skygiants

Thank you to everybody who voted to tell us what to do with our cabbage!

In the end, "Cake Filled With Cabbage" squeaked into the lead (by one vote! a breakneck race!) and so we embarked upon this recipe:



(Transcript:

Shred 1 head cabbage (about 2 pounds), sprinkle with salt, and wrap in a cloth to squeeze out the water. Then cook until brown in 1 cup butter or oil. Saute 1 cup chopped onions separately in 4 tablespoons butter, and mix with the cooked cabbage. Make a yeast dough [see Doughnuts, page 138], and roll it out into 2 sheets. Grease a baking sheet with butter or oil. Lay one sheet of dough on the baking sheet, cover with the cabbage, and cover with the second sheet. Pierce it all over with a fork, allow it to rise, brush it with the egg [wash], and bake about 45-50 minutes.)

We were a little nervous about the fact that it wants the same dough as the book's doughnut recipe, but in fact this turned out really quite good! Based on a tip from a Midwestern friend of Slavic origin, we have tentatively identified it as a recipe-translation-to-Yiddish-to-English from pagash, or 'Slavic pizza.'

Biggest challenges: it would have been SO nice if the recipe defined an oven temperature but we realize this is possibly asking too much of 1938
Would we make again: yeah actually! but probably with a higher vegetable-to-butter ratio in the filling ....
Would we ask the internet what 1938 recipe to make again: it turned out pretty okay this time so stay tuned! I definitely do want to experiment further in this cookbook at some point.

( Cooking process pictures below the cut )

Some more disconnected updates:

1. This past weekend I participated in a cake decorating challenge among friends, for fun and zero profit.

( cake pictures under the cut )

Not all entries into the challenge have been shared online, but the ones that have include genarti's offensively impressive Dark is Rising cake, aberration's beautiful Star Wars Life Day cake, and shati's incredibly romantic mashed potatoes, each and every one a winner in its own way.

2. Two days ago I went to the most local protest I've ever been to -- a "Back the Blue" rally had been planned for the police station half a mile away, so the neighborhood organized a counter-protest. In the end, the pro-police rally never actually happened because the community was NOT into it, while the counter-protest had several hundred people, so that's something!

I was a little worried I was going to miss this one because it was the same day I had to be at my office to load 4800 video tapes into a truck to go off and be digitized -- a task that was accomplished last time around with the cooperation of seven or eight people, and this time, because of the pandemic and wanting to minimize human contact, was undertaken with only three -- but I just barely managed to make it before the group began to move towards the police station, where various hyper-local statistics about police brutality and discrimination were read, followed by a die-in. I'm really glad I was able to make it; I've been to a lot of protests at this point, but never one that marched literally down my own streets, half a block from my house. (Admittedly if I still lived in several of the places I used to live in New York I would almost certainly have had this experience several months ago already. But it still felt meaningful!)

3. Today I have accomplished absolutely nothing because Shannon Kao made an unbelievably gorgeous piece of fanart for my short story in Consolation Songs and I'm still screaming internally about it!!!

I've been on vacation for three days now and it has been largely wonderful! I got to celebrate raven's birthday at brunch with happydork and such_heights and various others, and get dinner with aella_irene, and today innerbrat and I have arrived in Amsterdam and got frites and fondue and free cider (not all at once) and also did some museuming!

Also, yesterday innerbrat and I went to go see a show called The Wider Earth at the Natural Science Museum in London, because Debi used to work there and I'm always intrigued by the notion of 'weird theater with puppets.'

I wasn't at all sure whether this was going to be a Play or an Informational Travelogue About Darwin's Naturalist Adventures, but it was very definitely a Play and overall one that we were glad we decided to see! The puppetry for the various creatures that Darwin encounters on his voyage is legitimately gorgeous - here's a trailer that gives something of a taste - and the music was ... charmingly unsubtle? Okay, imagine basically Ariel singing her "aaaah-ahhh-ahhhhhh" in Disney's The Little Mermaid, except instead it's a tenor, and that's the Music of Scientific Wonder and Romance that plays in the background every time Darwin is doing something important.

Which is appropriate really because Darwin himself is very much played as a puppy-eyed Disney Science Prince, who just wants the opportunity to become the naturalist that he knows he is inside! Early on he goes and flings himself down woefully at [future wife] Emma's feet:

EMMA: We've been protesting for the abolition of slavery!
DARWIN: Yes and talking of slavery, my FATHER is PRACTICALLY keeping me a slave in the house --
innerbrat and I: [look at each other with YIKES faces]

BUT IN FACT, much to our surprise, this turns out to be foreshadowing, as the show goes on to lean pretty hard into issues of slavery and colonialism and how those things are intertwined with the nineteenth-century theological worldview that the advance of scientific knowledge is in the process of disrupting!

This is voiced most prominently through the character of Robert Fitzroy, captain of the Beagle, who --

-- okay, so we hit the intermission, and the very first thing that innerbrat did was go search the AO3 to see if anybody had already written Charles Darwin/Captain Fitzroy RPF. (Nobody has.) The thing is, first of all, Puppy-Dog Eyes Disney Science Prince Darwin and Angsty Captain Fitzroy are both cast quite hot (Fitzroy's the visibly angsty one here), and second of all, the soundtrack insists on cuing up the Music of Scientific Wonder and Romance for all their positive interactions, and third of all, they spend the entire show having intense philosophical arguments and then making up, and throwing their arms around each other during life-threatening storms, and then Fitzroy names a mountain after Darwin, and then Darwin's like "I see you're having a crisis of conscience and are going to resign your commission, so I've decided that this time ashore is dedicated to inspiring YOU, specifically, by proving that I, specifically, can make it Meaningful! Look, I brought you a seashell!" and various Significant Repetitions of "I respect you even though I know in my heart that you're wrong!"

... however, as hilarious as is this show's earnest commitment to Emotional Tension On The Good Ship Beagle, I do think we are probably by this point well past "We Can Respect This Man For His Strong Beliefs While Knowing They're Wrong" when those strong beliefs are Ah, Yes, The White Man's Burden.

Still, I do remain impressed that this one-off show about Darwin at the Natural Science Museum did emphasize the topics and the historical beliefs of the people involved; I also liked the way the show left space for the story of Jemmy Button, the native Fuegian essentially kidnapped by Fitzroy for the purpose of "civilization" who's being returned to Terra del Fuego on the Beagle to start a mission there, and gives that character voice and opportunity to complicate the things that are being said about and around him.

...and for the record, Jemmy is also cast very hot, and has a number of quite significant scenes with Puppy-Dog Eyes Disney Science Prince Darwin before vanishing from the production in accordance with his historical return to Tierra del Fuego, so if you want shipboard romance for Disney Science Prince Darwin that isn't a hot but extremely Victorian Racist sea captain there is an alternative.

(My actual favorite scene, though, is probably when Puppy-Dog Eyes Disney Science Prince Darwin attempts to cheer up the ship's priest from a crisis of faith by explaining to him the proto-theory of natural selection, and then is utterly taken aback when this instead traumatizes the priest to his core. YOU TRIED, DISNEY SCIENCE PRINCE DARWIN.)

Things!

1. Birthday weekend chez neenie: AWESOME, of course. Even if Steph and other accumulated guests have now learned the cost of inviting me to her house, which is to have least three things knocked over, misplaced, or otherwise destroyed over the course of the period. Um. I shall just have to hope my charm makes up for it? :D?

2. On the way to chez neenie, our megabus got pulled over and searched by the cops. It was a double-decker bus and I was on the top deck (decker?), and the rumors were flying like crazy up there as to what might be occuring Down in the Depths Below.

The cops never actually made it up to our level, so either they were extraordinarily lazy cops or they actually found what they were looking for down on the bottom floor. Either way, I am forever doomed to curiosity about what kind of illegal goings-on were occuring in my vicinity! I think when I have to tell the story I am going to make up a tale of illicit contraband cheese, unless someone has a better suggestion.


3. The area around my workplace has recently been enlivened by several rather unnerving murals. The strangest portrays a fifty-foot-tall rat in a neat suit and tie, with a briefcase and bloody hands. The red of the blood is the only color on the whole mural, and the text scrawled next to its head reads, "LET THEM EAT CRACK."

(Every time I pass it, all I can think is 'the bulletholes are for speed!')

Once more into the school-shaped breach. Vacation was wonderful (and utterly unproductive.) Last weekend was extra-wonderful! Flight back to California was not so wonderful, but plane did not get hit by lightning over Chicago despite some speculation in that direction, so could have been much worse.

Back to class tomorrow. Coherence, also, hopefully tomorrow. Perhaps even complete sentence structure! For now: sleep.