Category: Uncategorized

So, If Only One In Eleven Persons in Britain Are Catholic……one does wonder why the Pope came by. The BBC called it a missionary visit. Well, then.

If you, too, live in an area of heathens, you might well get a Papal visit as well. Although I’m sure the Presbyterians, who make up the official Church of Scotland, are a bit baffled by this…

In any event, most Glaswegians couldn’t seem to care less one way or the other, although they do seem to take a dim view of anyone who manages to get the M8 closed at five minutes to five on a weekday! If you peer closely at the picture, you can see that, between a line of yellowy-blue police cars and backed by a yellowy-blue ambulance, there are only white vehicles on the overpass there in one direction, and the outer lanes are filled with carefully spaced parked cars, probably containing police and Home Office security personnel. The Papal convoy itself has no cars in color. Handy, we suppose, to keep track of one another on an empty freeway.

D. took this shot from the window at Skypark (work). This is as close to the madness as we wanted to get, although the Catholic chaplain at the University did send out an email to invite us to buy a £25 ticket to Mass.

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On The Baking Front… Last week we discovered that there’s no such thing as date bars here. T. had cooked down figs and dates, added a bit of cinnamon and cardamon and then sandwiched the resulting sweet sludge between a bit of olive oil “butter,” rolled oats, flour, and sugar to make what we always thought were date bars. At least, that’s what they were when we were little. Since we made what must have been a triple recipe (and ended up with thirty-five squares), D. rescued us from T’s baking largess and took them to work. They were pounced on, pronounced, “gorgeous,” and scarfed. But there was bewilderment when D. called them date bars. “What? You mean the slice?”

Slice. Yes. Apparently we made date slice. Since it’s not actually… sliced, per se, we can’t figure out what makes some things slice and other things just… bars. Or cake. But anyway, it was so good and went so fast, we don’t even have pictures.

The strangely cool summer has given way to a wet and wild end, but a few sunnier days have finally prompted berries and such to ripen. Our friend A. shared a few currants from his garden.

Now, given a choice between currants and raisins, this household will always choose raisins, because they’re a familiar sweet, and don’t have stupid little seeds in them which get caught in one’s teeth. However, it seems most Brits prefer currants, so we thought we’d give them a shot. There are several kinds – this red variety is not the sort which is widely used for drying, as it is quite tart, but it works well in jams and jellies, having a gorgeous clear red color which clarifies in heat. Because we really only had a handful left after tasting them, we added plums from A’s tree, which are lovely and sweet, and made a currant plum sauce. (It would have been jam except a.) T. was bothered by the amount of sugar it would take something that tart to gel, and b.) added too little cornstarch.

Our sauce is quite, quite tasty. Unlike traditional Asian plum sauce, which has a very dark, complex flavor, based on being made with plums first cured in salt, this currant plum sauce is a lot like cranberry sauce – bright and fresh with shadings of tartness and bitterness from the skins contrasting well with the plum’s sweetness. It goes nicely with our seitan sausages.

The plan this weekend is to hop the train to Largs and then take a ferry to a nearby island. We’ll hike off the beaten path to the wild bits, and plunder the blackberries growing there. Wild blackberries are smaller than ones found in the store, but we hear the flavor is more intense. A. doesn’t think they’ll be useful for jam because “well, they’ve got all of those seeds,” but he’s obviously never heard of a strainer, and T. is well practiced from squishing the currants through a sieve last time. Stay tuned for pictures, and cross your fingers that it doesn’t rain – much.

…The face of the sea is always

changing. Crossed by

colors, lights, and moving shadows,

sparkling in the sun, mysterious

in the twilight, its aspects

and its moods vary hour by hour.

The surface waters move

with the tides, stir to the breath

of the winds, and rise and fall

to the endless, hurrying

forms of the waves.

~ Rachel Carson, from The Sea Around Us

We’re beach people. We’re of that Northern California breed who simply cannot live too far inland, who cringe at the thought of life without an ocean nearby. Massive rocks and booming surf? Freezing waves? That’s the beach to us. (This to differentiate “beach” from the Southern Californian understanding which actually includes sand and getting into the water sans wetsuit. For behold, there they fear not undertow nor riptide, nor sharks, nor hypothermia… lucky buggers. But we like our cold mean shores.) And it sickened us, and continues to, as we continue to hear of the tremendous toll taken on the waters of the Gulf. Not our waves, no. Not our concept of “beach.” But it’s hard to hear, hard to bear knowing that not only have decades worth of livelihoods and millions of animals perished in the gush of oil, but quiet places for peace – which we all need so badly – are destroyed and diminished.

So, when we heard that our friend Kelly was part of BREAKING WAVES, we were doubly glad – first because she’s an amazing poet, second because she’s a perfectly wonderful human being (with whom T. has been “blog buddies” for about three years, and whom she met in person for the first time this past June at the ALA Convention). We’re very proud to do a little commercial for Breaking Waves.

Breaking Waves, edited by Tiffany Trent and Phyllis Irene Radford, is a collection of 34 poems, memoirs, short stories, and articles (including an excerpt from Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us). It sells for $4.99 U.S., and all proceeds go 100% to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund of the Greater New Orleans Foundation – which spreads donations between organizations that help fishermen and their families, with not only direct assistance to the local fishing families but also funding to the SPCA, environmental monitoring via the “Bucket Brigade” and more.

The book begins with a poem by Ursula K. Leguin (if you have any sci-fi geekatude, this is exciting), and ends with Kelly’s poem, “Troubled Water.” The work in between, by writers and poets from various genres, varies, but all come back to the sea. The collection is hosted at Book View Cafe, and downloadable in DRM-Free formats: epub, mobi, pdf, prc.

What’s that saying? “Where there’s life, there’s hope?” More from Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us:

…But the symbols of hope are not lacking

even in the grayness and bleakness of the winter sea.

On land we know that the apparent lifelessness of winter

is an illusion. Look closely at the bare branches of a tree,

on which not the palest gleam of green can be discerned.

Yet spaced along each branch are the leaf buds,

all the spring’s magic of swelling green concealed

and safely preserved under the insulating, overlapping layers.

Pick off a piece of the rough bark of the trunk;

there you will find hibernating insects.

Dig down through the snow into the earth.

There are the eggs of next summer’s grasshoppers;

there are the dormant seeds from which will come

the grass, the herb, the oak tree.

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So, too, the lifelessness, the hopelessness, the despair

of the winter sea are an illusion.

Everywhere are the assurances that the cycle has come

to the full, containing the means of its own renewal.

There is the promise of a new spring in the very iciness

of the winter sea, in the chilling of the water,

which must, before many weeks, become so heavy

that it will plunge downward, precipitating the overturn

that is the first act in the drama of spring.

There is the promise of new life in the small plantlike things

that cling to the rocks of the underlying bottom,

the almost formless polyps from which, in spring,

a new generation of jellyfish will bud off and rise

into the surface waters. There is unconscious purpose

in the sluggish forms of the copepods hibernating

on the bottom, safe from the surface storms,

life sustained in their tiny bodies by the extra store

of fat with which they went into this winter sleep…

Thus ends our commercial break. Thanks for reading.

It is always better to do a small thing than nothing at all.

A long time ago, we came up with the fairly daft idea of making our own marshmallows.

Okay – it wasn’t really such a daft idea, as far as our rather ridiculous cooking experiments go — store-bought marshmallows are, unless otherwise stated, made with gelatin, which is generally made from the hooves and bones of various animals, and so most vegetarians are not at all keen on the idea of eating them, if they think about it at all (and most of us DON’T, when we’re kids or we’re offered them on camping trips, and then later we wince a bit). What was daft was that after we took a look at various awesome recipes from the interwebs (Smitten Kitchen’s recipe really is good, and if you’re going to eat gelatin marshmallows, it might be good make your own – unless you’ve identified what BHT and TBHQ are…), we decided to actually use mallow — the plant — and try to sort of reverse engineer what people did in the olden days before cornstarch.

Let us draw a veil over some of our…er… rather sticky, stringy, weirdly stretchy and singed results.

While it probably works just fine for other people, we did something really, REALLY wrong, scorched a lot of sugar, and suffice it to say, after we de-sticky-fied the kitchen, we haven’t gotten up our nerve to try again. We could have of course, but we reasoned, Hey, we don’t really like marshmallows all that much anyway.

And — we don’t. The marshmallows of our childhood were always too sweet. They were sort of …rubbery. The powdered sugar on them always got on everything – cheeks, lips, fingers, chins. In the realm of Really Pointless Foods, marshmallows are right up on top of the list…where they would have safely stayed, if it weren’t for our friend Jac.

Jac is a vegetarian who, lacking an American upbringing, has never endured Girl Scouts, Brownies, Pathfinders, Girl Guides, or S’mores. For some appalling reason, she truly, dearly, desperately wanted to try them, and asked us to get her some vegan marshmallows from the U.S. a couple of years ago. We tried. We went home three times over thirty-six months, and could never remember to get over to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s or when we did, we found them cleaned out of vegan marshmallows or only carrying organic marshmallows – made, apparently, with organic horse’s hooves – and we were stumped, and T. got aggravated. She got serious about searching, only to discover that Jac had finally sourced her own marshmallows. Another friend of hers had gone to the East Coast and brought some back for her just this past June, along with the requisite graham crackers and Hershey’s chocolate (which, she informs us, “tastes like sick.” We snicker at this and say, Just wait ’til you taste S’mores, Jac…).

So, Jac had her S’mores makings, and we had two packages of locally sourced vegan marshmallows we weren’t sure we wanted. D. was all for carting them off to Jac’s house anyway, and we will probably do that with our other package, but T. decided we should try something we haven’t enjoyed in awhile – Rice Krispy Treats.

Whole Foods used to carry a rice whip… thing… that was essentially a tub of marshmallow fluff, only it was made from brown rice syrup. It worked perfectly well with Rice Krispy or any puffed grain cereal to make the “treats” and we used it to make the Littles popcorn balls sometimes, too. However, we’d never tried vegan marshmallows – for a couple of reasons. First, they were hard to find. Second, there were questions of what a vegan marshmallow actually was. And, would they melt? Could we roast them? We tried these things with our Sweet Vegan marshmallows, and found to our surprise that the answer was yes! While they didn’t melt exactly like a gelatin marshmallows – they turned into a big soft pillowy ball of foam instead of liquid lava — they softened enough to work with in just a few seconds in the microwave. Roasting produced an all-over tanning — over a campfire would have been better, because then we could have seen how long they took to burn, which is really how they taste best. (Ahem. However, in a bid not to thoroughly mess up the kitchen, we refrained.)

In answer to the question of “what are they,” our bag of small vanilla marshmallows are made with Sugar, water, glucose syrup, carrageenan, corn starch, soy protein, Madagascar vanilla and a powdered sugar topping. We were a little revolted to discover we could have ordered them in strawberry, chocolate, or coconut flavors — which just seems weird. Who ever heard of flavored marshmallows? There’s a Lucky Charms or Count Chocula application in there somehow. We were also disappointed to discover that our vegan marshmallows contain no mallow. Of course, the jet-puffed store-bought ones don’t, either, but… we somehow expected mallow to be a base ingredient. Carregeenan – which is seaweed! – is a great substitute for the sticky, stringy mallow, however, and really served to make these a lot like the real gelatin-based confection.

We took our plain vanilla-esque mini-marshmallows out of the microwave, poured in our rice cereal, squooshed them into a brick on a convenient cutting board, and let them cool. Et voilà – Rice Krispy Treats! We were surprised how well it worked. Though we basically followed the “recipe” on the cereal box, we would actually have preferred to use more rice cereal, and will do so if we make these again. The Sweet Vegan marshmallows really have a lot of stretching power – they’re moist and dense and can take more cereal than we expected. Of course, everyone has their own Krispy Treat preferences, so you’ll have to experiment on your own.

Vegans and vegetarians in the U.S. have lots of choices for marshmallow purchasing – Sweet & Sara is carried in quite a few West Coast stores like WF and TJ’s, as are the Chicago-based jet-puffed Dandies, both of which can be ordered. (Or, if you make them yourself, do let us know how! We still want to someday make vegan ones which aren’t quite so sweet… when we have a kitchen that’s easier to hose down…)

We’re still not sold on marshmallows as an actually useful food in and of themselves. They’re still too sweet. They’re still too rubbery, and the powdered sugar still gets everywhere. However, Rice Krispy Treats somehow seem to hold the essence of autumn and school lunches, of party food for Hobo Nights and Halloween treats for those of us who didn’t Trick-or-Treat. They hold something of childhood, which make them a must-have-once-in-a-great-while treat.

We have had a week of what T. wistfully calls suede weather, which is weather which is actually both cool and dry, with appropriately atmospheric looking cloud formations, nippy winds, and leaves sailing by. Perfect September weather. A perfect time to zip into something suede, or even faux suede – a nice camel-colored jacket, a pair of knee-high boots… Sadly, living here as we have for the past three years now, we don’t own any suede, not even the fake kind.

Suede in Scotland, unless you own a car and are quite adept at nipping between vehicle-and-building, makes little or no sense. If the water doesn’t stain it, the creeping damp in the closet will make it break out in some unsightly mold (unless it’s the fake kind. Mold seems not to eat microfiber). But for a brief moment this past week, we experienced a moment in autumn like other people do — cool, breezy, and dry.

And of course, the windy was what made the entire city start sneezing. Filth flung through the air has made us all of us walk around with red-rimmed eyes, runny noses, and the mother of all headaches. This household was greatly relieved when the rain started pounding down again at about two o’clock this morning. Suede is overrated.

One thing the wind did do, aside from blinding us with particles of the sandstone which make up Glasgow, was to provide enough particulate matter in the atmosphere to create some of the most amazing sunrises and sunsets. For once, we weren’t socked-in with fog, so could actually see the gradual pinkening of the light, the clouds limned with peach and magenta and that warm golden light which heralds the ascent and descent of the Daystar. (Yes. Purple prose. We could also say “It shure was purty.”) We’ve been getting up early and staying up late to catch these things — not too late, and not too early just yet, as sundown is at eight already, and sunrise is at six thirty-three, so we’ve yet fourteen hours of “light”, give or take a few fogbanks. We are, however, at that steepest point of the year, and darkness is encroaching rapidly.

This is probably our last winter here.

One might expect us to be wistful about this. Hah.

To fight the pull of hibernation, we’ve once again launched ourselves into the arts. The Glasgow City Chorus, which meets at another university, is the most colorful, friendly, slightly insane group of people we’ve met here so far — we’re already wishing we’d met them sooner. The director started the group in the mid-eighties, and he’s… a very good example of a Scotsman – by turns acerbic, amusing, and full of stories. The chorus have a rather frightening schedule of concerts, compared with the easy two-per-year we’ve been used to with the University, and we’ve waded right in to learning the Cherubini Requiem in C Minor, which is a gorgeous and under-appreciated piece. Much to T’s delight, we’re also doing the Faure Requiem for our November concert, which she did in high school, and for which she still has a battered score. (Although D. has no idea why she bothers with the score as she has it memorized, Latin and all.) We’ve been received with genuine friendliness, and the group, the bulk of which is made up of thirty-fortysomethings, looks like a good match for us – we must now be told whether or not we’re a good match for the director, who wants to listen to our individual voices, etc. etc. This sounds remarkably like an audition, which is a dirty word to T., but she is being dragged along by D. and another friend, so when the dust clears will probably belong to the group.

(We must note that the director is newly dubbed an MBE. We were told this in tones of awe… and then T. had to go look it up. D. already knew it meant Member of the British Empire. T. said, “But, wouldn’t all British people, just by circumstances of birth, be members of the British empire?” Our friend tried to explain that it was a chivalric order, the lowest in the rung of five or so which make up the knighted ranks in the United Kingdom, and T. nodded in all the right places, and then said, “Right. We’ll just call him ‘Nearly Knighted.'”

Not makin’ friends here, that girl.)

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In the days before it became dry and cool, it was periodically dry and clear — thus precipitating once more the time of Great Gouts of Smoke in the Garden, aka Glasgow barbecuing, and rosehips.

The rosehips in question grow in Finneston, which has bits that are all right, and has bits which are, frankly, squicky. We, of course, know all the squicky bits because we had to walk through the dodgy neighborhoods with rank mattresses, unidentifiable (or what you wished you couldn’t identify) trash, vomit and Buckfast bottles strewn about — to get home. But, like that tree growing in Brooklyn, there are wild-ish roses in Finneston… and all summer long they are loaded with blooms. This time of year they always tempt us a teensy bit to harvest the haws or “hips” that are left behind.

We did say a teensy bit. Yes, while water washes away many things, it’s hard to talk yourself into the idea of eating something grown out of that … muck, no matter how good for the health rosehips might be. In any case, they’re not officially considered “ripe” until the first frost, and we’re not quite there yet.

In Alaska we had rosehips dried for tea; apparently they can be used like cranberries to make syrups and jellies and the fruit is baked in crumbles. Maybe we’ll find some grown someplace… cleaner. If not… well, they are filled with Vitamin C. Maybe that will make a difference.

Elsewhere, the United States are still sweltering, or being humidified, or being rained on — perhaps all of us are wishing for windy days and suede. Those days are coming… hang in there.

After the lovely vibe that last little poem brought, it seems horrible to launch into a new week with a rant.

…but we’ll be ranting here anyway.

T. is recognizing that she is a somewhat more public figure than at previous times in her life, and that being more of a public person means occasionally getting interviewed. She actually hates being interviewed. Her inherent shyness, coupled with deep introversion combine to create a person who would much rather talk to people in handwritten letters (possibly written slowly and thoughtfully with ink and quill, and sent by Pony Express) than on the telephone, and she’d much rather swim laps in the English Channel or have her colon irrigated than talk about herself. And yet – this is all part of the package now, and she attempts to attend gracefully, with minimal internal screaming and snark.

(“Attempts” being the operative word. It is still excruciating, and probably always will be.)

Sometimes there are phone interviews, sometimes they’re given face to face, but most often these days there are email interviews.

Given the fact that many of the interviewers are people who a.) have no knowledge of who T. might be, b.) just got assigned this gig, and c.) don’t actually read young adult literature, she’s completely comfortable with filling them in on a few things, and sort of helping them understand who they’re interviewing and, hopefully, why. But the other day she got an email interview question “What are your books and what are they about?” from an interviewer, and had to sit on her hands to prevent herself from sending an Unfortunate Email.

What are your books? Really? That’s all you’ve got? Hon, LET ME GOOGLE THAT FOR YOU.

This interviewer made T. really, really angry. She hates being interviewed anyway, and by someone who doesn’t even do her the simple courtesy of looking up her name and knowing why he’s supposed to be interviewing her to begin with!? — Hello? This is the level of inquiry one could expect from a fifth grader trying to avoid reading a book to write a book report — just write and ask the author to outline the entire plot, because they have nothing better to do than do your work for you, right? This …person is alleged to be a college graduate — obviously disinterested in his subject matter, his interviewee, and sitting somewhere texting, picking his teeth, and expecting T. to prove to him that she’s worth his time.

Oh, NO, no, no.

T. sat and thought about flamethrowers and small hammers and Indiana Jones’ really long braided whip for awhile after getting this email.

And then she took a deep, deep breath…

and let it go.

Good grief: writers. Seriously. If you visit them, they will write about you. It is what they do. They are dangerous, and should be treated with all due care. Or else.

Episode one of our visit, and then two…complete with disturbing pictures.

Ignore us. Concentrate on how pretty the house is…

…than a fond reminiscence. This lovely shot was taken at two thirty-five this morning.

Dark: it’s optional.

What is it about the coming of the summer that makes one want to dye things?

Other people shop. We dye.

Last summer was the Summer of the Fabulous Duvet Cover and Slipcovers of Awesome — which still looks gorgeous, by the way. This summer looks to be the summer of the Necessary Redying of One’s Black Things (which, given the dearth of black dye in the hardware store most of the time is something all Glaswegians do on the weekend.) (You have seriously never seen as much black as people in this city wear. It must be an urban thing; workwear is a virtual uniform of black, black, black and white. Students in their colors stand out, especially in the wintertime), followed by the Fully Unnecessary Dyeing of Anything Cotton One Can Get One’s Hands On, Including One’s Spouse’s Dress Shirts, Much To One’s Spouse’s Dismay.

A small fraction of this dyeing is actually necessary — the vagaries of Yonder Teensy British Washing Machine have left us with some suspicious bleach spots from time to time, because T. refuses to use “thick bleach,” which to her is not bleach at all, but mostly, the dye thing is Just Because. The Sikh gentlemen at the hardware store (which is from whence dye comes around these parts) give us quite odd looks when we come in with requests for cherry red and bright blue.

If it’s not dyeing fabric, it’s dyeing hair (been there, done that, and T. now has the look of a fading red-furred lemur). With the advent of the warm weather, we’ve seen our share of home tie-dye jobs, home hair dye jobs, home tattoos… hm. Maybe that doesn’t count as dye. Anyway — We hope that the sun shines for you today, and you feel inspired to splash about a bit of color. Grab a box of dye – of either sort – crayons, markers, watercolor paints, and join the fun. Color + Light = Magic.

…but perhaps you didn’t know that the Piper of Hamlin actually played one.

::shudder::