wiseheart | So, it is party time again, folks!

Current Mood: excited
Current Location: the virtual living room

Entry tags:

silly things

So, it is party time again, folks!

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!

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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.

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.

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.

Even with two people, baking generates far too much bread to eat sensibly, sadly.

It is a great shame, because baking bread can be such a therapeutic activity, not to mention the lovely smell in the house!

We have the lovely scent of roasted coffee beans in the kitchen :) Which have the advantage of being calorie free!

I do love the smell of coffee, but I just can't do with the taste! Living on my own, that means I don't really get the smell of coffee either...

Aie! A person who doesn't like coffee! [Makes cross symbols]

I meant to learn how to drink coffee, honestly! But then this course mate of mine told me I wouldn't be able to get through my engineering degree without drinking coffee. That was just a challenge I couldn't let pass by. Then, just to make sure I wasn't accused of cheating, I didn't drink coffee for my Ph.D. either. And then I moved to England, where people actually make good tea, so learning how to drink coffee just slipped off the list of things to achieve in life. I used to think drinking coffee was the mark of being an adult; this might still be the case, I have just given up on being an adult...

I learned to drink coffee slowly through my childhood -- my father apparently made it for me with milk before I can remember, and then as a fairly small child we stayed in France where they didn't serve milk with coffee at all, so I learned to drink it black, with lots of sugar, before I was ten. Then I gave up the sugar as a teenager, and started drinking espresso when I graduated and first got a proper flat to put an espresso maker in. So for me it's definitely not a mark of being an adult!

In the remote parts of Sweden, where I grew up, coffee was what the adults drank when you went visiting; children got cordial. With age, I find I don't much care for most cordial any more, finding it far to sweet. When I moved to university, tea started being offered as an alternative hot drink. At first I drank it very weak with lots of milk, and that would have less strong a taste than coffee so it was easier to get used to. Nowadays, given the choice I will mostly have peppermint (or even better fresh mint) tea.

When I was a child, children in the UK also got fed cordial -- or at least squash, which is much the same. (Never quite worked out the difference.) Most adults drank tea, not coffee -- my mother, who preferred black coffee to tea, was quite an exception.

I must get back to drinking herb/fruit teas -- I used to do it a lot but I've got out of the habit.

All through my childhood my parents would have coffee with breakfast and tea with the evening meal, which consisted of sandwiches. They were the only people who I knew of who did drink tea, except my Mother's family in England.

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espresso-addict.livejournal.com - 2014-10-03 23:38 (UTC) - Expand

I, too, tried to learn to drink coffee, and I could enjoy the taste. But my belly simply will not tolerate it: not in a cup, not in a cake or any other food. So, it's tea for me, and enjoying the smell of others' cups. [grin]

Mum gave up 'regular' coffee, when she had an ulcer decades ago. She found she could still drink the instant kind, with about half coffee/ half milk. Indeed, she says she prefers instant coffee to the other types, though most other people I know who like coffee think instant is a disgrace to the name.

Personally, I think instant is blasphemy, but everyone must find what works for them.

We make a middle strength espresso, the kind where you can still discover the taste of coffee, not just the bitterness.

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espresso-addict.livejournal.com - 2014-10-04 21:26 (UTC) - Expand

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espresso-addict.livejournal.com - 2014-10-04 22:12 (UTC) - Expand

Mmmm.... coffee....

Mmm indeed!

I cannot drink coffee, even though, as someone once noted, my tea is dark enough that it looks like coffee! However, The Beloved is quite fond of his coffee. He grinds his beans, and when buying them at the store, often mixes a couple of the choices. So, I get to enjoy the wonderful aroma!

Oh, and in college, my then-boyfriend's roommate sat down at the dining hall table, looked at my cup, and said, "I thought you couldn't drink coffee?"

"I can't," I replied. "That's tea."

He looked hard into my cup, looked up again, and said, "No. That's coffee!"

Ground fresh beans do smell simply wonderful :)

Indeed.

What is an "Aga"?

It is a special type of cast iron heating stove and cooker, invented by the Swedish Nobel prize winning physicist Gustaf Dahlén. We have never had one in any of the homes I have lived in, but everyone I know who has loves them!

I hadn't realised they were Swedish! Somehow they feel very British. My husband had a Rayburn in his previous house, but we've neither of us ever owned an Aga, so it's going to be an adventure.

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