Thud: Above

June 2, 2008 Progress Notes:

Above

Words today: 1500.
Words total: 41,000 MS Word, 51,000 SMF. We have breached 50k, captain. :)
Reason for stopping: Nice tidy number. And it's not 2am yet, but it's getting there.
Liquid Refreshment: Water.
Munchies: Apricots, bocconcini.

Darling du Jour: There's no cold like shadow-cold, the touch of something not-alive and hurting and hating on your skin. But there's cold near it. There's cold that gets to your skin from the inside coming on out.
Words Matthew Won't Admit to Knowing: Nothing today, but he did own up to quarry.
Mean Things: Bad Idea Seance is gonna go bad. Also, that the secondary characters didn't actually put their lives on hold while you were off doing your thing. Oops. :p
Research Roundup: N/A.
Books in progress: Textbooks. I have to have Othello done for Wednesday.
The glamour: Cough, cough, woe is me.

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Hit a signposted scene tonight and dragged it into the fabric of the rest of the book, which...triggered one of those moments where you're working into the loose and sort of wiggly bits that you sorta-know happen, but aren't sure of the particulars of or where those moments aim. And then a gear turns and the teeth lock, or a thread tightens just so, and the whole book draws tighter, clicks over one step closer into realness and coherence and interrelation.

There is something ridiculously satisfying about feeling a story pull tight.

So some of tonight's verbiage is skipping around on the end scenes, fleshing them out a bunch. Every time this happens I go add some more to the end, because more comes clearer about what needs to be there. The end-end just got a little less skeletal, and there is something I need to string through better if it's going to rear up and hit just so in the very last line.

(Were you here, in front of me, I would show you with my hands.)

I wonder how the hell people worked with my kind of process before a word processor, all jumping and skipping and changing one's mind. I imagine it involved a lot of notecards and cursing.

Onion Soup, Adulterated

Mostly blogging this so I don't forget the changes I made. The original recipe's from Emeril Lagasse's Louisiana: Real and Rustic, a cookbook I have owned for eight years and only ever used one other recipe out of, but it's somewhat unrecognizable by the time I'm done with it.

Adulterated Heathen Onion Soup

1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup flour
5 cups sliced onions
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne (and actually, we may want to take this down a bit)
4 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon basil
2 tablespoons chopped garlic (this may come down too)
8 cups chicken stock
large honking amount of white wine
4 tablespoons-ish good soy sauce
handful of oyster mushrooms
some good parmesan
butter

Okay, then. Slice up the onions into thin thin rounds. Do not have enough onions for the original recipe amount. Shrug. Chop your garlic, do your mise en place.

Over medium heat, make a blond roux with the oil and flour. Thicken it up a little, then put in the onions and all the seasonings but the garlic and cook (stirring lots) until everything slumps a bit and the onions are golden. Then add the garlic, cook maybe a minute more (at this point it'll be hell getting the roux to not stick to your pot) and put in the chicken stock. Turn the heat to medium-low.

Decide that this is too spicy and onion soup without alcohol in it is a sham and a mockery. Add some serious amounts of cheap white wine. No, more. More than that. A little more now. Good.

Taste again, decide that there's no bottom note to this soup and go hunting for something to give it one. Throw in two little containers of soy sauce salvaged from sushi takeout last week. Demonstrate manic grin as it works just fine.

Decide, a few minutes later, that really nothing is ever made worse by mushrooms. Find a handful of dried oyster mushroom in a paper bag in the fridge. Crumble it into bite-sized pieces, toss it in.

Meddling included? Simmer for a good hour on medium-low, uncovered.

At about t-minus 20 minutes, it will start to smell gooooood. Stir it every so often, tasting to see if any more meddling is required. Watch like a cat.

After the hour is up, add some good parmesan and stir it in so it melts evenly into the soup proper. Ignore a bunch of shit at the end of the original recipe about croutons and other cheeses and mess and fuss that you don't care about (I have kindly done this step for you!). However, get a brainwave re: that and toss in a chunk of butter, stirring, so the texture's a bit smoother.

Eat. Nom nom nom nom. Oh my.

Blog recipe, because nothing sucks like forgetting how you adulterated the original. *g*