Hot and dry
Oct. 27th, 2012 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI have harvested my chiles de arbol, and taken, I dunno, a couple of hundred fruits off two plants? Which I am now drying by a method I picked up sidewise on the internets, viz by spreading them on a baking tray and leaving them overnight in the oven with the light on but no heat else. Seems to be working; it is actually quite warm in there. Some of that may be coming from a pilot light, of course. It's something else to be tested. When I have a reliable oven thermometer.
The chiles are bright and red as they ought to be, if not as hot as I would like - but that last is almost a universal, as we know. I worry sometimes that I will lose both my palate for the fiery and my head for alcohol, in this so much milder life that I am living. You may tell me - of course you may tell me! - that neither of these is actually a cause for concern, but, y'know. I've never been macho much, and I have quite enjoyed being extremophile over what I put in my mouth. It would feel lossy, were I to lose it.
In an act of synchronicity that is not at all coincidence, as the Frankenstorm looms over yonder - stay safe, East Coast people - I am reading Mother of Storms by John Barnes. Of course I am reading it in the balmy late-October heat of NoCal, but hey. It is ... remarkably prescient, for '94. I hadn't realised climate science was quite so far advanced, twenty years back.
We had a climate scientist talk at SETI a couple of weeks ago. Half his talk was about drawing parallels between the warming cycles of our sun and the observed cycles of other stars; the other half was about how miserable it is to be a climate scientist, since global warming was politicised. Sometimes he feels obliged to lie about his job at parties. Marry that to the lies he sees promoted constantly in the media, and - yeah. Wouldn't want to be him. He said that.
Meanwhile, I am at the tipping-point in this story: where I need to tilt it from disturbing-but-all-too-likely realism into actual sense of threat, in order to justify the escalation towards the bizarrely-improbable end-point. Hunh. Actual sense of threat is proving evasive. The damn thing probably wants to be literature or something.
Darling du jour, since you ask: We are all too prone to backward-looking, in these days of a terrible recovery. (She is on a train with children not her own, some few years after WW1, taking them to find their father's grave in Flanders.)
The chiles are bright and red as they ought to be, if not as hot as I would like - but that last is almost a universal, as we know. I worry sometimes that I will lose both my palate for the fiery and my head for alcohol, in this so much milder life that I am living. You may tell me - of course you may tell me! - that neither of these is actually a cause for concern, but, y'know. I've never been macho much, and I have quite enjoyed being extremophile over what I put in my mouth. It would feel lossy, were I to lose it.
In an act of synchronicity that is not at all coincidence, as the Frankenstorm looms over yonder - stay safe, East Coast people - I am reading Mother of Storms by John Barnes. Of course I am reading it in the balmy late-October heat of NoCal, but hey. It is ... remarkably prescient, for '94. I hadn't realised climate science was quite so far advanced, twenty years back.
We had a climate scientist talk at SETI a couple of weeks ago. Half his talk was about drawing parallels between the warming cycles of our sun and the observed cycles of other stars; the other half was about how miserable it is to be a climate scientist, since global warming was politicised. Sometimes he feels obliged to lie about his job at parties. Marry that to the lies he sees promoted constantly in the media, and - yeah. Wouldn't want to be him. He said that.
Meanwhile, I am at the tipping-point in this story: where I need to tilt it from disturbing-but-all-too-likely realism into actual sense of threat, in order to justify the escalation towards the bizarrely-improbable end-point. Hunh. Actual sense of threat is proving evasive. The damn thing probably wants to be literature or something.
Darling du jour, since you ask: We are all too prone to backward-looking, in these days of a terrible recovery. (She is on a train with children not her own, some few years after WW1, taking them to find their father's grave in Flanders.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-10-28 01:16 am (UTC)http://www.sfgate.com/food/chefssecrets/article/Restaurant-1833-s-cheddar-bacon-biscuits-3984691.php