Filling A Much-Needed Void

I’ve been giving thought to this for some time, both before and since the blogging hiatus I took this winter, and I have determined that I need to hang up my blogging spurs, such as they are.

Basically, I am not cut out to be a blogger.  No matter how I try, or how I try to convince myself that it’ll be different this time if I just do this instead of that, I don’t do short, breezy, and casual very well.  Nor indeed short, hard-hitting, and serious. Mostly I don’t do short very well.  And I don’t do it reflexively at all.  I tend, as anyone who’s read this blog very much already knows, to write essay-length pieces.

A little aside on this, if you’ll indulge me: Most writers I know seem to find over time that they have a “natural length,” an average quantity of verbiage they are wont to spew in the average day’s work.  My “natural length” as a writer, if such a thing can be said to exist, is about 1500 words. As some of you may recall from agonized attempts to pad out college term papers to their requisite length — and I must note that making wordcount on academic papers was never my personal bugbear, but when I taught undergraduates,  many of my freshman comp students seemed to struggle with it a great deal — writing 1500 words takes a lot more time than reading 1500 words.  1500 words — about 6 double-spaced typed pages — is a pretty good writing day for most of the writers I know.  Sometimes I have a really good writing day and I get more than that.  Sometimes I spend all day grinding against something that’s hard to structure or express and I get less.  But that’s about average for me.

And herein lies the basic problem: writing 6 pages takes time and energy and concentration and so on. I only have so many hours in the day, and only so much energy and ability to concentrate.  I can spend it on blogging or I can spend it on writing books, but I can’t really do both.  Not reliably, and not well.  If I’m writing a lot of blog stuff I’m usually not writing a lot of book stuff, and vice versa, and either way the guilt sets in, and either way something isn’t getting done the way I would prefer it to get done, and, well, it’s just not helpful.

If I could easily and reliably write short’n’sweet for the blog, and writing blog entries didn’t suck time and resources away from my work, it might be a different story, but it ain’t.  Turns out that the answer isn’t “take some time away from thinking about the blog and then things will be different,” after all.

Oh, as they say, well.

I plan — as I have time — to finish recording podcasts of The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, to which I will post links in this blog as I can get that done, because I’d like to finish that for those of you who’ve been listening.  And I’ll leave the blog archives where they are.

Thanks for reading, and may all your domestic adventures be delightful.

I am not amused. A few days ago, as far as Amazon.com was concerned, I had written or edited five books that came up when a search on my name was run in the “all departments” search.

As of today? One. Virgin: The Untouched History.

Why? Because Amazon has decided that things with icky GLBT and/or sexually explicit content are icky! And also might make the eyes of helpless children explode! Or turn them queer!  Or make them think about (shudder) their naughty bits.  Or (even worse) someone else’s naughty bits. And as we all know, when that happens, the Ewoks dance terrorists win, thousands more workers in the American automotive industry get laid off, people buy automatic rifles and shoot innocent people, bell bottoms come back in style, and God kills a kitten.

So they had to strip all such items of their Amazon Rank.

Mind you, if I deliberately search only on “Books,” clicking that option in the search box, all of my books appear.  But I have to turn on the “Books” function.  A search on “All Departments” does not, in fact, give the search results from all departments at all: it gives highly censored search results.

You will perhaps comprehend that not all people are likely to specifically click the “Books” option on an Amazon search.  In fact, I confess that mostly, when I have used Amazon.com in the past, have not done so, because I operated under the perfectly reasonable assumption that when the search parameters are set for “All Departments” the search will, in point of fact, search all the available departments.

So the “All Departments” search is not at this point a comprehensive search of all departments.  It is a censored search that disallows certain types of results from appearing at all.  Effectively, Amazon is attempting — by duping the good-faith searcher into thinking that all of Amazon’s for-sale items have been searched — to mislead the user of their website in regard to whether or not Amazon carries or sells certain items.  Given that many users use Amazon not to see whether Amazon carries an item that is already known to them, but to browse for items they may not have encountered previously, this effectively means that Amazon.com is disallowing items with GLBT or sexually explicit content to be encountered.

Think about how you use Amazon.com, or the public library, or indeed a brick and mortar bookstore (if you are lucky enough to still have one of those around, since so many of them have been wiped out of existence by Amazon.com in the past 10 years).  Think about how you most often encounter new-to-you books that look enticing enough that you’ll pick them up and read the jacket copy, or maybe even to buy them and take them home.

By browsing.

Exactly the point.

I will further note that for an author, having only one of their several books easily findable on Amazon.com might, y’know, do some bad things to their sales, and thus to their ability to make a living. Publishers do, you know, consider an author’s prior sales as part of how they decide whether or not to publish new books.  (Prior sales also influence what kinds of print runs a publisher will produce of a new title, and what kinds of promotion those new titles will receive.)

This is not okay.

It’s especially not okay because it constitutes a massive attempt to make information on sexuality — explicit and not-explicit — difficult or impossible to find. Some of my friends’ sex ed titles are effectively erased from general Amazon searches because of this maneuver, including non-explicit titles aimed at responsible and comprehensive sex education for children and young adults.  Other titles that are affected deal with important topics like contraception, sex work, sexual violence, and sexual health.

I don’t think I need to rehearse all the very many reasons this is not okay.

Amazon rank this, Amazon.com: I have deleted all my payment information from my Amazon.com account and I have followed procedure (email their customer service from the e-mail account associated with your Amazon.com account or call 1-866-216-1072 ) to close my Amazon.com account permanently.  Your policy is cowardly, bigoted, homophobic, repressive, oppressive, and thoroughly repugnant, and even if you reverse this policy decision tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Seattle time, you have lost my business for good.

If you need or want some books, or for that matter CDs or DVDs, find an independent book/media seller near you.  My favorite is Baltimore’s own mighty Atomic Books.  If you stop by, or send in an order (they happily do mail order and special orders — they order things for me all the time!) tell Benn and Rachel (and everyone else) I sent you.

White pizzas: double-mozzarella and smoked garlic (left); herbed romano-provolone (right)

I volunteered to make food for my Belovedary’s gaming night tonight.  I decided on pizza, one of the major Geek Food Groups.  Knowing that one of the gamers prefers white pizza to red-sauce pies, I decided to turn out two white pizzas, each with its own distinct identity.

These have crusts that are on the thin side.  Not cracker-thin, but fairly thin nonetheless; I would say the main portion of the dough (not the rims) was stretched to a bit less than a quarter inch thick, on average.

I have to confess that I don’t know what these pizzas taste like, as I can’t eat them (dairy protein allergy).  But the response to my pizzas has always been very positive.  Perhaps you will like them, too.

Hanne’s Basic Pizza Dough

makes 2 large thin-crust pizzas, 2 medium focaccia, or 4 small pizzas, or some combination of the above

3 cups 00 flour (this is a very finely milled wheat flour that gives a wonderful light texture, traditional in Italian bread bakery and pastamaking)
1 cup all purpose flour
2 teaspoons instant yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2 cups hot water
4 Tablespoons olive oil

Mix the dry ingredients together, then add the liquid ingredients in a steady stream, beating as you pour it in.  The dough should soon begin to clump together and clean the sides of the bowl.  Keep mixing for a minute or two, adding more flour (a tablespoon at a time, and mixing thoroughly between additions) if it seems too wet.  You want the dough to feel very soft and pliable, and slightly sticky, but it should not be shaggy or cling hopelessly to your fingers when you poke it.  Knead until smooth and elastic.  Form into a ball and place in a large clean bowl covered with a damp kitchen towel and set aside to rise until fully doubled in size.

After the dough has risen, punch it down and knead another minute or two, then divide into as many pieces as you require for your uses.  Set it aside and let it rest for five minutes or so before shaping the dough.

If baking as pizza, use a moderate 350F oven.  If baking as focaccia, 400F.  Brushing your pizza pans with a small amount of olive oil prior to placing the crust in the pan will help crisp the bottom of the crust and also help keep it from sticking.

The general rule I use in baking thinner-crusted pizzas is to bake them until the rim crusts are golden (these are! my kitchen lights are very yellowish, so it’s hard to tell) or even slightly browned if you think your cheese can take the heat.  A blonde rim crust usually means an undercooked bottom crust.

For focaccia, bake until the bread is a solid golden brown.

As for pizza toppings, you may, of course, use whatever you fancy.  Since this is intended to make two crusts that are on the thin side, I recommend that you don’t overload your pies: the crust won’t bake well, and the whole works will lack structural integrity.  If you choose to use a tomato sauce, or uncooked vegetables (sauteeing vegetables prior to adding them to your pizza is a nice option sometimes, especially with particularly juicy vegetables) I would recommend pre-baking the crust for about 15 minutes first so that it will stand a chance of not being sodden.

These pizzas were topped with

• chopped smoked roasted garlic cloves, fresh cow’s milk mozzarella ciliegine, smoked mozzarella
• generous pinches of oregano, marjoram, basil, black pepper and ground fennel seed scattered over the crust, topped with a scattering of crushed fresh garlic, provolone, and pecorino Romano

I promised a sauerkraut update, so this is one.  It has been fermenting now for a week, and is just barely beginning to taste as if something is going on in there, fermentation-wise.  My kitchen is pretty cool most of the time, at this time of year, so I was not anticipating a rapid ferment.  I estimate that it will begin to actually taste like sauerkraut in another week.  I just ate a small dish of it, well-rinsed, as part of my lunch, and as of now it tastes like salty cabbage with slight overtones of fermenty funk.  It was very pleasant, actually, but not sauerkraut yet.

I snapped a little picture anyhow, though, because red cabbage makes such pretty sauerkraut.  With the angle of the light from the kitchen skylight, it rather looked like it was shining with an inner light, doubtless the product of all the loving exertions of the groovy all-volunteer army of free-range lactobacilli in there doing their thing.

Homemade sauerkraut lets its little light shine.

So I had a little cooking debacle yesterday, of which I wish, now, that I had stopped to snap a photo, because it was kind of Biblical in its chthonic oozy bubbling horribleness.   There is just something about the texture and movement of gently-belching batter magma — batter that was supposed to turn into chocolate cupcakes and for some eldritch reason did not — that is really hard to describe in text.  Those of you who have ever experienced Epic Cake Fail will understand.

Anyhow, the short story is that although one of my batches of cupcakes did not succeed, the other one did, and so my small cupcake-decorating party went off without a hitch.  My Belovedary, plus two of our friends, R and M, came over to hang out and shoot the breeze and decorate cupcakes.

For those of you looking for a relaxing way to spend some time on a weekend afternoon with friends that doesn’t cost too much money, you could do much worse than decorating cupcakes.  A small tube of marzipan (a little goes a long way!), some food coloring, a few kinds of shiny decorating sugar or sprinkles or whatever moves you (or indeed whatever you have kicking around the back of your cupboards), and a few kinds of small candies if you like, and you’re off to the races.  You can make your own cupcakes, or buy them if you prefer.  The point is that you spend a couple hours sitting around the kitchen table with your friends. It’s very relaxing to do something creative and visual that is ultimately totally low-stakes and inconsequential because of the fact that you’ll be eating it later.  And one of the great things about doing something like this is that you can customize your recipes to your dietary needs: everything you see below is vegan, to accommodate my dairy protein allergy.

Without further ado, a little gallery of some of the results!

R made this bright, sunny sparkler that I loved.

M did some masterful food-coloring paint-mixing, and adorned mini marshmallows.

R's sweet little marzipan nest of eggs, so cute.

My Belovedary made marzipan dinosaur eggs in the marzipan grass.

I made a marzipan octopus.

And a marzipan piggy, complete with itty-bitty cloven hooves and a curly tail.

The marzipan proved quite popular, and unexpectedly inspiring.  In fact, my two favorites that came out of the whole proceedings were both made of undyed marzipan.  One was made by M:

Behold: Marzipanhenge!

And the very best one of all was the one that my Belovedary made for me:

It's a SQUID! Made of marzipan. With hand-painted chromatophores.

It’s a squid!  An adorable ickle marzipan squid!  I was so excited I squealed like a little girl, which I suppose tells you a lot about the kind of little girl I was and the kind of person I turned out to be, but perhaps most of all it tells you that I have married very, very well.