Happy Easter y'all! (if you celebrate)
This isn't a normal Post, I just have a lot of things happening and wanted to share some of them.
Here's what's new
I made a lovely Good Friday dinner for some friends and partners, and found some really tasty vegetarian recipes in the process. I made:
- This vegetarian tortilla soup, which uses black beans instead of chicken. It turned out great with no substitutions! If you want, you can fry the tortilla strips to a light golden brown in a pan instead of baking them (this lets you add more spices too!).
- This lentil bolognese which can be made nut-free by substituting mushrooms for walnuts (there's a note in the recipe about this; it works great but I found the leftovers don't keep quite as well because the mushrooms get kinda squishy).
These two are now on the recipes section of the bookmarks list.
Rosemary bread recipe
I also made rosemary bread, based loosely on this recipe, some ratios I found somewhere else, and some experience with dutch oven baking. Here is how to make it:
Expand recipe
- Mix some freshly chopped rosemary (~2 sprigs) with extra virgin olive oil (1 or 2 tbsp)
- Take 4 cups (500 grams) bread flour and mix with 1.5tsp salt.
- Proof 1.5tsp yeast with a little brown sugar (1tsp is fine) in 1.5 cup warm water (100-110 degrees F).
- Mix it all together and knead for about 10 minutes. If you have a stand mixer, use that. If the dough is sticky to the touch after about the first 5 minutes, add a little more flour.
- Prepare a bowl with cooking spray, put the dough in it, and let rise for 3 or 4 hours.
About 30 minutes before the bread is done rising, preheat your oven to 450 degrees F. Put a dutch oven in and preheat that too.
After rising:
- Don't punch down the dough (no need to remove all the air, although this process will get most of it out); instead use a spatula to gently scrape the dough from the sides of the bowl, folding the dough in on itself.
- Dump the dough onto a lightly floured sheet of parchment.
- Carefully shape the dough on the parchment. You can score it if you want, but I didn't.
- VERY carefully put the parchment and dough into the preheated dutch oven. Bake covered.
After 20-30 minutes of baking:
- Mix some more freshly chopped rosemary and olive oil.
- Brush the mixture onto the bread.
- Continue to bake uncovered for 10-15 minutes, checking every 5 minutes or so and brushing more rosemary/oil mixture onto the bread as needed.
After you are done, the bread should be a light golden brown.
What else I've been up to
Places
The tower at Mount Auburn Cemetery is open for the season again, and the flowers are back in bloom! It is gorgeous there. If you haven't been, you should check it out.
Some pictures
Reading
I read Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Wild-Built (WorldCat link), a novella about rest (and a beautiful vision of a possible future, but mostly rest). You should check it out. It is a pretty short read.
Other long-form fiction I enjoyed lately: The Transitive Properties of Cheese; She Who Became the Sun (WorldCat links). Thanks Philo and Faely for the recommendations. Both are very trans stories.
If you haven't already read Philo's "I Helped A Stranger Fare Evade On The MBTA And Now There's An Elven Mage On My Couch", you should check that out too. It's very cute.
Coming back to faith
You already know this if you talk to me regularly, but over the past few months I have turned into an Episcopalian (a type of mainline Protestant Christian). This was honestly a pretty unexpected turn for me!
I am going to write a more in-depth blog post about that, but in the meantime, I am happy to talk about it, if you're wondering what's up.
Current events
content warnings for US politics, gun violence, my mental health
Things are pretty scary over here!
I've been paying pretty close attention to the Abrego Garcia and Ozturk cases. It's kind of frustrating to see media outlets try to both-sides this stuff; the primary source documents are pretty damning for the government. I have a little bit of hope that things will resolve themselves (Abrego Garcia ending up in a non-CECOT facility feels pretty significant, and Ozturk's case is progressing well I think, just very slowly) but if not, we are all in for a pretty bad time, I suspect.
On Sunday, someone fired shots inside Harvard Station on the lower platform. I had just got off a train from the upper platform. I am physically fine but this stuff leaves more of a mental scar than I realized. I am looking forward to being able to take a Red Line train through/from/to Harvard again without having to talk myself down from a panic reaction :grimace:
Upcoming plans
Not much that I can talk about! I'm moving (within greater Boston) soon and the housing market sucks, so that should be interesting to navigate.
I might try to make a sporadic habit of writing posts like this in the future. If you have feedback please tell me what you think (on Signal or via email, tris@tris.fyi).