It's always something, isn't it?

So some of you have already been made aware of this, but for those who haven't: Captain Midnight's last day at work was October 1st.

This wasn't what he wanted. He was hoping to have this job until he retired. But more and more companies are treating their employees as expenses rather than assets, and will cast even their best people adrift after years of superlative productivity if they think doing so will improve their bottom line by the tiniest amount.

I have a lot of spicy thoughts about this subject, but that's all I plan to share publicly. Meanwhile, if anyone is looking for a superlative quality assurance software tester based in Western Washington with over 25 years' experience in the industry, hit me up in the comments. Thanks.

It's October! Welcome to CHAOS BAKING!

I know a couple of people who are afraid to bake. They're good cooks, but something always seems to go wrong when they slide cookies or bread or some kind of baked good into the oven. And I can see why they're nervous about baking. We've been practically brainwashed to believe that baking requires precision measurements, careful treatment of every ingredient, and an oven calibrated to the perfect temperature if we're going to get a quality result.

Nonetheless, every now and then it's worth attempting some chaos baking -- just making stuff up to see what happens.

It's easy to forget that people have been making baked goods for a long time, and for most of that time baking was much more a seat-of-the-pants process than it is now. Medieval baking required working with rustic, unsifted flour and a sourdough starter, using no standard measurements to bring a dough together, heating an earthen oven with a wood fire for many hours, then raking everything out so there would be no ash on the bread, then carefully sliding the loaves in, sealing the entry shut with a wooden door that had been soaking in cold water for hours so it wouldn't burn, and leaving the loaves in long enough to bake them through but not long enough to dry them out or scorch them. One way to check oven temperature back then was to toss in a little raw flour; if it turned brown the oven was ready, but if it turned black the oven was too hot.

If medieval peasants could successfully make bread with no measuring cups, no electricity, not even a set recipe -- then we can go a little off script with our baking and still turn out something worth eating.

You want proof? Here ya go!

Right now I have a whole lot of milk that's just gone sour (about 4 cups total), and I'm wanting to do something with it before it actually spoils. Thing is, milk that's just barely soured may not be great on your breakfast cereal, but it's still fine for baking and can be used, cup for cup, as a substitute for buttermilk in most baked goods. I'd just settled on making a homemade sour milk spice cake when I went to the store for supplies.

Well, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a pile of Betty Crocker cake mixes for 98 cents apiece. In this economy, that's hard to beat; I haven't done the math but I'm not sure I could make a cake from scratch at that price. There was no spice cake mix on sale (or even available for purchase), but that wasn't going to stop me. So I changed my mind and grabbed a yellow cake mix. (Also impulsively picked up a six-count of pumpkin spice flavored old-fashioned donuts, which will be important later.)

In the car on the way back from the store, I ate too many of those donuts. Yeah, sometimes I'm not very smart. Captain Midnight doesn't care for old-fashioned donuts and is neutral about pumpkin spice stuff, so I knew he wouldn't want any of the remaining donuts. He doesn't even like frosting on his cake. This spice cake is probably going to be pretty plain --

Oh hey. No it isn't. I have a potentially brilliant idea.

I mixed up the cake mix mostly according to directions, swapping in a cup of sour milk instead of a cup of water, and adding 1/2 t. allspice, 1/4 t. cinnamon and 1/8 t. nutmeg to the mix. (Now it's a spice cake! There ya go.) Poured it into a greased 9x13" glass pan, then did the brilliant thing: I dropped the remaining pumpkin spice donuts into a bag, mashed them into crumbs and used them as a streusel topping to scatter over the top of the cake batter. Baked about 25 minutes in a moderate oven.

Here's the result.

I didn't even wait for the cake to cool down, I just cut myself a corner piece.

NOM.

This is good, but if anything, this doctored spice cake needs even MORE spice. (My English ancestors didn't do insane things to find better spice routes just for their descendants to be terrified of "1/4 t. black pepper" in a recipe, dangit!) I'd at least double the amount of spices if I were to make this again. As it is, though, it's delicious all on its own and would also be great covered with whipped cream or served a la mode. There's no indication in look or taste that this cake was made with sour milk. And the streusel topping was a genius idea -- soft, light cake covered by a crunchy, sugary, spicy topping.

In fact, it was so tasty that the minute I left the kitchen, Charlie-cat jumped up on the counter and helped himself to a big mouthful of cooling cake. BAD CHARLIE. NOT FOR YOU. So now the cake is safely cooling in the oven with the door cracked open because our cats are mad jonesing for our chaos baking experiments.

Flash fiction: Inciting Incident

HROUGHOUT the Huldrealm, preparations for the Chosen One's imminent appearance were underway. The hidden entrance behind the abandoned church was swept and tidied and discreetly garnished with violets and tuberose petals, festooned with crystalline rocks that glowed subtly in the darkness to light the Chosen One's way. The clearing into which the Chosen One would enter, pushing through the choicest cobwebs and the ferniest undergrowth, was exquisitely misty and mossy and mushroomed. The Hulda fiddler tuned his instrument to entice to the wild dance, and the Hulda bakers created a magnificent twenty-layer pavlova lashed with passionfruit jam and dotted with silver dragées that would drive any child into a mad sugar frenzy.

But the Chosen One was playing Candy Crush on her phone that day, and did not come.

Puzzled but undaunted, the Hulda tried again. In a few years, they prepared another entrance through an overgrown bike path at the end of the Chosen One's street. Beyond it, in a meadow lush with long grasses and purple wildflowers, waited a glorious coal-black mount, fiercely wild yet willing to accept an apple in tribute, and prepared to convey the Chosen One deeper into the secret recesses of the mystic Huldrealm.

But the Chosen One was posting pictures on social media that day, and again she did not come.

Now carefully considering their options, the Hulda next spun up a castle of ice and moonlight (accessible through the disused final stall in the high school's basement restroom) and in its exact center, like the stamen of a frozen flower, arose the ever-youthful ruler of the Huldrealm -- snow-haired, sloe-eyed and fine in deep blue silks, haughty, sometimes cruel, but possessed of a feral beauty and grace, and obsessed with dancing.

But the Chosen One was busy texting her crush that day, and again she did not come.

So time passed, and again and again all the beings of the Huldrealm expertly stitched together scenarios of tantalizing and dangerous enchantment, always close by and discoverable with just the tiniest bit of digging -- and the Chosen One simply refused to dig.

Until one particular day like any other, a fifty-year-old woman with bushy hair graying around her temples stumbled into the most hidden sanctum of the Hulda royal palace without anyone noticing.

"Wait," cried the palace guard, "how did you get in here?"

"Well," said the Chosen One, shrugging, "it's the weekend, there's an electrical storm and all my devices went down. I had nothing to do and I guess... I guess I was just bored, so..."

How the Internet occasionally saves my sanity

(Pumpkin spice peanut brittle image courtesy of Target.com)

I enjoyed a piece of pumpkin spice peanut brittle today (go get some at Target, it's really good!), and as I crunched on it a phrase from a book bubbled up to the top of my head -- something about someone buying peanut brittle for an older relative, who would "clatter and crunch" over it later. I knew that particular phrase, and I knew I'd read it many times in the past, but couldn't place it.

People born after 1990, I want you to get a little taste of what life was like in the 1970s and early '80s. Barring my finding that phrase in a book through happy accident, or my subconscious managing to dredge up where it came from, I would have no choice but to let the phrase "clatter and crunch" bounce around in my skull for weeks to months, with no easy way to look it up because there was no modern internet.

As it was, I had my answer within 90 seconds. It comes from an early passage in the book We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, and it describes the narrator's Uncle Julian messily enjoying his treat.

Once again the internet has saved my tenuous sanity. Thanks, Al Gore!

Happy Strawberry Shortcake and Nothing Else Day!

 

Don't worry if it snuck up on you. As a movable feast, it tends to do that. The good news is, you can celebrate Strawberry Shortcake and Nothing Else Day any time it gets too hot to cook or strawberries are on sale for cheap. I actually ended up making these because I got a Too Good to Go bag that included some pre-made shortcakes, so all I had to do was prep the berries and add some whipped cream. Super simple and delicious!

I'll always miss my mom. This is one of the small reasons why -- she chose to do a few spur-of-the-moment things that became regular occurrences every year. (Including making nothing but strawberry shortcake for dinner on a summer night when it was just too hot to cook.)

GROW, my pretties!

Got a minute? I gotta share with you this thing I've got going on my back porch.

(No, nothing like that, don't make it weird.)

I can hear some of you now saying, "Okaaaay, Sooz, you have a veggie and two herbs growing in cut-down gallon milk jugs. Yippee. Whaddyawant, a gold star?"

Listen, I can't properly explain how nuts this is. Ordinarily, I'm Plant Medusa. All I need to do is glance their way and plants shrivel and die. I haven't had real house plants in my place for ages because I forget to care for them and they perish and then I feel guilty about it.

And yet. Chard and coriander and basil are starting to FLOURISH on my back porch. (Not to mention the mysterious air plant at the upper right.) I mean, the chard's getting to a point where I'll need to chop it into quarters soon and give each quarter its own, more spacious pot.

Which leads me to ask: What in tarnation's goin' on hyar?

All I can figure is that the fairy who moved in here around the same time we did has a green thumb and a fondness for culinary herbs.

She also has a thing for Tolkien

Thanks, good neighbor! Take as much as you want!

King Oscar and the lighthouse

If you've lived around the Puget Sound for any length of time, you know about The Gray.

It has other names, of course. The Gloomy Season. The Big Dark. The Drizzle. Or, as they say in a particular movie, "It rains nine months of the year in Seattle." The constant overcast and light-to-heavy rainfall, combined with our location above the 45th Parallel, means that from November to March the Puget Sound skies are almost unrelentingly dark, foggy, or both. If you don't already have Seasonal Affective Disorder, you'll start to develop a touch of it in midwinter. You need to develop strategies to fight The Gray or it will overwhelm you and shut you down.

Now if this were a normal time, I'd fight The Gray by being with people. I'd visit family and friends. I'd go to Bremerton's nerd pubs and play pinball or cabinet video games. I'd strike up conversations with friendly strangers in the library. I'd gather with local geeks to play board games. I'd go to storytelling nights and hear about people's adventures from their own mouths. I'd meet people and I'd make friends.

But this is not a normal time.

I don't want to get sick. I don't want to make other people sick. I can't be successfully frugal AND spend much time with local friends, since it takes time and money to visit our old stomping grounds on the Eastside. And with a couple of rare exceptions, I haven't gotten out enough to meet any new people around here. I've been strongly isolated. And isolation is no way to fight The Gray.

What to do?

Well, if you're me, which I am, you knit and crochet while listening to back episodes of The Magnus Archives, putter around the house, cook, read library books, spend way too much time bingeing YouTube videos. And when you tire of that, you go troll hunting.

Today, since Captain Midnight was determined to DM some D&D deeds of derring-do, I was on my own for the afternoon. The Gray was lowering and unrelenting, but it was not a day to stay in. So I stole CM's jacket, gathered up the usual bundle of accoutrements (vitamins, water bottle, hot chocolatey goodness) and made for the ferry to Vashon Island.

You might not consider Vashon a prime spot to hunt for trolls, and ordinarily I'd agree with you. It's a fine place to find aging hippies, bike-eating trees, and (if rumor is correct) several ferocious local strains of cannabis, but until recently the only certain locale for Scandinavian cryptids was under the Aurora Avenue bridge in Seattle.

And then Thomas Dambo and crew came along and shook things up. But we'll get to that in a bit.

It usually takes a while to drive from our current digs to the Southworth ferry dock in Port Orchard. It usually takes even longer for the Southworth/Vashon/Fauntleroy ferry to show up -- so much so that on the rare occasions when I've used it to get back to Kitsap from Seattle, I end up waiting so long that I'd have made better time just driving around Tacoma and up the peninsula. CM and I usually refer to it as "the cursed ferry." So to my great delight, I didn't have to wait more than 10 minutes for the cursed ferry to arrive at Southworth Dock. And it didn't take another 10 minutes to make the crossing from there to Vashon.

Despite the gloominess of the day, I enjoyed my first look at Vashon Island. I couldn't live there, as there's no hospital or even a basic medical clinic, and everything has to reach the island by boat or helicopter. But it has a remarkable number of creative people per capita, and it's beautiful.

I drove merrily through the cute little downtown area, took a turn to the left and continued to follow driving directions for... far longer than I'd expected. How long should it take to reach any spot on an island of 37 square miles? As the roadway narrowed and twisted, I pulled over and sent a quick text to my siblings: "This place is in the middle of nowhere. IF I SHOULD FALL, TELL MY STORY"

Just then, though, the end hove in sight: the upper parking lot of the Point Robinson Lighthouse. 'Bout time.

(BTW, if you're new to troll hunting, look around for clusters of painted birdhouses like these. They're a sure sign that trolls are nearby.)

Since I'd never been to Point Robinson before, I was also curious about the lighthouse. And at the time it seemed like a lot of people were paying homage to King Oscar. So I thought I'd just pop down and see the lighthouse first.

This turned out to be a mistake. Not the seeing-the-lighthouse part, the taking-this-route part. I headed down a forest trail that quickly became slick with mud and crud and slippery fallen leaves, and there were no handrails to cling to. Frankly, it's a minor miracle that I didn't slip and fall on my butt, BUT(t) somehow I SLOWLY worked my way down, walking like a little granny, and made it to the end of the path relatively unscathed (though it's a good thing my shoes were designed to be laundered).

And here's what I found!

Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Ah yes indeed, very nice. 

No official tours until Mother's Day, more's the pity. But we're good at showing ourselves around the place.

After taking a few more attractive foties...

...I decided to head back. Though by this time I'd figured out there was another route up to the parking lot, so I didn't have to run the mud gauntlet again. Which is good, because I don't think my shoes could've taken it.

Lessee, what was I doing here again? Oh yeah.

In a circular clearing not too far away... there was King Oscar holding court, surrounded by birdhouse clusters on poles. And a lot of fans.

If you're curious to know more about him, there's a helpful plaque nearby that goes into more detail about Oscar and about Thomas Dambo, the Danish artist who created him (and other trolls) out of local scrap wood.

Like most wise rulers, Oscar's staying off his feet today.

He looks so much more handsome in person than he does on the sardine cans. Also I like his birdhouse crown. Very chic.

Someone had used a few local clams to give him a fabulous pedicure. As you do.

I handed my phone to an innocent bystander and proceeded to commune with the King.

Now we're officially BFFs. If you can't be a king, it's at least nice to know one.

I wasn't through exploring yet, though.

Not far from the King's court was this mysterious object.

Other than possibly being some kind of cryptic municipal art, I have no idea what it was.

If you know, do clue me in, won't you? I'm most curious.

And then I ran off and took goofy selfies in front of a mural because I could.

Anyway, that's one way to fight The Gray. And it worked pretty well if I do say so myself!