Using Coconut Milk in Bread Pudding

I got the idea from some cooking magazine somewhere, the details of which are lost in the mists of time. You can substitute coconut milk for the milk on a 1:1 basis, which adds an interesting flavor, and the recipe is still as dead easy as always. Just dump the following ingredients together in a bowl:

  • 1 can coconut milk
  • 2 beaten eggs
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • handful of walnuts and/or raisins, if desired

Take the darkest, crustiest bread you can find and tear it into chunks (you can even leave it out uncovered overnight to make it crustier). Stir that into your coconut milk mixture. Glorp the whole thing into a greased loaf pan; top with shredded coconut, if you like. Bake at 350º until just crunchy on top, about half an hour.

The Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett

All I need to say to recommend this book, really, is to mention that Terry Pratchett wrote it.

It’s ostensibly a Christmas book, in the same way The Nightmare Before Christmas is ostensibly a movie about Christmas.  When the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus goes MIA, Death fills in for him.  Hilarity ensues.   And dang it, the guy manages to sneak in a reference to DOCTOR.  In a fantasy novel about Christmas.

The Demon and the City: A Detective Inspector Chen Novel

Meet Singapore Three … a city set in a future that’s just around the corner, a nexus of cultures where you can find nanobots and whorehouses, magical drugs and fried noodles, seedy slums and the estates of the rich.  And gods and demons from several major religions walk the earth.

Zhu Irzh is a rookie cop in the Singapore police department.  He’s here on a work visa because he was born in Hell.  The Demon and the City is a fascinating send-up of the noir genre, several world mythologies, and some received notions about good and evil.  The trouble starts when Zhu Irzh has to investigate a murder while his partner is on vacation.  Naturally, matters escalate until there’s a hopping-mad goddess on the rampage in the city, and Zhu Irzh and his friends have to save the day.

Though Williams’s vision of Singapore is fun, it’s the characters that really make this book worth reading.  You can never be sure who is a good guy and who is a bad guy, and there is always an ulterior motive.  (The murderer is not, absolutely not, who you would expect.)  Zhu Irzh is a demon.  He’s supposed to be Evil.  So why does he have to keep whacking himself upside the head when he starts to care?

One of the characters is a badger who can shapeshift, at will, into the form of a teakettle.

The Demon and the City is part of a series, so there were references to past events that I hadn’t read about, but it wasn’t hard to catch up.  In fact, Liz Williams might be trying a little too hard to bring us up to speed.  Characters discuss things with each other that they would already know.  At one point, Zhu Irzh remarks to one of his colleagues, “I am a demon, you know.”

But it’s a minor fun in a book that was a lot of fun to read.  This book pushes the envelope – is it urban fantasy or is it science fiction?  I’m definitely going to be looking up the other books in the Detective Inspector Chen series.

Confederacy Teaser Excerpt

Last excerpt before the release date of September 15!

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The city folk had another story, but the way the nomads told it was like this:  The people here were once great.  They were patrons of the arts and music and made such machines that even the townies’ best smiths could never match them.  But they were also corrupt.  They squabbled among themselves and worshiped false gods.  Finally the Confederacy of Heaven itself came down to earth and revealed itself to the people, and as punishment for the ancients’ corruption they took away all the rain and invented gliders.  The punishment came with one condition: in one hundred years’ time, the people of Earth could send one representative to plead their case to the Confederacy.  Barnaby the Accursed was sent, and he failed, and that was one hundred years ago.  There would be no rain now forevermore.

But in their bitterer moments the nomads said even that story was wishful thinking.  Think of it, water falling from the sky, free for everyone!  A fairy tale for children.  No, rain was a myth.

Matter, by Iain Banks

A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

All right, Iain Banks is not an idiot.  You can tell by the way he writes that he’s actually quite intelligent.  Here’s the deal: in the far-distant future, humans (or at least some species that looks a lot like us) have spread all over the galaxy in an anarchist utopia with easy FTL, strong AI, and near godlike technology.  They live in a postscarcity economy and the AIs do all the work, so ordinary citizens can do pretty much whatever they want.  One wonders why they bother to do anything at all.

Against this conflict-free backdrop, a minor diplomatic intrigue slowly develops over the course of the book on the planet of Sursamen.  Much late-night cavorting in nanotech bars and descriptions of planet-sized engineering projects ensues.  Eventually, the intrigue gets to the point where the whole planet is threatened and Djan Seriy Anaplian, secret agent, must save the day.  The ending is depressing all but one of the characters I like dies horrifically.  Even then, nothing that happens on Sursamen matters, because it is only one of literally hundreds of thousands of inhabited worlds in this universe.

Why did Banks bother to spend 600+ pages to tell us this?  Well, to show off the high-tech special effects.  If you like intricate, high-concept scientific wordplay, this book is for you, but if you were looking for plot, look elsewhere.

The Seitan Recipe o Greatness

Not original by me.  I picked this recipe up from a vegan blog, where it was already second-hand.  It seems that this recipe has been blazing through circles of seitan enthusiasts online.  I’m not vegan, but I love seitan.  The stuff is a little bit like tofu  – gluten, the proteinaceous part of wheat, molded and formed into chewy deliciousness.  It’s also hideously expensive.

Vital wheat gluten is not so cheap either ($2.50 for the 1 and a half cup it took to make this recipe), but it was still worth trying.  So, without further ado,

THE SEITAN RECIPE O GREATNESS

  • 1.5 c. vital wheat gluten
  • 1/4 c. nutritional yeast (Not sure what nutritional yeast is, actually.  I used 1/8 c. of baker’s yeast instead.)
  • 1 tsp. salt
  • 2 tsp. paprika
  • 1/4 tsp. cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp. cumin
  • 1/2 tsp. pepper
  • 1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper
  • 1/8 tsp. allspice
  • 3/4 c. cold water
  • 4 tbsp. tomato paste
  • 1 tbsp. ketchup
  • 2 tbsp. olive oil
  • 2 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce or soy sauce
  • 1-3 cloves garlic, crushed (Naturally, I opted to use 3.)

Assembly could not be simpler.  Preheat oven to 325º.  Mix together all the dry ingredients in one bowl and all the wet ingredients in another.  Then add the wet ingredients to the dry, stir it, then knead the heck out of the dough.  Form it into a log, wrap it in foil, then bake it for 90 minutes.  Let it cool down completely before you do anything with it.

Chewy, salty, savory, and great.  My seitan popped its foil wrapper, though, so it ended up looking like a turd in the oven.  Wrap it up in extra foil?  Or is it because I used baker’s yeast?

Wheat gluten, the hard-to-find main ingredient.

O Greatness?

The final product. Check out that texture!