Tag Archives: geekery

New Game Console

So, my son Vincent decided that he was tired of playing the XBox One, XBox 360, the PS2 and the Nintendo 64 and the DreamCast,  … and he had a Christmas gift card he hadn’t used yet. He decided on a new game console, suitable for 2018 gaming.

That’s what he came home with.

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Small Amusements and Memories

 

I like cups with funny sayings on them – funny to me, mind. A source of very minor contention in my household is my tendency to accumulate mugs – lots of mugs, a lot of them with amusing little phrases (one has an old-fashioned poison logo on it). I also have some plain mugs, and a while back I saw on Pinterest that there was someone who took a sharpie to their plain mugs and wrote on them, then baked the mugs to make the writing permanent.

Well, to satisfy my wanting more funny mugs, I decided to write on my plain mugs and not bake them, so that when the writing washes away, I can put a new funny saying. David was saying he needed a mug that had little lines on the side, measuring “Don’t talk to me… don’t talk to me…” and at the bottom, “You may now speak.” I retorted that he would probably never put the last bit on his mug, and he laughed and said I was probably right.

~~~

Mom told me today that she was unable to sleep because of memories triggered by a documentary about the Philippine Martial Law era. She remembered how my father came very close to being arrested along with one of his friends, who was also a student activist – like most of the students of the time. They were to meet at the University of Diliman campus, but Dad was a little late. By the time he got there, he saw his friend being hauled off by police. The friend, Vic Mendoza, was able to discreetly signal to my father to pretend that they didn’t know each other. So my father, heeding that, walked past him, looked past him, even though it likely hurt him deeply to pretend that he didn’t know his friend.

Vic Mendoza was detained for a long time. Just before my father and mother were married, he was finally released. One of the first people he visited after his release was my Dad. Previously a man with a mischievous sense of humour and intelligent wit, he and Dad were known as a pair of clowns. Afterward he was a rather changed man – quieter, my Mom remembers. When my father asked him how he was, and what happened, Vic said, “Let’s not talk about it.”

Mom says that he and my father were very popular with the girls back in their college years because of their love of bouncing repartee back and forth. They were popular because you spent a lot of time laughing at what they said and how they said it.

She says that Vic later became a doctor, and indications that he hadn’t completely lost his mischievous nature from what torments he suffered while imprisoned surfaced around then. He had an American classmate, and for one reason or another they needed photo IDs. Vic offered to obtain one for the fellow. When the friend agreed, Vic got him an ID… with Vic’s face on it!

I keep doin’ this to myself

Elven Fried Bread

 

So, I spent a rather insomniac night craving doughnuts, so I bounced around the Internet, gazing hungrily at doughnut recipes, because I’ve never made doughnuts before.

Well, okay I was also looking up ideas for making black forest truffle balls, because I am seriously, seriously missing me some Red Ribbon Black Forest Cake. ;_; (The last one I had, ever, was thanks to Ford Prefect42 and Akilika! Thank you~! I treasure the memory . )

So thanks to that, I ended up on a blog called Let The Baking Begin! Aaaaaaaaand in the manner that one usually ends up Trapped In TVTropes, by the time I resurfaced, it was 5 am in the morning.

Thanks to that I have a nice recipe for latkes that I want to try sometime. And a recipe for home-made soft cheese.

I am casting the puppy eyes at Rhys to help me make these doughnuts. And possibly fried elven bread – a more savory, salty, as addictive as popcorn bread that I make.

I probably should explain that one a bit more.

When I was a teen/early twenties I was able to get my hands on the Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home Dragonlance sourcebook. To my delight, they had recipes, and one of the recipes was for a travelling fried flat bread sometimes referred to as elven bread because the Kagonesti made the things. Being simple it was one of the first things I made out of the book. Yes, I didn’t make Otik’s Fried Potatoes; I wasn’t very good with spices at the time. Shocking, I know.

(Mutters: I haven’t seen the book since we last moved house. grumbles!)

Baked it was a bit dense and got hard very quickly (we guessed it may have to do with the flour) but my mom and I decided to try the fried version, which is the one favoured by ‘adventurers and wilder elves’, hence the resulting name.

It was good. We ended up with a chewy, addictive bread, but still lacking something.

Flour was cheap. So was oil. Over the next while, we made batches of the fried bread, tweaking and adjusting. My brothers were happy to eat the experiments anyway and we hadn’t had any problems with the amount we made.

I found the notebook I wrote the resulting recipe in (It’s got oil splatter on it, hahaha) so I’m sharing it now. It’s a deep fried, salty, chewy bread, that we make into small balls and eat like popcorn while watching movies or reading books.

 

Elven Fried Bread, inspired from the Dragonlance recipe

Ingredients

2 cup water

4 cups flour

1 tablespoon salt

1/2 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon yeast (I use a granulated yeast) / 1 packet yeast

1/4c (plus more for your hands) olive oil (I tend to use extra virgin olive oil)

Mix 1 cup water, at body-temperature warmth (what I call ‘blood-warm’, since it’s actually warmer than body temperature and hotter than lukewarm) with sugar, and dissolve. Add the yeast and let it grow in the water.

Dissolve the salt in the other cup of water. In a bowl, sift the flour and make a well.

When the yeast has bubbled, pour into the flour and mix to make into a sticky dough. Add about a handful of olive oil and mix it in – this helps make the dough flexible and chewy, as well as adds flavour, and has the side benefit of helping keep the bread from sticking too much to the bowl. You’ll end up with a very sticky, stretchy dough. If you want to knead it you may, but I tend not to.

Cover with a damp cloth and set in a warm place to rise for 1-2 hours.

Heat enough cooking oil for deep frying.

Oil hands and pinch off enough bread dough to make a 2-3 cm wide flat circles and slide into the hot oil. Or balls the size of quarters / 20 Australian cent pieces. Fry on both sides till golden brown, drain in a colander with a paper towel on the bottom. Best while hot.

 

The original version sounds a lot like American Fried Dough.

Now if y’all will excuse me I’m gonna make a batch of this stuff, because writing it up made me hungry hungry hungry.

 

 

 

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