Hello, everybody, and welcome to the new, snazzier version of Steam Trains and Ghosts. We’ve got custom CSS, thanks to Justin LeClair, a website designer (justin AT jlinkpro.com), and background art thanks to artist Mark Reif (his website here). Other new stuff includes better navigation in the overhead bar and the sidebar.
Come on in, the HTML’s fine!
First of all, I hope all of you out there in cyberspace had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family and no epic turkey disasters.
There’s a pecking order to family cooking affairs. Mom and Aunt Sue were the unquestioned empresses of the turkey this year, their respective offspring were in charge of the lesser dishes, and the menfolk were wise to keep out of it and helped out with chairs. This year, for the first time in recorded history, I got to participate in the madness as an adult (I’m 21). I got to bring a side dish.
Sadly, there are no photos available of the sweet potato cranberry casserole because some of the older folk don’t get the whole blogging thing and would have thought I’d gone round the bend if I’d whipped out the digital camera in the kitchen. Look, here’s a picture of a sweet potato:
Yeah. So. It was an adaptation of an Allrecipes.com Sweet Potato and Apple Casserole. I knew I wanted to make something like this, then went looking around on the Internet for what ingredient proportions other people tried and liked. There’s a variation on the Allrecipes site with pineapple, which is probably scrumptious.
Ingredients:
3 large sweet potatoes
1/2 c brown sugar, packed
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1/3 package fresh cranberriesTopping:
1/4 c flour
1/4 c brown sugar, packed
1/4 c butter
mmmarshmallowsssss…
Preheat oven to 350. Lightly grease a casserole dish with cooking spray. Boil sweet potatoes in large soup pot until tender when poked with a fork, about 20 min. Let cool, then slip them out of the peels and cut into about 1″ chunks. Add those to a mixing bowl, then snip cranberries in half with scissors and add those, too. (Breaking the cranberries’ skin ensures that they become one with the sweet potato while baking. Otherwise you’ll find yourself biting into a tart surprise.) Add the sugar and spices and stir just until the sweet potatoes are coated.
Spread the mixture out in the casserole dish. Cream together the flour, butter, and sugar with an electric mixer, than crumble that on top like a streusel topping. Bake about 25 minutes. Then pull the dish out of the oven and apply marshmallows to taste (that is, liberally). Return to oven and bake until the marshmallows are just getting golden on top. Enjoy!
Update: The pineapple version is even more delicious than the cranberry.
I have a newfound respect for graphic designers. You probably don’t want to guess how many hours it took wrestling around with Photoshop to get the colors of the circly things in the background just right. These people must put so much time and effort into every cover that hits bookstore shelves.
Anyway, my efforts do look homemade, but I’m quite happy with how they came out. That lady in blue there is Nasan, by the way, heroine of the upcoming Confederacy. I got to bust out the old watercolor pencils for her. I used to draw a lot when I was a teenager but quit when the writing thing took off. Maybe it’s time to pick it back up.
Oh, the nerdiness … I love it.
The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery. It’s not exactly deep, but aw, hell, neither is I Can Has Cheezburger.
In adventurous stories, there often happens to be this character who knows what’s going on. They’re the one who dribbles out confusing riddles to the hero just as he needs them, and no more. The one who could just tell everybody the big plot secret but won’t, because if that happened the characters could just resolve the story’s conflict and go home. These characters seem to take a perverse enjoyment of their job, reveling in the “Nyah, nyah, I know something you don’t know!” Such a character is the Bard of Skye in Patricia A. McKillip’s Tower at Stony Wood.
The Tower at Stony Wood starts out conventionally enough for a fantasy novel. Cyan Dag, knight of the kingdom of Yves, receives a visit from the Bard of Skye on his king’s wedding night. The Bard gives him a dire warning: the king has just married a monster in mortal form, and his true bride has been trapped in a tower! The book then proceeds like a strange dream. Cyan Dag has no specific instructions from the Bard (nor did he think to ask), so he wanders the countrysides of Yves and Skye at random, trying the towers that he comes across. He’s not the sharpest sword in the scabbard.
Invariably his experiences with towers go something like this: “Thank you! But our princess is in another castle. Please try again.”
Meanwhile, the Bard and her sister send Cyan unhelpful dreams, and in two apparently unrelated plotlines, another man in another tower is attempting to tame a dragon, and a baker and her daughter are in yet another tower watching the whole affair – princess, knight, dragon, and Bard – by magic mirror. I think I counted at least six towers in all in this book. Or maybe they were the same tower, all mystically connected? McKillip is never quite clear on this point.
Cyan and I would both like to grab Ms. Bard by the robe and ask her, “What the dickens is going on here?” There is a partial explanation at the end, but it left me feeling like somebody had just played a card trick on me.
Has the Carleton Snack Bar managed to top the doughnuts with the sausages on them?
Perhaps. The photo on the right simply does not do their latest creation justice. Earlier in the week these cups appeared on the Snack Bar shelves, enigmatically labeled “gluten free” and nothing more. Curious (and expecting a pudding), I bought one.
They are sesame seeds suspended in honey.
To be fair, they are sesame seeds suspended in honey, with chocolate sauce and whipped cream on top. But … sesame seeds in honey? Why? Does it have a reputation for health-giving powers? Is it some culture’s traditional dish?
To be fair, nothing about this, er, slurry is gross. It’s tasty, like a spoonful of apricot jam is tasty. Like apricot jam, it would be quite good on toast. But I wouldn’t want to eat a whole cupful of it.
As a matter of fact, after a little Google searching I’ve discovered that the Greeks have a candy called pasteli that is made almost exclusively of sesame seeds and honey. But pasteli is dry and chewy, kind of like a nut roll. Not like a, um … oh, I don’t even know what to call this stuff.
Adapted from Allrecipes.com.
Tasty, but not all that exciting. I think the problem was that I overbaked it, so the pudding on the bottom all dried up and it was just a spice cake. The ingredients are so dirt cheap that I might try it again. This recipe uses less sugar than the Allrecipes version, which was definitely a good idea, and if I was to do it again I think I’d up the butter content and add vanilla.
2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 white sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp nutmeg
1 cup milk1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1 1/2 cups water
1 tbsp butter1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 can pineapple rings
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease the bottom of a 9″ square baking dish. Bring brown sugar, water, and butter to a boil in a saucepan.
Meanwhile, combine flour, white sugar, baking powder, spices and salt, then stir in milk. Once it’s well-mixed, stir in walnuts. Pour into baking dish. Pour the hot sugar mixture over that. It’ll look gross, but don’t worry.
Top with pineapple rings in a pretty pattern. Bake 35-40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. You definitely want to use secondary containment here – look how that sugary mess bubbled all over the pan.
Enjoy!
