Party time ahead!

[wiseheart]

Well, yes, dear folks, it's this time of the year again. The big, one-week virtual party from today to the 9th of October starts here. Come on in, be welcome, make yourself comfortable, and post a comment. May we have many collapsed threads again!

Last year we had 559 comments on 4 pages, which is an impressive record to break. But I have an excellent apple pie in the oven, and offer a virtual slice to every party guest.

Let's party!

Addition: someone asked for the apple pie recipe. Here it is, behind the cut.


400 gr wheat flour
200 gr butter or margarine
200 gr sugar
1/10 litre sour cream
1 pinch of salt
ground peel of 1/lemon
2 gr baking soda

For the filling:
2 kg apples
sugar,cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla and ground lemon peel as you like

One eggyolk for painting the top.

How to make it?
1) Make a dough from abovementioned ingredients.
2) Cut it in two equal pieces. Roll out one piece, lay it into a baking tin (baking paper under it is helpful).
3) Spread some dried bread crubms all over it.
4) Peel and plane (slice???) the apples, press out the juice with your hands (it shouldn't be too dry, though) and mix them with the spices.
5) Spread the apples over the dough.
6) Roll out the other half of the dough. Cover the apples with it.
7) Paint the top with eggyolk and bake it in a pre-heated oven, on 200°C for twenty minutes.
8) Cut it when it's cooled down.

Sorry, but I had to use the metric system. My brain doesn't work in cups and pounds and that stuff. I hope you can still figure out how much you need from the ingredients.



Addition: I also wish to gift upon my dear party guests a birthday-present, Hobbit-style: Chapter 03 - Puer Natus Est Nobis of my Cadfael fic "Sparrows" has just been posted to hiddenrealms and to FF.Net. Enjoy!

And the end results are: 735 comments on 6 pages! It's more than I could have dreamed of, and I thank you - all of you - who contributed to this record. It will be a hard one to break next year indeed, but I hope you'll be back. :)

Thanks again, I had a fantastic time and met great new people - it was fun!

Comments

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Possibly his child-like naiveté explains why he had a thing with Tasha? He just thinks the best of everyone...

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I still need to work out what makes the threads on an individual page collapse. It seems on the first page we needed 50 comments, but the threads had already started collapsing on the second page when we had less than 30 comments on that page. More research is needed and for that we need to get to a new page...

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

You think you could talk her into it? That would be fantastic. We could use Bilbo and the whole elder generation of hobbits out of The Hobbit, and perhaps some of the more obscue ones from HoMe - it would be a whopper!

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :)

It was the first icon I uploaded, ages before I had others (I think) and have some on my computer to upload but haven't got round to it - although I got some of them uploaded to my other journal and dreamwidth...

[maglors-finch.livejournal.com]

Some of them.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

That's one thing that could actually make me *like* Feanor... and there aren't many such thing. Imagine that: him, sitting in the kitchen, apple peels falling off in horror, apples bursting into tiny pieces and hiding in the dough - hell he'd even be able to bake the pie with his spirit of fire.

hides under the kitchen table from enraged Silmficcers

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

There's nothing wrong with a little doom and gloom, although personally, I detest Wagner. I'm not much of an opera fan as a whole. Now, Bach's pieces for the organ, or his cantatas, that's something for this girl.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Awww, sorry to hear that - get better, soon! I used to have a bit of a cold a week or so ago; now I'm working to long hours for the germs to survive. They've got a healthy sense of self-preservation, I guess, coz they've fled my system during the recent week. ;)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Discounting The Lord of the Rings as too obvious, I'll say The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. It's the perfect science fiction book. Or else The Far Side of Evil by Sylvia Engdahl, a YA science fiction book with a brave and smart female lead and lots of sociology. (My icon is from the cover of the recent hardback reissue.)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Who would ever have guessed he'd make such a handy household appliance?!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

"Götterdämmerung the Cheery Bits Version"? Might not be very long, though.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Favourite book? That is a very hard question! :)
There are so many books I love, it makes it really hard to choose a favourite.

To name several, limiting myself to one book or series by an author:

Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome - children's books written and set in the 1930s about children camping, sailing and playing games of imagination in the Lake District. There are so many reasons why I loves these, the main on is that each of the children have their own strengths and weaknesses and these all play their part in the stories.

Lions Of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay - historical fantasy set in a alternative version of Reconquest Spain. Very detailed and characters from all sides are shown without any feeling that there is one side that is right and the others are wrong. Individual characters are good, bad or mixed, mostly mixed and have their own motivations and values which inform their actions. It is also a book that makes me cry at the end, but without seeming too morbid.

Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold - historical fantasy set in an alternative world parallel to Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. A world where there are gods who intervene in the world, but can only work through people who let them. Twisty and very detailed.

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott - historical novel based in England in the reign of Richard I. A nostalgia favourite, I think I was about 6 when my father first read this to me. I know there are problems with it - and I like having read it enough to know which bits I can skip. I really enjoyed the way that the reader keeps finding out more and so many of the characters aren't who they appear to be when the reader first encounters them.

Lord Of The Rings - obviously. Engrossing and such a sense of the world going on around the edges of the story with all the details of everything - history, language etc.

Interesting to see that I've picked 3 fantasy novels, 3 historical (of various types) and 1 children's book. I'm surprised as I read lots of science fiction, but thinking about it most of that is more light reading than the ones that I count as my favourites. I could list more, but I think this will do for now. :)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Heh! Imagine if we could bring Morgoth down with apple pie. Balrogs sitting around the fire, keeping it alive, and Orcs waiting impatiently for their bite of pie.

After all, apples led to the loss of Paradise for mankind, they can as well make up for that loss with something else than just being delicious.

The above comment was from Gildor. I'd never think of anything so blasphemic in my life, but Gildor is one embittered Elf-Lord... has been ever since Celebrimbor bought the farm.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Well, at least we share two of these: Ivanhoe and LOTR. The other fantasy books you've mentioned sound interesting, too. Never heard of them before, but again, they don't import the really good stuff all that often here. :(

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I voted for The Lord of the Rings in the BBC Big Read search for our favourite book. In this setting I will agree it is overly obvious, though.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah, I didn't count LOTR either, since that's the A and O of all books - even though I might like "The Hobbit" just a bit better... on a purely emotional level. That was the book I fell in love with first, with Elrond, who's as kind as summer, with the gorgeous Elvenking, with Gandalf, Balin the Dwarf, and first and foremost Bilbo.

I don't know that particular Ursula Le Guin book. Is it SF or fantasy? That it would be absolutely brilliant and deeply depressing is without question, right?

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Sometimes being obvious isn't such a bad thing, though.
One of my deepest regrets is that the Professor never found the time to write the entire Tuor cycle, with Gondolin and stuff. What little is there in the Unfinished Tales is simply amazing - and then it just stops, and I could cry in frustration.

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

He's Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters (or at least, the head is), in an angel manip that bitter_crimson made! The delight of the image is in the juxtaposition of his grim manliness with the fluffy wings.

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

Oh whoops, I did the code wrong, that should be, that bitter_crimson made.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome as one of my favourite (series of) books, but I see jenn_calaelen beat me to it. Hence I will go with another rather obvious book and say To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It really is a wonderful, and positive book, showing that humans can and will rise to better themselves if we believe in them and give them a chance. When my friend K mentioned that he hadn't knowingly read many books by female authors this was my immediate recommendation. I then bought it for him for his birthday, just to make sure he got the hint! Happily he does have good taste in books and enjoyed it very much.

Edited to fix html-coding error.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Aaand we have the chance to go over 300 comments today. If I've counted correctly, this one should be #295!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

The Dispossessed is about a physicist who lives on an anarchist world who is being pressured not to work with people from a capitalist world. It's about his journey to that world, and what happens when he gets there, with his life story told in flashback in alternating chapters. Yes, there are some depressing bits!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Curse of Chalion YEAH!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see a version of that like the recent Children of Hurin.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I was really pleased it won, one in the eye for all the literati who insisted it was rubbish!