cookbook_challenge | Member Posts

My sister spent ninety minutes on the phone with me, helping me rewrite the pollinator garden plan for the THIRD TIME, and she is truly the best and what the fuck is wrong with the Parks Department? Not everyone has a sister who is a literal professional expert on pollinator garden design!!!

celli helped with an Excel thing last week and my friend C. loaned me a cart so I could lug the giant bag of garden dirt up to the community garden, and I am so lucky in my friends.

I wrote the Tatler Fairyland story in slow agonizing 100-words chunks and I hate it, the voice isn't quite right, but it is 1600 words long and I do think the premise is fundamentally sound. I'm going to sleep on it and do a last read-through in the morning before I send it to crit group, at the literal last possible second. (How the fuck do I turn this deadline-driven writing practice into something that can produce a novel, I ask. How.)

Once I send the story to crit group, I will reward myself with ice cream and a meeting with someone from the group building a pollinator garden nearby and then I will send the pollinator garden plan off and call it done for now.

One of my favorite skirts has been mended and it was not even that hard. It's not a perfect fix but it is better than it was! I need to sit down and catalog my sewing stash so I know what mending I have and then I can prioritize. I impulse-bought a couple of patterns from Tammy Handmade and that also needs to be done. The makerspace will be great during the summer: air-conditioning!

This is the weirdest spring ever — a forty-degree (F) swing overnight? Impossible to deal with.

musesfool

Frequently when we reschedule something because of a bad weather forecast, the weather turns out to not be that bad after all, but this weekend, it was the smart move. It seems to have finally stopped raining for bit after it rained heavily for most of yesterday and all of today. It's been a real chilly and kind of gray spring, tbh, those few days of high 80s/low 90s notwithstanding.

Anyway, I've taken the chance to try out some recipes - yesterday, I made chicken meatballs with garlic butter orzo, which is good and I have some leftover, but I would say that the meatballs are sort of unnecessary? And the garlic butter needs a little more seasoning imo - some rosemary and oregano and basil would not go amiss - but the orzo in garlic butter is good stuff.

I also made Ina Garten's shortbread, though I kept the teaspoon of almond extract from the pecan shortbread and covered them with chocolate sprinkles - I made the dough yesterday and then baked them off this morning. 20 minutes was probably a minute or 2 too long in the oven, but they still taste good.

I also baked a loaf of bread, on which I might make French bread pizza tomorrow. We'll see. I might also bake some kind of lemon cake, since I have a bunch of lemons, but maybe not. Again, I'll see how I feel. But for dinner tonight, I made these ricotta and breadcrumb balls. Which again, I seasoned to my own taste rather than following the instructions. They're pretty good if you like ricotta.

I think that's one of the most important things you can do when you learn to cook - learn to make things taste the way you like them. I save a ton of recipes and have a bunch of cookbooks, but mainly I need them for measurements and techniques, not flavorings. I mean, don't get me wrong, sometimes they will come up with a combination that would never have occurred to me which is delicious! But a lot of the time, I'm going, I'll swap in X for Y and I will like it better. If there are too many of these in one recipe, then it's not really that recipe (not that I would comment to say so!), but the technique might be useful just the same.

*

Current Mood: full
Current Music: who's gonna ride your wild horses? - u2

conuly

Sometimes when people are talking in real life, or you can see this on TV shows and in movies, they do a very quick knee bend. Why do we do this? Sufficient googling answered the question of "Why do we click our tongues" (it's a discourse marker, thanks) but I haven't narrowed this one down yet and I can't figure it out by reasoning and observation of my own and others' behavior.

*****************************

( Read more... )

spiralicious

Tea Month 2026: Tea 14

Tea Review
Name: Tung Ting Oolong Tea
Brand: unsure, vendor: Boulder Tea Co.
Type: oolong
Loose tea

Notes:
This was one of my two favorite teas from the tea tasting in March. It's from Taiwan. We tried six infusions of this tea. It is at the least roasted end of the scale. The color stayed pretty consistent across the infusions, a lighter black tea color. The first two infusions had a very grassy/leafy scent and taste. It became more floral tasting over the next infusions until the 6th one, where it had a slightly smokey aftertaste.

Rate
Appearance: 8
Aroma: 8
Flavor: 8

Overall Rating: 4 stars

Current Mood: rushed
Current Location: from francis with love

umadoshi

Reading: I am still slowly working through Braiding Sweetgrass, which is well suited to a gradual reading of one chapter at a time. I've also started in on The Vegetable Gardener's Container Bible. And I started reading Diary of a Keen Gardener (Mary Keen), but I think I'm bouncing off it after a chapter; no slight to the book itself, but so far I don't think it's my thing.

I finished reading To Ride a Rising Storm and now have to wait for however long for the next book. (Ah, for that window of childhood when I was quite young and ransacking the adult SFF section of the library and thus completed series were in epic supply. OTOH, it was all by definition books from the '80s or earlier, so.) I'm currently reading Eden Robins' Remember You Will Die, which is really neat so far.

And my copy of the new Yotsuba&! (vol. 16) arrived and I devoured it almost immediately. It remains the one manga series that gets read AT ONCE whenever there's a new release. It remains impossibly charming. It's also not a series I would ever have imagined making me rear back in surprise--the scope of the story is incredibly small! It's a slice-of-life about a five-year-old!--but this volume did that. Amazing.

Watching: A bit more Justice in the Dark (we're now one episode shy of halfway through) and a bit more Witch Hat Atelier. (I have now confirmed via Goodreads that I only ever read vol. 1 of the Witch Hat Atelier manga, back in 2020. The timing may explain why I remembered essentially nothing about it.)

kat_lair

***

Kat Reads Books

Jakob by Satu Rämö - Third in the Hildur series. A mysterious series of assaults and murders themed around an Icelandic Yule poem, all tied to illegal trade in horse blood, are occupying Hildur and Jakob's time. Jakob's custody hearing in Finland gets an unexpected end and Hildur has to travel to help him, all the while back in Iceland the solution to case starts to hit closer to home than anticipated. I continue to be impressed with how the different plot points are intertwined, both within a book and between them. There really is a strong sense that the author has an arching storyline in mind that she's revealing bit by bit.

Rakel by Satu Rämö - Fourth in the Hildur series. A young man with knife wounds stumbles out of a luxury cruise ship, a baffling series of burglaries, discovery of old skeletons and a suspicious death of Hildur's old friend all turn out to be connected in one way or another... Add in family worries for both Hildur and Jakob, and you get another intricately woven story that picks up and adds to the threads started in previous books. Book also teaches you about tourism and fishing industry in Iceland without once sounding like a textbook. The characters are all very real, as are their relationships.

Tinna by Satu Rämö - Fifth book in the series and the last one so far published. This one focuses on a murder of a young woman, and the link it has to Hildur's first case. Throw in Hildur's aunt's (the titular Tinna) quest to find out why her oldest sister left and never came back, the dark legacy of a nearby children's home, and surprise return of Hildur's first love and (separately) a character we got to know in one of the earlier books and you get a by now delightful mix of history, mythology, social commentary and interesting characters that have realistic relationships. I continue to be impressed with how the different threads are weaved together.

Curious Wine by Katherine V. Forrest - Lauded as a classic of its genre, this romance 'written for lesbians by a lesbian' was an interesting read, and actually provided a nicely blurred view of sexuality illustrating neatly how 'lesbian' was an inclusive label for female to female attraction that encompassed people we'd now label bi or pan for example. Anyway, the story focuses on two women who discover an unexpected connection, emotional and physical alike, with each other during a skiing holiday. There are some sharp and humourous but ultimately empathetic observations about women and women's friendships with the larger group of the holiday makers, but the main story is very much Diane and Lane falling passionately in love, making passionate love, and then a little bit about the practical implications of deciding to transition from an affair to a relationship in the context of 1980s US. I liked the book, though the writing style didn't always work for me (a bit jumpy at times) and I was entertained by the sex scenes that weren't purple prose as such but were definitely euphemistic enough at times I couldn't quite tell what exactly, in physical terms, was happening. The word orgasm was used several times but no sexual organs below waist were actually named. Anyway, it was a sweet story and I did finish it with rooting for the couple to make it and have their happy ever after.

Kat Watches Things

Naruto season 1 - LISTEN. I KNOW. But Anime was not a thing that a kid in 80s in Finland could feasibly grow up with. But apparently BBC iPlayer currently has all of this (and also all of One Piece...), so this is now my current watch project. I'm actually not fully through with even the season 1 but turns out I have a Surprising Amount Of Opinions, so like, uh... A separate post will turn up at some point, maybe that will be amusing to some of you?

Project Hail Mary - Sun and all the other stars are dimming. A disgraced academic now a mid school teacher Ryland Grace gets involved in an international effort to find a solution. How that ends with him waking up in a spacecraft full of dead bodies very far from Earth is a tale that unfolds in flashbacks and the effort to succeed in the mission he's on. Luckily, humans aren't the only ones who've sent a team to find a solution. Cue the most adorable interspecies friendship since E.T. I loved this. I LOVED it. The level of chemistry between Gosling and what is essentially a puppet that looks like a collection of rocks was off the charts. Shout out also to Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt, the head of the international task force, #career goals. If I ever need to *spoilers* I can only dream of doing so with such well balanced humanity. And the ending. Absolute gold standard. I love a good 'peril in space' movie but I was getting so fucking bored with the depressing endings whereas this was exactly what I wanted.

The Magic Faraway Tree - I have not read the books. They didn't really reach Finland to the level that would've made it to my (pretty broad) childhood reading list. I'm guessing that if you approached the movie primed with childhood nostalgia you probably got more out of it. I... Enjoyed it? Like I've definitely seen worse children's movies but I've also seen better ones. No idea how much was changed from the books but the movie plot goes that down on their luck family moves to the country side to restart their lives by growing tomatoes, kids find a magical tree and make friends with its equally magical occupants, and have adventures in the everchanging land on top of the tree. Mild peril and rescue mission happen when a birthday wish goes awry. Something something family is the best and kids and magic go together hurray? The best part of this was Rebecca Ferguson as Dame Snap.

***

conuly

but judging by the stubby little tail and the scoop claws, this poor little dead animal on my sidewalk was a mole, not a mouse as I first guessed.

Not a mark on it, either - you'd think it just crawled up out of its nest and died right there in front of my house.

***************

( Read more... )

conuly

Watch on YouTube

**********************

( Read more... )

conuly

but you shouldn't ignore somebody who's outside at 11:30pm, sobbing on the ground in the rain.

And indeed I did not ignore her, but everybody else was studiously looking the other way. (She declared that she was fine and did not need me to call anybody. I don't know if I believe that she was fine, but she got up and walked to the bus stop and didn't stagger as she did so, so okay. Also, I saw as she stood that her phone was clearly working, so she really didn't need me to call anybody.)

flareonfury

In honor of the release of Supergirl (2026) film on June 26, 2026 over at

supergirl_tv we're going to have a drabble/promptathon/prompt meme (whatever you want to call it) focused on Supergirl (any universe).

So from now until June 25th, comment here with prompts & I'll post a masterlist by June 26th at

supergirl_tv. That gives us about over 5 weeks submit prompts and then a free-for-all to grab the prompts and start writing. There will be no "claiming" or "signing up". You basically have the rest of the Summer to write something for these prompts to help us celebrate the new movie!

PROMPT AS MUCH OR AS LITTLE AS YOU WISH! THE MORE THE MERRIER! You want a full sentence or song title or whatever go ahead, or you can just do simple one or two worded prompts. If you have more than one prompt for a pairing or character, please separate by a comma (such as Barry Allen/Kara Zor-El - bed, kiss, sing battle). More than one prompt can go in a comment; If you're still unsure how to do it, check out my comment below for ideas.

More information here + Comment with prompts!!

conuly

The washing machine at work is broken for real again :(

I got the towels done last night, but this involved hand-wringing them because the spin cycle wasn't really spinning. And then three times around in the dryer, yay!

************

( Read more... )

svgurl

This is what I wrote for the

unsent_letters_exchange. :)

Title: words i cannot say
Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Pairing/Characters: Shane/Ilya
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 3122
Summary: Irina loved to write letters. Ilya followed in her footsteps. It was easier, after all, to write than telling Shane Hollander how he felt.

conuly

Owl small be enough

The child for all his feathers was a cold.

Oh wow the owl.

The poem the vowels

The owl, look its vowels

That branch for you

Owl, are you an armature vector

And a large step for mankind?

Owl astronaut burgeoning owl is a gift

You give to me give to you

Terrible other things happen.

We stay on our branch.

A hundred eyes

Two will do

************

Link

conuly

Modern (by which I mean within my lifetime, + about ten years?), popular or popular-adjacent, good beat to allow dancing, no profanity or slurs, or at least, clean versions available.

Please and thankies!

***************************

( Read more... )

spiralicious

Tea Month 2026: Tea 13

Tea Review
Name: 2015 Guan Yang Gong Mei "Wild White" Tea
Brand: unsure, vendor: Yunnan Sourcing
Type: white
Loose leaf

Notes:
This tea is one of the two that I had at both the tea tasting in March and the one earlier this month. It is another tea imported from China. "White Wild" usually means that the tea comes from older trees. This is an aged tea. The 2015 in the name is when the tea was originally harvested. It is also minimally processed. At the first tasting, we tried six different infusions of the tea, and at the second tasting we did two. At both tastings, I noted the color changing from a golden yellow at the first infusion and getting a deeper, more amber, like a light black tea color with further infusions. I also noted at both tastings the strong smell of the leaves and how the flavor of the tea is sort of thick and fills your mouth, kinda of like thinned down honey. It was also the second tea at both tastings. Here is where things differ. At the tasting in March, I describe the flavor as starting off like a mellow, light black tea, getting more of a bite as the infusions when on, with the sixth infusion being described as having a "nutty" flavor. At the more recent tea tasting, I described the taste of the first infusion as "almost like a light black tea with a lingering not quite honey after taste" and the second infusion as more "grassy/dry hay." Did they taste different because we had different teas before them on the different days or was it that on the second tasting day, Tea Guy did shorter infusions/brewings, or both? I do not know.

Rate
Appearance: 8
Aroma: 9
Flavor: 7

Overall Rating: 3.5 stars

Current Mood: discontent
Current Location: from francis with love

lizzybuffy2008

23. When is the last time you ate fresh pineapple – did you prepare it yourself?

Last week. It was on sale the week before, so K cut it up and we finished it last Friday, the 15th.

Current Mood: accomplished

genarti

The Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network does a lot of vitally important work supporting immigrants in and around and from Massachusetts, including paying bond (the immigration detention equivalent of bail) to get people released from ICE detention. So much so, in fact, that after paying out over $1.5 million in 2026 alone (!!), they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for their bond fund. They urgently need more money to keep up this work. This is an all-volunteer organization -- I volunteer with them, and can vouch that aside from a tiny bit of overhead, every penny goes to helping immigrants.

I know times are tight and there are a million worthy causes around right now, but if you happen to have some spare funds you'd like to toss at a good cause, this is a really good one and a really good time to donate. Every little bit helps.

(And if you're not in a position to donate, no shame and no judgment.)

yuuago

Witch Hat Atelier has been all over my tumblr dash lately. The art is really pretty and some of my friends are very into it. I kind of want to read the manga, but I would have to get it through interlibrary loan. HMM. What do you all think?

Poll #34636

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9

View Respondents

Should I go to the trouble of ILLing it?

View Answers

Yes!
7 (77.8%)

No
0 (0.0%)

IDK/See results
2 (22.2%)

svgurl

unsent_letters_exchange had its collection reveals last week and this is what I got! :)

Title: Sealed with a Kiss
Author:

Ultra
Fandom: Gilmore Girls
Pairing/Characters: Luke/Lorelai
Rating: G
Word Count: 2535
Summary: Luke discovers that he knew Lorelai much sooner than they thought, though they never actually met back then...

I love the idea of Luke and Lorelai communicating pre-canon and this was so cute and sweet! :D

purplecat

People standing on top of a grassy dunes, within which are walls and doorways. There is blue sea and blue sky in the background.

Skara Brae

The random number generator seems very fond of Orkney at the moment...

Profile

Cookbook Challenge!

February 2024

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29

Page Summary

watersword - reminding myself that these are good things if a little stressful
musesfool - you're dangerous, you don't know what you want
conuly - Paralinguistic knee bend
spiralicious - tea review: tung ting oolong tea
umadoshi - Weekly proof of life: mostly reading
kat_lair - Kat Consumes Media
conuly - I'm not great at comparative rodent anatomy
conuly - This is great to watch on loop....
conuly - Maybe it's just me
flareonfury - Supergirl Summer 2026 > Prompts Needed!!
conuly - My fix on the dishwasher seems to be working, yay me!
svgurl - fic: words i cannot say (shane/ilya)
conuly - An Owl (in Memory of Gil) by David Shapiro
conuly - I need some music recs
spiralicious - tea review: 2015 guan yang gong mei "wild white"
lizzybuffy2008 - May 23, 2026
genarti - quick signal boost for a local-to-me and worthy cause
yuuago - (no subject)
svgurl - gift work (luke/lorelai)
purplecat - Random Neolithic Remains

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated May. 25th, 2026 02:55 am

Cookbook challenge

Make new recipes you already own!

Member Posts

reminding myself that these are good things if a little stressful

you're dangerous, you don't know what you want

Paralinguistic knee bend

tea review: tung ting oolong tea

Weekly proof of life: mostly reading

Kat Consumes Media

I'm not great at comparative rodent anatomy

This is great to watch on loop....

Maybe it's just me

Supergirl Summer 2026 > Prompts Needed!!

My fix on the dishwasher seems to be working, yay me!

fic: words i cannot say (shane/ilya)

An Owl (in Memory of Gil) by David Shapiro

I need some music recs

tea review: 2015 guan yang gong mei "wild white"

May 23, 2026

quick signal boost for a local-to-me and worthy cause

(no subject)

gift work (luke/lorelai)

Random Neolithic Remains

Profile

February 2024

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags