Friday, November 18, 2011

Friday Fave: Late Night Thanksgiving Goodies

In honor of the coming holiday, this post will contain two favorites. And again, I'm going with recipes, but don't worry--nothing complex, as these are meant to be whipped up after all the other Thanksgiving goodies are gone or no longer sound tasty. Or when you need your relatives to shut up and get a little tipsy. *laugh* Whichever comes first.

I'm referring, of course, to the all-star combo of  Apple Betty and Hot Whiskey.

*happy sigh*


Apple Betty

Difficulty: Easy

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cook Time: 30 minutes

***

4 apples, cored and cut into sixths
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup oatmeal
1/2 cup flour
1/2-to-1 stick butter, melted
Few pinches cinnamon
Pinch nutmeg
Cooking spray

Preheat oven to approximately 375. Coat a baking dish (I like small, deep ones for this, but any size/shape works fine) with cooking spray; fill with apple pieces. Combine dry ingredients and toss slightly. If you want a  "crust," you can add more oats and sugar to the top and not toss. Gently pour melted butter over the mixture, paying special attention to the oats. Bake 20-30 minutes.

and then drink some of the following when you eat it!

Hot Whiskey

Difficulty: Easy peasy until drunk

Prep Time:  2-5 minutes

***

1 1/2 oz of  [decent] whiskey.
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp honey
1 lemon wedge
4 cloves
1 cup boiling water


Puncture lemon with cloves. In mug, combine whiskey, brown sugar, and boiling water; stir. Dizzle in honey; stir. Give lemon-clove wedge a good squeeze and drop into mug.

YUM! Also good for sore throats, by the way.

Update! Nano and otherwise



What's your word count, fellow NANO writers?
Anything badass happening with your novels?



As someone who writes and reads for bread and butter, 1,667 words per day, especially on a fairly well-planned novel, is not that bad. Right? Right. This being the undeniable truth, I set my goal for at least 2,000 words per day. Again, not that bad. Right? Right. So I changed my goal--again--and set it for 4,000 words per day on said novel. (On that vein, any of you set wild goals?)

Ermm...

Thursday, November 17, 2011

TCE 44 WIP: The Effected

Well, this is all I got last week; ahh well. *sigh* At least I have a working title, right? Didn't get close to working the prompt into the blurb.

Yeah, erm...lol...



The Effected

I pounded, loud, on one of the heavy metal doors. Pounded hard enough that my fist made a sound like metal on metal. Behind me, I felt the children jump, long over pretending to be brave. Bravery equaled stupidity in days like these. There was no answer, but I knew someone had to be inside the warehouse or factory of whatever this building was. I’d been sure I’d seen steam, from the hill of the overpass, and standing outside its doors there was the smell of laundry drying. Laundry, of all things. I pounded again.


A face appeared in the narrow window pane. It was the face of a girl, still a teenager but probably only in number. The glass fogged up in front of her breath, but I saw her eyes dart behind me to Pilar and Michael, still in their school uniforms. When the face ducked down, the sound of grinding, metal on concrete, perhaps, came through the door, and then it opened.

“Do you have it?”

“No,” I said, pulling the children forward so she could check their jaws and mine, their eyes and mine. We hadn’t displayed any of the symptoms, even as far as we’d came. Not one.

“Get in.” And we did. The metal door banged shut.




The gilr-woman led us round about through a thick hallway, then offices, then into an open area, machines still present—looked like a plastics plant—but now littered also with makeshift cots and various items of the few living within its walls. Her head jerked at my shoulder, where my semi-automatic hung, making her long red hair jump with the force of her gesture.

“Not gonna happen,” I told her with my own head jerk. “You don’t get my gun. Like hell.” I sounded way more bitchy than I ever had before the drug bombs, but then, I hadn’t any reason to be bitchy back then. I’d stolen this gun fair and square, and it had helped us get all the way from Midtown to out here, where the suburbs turned back into the boondocks.

“Don’t be a bitch,” she said. “None of us are carrying. We can’t let you keep that on you. Just stash it some place; we won’t look.”

Pilar nudged me.

“I don’t want to go back out there, Auntie,” she said. “My nose hurts…and I’m tired. Real tired.”

“We both are,” mumbled Michael. I said nothing. The girl and the seven other people stared at me, inching behind the lumbering machines, as I stared at them.

“Let her keep the gun, for now,” a voice called. The man to whom it belonged stepped from a back left doorway I hadn’t yet noticed. He wore a gun too, I saw, but it was a handgun, snug against his waist. “John?” His voice was grim. Another man, presumably John, dislodged himself from behind a machine.

“Come on,” John said, a gray fringe around his head like a monk’s tonsure. “Let ol’ Doc take a look at you.”

Saturday, November 5, 2011

TCE 44--Rudyard's Clara

Okay, so I was playing with verb tenses in this and it probably reads a little funky; hopefully I'll get that squared away soon. The TCE prompt was  "Fell down a well/ It should be pretty/ Like a little fairy tale."

Here you go!


Rudyard's Clara 
You’d think being dead would mean you don’t care about the living. But you’d think wrong. In fact, I’ve seen so much of humanity…well, suffice to say that on occasion it’s hard not to get attached. A beautiful soul really sticks out when you’re dead, it shines, almost. Like a beacon. A very hard to ignore beacon of everything you miss about life.

My beacon likes to hang wallpaper.

“Why do you live alone here?” I asked Clara. She’d bought the house from the bank because they lady before couldn’t pay her bills. I’d never liked that woman; she smelled like old cats, only she had none, and I haven’t had a real nose in 217 years, so my olfactory sense is a little dim; she smelled that bad. Clara was a different story. She smells like the honeysuckle blowing through the window she’d hung the lace curtain upon.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Friday Fave: Cold Weather Soup

It's finally chilly here, with gray dawns, gray days and brilliant sunsets. Which means it's nearing winter, and time for cold weather soup. Yum. So this week--yet again--my Friday Fave is a recipe.

Cheater's Potato Soup

Difficulty: Easy!

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cook Time:  20? minutes

***

Four potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 small mushroom cap, diced (optional)
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/2 stick butter (butter, yum!)
1/4 cup-ish instant mashed potatoes
1/4 cup-ish water
2 cups-ish milk or heavy cream
healthy amount of parsley
pinch nutmeg
salt
pepper

Cheddar cheese for topping


In medium saucepan, melt 2 tbsp of butter. Saute onions until soft; add mushroom and saute until soft and onions are lightly browned. Add potatoes and remaining butter, bring heat to med-med-high. Add water, salt, pepper and parsley. Lid and simmer until potatoes are done al dente, stirring occasionally. Add splash of milk to moisten, then add instant mashed potatoes and nutmeg. Pour in remaining milk slowly, stirring and pouring until just a little more liquefied than you actually want it, as it will thicken. Cook for another minute or so, stirring gently.

Serve immediately with cheddar cheese and hunk of sourdough!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

NANOWRIMO Is Here!



NANOWRIMO is officially in full swing. Anyone start writing yet? Anyone get a purty Paint star for writing during the wee hours?

Feel free to tell me all about your titles, your plots, your characters, or that one thread you can't stop reading when you really should be writing, or, you know, sleeping. Like that thread about DID/MPD. Incredibly interesting, right? My username is Jimothea, if you want to contact me on NANO.

Here's my stats:

Title: "Of These Fine Days"
Genre: Err...Lit fic. Basically.
POV: Third Person limited.
MC: Emilie Hirsch, age 8-29
Current Word Count: 2018


What about you?