"Barnswallow!"

"What's that one?"

"Barnswallow."

"Oh.  How about that one?"

"Barnswallow!"

---paraphrased from Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation

Apparently the Great Backyard Bird Count is coming up this month - and in just a few days.  From the 17th-20th, people all across the country will choose one spot to watch for at least fifteen minutes, counting all the birds they see and submitting the data here.  The GBBC also has a Facebook page with lots of great photos (ooooh, pretty).

I read about this in The Cornell Lab of Ornithology Newsletter, and also included in this issue were links to some really great bird videos from the Macaulay Library.  You can see Sandhill Cranes and Northern Gannets and Western Grebes and Greater Prairie Chickens... and a lot more if you go poking around in there, I'm sure. 

I'm dying to make another barnswallow joke, but I'm not sure how many of you Imaginaries have seen Mr. Hobbs.

...You know what?  I'm gonna do it anyway.

"Do you know what that is?!  It's an incredibly rare bird I've been looking for my whole life!"

"Oh, yeah?  What's that little guy sitting next to him?"

"BARNSWALLOW!"

Roast Beef Leftovers

One of my favorite things to do with roast beef leftovers is to make pasties with them.  I've found multiple pasty filling recipes that call for starting from scratch with raw meat (and tried several of them), but honestly, leftover cooked meat just works SO much better.  After Thanksgiving I even made filling from leftover turkey.  But roast beef is definitely my favorite.

FOR THE CRUST:
3 cups flour
1 1/2 sticks butter
> 1 cup water (added according to baker's judgement)
(you could make a double batch since I always wind up with more filling than will fit)
FOR THE FILLING:
+/- 2 cups roast beef leftovers (or cooked meat of choice), diced fine
1 small onion, diced fine
1 potato, diced large
1 carrot (if desired), shredded or diced fine
1 - 2 eggs
garlic as desired
thyme as desired
Rosemarie as desired
MAKING THE CRUST:
Barely soften the butter - just enough so it's easy to mold with your hands
Put flour into a large mixing bowl
*Put the butter in with the flour and mash together until the flour resembles fine bread crumbs
add the water a splash at a time, just until the dough is neither dry nor wet and doesn't stick to your fingers.  Cover with plastic wrap and put in the fridge for half an hour.
MAKING THE FILLING:
Chop the meat, onion, potato, carrot, and garlic and scramble the egg(s) in a separate bowl.  Heat some olive oil in a big (BIG) frying pan and saute the onions and garlic.  You can either scramble the eggs at this point in the same pan, or you can add the other chopped ingredients to the garlic and onions and scramble the eggs in a separate pan while the main mixture is heating up, then add the eggs in once they're almost done.  Add the herbs as desired.  Once everything is heated through, turn off the burner and take off the heat.  PREHEAT THE OVEN TO 350 DEGREES F.  by this time the dough should be chilled.
MAKING THE PASTIES:
Take the dough out of the fridge and work it in your hands until it has warmed up a little.  Now you can roll the dough out on a surface and cut out perfect circles until you need to lump the rest back together and roll it out again, but I find that the repeated rolling out ruins the texture of the dough, so I just break off palm sized pieces and work them out with my fingers, like you sometimes see done with pizza dough.  However accomplished, one you have a flat, roughly round bit of dough, drape it over your hand and scoop filling into its center.  Then fold it up so when it lies on its side on the pan it looks like a fat half moon.
The pan?  Oh, yes.  Just a regular cookie sheet will do - I always spread baking parchment over the bottom.  Repeat until you run out of dough.  Once the oven is preheated, cook the pasties for 30 minutes.  Then slide the rack out and slather the topsides with melted butter or an egg-wash, after that, cook for another 20 - 25 minutes.
Pasties can be eaten hot or cold, and keep in the fridge for several days.

I made a batch of these last night.  My brother likes to have them in his lunch, which is great...the only problem is - I'm on a no-wheat diet so I couldn't have any.

Yes, I'll admit it.  I cried.  Just a little.

*this is one of the most important actions I've discovered that helps give the crusts a nice texture - it works on bread dough, too.  

WIP Worldbuilder notes

I was preparing the worldbuilder notes for a modern-themed steam punk story to do as my final short story for creative writing... and then the professor said in class that we should do straight up literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction.

o.0

But I kept the notes, and I thought I'd post them, 'cause some of the stuff (I thought) is pretty clever, and I just turned in my non-steam punk final today - oh, sorry, that breeze you just felt was my profound sigh of satisfaction - anyway, here they are:

protagonist: young, sheltered girl working to become a creative writer

world: modern steampunk

plot: briefly meets a person whose philosophy changes her outlook on life/internship w/Conclavical Refractographic?

Ephemera: constantly writing "fantasy stories" about character named Harrigan.  no excerpts or direct information, we only hear about these stories through dialogue protag has with best/childhood friend (male) also working to become writer

Sub-atmosphericals - airships.  protag's father worked on some while in the Aerotime Forces

loving but somewhat maddening parents; mother keeps pointing out to protag that many famous writers were originally painters who failed art school (the only implication that protag ever wanted to be painter); father and protag never know what to say to each other, so father will randomly pick out topic of conversation - usually either historical or technical

Celebrities: ruler of New Year's Conclave, Pamela Bean (who single handedly started a craze for cooking with sea-serpent fat), E. S. Swintenberg, author of the reigning popular fantasy series, Fisticuff Master (needs work) - as in, "Well, we can't all be ESS now, can we?"

PudgyBird Press, Conclavical Refracographic

"New homes at Laborer's mudpuddle!" "Hearts of Romaine, in (needs work)  prismatriums soon!"
Refractography = photography

Halloween Knitting Project

This last Halloween, I dressed up as a Gypsy and went to a Harry Potter Party.  I had some yarn in a nice white/brown tweed looking color... Bernat brand, I believe - anyway so I made myself a vest.  The pattern originally started out as someone elses', but I modified it so heavily it's really hard to tell.  I've only made the one vest, which I wrote the pattern for as I went along, so there might still be a few bugs in it, but here it is, with some pictures:

Key:
K=knit
yo=yarn over
st=stitch
ssk=slip, slip, knit
k2tog=knit two together
m1=make one

Halloween Gypsy Vest

Cast on 59 st

Side shaping: k1, yo/yo k1

Left panel right side: k1, yo, k28, k3tog, k26, yo, k1

All wrong sides: purl

Follow this until 21 right side rows have been completed

Bind off 29 stitches, knit to last three st, ssk, k1

Knit to last 3 st, ssk, k1, repeat until 17 st remain

Knit 2 tog, knit to end, repeat until 10 st remain

Next row k2tog, k7, m1, k1

Repeat this row twice

*K2, yo, k6, yo, k2

Purl last row then bind off

Cast on 59 st

Side shaping: k1, yo/yo k1

Right panel right side: k1, yo, 26, k3tog, k28, yo, k1

All wrong sides: purl

Follow this until 21 right side rows have been completed

K1, k2tog, k27, bind off last 29 st

Reattach yarn, k1, k2tog, knit to end

K1, k2tog, k to end, repeat until 17 st remain

K to last three st, ssk, repeat until 10 st remain

K1, m1, k6, k2tog, k1

Repeat this row twice

*K2, yo, k6, yo, k2

Purl last row then bind off

Finishing: choose a lace-up yarn and thread it through the yo holes, then tie in a butterfly knot at the top.

*At this point, I was afraid I was going to run out of yarn, so made two yarn over holes on each strap and threaded some of the lacing yarn through them to be makeshift ties.  If I’d had enough yarn I would have decreased instead of yo, then knit st st until the straps were long enough to tie at the back of the neck.

This pattern was originally based on and borrows heavily from the Fanny Liege “Waitress” pattern, available on Ravelry

ABCdery

A garden starts in winter.  Breath fogs as the ground freezes, old stalks rustle and fall down.  Clearing begins in spring, when the old material can be turned over and buried to help feed the new.  Daydreaming about what to plant where is a winter survival tactic; afternoons spent pouring over the seed catalogs with their brightly colored pictures, so cunningly sent out in the dead of January.  Except by the time the frosts are far enough apart to count, “where” questions are mostly settled, and it’s time to start thinking of “when.”  Frosts are a central pillar around which gardeners plan and hope.  Good pea plants are born of hard frosts, but less hardy plants, like tender greens, need warm soil to grow in.  Hard frosts tell a gardener when to plant indoors and when to move indoor seedlings out.  In mid spring when all the frosts are gone, transplanting and direct sowing can begin in earnest.  Just like magic, or seems like.  Keeping watch, day after day, over a stretch of ground that looks empty and then spotting the very first tiny leaves one fine, sunny morning.  Later, when the weather warms up even further it’s time to plant the heat lovers like tomatoes, peppers, and basil; a late start for a late crop.  Maybe as far back as the first day of February another set of tomatoes and peppers have been started indoors, and now is the time to transplant them; a very early start for an early crop.  Now starts the long haul towards harvest time.  Other than a rogue hail or windstorm, the garden is relatively safe weather wise until the real heat of summer sets in.  Perfidious pests are another matter and must be dealt with severely.  Quietly multiplying aphids, voracious Japanese beetles, legion squash bugs and distance jumping grasshoppers, all make an appearance.  Rightful garden denizens like ladybugs, tachinid flies, and soldier bugs seem in much shorter supply.  Scented herbs, both aromatic and sweet, dominate the air.  Trailing vines of peas, cucumbers and melons act like common thugs in their attempt to dominate their own little portion of the world.  Underneath the shading leaves of larger bushes, less heat resistant plants shelter, and grow as best they can.  Vital water flows in the muggy cool of morning and the sticky heat of evening.  With the passage of June and July, the heat really sets in, causing weariness even among such veterans as the tomatoes.  X-acto blades clear away dried and dying vegetation.  Yielding its harvest, the garden goes mostly dormant in the weirdly mirrored, yet polar opposite image of winter.  Zooming oppressively by, the summer will soon be replaced by the cool of autumn, but not soon enough.