I decided on Persimmon Pudding because it was a childhood favorite and the thing my mom always made for holidays. And because it is delicious. And because I have made it before (granted, with my mom's help and many years ago, but still! Sense memory, right?)
Note: You should use the big orange Hachiya variety persimmons, like what grows all over in southern California, extra-ripe & soft - if you must use Fuyu persimmons, you'll have to skin and blend first because they are not soft enough.
Here's the recipe:
1 1/2 c sifted flour
1/2 t salt
1 1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t cinnamon
1 c raisins
1/2 c chopped nuts
2 beaten eggs
1 1/2 c sugar
1 1/2 sieved persimmon pulp
1/4 c melted butter
3/4 cup milk
Mix dry ingredients in bowl. Mix eggs, sugar, persimmon & butter in a mixer. Add stuff in bowl & milk. Mix. Put in well greased mold. Set in a pan of water and bake at 325 for at least
HARD SAUCE = 4 Tbs soft butter, 1 c sifted powdered sugar, 1 egg yolk, dash salt, whip, add 1/4 c brandy, blend.
OK, sounds easy enough, right? Well, first of all it is a terrific mess and uses WAY more bowls and things than anything else EVER. Second, my mom told me "the recipe takes way longer than the recipe says". Sadly, she told me this after I was well into making it.
Anyway, I put it all together, I pop it in the oven, I leave the thing in for an hour and a half. I peek. Looks done. Put a toothpick in. Seems done. Take it out.
Flip it over onto a plate.
OY! NOT DONE! The bottom (now top) is in the shape of the pan, but still liquidy. It is like nothing I've ever seen before. So, I decide that it should go back in the oven. But how?
Our bundt pan is not simple, it is a Fleur-de-lis. I carefully position each pan spike over the appropriate cake spike.
I flip the cake back in. But oh no! My judgment was off by an eighth of an inch and now the whole thing is crooked and half of it looks collapesy! But no matter - we are the only ones who are going to eat it, right? I let the thing bake another half hour and wash all the dishes. (It is remarkably difficult to get persimmon pulp out of a sieve, btw.)
At this point the top of the thing is starting to look a little TOO brown. I decide it has had enough, so I take it out. I flip it over onto a plate. The bottom (now top) is STILL not done, and the top (now bottom) is burny. So I cut off the top and the bottom. The remaining chunks I put into a little silicone mini-loaf pan. I'll bake for a few minutes just before serving and top with the sauce.
This is what the dish is supposed to look like:
This is what mine looks like:
( Surprise! )
I prefer to think of it as "rustic" or "wabi-sabi" rather than looking like "a dog's dinner."
This year Scott and me hosted the family xmas at our new digs. This is the first time in my entire life it’s been held anywhere but at my parents’ place. Made me feel very grown up indeed.
Because of our recent Istanbul sojurn we went with a Turkish feast. Here’s me and Scott putting the finishing touches on the main course patates bastisi (potato casserole) and çingene pilavi (gypsy salad) and part of the mezze (first course) haveuç köftesi (carrot rolls with apricots and pine nuts):
And here’s the mezze spread on the table. The dishes are aci domates ezmesi (chilli tomato paste), yoghurt with garlic and lemon juice to go with the carrot rolls, kisir (bulgur patties) which you squeeze lemon on (see the wedge on everyone’s plate), humus (which my sister made), and muhammara (walnut and capsicum dip):
The meal was powered by garlic (it was in every single dish—even dessert! Just kidding! Or am I?) and our mighty mortar and pestle (two of them: one huge, one wee). All the recipes come from Classic Turkish Cookery by Ghillie Başan, which is dead good.
Hope you’re all eating and drinking as well as we are!
I am stealing time while the food cooks, before the relatives get here, swapping off between a new project and rewriting an old. Something that
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barbarienne said a few days ago sure resonated.I don't think what she says applies just to beginning writers, I think it applies to all of us. Or, maybe I should say, those of us with more drive than talent--like Yours T. It's really come home as I've been going over Exordium the first volume, Phoenix in Flight, and absolutely cringing at some of the craptastic prose that got by us. No, by me. Most of the worst of the writing is mine, not Dave Trowbridge's. Rewriting this thing has been both freeing and also intensely humiliating. I think I cut at least ten thousand words of solid sludge larding up sentences, without changing anything that actually had content. In fact, probably more like 20 k. I added a couple of short scenes to the beginning in an attempt to make it more accessible, but the whole is still shorter than the original length.
Anyway, learning never stops for some of us. It might take some time between awareness of a problem and figuring out how to deal with it, but never stops, never never never. (And each time I close that file, when I open Banner of the Damned I jet back looking for ways to tighten it up yet again.)
When I went to visit grad schools during my "senior" year of college, I had pretty much already made up my mind that I wanted to go to Princeton. But they didn't know that and what they also didn't know was that, in fact, I did not get accepted at any of the other grad schools that I had applied to. Yale was a no. Stanford was a waiting list. This made no sense of to me since at the time Princeton had the #1 German program in the country. But I didn't care.
I was so excited to visit the campus, meet some of the students, and most of all to meet the professors. One of them was a white-haired man, not much taller than I was, whose office was under the eaves of the top floor of the building. It was a cozy, quaint place and he spoke with a rather odd accent that I couldn't place, half Brooklyn, half British. He asked me about my interests. I told him I loved women writers and poetry and Goethe, which at the time was true. Then he asked me what interested me most about Princeton. I giggled.
Yes, I giggled.
I was nineteen at the time, and I giggled when I was nervous.
I don't remember if I tried to say anything else coherent. I only remember that he stopped asking me questions about my background and asked me instead how old I was. I told him the truth and he was surprised, to say the least. I said I thought that my age was one of the reasons that Princeton had accepted me. After all, I only had two years on my transcripts. Surely no one could have missed that.
He apparently had not been on the search committee and finally said something about perhaps if I stayed a few extra years I would get the maturity I needed. He said that I was very "cheerful." I went away wondering if they would take away my acceptance, but they didn't. It was many years before I stopped giggling in nervousness. Mostly, I tried to avoid interview situations like that.
- Mood:
laughing
*does weird rambo-like dance, falls over*
I am staving off the flu with a combo of vitamin-c and sheer cussedness.
That is all.
This goes out with love to some dear friends of mine. You know who you are.
There’s an xkcd cartoon so famous that many refer to it by its number, 386. It’s my favourite and one that is referred to frequently in the Larbfeld household.
“OMG!” I will yell, looking up from my computer.
“Is someone wrong on the internet?” Scott will say, making me feel a wee bit foolish, and deflating my outrage by at least 50%. Thank you, Randall Munroe.
Turns out that it’s not as famous as I thought it was. Recently I discovered that my sister, who makes a living in the visual effects industry, had never heard of it or xkcd. Now, there aren’t many geekier professions or industries than my sister’s. And yet she did not know xkcd. I did a wee survey. Many of my friends, who spend as much time online as I do, had never heard of it.
Which leads me to my point: Internet famous is not the same as world famous. The internet may be vast, but it still isn’t as vast as the real world. Much that feels big and important online, that the whole world is paying attention to is, in fact, unnoticed by anyone but you and your online friends and enemies.
When you are caught up in some drama or other that has broken out on a list (or loops as some people call them), newsgroup, twitter, comment thread it’s easy to forget that. Many of these conflagrations are about incredibly important matters like race, gender, inequality etc. etc. Some are not. But no matter how grave the matter, getting caught up in an online shitstorm, or worse, being at the centre of one, is hellish. It can eat days or weeks of your life, mess with your head, and get in the way of work.
It’s easy to lose your sense of proportion and forget that the vast majority of people have never heard of the storm that’s been encircling you. Not only do they not know about it, they’ve never heard of the site where it took place, or the game it was about, or the field it’s part of. You will have friends and colleagues in your field who have no idea it ever took place.
The interweebs are vast. That’s true. But they’re also tiny and fragmented.
When I was on tour, I met countless booksellers who had no idea there’d been any storm surrounding the cover of Liar. These were YA specialists who make a living buying and selling YA.
The vast majority of people who read YA do not know about the YA lit blog world. I did many school visits. Most of the students I talked to had no idea that some writers blog, let alone that there are active communities and blogs solely devoted to discussing YA. So they certainly weren’t reading any of those blogs. Some of the librarians and booksellers and teachers ditto.
When you’re caught up in an online conflagration is exactly the time to remember that it’s a speck of sand in the scale of things. Sure, it’s important to argue for what you believe is right and to do so for multiple audiences. But don’t do it at the expense of your work and your mental health. Don’t think that the survival of the universe depends on your doing so. Let yourself back away when you need to.
Because one of the wonderful things about the intermawebbys is that you can back away. You can turn it off. Something it’s a lot harder to do with conflict in the real world.1
Besides for many of us around the world it’s holiday time. Enjoy yourself out in the sunshine!2
This is me turning off the internets and starting the xmas cooking.
Hope you have a wonderful break from work. I know I will.
- To be clear, what happens online is real. But it’s a real that’s a lot easier to turn off than conflict at work or at home.
- Or out in the snow and cold and misery if you are unfortunate enough to live in the wrong hemisphere.
It will apparently be Christmas in two days, which reminds me of my fave Christmas movies. Here's my list from last year. This year, I would like to add another: Bed of Roses. You're probably like, Huh? I've never heard of that one. But it's really good. Plus, it has a mid-90s version of Christian Slater. The story is told over several seasons, but the Christmas scenes are for anyone who feels lonely around this time of year. Actually, it's a good movie about loneliness in general. Okay, now it sounds depressing, but I swear it's uplifting!
As a gift to myself, I finally purchased my first full-on winter coat ever. I've always just had these thinner coats and layered a lot, which never kept me warm despite my Warming Plan. I got tired of layering. And my friend had this amazing puffy coat that was the flat kind of puffy, all slim cut and not making her look like a giant marshmallow. I kept waiting for it to go on sale, but it never did. If there's anything I've learned about being frugal, it's that if you really want something, don't wait too long for it to go on sale because it will either sell out or they won't have the one you want by the time it does go on sale. So I snatched up the last one. It's a wonderful thing - I totally don't feel the cold wind! Even without a scarf, which is an unprecedented winter move for me. Yay for flat puffy coats!
Now I'm wondering about my gifts from people who aren't me. I wouldn't mind getting one of these Clue games:
I want to wish you a happy, healthy, and safe holiday season. Whether you're spending it with family, friends, or taking in some alone time, I hope you enjoy a peaceful celebration. Let's recharge and get ready for an exciting new decade!
We are hoping Santa puts some good cat toys in Fred and George's stockings, as they have both gained THREE POUNDS since their last check up. Ugh. Beasts. They don't seem to notice their rotundity, and think they should still be able to fit in their basket (clearly they are mistaken):
Oh Fred. If only you would be INTERESTED in cat toys. *sigh*
Hope you're all enjoying the holiday season!
Peace and love,
Jo
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Page Summary
- literaticat : The Persimmon Pudding Incident of '09 [+3]
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larbalestier : Sydney Christmas [+0] - sartorias : writing, rewriting, and writers [+21]
- editorialass : (no subject) [+0]
- metteharrison : most embarrassing part 2--#1 [+0]
- jenniferechols : I have finally broken down. [+0]
- literaticat : Ow owow ow ow. [+5]
- larbalestier : Wrongness on the Internet [+0]
- windowlight : holiday time [+3]
- jbknowles : Happy holidays! [+15]
