I made my first rolled cake this weekend - excitement!! A bourbon-banana cake with cream cheese/buttercream frosting. So much fun, and it actually came out looking like it was supposed to. I got the recipe from Deb Perelman's new Smitten Kitchen cookbook; she is my go-to recipe source, always so easy and tasty, and this did not disappoint. Best thing is the trick about not needing to separate the eggs, just beat the heck out of them for ten minutes. Worked like a champ, all soft and springy. The frosting also you beat for quite a while, so it too was much less rich than I expected. I wanted to do a bittersweet chocolate glaze but Mr Psmith is a banana purist and lodged a protest :)

Next time: chocolate with coffee filling. Because chocolate.

( Click for noms )

New Year's Day it was -15 here. Brrrrrr.

Just finished re-reading Bridget Jones Diary and had to laugh at this quote, which expresses my current feelings exactly:

"It seems wrong and unfair that Christmas, with its stressful and unmanageable financial and emotional challenges, should first be forced upon one wholly against one's will, then rudely snatched away just when one is starting to get into it. Was really beginning to enjoy the feeling that normal service was suspended and it was OK to lie in bed as long as you want, put anything you fancy into your mouth, and drink alcohol whenever it should chance to pass your way, even in the mornings. Now suddenly we are all supposed to snap into self-discipline like lean teenage greyhounds."

New Year's Eve we binge-watched Season 1 of Game of Thrones. Remarkably, it is just as good as everyone said it was. I live in hopes that Seasons 2 will see Sansa murder Joffrey (who is a Draco Malfoy clone; even his parents are strikingly similar to Lucius and Narcissa) and that Aria Stark continues to kick butt, but Tyrion's whore provided my favorite exchange of the series so far:

Tyrion: Where did you find one so pretty at this hour?
Bronn: I took her.
Tyrion: Took her? From whom?
Bronn: From, uh...Ser...what’s his name? I don’t know. Ginger cunt, three tents down.
Tyrion: And he didn’t have anything to say about it?
Bronn: He said something.

*chortle*

Which seems an oddly logical segue to the fact that I just finished reading Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House , because it's actually quite a lot like Game of Thrones only with more suits and fewer swords. Also less incest. Hm, not completely sure about that, actually. It has a cast of thousands, lots of backstabbing, and even a Wolff lol!!

sshg_giftfest has begun posting! And the opening double-header is awesome. Go ye and marvel :)

Also, here is a picture of a new trick our cat learned. Are we nervous? Um, yeah...

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snapecase is still open for signups! Go on, you know you want to :)




snapecase: Celebrating Severus Snape throughout his ages!

snapecase will be a thing again! This makes me so happy :)


snapecase: Celebrating Severus Snape throughout his ages!

Signups are still open for the sshg_giftfest!! And Rita Skeeter has lots to say about it in her Sunday Gossip Column today :)

I can't believe it's been six weeks since I posted anything, woah. And I was pretty spotty for a while before that. Real life has been keeping me pretty busy -- our local Ren Fest started which takes up most of our weekends, I've been deep into a re-read of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, we did a ten-day trip west to see family and take care of some business/financial stuff, there's been a bunch of aggravations at work, we've got family coming to visit, there have been some tough times for a close friend, and underneath it all is the constant barrage of nonsense coming from Washington, D.C. which I find more dispiriting every day.

Still, that is no excuse for not keeping up with friends, whether real or virtual. I hope some of you are still around lol!! As a kind of apology for being AWOL so long, I have some books to give away :)

These four I would love to get in the hands of a teacher or home-schooler. They're terrific activities for kids -- math, English, etc.

https://www.amazon.com/Workjobs-Activity-Centered-Learning-Early-Childhood/dp/0201043114
https://www.amazon.com/Workjobs-II-Number-Activities-Childhood/dp/0201043025
https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Their-Way-Activity-Centered-Childhood/dp/020186150X
https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-learning-centers-Discovery-children/dp/B0006W1KME

And then there are all of these:

The Hobbits: The Many Lives of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin
A Window Opens by Jennifer Egan
After Alice by Gregory Maguire
Ghosts, Demons and Dolls
The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror by Joyce Carol Oates
A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates
The Elementals by Michael McDowell
A Darker Place by Laurie R. King
The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart
Twenty-Five Years of American Short Fiction, Vol 19 No 63 Fall 2016 -- 8 short pieces by established authors (e.g. Joyce Carol Oates) as well as brand new ones, winnders of ASF's writing competition.

First come, first served. No need to pay postage; if you want to do anything in return, please donate to these folks or these folks or your local animal shelter.

Also of course if you get one and read it, come back and tell us what you thought :)

The French election has made me feel rather better about things. Toutes nos félicitations et tout mon amour, all of y'all :)

One of my goals this year was to get out of the usual menu items that we have in regular rotation and try some new things. The best so far have been sweet potato-green onion pancakes with eggs, ham and pepper jam and Smitten Kitchen's crispy broccoli with lemon and garlic. Tonight I thought I'd try roasting some carrots and parsnips tossed with olive oil, sea salt, fresh-ground pepper, and herbs. I was pretty sure I'd had parsnips at some point in my life, and how bad could a root vegetable be?

Nowhere did any of the recipes I consulted warn me that for the first ten minutes roasting parsnips smell like melting plastic. Ugh ugh ugh.

We soldiered on, however, and in the end they...weren't bad. They needed butter (which is unusual, in my experiene, for roasted veg; perhaps I went too light on the olive oil?) and more seasoning. I also grated a little manchego on top because cheese, you know? The first bite was meh but then they rather grew on me, though I admit that could have been the butter, salt and cheese.

So all I can say is that where parsnips are concerned, I remain uncommitted.

We went out for dinner with some friends last night (mmmm, seared ahi tuna...) and while yakking about this and that, B. pointed out something I'd never noticed before. Not one of the Disney princesses has a mother. She said that that's why, in the new live-action Beauty and the Beast with Emma Watson, they added a sort of "vision" of the past where Belle has a chance to see her mother and learn what happened to her.

Of course, given that the Disney princess stories generally draw on fairy tales, and girls don't often have mothers in the fairy tales either, perhaps it's not so weird. But even the non-fairy tale ones -- Ariel (The Little Mermaid), Pocahontas, Jasmine (Aladdin), Elsa and Anna (Frozen) -- don't have mothers.

The only two exceptions I could think of are Merida (the red-haired Irish girl who wins her own hand at the archery tournament) and Mulan (the Chinese girl who learns fighting from her father and goes off to war). So basically the only ones that have mothers are the ones who apparently don't need mothers because they're off doing "boy" things.

Isn't that weird?