baking > jobhunting

so coping with new medications, doctor's visits, and miscellaneous other issues has eaten my time this week -- before i've even had it which seems unfair -- so therefore all i have for you on this lovely wednesday are links to three cooking blogs.

lately, i've been baking on the weekends as a de-stressor from work and job-searching and all that kind of fun stuff. yeast bread doesn't ask you to fill out resume forms when you've already uploaded your resume to the job sites. chocolate cookies are not known for being critical of your professional development experience. and i have never yet found a quick bread which requires a cover letter.

joy the baker is the newest, courtesy of my friend diana, and i want to make pretty much everything on this site. the photography is appetite-inducingly good, too, which doesn't hurt at all.

sprinkle bakes has equally great photography and some nice recipes -- more useful, i find, for ideas for what to do with recipes i already have or decoration ideas or the like.

the british larder sounds like it should be one long list of recipes for fish 'n chips or fry-ups but it isn't. there is my current favorite recipe -- hot cross buns with golden sultanas and cardamom -- on here and i can vouch for the fact that not only does the recipe produce awesome hot cross buns, but the dough is perfectly amenable to being turned into loaf form and makes the most wonderful, tender, toast-worthy spice raisin bread.

"...better than chocolate..."

i remember reading an essay by patrick mcmanus once in one of his earlier collections -- they shoot canoes, don't they? or maybe the grasshopper trap? -- about reading habits, winter vs. summer. when winter came around again, you would be back reading the heavy thinkers: "jacqueline susann, erma bombeck..." and so forth. likewise, terry pratchett in the last continent, mentions that there is a rule that any book taken onto a beach for long enough and brought into contact with enough suntan lotion and coconut oil will inevitably morph into a tome with a title like the omega precedent or the alpha adventure and be almost entirely filled with weapons specifications.

i can't say that this has happened to my reading list of late, but i did find it was a little tough lugging around marianne elliot's latest tome on the history of catholics in ulster -- it weighs as much as my water bottle! -- and so, based largely on a recommendation from jo walton on tor.com, i went and found patricia wrede and caroline stevermer's epistolary historical fantasy, sorcery & cecelia at the brookline public library.

spoiler warning: none, really. it's too cute to spoiler for you and really too much fun to tear apart.


sorcery is a sweet, charming, fast read -- you could get through it easily in an afternoon. the only real issue i had with it was the similarity of some of the names -- the men all seemed to have the same number of syllables in their names and, until about half-way through the book, i didn't feel their characters were distinct enough for me to keep them apart based on name alone. i solved this by memorizing which man was where -- london or essex -- and going by that!

the story is straightforward: the two narrator characters, both young women, are swapping letters from london and essex, describing the progress of one's london season and the other's adventures in the countryside. in this universe, magic is a real and socially acceptable phenomenon; one of the girls comments early on in the story about an academic and magically minded neighbor going up to london to be inducted into the royal college of wizards. (one is reminded, somehow, of the reclusive mr. norrell in jonathan strange & mr. norrell.) there are complications with attractive and surly young men, repressive aunts, difficult cousins, and the impossibility of persuading one's relatives to shell out for the right kind of dresses. it's sort of like jane austen with spellbooks. (definitely minus zombies, though.)

quite a lot of this book is like susannah clarke's later fantasy -- the time period (napeolonic wars); story elements (the wizardly neighbor who loves his books); the involvement with political affairs (magicians campaigning with wellington). but the similiarity doesn't make this book boring and doesn't make it seem as though clarke ripped her idea from wrede and stevermer.

it isn't all light fluff and chat about dresses, although there is quite a bit of that. there's a real sense of darkness and danger here; the consequences for messing about with little-understood magic or irritating a higher-level magician are made to feel quite real. i'd say the freakiness really gets going on page 21 when kate, in london, writes to her cousin of a woman she has stumbled upon:

Her skin was smooth and carefully painted, her eyes were dark and very hard. She smiled kindly at me and asked if I would take chocolate with her.

You and I often played at dolls' tea party together, Cecy. I will never again remember such games with pleasure.

anyone who has read neil gaiman's short story "don't ask jack" should be totally aware that children's toys are not great in pretty much any way, shape, or form -- particularly when they show up in genre fiction like this!

there are two more books in the series -- really! there are! i checked and doublechecked and they're both published and available! -- and i'm planning to track them down via library as soon as i can.

friday fun times

because this week has been something like youtube/video overload, i decided to go with something not a video for friday.

so, instead, i suggest you visit the photographic dictionary. i think the project is more or less entirely self-explanatory from the url, but in case you need convincing for the clickthrough....

"injury," jimi franklin

...and...

"zazen," nicholas gottlund

probably more well-balanced than the master. maybe.

and since john simm did, to my mind, such a fantastic job as the master -- particularly in end of time -- and more than made good any doubts i had about his ability to walk in the footsteps of roger delgado and anthony ainley, anna and i decided to check out the other series we knew him to have been in, a time-travelling police procedural called life on mars.

i know there's a u.s. remake of this starring, i think, harvey keitel. which only goes to show that american networks will rip anything and convert it to a u.s. cast to try and make ratings. which is sad, really, when you think about it, because then a lot of people miss the really good original versions of shows like cracker. (really. if you've only seen the u.s. remake -- just -- forgive yourself and then go watch the robbie coltrane original.)

so, yes, anyway, john simm, life on mars:

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the lazy blogger's friend

short posts this week, guys -- no time or, really, energy to write this weekend when it was solidly 70 and sunny out. after a winter of cold, rain, wind and assorted other fun wintry weather, who really wants to sit at a computer when there are other options which involved iced coffee, walking by the river, and used bookstores?

right, i didn't think so.

anyway, a week that makes you glad youtube exists:

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i shrank the width a bit on this video to make it look more proportional to everything else going on and, if you're a die-hard resident evil fan and haven't got this memorized yet, you probably want to click through to youtube and watch the regular size version.

i have to say, i wish it wasn't going to be in 3d because i wear glasses and propping those stupid little 3d glasses over my regular ones invariably gives me a headache and a faint sense of loss of balance, but i'll risk it for this.

friday fun times

and some sweetness and light after all that panning i had to do this week.

okay, not exactly sweetness and light -- but clever catness, how's that?

starting with my personal favorite, "cat man do":

and "let me in":

and, last but not least, "snow business":