Sunday, December 31, 2023

Hobbies: Cooking

So I inventoried the spices yesterday, because I got a cross-cut miter box for Christmas and I want to build a spice rack, because spice racks with ~100-jar capacity are basically nonexistent.  I probably won't build 100-jar capacity; I need to go through the list and denote which ones are recurring purchases and which are one-off spice blend purchases that we probably won't replace.  But either way, we have... a lot of spices.

I did not expect cooking to be one of the things I did a deep-dive into.  Baking, yes.  I like baking, because I like cookies, cake, etc.  Also baking is basically chemistry, and I like chemistry.  Cooking is frequently less precise and more improvisation.  That's fine too, but it frequently requires more active time, and I like set-it-and-forget-it food production.

For a variety of reasons, we have home-cooked food six nights a week; salt is the biggest reason, hence the prodigious variety of herbs, spices, and spice blends taking up space in the cabinets.  (We effectively have two shelves' worth of spices in the cabinets.)  This has also meant finding recipes that we can make flavorful with minimal salt, and that MSG is a regular part of our seasoning plan, to reduce the sodium and boost flavors.

Although my grandmother was the one with the reputation as an outstanding cook, the bulk of my cooking techniques that I learned before moving out came from my mother (baking, stove-top cooking, slow cooker cooking), and a little bit from my father (primarily for pancakes; I still have not mastered skillet potatoes).  There are some foods I have not bothered to learn to cook well, because my husband fills that niche (steak, most pasta dishes that are not lasagna, tacos).

Cooking for dietary needs means I've tried recipes from a wide variety of cuisines, mostly through cookbooks and online recipe sites (especially the New York Times cooking section).  Recent dishes include moo goo gai pan (100% will make again), hot chocolate cookies (100% will not make again), and chicken cordon bleu (100% will make again, with improved technique).

Moo goo gai pan
 

Some things I've learned for time-saving and not wasting food over the years include weekly meal planning to build the grocery list (we use a shared Google doc); making extra rice to freeze in 1-cup portions when I make rice; and making the entire 5-lb. bag of potatoes as mashed potatoes and freezing the extra, rather than letting the potatoes languish and rot.  (Buying potatoes in 5-lb. bags is cheaper per pound at our grocery than buying loose potatoes.)  I've also stopped looking for recipes that only serve two and just freeze leftovers now to take for lunches or have for dinner on Wednesdays I'm too tired to cook.  My husband and I split the six nights we cook at home equally, but I usually make something that will cover two nights on Sunday, since Monday night is D&D and it's easier to do leftovers, and Wednesdays frequently end up freezer food if I'm too tired to cook.  Egg dishes are a frequent Wednesday meal, as well.

There are still some cooking techniques I would like to learn, primarily in the realm of candy making; my next goal is soft caramels.

Saturday, November 18, 2023

Best Books 2023 (that I read)

I'm going to go ahead and put this list up now, partly because I don't have a lot of stuff slotted to read the rest of the year that I think is going to add another entry to the list, and partly because I can always edit the post.

I haven't read as much this year as I did last year; I've felt busier, but I don't know that that's objectively true.  I have been consciously making an effort to play piano most days, but I don't know if that's where the time is going.

Anyway, I've still read some good stuff this year; this is basically everything I've read from this year that I actively recommend to people.  I'm linking out to Goodreads for them since that's where I track my reading.

  • The River of Silver (the Daevabad Trilogy #4) S.A. Chakraborty:  This is an epilogue to the trilogy that gives most of the main characters a chapter or two.  It was an extremely satisfying read after the trilogy, because it wrapped some things up for some characters that there wasn't room to in the trilogy itself.  You'll definitely want to read the trilogy first, or a lot of them won't make sense.  The trilogy itself starts off like you're going into a historical fantasy (French-occupied Egypt with some subtle magic undertones) and then tilts full into fantasy by like, chapter 3 (djinn kingdom political intrigue).
  • The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty:  This is the author's next series after the Daevabad trilogy; it's about a middle-aged retired pirate who gets pulled back into the pirate life by a mystery that involves her old crew.  I'd still call this historical fantasy, but the layer of magic isn't as thick as it is for the other series.  This one is independent of the other books in that you don't need to have read them for it to work, but there is a character who appears in the later half that makes you realize it's the same setting (but about a thousand years earlier) if you have read it.
  • The World We Make (Great Cities #2), N.K. Jemisin:  The second half of the Great Cities duology (I've started reading the afterwards in books, which is weird to me? But she explains why it's a duology and not a trilogy in it), this was a solid and satisfying follow-up to the first.  The general idea of the books is that cities, at a certain point in their development, become living entities, embodied in avatars, and since this is about New York, it's somewhat complicated in that each borough has one.  I think I've mentioned before that I love the way the author draws off Lovecraft for this while acknowledging and critiquing the racism in his work.
  • Strong Women Stay Young, Miriam E. Nelson:  I heard about this book from the menopause subreddit, where I've been lurking for a while now as I approach the age where perimenopause could just show up one day and not be unexpected.  They recommended it because strength training is especially important for countering some of the loss of bone density from aging, and I had been looking for a sustainable weight training program I could do at home, so I got a copy from the library to see if it would work for me.  The first half of the book, originally out in the 1990s, is just trying to convince you with the author's scientific research that weight training is beneficial for women's long-term health, with some of the how's and why's that she had discovered.  So that part I mostly skimmed because, yes, I know I need to do this and it's helpful, just tell me how.  The second half of the book is how.  It is, indeed, an easy weight training program that I can do at home.  I've been getting pairs of dumbbells off Amazon as I work up to them, and I finally picked up a single adjustable 20-lb. ankle weight (they're expensive!).  The copy I got from the library was the original edition, and the paperback I got used for like $4 was a revised edition with updated exercises.
  • His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik:  I forget where I heard about this book, since it is not new, but it was only recently on my radar.  It is basically the Napoleonic wars, with dragons.  So I read it, and then I realized, crap, this is like, a nine book series, which I do not currently have time for.  So I've only read the first two so far, but I'll probably get through the rest of the series sometime next year.
  • The Singing Hills Cycle, Nghi Vo:  I got the 2nd book in this series free from Tor in one of their ebook giveaways, and as I was working through my ebook backlog last year, I realized it was the second book and got the first one from the library.  It was, easily, the best book I had read in at least two years, and it felt like I was exactly in the middle of whatever Venn diagram of target audience groups the book might be considered for: the main character is a historian; it's somewhere on the line of fantasy history/magical realism (it's in a fictional empire with the essence of parts of south/east Asia, but not Earth, or at least, not our Earth); and it looks at the blurred lines between history and legend that I have an unwritten essay about floating around in my head.  I read the first two last year and pre-ordered the third (and sent in my pre-order receipt to get the pre-order incentive pin of the bird character in the series), then pre-ordered the fourth after the third came out this year, and then I read the fourth the day it came out.  I've pre-ordered the fifth book.
  • System Collapse (the Murderbot Diaries #7), Martha Wells: I got the audiobooks of the Murderbot Diaries this summer (I had read them all before, from the library), and I don't know how far down the hold list I am for the print copy of the seventh book, but my husband pre-ordered me the audiobook of it, so I listened to that rather than wait for the print.  (I'll still read it in the print, again, when my hold comes up, partly to clarify the internal monologue/dialogue distinctions that are sometimes confusing in a first-person perspective book.)  The short version of "what is Murderbot" that I've been giving is that it's about an android with anxiety that works security.  It is far-future space-based sci-fi (Earth doesn't ever come up as far as I recall) which is more in the speculative fiction realm of "what does it mean to be human" than it is in the crunchy sci-fi realm of "how does terraforming work" and the like.  Eventually I'll get print copies of this series, too, but most of the books are novellas and only 3-4 hours in length, so I can easily listen to one in a week of commuting.

Saturday, October 14, 2023

Euphemisms and Intent

So I've been thinking about the idea of "it's the thought that counts" and euphemisms - about the meanings of words and intent.

People use euphemisms to avoid using "bad" words that they think would offend the listener or someone overhearing.  But the intent is still there.  And if you consider a word like "dang," the only meaning of which is "damn," what does the substitution really accomplish?  Why does a euphemistic word carry less baggage if the intent is the same?

More ambiguous phrases, like "Bless your heart," which can carry genuine sympathy as well as standing in for malice, make more sense to me as a euphemism.  They are disguising not just words, but also potentially intent.

So if one were in the habit of using euphemisms to somehow soften one's language or avoid using curse words, perhaps one should examine the thoughts and feelings behind what is being communicated and see if the intent is the real harm, rather than the words being used.

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Hobbies: Music Stuff

I come from a family of music makers/appreciators.  Everyone either had music they listened too, instruments they had taken lessons for or still played, a choir they had sung in or still did, or some/all of the above.

I started taking piano lessons in, as far as I can tell, June 1988.  I started learning trombone in 5th grade, but I was only in band through 8th grade.  (No regrets about not marching in high school - I am way too heat-sensitive for southern Indiana summers.)  At school I did choir in 7th and 8th grade, and I joined the church choir around then (and did that through the end of high school).  I sang alto then, although if I actually did voice lessons now and worked on my upper range, I'm probably a mezzo-soprano; my speaking voice is just at the bottom of my range.  Anyway, this works out to that I've been comfortable reading music on the treble and bass clefs since grade school, and I've been playing an instrument for 35 years now.

The new piano means I've been playing a lot more than I had the past decade or so, and I spent a chunk of this summer re-memorizing the first movement of Moonlight Sonata.  Now I've pulled out the Christmas books to get some thing back up to speed.  I like piano as a hobby because playing nowadays can serve a variety of purposes - stress relief, technical challenge, creative outlet, social connection.  I have a short list of pieces I want to learn to play that are challenging for me ("Raindrop" Prelude, "Clair de Lune," "Memories of Green").

As a listener, I was drawn early to Beethoven - not through piano lessons, but through a record with the "Consecration of the House" overture on one side and "Lenore III" on the other.  I used to roller skate to them in my parents' basement. My interest in playing Beethoven's works stems from that record, rather than the other way around.  Most of my cassette purchases were classical music, and my first CD purchase was a Beethoven one with those two overtures.  When I got a radio, I started listening to the oldies station - 1950s and 1960s music primarily, and I would turn it to the local NPR affiliate for overnight.  I used to listen to Pipe Dreams every week until I moved somewhere that didn't carry it.  (I have since discovered their streaming option, but I wish it was available on a podcast platform; it would be much easier to listen to in the car.)  Dad got Mom a CD of Dark Side of the Moon the same year I got a CD player for Christmas, which meant it soon spent a six-month stretch on repeat in my room.  (Instrumental Pink Floyd is still some of my preferred writing background music.)

I recently started listening to Minnesota Public Radio's "Song of the Day," which is available as a podcast and thus easy to catch up on in the car, which has introduced me to a variety of new-to-me musicians, like Hermanos Gutierrez and Philip Selway's solo work.  And of course there's satellite radio - when I started commuting for 40 minute stretches at a time, through hilly country that I couldn't get a consistent radio signal, we got me a satellite radio subscription, and then a lifetime subscription when Sirius and XM merged (I don't think they offer them anymore).  I do miss one of the old XM alternative stations for the new music they did, but they added a new music segment a few years ago on the Sirius-XM equivalent stations.  That generally drives my music purchases, because sometimes I really like songs that don't make it into their regular play.

I still buy things on CD - partly because of things like the demise of Google Play Music, and partly because if I want to listen to something in the living room, I put it in the CD player.  I don't regularly buy LPs - we have two functional record players, but neither has great sound, and we haven't yet set up the stereo system in the living room to hook up a better turntable.  One day.

As a hobby, listening to music is a very flexible one, and easy to stack on top of other activities: writing, gardening, sewing, cooking - most things that don't already involve listening to something; and stackable is appealing as a hobby when you already have too many.  Piano brings a lot of value to the time I put into it, but it's not something you do while doing something else.  (Recording Bach's Prelude in C, though - that feeds the listening hobby and is a very satisfying/de-stressing piece to play.)  I can't drive in a silent car or I will start singing, and I will wear out my voice with the commute I have, so I do a lot of listening.

Speaking of car listening - besides the satellite radio, I used to use Google Play Music for playlists of music I owned.  With its demise, I thought I would have to go back to just random mp3s off a USB drive, but I've since started using VLC for Android.  It's not perfect - sometimes after an update, it will wipe playlist content, so I try to duplicate them on my computer if they're lists I care about (and not just, 80s music, which is pretty easily recreated).  But it also has shuffle all options and 100 most recently added items.

Both listening to and playing music are hobbies I anticipate keeping for the foreseeable future.