feh

[ritaxis]

I've been trying to apply Nicki's wisdom to the query letter, and it gets more and more like a synopsis. Fooey. I guess it'll have a bunch of synopsis in it.

Mostly though it's been a lost weekend so far. I've been eating too much and veging. But I read Spirits in the Wires by Charles de Lint and re-read Seven-Day Magic by Edward Eager.

I don't quite have a handle on Charles de Lint. He's got great ideas, and he appears to be intending to write down there where I like stories to be, but everything and everybody in his books are so precious. Nobody ever eats macaroni or chow mein -- everybody eats tomato-basil-feta salad. They drink chai and espresso. But all the time. Everybody has a cute name. Half the population of the town is a cute supernatural. I mean a cute supernatural. And everybody's either in their twenties or ancient beyond reckoning. And they're all artists and writers and musicians -- the most prosaic is a book editor for the newspaper. No, the most prosaic is a super hacker computer nerd at the newspaper. And he romanticizes street people. I think he's intending not to, but he does. I hope The Conduit doesn't seem like that. I mean, I have some of the same elements: supernatural character, a musician and an artist somewhere around the story, some chic food, homeless people. But well. I hope not precious.

What's a vegetable dish that people eat for Easter? My inlaws always do ham and stuff and I'm supposed to do vegetables and this year I'd like it to be something traditional.

Meanwhile, the nice fellow and Frank are marvelling at the milk I bought at Trader Joe's, which does not appear to have been homogenized.

And we didn't go to Point Reyes because of the rain, but now we're thinking to go to Death Valley right after I have a couple of teeth pulled next week so we can see the wildflowers.

Comments

trad vegitable dish

[crow-fjord.livejournal.com]

This is the one - green bean casserole.
Simple and really tasty.
The recipe is on the can of French's Onions (dry, french-fried) ask any supermarket clerk where it is and they'll know.)

Now here's the secret: everybody in my family and their friends makes this dish for every holiday feast, but only my Mom's comes out just right:
because except for her, they all messed with the recipe...
they substituted ingredients such as gourmet type cream of mushroom soup (stick to Campbell's) and soy juice (no no no!) - the results always come out splammy.

The ONLY substition, and this is very important, is DO use french cut green beans (frozen, fresh not recommended unless exactly like french cut green beans) aka string beans.
Whole green beens are too thick and don't absorb the mix. This is the one upgrade that Mom figured out.
Otherwise don't veer from the commercial sounding recipe and it will come out great.
Don't try to make this dish in the presence of new age food fetishists, they won't let you stick to the tried and true.

No additional spices, herbs, or altered amounts.
Double up in precise proportion if you're feeding 10 or more people.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The vegetables we always used to have for Easter when I was a kid were the very first new Pembrokeshire potatoes, tiny and sweet, washed, but with their skins on, boiled with mint just long enough to be cooked and served piping hot, and new green peas. We'd have them with roast lamb, and it would be the first lamb of the year, the spring lamb -- or maybe it was just that it had been Lent and we hadn't had much meat, but it always seemed glorious.

Then we'd have a simnel cake, which none of us liked, because it's all almondy and marzipanny, and one year my grandmother decided not to do that but to make a chocolate cake with chocolate eggs instead, and we were all really pleased and said we'd always do that in future, but by the next year she was dead.

My grandfather always got depressed on Good Friday, and it wasn't because of all those hours in church which would be enough to depress anyone, it was thinking about Jesus being dead. He'd stay depressed all through until the Easter service. One year my grandmother said to him, "Well really, Jack, you'd think you'd remember after all these years that he always rises again on Easter Sunday!"

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

That's the thing about Easter that makes it powerful. Or 2 things: the springing of new life, and the springing of life out of death. Oh, also, the pretty colored things.

Where I am, we don't have "dead of winter" -- we have "dead of summer," although it's completely mitigated by only being in the graslands: the forest is just quieter, and the farmlands of course are in high harvest mode. But we do have this sense of expectancy as the greeen gets taller and taller through the winter and first one thing blooms and then another and by the time we get to here, with the equinox, the world is all color, so we get to share in the excitement that people in places like yours get with the first crocuses or forsythias -- it's different, but it's there. And the light -- well, I guess I say it at every season, but the light is so profound.

I love the story about your gradfather and grandmother, it's gorgeous -- I think your father allowing himself all the way into the story every year is a very good thing (unless he was a crabby kind of depressed).

I think I will look for tiny potatoes and peas (we call them "English peas" around here, did you know that? To distinguish them from snap peas and snow peas and sugar peas and black-eyed peas, I guess). And other baby vegetables. I have the mint in my garden, but it likes to hunker down when it's wet and I suppose store up its energy for growing when it's bright and drier.

Thank you!

And Ken, thanks for the idea too.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

It does not seem to me that The Conduit is precious, nor that it romanticizes any of its subjects.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I hoped not.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I gave up on deLint after enjoying his first half dozen books or so--either preciousness wasn't in play at that point, or I didn't notice it, but he was making the magic too rational and hammering on moral points more than I wanted. It may come as a shock, but I'd already heard that child abuse is bad.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The thing is, I think that his intention is to make the morality stuff not a point to be hammered home but the guy wires that the story rises from.

I don't think it works out that way.

I also think he might be suffering from writing in Newford for too long: he needs a new city.