Didn’t post much this week because I’ve been fairly busy with RL stuff. Not least of which was that my writing laptop had the good taste to crash with the only copy of my Paris UF fantasy on its hard disk (I do have Dropbox; however, since the computer wouldn’t boot, it wouldn’t actually upload the file where I could recover). A tense night was spent poking at it to see if it would stop being grumpy; fortunately, my husband worked miracles yesterday night, while I was interviewing with Ben Love and Guillermo Velez for the First Million Words (really fun interview, btw, look for it in July–it’ll coincide with the release of the Obsidian and Blood omnibus). So now the laptop is… sort of working, I guess, and my fingers are crossed it doesn’t fail me again. And I have found my synopsis and my first chapter, so I’m ready to roll!

I obsessively proofread the upcoming “Immersion” in Clarkesworld; I think I’ve got everything, but probably I haven’t Kind of worried how it’ll come across: I seem to have moved in a new phase where I attempt very ambitious and very personal things, and end up always worried I’ll get something wrong or get howled at by everyone (OK. Not that very different from the Impostor Syndrome. Just turned up to max, for no reason I can see).

Cooking wise, this was very much a week for not trying out anything new–bought some coconut milk to make a bánh chuối nướng in order to consume leftover bread; of course ended up with leftover coconut milk, so made cà ri tôm (sort of a merge of this recipe and this recipe with half the ingredients substituted for something else). Next week, however, I have some crab to use up, and I’m going to be more adventurous (might even open the VN cookbook and check out promising stuff, ever-so-slowly and with the help of my trusty dictionary ).

Now I’m off to buy some running shoes and celebrate a birthday–and eat the last of the chả lụa Grandma brought back from Saigon (which is going to make me regret Vietnam all over again…).

So… I never thought I’d ever say this, but it’s the second time in less than a month that I find myself cooking in a kitchen that’s not my own, and I have to say you don’t realise how well-stocked your kitchen is until you run into one that’s… less well-stocked? I was cooking for VD [1], and the things I missed the most were, by order of decreasing importance:

-chopsticks. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m absolutely useless as a cook without a pair of chopsticks.
-kitchen knife. The difference between a good quality, balanced knife and a random ikea knife really is striking. Not in a good way. (also, still a fan of santoku over more Western-shaped knife; the thing just feels better in my hand. The household is sharply divided between my husband, who uses the paring knife and the traditional kitchen knife; and I, who just reach for the santoku for everything from dicing carrots to cubing meat).
-pots and pans. More minor, but gah, the absence of a wok with a lid is a major drawback for so many dishes. Especially broccoli.

So I guess I’ve learnt my lesson: take chopsticks with me next time I have to cook in a stranger’s kitchen

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[1] In case you’re wondering, the actual Villa Diodati workshop was great; I got tons of work done, edited “The Two Sisters in Exile” into submittable form, and made a head start on revising “Immersion”, aka the globalisation piece in space (with social networks! And Vietnamese! And lemongrass chicken!).

Best moment of the day: the H and I finish filling the washing machine. We’ve been using a lot of rice bowls lately, and we have trouble fitting them all in: like most washing machines in France, ours has a space at the bottom that’s specifically for plates, with little grooves holding them in place (which also prevent you from slipping in anything that’s not round and flat-ish); and a smaller space on top that’s used for glasses. Rice bowls don’t fit in at the bottom, and sort of fit in at the top (while taking the space of 1.5 glass, which is problematic). The H pulls back, looks at the washing machine, and says, “You know, I bet Asian washing machines are set up differently, because this was clearly not meant for rice bowls at all.” LOOOL

And today, we went and celebrated the Nebula nomination (yes, I know, fashionably late), and I used the opportunity to drag him to Chinatown Olympiades for the first time, one of the biggest Chinese restaurants in the XIIIe (which turned out to be kind of busy a Saturday at noon, lol). I introduced him to their dim sum menu (which is extensive compared to what you get in a lot of Paris Chinese restaurants), and we had a very pleasant meal altogether.

Afterwards, we joined the queue of people in the Asian food stores, and bought a 5kg bag of the 2012 crop of jasmine rice. *happy cook*

Still brainstorming the %% urban fantasy. Gotta figure out how to tie together a violent break-in and a fire at a middle school into the same plot… (preferably without having the same vilainous figure involved in both, because it’s such a cliché). On the plus side, I now have my romantic options for the MC figured, except there’s a pesky husband in the way… (I’m tempted to inflict random grievous bodily harm, but it feels like a copout).

I sent off everything for the Obsidian and Blood omnibus as well: all being well (haven’t heard back yet), the volume will contain all three Acatl short stories in addition to all three novels, a new Introduction by the author aka me, and a character index that was sadly missing from Master of the House of Darts. And I’m hoping we’ll be able to fix various egregious mistakes that were around in the text (as pointed out to me by translator extraordinaire Laurent Philibert-Caillat). So definitely worth investing if you’re a fan

Misc other Obsidian and Blood news: Master of the House of Darts has been entered into Book Spot Central’s annual tournament, where books face off against each other. It’s in the same bracket as Patrick Rothfuss, Mira Grant, N.K. Jemisin and other powerhouses, so very much doubting it’ll get past the first round. But just in case… voting is March 13th-March 15th, I’ll try to post a reminder when it actually happens.
And Servant of the Underworld is book of the month over at Absolute Write Water Cooler’s Book study, so if you feel like discussing its merits (or lack thereof), feel free to hop on over to the thread and speak at length.

Meanwhile, we’re having stuffed zucchini with soy sauce, and I’m once again amused by the fact that, whenever we’re given a choice, the H uses the French/Western-shaped knives, whereas I feel much better when I have the santoku in my hands (I hate French knives, they feel all wrong, balance-wise).

… put it in a wok on high heat and use it to stir-fry chicken and noodles for a full 2-3 minutes. (as seen in my canteen today)
Toasted sesame oil, the Chinese kind, has a low smoke point at 180°C, which means that it starts decomposing into a lot of components if you use it on high heat–including a fair amount of carcinogens. Most cooking oils, by contrast, have a higher smoke point at 230°C or something like that, and are thus suitable for frying on high heat. Sesame oil is more like a dressing: you put it on cooked stuff, or in salads, but you certainly never ever use it for frying.

So, no, thank you, I’ll pass on the chef’s special stir-fry today…

So, I can’t believe I’ve spent an entire afternoon on this, but I’ve put up an index to the recipes I posted on the blog, and done my best to clean up their tags (and sort them out by ingredient and by place in the meal such as main course, side dish, dessert…). I looked for a plugin that would autoformat recipes in a consistent fashion, but all I found was either buggy (one plugin I tried didn’t even bother to close the italics tags, which meant anything you put after the recipe proper showed up like this…), or imperatively had to be edited in the visual editor (which I’ve deactivated because I put PHP in my pages).

You can find the index here: it’s still very much under construction, but I realised to my shock that I’d published 29 recipes on this blog, and that they were, erm, as well organised as my desk (which bears witness to the slow increase of entropy as time goes by).

Any brilliant ideas for publishing and/or organising recipes on WordPress very much welcome at this stage, since I really feel I’ve done nothing but a short-term hack to fix the problem…

In the process, I reorganised my website a bit, and moved a few pages around (hopefully nothing traumatic), as well as set up missing pages (*cough* Obsidian and Blood omnibus *cough*).

And the weekend was meant to be spent looking at my US taxes, but this has come to a halt because the H is acting as some kind of virus incubator, and is therefore not entirely up and about… At least I have brainstormed more Jade in Chains, and am currently reading through Kate Griffin’s A Madness of Angels (after finishing Ben Aaronovitch’s Moon Over Soho). Interesting contrast between the two so far.

Still moving through the Vietnamese. The area around my screen is now handily covered with vocabulary post-its (down to pronouns now, after doing numbers last week). Currently brainstorming a story about obsolete languages (no relation, I swear), and dearly hoping to keep it short, which isn’t going to be much fun. I seem to be stuck in novella mode lately. Reading-wise, going to tackle House of Silk, the authorised Sherlock Holmes novel, next. Quite curious to see what it’s worth.

Latest cooking experiments: a re-tread of my ginger and chả lụa noodles , with lots of onion, and a bunch of fresh ginger. Bánh cuốn with fried shallots (let’s just say I need to get better at that whole steam-cooking thing, because they came out tasting good, but looking horrible).

More late. Off to write.

Not recipes per se, but my latest escapades…

Tomato sauce: was cooking ravioli, and quickly throwing together a tomato sauce from 210g of tomato paste. Which, of course, tastes horrible. I followed H’s advice and put in a tablespoon of sugar, but it still didn’t work. Mmm, time to get creative… I had a jar of dried tomato paste in the fridge, so I threw a heaped teaspoon of that in the mix; taste the thing, still wasn’t satisfied. It lacked… umami, for want of a better word? I swear I reached for the bottle of nước mắm, but the thought of having a fishy-tasting tomato sauce stopped me at the last minute. Fortunately, I had fermented soy paste in the fridge–you can see where this is going, right? Threw in a little more sugar in addition to the teaspoon of soy paste, and pronounced myself satisfied. I then very carefully asked the H what he thought of the tomato sauce before admitting what I’d put into it… (he liked it, but his enthusiasm wavered a bit when I explained the composition process).

Bò bún: it helps if you think of bò bún (and other bún dishes) as a giant salad–yes, there’s meat in it, and warm rice vermicelli, but it’s not really a hot dish (and please please don’t microwave it, as I’ve seen a number of takeaway places do. It tastes horrible, and the soy’s gone all limp). So, accordingly, I made my bò bún with honey-dipped beef & shallot for the meat, and salad, soy and the remnants of a cucumber for the veggies. Mmmm… (also, it’s not real bò bún in my book unless the rice vermicelli are swimming in a ton of nước mắm–think of it as vinaigrette, except that it’s not a dribble you put on the salad, but several tablespoons…)

So, I just tried out the santoku, the biggest of the three Japanese knives I received from my former colleagues. I was chopping a carrot–normally a task that requires me to push slightly in order to counter the basic springiness of the carrot.
The santoku moved through the carrot as though it were soft butter.

The Japanese: proudly supplying kitchens with high-grade weaponry since 1945.[1]

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[1] I could be wrong about this because I’m not Japanese, but I was given to understand the santoku was actually a “modern” knife, born in the crucible between the West and post-war Japan–when traditional food was scarce, and the influence of the West in the diet started to loom large.

Ginger and pepper mutually reinforce each other’s taste when put in the same dish.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off looking for a big bottle of water.