Hyperbole and Cliche on the Eve Eve Eve of Thanksgiving

Yes, that's white flour you see in the basket, and it's bleached white flour and it's self-rising white flour. I'm fixing (like my Tennessee friends say) to make about ten dozen southern biscuits. Angel Biscuits. Our beloved Mary Moon provided me with a recipe. I'm also baking about ten thousand apple pies and about five thousand pumpkin cheesecakes. Hyperbole is the rule today. The apple pie is a pretty standard recipe that I've made a bazillion times, and the pumpkin cheesecake, the same. I've found that slicing the apples very thin -- like about 1/4 inch -- is the trick to ensure that the pie doesn't become a mushy mess, although mushy messes have their charms. You let the slices macerate in some lemon juice, brown sugar, white sugar, cinnamon and salt first, and then you drain them and boil down the juices into a thick syrup that you then add cornstarch to and toss with the apples before adding them to the pie. You know the rest. The pumpkin cheesecake is a tad time-consuming and after being cooked must chill overnight in its springform pan before being un-molded, and the only trick I have for it is to use really good cream cheese because the cheap kind of cream cheese sometimes has a lot of water in it (kind of like cheap butter) so it's better to use the good stuff, if and when you can. Despite making ten thousand things, I remain a bit of a snob when it comes to baking and pastry. If you're a new reader, in another life I worked in fancy-schmancy kitchens in New York City under asshole chefs and learned all the finer things in pastry, before being thrust into the cruel world of childhood epilepsy when my infant daughter was diagnosed with it and so began The Seizure World which might be sort of like The Matrix (I have a limited understanding of the movie as I am decidedly not a fan of sci-fi) in that it's kind of a simulacrum of the world as most know it where tiny little mother minds™ are trapped and enslaved. Wait. That's the real world, too, isn't it?

Anyway.

Hyperbole aside, I have a hell of a lot of biscuits, apple pies and pumpkin cheesecakes to make over the next few days for my cottage business, Everyone Needs Cake.™ Because of that I have decided not to make Thanksgiving dinner this year, and both my sons (Henry comes home tomorrow night!), The Bird Photographer and I will be feeding the homeless on Skid Row Thanksgiving morning. Then we'll return home and eat pizza and pie.  It's just as well (it's also cliche day, apparently). We have much to be thankful for, and it isn't the origins of the country, to tell you the truth. Or the Pilgrims that set the tone for the rest of history, either.

Tuesday Evening Tiny Little Mother Mind™ Peach Pie and Miscellany

In case you're wondering, Sophie continues to enjoy her new community-based adult day program. Today, she and a group of other clients went to the California Science Center. They rode the train downtown, and evidently Sophie loved the ocean room. Of course.

I took this picture this morning. I love Sophie's hands. They are so delicate and fine. I wish that she could use them more.

This sign made me smile and roll my eyes. It's hard to believe what's happened in the last five years in the cannabis medicine world. That being said, I heard about a neurological/pharmaceutical conference recently where the Powers That Be spent a good amount of time denigrating the CBD oils that we've been using for so long. The usual Two-Faced Neuro was there, sort of my nemesis if I really gave a shit anymore, which I don't. He was doing his thing, and this tiny little mother mind™ was doing hers.

Surprise, surprise. I hate to be cynical, but these guy and lady docs are about as cliche as the older man who has an affair with a younger woman.

Recently, a newspaper article touting the benefits of Epidiolex, the new CBD-only single-molecule pharmaceutical approved for Lennox-Gastaut and Dravet Syndrome, quoted a physician who said something to the effect of the "artisan oils" being used were "impossible to test." I don't mince words. What a load of crap. If crap could be, it'd also be transparent -- so clear that Big Pharma and the stooges in the medical world are busy, busy, busy undermining everything that's been done. Telling lies. Propaganda.

Don't get me started.

I made a peach pie today. It's one of the monthly offerings in my gig as baker for Everyone Needs Cake,™ in this case, pie. I took the skins of the peaches, Reader, and honestly? It was like slipping off a silk nightgown.

I tossed them in sugar and whiskey and let them sit for a bit.

I cooked the juices that collected after they sat for a while, added some cornstarch and cooked that up. Then I rolled out the pie dough that I'd made earlier and dumped the peaches in. I made a lattice with the other disc of pie dough and then I froze the whole thing for a couple of hours.

Here's the finished product -- perhaps a tad too brown in places, but my God! Those naked, cooked peaches sure smell good!

Gig Economy Update

Everyone Needs Cake™ for March Selections
photo by Carl Jackson

The gig economy is going ok. I'm making cakes every month -- this month's selection is a Funfetti Vanilla Cake with Vanilla Buttercream and White Chocolate Ganache Glaze and a Pistachio Rosewater Cake from Ottolenghi's new pastry/sweets book. I have orders for both of them throughout the month but can always take more! Everyone Needs Cake.™ I'm also working on a very cool project with a very cool tech entrepreneur that you will hear about soon, so stay tuned. I have some nice writing assignments via The Los Angeles Times but am looking for anything I can get to supplement them. Do you need a ghost writer? Do you need a writer for anything? Check out my website and pass it along to pertinent people.

As you know, Sophie is an Uber driver and working toward getting off the backs of our hard-working Republican lawmakers who are working on balancing this great Disunited States of Amerikkka's budget on her back. Between the Uber driving and her part time job as a sex worker,* she'll be in the black soon, I'm certain, and recognized for her contributions to the great Capitalist Economy.

Today, I paid my health insurance bill before my mortgage because -- you know -- I'd sooner be homeless than without health insurance.  That's not a complaint.

In other news, I thought I'd misplaced the four worn sheets of passwords that I keep, so I spent about two hours on the computer changing the passwords to all the important accounts, and then I found the password sheet in the dash of my car where I'd stashed it on my way to Palm Springs this weekend. Does anyone out there in the interwebs know of a better way to organize, store and keep safe from Russian bots the bazillions of passwords to one's accounts?

I hope ya'll are having a nice day. I miss all of you.











*See my post a few days back for an explanation to this, admittedly, inappropriate and very dark-humored comment.

Baking Cakes

No, I'm not advocating bomb-making, but I can make a cake.

Flourless Chocolate Cake for Everyone Needs Cake™

As for bombs, I can throw around the f-ones, particularly in these dark times. I found this article really illuminating. It sheds light on anger, my own in particular.

I used to insist I didn't get angry. Not anymore. On female rage.

Here's a favorite paragraph with words attributed to Audre Lord:

Anger isn’t just a blaze burning structures to the ground; it also casts a glow, generates heat and brings bodies into communion. “Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions,” Lorde writes, “which brought that anger into being.

If you're Homeland Security, be assured. I might be an angry woman (at times), but I'm not making any bombs.

Did ya'll go to the Women's Marches in your city? I didn't go this year because my little sister and her daughter were visiting, and -- to tell you the truth -- just wanted to be quiet. I'm so moved by the numbers of people who showed up, though, all over the world. It gives one hope, right?

Here's one of my favorite posters:

Last week I interviewed the founder of the Pussy Hat Project, Kat Coyle. She's the owner of The Little Knittery, a much-loved community knitting store. I'm writing an article about it for The Los Angeles Times. Stay tuned.

I bought a skein of pink wool to make another pussy hat.
Kat is the one knitting in the background. She's so cool I can hardly stand it.

This is over the door of her new store -- so weird and wonderful how women make history.

Yeah. It's been a wonderful weekend.

Playing Chicken Feet dominoes. I won.

Merry Christmas Eve Resistors!

I tossed and turned last night and dreamt of moths. No anxiety dream, though, as I went to bed reading about moths. They build scaffolding, web-like things, lurk in dark closets burrowing into grains and stained clothing. They've been flying around our house like they own it. I've done the clean out the cupboards and throw away the open boxes, spray down the shelves with vinegar. I dislike their papery wings, their longing for water and light.


I figure baking and writing go hand in hand.** I've baked ten gingerbread forest cakes and am working on my fourth coconut cake this morning. My cottage industry gig, Everyone Needs Cake,™ has helped to fund Christmas this year. If there's a grosser phrase than help to fund Christmas, write it down in the comments because what's grosser than Consumer Christmas? My tiny men-children and daughter will reap the benefits of my returning to my pastry roots, and so has my writing. I wasn't writing at all the last few months, not so much paralyzed as overwhelmed and disgusted by the meaninglessness of all of it. Not just my writing, but the whole full catastrophe of Terrible America, fueled by the POSPOTUS* and his band of billionaires and Eddie Munster and The Turtle and all the rest of the Kochacracy (that's you, Susan Collins, and Murkowski, too, with the selling off of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge to oil).

Anyway.

The writing and the baking go hand in hand, here in the gingerbread forest with confectioner's sugar snow, papery moth wings, and coconut clouds on the pale blue dot of home in the vast galaxy around it.

Merry Christmas Eve, resistors!

#RESIST




















*Piece of Shit President of the United States. Yeah, I know it's Christmas Eve and all is hallowed, but the acronym still stands.

** No moth infestation in the products used for Everyone Needs Cake™ -- just in my dreams.