooking station. I'll probably cook some or all of the onion with the meat. Now the Seasonings. Not everything used in your cooking needs to have a magical purpose. It can just be there to enhance the taste of your food. I use Worcestershire sauce often in my cooking with no thought to it's magical abilities. I use it all the time when I want to add some extra umami or savory flavour. But there are some things we can add to help enhance the magic. Thyme, Rosemary, and Bay. All three of these herbs are good for health and healing. I can feed this to my SO before a donation to make sure his Iron is up. Then I can feed it to them after when their body is recuperating. Though I may forgo the Bay leaf. I tend to worry I'll leave it in my food when it's not supposed to be eaten XD But that said, I think I'll add a few of my own. Marjoram seems like it will go well in this, which will add to the Happiness and Comfort of my meal. I wanna add some Basil and Cayenne to this. The Basil I'm hoping will help stop long term fatigue, so my SO's mind is not affected by the donation. Cayenne for a blast of extra energy. I'll also add some extra Garlic and Parsley. I'll also make a few other personal tweaks like swapping the Flour for Cornstarch. I prefer using corn starch in my sauces, and I already have corn as an ingredient anyway, so it should mesh together better on their property levels. Cooking/Assembling Now that I have the magical properties of all my ingredients established, I simply need to assemble them according to the recipe directions. The only difference is, when I add something to the dish, I know what I'm adding not only on a Mundane level, but also the magic properties of the food. I'm adding ground meat to ground my dish and the people consuming it. I add Celery to help the food be emotionally satisfying. I'll add peas to enhance health and healing. Ect.

Also note, you don't need to do as big of a dissection every time you want to cook a recipe as a Kitchen Witch. If you come across an ingredient or two you are familiar with the magic properties for (Or the ingredient just has a spiritual meaning to you personally) You can add it to your meal with that meaning in mind. Like adding a little honey to your tea to sweeten and brighten your day. Also note, most ingredients have multiple magical uses. Just as they have multiple culinary uses. You can add honey to tea for happiness, or may may choose to add it help heal and get over a cold you have. Or you can add it for both reasons! Or neither reason; maybe you just want some honey. You are the Castor, the Decider, the Kitchen Witch!

Eat well and be well 💜💜💜

#food and folklore #klickwitch #kitchen witch #kitchen witchcraft #witch #cottagecore #cottage pie #Shepperd's pie #recipe #witch cooking #food meanings #magic properties #food #yum #pagan #recipes #magic #practical magic #cooking

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thesquareinthecircularhole · 3 years

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hey stupid, i love you [MCYT: Dream x GN!Reader]

song: hey stupid I love you by jp saxe

warnings: fluff

im pretty sure i made this an gender neutral as possible but if there is an error lmk thanks bby :*

im in a simpin mood bby

as always, song lyrics in italics

i skipped a couple versus due to repetitiveness oops

this is the one i complained about losing, but it actually worked out bc i like this one better...less wordy

word count: ~2k

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Nothing's wrong, and it's not what I'm used to Oh, does it surprise you too? When it's simple, is it easier than it should be?

"Hey babe, are you okay? You've been quiet today," Dream practically pouted as he asked you. He loved the sound of your voice and while you definitely weren't giving him the quiet treatment, you sure weren't as talkative as you normally are.

"Yeah, I'm good. Just distracted thinking my thoughts." You smiled at him and leaned against him. He looked down at you and pecked your lips. You gave him a sweet kiss back. The smile he gave you made your heart boom. Loving him was as easy as eating a cake (because the usually analogy 'baking a cake' isn't true, its sometimes hard to bake a cake, especially when a hungry streamer keeps trying to eat the batter or start a flour fight).

"Anyway, don't you have a stream with the Dream Team to get ready for? One that starts in," you look at the clock on your phone, "three minutes ago?" The slight panic that crosses Dream's face makes you laugh loud. He gives you another kiss and in less than five seconds has practically launched himself across the house into his recording room. Your laughter follows him the whole way, a smile and blush upon his face.

Nothing's wrong, but when you're not in my arms I send voice notes, you send hearts And get quiet, and I know that means you miss me

Okay, granted, you were the one to remind him that he was streaming with his friends today and speedrunning, but you didn't expect it to last well over five hours. At the beginning you worked on your classwork for your [college degree of choice]. You got it done quickly, as it was nearing the end of the semester and most professors of yours were laidback and wanted you to study more than write nonsense papers (fictional you, i'm so jealous). Occasionally you would jump in fear when you heard Dream shout, still not used to it after years.

After finishing your classwork, you started cooking dinner. Soup was the vibe for the evening, and you had found a wonderful chicken and dumplings recipe a while ago that you wanted to try. You did have to go to the store for some of the ingredients, but luckily it only took you an hour. You can back and he was still streaming. It took about another hour for dinner to be done. You let it cool and prepared yourself a bowl. You set your laptop up and started watching Dream's stream. Hearing his voice made you miss him, so you pulled out your phone.

Going to the two of y'alls messages, you started making him a voice message.

"Hey baby, I made dinner, so don't play so long it gets cold. I love you! Kick the enderdragon's ass baby! Mwah."

You continued watching him stream, and he took a pause for a minute, his screen not moving from the create a new world screen and his mic muted. A couple seconds later you got spammed with every heart offered in the emoji index times what felt like a thousand.

He continued being quiet for a couple seconds, although he did unmute and continue playing, answering George's and Sapnap's questions of where he went with, "I had to take a message."

You're jealous, you shouldn't be I want you obsessively But I know how complicated it can get When you're not in front of me I know insecurities get in your head

Chat sometimes upset you. Sure, you got Dream, all of him, but sometimes the comments made by some of the more obsessives fans were a bit to much.

'With the way he killed those mobs you know he's got good fingers'

'His voice is hot so he must be'

'Heyo dream baby lemme see them feet'

Okay the last one was more weird, and actually turned out to be a joke from Quackity but anyway moving on.

He was your guy, and he promised himself to you, but sometimes he seemed to have a genuine connection with some of the sweeter and not gross ones. It made you scared that someone, one day, will swoop him off his feet with a comment and he’d leave you for them.

But I'm not gonna interrupt if you need to talk about it Roll my eyes, get offended by the way you doubt it You know you're mine, you just forget sometimes So promise me you won’t And you know I'll remind you when you think I don't

The stream ended a little under an hour later. Dream left his recording room, grabbed a bowl of soup, and found you in the living room, lost in thought. He plopped down right next to you.

“Talk to me baby.”

“About what?”

“Anything and everything.”

“Okay.” You’re quiet for a bit, despite his offering of listening. He knew you were gonna take him up on the offer, you just needed a bit of time, so he was going to wait patiently. He finished his soup quickly, he was much hungrier than he thought. He put the bowl on the coffee table and before he was all the way leaned back on the couch, you were leaning against him. His arms wrapped around you, your head was tucked in between his head and shoulder, and a blanket covered the both of you. You looked towards the blank tv screen but felt his eyes on you.

“I love you a lot. And I know you love me too, but I’m afraid I’m not enough. You have so many options, especially with your popularity online. I don’t know what I’d do if you left me, whether it be for someone else or just because you’re tired of me.” Dream waits for you to stop entirely, with you breathing heavily.

“Well, you’re right about one thing. I do love you, a lot. The rest of it is wrong and I’ll spend the rest of time telling you so.” Dream says, pressing several kisses against your forehead.

“Yeah I know it’s stupid to feel this way, but my anxiety gets the best of me. It’s stupid, I’m stupid.”

“First of all, you’re not stupid. Second, hey stupid, I love you.”

Nothing's wrong, I just get in my head too Can you reassure me you, you're still in it? I just wish you could lean in and kiss me

As much as Dream loved you and reassured you, sometimes he would get caught up in his thoughts too. The life of a streamer/youtuber, especially one with as much fame and subscribers as him, was rough. The constant need to feed his fans with entertainment and content, and the need for the content to satisfy his fans was stressful. He hates to admit it, but he some days he spent to much time working and not enough with you. He thinks you would be so much happier with someone without a tight schedule and without a large, intense fanbase. Any random person on the street would be better for you than him, he thinks.

When he gets into this headspace, the only thing that grounds him is your lips on his. When you kiss him, the clouds go away and all he can see is your eyes, as bright as the sun, and your smile, which can tempt even the purest.

Say nothing's wrong, tell me to settle down You do it better than I've ever known how Won't pull some tricks for attention But could I get a little now?

Now, everyone knows that Dream likes some attention. He especially likes attention from you. Good thing is you also like attention, especially from him. The not so good thing is both of y’all get distracted so bad, it’s almost too funny.

He tends to get your attention by tickling you, whether it be in the comfort of your home or in public. One day, when you guys were walking through town, you stopped at a flower booth and got to talking with the friendly and flirty florist gentleman. It had been a couple minutes, and Dream was really needing some love, but you continued chatting with the florist who was definitely going to ask for your number but you genuinely thought he was just being nice. Dream crept up behind you and placed his hands on your side. You froze for a moment and looked at him, confused. The smirk that crossed his face barely gave you a second to prepare as he tickled your sides. Your laughter filled the street as you turned around as he tickled you. You wrapped your arms around his neck, which got him to stop ticking you, and gave him a kiss. The two of you continued on your way, attached at the hip.

And one day, when you wanted his attention, it was after he was done recording a manhunt with his friends. The actual video had been done for a bit, but they were just fucking around in the minecraft world and talking to each other. You had had a not so nice day, and wanted the crushing weight of your boyfriend on top of you. You crept into his recording room and came to stand right behind his chair. Based on the conversation you could tell he wasn’t recording anymore, so you knew it was safe. Your hands started in his hair, trailed down to his face, and slid down his body till your arms were wrapped around him snuggly. Your head was placed on top of his.

“What are you doing?” he asked, and received no response. Instead, you began aggressively shaking him and the chair, turning it this way and that, making him slightly dizzy. His laughter filled the room, and he quickly ended the call. The two of you spent the next 12 hours cuddled in bed, leaving only for the necessities.

You're jealous, you shouldn't be I want you obsessively But I know how complicated it can get When you're not in front of me I know insecurities get in your head

Dream got jealous as well sometimes. You were beautiful and a lot of the time attracted the attention of random passerbyers. Those people, who you don’t even know, who lived normal lives where they didn’t have to spend every second worried that their face will be revealed to the public and suddenly all their fans from around the world will know what they look like or the general area in which they live, who don’t have to obey algorithms and bend to the will of the masses to make sure they get paid enough to live, who could give you a normal and safe life. Every time one looked at you with some attraction, he pulled you a bit closer and kissed you a bit harder.

But I'm not gonna interrupt if you need to talk about it Roll my eyes or get offended by the way you doubt it You know you're mine, you just forget sometimes So promise me you won’t And you know I'll remind you when you think I don't

Sometimes, Dream needed to rant. A long, hard, intense, rant. Sometimes it was about how someone accused him of cheating his speedruns. Sometimes it was about how someone said something nasty to him or one of his friends. Sometimes it was about a comment someone made about him or you that got on his nerves. When he needed to talk, you sat there and you listened. You did whatever he needed to get better, whether it was just listen or talk to find solutions. You did it because you know he would do the same for you. And afterwards, a cuddle session was a must.

How could you forget? I told you seventeen times before 7 AM I love you How could you forget? I told you seventeen times

The morning after rough days were one of the bests. Arms tangled together, legs tangled together, everything tangled together, no one able to tell where one started and the other ended. Lazy kisses pressed to faces, hands, necks, any part of skin the lips could touch. One particular morning you woke up earlier than he did. A quick kiss against his cheek woke him up, and he gave you the most love filled smile any man could do.

“Hey stupid,” you said, “I love you.”

#mcyt #mcyt x reader #dream x reader #dreamwastaken x reader #fluff #songfic

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amuseoffyre · 4 years

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Britpicking Index

Some useful compare/contrasts for non-British people writing characters in Britain :) (Also, vice versa, because me and my editor have had some run ins over things I didn’t realise had different names in the US). Feel free to add more if you think of them. These are the main ones I’ve encountered and seen discussed in various forums.

Apartment

Flat. We occasionally use apartment now, purely because Americanisms have slipped into the lingo, but mostly, we call them flats.

Bangs

Have never understood why they’re called bangs. We call them fringes.

Bathroom (Going to the…)

Nipping to the loo, having a slash, nipping to the little girl/boy’s room.

Candy

Sweets. Just generally sweets of any kind.

Chips

Crisps. Because they’re crisp, I suppose?

On a related note, chips over here are the great big chunky potato fries. The little skinny ones (ie. Like McDonalds or Burger King’s) are French fries, but generally, people will still call them chips.

Cookie/Biscuit

Honestly, this one is… all over the place because US biscuits sound like savoury scone-type things but are very much not savoury scones because they’re served with gravy. Or apparently with jam/honey/other stuff.

Meanwhile UK biscuits are generally small, crunchy and sweet. But I have been reliably informed that a biscuit =/= cookie. However, some things that UK manufacturers call cookies are – in fact – biscuits. Do not trust cookies that crunch and hurt your teeth.

Fannypack

Um. So fanny is a certain area of genitalia over here. Just... worth knowing. We also call them “bumbags”.

Faucet

Tap. Also, we have separate taps for hot and cold in older buildings. Because Chaotic Evil :)

Freeway

Motorway. (More road/traffic information at the bottom)

Garbage/Trash

Rubbish. Bins are the general receptacles for it.

Gas (Gasoline) and Gas Stations

Petrol and petrol stations. Same stuff, a lot more expensive from what I’ve seen of pricing per gallong versus per litre.

Grill (For cooking)

This one tripped me up very hard in one of my short stories. My US editor and I were as confused as each other when we described them to one another.

We do have grill pans here (ie. The pans with the ridged bottom) and we do the outdoor grilling thing over a flame as well, but generally in the UK, if we say ‘grill’ we are talking about the oven broiler.

Outdoor grilling is just called barbecue unless on a large/professional scale, when it miraculous turns into a grill. The George Foreman grill is also a thing, but I haven’t seen them show up in fic all that often.

Jelly

Jelly = jam, ie. the spreading stuff for sandwiches and things. Jello, on the other hand, is called jelly.

Jumper

Not a dress. These are generally the knitted kind of pullovers/sweaters. Christmas jumpers are definitely a thing.

Lemonade

It’s a trap. It can refer to a) freshly squeezed lemon juice, b) fizzy lemon juice or c) lemon-ish-flavoured-ish fizzy drinks like 7Up and Sprite. And to add to the trap, it varies in every shop and restaurant. Good luck!

Line/Lining up.

Queue/queuing. Also getting in line.

Movies (Going to)

Going to the cinema or going to the pictures.

Pancakes

Yes, I hark back to The Discourse of crepes versus pancakes. UK pancakes were not like US pancakes in my tothood. They were thin, rolled-up things that were more like crepes. However, Scotch pancakes (or drop scones – no idea. Not a frigging scone) are like chibi US pancakes, thick and fluffy. Ingredients vary across the board. I’ve seen recipes including butter and soda and everything. The most basic recipe is pretty much eggs, flour, milk.

Pants

This is a big one that shows up an awful lot. The word pants in Britain tends to describe underwear of some variety, so you can imagine that this gives a very different mental image of a scene if someone is wearing tight pants in a fancy restaurant. Pants can be anything from tighty-whities to full-blown granny pants.

Generally pants get called trousers over here. We have the usual varieties of jeans and leggings and things, but generally, full-length leg coverings? Trousers.

Pie

Generally, a pie is savoury, unless specified otherwise.

Pumps

Technically, some shops do refer to them as pumps, but most people I’ve encountered in my 30+ years of living here just call them shoes and define by other means (ie. ballet flats, beach shoes etc)

(Also, fun fact, pump is frequently used as slang for a fart. So someone putting on a pair of pumps...)

Refrigerator

Just fridge, usually.

Roommate

Unless you are literally sharing a room with them, they’re a flatmate. Also, UK universities don’t generally do shared dorms. Everyone gets their own private room, though not everyone gets their own private bathroom.

Sidewalk

Pavement or footpath depending on how rural said walkway is. (More road/traffic information at the bottom)

Shopping Cart

Trolley. If it doesn’t have one wonky wheel, you are Blessed.

Sneakers

Generally, trainers. This can cover any kind of laced-up shoe that is used for sport or is kind of casual and flat, although we also differentiate between Converse, tennis shoes and such as well.

Plimsols are those lace-less slip-on canvas shoes used by kids for indoor sports. They are awful and smell like rubber.

Soda

I can’t give a fixed answer for this one. There are some areas that call all fizzy drinks “pop” while there are other regions which call all soft drinks/fruit drinks “juice”.

Store

Shop. Superstores, on the other hand, are supermarkets. On a related note, going grocery shopping is generally just known as “doing the shopping” or - more northerly - “getting the messages”.

Street cars/Trollies

Trams. This was a matter of great and heated argument back in the day. Fortunately, there aren’t all that many in the UK, so unless you’re writing in specific parts of the country, it shouldn’t be an issue.

Suspenders

Braces. Because using the word suspenders over here is generally referring to the stockings-and-suspenders variety, with strong hints of lingerie involved. Kind of a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, wahey! kind of thing. Because sometimes, we never grow past the Carry On films.

Trunk (of a car)

The car boot or just ‘the boot’. Similarly, the hood of the car is called the bonnet.

Called either TV or telly. Daft little thing, but putting the telly on reminds me of home :)

Washcloths

Flannels or facecloths.

Some minor oddities that may be useful:

Eggs

We don’t refrigerate them. We don’t have to. Some people keep them in a special shelf of the fridge, but generally it’s not necessary.

Laundry

In British houses, washing machines are generally in the kitchen. Don’t know why, given that Europe tends to have them in bathrooms or laundry rooms. (Useful to know, we don’t call the baskets laundry baskets/hampers. They’re generally just referred to as “the washing”)

Also, a lot of houses don’t have tumble driers. Outdoor drying is still quite common (weather permitting) on lines strung for the purpose between poles or on a whirligig contraption in the back garden. In Scotland, blocks of flats often have a shared “drying green” which does exactly what it says on the tin. Except, because it’s Scotland, I believe they named it ironically.

If you don’t have a tumble drier and the weather Gods are displeased, then we resort to the good old-fashioned airer, a murderous contraption of metal rods (usually coated in white plastic) that unfolds (and bites the unsuspecting finger when it collapses for no good reason).

Recycling

Oh. good. god. In the name of trying to make us save the planet, we have bins for everything. In my area, we have a regular bin, a recycling bin, a garden waste bin, a composting bin and a glass-recycling box. I know places that have more. I know places that have less.

They’re usually on weekly rotations and it’s an absolute nightmare trying to a) find space to store them and b) find space to put them out for the rubbish collection. Some areas that are mainly blocks of flats have large communal bins with similar distinctions, but I think pretty much everywhere is burdered with an excess of large plastic bins.

Roads and the Use Thereof

We drive on the left side of the road with the driver’s side on the right of the vehicle. Intersections are called junctions and I think roundabouts are a much more common phenomenon in Britain than in most sensible countries.

We still have the usual road signs and things, although British variations thereof. You can find British traffic signs by any basic search online. Traffic lights are usually just the three colours - red, amber, green - but you do occasionally get ones with extra signals for cyclists and the like.

Cycle lanes are about, but they’re not as common as somewhere like the Netherlands.

Which brings me to crosswalks - we have two common varieties: zebra and pelican. Yeah, we’re eccentric like that.

The pelican crossing is the one where you press the button and wait for the little green man to give you the all-clear to walk. It’s called Pelican because it used to be a semi-acronym - "pedestrian light controlled crossing".

Zebra crossings usually have no buttons. Some of them have striped poles with roung yellow/orange lights at the top, but not as much anymore. These kind of crossings give pedestrians the right of way, although a lot of drivers seem to ignore that rule.

Technically, they do have their names, but most of the time, we just refer to them as “the crossing”. No one really differentiates between pelican and zebra anymore.

School/college/variations.

Generally, we have state schools (government funded, variable on quality) and the independent schools which are the fee-paying ones for people who want to go private. Be aware that public refers to independent schools in some places, but to state schools in others. Children are entitled to education between the ages of 5-18.

For the early school stages, it varies depending on region. Where I am (Scotland), you have 7 years of Primary school (P1-7) and up to 6 years of Secondary school (S1-6).

I get a bit confounded with the English system because it seems to vary a lot depending on region. Primary covers most for the early years, up to age 11, but then you get a cocktail of Lower/Upper, Sixth Form and College for the secondary years depending on which area you’re in.

We don’t use terms like sophomore etc (I honestly thought that was the flag-code thing)

College is generally seen as the stepping stone between school and university. You don’t need to go to college in order to go to university in a lot of areas, but in some regions, your final year of school is done at college. It’s all a bit confusing.

University is where you go if you want to study a degree. Again, the courses vary by length depending on subject. A standard bachelor degree is 3 years in most places (except for stuff like medicine and architecture). Masters are an additional year (or two) on top of the Bachelor. Anything beyond that is variable depending on both university and course. We call the unis for short.

Swearing

Depending on region, the strength and frequency of profanities varies. For example, I’m in Scotland and one of the ladies I work with has used the c-word as a verb. Someone was playing the fool and she described them as “c*nting about”. My boss was usually ill if she didn’t drop f-bombs 8+ times a day and usually while laughing. It’s rare not to hear someone on the bus swearing on a daily basis as well.

Going back to the previously mentioned fannies, please enjoy an infamously Scottish advert:

youtube

So swearing. Yes. Variable. Definitely something to be aware of.

#britpicking #trying to be helpful and useful to fandom for a change :)

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robbybirdy · 4 years

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Generation C - Chapter 72

Sul Sul, Gerbits. Tiz the season of Zucchini. As soon as zucchini can be harvested, baker’s go crazy. Yes, zucchini’s are a vegetable.

But they make such good sweets. We are going to be testing different Zucchini bread recipes, and other Zucchini sweets.

Today we are going to be using a recipe from a cookbook I got from the local library book drive. It is called “Good to the Corps; West Point Women’s Club Cookbook.” This is one of those cookbooks that you can pick up and find a new recipe every single time.

I will have the recipe and the measurements in the description down below.

Zucchini bread is one of those things that I didn’t like when I was growing up. I would always think that it was weird that we were making a vegetable into a sweet, but something came over me this summer, and I have been craving all kinds of different zucchini sweets.

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

This first recipe, we are going to need: 3 eggs, sugar, oil, flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, cloves, and grated zucchini. Do not add any water or any other liquid to the mixture. It may look dry, however, the zucchini has a lot of moisture.

In a large mixing bowl, you are going to add all of your ingredients to the bowl. When I have a dump recipe like this one. I usually tend to dump the ingredients as they are listed. Make sure to mix them by hand, and not use a hand mixer. Your mixer won’t be able to handle it.

Also, with the amount of zucchini, just use your judgment on that. This recipe called for 3 cups of grated zucchini. I usually just use one zucchini, especially when they are bigger.

You are going to separate the batter into 2 greased loaf pans Or divide them up into muffin tins.

For the 2 loaf pan, place it in the oven for 1 hour at 325.

For the muffin tins, you are going to put them in the oven for 15 minutes at 325.

It is easy to turn a bread recipe into muffins. You just have to have the right pans.

I hope you all enjoyed this recipe. If you want to make this recipe yourselves, make sure to tag me using the # Breakfast With Cordelia. I would love to see your recipes. If you want to see more recipes like this one, make sure to like and subscribe. Vadish, Dag Dag!

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Recipe Via: “Good to the Corps”

#TS4 #Random Alphabet Legacy Challenge #Generation C #Cordelia's Journal #Breakfast with Cordelia #Zucchini Bread #Baking

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script-a-world · 4 years

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I really want to create new foods and recipes for one of my worlds, but I have no idea how I would go about doing research for something like that. Do you guys have any resources or advice that might help? To be more specific for this world, most ingredients are incredibly low quality (but they are in abundance) and any imported ingredients are only used for the rich. I was thinking their food would use a lot of seasoning to mask the quality, but I'm not too sure. Thank you!

Feral: We could actually do with a few more specifics to answer this question as fully as you would probably like, but I’ll do the best I can.

First, I’m not sure whether you want to create recipes using real world ingredients that would in fact be cookable to release on your blog as some kind of companion for your audience or you want to conceptualize some recipes to be able to describe taste, texture, etc. If it’s the first option, creating recipes from scratch is pretty difficult. You might want to consider taking some cooking classes to learn techniques, reading cook books for a lesson in combining ingredients, and doing a lot test cooking to nail down the flavor profiles. If you don’t want to go completely chef-y, you could also take recipes and then tweak them by substituting an ingredient or using a slightly different technique (baking instead of broiling, etc). This would also be helpful in the second case. If by "low quality" you mean "low cost," try looking at food preparation that developed in poorer, underprivileged, or minority communities, like American immigrant cuisine and soul food (the original styles, not the bougie, hipster, “elevated” styles).

For example, understanding how immigrant cuisine differs from motherland cuisine can be particularly helpful in determining how your world’s “rich” food can be adapted into “poor” food. In America we often think of corned beef and cabbage as being a traditional Irish food, but in reality, no one in Ireland really eats corned beef and cabbage - it’s a traditional Irish-American food because poor Irish immigrants could not afford the lamb they would have eaten at home (which was more readily available in say rural Ireland than in New York City and therefore at an affordable cost), and they often could not source any bacon or cured pork products because the butchers who would sell to them were often the Jewish immigrant butchers. So, the cheapest cut of cured meat they could get was corned beef and replaced the traditional proteins they would have used at home.

Second, I’m working off the assumption that your world has the same ingredients as we do, but it’s unclear. When you mention creating new foods, that could mean food preparation or it could mean edible plants and animals. If it’s the latter, then the easiest way to do it would be crossing real world things.

So, for example, everyone’s favorite vegetable on your world may be a cross between a cucumber and a lemon (the flesh is cucumber like but grows in segments in a thick skin that wouldn’t be eaten straight but could be zested, and the flavor is like a very watered down citrus). This also gives you the ability to create recipes by using the two ingredients you crossed.

Also, I’m assuming that you’re using actual food rather than powders and extracts (very common in scifi settings where "real" food is incredibly scarce), which I don’t have too many ideas on how to create recipes that way. Firefly has a pretty good method of just obliquely referring to “protein powders in every color” and showing cans of things but only really showing food prepared and being consumed when it is in fact real food provided to the crew as payment.

Finally, seasoning is a good way to hide low quality ingredients, whether it’s a cheap cut of meat or slightly wilted vegetables. Especially sauces. Especially, especially cream sauces (providing that milk of some kind is one of the ingredients generally available). Sauces make spices go further. Also, keep in mind preservation techniques (salting, smoking, drying, pickling); in the real world what has often made something the “cheap” version is that it is preserved and not fresh (with the common exception of salted foods when salt is an expensive import). But those preservation techniques also infuse additional flavors into the food.

And speaking of the real world - have you ever heard that England conquered most of it in search of spices and then decided it wasn’t going to use any of them? Spices were the purview of the very very wealthy for a very long time. The common folk did not have much access to anything they couldn’t grow in their own backyard. So, the working class dishes we commonly associate with England are not particularly spicy. As you’re deciding how the poor disguise the low quality of their food, whether it's less costly trying to appear more costly or slightly less fresh than one would prefer to eat or whatever, keep in mind what they are able to grow in the soil and climate they have (spices are typically tropical while herbs are more often temperate).

A helpful guide in food experimenting:

Cook Smart: How to Maximize Flavor Series

Part 6: Guide to Adding Flavor with Aromatics

Brainstormed: Low quality how? Like, the bakers put sawdust put in bread to save flour low quality? Our teeth are worn down by forty years old because we live in a desert and the sand gets into our food no matter what we do and grinds our molars to nubs? We only get the worst cuts of meat because it’s all we can afford or the best stuff has to be sacrificed or tithed? Salt is expensive because we don’t live near the sea or any salt deposits so trading for it is pricey? There’s been plenty of cheats, circumstances, and shortcuts throughout history that may decrease what we would call the quality of food, and all of those examples really did happen.

Your idea of quality may be a hoity-toity five star restaurant, or an enormous home-cooked fresh meal, or the tastiest dish with all the seasonings on it. Instead of describing the food as low quality, think about what your people would consider high quality. What do they love? What flavors are common, and what’s rarer and therefore richer? How available is plant-based food, meaning are there herbs and fruit trees in everyone’s garden or is agriculture and import the only way of obtaining them? How available is animal-based food, meaning do these people live as herdsfolk and eat a whole sheep every week including the organs or do fishing boats bring in dozens of kinds of seafood or is the entire population practically vegetarian until traders arrive with preserved meats?

Think about where your people are situated geographically to figure out the resources available to them, and their neighboring countries for trade. Also think about how developed your people are. This website is a timeline of food throughout history, and may help you pin down some barebones basics.

Tex: Both Feral and Brainstormed offer excellent advice, and I’ll be reiterating most of that in my own opinion.

Cooking techniques are cumulative skills that reflect a culture’s technological progression. We started with a plain old fire, so cooking food with that meant techniques like spitroasting - with the invention of pottery, we could put things in containers over, on, and even under said fire, which would bring us “new” techniques like broiling, boiling (comestibles in a liquid), roasting, sautéing, searing, and blanching (comestibles scalded in boiling water and then removed into an ice/cold water bath).

These cumulative skills are also exponential, in that most of these adapted techniques can be combined with other skills. Take, for example, a stew. The base ingredients - meats, vegetables, grains - can be cooked with direct heat (e.g. grilling over a fire), then added to a cooking container (e.g. pots of different compositions) with a fat (e.g. oil, butter) to further cook the ingredients until it’s a desired texture (e.g. “spoon tender”).

This would be a “complete” meal by itself, of course - but it’s a cook’s decision to continue on to a stew because… well, because they think it tastes good, and there could be social/cultural reasons to continue expending effort into their food. Adding a liquid - it could be water/milk, but also a composite liquid (more cooking!) such as a broth - and simmering (low indirect heat over an extended period of time) would turn this dish into a stew.

Stews (and soups, the less dense predecessor) are popular in a great deal of cultures for a variety of reasons. For one, it’s relatively easy to make - Medieval European pottage could be tended over a fire throughout the day, portions taken and the dish stretched with minimal fuss. For two, such dishes are filling, with minimal concentration on the type or number of ingredients - the basic recipe is usually water + grain(s) + vegetable(s), and can be dressed up with whatever extra ingredients are on hand. Vegetables are resource-cheap foods, as they can be grown in family/shared gardens, and grains provide the lion’s share of carbohydrates (glucose, necessary for cell function; see: cellular respiration) as well as other things like protein and fats that vegetables are usually unable to provide in significant quantities.

Soup is, in itself, preceded by gruel. Originally, soup was nothing more than something to dip your bread (or other grain-based, dry food) into, and expanded into more than just a glorified sauce. Gruels are liquid + grain, and even simpler than soups or stews. They’re very easy to make, and often invented when a culture experiences their transition to a sedentary society (marked by the shift from hunting/gathering to agriculture). Breads of some sort usually accompany this because someone will figure out indirect heating (our first baking!).

Bread-beers (Ancient History), as a side note, frequently accompany breads and gruels in terms of cooking technique epochs. The Ancient Egyptians had one, Eastern Europe another (Kvass). This is a cousin, sort of, to gruels and breads in terms of technique, and utilizes the introduction of fermentation (another skill! Possibly discovered by accident via “oh this spoiled food didn’t kill me, neat”) from ingredients such as yeast. Alcohol that doesn’t start from a solid base such as bread is the refined version of this technique.

So far, everything I’ve mentioned is made from staple foods. It is the application of technique that creates such a wide variety. There is some degree of social hierarchy when it comes to what techniques are picked by a cook, if only because some of the more refined (a term I use as a concentration of technique, not an indication of quality) ones are costly in terms of time and sometimes also available tools (e.g. it’s simpler to make a bread-beer than vodka, especially if you don’t have a distillation set-up).

Seasoning is… a thorny topic. Most ingredients that get called “seasoning” - especially in the modern, North American sense - are just plants used in lower ratios than others in a dish. Take basil, for example. When it’s used in low proportions, it’s a seasoning (e.g. tomato sauce with basil). When used in high proportions, it’s an ingredient (e.g. pesto).

Now, there’s significant overlap in which plants are called “seasonings” and which are called “herbs”. This would be because plants designated as herbs are frequently prized in cookery as adding aromatic or savoury elements to a dish - too much can be overpowering (e.g. rosemary in small amounts can be delicious, but in large amounts can be too bitter to enjoy), so they’re often relegated as a component towards flavour profiles. Their physical quantity available to a culture does not necessarily designate “high” or “low” quality, merely the ratio that is culturally-accepted in recipes. (E.g. Italy uses basil in many dishes, but does that make either the dishes or the basil low quality? No.)

Herbs, as another side note, are frequently also used in medicine - hence herbal medicine. The medicinal plants wiki is less biased than the herbal medicine one, and offers some greater anthropological context.

Quality in terms of food is… usually more the ratio of preferred to not preferred qualities. In meat, this would mean things like fat, tendons, and gristle. Food, or rather ingredient, quality is a benchmark of how much time needs to be invested in preparing a dish. It takes significantly less time to cook bread when the grains are already hulled (and oftentimes polished), than if you had to go out to the field and do it yourself. Higher quality = higher convenience.

(Despite what Apicius might claim, spoiled food is not actually edible, and is different than purposefully fermented or cultured foods.)

Higher-quality ingredients means time saved, and that time could be allocated toward more complex cooking techniques. This isn’t always true in practice, since something like a cut of meat is better for one type of dish as opposed to another for practicality’s sake (i.e. if you’ve trimmed your meat so much it’s cubed, you’re not going to get a steak out of it). There’s some debate as to the idea of ingredient quantity vs technique complexity, where touted “high quality” foods (e.g. Sachertorte) use few ingredients, and “low quality” foods have many ingredients - usually seasonings, to mask the subpar flavour of something like a cut of meat.

Like Feral said, sauces are a great carrier for flavour, as well as helping to stretch the usable lifespan of an ingredient. A cut of meat ordinarily good for a steak that’s close to expiration might not be a good steak, but it could make for a decent stew or sausage, both of which could have sauces added to them to increase the complexity of the flavour profile. The food timeline which Brainstormed mentioned also has a timeline on sauces, which I think might interest you.

You mention “all the imported food is for the rich”, and I’m curious about that. Feral gave the example of the British upper-class restricting usage of some spices to the wealthier - and thus upper - classes of their society; is that what you’re referencing? What spices are you using as a base for your world, can they be domesticated? (For that matter, do greenhouses and the accompanying opportunistic entrepreneurs also exist? Or just a general opportunistic individual.)

The economic context of spices can’t be readily dismissed - there’s a weighing of amount of resources against amount of diplomatic tensions, so even if there’s an abundant amount of a given product, the providing nation could well make a money-based rude gesture in the direction of their client and increase the prices to artificially restrict supply. (Take tea, for example. Many, many economic wars have been fought over that [Abstract].)

The fluctuations of class-availability can include a factor of a nation’s influence on the global stage, and they could demand a good at a lower price and in large enough quantities to satisfy - at least temporarily - multiple social classes. This often comes at the cost of quality (here, in terms of purity of ingredients) - you can see this with tea, black pepper, olive oil, and many other class-oriented comestible goods (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I will stress that quality grades aren’t precisely the same for single-source foods and multi-source foods (e.g. sirloin steak vs curry powder), because a drop in single-source quality is more noticeable than multi-source quality due to fewer things to hide an ingredient’s quality behind.

Foods can still be heavily seasoned on both ends of the class spectrum, but there would be differences in local vs foreign (domesticated vs imported), and whether it’s a specialty dish (e.g. foods made for holidays, see: stollen) because infrequently-made dishes on a cultural basis are more likely to have fewer differences in ingredient quality and technique complexity.

There are also some dishes that have artificial class restrictions, because the upper classes have a habit of refusing to eat dishes from the lower classes as a means of social division. This is especially apparent in something like bread (1, 2), but fluctuations of technique complexity and ingredient quality availability can mean that the classifications of bread types can shift (1).

Further Reading

(PDF) Evolution – Culinary Culture – Cooking Technology by Thomas A. Vilgis

History of Cooking by All That Cooking

Feral (again): Modern History has a four part series on food in Medieval England broken down by social class with commentary on how it compares to food today, which may elucidate some of what we’ve been talking about in regards to the culturally variable meaning of “quality” in food.

#pylons #food #Anonymous

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pack-the-pack · 5 years

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Any thoughts on the aftermath of mating bites? I have a headcanon that taking care of the other's bite until its healed is a huge part of strengthening a pair's mating bond. Do you think Alphas would take pride in changing the Omegas bandages every day? Or feel guilty for for causing them pain? Would Omegas fret over using the best salves and anti-inflammatory medicine?

Honestly I adore this idea. But as in most of the asks I answer my response is not just “yes, pretty much” or “No” lol Yeeea, sorry about that guys… I do think that overall the biting and the care for it is an intimacy majority of couples take pride on, but I also think the process and importance itself might change depending on personal preference of the couple, culture, time period and social and economic status. Yes We are going there again, fasten your seat belts kids, cause it’s time for a History lesson, Pack style!!!

Warning: Mentions of death, abortions, mental illness, sexual stuff and all sorts of ancient hi jinks in an incredibly lengthy post (cut possibly unavailable on mobile cause tumblr is garbage).

Disclaimer: A lot of what I’m basing these fictional concepts in is very eurocentric because that’s what I know best, I am not a historian, I am not an archaeologist or a biologist, I have no degree on no nothing let alone an specialisation on anything relevant enough to be used as educated sources for what I’m about to write. This is just for fun okay, guys? So no need to rub your years of hard work and experience on my face or be like “well actually-!”, cause it will be like just, cool to know? But very unlikely taken into account past that, so just, relax m’kay? Thanks…… Also a lot of my knowledge on these things just comes from the “History of the entire world I guess” video so yeaaa.

So first and foremost, the types of things one would use to treat mating bites. Again, I think there are variants regarding time period and culture, but I think every culture would end up coming up with rather similar things, or overlapping methods of treating such scarring, and I made a little drawing for it :3 Nothing, great, nothing awesome, but because this ask inspired me to draw something.

(Kind of messy, my pottery is kind of crooked and I totally intended for the background to be grey and didn’t just fuck up cleaning up on the wrong layers and had to pretend that was the original plan, you’re imagining, but it’s from the heart c’mon).

Before people had this fancy thing called modern medicine, they had to rely solely on instinct, anecdotes and superstition to make their medication, and of course, bite treatment wasn’t any different.

Whenever an Alpha would bite an Omega or a Beta or vice verse, the glands around the bite area would get irritated, itchy and achy. The most ancient method of soothing these aches was mud, just plain out wet dirt, applied to the area and left there to dry and reapplied only when the entirety of the first batch cracked and fell off naturally during daily activities. It was the hottest trend amongst packs 50.000 b.c. - Though there is also evidence of animal fat being used for the same purpose as well as snow.

With the end of the Paleolithic period and the invention of agriculture things started to get more advanced, now people have bowls, and lots of seeds… and grains! Grains and seeds that they can squeeze really hard and it makes residue come out of them. This is when various types of oils started to pop all around along with various simple mixtures of flour and water. Many clay statues and other rudimentary paintings from these periods show a variety of deities and rituals that existed around the manufacturing of these products and there are indications that the importance of treating bite wounds only then started to become somewhat of a significant part of mated couples’ lives. It was believed that these smaller human settlements created by the first sedentary packs, aka warrens, didn’t make distinction between the Eleusinian¹ and Asterian² dynamics when it came to mating bites and the treatments of such. Omegas would bite and care for the marks they inflicted on Alphas just as much as Alphas and Betas to one another or other Omegas. It was only when these warrens started to grow into full blown villages and subsequently distinctive cities that these differences started to develop.

Once these villages and cities started to gain shape and power, social hierarchy took on a new dimension beyond sole survival. Alphas no longer concerned themselves solely with the survival of their own small pack and hunting food to provide for their mates and children, Betas no longer concerned themselves with just assisting Alphas and Omegas in their daily activities as well as primarily caring for crops and animals, and Omegas no longer only cared to make sure their children and pack were in good health and cared for. Farming and the domestication of animals allowed everyone to have more time for architecture, writing, laws, politics, dancing, music, religion and most important of all: Figuring out how to divide people in a way that totally doesn’t benefit everyone equally, as one do. So now you got social classes and cultural diversity, and these come with different ways of treating mating bites. So around the period of the Bronze age to when the Greeks were like really important (specially cause a lot of the terminology and ideas about the dynamics carried nowadays comes from them and the Romans in western society) methods and materials started to shift a bit, but not drastically. Herbs like mint and parsley, flowers like lavender and aconite, roots like ginger and marsh mallow, and oils like that from olives, frankincense or sesame seeds as well as animal derived products such as wax from bees or blood and fat from animals and sometimes even metals like iron started to pop up all around from east to west as cures for all sorts of ailments and diseases. Brought through the sea or through land by merchants (rhizotomiki) who crossed nations and continents, carrying with them they brought all sorts of new superstitions and beliefs about mating bites. Flowers said to be born from rivers or lakes of eternal youth, roots and spices made of fire itself, honey directly from the mouth of deities or roots that’d kill any spiritual disease started gaining popularity quickly with pretty much everyone seen as a lot of these were said to provide for good fortune and happy and prosperous marriages if incorporated on biting rituals. Oracles and religious leaders would advise their followers and rulers to consume certain things before mating and to care for their bites and their partners with extra amounts of care because all of a sudden they started to become super important. Deaths, famine, bad luck, abortions and mental illnesses started to be blamed on the lack of care or the improper care of mating bites, said to either cause the body to perish in account of some malignant aspect of a specific plant or to have angered the gods in some manner.

The high mortality that could come with infected mating bites became more and more apparent the more society advanced, but they didn’t know it was because of the infection itself yet, so surviving these was not only a sign of strength or luck, but a sign of status, power, money and higher spirituality. Emperors, Empresses, feudal lords in the orient, etc. All took pride in having enough money to buy rare ingredients from merchants from far away lands as well as hundreds of slaves and servants to care for their gardens, plantations and animals which provided them with an immense diversity of always available plants, herbs and roots that gained favour in aiding with biting marks. To be the chosen mate of one of these people would grant one with a similar status and privileges, such as not dying and having better flavoured bread or something.

This also meant that they didn’t really want other people but them using these miracle medicines, because they thought that for the common people to use “divinely provided” forms of care would inevitably result in corruption of said methods and subsequently the fall of society. So now you had:

The rulers of nations and cities/nobles: Using and manufacturing refined powders from roots, grains and metals from far away nations in order to bind and cure mating bites. Rare Oils from plant eradicated anywhere but the palaces and gardens belonging to the highest circles, bandages made from the finest silks and sown and painted with all sorts of religious meanings. Concoctions that took hours, months or even years to be finished for a single claiming treatment, with recipes and processes kept secret and many times lost forever with trusted doctors/shamans that’d tend to royalty only.

Generals, Priestesses, Shamans, Politicians: Using plants and roots that were common, but difficult to come by, expensive, difficult to use or “required” a specific ritual that’d grant them some sort of untapped potential from these plants otherwise, providing them “enlightenment”, “strength”, “wisdom” and “spiritual clearance” in order to win all things from wars, to new knowledge and insight on the gods’ wants and needs to political feuds. Alcohol and other fermented blends such and wine and grape must with marsh mallow, made to clean and close wounds as well as soothing burns were prioritized here. The immediate pain was considered cleansing and efficiency. Mandrakes were rather popular as well, but for treating “deep spiritual diseases”, such as when ones mate falls ills some hours or a day after the bite is consummated, or to ensure healthy and strong offspring coming from the union since it was considered to aid on sexual prowess. However given its “immense” power and magical properties it was rarely ever given or prescribed to the masses without the supervision or blessing of a highly spiritual attuned authority.

Lords and wealthy merchants: Using, manufacturing and selling all sorts of blends, mostly creams and perfumes said to help with pain and itching. These would change depending on the city and the deities they worshiped and superstitions they carried as well as the plants naturally available in the lands (the ones that haven’t been eradicated or hogged by other classes of people). These were the ones usually gifted by acquaintances, and friends of the newly mated couple as offerings of good fortune, prosperity and fertility. These varied hugely in ingredients and price as well. Though there were other ingredients and recipes guarded with an amount of secrecy by these as well, gifted and used just by the family to other members of the same, these tended to be tended to and made with a higher degree of care, utilizing plants one would have at their disposal in their own home.

Common soldiers, artisans and lesser merchants, sailors and farmers: The people that didn’t really have much money, time or social status to dedicate to bite wounds would resort to simpler and cheaper methods of soothing their pains. Simply dousing the wounds with olive or fish oil was a common practice, as well as using salt water to wash the area. Clay of various kinds as well as coal and ground up seashells were popular on various cities as ingredients for lotions and creams and many times were offered to the gods as well as a form of prayer for good health and happy mateship. Lamb and goat fat was also very popular with the poor for its healing and relaxing properties, people would collect an array of herbs and flowers that’d fancy their partner or the both of them to incorporate into it, in order to symbolise their union as one as well as to mask the strong foul smell from the fat.

Slaves: Slaves were usually prohibited to mate by their masters, but the ones that happened to mate someone or being mated would be punished with not being able to treat their wounds. It was seen as a disgrace and distasteful to not treat ones bite wounds, and people thought only fitting that slaves who step out of line would have their favour taken from them entirely on the eyes of their gods or polite society. As a result slaves had to resort to only using water and cool mud, many succumbing to the infections and fevers that were attributed by most as a corruption of the spirit and not worthy of pity.

So as you can see, there was a divide in how they treated their wounds based on many things, and while some of these methods and rituals sometimes overlapped between classes the distinction was stark enough that you could clearly tell what type belonged to whom. It was around that time as well that the Eleusinian and Asterian dynamics started to get divided more and more as time passed. Omegas were treated as borderline property and in many places like Athens were not granted the right to mark their mate back, with exceptions occurring just in certain occasions (such as the soon departure to a losing war on the mate’s part, or to save the mate’s life though a spiritual treatment), Beta females and poor Omega females being forbidden to use certain plants and to take part in certain rituals by law claimed to be belonging solely to Omega females of higher social status, Omega males being prohibited of using any sort of soothing agents if not prohibited of being bitten altogether. Alphas having or not marks as a form of weakness or a show of strength varied ridiculously from city to city and from nation to nation (So much so that to this day there is not full agreement on that in society). And a whole lot of other rules and random crap just around mating bites alone.

With the invention of modern medicine, these things started to change obviously, people had a better grasp of what helped and what just made things worse, creams, pills, oils,,and ointments started being patented and people would gradually only look to more naturalistic methods of treating claim bites as an element of a different all-natural life style or a belief (misguided or not) that natural = better. With all that said one thing has remained true: Yes, caring for ones wounds is something that is and was believed to strengthen and solidify ones bond with their mate. People always tended to care a great deal for it, doing everything in their power to provide for their mates in the best way they knew how, if it were through giving them private care by more servants then they can count, with the best ingredients in the world at the moment, or simply by choosing smells and things that they’d like in order to show how much they care, they took and still take great pride in caring for that very fragile wound in their necks. As whether or not this is more an Alpha thing or a Omega thing, or if Alphas hate or take pride in causing pain to their partners, that varies in belief, culture and time period. I particularly think that overall it’d be a mixture of both. They don’t want to cause excessive pain to their partner but they also want their bonds to be solidified forever. The Eleusinian dynamics were always the ones more intimately connected with the production and rituals surrounding bite soothers so to me it makes sense they prioritize its quality more than Asterian dynamics, but that also is a highly individual thing.

Overall I hope this wasn’t a complete departure from what you asked >.> But I really wanted to explore this a bit more and your ask gave me the opportunity to. Remembering this is all just my interpretation and applies to my verse (PTPverse) which is completely open for creative use in fanfictions, RP sessions and others, so if you don’t agree with what I said here that’s 100% fine, to each their own, I just hope this somehow was able to help anyone ;) any lingering questions try checking out my other history posts such as the Ancient Greece Headcanons one or make another ask on my inbox for clarity. Peace.

¹ - Eleusinian dynamics: Referring to Omegas (of either gender) and Beta females.

² - Asterian dynamics: Referring to Alphas (of either gender) and Beta males.

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pinkykitten · 4 years

Text

The time in Summervale: 1

Warning: none

Specifics: y/n=your name, oc, oc fic, comedy

People: athela (your mother), edward (your father), huxley (cook), ruthy (maid)

Words: 1,438

Summary: In the fictional land of Summervale, 1700, you, the Duchess are made into an arranged marriage.This is the dream of your parents but certainty not the dream of a longing inventor like yourself. You are taught to be a lady but who wants to be a primp and proper lady when you can have fun and be yourself. You need to try to convince your parents this is not what you want or is it? How will it be seeing the Prince of Linwyn? Will you finally change your mind and side with your parents?

Authors Note: this is something newwwwww. ive been wanting to do kinda my own thing for a while so this is not on any fandom this is a story i will be updating with chapters about my characters but in a x reader way if that makes sense so its still gonna use you and such just this is my own story. i got inspiration off of this story “the austrian suitor” by @headoverhiddles, granted i dont know the character or the fandom i just read it cuz another blog reblogged it yet i rlly enjoyed it even tho it is smut and im not usually a smut reader just kinda skip that or whatever either way it was extremely well written and gave me such inspiration like wowowowowow. so i made this piece inspired by that and i hope you guys like it. this is just kinda an opening to the whole thing and to kinda see how it works out so there is not any romance in this but trust me there will be but like i said i want to see how this goes if yall like if u do pls tell me tell me what u think ur thoughts everything i worked rlly hard on this so pls share like reblog do what you gotta do it would me a lot to me. thnx guys <3

“Maybe this piece goes here,” you mumbled to yourself. An action you always did but it was something your mother hated. Sitting atop your bed you concentrated your efforts in inventing a mixer that did its job on its own. Call it a hobby or a dream but inventing was your world. You loved the satisfaction of creating something with your own two hands especially if it helped people. Unfortunately, your parents the Prince and Princess of Summervale did not approve. They called it very unladylike. Your mother, Athela, would scold you about getting messy and dirty and then throw you in the tub like a little child. Your father, Edward, was always forcing you to learn how to seam. His mother used to do it and he wanted to pass it down to you. Those things didn’t excite you, didn’t make you complete. Inventing was something you loved and was always thinking about. As you would look at an apple tree during your morning stroll you would wonder about what inventions would be good for peeling apples whilst your parents bored you with duties as a Duchess.

“Almost done,” you screwed on the last screw to your creation. You had dirt under your nails and they were short and barely ever polished, only for special occasions. Your hair was almost every time how it was meant to be. None of those gels, ties, bows, again only for special occasions. Your mother, Athela, would buy you all these face creams, soaps, masks, but you were content with your scars and bumps, naming them every so often after royals, saying your “face was a castle and there should definitely be Queens and Kings roaming on it.” You were odd and different to others but to yourself you were this boring, normal, royal girl that everyone hated because you were granted everything you could ever want. Life was not that simple though. Sometimes when you have everything handed to you - all the money in the world - it still doesn’t fill up that hollow feeling inside or take away the sadness. It was something to help people cope but it was never the antidote.

“Alright...finished. What do you think Karim?” You hastily got out of bed and sat on the floor presenting your mixer to your pug. One very lovely vacation you took with your family you had learn a bit of Arabic. It was a beautiful language and you had made many friends there. You named your dog Karim meaning generous. Karim was generous, he was the only one who would look at your inventions. “Do you think it will work?” You gave a toothy grin, excited.

Karim grunted as he licked his nose, panting.

“I knew you would like it,” patting his head you jump up ready to show not just your parents but also the cooks. You had a very good feeling about this one. Every time you made an invention you had hope that maybe your parents would change their minds about your future but every occurrence was the same.

“Mother, father! Come look!” You yelled as you sprinted down the stairs not caring if your nightgown would get dirty sweeping across the floors of the castle. “Come quick!”

“What in the heavens is the matter my dear child?” Edward, your father, grumbled seeing you in such a hurry.

“See, father, in the kitchen.”

“In the kitchen?”

You passed by your mother, she tried to catch you but you slipped from her grip. “Young Lady why are you not dressed and groomed properly? You look like a mess.”

“Doesn’t matter, mother in this moment time is of the essence!” You arrived at the kitchen and grabbed a blue glass bowl, plopping it with a loud clank on the counter top.

“What are you doing y/n?” The cook asked. “You almost broke me bowl!” He was a plump older man, very short. His hair was salt and pepper and his face was as white as flour yet his cheeks were always red.

“Forgive me Huxley I just need to know. Need to see and dive deep into the unknown.” You opened up a recipe card that Huxley wrote down for your favorite cake. Vanilla cake, you were a simple girl. “Alright I need eggs and flour and oh yes milk! Almost forgot about the milk!” You were talking to yourself again as you ran around the kitchen like a mad woman.

“Is this another one of your inventions?” Huxley crossed his arms knowing about your obsession.

“Yes but my dear good old Huxley-”

“Old?” He lifted his brow.

“No time to explain, I have a tingling within me. This one is going to be it, I know it. Mother and father will finally see and believe in me.” You poured all the ingredients in the bowl. Your parents walked in, perplexed.

“Hello everyone. Today I show you something I have been working on the for the past week. I am very proud of myself but any who let me show you my newest invention-”

“Oh here we go again?” Athela rolled her eyes.

“The mixer!” You lifted it high in the air. “This mixer will not only mix greatly and fine it will mix to your acquired speed. Please watch.” You pulled the lever three times and then pushed the big button. The mixer turned on automatically with it squeaking from the gears. “As you can see the mixer is mixing all the ingredients together. No more of the hassle of blistered hands or tired arms, this does it for you! You can even look away and do other chores in the midst.” You turned around and your creation you thought so high about was creating smoke and making an odd sound.

“Um y/n,” Edward said, “is it supposed to do that?”

“Huh,” you turned to it again and all of a sudden the mixer started to go faster in speed. “Oh no.” The mixer then flew high in the air and starting to spin around like a mini airplane.

“Get down!” Huxley shouted and everyone in the room screamed in fear or bent down hiding under tables and items.

“Its alright everyone! Just a little mistake!” You climbed onto the tables trying to fetch the item. “Blasted thing.” You jumped onto the counter and caught it making it stop. Until it started to mix again and it caught a piece of your hair. You screamed loud and tried running away but hit the bowl of cake mix making it hurl in the air on top of your head making you slip from the batter onto your back. The mixer finally stopped. You groaned knowing you were about to hear it from your parents.

Athela stood up with a scowl on her face. “To your room. Now!”

You sat at your vanity disappointed with yourself. You had worked so hard on the mixer and had embarrassed yourself. Athela was standing next to you, glaring. Karim was laying in his bed munching on a treat and your maid Ruthy tended to your hair.

“I cannot believe you chose to do this on a day like today. Of all days!” Your mother was furious. Her gloved hands were held into fists. “You were supposed to be ready!”

“I know. I’m sorry mother.” In the end you always apologized even though you really hadn’t meant it. You hated when your mother was right especially about inventing. You always wanted to prove her wrong but it ended in outright disappointment.

“Look at this hair now.” Athela lifted the piece of hair that was wrapped around the mixer. “Can you save it Ruthy?”

Ruthy bit her lip as she heaved a sigh, “I’m sorry your Royal Highness it is very tangled I must cut it off.”

“Oh my! Are you sure?”

Ruthy nodded.

“Today of all days,” Athela repeated herself. “How will your future husband think of you now?”

“What?” You asked and then all was heard was a snip as Ruthy cut that one lock of hair.

“Make sure you take that disgusting batter out of her hair.” Athela pointed to your scalp.

“Mother what are you talking about?” You stood up throwing your precious now broken mixer onto your desk.

“My dear didn’t you not fall just mere minutes ago in that vanilla goop?”

“Thats not what I meant and you know it. I am asking about what you said about a future husband. What did you mean by that?”

Athela rubbed your shoulders up and down and broke into a huge smile. “My dear you are getting married!”

Tag list: @harrington-lover, @angelgl16, @perfectlybeautifulsuit, @hyehoney, @haven-prelude (wont let me tag), @leasly, @totally-alexa21, @creamy-pasta-boi, @multireese, @fanfictionrecommendations-com, @prentisskelley, @malereaderforkpop (wont let me tag), @guardian-of-cookies, @justafangirl-97, @teenageshitposts (wont let me tag), @dippergravity (wont let me tag), @some-booty, @fromfoolishpeopletodeadpeople, @collectiveyou, @wtfisalltherandoms, @dirbel, @eastcoasthaven, @fangirl-4-life415 (wont let me tag), @melonreblogsstories, @reginalinettis

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kelleyish · 4 years

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Happy Wednesday Tumblr. Let’s do some bullets today

Yesterday was Super Tuesday for the primaries, in which Texas participates. I voted early last week. I didn’t really have strong feelings about any particular person, as I plan to vote for whoever gets the nomination for Democrat candidate in November. I ended up going with Warren, and she didn’t do well at all, something like 1% of the vote. I voted for Sanders in the primary four years ago, and then of course voted for Hillary that November. This time I just wasn’t super hype about Sanders for whatever reason, so I decided to vote with my vagina.

(Not literally, that’d be pretty unsanitary)

I tend to do that in general, and vote for women wherever possible in the local elections.

Today it looks like Biden just squeaked out the win here in Texas. I’m not super thrilled with Biden either, and he’s got some problematic shit in his record, but you best believe if he gets the nom I’ll be voting for him over the pussygrabbing cheeto.

Yesterday I had my first official “physical” from a general practitioner, mainly so I could get him to refill my heartburn medication so I can get it for free with my insurance instead of having to pay money for the over the counter version.

I used to have yearly exams my gyno of course, although now that I’m not being held hostage needing birth control refills I haven’t been to see her in three or four years. I know I should, but it’s not like I’m in any danger of STDs at the moment and I’ve never tested positive for HPV, so I’ve just been letting it slide.

Anyway, there wasn’t a whole lot to the physical. He listed to my heart and arteries in my neck, which in retrospect did not necessitate me taking off my bra. I had a paper gown deal but it’s not like he gave me a breast exam so I’m not sure why that was necessary.

So the nurse said undress from the waist up, and then she made a comment about putting my shoes under the chair, I guess so the doc wouldn’t trip on them when he came in?

She left the room and I was like, if I have to undress from the waist up, why do I have to take off my shoes? So I opened the door again and asked her just that, and she was like I think he wants to look at the bottom of your feet?

He did not look at my feet

He also looked in my ears, felt my neck a bunch, and went over my blood test results. Those were pretty good for my age and signifiant oveweightness. My blood sugar was perfect at 84, so I’m still avoiding diabetes for now, yay! My cholesterol was 208, which is just over the recommended level of 200. The good and bad ratios could use a little work, but my triglycerides were fantastic, which is apparently a side effect of low carb eating.

He didn’t mention my blood pressure reading, but I have noticed a general trend that I’m usually in the 140s over upper 80s these days. I used to have excellent blood pressure but I guess weight and age must be starting to catch up. I’m hoping I can get that down lower with more weight loss, especially now that I may have blood vessel weakness in my DNA.

So I told myself I was going to jump back into super healthy living but I didn’t go to the gym like I’d planned and I just ate a Starbucks chocolate croissant. I don’t know what it’s going to take to jumpstart my motivation again.

Maybe I need to ask out another dude who is inappropriately too hot and young for me, spend a week working out like crazy, and then when he doesn’t call I’ll just go ahead and feel occasional stabs of embarrassment every few days for the rest of my goddamn life.

Here’s a picture of me from last night. The light was kind of interesting outside, and I’d put on a little makeup that day, so it was prime selfie time, apparently.

I’m wearing an apron because I was getting ready to make dinner.

This is outside the front door of my parents house. Inside the house on the wall behind me you can see the remnants of some of our old photography business. We had a huge wall covered with large framed bridal and engagement portraits and pictures form weddings.

A couple years ago I started helping my dad rearrange the wall. We took down a lot of the bridals but left up a few that we liked the most. Yeah, they’re pictures of virtual strangers but it’s also our art, too.

It also features a picture of me and Chip from our wedding, and the bridals we did for my little sister. This is about half the wall, and the rest is blank because we never got around to filling up the other half. It’s on the todo list.

We had a client once come in for photography services, and made a comment about how many daughters my dad must have. Even though he was there to procure photography services from us, he somehow thought all the pictures on the wall of brides must be family, otherwise why would they be on the wall of our house?

That shirt is my current favorite shirt. It’s green and the pattern on it is very slimming. At least i think it is.

Here’s what I made for dinner last night. https://recipechampions.com/recipe/keto-bacon-cheeseburger-burrito/

It was pretty good, but my goodness was it fatty and high calorie. It kept me full the rest of the night, I will say that. You have to work fast with the cheese tortilla, it gets hard really quick and makes it hard to fold the burrito.

The underwire came poking out the end of one of the channels in my bra. It took me several weeks to get around to fixing it. I sewed it up finally a couple days ago, and today it is poking through again.

I’ve done a couple transcription jobs for cooking competition shows lately. Specifically it’s these talking head interviews that they later splice bits into the footage of them actually doing the cooking and whatnot. I’m not sure why they are bothering to do a transcript of raw footage like this, when only a fraction of it will make it into the final cut of the program. It seems like it would be more cost effective to wait until the episode is finished and then have a caption person do the whole thing. Who knows, maybe that’s not even the purpose of these. I’ll take their money either way, I guess.

Because of the way they splice the footage in they want the talking heads to be present tense, and people have a really hard time with this sometimes. This is taking place after the competition is over, so they’re saying things like “I went over and grabbed the flour and started making my crepe batter,” and so the director has to keep stopping them and making them say, “I walk over and get the flour and start making my batter.”

The end. Time to leave Starbucks now.

#my own posts #GPOY #keto #weight loss #Keto Recipes

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holidays-events · 5 years

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Guide to the Passover Seder Jacqueline Weiss

Questions like, “What do I wear?” and “What do I bring?” are all too common. So if you’ve never been to a Passover seder before, it can be hard to know what to expect. We asked a few first-timers for their insight on attending (and hosting!) Passover seder. If you’re a newbie, or just interested in learning about the traditions, here’s what you need to know.

Passover Seder at a Glance

Passover is the Jewish holiday celebrating the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. The holiday lasts seven days and is traditionally celebrated with a seder. Think of the seder as a celebratory dinner with family and friends. What’s on the table, you ask? Delicious recipes like these.

This year, the holiday falls from March 30-April 7, but the seder is generally held on the first night. Some families hold two seders on the first two nights, first with family and second with friends.

What to Expect

The word seder means “order.” At a traditional seder, you’re likely to partake in a dozen (or more) traditions, from washing your hands to breaking the matzah to singing Pslams. Each represents a part of the Jews journey from slavery to freedom.

However, not all seders are alike. For most families, the traditions may vary and the steps may be abridged, Taste of Home staffer Gina Kapfhamer explains how she hosted her first seder, “We cut out the singing, for example, because we had all non-Jewish friends coming and wanted to have them get the ‘gist’ of what a seder is, but didn’t want it to be quite as long as a traditional seder.”

Pro tip: The dress code may vary depending on if your seder is more cultural or religious. Be sure to check with your host if you should plan to dress more casually or formally.

The Seder Plate

The seder plate is the center of the celebration, and has five ceremonial foods representative of parts of the story of Passover.

Zeroa (shankbone): This represents the lamb that was the paschal sacrifice on the eve of the exodus from Egypt, and annually in the Holy Temple on the day before Passover.

Beitzah (hard-boiled egg): The egg represents the pre-holiday offering traditionally brought into the Holy Temple.

Charoset: This sweet mixture represents the brick and mortar that they used to build for the Pharaoh. Check out our recipe, here.

Maror (bitter herbs): The bitter herbs, often horseradish served on romaine lettuce leaves are representative of the bitterness of slavery.

Karpas (vegetable): While the type of herb can vary, it is often customary to serve parsley alongside a small bowl of warm salt water, representing the tears of the Jews while leaving Egypt.

“We had a traditional seder plate to explain all the symbols, but had mini seder plates along the table,” says Kapfhamer. “This worked out great, so we didn’t have to pass the large plate.”

Pro tip: Tradition and wine typically come before the main course if following the steps of the seder, so don’t go in with a completely empty stomach.

Matzah

Matzah, unleavened bread, is one of the central foods of the holiday. The Haggadah (special Passover text) tells us that the bread is flat, crispy and unleavened because there was not enough time for the Jew’s bread to rise before leaving Egypt.

Along with the seder plate are three covered and stacked pieces of matzah, representative of three groups of Jews: Israelites, Levites and Priests, and also commemorating the three measures of flour that Abraham told Sarah to bake into matzah after being visited by three angels.

“Every year at the Pesach seder my grandma tells the entire table about how her mother and grandmother taught her to make matzah with a little pinwheel (they called it a dreidel). My grandma had to hide her religion from their neighbors because it was illegal to practice any religion in the USSR. The family would close the shutters and do everything in secret. Pesach is about freedom, and I love how my family has its own Exodus story,” says Fanya Donin, a student at Pace University.

Main Course

When it comes to the main course, this is completely personal preference and up to the host. A few traditional dishes that you may find at the table are roast chicken, matzo ball soup and brisket. If your host asks you to bring a dish, make sure to check if the meal will be Kosher for Passover, which needs specific preparations.

“We tend to have a lot of side dishes (farfel, kugel, etc), matzo ball soup, and a salad—we have a few friends who are vegetarian, so with those options everyone has plenty to eat!” says Kapfhamer.

When it comes to dessert, chocolate covered matzah can be purchased or made at home, as can a delicious toffee bark. Expect lots of Manischewitz and red wine to be shared and enjoyed as well.

More Seder Traditions

Some of the traditions you may see as part of the seder are the hiding of the afikomen (a piece of matzah—unleavened bread—in a traditional wrap), which is typical if there are children at the table. You’ll also see a cup of wine set out on the table or by the door for the prophet Elijah who visits every Jewish home during the celebration (although the host is usually responsible for sneaking in to drink the wine).

“It’s a great way to share a culture and celebrate a tradition over food with friends. Keeping the story alive, and sharing the experience with people of different faiths, it’s a beautiful thing,” says Kapfhamer.

Chag Sameach! Have a wonderful holiday!

https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/passover-seder/

#Passover #Seder Traditions

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lilacsolanum · 6 years

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Okay kids gather 'round, I'm about to lay some unpopular ass truth bombs at your doorstep.

Marco can't cook.

"But Lilac!" you say. "He does the cooking and cleaning for his dad!" Okay let me explain you a thing or two about being a kid and experiencing negligent abuse. This shit's about to get personal.

My dad left my mom when I was 11. My mother was the Womb Haver, which CLEARLY made her the Best Parent, so we stayed with her and she left us to our own devices while she went to work and parties. Lots of parties. Whole shitton of parties. That woman is 58 and can out party me any night of the week, bounce back the next morning, and do it again. She is a warrior! She is an amazoness! She's an alcoholic and my siblings and I raised each other.

As I was The Incredibly Responsible Eldest Child (TM), I cooked for my siblings. What did that mean?

I cooked 25 cent ramen packets. I heated up two cans of Campbell's soup on the stove. If mom had enough money that week, my siblings and I might rock a frozen pizza. I dumped shit into a pan, put that pan on some device that generated heat, and grumpily walked away to go back to the hand-me-down family desktop computer and read Final Fantasy VIII fanfiction.

Not everyone in my particular situation "cooked" the way I do. Please do not think that because my situation worked out in this way, that I assume EVERYONE'S situation was the same. I lived in a low income area and went to a low income school and I wasn't the only Incredibly Responsible Eldest Child (TM) (or Only Child, y'all can hang too). I knew tons of kids that were using the stove top to make elaborate dishes. Also, some kids legitimately enjoy cooking, and learned a lot about food even without A Dark Past. If you want to headcanon Marco in that way, I support you? But sometimes the reading of his past gets a little woobie-ish, like, look at this poor ‘lil abused kid, isn't it cute that he knows the difference between baking soda and baking powder because of his sad sad dad. As someone with a somewhat similar history, that reading tends to make me stiffen and twitch my upper lip with repressed frustration. Especially because it’s NOT REALLY IN THE BOOKS.

Yes, multiple times, it’s mentioned that Marco does the cooking and cleaning for his house. But at literally no moment is he expressly shown to be cooking or enjoying cooking. Here’s what we know about Marco:

In #5, he goes “grocery” shopping. At a convenience store.

Which is why what happened on my way home from the 7-Eleven was so dumb.

I was walking down the street with some low-fat milk, a loaf of bread, and a bag of peanut M&M’s. Since my mom died, I’ve gotten stuck with a lot of the shopping and stuff for my dad and me.

Yes. The 7-Eleven. Grocery shopping. First off, he’s clearly doing a Man Shop, which is when you treat the closest food store to you as a personal pantry and buy two or three items every other day. That’s not really how people who cook for themselves do it up, and I know this as a recovered Man Shopper and current Good Cook. Also, that 7-Eleven? That’s where this kid is going to get ALL his shopping done. Groceries! Cleaning supplies! Toilet paper! 7-Eleven. It’s in walking distance and Marco is thirteen. And convenience stores have mark-ups on their items specifically BECAUSE they are convenient. That loaf of bread is probably 2$ at a real grocery store, but is going to be 3$ at the 7-Eleven, so that’s something to remember when you think about Marco handling his family. He doesn’t have a ton of budget here.

Also, the 7-Eleven isn’t going to have things like fresh vegetables or proteins. How is he going to make carbonara without, like, bacon. He’s beholden to whatever awkward sad trucker food happens to be at that 7-Eleven. He can’t … make much, guys, even if he wanted to.Peter’s not going to get it together long enough to drop Marco off at the local Albertsons and ALSO come back for him. Maybe sometimes on a Saturday Marco makes a day trip to a real store on his bike, but then he can only grab what he can feasibly bring home on said bike. Nothing frozen for sure, perishable items from the coolers are risky, and heavy things might throw him off balance. And it’s not like he had the internet available to look up all the clever things you can do on a budget or have access to recipes for college students. Ya boy is heating up some sphagettios. He’s using that loaf of shitty cheap Wonderbread from 7-Eleven to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He’s a kid, and he’s eating like a kid, and he’s cooking like a kid.

Also, shout out to Marco for spending what little money his family has on peanut M&Ms. That is honestly one of my favorite Marco details of all time. You deserve those peanut M&Ms, buddy. You earned them.

There’s also this passage from #45:

When it’s my night to make dinner, I don’t order in. I don’t crack open a can of Chef Boyardee and call that a meal. Please.

I go the extra mile.

I use the oven.

I know. You’re saying to yourself, “But, Marco, man, you’re fighting a war against alien invaders. You and your friends, you guys battle Yeerks twenty-four seven. How do you find the time to cook?!”

It isn’t easy. But with a little help from the freezer aisle and a guy I know called Red Baron, it’s a lot simpler than it could be.

Plus, this particular night, I was trying to make my stepmom feel, well, glad that she’d married my dad. Even if I wasn’t one hundred percent behind the whole thing, she made my dad happy. That’s worth something. “

He’s basically saying “I’m doing what I can to surprise and delight my step mom, because she makes my dad happy, and I hate her and this whole situation but I’m making an effort for my family.” If he really spent ages eleven to thirteen caramelizing fucking onions, would he show his appreciation with Red Baron? Which isn’t even that great of a frozen pizza brand? We were a Tony’s family. Sure, you can interpret it as Marco only putting forth the barest of efforts and holding back his Real Talent of serving pecan crusted salmon over lemon risotto because he doesn’t like Nora if you WANT, but you better EARN it.

Do I think he spent all two years not even making an effort to cook? No. I think maybe he goes to the library or a local bookstore, whatever is closest, and finds a cookbook full of recipes based in his mother’s country of origin. He looks up a dish he misses, something she loved to make, something that was uniquely her and her family and her culture. He carefully writes down each and every ingredient, some of which he never really heard of, because he only had eleven short years with his mom and they didn’t have time to go over spices and flours. He carefully budgets for the next few weeks, trying to find extra money here and there so that he can bike to a real grocery store and find everything he needs. He takes the ingredients home and tries his damnest to follow the recipe and he burns shit. He tries again a few days later and uses a half cup instead of a quarter cup at one point. He tries a third time and everything went perfectly and it tastes wrong and it will ALWAYS taste wrong, because she never taught him how to make it the way she made it, because she never wrote down the recipe and now she never will, and he cries wildly in the quiet way he’s invented so as not to disturb his dad. If his dad hears him crying, sometimes he comes to check up on Marco and that’s awkward -- and sometimes Peter hears him crying and doesn’t check up on Marco, and that’s worse. Marco doesn’t attempt the dish again. She’s gone, and she’s not coming back, and so he throws mayonaisse on bread and feeds himself and his dad Oscar Mayer turkey sandwiches.

But he gets to buy all the groceries himself and feed himself whatever he wants and sometimes he has cookie dough ice cream for breakfast and that’s bomb as fuck.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #don't worry guys my mom's cool it was a long time ago

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queerpyracy · 6 years

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At Blue Scorcher in the seaside town of Astoria, Oregon, customers count on a few things. There’s, of course, the golden braids of challah and the crisp loaves of sourdough, but also those flaky pinwheel pastries that go so well with the cafe’s frothy honey-cardamom lattes. But for the workers who find their way to Blue Scorcher, the business means much more than artisan breads and a paycheck. “When people find a good match here it’s kind of magical,” says Joe Garrison, a founding partner in Blue Scorcher.

As a worker-owned cooperative bakery, Blue Scorcher offers employees opportunities to advocate for themselves and benefit directly from the business’s success. Garrison tells the story of a young job applicant who walked through the door four years ago. “He sat through the interview with his arms crossed and didn’t make much eye contact, but we hired him anyway,” Garrison recalls. Today, the same man is an excellent pastry baker, a co-owner in the bakery, and financial officer on the cooperative’s board. “I really think there’s something powerful with this [co-op] model,” Garrison says. “It engages people in a good way.”

The worker-owned cooperative model offers many benefits, says Melissa Hoover, an executive director for the non-profit cooperative advocacy group Democracy at Work Institute. Owners in the business get to accumulate capital. When the business is particularly profitable, the employees who helped make it successful get to share in those profits rather than seeing the money doled out to shareholders or upper management. Worker-owned cooperatives also empower people through governance, dispersing the power balance between employees and employers — something that’s become even more important in the era of #MeToo. “If you own and control this, you will have a greater degree of say over the kind of people who are in power,” Hoover says. “You’ll be able to control those conditions better.”

And for the restaurant industry in particular—famous for its long hours and low wages—co-ops promise better working conditions in general. “When the workers own the business, they tend to pay themselves a decent wage,” Hoover says. “They almost, across the board, [have] better benefits.” Workers also tend to build more on-the-job skills, because as owners, they’re cross-trained for a variety of roles within the business. That generally means a lower rate of employee turnover, a perennial issue in the restaurant industry. “There’s really strong data that [says] employees stay longer in worker co-ops and experience higher job satisfaction,” Hoover says.

So with some many voices in the industry calling for more better working conditions, why don’t more restaurants adopt this model?

The Democracy at Work Institute, which is associated with the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, estimates that restaurants and cafes account for roughly 13 percent of all 375 worker cooperatives currently operating across the country. The larger food industry, including food processing and production businesses like Alvarado Street Bakery and Ubuntu Coffee Roasting Cooperative, accounts for 22 percent — the highest concentration of any industry. A 2015 state of the sector report from the same group also found that food services made up a large portion of new or converted co-ops (those that transitioned to work-owned businesses from traditional business ownership models) that emerged in the previous two years.

“We are in a wave of growth right now,”, Hoover says. Worker-owned cooperatives, she says, have undergone several major “waves” over the last 40 years, each fueled by a different goal. In the 1970s, many newly formed cooperatives were tied to people desiring a counter-cultural lifestyle outside of traditional economies, but today, Hoover observes that more co-ops are being formed in response to economic stressors. “People don’t feel secure at their jobs anymore, and having ownership of something gives them security,” Hoover says. And some aging baby boomers implement co-op models as a way to keep their businesses open after retirement — by transferring ownership to employees.

At Arizmendi, a bustling group of Bay Area bakeries known for its sourdough chocolate croissantsand vegetarian pizza slices, the employees manning the ovens and the cash registers are cooperative owners. Inspired by Berkeley’s beloved Cheese Board Collective, Arizmendi’s first location opened in Oakland nearly 21 years ago. Since then, it’s blossomed into six affiliate bakeries that exchange recipes but operate as independently run cooperatives.

“It’s really empowering for a lot of people,” says Maddy Van Engel, a former baker at the Valencia Arizmendi Panadería & Pizzeria. Van Engel now oversees operations at the bakery collective’s sister organization, Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives, which helps organize the independent Arizmendi Bakery network; the association has become a model for successful cooperative restaurant management.

Van Engel sees worker cooperatives as a remedy to many of the often-difficult working conditions at traditional restaurants: wages that keep 40 percent of restaurant employees below the poverty line, hierarchies that tend to marginalize women and people of color, and a lack of sick leave. “The restaurant industry treats its employees very poorly, and a cooperative is the exact antithesis of that,” she says. “It actually can be this pretty big transformation for some people, going [from being an employee] to being a business owner.”

With employees deciding how the business should be run and advocating for themselves, conditions and benefits often improve. “In a co-op we’re deciding what’s best for us, and we decided we’re going to take 50-minute breaks no matter what,” she says. “We decided to have really great health benefits,” such as health insurance and sick leave.

And because workers are setting the tone at worker-owned cooperatives, Van Engel says that often results in higher pay. Wages at Arizmendi bakery vary depending on the location and what each cooperative decides, but Van Engel estimates that employees at some bakeries make roughly $40 to $50 dollars per hour, including benefits and profit sharing. “It’s actually bordering on a living wage in the Bay Area,” she says.

Similar cooperatives have secured comparable benefits for staff. Whereas the state of Oregon’s minimum wage is $10.25 an hour, Blue Scorcher offers a flat wage of around $15 to $16 per hour including tips. At Austin’s Black Star Co-op brewery, employees start at around $12 per hour and receive pay increases after three months to $13.10 per hour — nearly twice the state’s standard minimum wage. Employees can pursue additional raises if they work towards a role on the managerial-level governing body called the Workers Assembly, which comprises roughly half of the brewery staff. In addition to the living wage, Black Star gives all employees paid time off, and staffers, regardless of their leadership role, are also empowered in the decision-making process. “We operate democratically, so there’s no one person making decisions,” says Black Star business team leader Jodi Mozeika.

Where cooperatives value collective ownership, many outsiders are put off by the prospect of a business that seemingly lacks a clear management hierarchy. “People think of collective or consensus decision making, and they’re afraid of that,” Hoover says. “They don’t necessarily see it as a benefit. They see it as, like, ‘Oh my gosh. Everybody’s going to be deciding everything; that’s not typically true.” Rather than relying solely on consensus voting, worker-owned cooperatives typically have committees and boards that help oversee company decisions. This helps the business stay nimble, while still giving employee-owners “more agency,” she says.

Still, fielding several opinions about policy changes does mean that decisions are, at times, made at a slower pace compared to a restaurant with an owner or CEO. At Black Star, a simple majority vote can result in a managerial decision. When a proposed change that’s pertinent to running the business is voted down, “it’ll be revised so that we find a plan that works best for us and for the business, and that process takes time,” Mozeika says. Smaller decisions are decided by a team leader council and larger policy decisions are made by a board that’s elected by Black Star’s membership community.

To avoid employees “blocking” important decisions, Blue Scorcher adopted a dynamic governance system when it fully transitioned into an employee-owned cooperative in 2012. Under the model, employees elect a representative to lead their department — known as a “department circle.” The leads are then charged with making quick daily decisions, such as making sure the bread department has enough flour to do their baking for the day. Those leads then attend group meetings with the other department leads, called the General Circle, where they discuss higher-level issues within the bakery. During the lead meetings, representatives are allowed to propose business changes.

With so many voices in the room, not all discussions are simple. “We’ve certainly stubbed our toes on all kinds of issues,” Garrison says. But Blue Scorcher’s sociocratic model forces the group to make decisions more quickly. A single employee, for example, can’t block a decision that’s approved by the group if the decision doesn’t violate the co-op’s bylaws. Garrison points to a suggestion several years ago, where a group of members felt that the coastal and entirely vegetarian bakery should start serving fish on its menu. “There were people strongly for and strongly against [it],” he recalls. Rather than making a quick decision that would alter the identity of the bakery, the group decided to survey customers. Following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster off the Pacific Coast, the group ultimately decided to ax the fish plan.

But not surprisingly, worker-owned restaurant cooperatives face many of the same challenges as their more traditional counterparts. Founding cooperative members often share the rewards as well as the risks of starting a new business, Hoover says. “A single person may not be able to raise $100,000, but 10 people together might be able to, from their own resources and friends and family.”

Such was the case with Black Star, which was facing potential closure in early 2017 after several months of declining sales. “That cash crunch that we got into was a result of… the same struggles that all restaurants face, [which] is staying relevant in an ever-changing restaurant scene and brewery scene,” Mozeika says of the downturn. Where other restaurants might look for a new line of credit or into the owners’ own pockets to save the business, Black Star was able to turn to its 3,500-person membership community for help. While somewhat temporary, the call to action led to a boost in sales that ultimately saved the brewery and gave Black Star time to strategize. “Luckily we have the community to rally around us and a really strong membership base that wants to keep us open,” Mozeika says.

Beyond the regular challenges of running a food business, cooperatives also sometimes find it challenging to secure loans and investment. “Often restaurant investors want either some kind of control or they want a large return on investment,” Hoover says. “In a co-op, both of those things violate the principles of the co-op, [which] is that the members are the main beneficiaries and the members control it.” In these instances, co-ops will often form a third-party organization such as the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives, which can establish the business and then transfer control to the cooperative.

While having more say in the running of a business can have its benefits, the model isn’t for everyone. “We’ve had several people who came in and were just gobsmacked when they realized that there was no clear boss and there was nobody to play the role of the sheriff,” Garrison says of Blue Scorcher. “If you’re not saying, ‘I’m ready to engage in a workplace that requires me to collaborate well,’ this is not the right workplace for you.”

For himself, though, Blue Scorcher’s co-op environment has been transformational. “It’s helped me encounter disagreements throughout my life in a more productive way,” Garrison says. “That business of yelling at each other and thinking, ‘I’m right and you’re wrong,’ it’s kind of miserable. There’s a better way to live, and that way is to collaborate.”

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kitsbakedgoods · 4 years

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Best Voice Recipe - smooth and silly - an absolute must try!

It all started in 1997, when I let out my first cry after just being birthed. My mother never told me this, but I definitely know for a fact that as soon as she heard me she said “Wow. This child of mine is definitely going to have a voice.” And you know what? She was right. Now I know what you’re thinking, “just get to the recipe” right? Wrong. I, like every other cooking website, am going to include a huge introduction that will definitely make you wonder if trudging through this is worth it, but believe me, it is!

I don’t think I ever really thought about my voice when I was younger, or at least I don’t remember it. However, my earliest memory was when I had gotten into my high school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof when I was 13. It was my first singing rehearsal, and the teacher had to split us up into 3 groups - alto, soprano and men. When I found myself with the boys I thought “this is definitely from growing up with two older brothers, isn’t it?” and honestly, I still wonder that. Growing up with boys and boy culture made me really passionate about hating stereotypical girly things like barbies, make up, and the colour pink. I wonder if that shaped my voice since having a high-pitched voice was considered girly.

I personally consider my voice to be in the alto range considering that when I speak I can feel it coming more from my chest rather than my head. I find myself most comfortable staying in that range. When playing, I gravitate towards lower and deeper sounds while occasionally going for a more nasally sound.

In my day to day life, I am constantly playing with my voice. I love to sing random sentences that come to mind, make weird noises and try to do impressions and accents. This is really important to me and I find it makes my voice unique and can make me feel happier. My go-to impressions are Kermit the Frog and King Julien from Madagascar. However, I LOVE imitating my friends and family and I think that through imitation I accidentally pick up and keep their sayings. For example my girlfriend once accidentally hung up on me, and called back with her mouth right to her microphone and said “my bad” in a way that sounded like this low “mmmmm mah ba-yuhd” and now I cannot stop saying it like that. I also love doing Italian, New Jersey/New York, British, Western and Russian accents. My voice changes all the time, and even when I smile, my voice gets a little higher and more bubbly. Although this isn’t an impression, I too, like everyone else, have a customer service voice. This also blends with my counsellor voice that I developed in Cegep through my studies. It’s positive, clear, warm and endearing.

Other versions of my voice include my tired voice, which stays in my throat and sounds rather raspy and breath-y as well as my intoxicated voice, which is, I think, where I use my head voice the most. I feel like the higher I go, the more euphoric I will feel and thus, I continually climb that vocal ladder until I laugh so hard I cry. I can also slur my words and get incredibly loud. In non professional settings, It’s really easy for me to get loud and stay at that level. My laugh itself feels like a drum to me. Additionally, most times when I speak, I move my body a lot, especially my shoulders and my hands. I believe that this provides a visual guide to help convey how I’m feeling and the emotions I channel through my voice.

I use my voice as a vessel to express my passions and my personal values. I think my voice can be steady and strong and even though I am a tiny little 5” munchkin, it can make me feel like a giant. There are however, two different types of passions. The first one is for when someone says something ignorant and I have to correct them: for example, the use of language around preferred pronouns, the Black Lives Matter movement and anything even mildly racist, sexist or homophobic. I clench my jaw without noticing and I direct my tone towards them like I want them to feel my words in their bones. The other passionate voice is when I talk about my interests (theatre, the human brain/psychology and art) as well as people I love. I stand taller, project, move and smile and get loud and strong but in a completely different way, like that strength isn’t a defence mechanism.

I really like my voice. Sometimes it is a shock to hear it through recordings and videos, but I like it. Even though my voice tends to crack a bit and sometimes I find myself stuttering, this is my one and only voice and I really do like it. And now, the moment that you have all been waiting for. The most scrum-diddly-umptious recipe. Passed down from generation to generation, never before seen: the recipe for my voice.

My Voice

(Double Fudge Brownies)

Ingredients:

½ cup and 2 tbs of smiley (butter)

6 tbs funky noises (cocoa)

1 cup of random singing (sugar)

2 customer service voices (eggs) well beaten

½ cup impressions (flour)

½ cup of that smooth, earthy alto chest voice (walnuts)

Directions: Melt together Smiley and funky noises (butter and chocolate), stir in random singing (sugar) and customer service voices (eggs). Stir in impressions (flour).

Put into a greased 8” pan and into the oven at 350 F for approximately 25 minutes.

Enjoy!

Reviews:

“You sound like a cartoon character. You also sound like you’re always smiling/about to laugh” - Salma.

“You’ve got good projection, good for storytelling” -Kayla.

“Nice even tones. Earthy.” -Sean.

“Warm hearted and open” -Ajali.

“expressive” Jamie.

“very kind” -Chris.

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choclette8 · 4 years

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If you love a good curry, but keep making the same ones time and time again, it might be time to try something different. This healthy mushroom curry with cashew nuts is full of flavour, colour and nutritious ingredients. It’s one of Chetna Makan’s recipes from her new book, Chetna’s Healthy Indian Vegetarian. Plus there’s a chance to win a copy for yourself.

If you’re a fan of The Great British Bake Off, you will know Chetna Makan. She wowed the judges with her creative and vibrant flavour combinations back in 2014. But although she’s a keen baker, she also enjoys simple Indian home cooking. Chetna’s Healthy Indian: Vegetarian is her fourth book.

Chetna’s Healthy Indian: Vegetarian

Chetna was inspired to write this book after a research trip to India. Vegetables and home cooking are integral to the cuisine of most parts of this vast country. As well as making veg the star of the show, however, she also showcases recipes that are healthier than many. The tag lines, “everyday veg and vegan feasts; effortlessly good for you”, pretty much says it all.

Most of the recipes are really easy to make. And a lot of them are quite quick too.

The book is divided into eight chapters. Each chapter contains around ten recipes, although some have a couple more and some a couple less. I’ve looked at every single one and strangely enough, I want to try them all. Here’s a flavour of each of the chapters and what you might find therein.

Soups & Starters

Soup isn’t something I generally associate with Indian cuisine. But of course there are soup recipes. Every culture has them after all. Creamy tomato and coconut milk soup looks totally delicious. Sweet and sour garlic and tamarind rasam, on the other hand, sounds quite intriguing.

The salads are refreshing and light and include lentil and mango salad and grilled corn and red onion salad. You can treat these as a starter, a light lunch or a side.

Snacks & Canapés

The recipes in this chapter are perfect for entertaining. But they’re also great for picnics and packed lunches. Cheese and potato chapatti sandwiches sound counterintuitive , but I suspect I’d find them irresistible. They’re definitely on my list of must tries. I’ve made chocolate rocot0 stuffed chillies before and they nearly blew our heads off. Chetna has a recipe for gram flour stuffed chillies. She suggests finding the right chilli for your tastes before stuffing them. Much more sensible than our approach.

Sabji

Sabji are dry vegetable dishes. Chetna describes them as akin to Indian vegetable stir-fries. Serve them on their own with flatbreads or to accompany curries and other dishes such as dal and rice. Chetna particularly likes to use them as stuffings for sandwiches, wraps and toasties.

Onion and green pea sabji is a great all rounder. It sounds delicious and given that most of us have a pack of frozen peas in the freezer, it can be made at a moment’s notice. I’m also keen to try sour and spicy okra with potatoes and asparagus paneer.

Lentils, Peas & Beans

Dal is one of my absolute favourite dishes. So I can’t wait to get properly stuck into the recipes in this chapter. You’ll find a basic quick and easy dal recipe for sure, but there’s so much more. In this chapter you’ll also find a recipe for a super green spinach masala chickpeas.

I know I have a pack of urad dal lurking around somewhere in the back of a cupboard. So I absolutely must make Chetna’s masala urad dal. It’s a nice thick one and it just sounds so good.

Curries

As you’d expect from Chetna, there are a few tricks and twists to elevate your curry cookery to the next level. The mushroom curry for example, isn’t just any old mushroom curry. It contains cashew nuts for extra texture, nutrition and flavour, but also gram flour for thickening.

There are also some unexpected finds. I understand jackfruit curry is quite common in India, but I’ve never seen a recipe for one in an Indian cookbook here in the UK before. Chetna has that one covered.

As much as I dislike the term fusion food, Chetna has snuck in a few adaptations. Look out for some standard British produce which gets a makeover. Here are a couple: broad bean curry; courgette kofta curry.

Rice & Roti

If you’re after a standard roti, paratha or naan bread recipe, this isn’t the book for you. Instead Chetna gives us a whole range of lesser known and unusual bread recipes. I’ve been exploring all sorts of flatbreads over the last few months and I’ve enjoyed the process enormously. But I have to say I’d never heard of kulcha until I saw the recipe for buckwheat kulcha in this book. But now, of course, I want to try it.

This chapter includes recipes for dosas, a beetroot chapatti and a chilli naan. When it comes to the rice side of things, expect to see such delights as bengali khichdi and aubergine and potato rice.

Raita & Chutney

The penultimate chapter of the book is for the spicy or cooling condiments that put the finishing touches to a good Indian meal. Roast carrot raita sits alongside a host of other yoghurt based sides. The tamarind and date chutney, with its sweet and sour notes, has my name written all over it.

Sweets

Well you can’t have an Indian cookbook without a few sweets to finish off. Indians have a notoriously sweet tooth. Chetna’s desserts err on the healthier end of the spectrum though and aren’t nearly as sweet as you’d expect. Rose sandesh, a strained milk based pudding, sounds particularly appealing.

Publisher Details

Chetna’s Healthy Indian: Vegetarian */ Chetna Makan. Published by Octopus Books in hardback with an RRP of £20. ISBN – 9781784726621.

If you like the sound of this cookbook, head down to the bottom of the post where you’ll find the chance to win a copy.

What I Really Like

Although there are some familiar recipes in the book, such as chana dal there are many more unusual ones. This gets me excited.

Every recipe has a photograph to show the finished dish. This is quite a rarity in cookbooks these days. As you’d expect, they all look good and eminently toothsome. But there’s also a number of shots taken in India. These are mostly of market produce, but there’s a few buildings and street scenes thrown in to conjure up an exotic, sultry and colourful aura – the essence of India.

Some cookbooks these days are obsessed by celebrity culture and feature more shots of the author than they do of the recipes they’ve created. I’m very pleased to say that Chetna is not such a person. There are only two photos of her in the whole book and they’re both in the introduction.

I’m a big fan of pulses, which is just as well as they’re a mainstay of my diet. Not only are they nutritious and tasty but they’re also incredibly versatile. It seems I’m not alone. Chetna is also a fan. To help those that aren’t as familiar with peas, beans and lentils as she is, there is a Pulse Primer section in the book.

Her guide to the individual qualities of different pulses is to encourage readers to explore and use a wider variety than they may be familiar with.

What Could Be Better

To be honest, I’m struggling to think of anything.

Mushroom Curry with Cashew Nuts

We really enjoyed Chetna’s mushroom and cashew curry. I’ve called it mushroom curry because there aren’t really that many cashews included. They do add to the overall texture and flavour though, so they’re an important addition.

To turn this mushroom curry into a vegan offering rather than a vegetarian one, just swap the dairy yoghurt for a plant based one.

It’s a standalone dish, quite capable of top billing. Just serve it with rice or flatbreads. That said, it would also make a fabulous contribution to a curry night. Pair it with a dal and some sort of green vegetable curry maybe. I’ve provided a selection of curries further down the post which would all make excellent accompaniments.

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Fry the cumin seeds, onions and cashew nuts.

Add the garlic or garlic scapes.

I mostly followed the recipe, but did make a couple of adjustments. We had a load of garlic scapes from the allotment that I needed to use up. So I added quite a lot of those rather than the garlic listed in the recipe. As there was quite enough allium activity going on, I only used one onion rather than two.

Gram Flour for Thickening

Watery curries aren’t generally that appealing. Chetna, however, has a great tip for thickening the sauce for this cashew mushroom curry. She uses chickpea flour, also known as gram flour or besan. Well what a brilliant idea this is.

The flour not only helps to thicken the sauce, but it also add flavour and a little extra protein. And it’s gluten-free, so there’s no need to worry about any allergies on that score.

Add the gram flour to the fried onions along with the spices and stir. I also added salt and pepper at this stage as I thought it would be harder to stir everything together later in the proceedings.

Top Yoghurt Tip

I’m always wary of adding yoghurt to curries as the yoghurt tends to split. Consequently, the resulting dish doesn’t look very appetising. Chetna’s top tip is to add water to the yoghurt before adding it to the other cooking ingredients. It worked perfectly in this mushroom curry. Just give it a good stir before you pour it in and don’t add it all at once. Slow and steady wins the race.

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Stir in the yoghurt & water after adding spices and gram flour.

Add chopped tomatoes.

I deviated from Chetna’s instructions at this point. Who am I to mess with her recipe? Well it seems I just can’t help myself. I mixed all of the water with the yoghurt and added it in after frying the onions etc. It somehow made more sense to me to do it that way. I poured it in slowly whilst giving it a good stir to mix in the gram flour and spices. It worked fine.

At this point, you add the tomatoes, clap the lid on the pan and allow the contents to gently simmer for ten minutes.

Cooking the Mushrooms

Finally it’s the turn of the main ingredient. Add the sliced mushrooms and coriander leaves. Turns out I had plenty of parsley, but no coriander leaves. So I substituted the first for the second. Cover the pan again and cook for a further ten minutes. Job done.

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Add the mushrooms and coriander (or parsley) leaves.

Cover and cook for ten minutes, then give a good stir and serve.

My top tip is that mushrooms really benefit from a little drop of soy sauce. So I added a teaspoonful of tamari along with the mushrooms for an extra umami boost.

We accompanied the mushroom curry with rice initially. But as there were only two of us, there was plenty left over. So the following evening I warmed the curry up and we enjoyed it with flatbreads.

Other Curry Recipes You Might Like

Baby corn masala via Flavours Treat

Cauliflower kurma via Greedy Gourmet

Green split pea curry via Tin and Thyme

Indian potatoes via Crunch & Cream

Lentil curry with kale & red peppers via Tin and Thyme

Matar paneer via Lost in Food

Roasted aubergine curry (baingan ka bartha) via Simply Food

Sri Lankan okra curry via Veggielicioius

Spinach chickpea curry via Tin and Thyme

Keep in Touch

Thanks for visiting Tin and Thyme. If you make this mushroom curry or have a copy of the book, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Have you made any of Chetna’s vegetarian curries? Do share photos on social media too and use the hashtag #tinandthyme, so I can spot them.

For further book reviews and giveaways follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or��Pinterest.

Choclette x

Mushroom Curry. PIN IT.

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Mushroom Curry – The Recipe

Mushroom Curry

A healthy vegetarian main dish curry which is full of flavour, colour and nutritious ingredients.

2 tbsp sunflower oil

1 tsp cumin seeds

12 raw cashew nuts – roughly chopped

2 onions – finely chopped

2 garlic cloves ((I used garlic scapes))

1 tsp ground coriander

½ tsp chilli powder

½ tsp garam masala

½ tsp turmeric

2 tbsp gram flour

100 g natural yoghurt

250 ml water

3 to matoes – finely chopped

400 g chestnut mushrooms – thinly sliced

20 g coriander leaves ((I used parsley))

¾ tsp salt ((I used ½ tsp salt and 1 tsp tamari))

¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a large pan over a medium to low heat and add the cumin seeds. Once they start to sizzle, stir in the cashew nuts followed by the onions.

Cook for about twelve minutes or until the onions are golden brown. Add the garlic and fry for a further minute.

Add the gram flour and remaining spices and stir fry for another minute.

Stir the yoghurt and water together and pour into the pan, a little at a time, stirring all the while. I added the salt and pepper at this point.

Bring it up to a simmer then add the tomatoes. Cover the pan and simmer gently for ten minutes.

Add the mushrooms, coriander leaves and the salt and pepper, if you haven’t already done so. Cover and simmer for a further ten to fifteen minutes or until the mushrooms are cooked.

Give it a good stir and serve warm with rice or flatbreads.

To make this curry vegan, just swap the yoghurt for a plant based one.

Please note: calories and other nutritional information are per serving. They’re approximate and will depend on serving size and exact ingredients used.

Mushroom Curry Sharing

I’m sharing this recipe for a gluten free sponge cake with Apply to Face Blog for #CookBlogShare.

Chetna’s Vegetarian Healthy Indian Giveaway

Octopus Books is offering one Tin and Thyme reader a copy of Chetna’s Healthy Indian: Vegetarian. To be in with a chance of winning, please fill in the Gleam widget below. You will need to leave a comment on this post, answering the question, which then gives you additional chances to enter if you so wish. Gleam will pick a winner at random from the entries received. If you are commenting anonymously, please give me some way of identifying you as I will be verifying the validity of entries. Any automated entries will be disqualified.

This giveaway is only open to those with a UK postal address. Winners will need to respond within 5 days of being contacted. Failure to do this may result in another winner being picked. Leaving your details gives permission for them to be passed on to Octopus Books should you be a winner in this giveaway.

Prizes are offered and provided by Octopus Books and Tin and Thyme accepts no responsibility for the acts or defaults of said third party. Tin and Thyme reserves the right to cancel or amend the giveaway and these terms and conditions without notice.

Closing date is Thursday 16 July 2020

Healthy Indian Thanks to Octopus Books for the copy of Chetna’s Healthy Indian. They did not expect me to write a positive review and all opinions are, as always, my own. This post contains affiliate links to Amazon*. Links are marked with an *. If you buy through a link it won’t cost you any more, but I’ll get a small commission. Thanks to my readers for supporting the brands and organisations that help to keep Tin and Thyme blithe and blogging.

Mushroom Curry + Chetna’s Healthy Indian Giveaway If you love a good curry, but keep making the same ones time and time again, it might be time to try something different.

#cashews #chickpea flour #mushrooms

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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King Arthur Flour’s Baking Hotline Has Never Been Busier — and the Questions Are Getting Personal

Efired/Shutterstock

During quarantine, the bakers who staff the hotline are providing baking — and emotional — support

On March 14, COVID-19 was declared a national emergency in the U.S., hand sanitizer profiteers made headlines, and states had yet to issue stay-at-home orders. It was also Pi Day — that is, the date 3/14, which is often cheekily observed by baking or eating pie. The date stands out to Martina Pochop because she’s a baker and because when she went to work the next day, she noticed a flood of new calls and emails. Popchop works as a baker support specialist at King Arthur Flour’s Norwich, Vermont headquarters, and part of her job is answering calls on the company’s Baker’s Hotline, a number anyone can call for advice on their doughs and batters. “It was literally overnight,” she says. “Everything just started tumbling down an endless path in search of flour.”

King Arthur Flour quietly launched its Baker’s Hotline in 1993. While it may not be as well known as the Butterball Turkey Talk Line, it displays a level of homespun commitment not seen in other culinary help lines. The Baker’s Hotline is staffed by 15 people who answer calls and emails for eight to 12 hours a day, 357 days a year. Most have culinary degrees and worked as professional bakers, chocolatiers, and chefs before coming to King Arthur, where they generally work in education, recipe-developing, or product-testing roles in addition to answering the hotline. They’ve picked up the phone so many times that many can recite their opening line as if in their sleep: baker support specialist Maggie Perry recently answered a call from her child’s pediatrician with, “Hi, this is Maggie at King Arthur.”

The holidays and summer (baking contest season) tend to be busy for the Baker’s Hotline, but those pale in comparison to the pandemic. In April, queries to the King Arthur hotline surpassed the four busiest weeks over the winter holidays, with a total of 10,406 calls and 7,740 emails, requiring six additional bakers working in other departments to step in and answer emails. It hasn’t let up: King Arthur’s staff has experienced unrelenting call volumes for three months, and during this time, the hotline has become a magnet for lonely, anxious human behavior and lots of questions about sourdough.

The baker support specialists have seen a few patterns emerge. Before the pandemic, most calls came from regular bakers on the older side, with some “frequent fliers” who called mostly just to chat. But in March, they started hearing from more beginner bakers who couldn’t easily ask family members for advice about old recipes or about the difference between all-purpose and bread flour — sometimes it was because they’d recently lost someone, other times because they lived far away and couldn’t reach them by phone. Perry also noticed that once schools shut down, parents started calling about homeschool baking projects. “[Baking is] one of those magical things. It’s science, it’s math,” she says. And more people were asking about finicky projects like pâte à choux or macarons, recipes whose long timelines newly appealed to those working from home or looking for weekend time-sucks.

As grocery store shortages went beyond sanitizer and toilet paper, calls about ingredient substitutions flooded the hotline. When grocery stores ran low on bread, people called in to ask for recipe suggestions, solutions to rising issues, and once, if it was possible to bake bread on a grill because it was too hot to turn on the oven. Callers looking for a challenge tried out sourdough, “which, for people who have never baked before, is quite an adventure, to say the least,” Pochop says. There were more calls about cookies, but ones baked with alternative flours, since all-purpose was scarce.

More time and fewer options at the grocery store have indeed made baking more popular than ever, and King Arthur’s sales have gone up as much as 600 percent accordingly (as have hits to its website). But it’s not the only thing driving thousands more callers to the Baker’s Hotline. According to Pochop, who has been with the company since 2017, “in the last couple of months, people have seemed the most lonely.”

Baked goods in particular are so often tied up with nostalgia and relationships; people seem especially anxious about messing up recipes that their loved ones usually made, or just want to talk to someone — anyone — about how much a recipe means to them. A caller may technically be asking about how to halve a recipe, but what they really want to talk about is how they’d usually make a full recipe to share with their grandchildren. “You can’t actually give them everything that they need,” Perry says. “You can just let them know that you’re there and that a lot of other people are calling with the same feelings.”

“We hear from people who just don’t know who else to call.”

King Arthur baker specialist and customer support shift lead Amanda Schlarbaum recently spoke to a woman who broke down crying after asking a yeast-related question. Her parents lived far away and she didn’t know when she’d see them again. “She was like, ‘I can’t even believe I’m crying over bread.’ And I’m like, you know, that’s where we all are right now.” The caller ended up spending $55 to send her parents a homemade loaf.

In retrospect, the Baker’s Hotline was primed to be a source of comfort during quarantine. King Arthur has a reputation for its teaching culture; its resources are notably beginner-friendly and easygoing. “If you have a process you’ve successfully followed before, then hey, stick with it. Or try this one and compare. All good,” PJ Hamel writes in the company’s oft-recommended primer on sourdough starter. On King Arthur’s social media platforms, bakers have always felt comfortable posting panicked photos of explosively large doughs or asking extremely specific questions. And when bakers tag @kingarthurflour in photos of their finished products, the company responds like an enthusiastic friend. “What a lovely bundt, Marilyn!” reads a reply to one user’s tweeted creation. “Pairing ingredients and recipes is like putting two partners together for a dance. Will they fluidly tango? Your stunning Kaiser Rolls clearly answer that question!” the company replied on Facebook when a baker paired King Arthur’s bread flour with a Cook’s Illustrated recipe.

Hotline staffers are armed with all of King Arthur’s online resources and cookbooks, as well as fat binders of their own creation filled with handwritten notes on questions that have been asked before. And they’re game for questions that extend outside the baking realm. In late April, Schlarbaum picked up the phone to a stranger who wanted to know how much extra sauce she should make if she’d bought an extra pound of oxtail. “She was so nonchalant about it,” Schlarbaum says. As Easter in quarantine approached, Pochop received a few questions about ham and potatoes.

Even non-baking questions are usually culinary in nature, so if they can, the staffers try to answer them. After all, imagine you can’t leave your house, see your more cooking-inclined family, or even get through to most customer service lines — but there is one line that promises, seven days a week, to connect you with an actual human who will earnestly try to help you out, no matter how specific your problem. “On a daily basis we hear from people who just don’t know who else to call and they saw our number on the bag of flour that they have in their hand,” says Popchop.

As unprecedented as the volume of calls has been recently, the questions are the same as they’ve always been, just modified by the constraints of a global crisis. People still call about wedding cakes, but they’re making a miniature version because the couple is celebrating without family and friends. Schlarbaum called fellow hotline staffers to discuss a mascarpone filling for her own quarantine birthday cake. People are baking to relieve stress, just as they always have done, only now the stress and the baking have increased tenfold: “You’re looking for something that you can accomplish,” Perry says. “You’re looking for something that feels good and can take care of other people.”

People are maybe a little more emotional if their buttercream isn’t mixing properly, but Schlarbaum jumps into therapist mode, advising deep breaths and walking away for 15 minutes. “I tell them when I make buttercream, I’ve ruined it every single time.” Most calls end with a relieved baker and sometimes a few extra minutes of chatting, just because the caller doesn’t want to hang up yet.

“Right now, people are bored and anxieties are running high,” Schlarbaum says, “and I think people just need someone to be like, ‘No, no, the bread will be fine. Just let it rise another half an hour. It’ll be okay.’”

Erin Berger is a freelance writer and former culture editor at Outside magazine, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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During quarantine, the bakers who staff the hotline are providing baking — and emotional — support

“We hear from people who just don’t know who else to call.”

Erin Berger is a freelance writer and former culture editor at Outside magazine, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/30LRITh via Blogger https://ift.tt/3cYKRsk

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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jforjanice · 7 years

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Totoro Cake

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything but this is a good place to start again! It was my friend’s birthday recently and I’ve always wanted to try to create a fondant cake so I thought I’d give it a go! Both she and I love Totoro so it was an easy decision but a complicated cake when considering the logistics. After much (more like some...) research, I stumbled upon All About Ami’s post and her experience making a Totoro cake. I will attempt to take you guys through the process... and all the lessons we learned along the way. Here was my final product:

Note: Through watching many episodes of Cake Boss, Ace of Cakes and researching what I could online, we knew that we needed a dense cake (like pound cake) rather than an airy cake (like chiffon cake) so that it could support the weight of the design which would help prevent cracking.

Total Servings: Approximately 25-30 people (ish...)

Cake Time: 2 Hours (access to several ovens)

Assembly Time: 6 Hours

Total Time: 10 Hours (including 4 other people helping me, waiting for the cake to cool, and lots of struggles etc etc). Pre-making the cakes (on a different day or earlier that day) may be helpful so you don’t need to sit and wait so long for them to cool.

THINGS YOU’LL NEED:

(that you may/may not usually have in your home)

Buttermilk

Fondant (we purchased 10 lbs white and 1.5 lbs black at Michaels and used 4-5 lbs including our throwout fondant and extras. See the ‘Assembly’ portion to read about our struggles)

Shortening

Lemons

Lots of eggs

Gel food coloring

THE CAKE

We ended up using Once Upon a Cake’s lemon pound cake recipe with slight modifications. We made this recipe 3 times to make two 9″ round cakes and two 9″x13″ rectangular sheets.

Ingredients:

3 cups all purpose flour (leveled ish)

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt (do not add if you’re using salted butter...)

2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened

2 cups granulated sugar

A splash of vanilla (approximately 1 tsp)

3 large eggs

1 cup buttermilk

2 tablespoons grated lemon zest, packed (approximately 3 lemon’s worth of zest)

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (approximately 1 lemon’s worth of juice)

Instructions (Taken from Once Upon a Cake’s instructions and slightly modified. Also, look at their link for photos):

1. Preheat the oven to 325°F and set an oven rack in the middle position. For extra assurances, we lightly oil the pan (or non-stick cooking spray works too), dust with flour, then cut out a piece of parchment paper to line the bottom of the pan.

2. You will need 3 main mixing bowls (2 smaller bowls and one large mixing bowl or Kitchenaid bowl).

Bowl 1: add the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda and salt)

Bowl 2: add the ‘liquid’ ingredients (buttermilk, lemon zest, and lemon juice)

3. In the large mixing bowl, cream the softened butter using an electric mixer or a wooden spoon. After adding each ingredient, mix/cream well and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the sugar, then one egg at a time and vanilla.

4. With your mixer on low, start by adding 1/3 from bowl 1 and alternate adding 1/2 of bowl 2 until you end with adding the last 1/3 of bowl 1. Remember to scrape down the sides throughout. By the end, the batter will be fairly thick (similar to muffin batter consistency).

5. Scrape and level the batter into your pan(s).

Note: Try to push the edges of the cake onto the wall of the pan so there’s almost a divot in the batter (kind of looks like a shallow U). This is because cakes tend to rise in the middle and if the batter is able to cling onto the walls of the pan, theoretically, the cake would be less dome-y and more level once it’s done baking.

6. Place pans in the oven for about 1 hour. We rotated the pans in the middle for a bit more even baking but it really depends on your oven. To check if your cake is done, stick a toothpick or something similar in the middle and at different angles. If it is done, there should be no crumbs or batter that stick to the toothpick.

7. Let the cake stand and cool for about 10-20 minutes before removing the cake from the pan, let the cake rest and cool completely before moving onto the assembly portion.

THE ICING

After some googling of what type of icing would be best, we decided on Swiss Buttercream... though looking back, a regular buttercream would have been just as effective and less work... We used Gretchen’s Bakery’s recipe and added some lemon juice.

Ingredients:

180 g or 6 large Egg Whites

300 g or 1 1/2 c Granulated Sugar

240 g or 2 c Confectioners Sugar

170 g or 3/4 c Vegetable Shortening

454 g or 2 c Unsalted Butter

15 mL or 1 tbsp Vanilla Extract

2-3 tbsp lemon juice (or to taste)

Instructions (Copied from Gretchen’s Bakery)

Over a double boiler, in a large metal bowl whisk together the granulated sugar and the egg whites stirring constantly until the mixture reaches approximately 115 degrees F and the sugar grains have dissolved and are not longer gritty to the touch.

Pour this mixture into the metal bowl of the stand mixer with the WHISK attachment and whip on high speed until it is thick, glossy and white in color. The peaks should be as firm as firm can be.

In the meantime you can sift your confectioners sugar, and once you have achieved STIFF peaks meringue, add the confectioners sugar all at once with the mixer on very low speed to avoid having a snow shower of sugar all over your kitchen!

Once all of the sugar has been incorporated you can turn the mixer speed to med-high until it is all nicely mixed in.

Be sure your butter and shortening are at room temperature and they are the same consistency. Add it in about 2-3 additions, but FAST Additions.

Add vanilla extract

Switch to the paddle attachment and blend on low speed until smooth

Note: This recipe made about 6 cups of icing which was just enough (with about 1/2 cup extra). Make accordingly based on your cake filling needs and preferences!

ASSEMBLY

We used a variety of images as the model for the cake such as:

Once the cakes are cooled, level them off. Cut one of the rectangular sheets in half (below will be called half cake). Cut the other rectangular sheet at about 60/40 ratio (below will be called ‘60′ and ‘40′ cakes). You may also find that cutting off the corners of the new rectangle sized cakes may help too!

Note: We used a leveler that I got from IKEA a while back to help!

Making the Cake Base

1. We assembled the cakes largest to smallest. So, in the following order starting from the bottom: 2 round cakes, the ‘60′ cake, half cake, half cake, and lastly ‘40′ cake. Between each layer, add a thin layer of lemon swiss buttercream.

Note: We used my friend’s cake spinner thingy which definitely helped but it’s okay if you don’t have one either...

2. We then examined the stack of cakes and what seemed to look better and marked out the general locations for where the nose and arms etc. would be using toothpicks.

3. We then carved the arms and ‘built up the nose’ portion so that it was more rounded and pointed upwards a little bit (like a bear).

Note: doesn’t the cake look like it could be a seal or a dog or a penguin??

4. ‘Dirty coat’ the cake. Place a thin layer of buttercream all around the cake so that the crumbs don’t fall off (I think that’s why...). Refrigerate for 30-45 minutes.

5. Make a tail (about a tennis ball size) and the blue Totoro using the excess cake and repeat the process above.

Using the Fondant:

Here comes the fondant portion of the post....

I found these links the most helpful (to learn about fondant) and not helpful (because we weren’t making a simple shaped cake)...

http://www.gretchensbakery.com/covering-cakes-with-fondant/

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/videos/techniques/how-cover-cake-fondant-icing

As mentioned above, we bought 10 lbs of white vanilla (2 packs of white (5 lbs each) and the second pack of white was just for insurance because we had never done this before and weren’t sure how much we would need. We bought black fondant because black is always a hard colour to mix and we knew that Totoro would be grey... all the other colours could be derived from here using gel food colouring (it’s what I had... not sure if you can add regular food colouring or not...).

1. Knead fondant (like you would with dough) for 5-10 minutes or until softened (easily rollable). I would start by kneading about 2-3 lbs of white. Use icing sugar (aka confectioners sugar) to prevent sticking to your countertop and later on, to your rolling pin.

Note: If you live in a dry place like I do or just find that your fondant has dried out, use vegetable shortening to help revive your fondant. Knead in about 1 tsp at a time until you get the right consistency.

2. Take a generous cups worth of white and add green food colouring until desired for the ‘grass’. Roll this out to about 1/4″ thick and place it on your cake base. Trim around the base. SAVE excess green for later (wrap tightly in saran wrap-as airtight as possible!). Note: place a bit of water under the fondant to help it stick to the cake base (we used a Q-tip to make sure we didn’t put too much water for glue).

Note: I used 12″ cardboard cake circles from Michaels. I ‘glued’ two of them together so that they would support the cake better by covering them with tinfoil, cutting the edges into strips towards the middle (so they look like sun rays), folding the strips under and taping them onto the cardboard.

3. For Totoro, knead about 2 lbs of white and 1/5 to 1/4 of your black (approximately 1 cups worth or so... if it’s not enough, you can always knead more later on) .

4. Start mixing the grey by taking approximately 2 cups of white (feel free to eyeball these amounts!) and 1 tbsp of black. Add the black into the white by kneading them together. Add additional white or black until it is the grey that you want.

Note: It is best to add LESS black than you think you’ll need and then slowly incorporate it as needed... otherwise you’ll have a lot of fondant left over... like us... oops!

Note number 2: After some trial and error, below is the ‘technique’ that we used. Read: we tried it twice and had to ‘de-fondant’ the cake twice because he was too wrinkly... a thinner layer of fondant is better for a cake this size as the fondant is quite heavy and you will start to see cracks. Let me know if you have any better ideas/suggestions please!

5. Roll out your dough in an oval shape, until a generous 1/4″ thick. This portion will be for the head, arms and back of Totoro only (kind of like a cape). See image or confusing explanation below...

Lengthwise, it should be long enough to go from the base of the cake, over the arm, head, down the other arm, to the base of the other side.

Widthwise, it should be long enough to go from the base of the neck in the front, over the head, down the back to the base of the cake.

6. Place the oval on the head (in the middle lengthwise and off centred with the shorter side for the face (enough to go to the base of the neck)

7. Start by pressing down and smoothing the face FIRST, then the back of the head and the back of the body, slowly coming forwards towards the arms and front. Cut off excess fondant and in the tummy portion, trim the fondant into a circular shape. Cut out a circle of white fondant (underlayer) that will roughly fit into the tummy space. Refrigerate for 30-60 minutes for the buttercream to stay firm and the fondant to adhere well to the cake (this part is just what we did... not sure if it’s legit or not).

Note: this method worked for us because we knew the stomach would be covered by white anyway so it didn’t matter if there was extra wrinkles in that area... that being said... the less wrinkly, the better. Most of it was pretty smooth, but there were a few problem areas near the front neck area...like in the image below...though, most pictures don’t show these wrinkles (phew!)

8. Roll about 1/3 cups worth of white fondant into 1/4″ thick. Cut into a circle that will cover up the seams of the ‘underlayer tummy’. Stick onto the cake with water (just a little bit will do!).

9. Cover the tail with grey fondant.

9. At this point, we moved him to the cake base/grass.

10. It’s time to make his features! (We made some of these earlier when we were waiting...).

Grey: make ears and chest markings (we made 7 markings with 3 on top and 4 on the bottom).

Black: eyes, nose, claws (we forgot to make claws... oops!), and whiskers (we rolled fondant around a toothpick earlier and let it dry a bit).

Green: leaf on his head (we added more green food colouring to make the leaf more vibrant).

Other Features:

With inspiration from All About Ami and to help hide our boo-boos, we added some mushrooms, the white baby Totoro, and Susuwatari (soot sprites).

Note: we found random tools around the kitchen to help us make these... e.g. various sized straws, and thermometer case...

We glued the mushrooms and soot sprites on using glue and/or toothpicks.

And here is our final cake!

youtube

Happy Birthday MPo!

#lemonpoundcake #lemonswissbuttercream #totoro #fondant #stacked #totorocake

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