This blog post by Peter Ball fills me with the desire to quote all the lines. Well, not all of them. And I haven’t read On Writing, so I can say nothing about the book either way, but. Here, let me just quote bits. It’ll be easier. Read More
I’m looking for recipe ideas! Well, actually, a very dear friend of mine is looking for recipe ideas to rekindle interest in food and I offered to post something to ask my readers/dwircle for help. I’m a lousy cook, so signal boosting is pretty much the best way I can help and I know some of my readers/dwircle are avid cooks or otherwise know a fair deal more recipes than I do.
Obviously, though, these recipes have some specific requirements or any old recipe book would do. I’ll make a bulleted list for everyone’s convenience.
My friend’s all right with adapting recipes if it’s just replacing X ingredient with Y ingredient, so hopefully that last won’t prove much of an issue for people in the recipes they want to recommend. She’s not in a particularly good place right now emotionally, so I really, really mean it when I say that the recipes need to be nutritious!
Anyone have any recipe suggestions? My friend absolutely needs specific, direct, human recommendations because she just isn’t in the headspace to experiment a lot or deal with having to figure out which recipes on a site/in a cookbook are good recipes for her to try right now.
Thank you so much in advance for thinking along or/and signal boosting! <3
ETA: *facepalms* D’oh. You can absolutely link to specific recipes instead of typing them up yourself in a comment! It’s going “Here is a site with lots of recipes for you to look through” that she can’t deal with right now.
ETA2: First, I’d like to give everyone a great big THANK YOU to everyone who’s offered recipes and signal boosted (so far). But what I’m mainly editing for is a brief note brought to my attention by jjhunter.
Below is what my friend mentioned when asked for a slightly more elaborate list:
“Fresh, I can currently get tatties, sweet potato, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, courgettes, spinach, tomatoes, asparagus, carrots, chives, eggs (providing the hens are laying well)…cheeses…onions. Green/red peppers, lemons and aubergines in the big supermarkets if I’m lucky. Dried or canned I can get pearl barley, pasta, lentils, various beans, peas, sometimes sweetcorn. Probably couscous if I looked for it.”
I hope that helps people!
When I grew up there were a couple of movies that I’d watch over and over and over. The Last Unicorn was one of them, but it was years before I realised that the movie was based on a book — we’d taped it when it was on TV, you see, and that bit of rather crucial information did not survive — and it would be years more before I finally got my hands on a copy of the book by Peter S. Beagle. In fact, it was a gift for my 18th birthday. I was enchanted. It’s one of the few books I’ve allowed myself to reread after my TBR pile got completely out of control and it’s one of the few books on my “My precious” shelf, also known as the “I am not lending this to you even if you live in the same house as me” shelf. (I’m very protective of those books; if anyone’s going to accidentally wreck them or read them until they fall apart, it’s me.)
The Last Unicorn was a comfort read during a dark time for me too. I have all the love and feels for this book (and the movie) for all sorts of reasons, which is getting rather in the way of writing a great introduction to my read-along plans, but promises you will get copious amounts of squee later on. I promise to try and have interesting discussion questions (and answers), but my lack of self-confidence keeps me from guaranteeing you’ll have that, sorry. T_T Hence why the squeeing is important. There will be lots of squeeing and squealing.
The Last Unicorn is Peter S. Beagle’s most famous work. Have a description of the plot (don’t worry, it’s a back blurb with little-to-no spoilers):
The unicorn discovers that she is the last unicorn in the world, and sets off to find the others. She meets Schmendrick the Magician–whose magic seldom works, and never as he intended–when he rescues her from Mommy Fortuna’s Midnight Carnival, where only some of the mythical beasts displayed are illusions. They are joined by Molly Grue, who believes in legends despite her experiences with a Robin Hood wannabe and his unmerry men. Ahead wait King Haggard and his Red Bull, who banished unicorns from the land.
I love this story and the world so much. I can’t even. <3 But because I love this tale so much and because I was introduced to it, like many, through the movie adaptation, I also wanted to devote some time to re-exploring those related works I’ve managed to get my hands on alongside the book, and I wanted to invite/encourage people to do the same, so that’s why the read-along dates are a little… funky-looking.
The Schedule
The schedule for the read-along will be as follows:
June 17th – June 23rd: Chapter 1 through to the end of chapter 7
June 24th – June 30th: Chapter 8 to the end
July 1st – July 7th: Related works (i.e. the movie, the graphic novel, Two Hearts, The Woman who Married the Man in the Moon, etc)
You can get a copy of The Last Unicorn (book, graphic novel or movie) at your usual retailer; Two Hearts is collected, amongst others, in The Line Between; and The Woman who Married the Man in the Moon can also be found in Sleight of Hand.)
I’ll be putting up my posts on Fridays, so that’s the 21st, the 28th, and the 5th. This way anyone who wants to use my (discussion) questions can do so and have some time left to mull over their thoughts.
I don’t normally do linkspam round-ups like this on my WP blog. I’d tell you I’m not sure why, but I know exactly why: making these posts on WP scares me. People I don’t know might see them and judge me and — Well, you get the idea. It doesn’t bother me as much on DreamWidth because the culture there is very different.
Anyway, here you are. An assortment of links of potential interest and signal boosts. And this time — it’s probably the coffee — I actually have the energy to make them proper links! *gasp* I am quite happy about that. This looks so much nicer.
Hope there are interesting links in there and further signal boosting is no doubt appreciated!
Signal Boosting
The last time I did a book spine meme, I came up with a grammatically correct sentence that was something like seventeen books long. If I still had the books and/or the photographic evidence I would show you all and prove it, but that’s not what this post is about.
This post is about how I was bored tonight and caught in a mood where I did not (still don’t) want to read. (At least the author whose book I’m reading now knows how to use vocative commas. They’re still not hard, people!) Anyway. I was poking about the internet as you do and came across a book spine meme note.
And I thought to myself that it would be an utterly brilliant idea if I, you know, putzed around with my book titles just for the fun of it. Except… Except two things, really, or possibly three depending on how you count: