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]

[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.

Couple of links:
-Joyce Chng at the World SF blog on the Russ Pledge seen from outside the Western Anglophone world.
-Jonathan Dotse on why the future isn’t Western
-And two from Cheryl Morgan: one crunching data on SF anthologies, and the other on “Diversity is Hard”.

In other news, Irene Kuo is a genius. I’m down to 6 recipes picked out of her Key to Chinese Cooking (tea eggs, cha siu, white-cut chicken, two broccoli recipes, and the sweet-sour sauce), and they all worked out great. Also, the explanations are really clear on why you should do stuff, and it makes for way easier cooking.

While googling stuff on how to use cornstarch, I found this book: On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. Science and cooking? I’m sold… (but broke)

Recipe of the day: creative carrot cake (didn’t have raisins, so chopped up prunes after removing the stones; didn’t have orange zest, so added Orange Blossom instead; didn’t have walnuts, so put in pecans. And not entirely sure I had the right quantity of carrots. This could be fun)

Right. Back to the %%% story.

… as evidenced below:

(yup, you can tell that we ran out of nice-looking bowls for the food…)

From left to right and top to bottom: rice, bok choy in oyster sauce, tôm rang thịt ba chỉ (caramelised shrimp and pork belly), nước tương dến ớt (sweet soy sauce with ginger), sweet and sour sauce, bún canh gà (chicken broth with vermicelli), nước mắm gừng (ginger-lime dipping sauce), sour-sweet sauce, and Hainan chicken (one of those Chinese dishes that emigrated to Vietnam). There were a couple minor disasters, such as confusing the pork belly and the shrimp when preparing the marinade (a little embarrassing, as it’s the pork that needs to be covered with sugar and nước mắm in order for its fat to caramelise on high heat), and not having enough ice (pretty much a vital component for the chicken), but overall, it all went fairly smoothly.

Also, there was shrimp toast. More on that later.

So… the humongous rice cooker has among its many functions a “cake” setting, and I’m intrigued… Any good recipes for rice cooker cakes? Are we talking about regular cake baking, or steam baking, or something in between? (I ask because I’ve got a bunch of recipes for steamed cakes, and was wondering whether they’d work)

Inquiring minds want to know 🙂 (well, OK, the H said he didn’t want to know, but I reckon it’s worth a try)