I’m Clearly Procrastinating on Writing, Now. But… (Pancake recipe)

Just made the best batch of pancakes EVAH.

  • 2/3C whole wheat flour
  • 1/2C rye flour
  • 1/2C buckwheat flour
  • 1T Stevia (you can use 2T sugar)
  • 1-1/3T baking powder
  • 2 jumbo eggs
  • 3/4t vanilla extract
  • 1+C kefir (unsweetened, but you can use a fruit version)
  • 3T liquid coconut oil (heat to soften)
  1. Preheat a cast-iron skillet and use coconut oil to grease
  2. Mix dry ingredients thoroughly
  3. Beat eggs into kefir
  4. Add coconut oil just before (to prevent it cooling into a sheet on top of the liquid)
  5. Add wet to dry and combine thoroughly
  6. Ladle batter into skillet. 3 minutes one side, 90 seconds the other. Regrease between batches.

Yield:6×6″ or 3×10″ pancakes.

I lightly sprinkled a little more Stevia on the ‘cakes. Maple or agave syrup would work a treat. Goes well with kefir (I don’t drink raw milk).

 

Wow. Just wow.

 

Generative Activities

Short post here.

I write, but I also bake and cook. Bringing food to people is, for me, very similar to giving the literary nourishment of poetry of fiction. After a drought of creativity in the kitchen I’ve been (financially) kickstarted into the kitchen. Here’s something that’s slipping out of culinary favor this time of year: cholent.

It’s a simple recipe, that folks tweak for every different village and family. Orthodox Jewish law doesn’t allow for cooking on Shabbat (the sabbath), and it’s hard to keep, for example, a nice steak on hold for eighteen hours until it’s Saturday lunchtime.

Enter cholent. Take ingredients, toss ’em into a pot, cook it until it’s mostly done before Shabbat begins (a little before sundown on Friday), then go to the baker and stuff it into the bread oven. Overnight. And most of the morning. When it’s pulled out, it’s a heavenly, creamy, yummy thing. Below is the one my mom made, which pegs it to Sosnowiec in pre-WWII Poland.

Ingredients:

  • 3-4 oxtail bones
  • 1-2 lbs. Flanken. Well, my mother would say ‘flanken,’ but I think we’re talking about a skirt steak kind of beef. Given my mom knew 9 languages and my dad 10, I think fuzzy would be a good way to describe her recipe ingredients. At any rate, a fatty piece, in one piece.
  • 5-6 kartofel. That one’s easy: use huge Idaho baking potatoes with thick skins. My mom skinned some, but kept others unskinned. In either case, cut in half.
  • 2-3 medium onions, whole and peeled.
  • Garlic. At least a 1/2 bulb. Peeled but whole.

That’s it. Put it in a crock pot until there’s no more room. Put the lid on, then leave it be on low heat for about eighteen hours. When you open it up, the potatoes are brown and buttery, the beef fat and oxtail marrow is everywhere, and basically it’s salted and then a feeding frenzy ensues until it’s all gone.

Some folks put whole eggs, in shell, into the mix. Or (shudder) red or garbanzo beans. Or bulgar. Or other travesties upon the pure Holiness of the recipe above. They shall be purged when the Truth is Known. 🙂

Okay. I feel better now…

On to writing.

The Vagaries of Vagueness

GMOs are the red dye #2 of the decade. Vilified as poison, sanctified as nothing but yield increasing. As with everything outside the soundbite universe, it’s a bit more complicated.

The basics: A “genetically modified organism” includes every food plant and animal, and all the service animals humans have touched in the past 14,000 or so thousand years. GMOs in the protested context are ones where scientists have diddled with the genes to create changes in a single generation, tinkering in ways nature couldn’t. The unintended consequences of these changes are what’s at debate, not the initial intent. After all, it’s not as if we’re trying to invent a carnivorous plant.

It’s what you add. There’s a tomato, one of the first GMOs, that’s had a salmon gene added so that the tomato’s flesh is firmer and less likely to go soft in transit. Aside from the weirdness of having different kingdoms’ genes muddled, there’s not too much of an issue.And there are a lot of fish for which modification is in their future.

The most popular GMO to hate are the Roundup Ready™ soybean and corn and crops. Economics aside, adding pesticide resistance to the genome is a question of the unknown: there have never been any long-term very large scale, double-blind studies of any side effects. It looks good, but that’s as far as it goes.

The other kind of modified food is exemplified by adding not a gene to change the food’s taste or portability, but defenses. While organic crops are sprayed with microbial agents that produce the Bt insecticide, they can be washed off. The GMO versions cannot, as the active chemical in Bt is part and parcel of the plant.

 

The bottom line (and this is a post on writing, not organic farming), is that lumping a huge swath of anything under a single banner muddies the waters for all and creates a monolithic concept from which it’s harder, as a writer, to finesse nuances that give a scene, character, or even a more interesting reality.

Oh, and check out a mythbusting blog post on GMOs in Scientific American, as well as a whole raft of responses.

Stale Writing and Technology

The novel I mostly wrote back in 1985 can’t be finished now. Technological advances and political events have overtaken major story points so unless I want it to be an alternate universe fiction, it’s dead.

And that’s a good thing, I think. Writing the ten-year novel should be about the things that are unchanging: the nature of people, of personal growth. Wanna write science fiction? Write it and get it out there: dawdle and the po’on (POH-ohn, a Hebrew word literally meaning “‘here’ device”) is leapfrogged by the smartphone. And the Israeli-Palestinian stupidity has surpassed even the blackest of my noir fantasies. At least I got Syria and Jordan right.

I’ve been re-reading a slew of science fiction novels (latest: the Barrayan Saga books), and, as Lois McMaster Bujold has stated that most of the novels were written to stand alone, it’s been eye-opening to see how she avoids infodump in pursuit of establishing character and milieu when readers attempt to peruse them in order. Learn from all that’s been written, not just the latest.