musings of a bardic kitchen witch

I've been called "fat" pretty much my entire life by my peers. I was taught through assimilation of meaning that to be fat was not just a statement of fact, but an insult and also to imply that I was unattractive, undesirable, and not worth knowing. The irony of this of course being that while yes, I have fat, I was not exactly obese until I was probably a senior in high school.  I was not, however, rail thin nor under-developed much to my chagrin.  Puberty decided to "gift" me as early as eleven, and just went crazy from there. My mother and my sister were on the opposite side of the spectrum, and also cared a lot more about their presentation than I ever did. Rather than even try to fit into the box that was expected of me at an early age, I chose to ignore it altogether.  The words and implications hurt, but if it was decided that I was not worth knowing, what was the point of trying to convince other people otherwise? It lead to a lonely life. In addition to...

I've been participating in a zoom social mixer for a couple weeks now. I'm enjoying it to some degree. New people, similar mindsets, generally fun conversations. Today we had two new people, but one in specific was a death doula. I'm not completely unfamiliar with the job. I've known at least two birthing doulas or doulas-to-be in my lifetime, and I'd heard that death doulas were a thing. This past year has resulted in death being a thing on my mind in the background, whether I want it to be or not.  My mother is getting older and talks about dying at times, much to my chagrin; I've had six-degrees-of-COVID with a few of my friends and relatives of my spouse. 350,000 U.S. Americans have died from this virus. 9,061 of that number live in my state.  That's 2.5% of the country.  We are #4 on cases in the country in the past week; #8 for deaths.  It's hard to just... pretend that those numbers don't weigh on my mind.  So the DD talks about how she runs d...

Haven't touched this space in a long time. Thinking I might try and do that again. As it is right now, I've mostly used my stupid Facebook to act as my stream of consciousness whenever I have a Big Thought(TM) and while yeah, I might still do that... I might also just move it over here and link to it, so as to just trim the fat a bit.  I mean, how many of the people on my friend's list read my posts? Still follow me? And why does it matter anyway? Besides, Nicole keeps telling me I need to be journaling and doing the whole... gratitude practices and whatever. Nothing wrong with doing that here, right? It feels weird, not gonna lie. I can remember posting on my Livejournal almost daily. I remember keeping up with online writing groups. I remember having a tumblr. Hell, I remember having a domain name registered to me where I could design and post whatever the hell I wanted. Then I became whatever the hell I am today, trial by fire, despite (perhaps even in spite) of the wish...

I just roasted a whole chicken in my oven.  I love roasted chicken, I don't think you understand.  But I didn't have a rack to roast it on, so I washed and cut up two large potatoes and used that as a bed.  You can, of course, use carrot and onion and whatever else as well, but I didn't want to work any harder than I had to.  I also had two ears of corn that I roasted yesterday when I made vegetable stock for my roommate's crash diet. As soon as the chicken was done and had rested for twenty minutes, I took it off and set it aside to munch on as I saw fit.  And what was left were my potatoes and all the drippings - fat and juice - from the chicken. I dumped all of this into a pot, then added some of the vegetable stock to cover.  I didn't measure.  Once that was done, I set it to boil.  While this happened, I made roux using about two tablespoons each of bacon grease and potato starch.  After cooking it down just a wee bit, I slowly added...

I've been wanting to make labneh for a while now.  Labneh is strained yogurt, also known as yogurt cheese.  The title is a little misleading, because when most people think cheese, they think curds and chunks and crumbles.  My labneh came out about as thick as sour cream, which is hella exciting.  It still has the sourness of yogurt, so I might go as far as to say it's halfway between sour cream and cream cheese. That being said, I was thinking on what to do with it.  I added a little salt, but then I remembered that I had a packet of Hidden Valley Ranch seasoning in my cupboard that I was originally going to use for a crockpot recipe I didn't go through with.  So I stuck it in, gave it a stir, added some garlic juice, and omg .  So tasty! I did the math using a few sources on line, and I discovered that the calories per cup with the strain/reduce has 87% less calories.  That means my yogurt has gone from 120 calories per cup to 105 calories p...

I made the pie.  It was delicious. Still haven't made the tuna casserole.  But I did make my curry creamed spinach with a couple little adjustments, since I had heavy cream on hand.  I'm very pleased with it. And it turned out that my bread wasn't stale.  I just shouldn't have left that particular kind of bread in the fridge.  I typically keep my sandwich bread in the fridge because it doesn't turn green as quickly, but a rustic loaf bread gets hard.  Lesson learned. I just bought this amazing honey.  I've had it before, but I bought it again because I had been craving it.  It's Trader Joe's hickory honey.  I'm planning to make Chinese Honey Chicken in the future, once I pick up a spider skimmer.  There's no rush, obviously, because honey doesn't go bad so fast.  I might just cheat and make the sauce, then buy some fried wings and toss 'em or something.  I'm not very good at deep fat frying things T_T. I'm also very in...