Erich T. Wade

I swear this isn’t just spontaneously a food blog. I’m sure I’ll blog about something else soon.

An old Lifehacker tip pointed me to Recipe Matcher, a site where you can type in what’s in your pantry and be directed to recipes that use those ingredients. Given my current goal, this is really freakin’ cool. And it pointed me to a ridiculously simple peanut butter cookie recipe: all you need is peanut butter, sugar, and an egg.

These are really tasty.

A few notes:

• I took pictures. I swear I did. Apparently the sugar high from these things was so intense that it hit about fifteen minutes ahead of time, because all the pictures look like they were taken by a hyperactive vibrating gerbil.
• The recipe doesn’t say to grease the pan, and I assumed that the oils from the peanut butter would keep the cookies from sticking. This was correct.
• These cookies are really, really soft and crumbly, especially right when they come out. I thought I hadn’t cooked them long enough at first (I went for the low end of the cooking time), but as it turns out I nearly burned a couple of them.
• These cookies are incredibly rich. I accidentally made myself sick on them, and it didn’t take long at all. Also my whole family is vibrating like hyperactive gerbils.

Right! So the stewe was delicious.

It was savory, had a nice mixture of textures, and some stuff that doesn’t apply to all stews as well. The bits of zucchini squash were especially good. I almost didn’t notice the apple in there, but appreciated it when I did. There was a slight spicy aftertaste – this is not a spicy-hot dish, my wife had no issue with it, but the taste was there. I’d recommend it. I’d do it again, but given how I tend to experiment with dishes like this, I don’t think this exact stew will ever come out of my kitchen again.

Here, have a before-and-after-cooking shot of the crockpot:

Our plan had originally been to eat dinner around six or seven, or whenever depending on when we got to go look at a house, but looking at the house got postponed and we got hungry. In the end we ate about 4 PM, the stew having crocked for about 5 hours.

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Current Music: Scarborough Fair by Simon and Garfunkel. This has been stuck in my head for about two and a half days now, and I think I may forfeit my life if I play it again sans headphones near my wife any time soon.

When I was writing up supper last night, there are two things that completely slipped my mind. First, our crockpot is broken. The last time we tried to use it we checked in at the several hour mark and discovered that it was still cold — well, you know, room temperature really. Not hot, is the point. The other thing that slipped my mind was that, yesterday being Thursday, that makes today Friday, which is (1) the day Summer and I usually go over to my aunt’s house in the morning and (2) the day we’re all eating dinner at my aunt’s, what with her going on a trip tomorrow and all. As it turns out my aunt was planning a roast for dinner, but since we still don’t know exactly when today we’re going to get to look at a house we’re interested in it would be difficult to time the roast correctly.

Luckily, these problems all contain the solution to one another. My aunt and I just got done throwing a stew in the crockpot which is heavily inspired by the aforementioned Greene Beef Stew: she didn’t have any brown sugar on hand and didn’t really want to add any, nor did she have seasoning salt, but on the other hand she had some other stuff she wanted to use up before she left. The final ingredients list looks about like so:

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Greene Beefe Stewe – Wade Porke Variante*

• 1 lb boneless pork sirloin roast, cubed
• about a dozen baby carrots, sliced (I made sure the total carrot volume was about right)
• 3 celery stalks, chopped
• 4 yellow potatoes, diced
• about a third of a really big red onion, chopped
• 1 cup corn
• 1 large clove garlic, minced (This was probably equivalent to 2 normal cloves; we had another clove that would have brought the equivalent total up to 3, but it was moldy so we didn’t use it.)
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tbsp olive oil (used to brown meat)
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp marjoram
• 1/2 tsp rosemary
• 3 cups beef bullion & 1 cup pork bullion
• 1 small zuchinni squash, chopped
• 1 red and 1 green sweet pepper, chopped
• 1 small Red Delicious apple, cored and chopped

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The stew is now sitting in the crockpot, making my aunt’s house smell really good and patiently waiting for us to end its life sometime around six or seven tonight. I have a great picture, but since the cable for my camera is at home, you’re just going to have to imagine it. Or wait, I guess. You could do that.

In the meantime, worry not, I intend to make actual Greene Beefe Stewe next week, since my aunt has been so kind as to offer me the use of her crockpot during her absence.

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*I totally asked permission to do this to the stewe’s name, because it makes me giggle. It also makes me giggle that the words that actually have e’s and the names are the same. It’s entirely possible that I’m easily amused. Or short on sleep. Those look a lot alike.

I apologize if the resized images kill anyone. WordPress is being stupid and I’m tired of fighting it today.

Hi, Summer! Whatcha reading?

Oh.

Oh God.

The funny thing is, I actually took it from her and put it back on the shelf once. She really wanted to ‘read’ this particular book. She sat there with it for about ten minutes, saying “E I M” over and over and occasionally turning a page one direction or another.

Only a test. (more…)

I mentioned a plan to list the books from NPR’s top 100 Sci-Fi/Fantasy list that I plan to read. Here it is.

Remember, you have standing permission to skip the list. (Or skip to the bottom. Or whatever.)

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Books I plan to read for the first time this year

A Song of Ice and Fire series, by George R. R. Martin: I’ve read A Game of Thrones, and I loved it, and now I’m going to go ahead and read the whole thing. This will, of course, involve re-reading the first book.

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.

The Princess Bride, by William Goldman

Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley: I read about half of this at some point when I was younger, but for some reason I never finished it.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Phillip K. Dick

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

The Dark Tower series, by Stephen King (7 books): I’ve read The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, but not the rest.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein

The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller

The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny

The Belgariad, by David Eddings

The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Ringworld, by Larry Niven

The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien: I once checked this out from the library and tried to read it. The attempt was aborted.

The Once and Future King, by T.H. White

Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

Stardust, by Neil Gaiman

Cryptonomicon, by Neil Stephenson

The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

The Forever War, by Joe Halderman

Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett: Pratchett is one of my favorite authors, but I doubt I’ve even read a third of his work.

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson (3 books): I’m not going to worry about The Second Chronicles or The Last Chronicles for now.

The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold (. . . 19 books?): 19 books? Really? I knew there’d be a couple of series in there that would inflate the number over a hundred, but I figured the books I’d already read would in turn drop the number a bit. 19 books. I don’t know enough about the Vorkosigan saga to even begin to decide how to chop that down. Still, I’ve heard they’re really good . . .

The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle: I think this is the one where they had to cut the manuscript size by 10%, so they figured out how many words per page that was and went through the manuscript page-by-page tightening up the prose. Writing Excuses has told the story a couple of times.

The Sword of Truth, by Terry Goodkind: 12 books. Thirteen if you count the prequel. Oh, dear.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke: Hey, I was about to read this one anyway! Sweet.

I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist

The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks

The Conan The Barbarian series, by R.E. Howard: I’ve read Robert Jordan’s Conan books, but not the originals.

The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb

The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson: This has been sitting on the shelf by my computer for almost a year. I keep thinking I’ll read it next, but then I see this other really good book that would fit into it eight or nine times with room to spare.

Sometimes I think I’m not cut out to be an epic fantasy fan.

The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson

The Kushiel’s Legacy series, by Jacqueline Carey. I’m not even going to look up how many books are in it. I know I’m doomed.

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’ve read a lot of Le Guin’s stuff – Rocannon’s World was actually one of the earliest sci-fi books I can remember reading – but by no means have I read everything. I meant to fix that this year, but it didn’t happen.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. I keep thinking of this song by Rachel Bloom (NSFW) when I come across the Bradbury books, and it’s really catchy. If I’m not careful I’m going to burst out singing it in the supermarket, and that would be a very bad thing.

Wicked, by Gregory Maguire: And probably Son of a Witch too, since the copy I have contains both of them.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, by Steven Erikson: I got the first book for $3 while it was on sale a couple of weeks ago. This sounds like a good series. Well, obviously, what with it being on the list and all.

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde

The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks

The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart: And the sequels.

The Codex Alera series, by Jim Butcher

The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe

The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn

The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan

The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock

The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury: (“. . . the greatest sci-fi writer in his-tory . . .”)

Sunshine, by Robin McKinley

A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge

Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis

The Space Trilogy, by C. S. Lewis: I’ve read the first book, and it was really good. It was short, too, which is an increasingly appealing trait as I look at this list.

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Books I Plan to Re-Read This Year

Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card: I haven’t read this since before ASMSA, which is a damn shame, and it’s not a long book.

Dune, by Frank Herbert: I read it once before and thought it was, well, okay. Then, later, I learned just how INCREDIBLY AMAZING it apparently is. I’ve tried to reread it several times, but never gotten more than a few pages in. This seems like a good time to give it another try. The NPR actually lists “The Dune Chronicles,” but I’ve heard only bad things about the sequels. I might give them a try some time, but probably not this year.

The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov (at least 3 books): I last read this in . . . middle school? I’m not sure yet whether I’ll read the whole series or just the original trilogy.

The Wheel of Time series, by Robert Jordan (and Brandon Sanderson) (14 books, since I’ll be reading New Spring as well): This has been on my list for a while. I didn’t re-read the whole series before A Gathering Storm, but it’s been long enough that I want to do a full re-read before starting Towers of Midnight. As a result, Towers has been sitting unread on my shelf for nearly a year now. This must end.

The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss (1 book remaining): I’ve been re-reading these alongside Jo Walton’s re-read on Tor.com, and I’m finally caught up again. So I’ll be finishing up Wise Man’s Fear at a pace of about five chapters a week as I read along.

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke (4 books): I’ll actually re-read the whole series, even though only the first book is on the list. I haven’t read these since middle school. Or grade school. I’m not sure. Was I a Clarke fan yet in 5th grade? Maybe Mom remembers . . .

The Sandman series, by Neil Gaiman: I’ve read . . . a lot of this. Most of it. Maybe all of it. It’s worth re-reading to make sure.

Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keys: I don’t remember if I read the short story version or the novel version.

Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke: I’m certain I’ve read this – there was a period in my childhood when I read basically everything by Clarke I could find, anywhere – but I don’t remember which one it is. Is it the one that has the hyperevolved raccoon in the sequel?

Contact, by Carl Sagan: Yet another one that I picked up and put back down when I was younger. I think I might have been seven or eight at the time. My grandfather had a huge sci-fi collection, and I was always digging through it. That’s where I got my introduction to Clarke and Asimov, first read A Gun for Dinosaur, and read a really fantastic time-travel short story that I have never since been able to find.

A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne: I’ve read this, I’m sure I have. I think. I’ve read a lot of really old Journey to the Center of the Earth books. Is this the one where they go down through a dormant volcano, and get lost at (subterranean) sea on a raft? Or is this perhaps the one with the drill machine and the – naked tribal woman, right, that would be Burroughs. I think this is the volcano one. That one was good. I read it a lot as a kid.

Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke: This is one of my all-time favorite books. I don’t know if I’ll read the sequels or not this time. Well, I’ll probably at least read Rama II — but then of course I’d have to read The Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed. And I now know there are two more novels in the Rama universe that Gentry Lee wrote later on, and I’d probably better stick to just Rama I this year because this list is getting pretty big.

The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov: Again, probably around middle school when I last read this.

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Books I Might Re-Read This Year, Time and Inclination Permitting

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien: I’ve actually only read them once or twice, back in high school, and I’ve been meaning to reread them for a while. (The Hobbit, on the other hand, I’ve read rather a lot.) They are pretty long, though, and I have a lot of reading to do. However, I’ve never read The Silmarillion in full, and it might be a good idea to read them together.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. I probably won’t re-read the whole series this year, but I stand a good chance of rereading at least the first book.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

Watchmen, by Alan Moore: At some point I’ll probably watch the movie and re-read the book. I still haven’t seen the movie.

I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov

Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson: This is right up there with the Rama series on my favorite-books-of-all-time shelf. Er, actually, I think I like this better than the Rama books. Wow. I never knew that. These are long, dense books, but they’re so, so worth it.

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Books I Have read, and Will Not Re-Read This Year

1984, by George Orwell

Animal Farm, by George Orwell

The Stand, by Stephen King

Watership Down, by Richard Adams

The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne

The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells

The Mistborn series, by Brandon Sanderson

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin

The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons

World War Z, by Max Brooks

Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett: One of my favorites, but I’ve got to chop the list down to size somehow.

The Legend of Drizzt series, by R. A. Salvatore: I used to be such a huge Drizzt fan. I probably still like the books, actually, I just have so many bad memories of Drizzt clones in gaming . . .

Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville: Great book. Incredibly depressing.

The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony: If I ever read this entire series back-to-back, I think I would explode. Maybe in 2013.

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Right. So I was going to keep a tally of how many books are actually on my list, but I lost hope around the third or fourth epic fantasy series. Seriously, I’m starting to see why some people dislike them so much.

A couple of things jumped out at me while I was making this list. For one thing, there are a lot of books here that I started and never finished. Some of these I may have just been too young to appreciate at the time. (I read about half of Frankenstein when I was, oh, nine or ten. I think I was seven or eight when I first picked up Contact. Both were eventually dropped because they were too boring.) On the other hand, I read a lot of stuff when I was young. I would have been in sixth or seventh grade, I think, when I started reading Asimov; I got hooked on Clarke a bit earlier. I think. It’s all a little fuzzy that far back. But I clearly remember reading Carson of Venus when I was in third grade.

Another thing I noted is that I read a great deal of classic sci-fi around middle school. I don’t know exactly when I read most of it, but I’d say between fifth and eighth grade or so was when I read every Clarke, Asimov, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs book available in my home library, my grandfather’s library, the school libraries, and the public library. I clearly remember a period of time when I would turn in my finished books at the public library, go to where the Clarke books were on the shelves, and grab whatever was next in line. One year for Christmas I got the collected short stories and the collected essays of Clarke (equally large volumes); the book of essays is on hand as I speak, but my beloved book of his short stories is nowhere to be found. I really wish I knew where it is.

But enough reminiscing. I have a lot of reading to do before January 2013.

Dear Summer,

It’s 5:45 AM. Please consider sleeping.

Sincerely,

Dad

Today, I have tried to maintain a policy of not letting the 9/11 anniversary get me down.  It’s what everybody’s talking about, but I don’t really feel like dwelling on the worst parts of the last decade for a day.

Instead, here are two related articles that really lifted my spirits.

Gander, Newfoundland’s hospitality

An extraordinary fighter pilot

Both were shared with me by friends via Google Reader. Many thanks to both of you*.

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*I have a general policy of not using peoples’ names, even first names, without first asking them. But I’ll happily pop your names in if you want.

If you thought of mind-bullets, at least we’re on the same wavelength.

I’ve been trying to do a bit of outlining this morning. I don’t do this much, and I feel like talking about why, so here goes.

First of all, I’m not an outline writer.  I discovery-write most stuff, and I find that an outline just gets in the way during the initial draft.  It tends to be something that I put together after the fact, as a tool to use during revisions.  This means that Derelict is right smack in the middle of the “I need an outline” stage.  I’ve also been trying to get something new written — more on that later — and in an effort to try something new, I’m trying working with outlines ahead of time.  So pretty much everything I’m doing right now, writing-wise, is outline-intensive.

The problem is that I don’t have any outlining software that I really like.  Honestly, I have yet to encounter an outliner that even approaches MS Word’s outline view; however, I don’t feel like shelling out the dough for what will essentially be a really expensive outliner program, since I’m pretty happy with the document editors I typically use.  (Mostly OpenOffice and Google Docs, with a splash of WordPad and occasional forays into programs such as Jarte.  You know, if you’re curious.)  I’m just not happy with the outline  capabilities of any of the above.

I’ve encountered a couple of good dedicated outliners — Noteliner being the real winner — but they tend to have a couple of little quirks that drive me crazy.  Noteliner, for instance, kind of assumes that you’ll be putting all your notes in one file.  For everything.  All your projects, work and home, your daily schedule and to-do lists . . . in one file.  It’s designed to make this work pretty well, but it still drives me nuts.  If memory serves, I can’t even open multiple instances at once, which is a bit of a dealbreaker.  It also has a proprietary format, which fundamentally isn’t a big deal but still makes me nervous.  (What if it breaks forever?)

Basically, what I want is a WYSIWIG outline program.  I’d prefer it to save in a portable or at least non-native format — .doc or .odt would be fine, .rtf would be ideal.  The outline level could probably be stored as the indention settings, if necessary.  Perhaps most importantly, you could collapse and expand sections willy-nilly.  It would ideally have robust customizability and keyboard shortcuts that are available, but not necessary to learn up-front.  Oh, and it needs to gracefully handle everything from small lists of notes to novels.

But enough about that.

When I trawl the net for potential outline solutions, which I do about twice a year, I always run into mind-mapping.  Mind-mapping is something I’ve always liked in theory, but have never had work really well for me.  Even so, I tend to recommend Freemind to anyone who looks interested, because I can tell it’s a fantastic tool.  Part of the problem is that I tend to run across it when I’m trying to find a good method of outlining, and it just doesn’t work as an outliner for me.  (Among other things, it really doesn’t lend itself well to expanding outline points into scenes and chapters.)  I keep it installed, though, because I always think I’m going to find it useful someday.  Like today.

Turns out, it’s an amazing brainstorming tool.  Who knew?  (Don’t answer that.)  Every time I’ve used it before I’ve tried to turn one of the nodes into the parent of a proto-outline; then I get frustrated and quit.  Except the time I tried to make twenty or thirty cross-node links, building more of a web than its default tree structure.  Hint: Don’t do that.

So my outlining session turned into more of a brainstorming session, but that’s fine, I’ll take whatever progress I can get.

Freemind is not a tool that I can use as for long-term notekeeping on a project.  For that I need something a bit more robust in the interlinking and verbosity department: Wikidpad works best so far, despite a few minor quirks that bug the heck out of me.*  (You’ll find that’s a recurring theme with me.)

But if I need a place to record quick thoughts on a project, or when I’m brainstorming ideas and don’t want to get bogged down in outlines or prose yet, it’s a hard tool to beat.

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*For the record, the biggest issue for me is how the linking works.  Basically, the link has to be the name of the page it links to.  I can’t have the text “Lily” link directly to “Starfire Lily;” I can either put in her full name every time, or have “Lily” link to a disambiguation page.  Worse, in my home campaign there are around fifteen different versions of Starfire Lily from various alternate universes.  If I’m writing a page about a particular Lily’s exploits — session notes, for instance — I have to resort to constructs like “ApocalypseLily” or “FeyLily” (the Lily from the Apocalypse alterna, who actually goes by Adriana now; or the Lily from the as-yet-unnamed alterna where she had a mostly normal childhood, save for a fey pact).

I’d much rather say “Lily” and have it link to whichever Lily is relevant. Better yet, I’d like to be able to say “her sword” and have it link directly to the article on Lightbringer.  You know, like normal hyperlinks can do.  If there’s a way to do this in Wikidpad I haven’t found it, and you win about fifty points if you point it out to me.

EDIT: And fifty points go to my friend Pip.  As it turns out, this is done with a vertical bar, in the format [ActualArticleName|What you want them to see].  Thank you, Pip.  You have saved Wikidpad for me.