Brownie Love

While the wind mutters and the snow continues to drift into amazing sculptures ...

I bake.

Here's the thing about brownies. You mustn't overcook them. They're not cake. They're meant to be gooey. Also, although it's possible to add too many chocolate chips, I've yet to see it happen in my kitchen. Lastly, to bake in cast iron is divine.

Assuming you're cooking with real ingredients and/or have a high-quality mix, they shouldn't stick to cast iron. The directions on the extremely yummy Dassant chocolate chip brownies (they taste like homemade because they have awesome ingredients–for real, read the label!) call for parchment paper and greasing the pan. Ha! I lift my chin in disdain at your parchment paper!

Preheat the oven with your super-awesome 8" round cast iron pan in the oven. Mix the brownies according to the recipe. Add chocolate chips, or butterscotch chips, or white chocolate chips, if desired. When the oven is preheated, remove the cast iron pan and carefully pour (or rather scrape and shovel) the brownie mix into the hot pan. The sides will rise much more than the center. Don't be alarmed. It will still tasted good. Check the brownies earlier than the directions say, as the hot pan may cook them faster than the directions state. When the center no longer wiggles like jello and a toothpick inserted comes out only slightly goopy with mix (most likely it's melted chocolate chips anyway), remove from the oven and allow to cool for as long as you can stand it.

Ice cream is not amiss in such situations.

This is how your pan should look when you remove the still-warm brownies:

Notice the lack of brownie stuck to the pan

You may notice that the brownie in the bottom of the frame has some crust peeled off. It had risen to a height too great to abide, so I ate it.

Should the brownies for some reason stick a bit to the pan, run the pan under hot water. The residue should slough right off.

Cast iron is amazing. Love your cast iron pans, and they'll love you right back.

Complexity

I fibbed about the wine yesterday.  Not only did I not get around to opening a bottle, but then I calculated my last dose of ibuprofen to land at 11:15 am today and had a glass of wine at 9pm when all but a minute trace of ibuprofen would be out of my system.  Ahhhh, wine and chocolate, Fetzger Shiraz and Dagoba dark chocolate with lavender, to be precise.  Way better than meds, and probably (not sure) healthier for me.

Once I started to suffer from solid pain the depression mostly went away, probably from the body's reaction to pain with the release of a complex cocktail of hormones and other living chemistry.  Sometimes I think about how the body is both very simple--a reactionary organism that is relatively fragile and predictable in relation to the overall environment--and very complex and sturdy with its interplay of checks, balances and compensatory mechanisms that keep us functioning through a huge spectrum of circumstances in ways that we still don't completely understand.  I doubt we ever will completely understand, but complete understanding isn't necessary.  We are what we are, and we live how we live and existence is a patchwork of willpower, fate, environment, timing and a whole slough of factors that we all ride out to our ultimate ends.  

Gee, I got all philosophical there.  Sorry 'bout that.  But, while I'm philosophizing ...

Storytelling attempts to create life experience.

But wait, some say, some stories are just for entertainment.  Well isn't life entertaining?  I know mine is.  And heartbreaking, and beautiful, and ugly, and frustrating, and teaching and wonderful.

 When storytelling is done well the listener connects with the story and becomes engaged enough to experience it in a deep fashion that opens the emotions/heart/being to surprise, wonder, laughter, pain--all the colors of emotion.  Done poorly and the best a listener can hope for is a line that resonates with them enough to get a quick kick of some sort, whether it's a laugh, an aha or whatever.  

A story is by necessity, and due to limitations of medium, simplified.  I think that part of the appeal of VR (remember the SF projections of VR in the late 80's early 90's?) is that we can envision fewer limitations to story, deeper experience.  That deeper experience is achieved by more sensory experience, and more implied history through the creation of characters with independent existences as well as more plot possibilities which, as in the case of Star Trek holodecks, become interactive with listener choice.  

Good writing not only includes lots of sensory detail, unexpected moments, turns of fate and complexity of character, it includes choices that hopefully can draw in a reader into feeling like they themselves are faced with hard choices, and they themselves might choose as the character chose even if it's a bad choice.  Then the story begins to feel real.  

Lately I've read quite a bit of work where I'm not on board with the character choices.  I don't have to like the choices, but I darn well better feel like I might have chosen the same way in the same circumstances.  I think this is the real killer with 'But we have to go back to save Fluffy!' plots.  Done well, they can be entertaining, but now we're not talking a fine Shiraz (good story.)  We're talking pop, something a person drinks because it's sweet, it temporarily kills thirst, is predictable and readily available and is worth little or nothing--a throwaway that readers accept with comments like 'I just wanted to escape for a while.'  It's an Atari video game at best.  No crime in that, no shame.  I played lots of Asteroids and Pong as a kid, and I still love Snood (argh! get thee back, foul addiction!)  But if you're a writer who wants to create a really good, memorable story, you have to look around at real life's complexity.  Develop an awareness of a body's complexity, of life's complexity, and bring your story to life with it.  

Which, btw, makes me think about pat endings.  People say they don't like them, and say things like 'it all wrapped up too neatly.'  But sometimes life happens that way too, at least temporarily.  There are moments in our lives when we 'live happily ever after,' and a writer can capture that and give the audience that sense of closure and peace without the pat ending blahs.  The way a writer pulls that off is with implied continuance beyond The End.  There's more after 'happily ever after' that may not be happy.  It's just that the story reached its natural resting place, a point where we can diverge from traveling with the characters and return to our own lives.  Then it's a very satisfying ending, not just a mechanical knot that contains all the loose ends.

Stuff to think about while living in the clutches of complex body chemistry in a world that surprises me, lulls me, creates me as I create small pieces of it.

At least the camera is working

Rory gave me a clue, so now my camera is operational again.  Yay!  Just in time for serious gardening season.  It's late, but not too late, to weed like crazy in hopes to limit weed seed generation and spread.  We're high enough on the hill that the dandelions haven't turned into puffballs yet, but I noticed that lower down there's lots of yellow and white in the meadows and along the roads.  Other weeds are just getting wound up so if you have a garden, or even just a few containers, get out there and get to work.  Locally the soil is the perfect texture--not too hard and dry, not so wet that everything clumps into yucky globs.

It's too early for tomatoes, peppers, beans and other warm crops to go into the ground, though they can go into containers.  The air is the right temp but the soil isn't, yet.  But just about anything that isn't a tropical or sub-tropical dainty can get planted.  I spent the whole day on hands and knees filling the white garden beds with sweet alyssum, pansies, wave petunias and snapdragons.  When they all fill in it should look really sharp.

I've identified the mystery hummers.  There are two female rufous hummingbirds as well as the lone male we've seen so far.  They're fearless--too fearless, as I saw one humming around my hanging flower baskets sedately dodging Huntress as she leapt repeatedly for the bird.  I chased Huntress off before she got it, but the kids reported that Wizard got one a couple of weeks ago.  So we had four, and are down to three unless the captured one managed to get away.  Their numbers will probably grow as we warm up.  We're keeping the cats in most of the time, which will help, I hope.

While I was adding bird seed to one of the feeders I noticed there was a pine siskin that didn't want to fly off.  It just hopped around.  It looks like a male to me, and too bright to be an immature one.  Maybe it's sick?  The pine siskins let me get very, very close and often watch me from a couple of feet away in the tree when I fill their feeders, but I've never seen one hop around on the ground like this before.  If he's sick he's not going to make it, not with all the predators around, even if we keep the cats in continuously for the next several days.  He's so cute, it makes me sad.  But maybe he's fine.  He stayed in the area long enough for me to get my camera, come back, and take pics of him, and then I decided to stay away from him so he didn't get stressed.  Unfortunately that means I don't know if he eventually flew off, so I'll be thinking about him worried that he's suffering.  I don't know if the dirty bill means anything.  I think it's just cracked nyjer seeds.  There may be an illness going around, because I've heard others mention finding more dead birds than usual, especially pine siskins.  I've also found a towhee with no apparent cause of death visible on it, and the dogs have ended up with an unusual number of dead birds in their clutches this year.

I'm all stressed, depressed (not real bad, just gloomy) and hormonal right now.  Chocolate is helping.  Maybe I'll have some red wine tonight too.  Last glass for a while, because I'll probably need ibuprofen in the morning and I never mix alcohol and ibuprofen.  It's too hard on the liver.

Blend

Still tired from this weekend. Tomorrow I have a day off, and then it's back to the retail trenches for a couple of days. I'm really, really looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. Whew!

Things and stuff:

While shopping for wine for the ABBB, Rory found Jest Pink wine. I'm so saving that bottle. When I put together the jester's garden hopefully I'll find a way to have it out there without risking the destruction of the label. Ideas are welcome. The Jest line of wines is a series of blended wines. For more info on what's up with that read: http://www.winereviewonline.com/splendid_blendeds.cfm

My family has discovered that there can be such a thing as too much chocolate cake. Anyone who wants to come over and help us eat (and drink) leftovers, btw, is welcome.

Yak pot roast is yummy.

Our friends are very tidy and considerate. Despite this, it will still take several days to clean up after ABBB. My mind boggles at the thought of what cleanup would have been like had our friends been wildly messy and inconsiderate.

The scent of summer rain after a long dry spell is very distinctive. Note to self--shamelessly evoke this in my next novel, Signet (working title.) It just happens that it'll be summertime, too, when the novel starts. Yay! But that wasn't the best part during the rain today. The best part was listening to the rain hammer the store's metal roof and remembering the kewl rain storm clapping game that Jill lead at the ABBB firepit circle and then right after work stepping out into that incredible scent and being outside myself completely, a part of the air.

Wizard is fast becoming one of my favorite kitties ever. When I come home he trots up to me and curls his tail into a question mark while rubbing against my leg. When I scratch his back and tell him what a nice face he has he bends down and rubs his chin on the ground, leaning over against the scratch until he rolls onto his side. It's become an elaborate greeting between us and he becomes confused and insistant when I don't follow through all the way to the roll.

The cricket songs are multiplying. Summer is growing late. Noooooooo!

This is the end of the blend, my friend.