The Raven's Roost

One of my pumpkins has been GNAWED ON by an ANIMAL. Probably a squirrel. It didn't get far enough to really damage the gourd too badly, it looks like it mostly shaved off the green outer skin and the pumpkin is already healing. But it's probably time to put socks on them. This is an experiment - I've been told that animals dislike the texture of stretchy nylon stockings and won't bite into them, so you can slip a knee-high over the pumpkins to keep them safe. Hopefully even if the chewed pumpkin isn't suitable for eating I can still save seeds from it.

Not much has really been going on lately - it's happily quiet out here. I've been able to more consistently sit down and draw each day, and I'm knocking out a short comic. I enjoy stories where someone adopts a horrific monster-like creature and makes it a pet, and the monster starts behaving like a pet as well. And yeah, I'm also into monster girl/boyfriend stuff, too. (it's me - I'm the monster) But I;m just enjoying playing around with story ideas, weird imagery, and getting used to setting aside art time. Hopefully this will allow me to get back into working on Lora and finish the thing.

Speaking of art, I got a copy of Japanese Design Through Textile Patterns by Frances Blakemore. It's a collection of textile stencils that would be used to dye fabric, with descriptions and discussions of symbolism, etc. It's an enjoyable flip-through that will give me ideas for clothing patterns, backgrounds ... or just eye candy.

I also made my first attempt at melon pan. They were ... okay. The cookie layer didn't come together well and was super-crumbly. I switched recipes and was just reading through the pineapple bun recipe in Modern Asian Baking At Home which made much more sense to me. The inner bun is milk bread, so you start with a tangzhong and proceed much as you would for shokupan. She also doesn't call for scoring the tops of the buns, but I'll be doing that and sprinkling on coarse sugar. The ones I made aren't bad, they just aren't great, but I think I can nail it next time.

Since my birthday is coming up next month I might make a more elaborate cake, something like a butter cake with matcha frosting. Or a loaf of chocolate shokupan made in my kitty-shaped pan. Not sure yet.

In my continuing quest for the perfect sweet corn muffins, today I made ... (drumroll, please ...)

Corn cupcakes??

Okay first off, 1.5 cups of sugar was a lot and I should have known that when I added it in. They taste great, like vanilla and corn cake. But they're wholly unsuitable to serve with a hearty chili or spicy stew. They'd be more at home with a cup of coffee and some lemon curd.

Also, oil and butter was too much fat. And the called-for oven temp of 350 was too low, because they sank in the middle.

On the whole the recipe is headed in the correct direction, but it needs about half the sugar or less - half a cup should do it. JUST butter and no oil. And the oven needs to be at 425 so they don't deflate. I'm not going to be a perfectionist about Instagram-worthy perfect little domes, but they need to not look like surrealist donuts.

The positives - corn flour and freeze-dried corn powder gave them a great, simple corn flavor under all that sugar. So the next batch will hopefully have the sweetened corn flakes taste I am after. They were also very easy to make, as corn muffins ought to be. The muffin-like objects I have now will taste good mixed with yogurt but they're more properly thought of as a dessert or sweet snack than a bread.


Anyway, I'm tired of summer. I object to its continued presence and demand fall NOW. It's currently 93° where I am, and the heat index has us at THE SURFACE OF THE SUN°. Forget cooking an egg on the sidewalk, you could hatch dragon eggs here. I would love for some cooler weather to come along soon, especially since I really would love to get back out on my bike again. Gold Head Branch Park up the road here was recently placed on the Register of Historic Places so that seems like a sign that I should buy an annual pass and go ride around up there.

Wow, how about that hurricane, huh? Isaias is still about even with Cape Canaveral, so it didn't move too far overnight but it's still just a tropical storm and it did bring us some needed rain. I mean, it can and likely will strengthen as it heads up the coast, but it hasn't been a big deal here. The way people in the news media are hollerin' about it, you'd think it was a far stronger and nastier storm. But as someone local said, "Having a hurricane is the most normal thing we've done all year."

I'm probably going to get drizzled on but I'm doing errands today anyway. I'm almost out of peanut butter so that state of affairs must be rectified. I need to make a dump run soon and get rid of the old fencing, the mattress, and some other dubious items that I don't want to put out for roadside pickup. I also haven't forgotten about sending off art supplies to people, but I do need to get weights and shipping estimates.

So now it's August, so it's Leo Time! I don't make as big a deal out of my birthday any more, and since our Disney trip is canceled (the deposit showed back up in the bank account, so we're officially done) I will just make my own ridiculous sugary treats here at home. Fox stumbled across Milk Bar's website and emailed me their recipe for birthday cake, which looks like something I NEED BADLY. But the stacking and smoothing, and "perfect glossy white frosting" looks like it might be a few steps above my current baking skills. That's not going to stop me from trying, of course, but I'm going to need a cake ring or ring mold to do it. In the meantime I'm going to give their Famous Pie a shot - the one that was formerly called Crack Pie.

It looks a LOT like buttermilk pie. When I lived in Kentucky, a couple of my neighbors often came over and we cooked for each other. Peter was from New York City and had this old recipe for buttermilk pie, and it was amazingly good - tender, rich, slightly sour, mildly sweet. And he would never give me the recipe. And actually I did find the recipe eventually but it wasn't online. At that time I barely had AOL where I lived, and even if I could get online there just weren't tons of websites out there. I found the recipe when my vintage cookbook collecting landed me in a used book store in Nashville, where I found "The VIKO Cookware Cook Book." By Viko Cookware, obviously, which you can still find on Etsy and eBay & etc. The book was from the 1920s and had seen serious kitchen use in its time. The binding was still good and the covers were in decent condition and ... it had that buttermilk pie recipe. I tried making it and it was the same flavor I remembered.

I'm on page five of Feed Your Demons, and I started doodling ideas for the covers - I'll need front and back, as well as insides, but the insides can be something simple. The outer cover art I may do in Painter and get a little fancy with it, unless that seems like cheating when the inside artwork is simpler.

I've got a lot more stops to make today than usual so I'd probably better get going.

I'm exhausted. I am not sleeping as much at night as I need to, and part of the problem is that while I get tired and get into bed at my usual clock time, I am not falling asleep like I used to, so I may need to go back on melatonin for a while until my body resets. Of course, the other beneficial thing to do would be to abolish the time changes, but you've already heard this rant from me. And if you ever followed me on LiveJournal, you've been hearing it for the last twenty years! Huzzah, have a cookie.

Today in Stress Baking, I am going to whip up some protein bars. I follow this formula from No Meat Athlete with the slight modification that I find them a bit dry and add a little more peanut butter and sometimes a shot of almond milk to loosen the mixture up. My personal flavor preference is for cocoa powder and almond extract, which gives them a sort of amaretto chocolate taste, but vanilla is perfectly tasty, too. Later this week I'm making my blackberry tart, and I found a recipe for blondies that calls for the addition of crystallized ginger candy, which sounds amazing.

I also missed my morning yoga for several days but I'm back to it. Normally my rule is "don't miss two in a row," but sometimes exceptions have to be made to every rule. I can tell that I did, though, when I do anything that flexes and puts weight on my shoulders, I can feel the left one complaining. Gentle complaining, but it's still there. Recently I was reading an article about gut mobility and running. If you think about the general body movement of running, you can see why it's beneficial to have internal organs that can shift and move without too much problem. People develop issues when trauma causes adhesions, though. I had always wondered what those were, and it explained that any tissue that endures trauma can develop adhesions through a chemical bonding process, and the result bond between tissues can be stronger even than scar tissue. So when the physical therapist told me that my repeated falls on that shoulder weren't the cause of my troubles, they were only partly right. While I didn't actually damage the joint, I apparently DID traumatize the shoulder enough that - you guessed it - adhesions formed. The shoulder has a shroud of tissue that stretches as it moves, and then folds up when it's at rest, and it is structured sort of like a pleated cheerleader's skirt. In my case, that's the thing that is damaged.

Normally today would be a day for running errands, but I'm probably not going anywhere. The schools are closed this week, and next week is their scheduled spring break, so I'm not going to pick up the neighbor's kids, either. Fox and I may venture out Friday just for looky-loos and to grab a few things at Walmart. In all my preparation, I neglected to check how much soy sauce we had. Can't survive an apocalypse without soy sauce.

I also ... may have bought some books. I've been very good about my personal "dumb shit" spending, but I blame stress. I picked up some used books through Amazon Marketplace, and found that there are a lot of Friends of the Library programs that use it, possibly as an alternative to on-site book sales. Anyway, I bought some volumes of 1960's era poster art and print advertising illustration, and a Dark Mountain anthology. I would love to get my grubby claws on Rian Hughes' books on lifestyle illustration and typography of the 50s and 60s but hot damn they're expensive. Anyway, all that will be landing on my doorstep this week.

I had this idea earlier about pet portraits or furry pieces. I've seen a lot of great pictures people are doing of animals in medieval or Renaissance costume, high fantasy outfits, etc. But what might be fun is to offer mid-century modern portraits. Mad Men-type suits and dresses, dirty hippies, mod British swingers, etc. Beehive hairdos, psychedelic color schemes, Pushpin Studios-style stuff. I dunno, maybe no one will really bite, but it would be fun to try.

 All my dental stuff is finally caught up and I don't go back until March of next year. I don't have an eye doctor appointment until after we're back from Japan, but I do need to get a flu shot before we go. I don't want to spend all that time locked in a metal tube having to breathe everyone else's crap without at least a flu shot. The last thing I want to do is come down with Tokyo Death Crud. 

It's the end of summer and around here that means there's a zucchini glut. Like you can't leave Publix without some. I don't mean "Oh it's such a good deal I can't pass it up!" I mean the manager forces bags of it on you as you leave. (j/k) Today I'm making as many loaves of zucchini bread as I can with the squash I've got and freezing the majority. I make a variant of the New York Times olive oil zucchini bread that subs in avocados for some of the oil, reduces the sugar, and adds in semisweet chocolate chips and toasted pecans. Depending on how many loaves of that I get, I may take some of the batter and make chocolate zucchini muffins. They get frozen, too. Since it's just me and Fox we don't go through a whole loaf or whole batch of muffins before they go stale - or if we do we regret it. So it's easier for me to portion out things and freeze them. I usually halve the loaves, but I may quarter them this time.

I'm hoping to also get some art time today. Once the batter is made, baking just becomes an assembly line activity, so while loaves are baking I can draw. I've been playing with using the tones and patterns loaded into CSP, as well as teaching myself how to use vectors. I had a sketch/doodle called "Owls All the Way Down" that I've started rendering as a larger piece using some of my newfound knowledge. I feel like I have tons to do every day, still, though I suspect that's a hangover from having a very busy couple of weeks recently. Things should calm down for a while until mid-October, when of course it's time to get ready for the race and the trip. But looking at the calendar I don't see anything coming up.

 I know we still have a few weeks to go, but this morning it was cool enough to run outside - 63 and though it was humid, it was breezy, so that wasn't bad. IT WAS GREAT. I did four miles, saw the garbage truck guys, and got followed by a small dog I've never seen before. No collar or anything.
Today's errand day and I mainly need to go into Middleburg though I'm sorely tempted to go up to Jo-Ann's. I found some dessert recipes on Tastemade Japan and it's poking me to make goodies. But P'shaw, are cookies, cakes, and shit in line with your nutrition goals? Technically? No, but everyone needs treats now and then. I found this nifty recipe for Matcha Chocolate Layer Cakes,  (caution - autoplaying video) and put it into MyFitnessPal. If instead of four you cut it into 16 pieces it's only 145 calories a serving, and the squares are about the size of petit fours. For me personally, this is the perfect size to kill a sweet tooth. 
So at Jo-Ann's I'd be looking for other decorations besides gold leaf. It's pretentious and bourgeois. They might have those little candy pearls, though, which in white and green would look really neat against the chocolate and the matcha dust. I already own an offset spatula and double boiler, so I'm all set up there. Given how little of it I tend to eat anyway, I'd like to make my own desserts because the process is enjoyable and kind of soothing, I'll know almost exactly what's in them, and I found lots of things I can store in the freezer so I'm not "pressured" to eat them before they spoil.
That same site also has recipes for making those ridiculously thick, fluffy pancakes. They look so good OMG ...