Month: January 2018
A Day for Apple Pie: A Picture Essay
APPLE PIE
-pastry for a 9” double-crust pie, rolled out (I use this recipe – had some in the freezer still)
-6 cups peeled & sliced apples (about 6-8 large)
-2 Tbsp flour
-2 tsp cinnamon
-2/3 cup brown sugar
Preheat the oven to 350°F (180°C). Put the filling ingredients together in a big bowl, toss until the apples are coated. Put into the pie shell, top with the lid, seal the edges. Slash holes in the top crust. Bake for 45-50 minutes until it’s golden brown and the juice bubbles up through the holes in the crust.
Life, the Universe, and Apple Pie. Perfect for a snowy day.
#WordlessWednesday Two Days Late: Happy Sock Line
Project Unstick…
…has reached the kitchen food cupboards, forcing me to cook and eat four-year-old packets of chocolate pudding and five-year-old jars of home-canned pears. Can’t just throw it away, can I? (Well, yes, I can, and do, if it’s stale or otherwise unappetising, but this stuff still tastes good. Properly preserved food can actually last a remarkably long time. And I was raised by war-generation Germans who taught me that wasting food is a sin.) But I also don’t want to stick it back in the cupboard. So I still have a collection of food out on the counter that I’m going to either use up in the next few days or finally chuck out.
It’s actually not that big a collection, considering – especially compared to the vast total quantities of food that I had piled all over the counters. It reminded me of the Hungry Planet project, where researchers took photos in different countries of what one family eats in one week. My collection is several month’s worth of non-perishables, not just one week’s, but still, looking at it all made me feel very fortunate and thankful.
So I guess today I’ll be eating sushi (rice, seaweed, and a tube of wasabi all coming under the “past their best-by date” heading), and perhaps a pot of chicken noodle soup to get rid of that box of capellini noodles. If nothing else, this is making me eat something other than the same-old same-old.
Life, the Universe, and Everything in the Kitchen Cupboard. Project Unstick is having unforeseen side effects.
Light: A Reflection
I had meant to give you some erudition today on – well, on something. But then I was looking at these pictures on my camera from this morning, and I think they speak quite loudly for themselves; I can shut up.
Here you are:
Light – a Reflection
Enchanted Conversations Introducing… Yours Truly!
Just look at this: “Meet Angelika – The EC Team”!
That’s right – I’m being interviewed over on Enchanted Conversations by way of an introduction as their new “Contributing Editor”. What that means is that a couple of times a month, I get to write a post for their blog (sneak preview: some of it will be fairy tale flash fiction, which are short pieces between 100 and 500 words long), and I even get paid for it!
So head on over to Enchanted Conversations and find out what’s my favourite fairy tale (okay, one of them – they made me restrict myself to a single one, cruel people), whether I work from an outline when I write, and other fascinating and earth-shattering information about Yours Truly that I know you’ve been lying awake at night wondering about.
Life, the Universe, and a New Endeavour! It’s all very exciting.
Ode to Stuff, or: You Have to Unstick Your Life
“You have to unstick your life before you can write.”
This piece of wisdom was passed on to me by one of my writer friends early in November, when I was whining about how I had a hard time diving into NaNoWriMo because there was so much other things I needed to do first. “Unstick your life” – that phrase has, ahem, stuck with me ever since.
And I realised that one of the major sticking points in my life is the stuff. You know, the stuff all over my house, in cupboards and drawers and closets, on coat hooks and shelves, piled in corners and in the garage. The stuff that I was going to deal with right after I finished grad school. Yeah. Haha, never happened.
But I recently turned 50, and one day it dawned on me that that milestone was a really good time to unstick my life – in other words, to tackle the stuff. So far, I’ve progressed as far as the second bathroom, and as per usual, it’s all taking a lot longer than I figured. But it’s moving along, so that’s all good.
So here, for your delectation, is a brief and concise Ode to Stuff. In haiku, no less.
Ode to Stuff
Magazines, hairbrush.
Choices that have to be made.
Do you stay or go?
Life, the Universe, and an Unsticking Endeavour. We’ll see where it goes.
#WordlessWednesday: Still Life With Laundry, or: There’s Stories Buried Under There
#WordlessWednesday: Illumination
