Success, sez I!

So I finished the lamb by searing it very briefly (45 seconds per side) in butter, just to give it a nice crust, and then made a super-quick pan sauce with the fond and the juices.

Results:

The beets are a little bit less soft than I like -- I think next time I will jack the heat up just a tad -- but are firm and juicy and perfectly infused with the brown sugar and balsamic vinegar. Delicious. I can't wait to try with the parsnips.

The lamb chops are perfectly done, evenly pink (I cooked them medium-rare, as that's my preference for red meat) from edge to edge without the band of gray meat around the outside that you tend to get when pan-cooking them. The chops are incredibly juicy, with good but not overpowering flavor from the rub. The meat is moist and almost silky; I've never had chops this tender before.

I'll have to do my next trial with the kind of food I'd usually poach -- chicken or fish, say -- but sous vide cooking for lamb chops is a noticeable improvement on my prior lamb chop cooking method. I bet it'd be great for steaks, too.

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...because I had no Internet on Friday.

( Linkspam includes: Twilight and the fanboys, plagues, heirloom vegetable seeds, Patrick Stewart on domestic violence, body image issues, rings of Earth, cats being cats, conlang resource, Star Wars, and muppets )

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So I decided to go with the beets with balsamic and brown sugar, and the lamb.

( Details of how I cooked it all )

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Tonight will be the first experiment with the sous vide supreme, so I thought I'd have a poll to help me decide what to try first.

Poll #1492032
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

which sous vide recipe?

(Whatever it is would probably be preceded by a light soup -- tomato, consomme or miso, depending on what the main dish is -- and served with rice, except for the eggs benedict or florentine which require no other starch.)

It was an excellent Thanksgiving. There was buttered bread and cheese and crackers and mushroom frittata and tomato soup and cranberry sorbet and pepper tuille and smoked turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and buttered asparagus and green bean casserole and cranberry chutney and cornbread dressing and grits and pumpkin and buttered carrots and bread and butter and two kinds of pie and caramel-nut twists with peppermint cream. And white wine and red wine and coffee and tisanes.

I'm, perhaps, a little tipsy and very relaxed.

I am thankful for many things. Indeed, my life is so embarrassingly good that I feel a little awkward about it, and resolve every year to give more to charity, because I'm not sure I deserve life to be as good to me as it is.

But it is, and I thank God or the gods or the powers that be that it is, and hope it will continue to be so, and hope that my unusual and undeserved good fortune will expand outward to the people I love, and the people I don't know.

Gods all bless, everyone, and have a happy and productive and positive 2010.

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Problem? Overcooked the chicken breast.

Solution?

BUTTER.

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Who on my flist goes to WisCon (and would be amenable to meeting me if they go this year)?

I've wanted to go for a few years, but since it's a well-established con, I'm afraid that without some people I know I can say hello to, I'll hide in my room the whole time. (I had no problem at Sirens, but then, Sirens was in its first year, and so the fear that I was interrupting established groups was much less.)

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Most of the new-to-me books I've read recently I've read either because I've read the author before and liked them, or because I've read good reviews, which means most of my book reviews are generally good.

Today, I discovered a whole slew of books available for the Kindle for free! So I had a cross-section of the kinds of books I like (mostly fantasy, SFF, and romance) sent to my Kindle.

(For those of you with either a Kindle or the Kindle iPhone or PC app, you can find the tag for Kindle freebies here. Be careful, though -- sometimes when a promotion is over, the price goes back to non-free, but the tag doesn't get removed right away.)

We'll see what this does to my recommended-to-not ratio. ;)

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(Yes, I'm going through these at a rapid pace. I've got a backlog to post.)

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

In Mary's village, all life is focused on two things: preserving a vestige of humanity within the fence, and keeping the Unconsecrated -- the vicious, shambling dead -- out. To that end, life is extremely restricted, and each villager knows his or her role well, and follows the instruction of the religious Sisters who rule the village.

Mary, though, dreams of something else -- something beyond the village. So she chafes at the restricted possibilities for her life, dreams of the ocean... and is fascinated when someone arrives from outside the village.

This book had a lot of promise, which is, I think, why the flaws made me pull my hair out. I could see how great the book could be, and so I winced all the more when parts of it fell flat. It really was a page-turning read, with a lot of intriguing ideas, and so the holes in it frustrated me.

First, the good things: the book was written beautifully. Ryan has a lush, lilting voice, and that meshes well with the wild dangers outside the fence and with Mary's dreamy, searching-for-the-horizon personality. It read so easily and so enjoyably that, even with its faults, I'd be happy to read the next book.

I also liked some of the things that were done with the worldbuilding. It was enjoyable to read a zombie book that was so quiet and personal, and one that was set so long after the unspecified disaster that caused the zombies to appear. (I think it's actually several generations after.) I liked the details of how the villagers worked to slowly increase their protected village, and I was intrigued by the Sisters and by the stranger who arrived at the village. The book definitely kept the pages turning.

The biggest problem was the characters, which is a big problem for me because characters are the number one most important thing in a book for me -- and a big problem because this is a very character-centric book. Mary (the first-person narrator and definitely the main character) was well-characterized enough, but not terribly unique: she was a young woman who felt stifled by the options available at the village and who wanted to see the world. Not bad, and a character motivation that I, in general, like and am sympathetic to, but a fairly recognizable type. That would have been okay if the other characters had been more fully-rounded, but they weren't. The book focused on a core of, let's see, seven characters (eight if you count the dog), and unfortunately each one of them is defined only by their relationship to Mary. One is Mary's best friend and envies her; two are boys who are varying degrees of in love with her; one is her brother, who resents her; one is her brother's wife and has really no traits at all besides being her brother's wife; and one is a kid. The only desires and motivations they express are either a) related to Mary, or b) "not getting eaten by zombies." I really wanted one of them to have a goal or a desire or a response to something or anything that didn't have anything to do with immediate short-term survival or Mary.

The second big problem is that the book gets me intrigued by a lot of mysteries and secrets and then... never really explains them, or explains them in ways that don't make much sense. But I can't get specific about that without spoiling, so, cut for discussion and some flailing.

( Spoilers venture beyond the fence )

Despite all my flailing, I'll still be reading the sequel, partly in hopes that some of the unexplained things will finally be explained, and that Mary will get a bigger goal. I'd still recommend this, especially if you like zombie stories and/or smooth, pretty prose, but it's not as highly recommended as some of the other things I've recced.

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In the seven kingdoms of Graceling, some children develop eyes of two different colors—and those children will grow up to have extraordinary talents. Some are unparalleled cooks, some are inhumanly skilled acrobats, some can do complicated math in their heads, instantly. These people, called Gracelings, are given to the service of their country's royal family, where they use their skills to the benefit of the king.

Katsa has one blue eye and one green eye, and her Grace is killing. She is the weapon of her uncle, King Randa—and she hates it: hates being a killer, hates that he uses her to hurt and scare his people, hates that everyone looks at her with fear. So she decides, secretly, to use her power to help people instead of hurt them, which in turn embroils her in her country's politics.

My favorite thing about this book was Katsa: she is incredibly competent at some things (one of those being 'hurting and killing people,' to her dismay), but she's also incredibly not-competent at some other things, like understanding people and getting along with them. She's sharp and prickly, expects people to be afraid of her (and to some extent is afraid of them, not that they'll hurt her physically but that they'll act in ways she doesn't understand and can't control), tends towards isolation, and is kinder than she can give herself credit for. She's a good person, but not a particularly friendly one, and I liked that. I also liked that, while she has plenty of flaws and places where she's not the best ever, she gets to be super skilled at what she is super skilled at without being taken down a notch. (It also helps that, although she's supremely skilled, the challenges that the plot throws at her are appropriate for her skills. She still can't breeze through them.) And she gets more and more agency through the book, including through her romance subplot, which I liked.

I also liked her love interest, but I'll have to talk more about that behind the spoiler wall.

The Graces were a very interesting thing, too—similar to many other takes on 'magical powers granted at birth,' but with a few interesting twists. For one thing, just because you're Graced with something doesn't mean you like it. Someone Graced with cooking might very well hate cooking, just as Katsa, Graced with killing, isn't herself a sociopathic murderer. For another thing, the plot really does face the bad side of having some people born with incredible powers; when someone monstrous winds up with a strong Grace, the results are horrifying. (This is also something I liked in How To Ditch Your Fairy, which I'll write about later.) It was a nice change from books in which mages clearly could take over the world, but for some reason just... don't.

The book was not without flaws. While the prose style was very clean and readable, it fell flat in places, and sometimes seemed unpolished. (I am pleased to say that Fire is better in this regard; I think Cashore is learning as she goes, which makes sense for a first and second book.) The worldbuilding also felt generic medievalesque (heck, the countries are named Wester, Estill, Nander, Sunder, and Middluns, if that gives you an idea), with the exception of the Graces. Actually, one country -- Lienid -- gets more detail than the others, and I liked it better but I'm afraid the more detail there threw the flatter worldbuilding in the rest of the world into sharper relief. I think I am getting pickier about generic medievaloid—I don't mind medieval, as long as it has some actual flavor, rather than just horses-and-castles-okay-we're-done. But the flaws were minor enough that they didn't take away from what I loved, which was the characters.

This is a book that I think really merits from being unspoiled, so unless you've already read it or you're pretty sure you won't read the book, I'd avoid reading on.

( Spoilers have one blue eye and one green eye )

Recommended, especially if you like light-ish YA fantasy. This is one of the books that I read in one evening, and I grabbed the next book (which is actually a prequel) as soon as it came out.

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This was a good book, and I think I would have liked it better if I hadn't loved The Hunger Games so much.

It's also basically impossible to talk about this without spoiling The Hunger Games to some degree, so if you're really strictly spoiler-phobic, you should probably scroll on by. I don't think any of the spoilers outside the cut are book-killers, though; all the major spoilers for either book will be behind the cut. Anyway, past this paragraph there are spoilers -- mild ones, but still spoilers -- for the end of The Hunger Games, but all serious spoilers for either book are behind the cut.

Catching Fire picks up where The Hunger Games left off, and Katniss is in an awkward situation. Because of the way she survived the Hunger Games, the oppressive, totalitarian government of Panem and the Capitol have it in for her. In order to prove that she was not a deliberate revolutionary -- and, therefore, save not only her life but the lives of her whole extended family -- she has to convince them that she was young, foolish, and desperately in love, rather than sharp-minded, clever, and a little bit ruthless, as she actually was.

To make matters worse, the other Districts -- inspired, largely, by her -- are fomenting rebellions, and the Capitol is, shall we say, not happy.

I really liked the beginning of this, and I liked elements of the whole thing. The writing and characterization remain strong, as in the first book. We got to see things that were only hinted at in the first book: the other Districts, more of Capitol politics, the growing unrest. And I liked watching Katniss deal with the aftermath of the Games while putting on a happy face for the benefit of the Capitol's propaganda machine. (She has to, on pain of her family's lives.) I liked seeing more of Gale. I liked the exploration of Katniss's romantic dilemmas. I also liked that we got to see one of Katniss's weak spots: she was extremely competent at keeping herself alive in the first book, but she's naive about politics, because she has grown up with no political voice whatsoever (even in terms of the smaller politics of her own hometown), and so there are moments where she was in over her head. I liked that: having established her as thoroughly competent, we can now see some of the places where she's not as competent, which makes her more well-rounded.

Indeed, I think my biggest problem with the book was that it felt like Collins wasn't confident enough with exploring new territory. We got tantalizing tastes of it... and then ducked back into a very similar plot as the first book. But I'll talk more about that behind the cut.

( Spoilers for both books )

But I still really enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to anyone who liked The Hunger Games -- and I'll be waiting impatiently for the third book.

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Three culinary lessons of the day:

* You can make good pesto out of practically any combination of nuts, greenery and cheese, plus olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic. (Okay, I probably wouldn't recommend, e.g., pistachios, beet greens and chipotle cheddar, but nevertheless.) This one? Pecans, parsley, soft cheese from the farmer's market. Mmm. (It's going over pre-prepared butternut squash ravioli.)

* Golden beets are a godsend. They may not have quite as assertively beet-y a taste as regular red beets, but they also don't make me look like I just survived a knife fight.

* Beets and apples roasting in the oven smell awesome.

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...This is an experiment! But I keep seeing links I'd like to share, and then I don't do it, because I can't write a whole post around them. So instead, linkspam, with comments.

( Linkspam includes: medieval marginalia, publishers behaving badly, race at the movies, Choose Your Own Adventure books, a requiem for the history channel, feminism and the late show industry, sexual assault prevention, adults and children, three Liquid Story Binder tutorials, and recipes )

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Yet another just for my own curiosity poll! This one is about book reading.

(I realize that 'at one time' is ambiguous, and someone is going to make a smart remark about the number of hands and eyeballs they have. What I mean is: how may books can you comfortably have currently in progress -- can you read two chapters of one, and then the next day two chapters of another, or do you need to read sequentially?)

Poll #1487732 book stuff
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 48

When reading a series where the internal chronology differs from the publication order (for instance, the Vorkosigan books), what do you usually do? (Assume for the purposes of this quiz that you have access to all the books, so it isn't dependent on 'what the library has' or similar.)

How many books can you comfortably read at one time?

Dear iTunes,

You have insisted that you need to update my library, a process which, apparently, takes a while, during which I can't listen to music or do anything else in iTunes. Okay, fine. Applications require updates like that from time to time. I understand.

However!

Stealing focus from my other applications every thirty seconds (yes, I timed it) while you do this IS NOT ENDEARING. Especially when you aren't stealing focus to prompt me to do something, you're just randomly stealing focus to make me look at the progress bar crawl along a little farther. It means that not only can I not use you to listen to music, I can't do anything else while I wait to listen to music! Even typing this post is annoying, because every sentence or two iTunes opens itself over the posting window and then helpfully goes 'ding' because I'm suddenly trying to type onto the progress bar.

In conclusion: KNOCK IT OFF.

No love,

Cora
who's trying to listen to music and write, and right now, inexplicably, can't do either

People who get all smug in the comments about how this wouldn't happen if I used [insert favorite other music program here]? NOT HELPING EITHER.

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I just had a lovely (and small, which was also lovely) birthday party, at which I served naan and cheese and hummus, and then, later, soup two ways: one chicken matzo ball soup, and one vegetable barley soup. Then, after: tea, mulled wine, and hot chocolate.

I also pressed books on people, which is one of my favorite things to do. (What can I say? I'm a pusher.)

And I got homemade chocolates (NOM) and Mouse Guard and the Mouse Guard RPG (which are like Redwall -- medieval mouse people -- only a bit more hardcore), which is awesome. I am hoping for bellwether to run a Call of Cat-thulu session for me, and then I'll run a session based on the politics of Charlemagne.

Yay!

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Dear world,

Medieval cooks didn't use spices because they were covering up the taste of rancid or rotten meat. There is a very simple reason for this: eating bad meat will make you very very sick, and quite possibly kill you (especially if you live in a time when you can't get electrolyte drinks or IV fluid replacement). Covering it up with cinnamon and pepper will not fix that. Medieval people did not eat rotten meat, because, while they didn't have our modern germ theory, they were capable of noticing that people who ate meat that smelled bad got very sick and often died.

It is true that a lot of meat in the middle ages was not eaten right away, but then, a lot of modern meat is not eaten right away -- what do you think aged steak is? And yes, accordingly, some of the meat eaten at the time probably had a somewhat different taste and texture than our refrigerated meats. (Also, not surprisingly, they very often dealt with the no-refrigeration problem by preserving meats, by salting or drying or sugaring or pickling or submerging in fat. But they preserved them before they went bad, because that's the point of preserving.) And yes, absolutely, people in the middle ages liked their food heavily spiced, and also sweeter than most modern people do. But they liked it that way because that was what they liked; it was a luxury, and also just a preference. I like the way pickles taste, but that doesn't mean I eat them because I had to do something with a bagful of rotten cucumbers.

But they didn't eat rotten meat, because eating rotten meat isn't something people do -- our digestive tracks can't handle it. It's almost impossible to hide the smell or taste of rotten meat (being as it's one of the things our bodies are designed to teach us not to eat), and even if you could, you'd get out of that habit pretty quickly after the first round of people got sick and died.

(Also, since spices were extraordinarily expensive, and therefore province of the wealthy, it just doesn't make sense. You save nothing by refusing to throw out a piece of meat and instead putting on spices that cost many times the cost of the meat; it would be financially wiser to just throw out the meat and slaughter another animal.)

Medieval people didn't think like modern people, but they weren't stupid. They just liked spiced food, when they could afford it.

Yours in the puncturing of historical just-so-stories,

Cora

the irritated history geek who just watched Top Chef

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I have two medium-sized zucchini (ie, big enough to stuff, not so big they're unpleasantly woody to eat) in the fridge that need eating. I need something to feed the book group people tonight. The boy doesn't care for zucchini. Therefore, obvious answer: feed zucchini to book group. Simple!

The question is: how?

Poll time!

Poll #1484528 oh the wonders of zucchini
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 20

how to serve?

what else?

(Since it's potluck, none of the options have to be the main course; hence, the variety from main-course-like to warm-salad-y. You will note that all the options are vegetarian, as food for book group is always vegetarian. You will also notice some ingredients turning up over and over. This is because I'm not going shopping for this, and those are what I have on hand. But if you have any suggestions, you can suggest them, especially if they are permutations of above and/or use fairly basic pantry staples.)

Happy birthday to me! I'm now twenty-seven. (Actually, I had somehow managed to convince myself that I was twenty-seven about halfway through the year, so I feel like I'm still twenty-seven. I seem to be starting to lose track.)

I've always liked my birthday-date, 11/11, Veteran's Day or Armistice Day or however you want to call it. (When my father was in the army and I went to DoD schools, I always had the day off.) I was born at 10:04 am in Augsburg Germany, after twenty-some hours of labor, and my very history-minded mother always said wryly, "You waited that long, I thought perhaps you were holding out for 11am as well."

Thank you to everyone who has sent me birthday wishes. I appreciate them all. :)

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My post yesterday was just my own small, six-year-old view of the Berlin Wall. Today I link you to The Big Picture's photograph retrospective.

The most impressive pictures, to me, are the set that you click on for a comparison -- the same shot, 1989 and 1999.

But many of the shots are lovely for their own sake, even if you aren't as taken with the history as I am.

EDIT: Original link didn't work; has now been fixed.

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