VD4 food: gỏi cuốn, spring rolls (or mixed salad rolls). Yummy food wrapped in rice paper.
Work is split more or less equally between chopping everything into small pieces and rolling the rice paper.
It seems my alt-history novelette, “Butterfly, Falling at Dawn”, has placed 10th in Interzone’s annual Readers’ Poll. *happy writer*
I’m pleased to see that several of my own favourites (“His Master’s Voice” by Hannu Rajaniemi, “Little Lost Robot” by Paul McAuley) have also made the Top Ten. (though I preferred “Rat Island” to “Greenland” in the Chris Beckett special issue).
Many thanks to those who voted for me–either positively or negatively, come to think of it. I’d rather you hated my guts than not remember me. It’s a story that has a lot of extra meaning for me in many ways (more on that later).
PS: there will be a VD4 report, as soon as I’ve filched pictures to go with it, since I was a dweeb and forgot my camera.
Huge congrats to T.L. Morganfield, whose story “Night Bird Soaring” is a finalist for the Sidewise Awards !!!
On his sixth birthday, Totyoalli’s parents took him to the holy city to see the Emperor Cuauhtemoc, but the plane ride proved the most exciting part. He kept his nose to the window, taking in the vast lands of the One World, from the snow-capped mountains of his home in the northern provinces to the open plains of Teotihuacan. He marveled at the miniature cities and cars passing below. All his life he’d dreamt of flying, ever since the first time he’d seen a bird gliding through the air.
From the airport, they took a cab to the royal palace on Lake Texcoco. Tenochtitlan, the single largest city in the world, sprawled around it for miles. The cab buzzed across one of the royal causeways, the water blue and shimmering in the hot sun. Inside the walled royal complex stood the Great Temple, meticulously maintained by a crew of thousands, its sacred Sun Stone keeping watch over the visiting crowds.
Packing for the Fourth Villa Diodati workshop, which will take place in Wickens farmhouse, a traditional English cottage in Kent:
As usual, this blog is going dark, and I’ll probably not be in a position to answer emails until I come back Monday evening. (unless I find a handy internet connection, which looks unlikely).
-Appreciation of Black Static 9 by Nick Cato of the Horror Fiction Review:
This issue’s fiction is (once again) fantastic. My faves were HAUNT-TYPE EXPERIENCE by Roz Clarke (an interesting take on the “Ghost Hunters” trend) and Aliette De Bodard’s dazzling, ghostly opener, THE LONELY HEART.
-Charles Tan interviews Nancy Fulda:
The single best thing I’ve done for my career is to make it less important than my family.
-List of nominees for Prix Imaginales 2009 (category Translated Works)
-Steve Cockayne, Wanderers and Islanders
-David Anthony Durham, Acacia
-Hélène (Ellen) Kushner, Swordspoint
-Ian McDonald, King of Morning, Queen of Day
-Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
(lots of good stuff, including fellow Campbell nominee David Anthony Durham, well on his way to conquer the world–but special congrats to Ellen Kushner for making the list!)
-Fantasy Magazine is posting con reports: first ones include Eugie Foster on Outlantacon, Penguicon (Dave Hogg here and Alethea Kontis here)
(and I share a TOC with Sarah L. Edward, alias snickelish on LJ)
EDIT: this is a sneak preview, the magazine isn’t out until May 14th.
So, since it’s a holiday and I had time, I figured: heck, why not try Vietnamese food?
I thought that chả giò, the Vietnamese fried spring rolls, would make a nice challenge. Boy, did I badly understimate.
The problem is that everything is suppposed to be chopped into very small pieces. And that the rice papers, which look like this:
have to be soaked, filled with meat, and then rolled. Which looks something like this:
.
Well, slightly less sagging once you get it right (those are my first attempts, when I was still figuring out the rice paper part). Then you deep-fry the rolls for a bit (the deep-frying is the most time-consuming part, since everything goes in batches, and you can’t fry more than a handful of rolls at the same time). But still, those taste wonderful, even if they’re slightly bent out of shape…
And, boy, it tastes good, too. Served wrapped in salad, with a dash of dipping sauce (1 chopped garlic clove, juice of 1/2 squeezed lime, 5 tablespoons Nuoc mam, 3 tablespoons sugar, and about 15-20 cL of water, or whatever it takes to go up to a cup), it actually made for a surprisingly wonderful meal (especially considering all the bits I screwed up on the way there).
Must try that again 
| Cha gio (fried rolls) |
This is a recipe where having a food processor infinitely cuts down on your cooking time.
This is awesome: the Pacific Asia Museum has online exhibitions (with downloadable pdfs):
(hum, yes, I’m straightening out the ranks in Foreign Ghosts, why do you ask?)
“Memories of My Sister” is now up on Expanded Horizons. It’s one of several stories inspired by my trip to India in 2004, set in the Hindu-flavoured universe of Lansara.
Many thanks to everyone who took a look at it on Liberty Hall, on Yahoo (Swapna Kishore), and on OWW (the awesome Marshall Payne, for whom this will be an anniversary of sorts, since I believe it’s the first critique he ever gave me–as well as David Reagan, Jeremy Yoder, John Oshea, Matthew Herreshoff, Samantha Rolfes).
I was baking flatbreads on the hearthstone when I saw my sister walk out of the forest.
I paused, disbelieving. She had left us, many years ago, to become a hermit. She had abandoned both my husband Nayen and me, and we had never heard from her afterwards. We had thought her safely ensconced within the forest, weathering monsoon after monsoon in some crude hut, serenely meditating on the gods of the Triad. And now she was walking towards me, as if she still belonged in my house.
She had changed. Her hair was white, her face gaunt and pinched, as if she had not eaten for moons. She wore rough, blackened clothes of bark, nothing like the red cotton sari she had put on before entering the forest.
I had half-risen, my hands still covered in spiced dough; she saw me. “Isalaya?” she asked, and swayed.
“Menmathe,” I said, and was there to catch her as she fell.
