Category Archives: Food

Ok, it’s really Pork Chops with Cherry Preserves Sauce (Cooking Light, Aug. 2006). But I should have read the recipe more closely before I decided to make it, as the sauce is just cherry preserves and a tiny bit of vinegar. Waaaaaaaaaay too sweet.

Next time I’ll stick with the pork-and-plums recipe I love so much from a previous issue. That fruit sauce is dried plums+wine+chicken broth. Much less sweet.

And I thought I was lucking out since cherry preserves were on sale. Continue reading →

Writing is such a pain in the rear.

I’d hoped, when I started this book, to save myself from the endless round of rewriting that I had to do on the previous book. No such luck.

This week I finished typing in the revisions I’d scribbled onto printouts of chapters 4-6, then reread the book so far (it ends in early chapter 9). Unsuprisingly, it gets off to too slow a start, so I’ll be deleting the last scene of chapter 1 and the second scene of chapter 4. Yay, more rewriting.

I also have to rewrite chapter 8, since I made a big change in chapter 7 to keep all my characters from getting killed.

Would anyone like to loan me a new writing process? This isn’t as tedious as poring over the thing trying to add more description, but it’d be nice to write a scene and not have to rewrite it, or delete it, later. (My cuts files already have two chapter’s worth of words in them, and that doesn’t include the old version of chapter 1 or stuff that only got heavily rewritten. That means I’ve cut nearly 20 percent of what I’ve written. Fantastic.)

Anyway, today I am going to whip chapters 1 and 2 (now called chapter 1) into shape, and then write more of chapter 9. (I finally started writing new story again on the airplane [1]. It’s been ages. (I will probably cut it again later.))

Yesterday I did no work on this book but did a million other things. Including making Peach Tapioca. That wasn’t what I wanted to make (I need to hit the grocery store), but it was pretty tasty:

Peach Tapioca

1 15 oz can peaches, undrained
enough soy milk to make 1 c of liquid
~2 TBSP quick tapioca
cinnamon and brown sugar to taste

Mix everything in a saucepan and let it sit for several minutes. Bring to a boil, stirring occassionally. Turn off heat and let sit for ~20 minutes.

[1] This would have been easier if I had a non-wireless keyboard for my Palm. I had a laptop, but it seemed too much trouble to drag it out for the short Chicago-Detroit hop. Continue reading →

Last night’s dinner was choucroute, more or less, from (as usual) Cooking Light. Pork chops, (turkey) sausage, and an apple, cooked in sauerkraut and beer. I hate sauerkraut, but for some reason every time I run across this recipe it … Continue reading →

Added an actual recipe to my food page: Pseudo-Asian Chicken with Soba Noodles Brown, on both sides, some boneless skinless breasts in olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Meanwhile, boil water and add soba noodles and green … Continue reading →

Food: Beef stew/soup Highly adapted from a recipe in this month’s Cooking Light. Forgot the 2 tbsp of dijon mustard. Made in the crockpot, so there was no browning of the beef or sauteeing of onion. Also no browned flour … Continue reading →

“Asian Beef”, the name of which tells you it’s Americanized. Turned out ok, despite including sesame oil. It probably helps that the instructions (mix 7-ingredient sauce, pour on flank steak, broil 5 min, flip, broil more) means that all the … Continue reading →

Cranberry pancakes turned out really well. Standard pancakes, with 1/3 whole wheat flour, an extra 1/2 TBSP of sugar, a bunch of cinnamon, and a lot of slightly microwaved and smushed up cranberries.

Oven-Braised Lentils with Sausage (Cooking Light, 11/05), with red wine instead of white. Good, fast (except for the baking). Made a lot (a pound of lentils and nearly a pound of turkey kielbasa), so it’ll be dinner all week.