Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m going to pause the tale in progress to wish you all a lovely holiday. No matter how big or small your gathering, no matter what you’re eating, or with whom you break your bread, I hope you have something wonderful to be thankful for this season.

For me, it’s the sheer awesomeness of the friends I’ve made over the years, my awesome family, and my perfectly brilliant husband and son (hubby brought me breakfast in bed at least three times in the last week and seems determined to spoil me).

If you were in my neck of the woods, I’d gladly share a slice of the pie (yep, that pie right up there, I made that!), feed you with all the goodies we’re having, and keep the mulled cider--or wine--a-comin’. But since that’s highly unlikely (sadness), I’ll content myself with raising my mug in the direction of my computer screen and wishing you a very happy Thanksgiving.

-Bika

Food Porn and Cheesecake [Safe for work! No, really]

Hubby was in Iraq for his birthday this year, so I finally made him a birthday cake. This is the same recipe I screwed up way back in high school when I accidentally put two layers' worth of batter in each pan. They filled those suckers all the way up to the top and took forever to cook, but they were the most dense and delicious carrot cakes ever.

As for the aforementioned cheesecake...

Dunwanna LaRoux, goblin librarian

The Cataclysm expansion is coming soon and I can't wait to make a goblin. I already have a name picked out and everything. Gary Larson specs and giant hooters, what's not to like?

Recipe: Apple Sour Cream Coffeecake

Even the little birdies on my favorite plates love this cake.

Once upon a time, when I was still a little girl, my mom found a kid's cookbook (almost certainly at Goodwill, she loves that place) and gave it to me and my brothers. There were some really easy recipes in there, like ants on a log (I used to think it was a shame to waste good peanut butter and raisins on a grody old piece of celery, but now that I am Grown Up I love the damn things, which is just further proof of my theory that Adults Love Gross Food) and a morning sunrise drink that taught me at a very early age how to whip up a fancy-looking cocktail using "nothing but" "cranberry juice" and "OJ".

Another recipe I remember from that skinny cookbook was the strata. It seemed bizarre to me at the time to make a bunch of ham & cheese sandwiches, stick them in a pan and cover them with raw egg. Now I realize that it probably would have been like eating an oven-baked, savory stuffed french toast and I am sad that I never tried it.

Anyway, the whole point of this was that one spring after getting this cookbook, we decided to try the coffeecake recipe for a Mother's Day breakfast. I'm pretty sure Mom had SOME hand in this, though she tries to give us kids all the credit; not to mention Dad provided the extra push and kitchen assistance we needed to make it a success. Whatever the catalyst, though, that coffeecake was damn good and became an instant tradition.

Mom got a coffeecake every Mother's Day for twenty years. The boys forgot this year and I was too far away to help, as I have been for more than a decade, but I made her one this summer when I went to visit. I used frozen blueberries because we were out of apples and it turned out so well that I only got one little piece before it was all gone.

I baked another one this morning with apples, but you can probably use most any kind of fruit.

Apple Sour Cream Coffeecake

1 cup flour

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/8 tsp. salt

1/2 cup shortening

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg

1/2 tsp. vanilla

1/2 cup sour cream

1 apple, peeled and chopped

Streusel topping:

2 T. butter

1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

1/2 cup brown sugar

First, preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a small mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, blend shortening and sugar until fluffy (I use an electric mixer). Add eggs and vanilla and beat until smooth. Add half the flour mixture and half the sour cream, mix thoroughly. Add the remaining flour and sour cream and repeat. Fold in the apples and pour into a greased 8x8 pan.

For the topping, mix the butter, brown sugar and nuts (you can squish them together with your hands, it's fun) and sprinkle evenly over the cake batter in the pan. Bake the whole mess for 25-30 minutes. It should be done when it's no longer jiggly in the pan, and a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.

Cool on a rack (or just on the stovetop if you're lazy like me) for 15-30 minutes before cutting, if you can hold off that long.

A Special Guest

(Unrelated picture: Steampunk Ethan, per his special request.)

It's the end of August. That means it's been a whole year since my husband left home to work overseas, and his contract is now officially complete. He's stateside again, finishing his outprocessing/debriefing crapola and will be home soon, soon as in maybe in a few hours, maybe tonight, maybe first thing in the morning, maybe maybe maybe. It sucks not knowing any more than that!

But we persevere, wielding our large cleaning brush and a vacuum-cleaner hose, washing the linens and sweeping the floors so it will look like we've been living in a clean, tidy house the entire time he's been gone. "Yes dear, that's right. I am supermom."

He won't believe it for a second.

What has he missed? Oktoberfest. Home-cooked meals (including lots of tofu and more pizza nights than I can remember). PMS (lucky him). An entire year of school, minus those two weeks in November when he was able to sneak away for just a little vacation and see us. Christmas in Oregon. Ethan's first DS. Mommy's malware incident. THE WORST SPIDER SEASON EVER. Those soba noodles that introduced tiny noodle-eating pests to the pantry and launched a spring-cleaning war.

He's missed poorly-sung karaoke, Super Dance-Moves Mondays, a dozen new CDs and the addition of a stereo to the living room. He's missed Ethan's Jet-Li obsession, his anime obsession, and most of all his obsession with subtitles on every show or movie EVER.

My hair has grown 10 inches longer in his absence. I hope he doesn't mind that I threw out let Ethan use up all the shampoo and bought bar soap instead.

He missed my affairs with LOTRO, doodling, hair care, D&D, Le Creuset, finding a houseplant I can't kill (go go kalanchoe) and real, honest-to-god snow that lasted a whole day.

I know he's missed us a lot. But I'm also pretty sure he wouldn't care if the house looked it'd hosted its own personal hurricane, so long as we're here.

But no. I am going to clean ALL the things!

Catch y'all on the flip side. I'll be sure to tell hubby that my invisible internet people are glad he's home.

Dysfunction, Dinner & Doodles [Lots of images!]

Today's been a very rainy, very slow and somewhat productive day. Usually Sundays just kinda tear by but this one was rather comfortable without feeling lazy.

I decide first of all to put on some music, then clean the living room. En route to the couch, I notice all the couch pillows are on the floor. It seems the Ethan-monster chucked them off so he could use the couch as a weekend bed. When I pick up his blanket I notice it smells rather funky and decide it should be washed.

On my way to the laundry (it's just a closet in the dining room space between the kitchen and living room), I find an exceptionally large spider has chosen to die in front of my washing machine.

By this time, the CD I picked is barely through the intro and I've already careened off-course into the completely wrong room. I'm supposed to clean the living room, not vacuum the laundry closet, but here I am with the Dirt Devil anyway, extra-long tube extended as far as it will go so that I can remain a safe 4 feet from the carcass (it makes audible rattling sounds and I can feel it clatter through my hand as it vanishes up the pipe, which is revolting).

Since I've already got the vacuum out, may as well tidy up the rest of the room. I go around every crack and crevice in the dining room, then the kitchen, using my vacuum rather than suffer the indignity of sweeping. Let's face it, sweeping sucks, and brooms are gross.

Holstering the tube, I see the toaster and a couple boxes of tea are taking up valuable real estate on my counter. I don't even eat that much toast, let alone drink tea. What am I, some kinda highfalutin' whatchamajig? Holy crap there is a lot of dead toast crumbs in this thing. Soon there's crumbs all over the counter, the sink, and the freshly-vacuumed floor, but the toaster looks pretty good huh? Aw yeah!

So I put the toaster in the cabinet and vacuum again. I want to relocate the tea, but where... oh, I'll put it up on the baker's rack! ...which is dirty, but whatever. I clean it off and decide that the tea doesn't look nice enough to go there, so instead I cram it all in a ziploc bag and open the corner cupboard to find...

Old medicine! Well THAT isn't worth a damn, is it? Expires March 2005? Oh no no no. All of that goes right into the trashcan, and I can finally put the bag of tea on my new clean shelf. Yay! But now I'm hungry. I should make dinner now, let's chop up some onions and some celery and some carrots and put them in a pot and play video games and draw a picture and wash my hands 16 times because I keep forgetting to do messy stuff all at once so I don't have to wash up after every single one.

AFTER dinner and all of that stuff is done, I finally remember that I was going to do laundry but it's getting kinda late so I should probably wash some clothes for Ethan to wear to school tomorrow instead before I wash his icky old blanket and he should really take a shower pretty soon before it's bedtime and he has to stay up late just so he can hose off the skunkiness of a weekend before I send him back to his teacher and that's what it's like to have ADD the end.

Here's some pictures!

This is my brother's girlfriend. She is pretty awesome. She also looks exactly like this IRL.

A friend requested a doodle for his real self, so I made this. I like how it looks in black & white. :)

Been working on some Libby and Fenniel cartoons so I can try my hand at making a comic. I think they look pretty adorable, if I do say so myself. Fenn is channeling his inner Peanut in this one, I think.

My mom FINALLY decided to start a recipe blog (I made her this doodle to put on it), and I'm very proud of how many posts she's made. She ain't no slacker!

I finally figured out how to use layers in Gimp, so I was able to color something without it being like torture. Yay!

Keltyr is evil. I don't know what else to say. Viva la turtleneck of doom!

A watersprite.

Here is a sketch I made for Ghaar. He ended up with Mel Gibson hair, eww! I don't know if I like how the coloring came out, but I do love the guild symbol on his tabard. You can see it whole here.

Dir Goes Commando; or What I Learned Last Month

So it's been a month since I started doodling. I'm still having fun with it, which is a good sign. I have good news and bad news, though. First off, I got some nasty malware (I blame Twitter, long story) and had to reformat my hard drive, killing all my arts. The good news? Almost all of it survived because I've been diligent about sticking them up on DeviantArt. I lost sketches, doodles, and re-colored completed sketches, but for the most part, at least one color version of everything survived the wipe.

So, now that I've had a good long week off, went to visit friends, reinstalled Windows, made pickles (for the first time ever!), a big pot of hot & sour soup, and coffee, it's time to get my ass back to the wheel (what?) and show you what I've been working on. Have some arts!

I've drawn Dir before, but it was a long time ago and I wanted something a bit nicer to go along with the story we wrote about Ysani and Dir. Dir prefers robes, because he can go commando. Duh!

Ysani decided after all that mess she needed a beach vacation, so I doodled a picture of her favorite bathing suit: green and pink. Not pictured? The big slice of watermelon on the butt. Story coming soon!

I play D&D on the weekends with some of my friends (official nerd card material right there, I feel validated now), and this is Mouse, one of the players. Mouse is a gnome shaman with a spider spirit companion, so she gets a nifty web tattoo. I like how she turned out, gnome-fro and all!

This dwarf fella here is Hardal, Ghaar's fighter in said D&D game. He actually gets a nose. I also think there may be a slight resemblance between this picture and his player IRL. Except for the beard, I mean (although I hear he gets quite the facial rug when his woman is out of town and he doesn't have to shave).

Fells is something of a legend, having taken a bazillion years to level her character (and she's still not capped). Her character is plain, prone to trouble and mischief, and doesn't seem to be all that fond of The Man. Personally, I would see that smile and run for cover.

Tried my hand at Hammaryn again, using a style more like Bika's beast-girl incarnation. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. I like how she turned out having a buff look to her, but I think she needs a narrower, rounder, more feminine jawline, and I just plain don't like how her eyes and mouth came out. I tried a ton of different ways but just left it at this for now.

Dravir is an engineer and I always assumed he lost his eye in some mechanical backfire (I could ask, but it's funnier to imagine he just had a mishap with an explosive sheep). He has some silvery facial tattoos, and they didn't really elaborate so I just made up my own design however I felt like doing it. The moral of the story is: be specific, or enjoy my own doodle-y interpretation. I think he liked it, so this was an overall win.

I started this doodle with someone specific in mind, but it did not go in the direction I was planning, at all. Female instead of male? Oops. I decided to make this one a DK, even going so far as to create Avaera on another server. Leaf tattoos are vertical on the WoW models, but I like them horizontal.

Last but not least, Reggie's warlock, Alsatia, is the Mary Poppins of evil zombie bitches. She wants you to be a good little boy or girl, so she can experiment on you and eventually eat your soul. Don't worry, she'll be sure to do so with a spoonful of sugar.

Warheads and Mullet-B-Gone

While catching up on Facebook today I discovered that my friend Eric/Gorebash sweats when eating really sour candy. Mild to moderate on the scale of TMI, it reminded me of that time in the 90's when cramming your mouth full of Warheads and puckering your face until it looked like a butt was the most extreme candy-related school activity. (Pop Rocks & Coke shooters were really before my time, I think. Plus, you know, that whole thing where it was a load of crap.)

Anyway, now that I'm done playing "hey, remember that thing that makes me feel old?" here are some more pictures.

After several revisions, my portrait of plaguebringer Uthas is finally complete. Braids AND five o'clock shadow, this drawing is basically like Christmas in 10000 pixels or less.

Renshank had the Coolest. Hair. Ever.

Tarquin got a wee reshaping to remove his mullet, hence the title of this post. FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS ROCK THE MULLET.

Wueten looks like he's contemplating how to fit 10 lbs of explosives into a 1 lb bag.

Redfield wanted to be drawn lighting a gnome on fire.

Wish granted, ya bastard.

Rashona is a fierce Savannah huntress. It is freakin' hard to draw cats, the end.

We will pretend that Grizz has shame. Blush, naked wench.

I like how Ezma turned out. She's like a cute bug. Also a zombie. Cute zombie bug. Yeah.

Thiyenn and a Cupcake Fight

Thiyenn is painfully shy and I'm not sure if she ever really smiles.

Ethan wanted a picture too.

Tom Galvadore actually turned out rather dapper, I think.

Cupcake Fight!

Bika vs. Jarderk, Bika wins.

Lazy summer Thursdays are good for drawing and bad for cleaning house. I'm going to go do some chores, but first, I declare every Thursday to be Cupcake Thursday, and will be making some after I get some work done. What kind should I make? Pumpkin? Vanilla? Chocolate, Red Velvet, gingerbread, cherry-almond, pineapple with coconut cream. Cream cheese frosting or chocolate buttercream. So many choices.

What's your favorite cupcake?

Summer vacation: GO!

Davien looks so... sweet and innocent. I'M NOT BUYING IT.

Dark days are coming! Ghaar is prepared.

Azunma makes evil look like so much fun.

Kansin and Bika, doing what they do.

Libby and Fenniel. Aren't they adorable??

School's out and spider season is here! I found a frickin' huge hairy brown spider in the laundry last night and totally flipped out. GROSS! I know they're beneficial insects, but holy gods do they give me the willies. If it won't fit on a dime, it's too big to be in my house. Ew ew ew.

Last week was pretty uneventful, so I spent most of the time drawing pictures and hanging out with Ethan. He spends a lot of time outside these days and the back of his neck is getting to be as brown as a UPS truck, even after I make him wash off all the dirt. The kid never sunburns. He sure didn't get that from me.

Speaking of summer sunburns... Feathermeet is coming up and I still don't know if I can go. Cross your fingers for me (or don't, if you hate my guts and don't wanna see me there) and hope that our scheduling allows it. All well-wishes on that front are appreciated!

It's a Fuck You Friday [PG-13. Fuck you, gratuitous profanity!]

Good friggin' morning, ain't it just a grand old sunshine suppository of a day? I'm not typically fond of rampant bitching, but it's just One of Those Days and if I'm gonna complain without being constructive, I may as well save it all up for a good old-fashioned Fuck You Friday!

Fuck you, Nancy Grace. You're a gossipy old hack. I guess if your relentless ululating throat-punch style works for you, you should milk it for all it's worth. Right? RIGHT! Fuck you!

Fuck you, CNN, for tricking me into watching even one second of a Nancy Grace clip. NOT COOL.

Fuck you, feet, for being cold all the time.

Fuck you, forum posters who condemn the RP scene as nonexistent without ever having done anything but sit conspicuously in a bar emoting heavy sighs and being vaguely provocative. "Please pay attention to me! My character is so deep and you would know if you would only sit and hear my sad, mysterious, sexy and important tale!" Grats on being the 14292358th person who couldn't be assed to try.

Fuck you, salt, for being so goddam delicious.

Fuck you, $224 million Megamillions jackpot that I won't win. Fuck you, sticky change in the bottom of my cupholder. Fuck you, people who write and propagate malware. Fuck you, coffee pot, for scorching my second cup. Fuck you, Friday, for being almost indistinguishable from Monday.

Now for some special guest submissions on this lovely FYF:

"Hey Friday? Fuck you. It's stormy, my net connection is trying to shit the bed, and I may end up actually having to do laundry. So, double fuck you." - Reggie

[Author's Note: I am super-jealous that I wasn't the one to think of the ol' double fuck-you for today's post. Fuck you, creativity!]

Fuck you, needing 7 hours of sleep to function. Fuck you, guy on the highway, for cutting me off only to slow down. - Greg

"Dear filthy club whore who came into my store at 3 AM: Fuck you.

Fuck your condoms.

Fuck you for scoffing at me when I ask if you have a fucking CVS card. I know, you're too drunk to know whether you're in CVS, W

algreen's or the tattoo parlor.

No, I'm not staring at your withered tits. I'm looking at your nasty hickey from last night, and NO you can't use my bathroom to wash up." - Branden

Getting fed up listening to old men whine. "Back in my day, we didn't text, we talked to people". Yeah, well, back in your day you were amazed by indoor plumbing and electricity. "My daughter never picks up the phone when it's me". All you do is gripe and complain, why would she? - Anon.

[Author's Note: "Back in my day, we talked to people. And made damn sure Those People didn't drink out of our water fountains." Amirite? Fuck you, misplaced nostalgia!]

Who wants to get in on the action? Consider this your one-day pass to get your gripes off your chest. Show me your best FYF face in the comments.

Tomorrow: 'It's Not You, It's Me' Saturday!

[rl] A Wrong Number

It's been both a long and short Spring Break out here on Master's week (god, I hate golf so much), and it's winding down to a close. We stayed up a little later, woke up a little later, and the days were hot and full of shenanigans and even some spring cleaning (that was out of left field, let me tell you).

The reason I write this is because a weird thing happened to me the day after a couple delicious full-strength gin & tonics made me so loud I was repeatedly removed from populated vent channels. At some point during or after such hijinks I put my cell phone down and couldn't remember where. Being a lazy asshole, I couldn't be bothered to go look for it.

Picking up my house phone, I dialed what I thought was probably my number. (In addition to being a lazy asshole, I am also terrible at remembering stuff.) I wasn't sure, but whatever.

Instead of the loud ringing I expected, a young woman answered.

"Oh, sorry, I dialed the wrong number."

"Wait, I just picked this phone up off the ground, did you lose it?"

What?! [In my head, Ethan is already getting a huge lecture for taking my phone outside again.] "Um. Well, I did misplace it, I was just expecting to hear it ring in my house."

"Oh! Well, are you still at the Tulip Festival? I can bring it over to you?"

Tulip Fffffffffffffffff- "Uh... I'm in Augusta, Georgia. Where's the Tulip Festival?"

"The Tulip Festival? It's in Woodburn, Oregon! How did your phone get out here?"

Oh, for the love of-- "It didn't! I just uh, happened to call the wrong number of someone else who just lost their phone."

"..."

"..."

So, after mutual declarations of weirdness, she took the phone to the lost & found, I got the correct number, and my phone was found. (It was on the console table in plain sight, of course.)

I've been told since that I should buy a lottery ticket. Once again, however, I'm still a lazy asshole, so unless I can buy one by calling a number, the alignment of stars and/or splotches of bird poop on my car will continue to mean nothing.

Happy spring break, everybody!

8 Things I've Learned This Week

1. You can get a permanent crease in your face if you always sleep with your left cheek smooshed into your pillow.

2. Guitars are pretty easy to restring.

3. It helps if you choose the right string.

4. Tuning the wrong string to the right note will sometimes let you know, with shocking suddenness, that you have chosen the wrong string.

5. People will deep-fry anything.

6. Garlic cloves make smelly chips. Okra makes inexplicably slimy-yet-crunchy chips.

7. I. Love. Gin and tonic. No, really. I will marry it. Sorry, honey.

8. I will continue to write lists, no matter how incomplete or inane, until the day I die. Or until the day my hands fall off and I have no access to studly young orderlies to take dictation. Whichever comes first.

A little fun at someone else's expense: Mixing reviews and creative writing [Possibly NSFW]

I've been following Heidi Swanson's vegetarian cooking/photography blog off and on for some time now. I like her photos, and I have really enjoyed trying some of her recipes. At the same time, I find her writing style grates on my nerves. A lot.

Thanks to Miss Heidi, I now cringe any time I see the words vibrant, spritz, jolt, drizzle, pop, and flecked. Especially flecked. Everything Heidi makes is flecked with something. It's like the Glitter Fairy threw up in her kitchen ten years ago and she's still having a hard time keeping the mess out of her food.

Heidi, some words are fun. I understand that! But sometimes words are uncommon for a reason. Unlike salt, you can't just liberally drizzle them all over everything you make, or they stick out like sore thumbs.

I'm fairly certain she'll never read this blog. I'm also pretty sure that I would never quite fit into the odd yuppie-granola category that seems to be her target audience. It's not really any of my business how she writes (and I know that her hordes of fawning foodie fans would eviscerate me if I dared to criticize her on her own territory) but it's bothered me for a while and something came up tonight that gave me a reason to write about it.

I was discussing a typical Swanson-esque blog segment with my friend Andrew. Here's an excerpt from her recipe for Buckwheat Cheese Straws:

Crispy, cheddar-flecked, and rustic, it's the buckwheat flour that lends these slender creations their convincing shade of brownish gray.

He came up with the brilliant idea to write pornography using the same words. I got on that right away, because I'm always up to a pervy challenge. Sorry, Heidi, this one's for you.

They made love in the rustic cottage until the sheets were crispy and his face was a convincing shade of brownish-gray. She knew he was sated then, and as they lay twined together in her fine, cheddar-flecked linens, she traced her fingers up and down his body. He was perfectly vibrant; her strong, yet slender creation. "I think we're all out of buckwheat flour," said Martha Stewart.

Here's another example of Ms. Swanson's flavor text. If you pornify it (yes, I know that's not a real word) in the comments I'll send you something nice!

It's just the sort of thing to slather on a sandwich, dollop over hot pasta, or you can do what I did, and work it through a bowl of plump, chewy wheat berries. The bite of the arugula is tamed by the creaminess of the pine nuts, and the saltiness of the grated Parmesan and chopped Kalamata olive offsets the wheat berries nicely.

One more sample before I sign off, a little gem that was just a few lines down on the same page:

These wheat berries have a beautiful, barely-noticeable red blush when cooked, and they plump into perfect oblong orbs that look like they might pop between your molars.