So, it is party time again, folks!

[wiseheart]

Each year this time, we launch my virtual birthday party, which starts on October 1 and ends on October 9 at midnight, sharp. The goals of the party are to post as many comments and collapse as many threads as possible, on as many new pages as we can. It is always great fun, as you can see if you check out the similar entries of the last few years.

This year, I'll also throw the real party at mid-time - and post the recipes of all the food that will be there for you, so that you can all participate if you want to. Virtual food has no calories.

Fandom-related discussions are as welcome as the ones about coffee or chocolate (just to name a few favourites from previous years), and, of course, pictures and recipes of birthday cakes. ;)

So, drop by, tell your story, post your pics or silly poems, ask questions you always wanted to ask and have a good time!

Soledad, in excited expectation




Oh, and by the way, to provide birthday gifts hobbit-style, I've got a revived story and a Kansas 2 update for you.

Enjoy!

Comments

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

I didn't know you were a vegetarian. One learns new things about one's friends all the time. ;)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Thank you. :)
Those are good things indeed.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Not to mention heavy. ;)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

For me, definitely Christopher Eccleston! Although I quite like Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, too. Peter Davison is a bit, as the Germans would say, "licked smooth" for my taste. And the others are all more or less insane.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

We've got insane weather over here. Over the day it's warm and sunny (or warm and clouded over), so they won't start central heating, understandably enough. But over night, it drops fifteen degrees Celsius, and we broke out the winter comforter to prevent getting a cold.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Sounds adventurous nonetheless. ;)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

So, what should we be aiming for today? For 300 comments or for Page 3?

BTW, last night I imported the first 134 comments to DW, just in case. Tonight I'll do the same. Better safe than sorry. Let's hope LJ holds out until that hour. *knocks on wood*

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Oh absolutely! I wasn't trying to belittle the baking adventure lhun_dweller was describing, just chipping in that there may be a different term for it that was more familiar to others.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

What would the birthday girl prefer?

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I don't like parsnips, either. Sweet potato is wondeful, though we don't eat it very often these days -- we used to do a fried side dish of spiced sweet potato with curry, but we've had to give it up as too calorific.

I know several vegetarians who don't like large numbers of vegetables. My mother-in-law, for instance, doesn't seem to like any vegetables very much and has been a vegetarian for ~40 years.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Eccleston was an intersting portrayal; I wished he could have continued in the role longer. Davison was too young for the role, even when I was a teen, but I thought he was sweet :)

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

We could do with some inspiring topics to discuss!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Sour dough I know! I wondered if Lhun Dweller might be gathering the yeast herself from the wild, which sounds very adventurous.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine gave me a fantastic book on baking a few years back; among the things it described was how to make sour dough from scratch. The process sounds very similar to what lhun_dweller describes. I think it might even have used the phrase 'wild yeast'. I tried it and it was great fun, but it also felt rather wasteful; you kept doubling the size of your sour dough every day, and then throwing most of it away every four days, for four weeks. I was very pleased with the taste of the bread, even if like lhun_dweller describes, it didn't rise as much as I expected.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

One of the recipe books I got for my birthday this year, had a recipe for a sweet potato gratin with peanut butter, which was positively scrumpcious! It would probably sadly fall in the category of 'too calorific' though, because it contained quite a lot of cream...

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Peanut butter's another thing on my Can't Abide list! But sweet potato gratin sounds delicious -- and one could always try it with low-fat yoghurt instead of cream.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Mr EA has a baking streak -- he's been known to make sour dough in the past but he's been too busy of late. Hopefully next year when he's (semi)-retired he'll get back to baking -- we'll have an Aga which is good for breadmaking.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

What is everyone having for dinner tonight? I am being very lazy! I stayed at work until twenty to eight, so I order a pizza on-line for delivery, specifying when I wanted it delivered with a bit of margin so that I was sure I would have time to cycle home. Actually, I ended up with a bit more margine than I needed, so despite the fact that I have been home for 15 minutes, I still have another ten to wait for my dinner...

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

We've just had chicken curry with butternut squash & lemon juice (which we're using in place of rice) and cucumber & mint raita. One of our standard meals but enjoyable, nevertheless.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I love butternut squash! Do I understand correctly that you use it and the lemon juice in place of the rice? If so, can you explain further? It sounds intriguing!

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I do love baking, but I find that living on my own and not eating much bread (I usually try to do salads for lunch to keep the calorie content down), making bread is not very sensible. Luckily my group at work are always very helpful in eating anything sweet I bring in, so at least I get to do some baking without feeling too guilty about how much I eat.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I love peanut butter, and thought it worked really well in this dish. My plan is to use coconut cream/milk next time I make it, because I think that would be a good taste combination, but again you may find that rather calorific. My recipe also had the zest and juice of a lemon in it, which worked really well with the sweet potato.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

They turned the heating back on at work at the end of September, which just so happened to coincide with the warmest weather we have had for quite some time. I went from constantly wearing a sweater in my office, to almost wishing I had worn shorts!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

The past couple of evenings I've been working on my last year's Yuletide recs. I always read (or at least start) everything in sources I have even the vaguest knowledge of (including many where that's just I've read a fanfic before, or I've heard people talking about the source, or someone recs a story and it looks accessible without canon knowledge). I bookmarked about 150 stories to reread back in January, and now I'm finally ploughing through them all again, with ~15 to go.

The slow stage is always the final one, where I've read everything at least three times but have a big batch I can't decide whether to rec or not. I'm trying to be more organised this year, so my file now has heaps for Grey Area on Fourth Reading...

Does anyone else recommend regularly? How do you go about it?

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

How about plans for the weekend as a discussion topic?

I am sadly going to have to spend a fair chunk of my weekend at work, preparing teaching material for an on-line Master of Science course I am both coordinating and teaching the first half of the semester. I am actually reasonably well prepared, having got half of the weekly notes written weeks before the semester started. However, since I also teach an on-campus module for the first three weeks of the semester, with three lectures a week, I find that I don't have time to get more notes for the on-line course written during the week...