Exercise paraphrased and slightly modified from Fiction Writer’s Workshop by Josip Novakovich.

This one should take about two pages, and runs from Monday, January 4 to Sunday, January 10.

The exercise is all about description and setting — no narrative required or involved. (Or, OK, not much.) Start by recalling a favorite place in nature. Novakovich suggests a bridge, but we changed this because I don’t actually have a favorite bridge. I do have a favorite beach, and I’ll be using that; you could use whatever sort of location you’re familiar enough with to describe it in detail.

Got it? Okay. Now you’re going to write two descriptions of that place (one page each), seeking to capture two different moods. In the first one, describe the place from the perspective of someone who has just been offered a really good job. In the second, describe from the perspective of someone whose significant other has just committed suicide. Don’t tell us about the person’s emotions directly. Don’t describe the person’s plans, regrets, thoughts at all. Show us how he or she feels by the way the details of the setting are perceived. In the example of the bridge, Novakovich suggests looking at the stones of the bridge, the river traffic, the vegetation along the banks, the water.

Have fun!

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Photos from Christmas Day both at our house and at my parents’ are up, as well as the cheerful chaos that is the Burbrink Christmas reunion. This should be it for Christmas photos, I think.

Public Galleries:
Christmas Day 2009
Burbrink Christmas 2009

Private Galleries:
Christmas Day 2009
Burbrink Christmas 2009

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I’ve finally got around to posting anything resembling an update on my reading journal, plus a review of what I’ve most recently finished:
Yeah, Yeah
No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach

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In January, I’m going back to writing. No crazy novel-in-a-month project for me, though — maybe again one of these months (maybe even November), but not now. January is for working on more specific bits, doing writing exercises focused on things I want to improve.

Although I certainly picked up on it enthusiastically enough, this was actually not entirely my idea. Once I started talking about monthly projects, Sarah Kathryn asked me if I wanted to do a month of joint writing projects in which she and I both wrote and then exchanged our work for critique. Then, of course, we will each revise and edit accordingly. So this is what we’re doing. Although I don’t want to make this into a big writing group thing (even if there’s the interest, I’m just not up to organizing it right now), I did think that other people reading my blog might get some use out of the exercises we’re doing too. So I’ll post them here, once a week, if you’d like to join in. If this goes well, we may even continue it into February.

All exercises are going to be inspired by Josip Novakovich’s Fiction Writers Workshop (First Edition from 1995; the link goes to the Second Edition) and Writing Fiction Step-By-Step (1998). Just to be on the safe side legally, though, I’ll be posting summaries rather than transcribing the whole exercise, and Sarah and I have tweaked several of these to meet our personal needs anyway.

We’ll be starting on Monday, January 4; I’ll post the exercise summary in the next couple of days so that anyone who wants to participate has a little time to think about it.

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Sunday: Mediterranean Garlic Herb Chicken

This was an idea adapted from The Joy of Cooking (what else?). The chicken is marinated for 2-24 hours in a wet rub that closely resembles a pesto (but with no cheese and no nuts), made from fresh parsley, red pepper flakes, black peppercorns, garlic, olive oil, and salt. Be sure to rub the sauce on and cover the whole piece. Then, after the marinating, bake at 350 F for 20 minutes on each side (starting with the skin side down). You can turn on the broiler briefly to crisp the skin, though I skipped that for lack of time. I used chicken drumsticks because although they’re fattier and therefore less healthy than the boneless skinless breasts, they’re also way, way cheaper and have more flavor even before the addition of the rub.

The general consensus seems to be that the method worked really well. The chicken was juicy and tender and lovely. The rub, though, was a bit too spicy. Next time, less pepper! Probably you could do this with almost any thick sauce or even a dry rub if you chose. Also, if you like potatoes with your chicken, dice them up and toss them in a little oil and stick them in when you put the chicken in. They should be done at about the same time the chicken is.

Monday: Marinated Beef

I took the idea of the marinade from, again, The Joy of Cooking — but didn’t really measure anything. Red wine vinegar, dried parsley, dried thyme, garlic powder (I was too lazy to chop up more garlic after having just prepped the stuff for Sunday’s chicken), a bay leaf, and two cloves all went into a small saucepan to simmer for a couple of minutes. I then let it cool completely before using it.

What I used it on was about half a pound of stew beef, which I put into the marinade before I went to work in the morning. When it was time to cook dinner, I just pan-fried it with a little oil to grease the pan. In the last 2-3 minutes of cooking, I added half a red onion, sliced thin.

Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. The vinegar was just overpowering. Next time, wine rather than vinegar, and a much shorter marinade time, I think.

Monday: Sweet and Sour Cabbage

(Pictured above, with Marinated Beef.)

This is not a recipe from That Cookbook. This one came from SparkRecipes. I’d gotten the cabbage (and the stew beef that I marinated to serve with it) last week intending to make Bavarian Beef, but hadn’t read the recipe closely enough and realized too late that I didn’t have enough time to make it. So I had this cabbage sitting there waiting to do something. I decided I might as well just do plain old cooked sweet-and-sour cabbage, which I’d always intended to try but never gotten around to. It came out more sweet than sour, which was fine since the beef was so vinegary. I think this one was a success.

Tuesday: Corn Cakes with Green Onion

This recipe comes from Bon Appetit’s Fast, Easy, Fresh cookbook. I was looking for something to do with bacon (because I wanted to, not because I had any around that needed using), and though these corn cakes don’t actually use bacon they seemed like they’d go well with it.

1 cup all purpose flour
1 Tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
2/3 cup milk
1 large egg
1/2 tsp white vinegar
2 cups frozen corn kernels, thawed
1/2 cup chopped green onion
2 Tbsp+ vegetable oil

Blend flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Add milk, egg and vinegar to bowl and whisk to blend. Mix in corn and green onions.

Heat 2 Tbsp vegetable oil (or bacon drippings!) in heavy large skillet over medium heat. Drop batter by scant 1/4 cupfuls into skillet. Cook until brown, 2-3 minutes on each side.

These came out, not surprisingly, like small pancakes with corn in them. They were a little sweet for my taste; the corn itself does that even apart from the sugar. I wish they were more savory — maybe next time some bacon crumbles and less sugar?

Thursday: Chicken and Cornmeal Dumpling Soup

Growing up, one of the dishes we didn’t have just all the time but which made an impression on my memory was “Chicken and Clouds”. It was chicken soup with light, puffy white dumplings, and it was just heavenly. I have that recipe, but it’s not the one I’m making this week, primarily because the idea of a chicken dumpling soup sort of developed organically and wasn’t necessarily a goal I set out for. It’s just kind of where I wound up. This recipe uses cornmeal dumplings (from Joy, again) and a random selection of vegetables I thought sounded like they’d be good in soup. You could use whatever vegetables you like.

5-6 cups chicken stock or broth
soup veggies, 2 cups or so
1/2 pound chicken breast or tenders, cooked and shredded
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp cold butter
1 large egg
1/3 cup milk

Bring stock to a simmer in a large wide pot. Add chicken and veggies. Meanwhile, sift flour, cornmeal, baking powder and salt together into a bowl. Cut in butter with a fork or pastry blender. Whisk egg and milk together and add to dry ingredients; stir until just blended. Gently drop batter by teaspoonfuls into simmering soup. Cover the pan tightly and simmer for about 20 minutes. (Test dumplings for doneness as you would cupcakes, with a toothpick.). Serve dumplings in soup.

The dumplings were tricky. “Batter” is misleading; it comes out more of a dough. I thinned it out a little with some extra milk, which was probably a mistake. The dumplings started to fall apart when I dropped them in, and the soup became sort of a cornmeal-thickened stew. Mostly they held together on top, though. Tim’s were pretty moist, almost like polenta, but by the time Natalie and I ate half an hour later they’d solidified a bit more into cornbread-like dumplings.

Tim rated the experiment “interesting”. Natalie smashed her dumplings into her stew and refused to eat any of it. I thought they worked out rather well, but next time no thinning the “batter” and maybe a slightly longer simmer time.

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Christmas gathering the first: With my father’s family, at my mother’s family’s homestead. Which also happens to be the house I lived in for the first five years of my life or so. It’s been remodeled and added to and drastically changed in some ways since then, but the same basic structure is still there. Aside from the sheer family history of the place, which is impressive in and of itself, I just think it’s really neat that I get to do not one but two Christmas gatherings there each year.

Photos!
Public Gallery
Private Gallery

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This food-as-project thing has turned out not to be as intensive as I thought it might be. Which is fine, because November’s project of the month was sort of on the other end of the spectrum, and the holiday stuff this month is so intense sometimes, it’s nice to have something a little lower-key to work on.

Monday: Fried Wontons

Several of this week’s experiments weren’t really that far out there in terms of being new and different. This is the most obvious example of that, because it’s actually just the dumplings I made last week, fried instead of boiled. I put enough vegeatable oil to cover the bottom of the pan in a medium skillet, heated it over medium heat, and then fried each wonton for about 30-45 seconds per side. I like this a lot better than the boiled version, but the filling’s still got too much ginger in it.

Tuesday: White Bean Chicken Chili

This is a recipe I’ve made a couple of times before, but usually on the stovetop. A cousin brought it to a family gathering many years ago and I fell in love with it and asked for her recipe. My challenge this time was to see how it translated to a crock pot application.

1 pound chicken breast or tenders, cooked and shredded
1 can (about 2 cups) chicken broth
1 15oz can white beans (or about 2 cups cooked beans if made from scratch)
1 15oz can diced tomatoes
1 7oz can diced green chiles
1 18.75oz can tomatillos, drained and chopped
1 cup corn (about 2 ears)
1 onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/4 tsp ground cumin
salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste

I put everything except the chicken in the crock pot and set it on low all day. The chicken I added in the last hour, because it was already cooked anyway and I’ve found that the family schedule means the day’s a little too long (~12 hours) for doing meat in the crock pot; it tends to dry out. If you’re only going to be cooking it for the standard 6-8 hours, you might get away with putting the chicken in right away. I also added the juice of one lime just before serving, because I remembered that lime juice really helped brighten it up. Unfortunately, I didn’t really taste the lime in the final product, so I don’t think it made much difference. I ate mine plain (because of the dairy issues I’m having), although Mom and Dad and Natalie topped theirs with cheese and sour cream. We all had tortilla chips on the side. Overall, it was a pretty big success.

You can substitute an equal weight of fresh tomatillos and chiles (mild ones) for the canned, and use fresh or frozen corn, but unless tomatoes are in season and you have some from someone’s backyard or the Farmers Market you want to use, I don’t recommend substituting fresh tomatoes for canned. The fresh tomatoes you get from the grocery store (even the organic ones) have to be picked underripe in order to survive shipping, and the process used to force-ripen them really doesn’t do much for the flavor. Canned tomatoes, by contrast, are picked and preserved at the peak of the ripening process and thus retain a better flavor.

Thursday: Apple and Pork Stir-fry with Ginger

Thursday I was looking for something quick and healthy and different to do with pork, so I turned to this recipe from SparkPeople. I made it exactly as directed, and I thought it came out pretty well. The sauce could’ve been a little more substantial (why bother with the cornstarch if it doesn’t actually thicken?), but I thought the combination of the pork and the ginger and the apples and the veggies was all right.

Tim and Natalie disagreed, though, so I guess this isn’t going into regular rotation on the menu or anything. It also didn’t reheat that well for lunch the next day; it’s best served immediately following its preparation, I think.

Saturday: Sugar-Free Apple Pecan Muffins

Saturday, we had a family Christmas brunch. Tim contributed a batch of Father Dom’s delicious Fab’s Nutty Goodness pecan rolls, but we were worried that it wouldn’t be enough and also that the two diabetics in the family wouldn’t be able to eat them. So I volunteered to make a batch of sugar-free muffins. These are really barely an experiment either, given how many times I’ve made variations on this recipe (originally from The Joy of Cooking), but I did have to adjust the baking time and temperature so that the oven would be at the proper temp for Tim’s rolls. They weren’t a huge hit; I took 14 and came home with 10. I felt they could’ve used a little more flavor anyway, but I was glad that their sugar-free nature wasn’t apparent in the way they tasted. And the addition of a little apple butter on top when eating them helps boost the flavor.

I have just realized, long after the fact, that I forgot the vanilla. Maybe that would have helped…

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 cup milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs, beaten
2/3 cup Splenda Granulated*
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 small apple, cored and diced (peeling optional)
1/2 cup pecan pieces

*To make these not sugar free, simply substitute an equal amount of white or brown sugar.

Preheat oven to 375 F and line muffin tins with paper liners or grease well. Combine flour, baking powder, salt and spices in a large bowl; stir to mix. Whisk together milk, vegetable oil, eggs, Splenda and vanilla in a medium bowl. Pour wet ingredients over dry and then stir to combine. When almost combined, add apples and pecans and then finish stirring. Do not overmix.

Ladle batter into prepared muffin tins, filling each cup about 2/3 full. Bake for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of one of the middle muffins comes out clean. (A couple of crumbs clinging is no problem; you just don’t want to see still-raw batter.) Turn out onto a wire rack to cool if desired.

Week Three: Marinades! And cabbage. And a twist on an old family favorite from my childhood.

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This is actually an article from November that I put off blogging about because… well, you know. It’s probably a little scattered for that reason; I beg your indulgence.

Do digital diaries mess up your brain?

If we rely on technology for documenting, sorting and storing information — creating digital diaries, or “lifestreaming” — what will become of our minds? Although there is not a lot of research on this subject, psychologists have a range of opinions about where we’re headed.

The thing that strikes me about this article is that it seems to assume that the technology it’s talking about is being used in a particular way. It’s looking at blogs, for example, as simply a high-tech version of the old diary in which we (well, some of us) used to record important events and our innermost thoughts and feelings for easy retrieval later. It sees Twitter as a log of one’s daily activities. And yes, some people do use them that way, but I think that to take that as the norm is probably misunderstanding how this technology is being used on the whole.

To me, the whole point of the Internet is communication. I document events in my life here, yes, but not because I want to save the information for later. That’s a secondary function, and one that I very seldom use. My point in blogging things like Natalie’s birth or our move to a new house is not to make sure I remember it later, but to share it with my friends and family and whoever else might care. When I tweet or update my status on Facebook, actually quite often it has nothing to do with the big events of my life; it’s just as often a random thought I wanted to share, a little complaint about something that happened, or a quote or link I thought my friends and family would find interesting.

It’s not about recording my life. It’s about communicating it, sharing it. I write as though I may be writing to myself, because I don’t know how many people are actually reading. I don’t keep stats on this blog; I can see how many people are following me on Twitter or Facebook or Google Reader or Goodreads or wherever, but have no way of knowing how many are actually listening to what I say or whether they are passing on my words to anyone else. When you get right down to it, though, what I’m trying to do is to share my life with others, to say something that someone finds helpful or worthwhile in some way. I’m not doing this to store information for myself; I’m doing it to spread information.

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Over on SparkPeople, I’m talking about my latest venture into exercise-video-land:
Exercise Videos: Bellydance Slimdown

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A brief summary of week one’s experiments and results:

Sunday: Jasmine Jellies

Sometime last month I found a recipe for jelly candies, tried it, accidentally melted plastic into it, tried it again, and succeeded. I’ve since been experimenting with flavors. This week I got especially brave and tried putting in some jasmine extract I’d picked up at Jungle Jim’s. I used two parts vanilla to one part jasmine, and couldn’t even taste the vanilla so I’m not sure why I bothered. The jasmine got decent reviews from taste testers (according to Tim’s report), but was a bit strong in my opinion. If I try it again I’ll probably cut the jasmine in half and maybe even cut it with another flavor that’s strong enough to stand up to it. I may try steeping decaf green tea leaves in the water used for the recipe before making the candies.

The recipe can be found on Coconut and Lime:
Raspberry Jelly Candies
(I substituted 1 tsp vanilla extract and 1/2 tsp jasmine extract for the raspberry, and green food color for the red. Also, I let the candies sit for a full 24 hours before unmolding.)

Monday: Asian “Ravioli”

The original concept was ravioli, anyway. Then I discovered that most of the fillings that sounded tasty had cheese (dairy!) in them, so I started improvising. I wound up using pork, cilantro, fresh ginger, garlic, lime and soy sauce, with egg and bread crumbs to bind. And doing the ravioli the cheater’s way, by using wonton wrappers. Okay. There is no longer anything Italian about these. Let’s just call them what they are: dumplings.

Boiled, with leftover satay sauce (which apparently gets spicier as it sits) on them, they were halfway decent. The ginger might be a little strong. If I do them again, though, I’m going to look at them as dumplings rather than ravioli. I’m going to do something else with them, like fry them or do that pan-fry/steam gyoza thing, or put them in soup. Not just boil them. And as much as I like the satay sauce, I think it’s too much flavor all in one place.

1/2 lb pork, diced and cooked
1-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
3 cloves garlic
~1/4 cup cilantro (just tear off a small handful of leaves)
~1/2 Tbsp soy sauce
juice of 1 lime
bread crumbs to bind the above into a paste
wonton wrappers

Throw everything but the wonton wrappers into a food processor and process until you have a fine paste that molds easily. To fill wrappers, brush two adjacent sides with water (making a wet corner), then drop about a teaspoon of filling in the center and fold the dry corner over to the wet. Press firmly to seal and be sure to get all the air out. If it tears, throw out the wrapper (but not the filling!) and try again. Freeze in a single layer on a flat surface for a couple of hours before packing into bags, or if you’re going to use them right away, cover with a clean kitchen towel and let sit for about an hour.

Thursday: Chicken With Cider Glaze

This one came from a recipe in The Joy of Cooking. It was supposed to be for grilled chicken, but I figured I could just as well put the glaze on chicken cooked however. It seemed to work well enough. I adapted it very slightly by using cider instead of apple juice concentrate, in an effort to use what I had on hand rather than buy new ingredients.

1 lb chicken tenders
3/4 cup apple cider
1/4 cup ketchup
1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup brown sugar (packed)
1 tsp dried thyme
1/8 tsp hot sauce

Combine everything except the chicken in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and let simmer while you do the rest of dinner.

Pound the tenders out so that they’re an even thickness. Season both sides and then cook with a bit of olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat until done, about 3 minutes on each side. (You’ll know when the first side is done because there will be only a small amount of pink left at the top of the piece. At that point, turn it over and cook it for the same amount of time on the second side as you did on the first.) You will probably have to do this in multiple batches.

At this point I removed the chicken to a plate and let it rest while I made the sweet potato pancakes (below). The sauce was simmering the whole time. It didn’t take long, maybe 10 minutes? After the pancakes were done, I drained the oil they’d fried in out of the pan, put the chicken back in the pan (it’ll all fit), and poured the sauce over it. After turning each piece to be sure it was coated, I let it cook for just another minute.

Thursday: Sweet Potato Pancakes

(Pictured above, with chicken.)

Not in the sense of a sweet potato batter, but in the sense of shredded sweet potato patties. This is another one all out of my own head. It sort-of worked, although I felt like it was missing something.

Most of a large sweet potato, shredded
1 tsp cinnamon
2 eggs
enough breadcrumbs to make a dry-ish, but still shapable, mixture
oil to fry in

Combine everything except the oil in a bowl. Put enough oil in a medium skillet to cover the bottom of the pan and heat it over medium heat. Shape your mixture into small balls, maybe a bit larger than a golf ball. To cook, flatten each ball between your hands (patting it back and forth a few times helps), then use a spatula to slide it into the hot oil. Carefully. Cook for about 45 seconds on each side, then remove to a cooling rack (with paper towels under it) to drain.

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