Allegra Sloman's blog

Biscotti for lazy swine

SHORTENED FOR EVEN MORE LAZY SWINE-PEOPLE VERSION #2 update on feb 23 2020

you will need a big bowl, a sharp thin long knife, enough aluminum foil to cover two cookie sheets, and two days.

throw 6 eggs, a cup of softened salt butter, two pinches of salt, 2 cups white sugar, a little almond flavouring, a lot of vanilla, one pinch cardamom and a two pinches of cinnamon, two cups *previously toasted nuts*, (hazelnuts or almonds by preference), two large teaspoons of baking powder, and five cups of unbleached all purpose flour in the bowl. Get the ingredients acquainted until no flour shows. Put the dough in a container in the fridge.

The next day form what’s left of the dough that your roommate didn’t eat into two logs. The fatter the log the longer the biscotti. Centre each log in a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil and squash it down. Bake for about 25 minutes, and watch it like a hawk so the edges don’t burn.

Take the logs out and roll them gently off the aluminum foil onto a cutting board. Leave the oven on. That shit about cooling the first bake is terrible make work shit like recipes are always full of. The most important thing is to show no fear. Take your big knife, and while imitating the action of a paper cutter – fearless and even – slice the loaf into biscotti sized slices. Thinner than 2 cm may break, much fatter doesn’t crisp right. Put slices back on the same cookie sheet (no grease or cooking sheet required) and bake until the OGB ORIGINAL GOLDEN BROWN BABY

STORAGE INSTRUCTIONS HA HA HA HA HA HA no.

 

LONG CHATTY VERSION

Adapted from a Toronto Star recipe about a zillion years ago. What you will need;

Two big bowls

An electric knife (really really helps) or a thin sharp knife with a serrated edge

Three cookie sheets

Enough HEAVY DUTY aluminum foil to cover the three cookie sheets

Food ingredients

6 large eggs

two pinches salt

2 cups white sugar

2 tsps vanilla

1 cup melted butter (no substitutions are permitted – marge does NOT cut it)

2 – 3 cups any combination of hand chopped hazelnuts and almonds

5 cups flour

2 tablespoons baking powder (I use slightly less)

several pinches cinnamon

optional but optimal several pinches ground cardamom

Sift the flour, baking soda and spices in one bowl. Dump all the other ingredients in the other and beat violently for about a minute. Upend the flour and spices in the other bowl. Get all the ingredients acquainted, but only just barely. Use your hands if necessary

Cover the bowl and refrigerate the dough for a couple of hours. Do not refrigerate for more than 12 hours or the dough will turn an odd speckly colour, which does not affect the taste but is not aesthetic. If you are in a hurry, add slightly more flour to reduce dough stickiness if necessary and go to the next step. Preheat the oven to 350 F. Put the aluminum foil down on two of the cookie sheets.

Divide the dough into four parts, and squeeze with your hands into a log shape. The final result should have a smooth surface with no big gaps or cracks, be between 1 1/2 and 2 inches in diameter and about ten to twelve inches long. Place this log lengthwise on the cookie sheet, one inch from the side. Do likewise with another log. Do the same with the last two logs on a separate cookie sheet. Mash them down with your hand until they seem quite impossibly flat. This is the only way to get the real biscotti shape.

For the first bake – 20 – 30 minutes is about right. I have given up trying to measure the time because it seems to vary so much with each batch and oven. Basically, when the smell starts to drive you insane, pull them out. They should be quite brown on the bottom as this crust is part of the structural integrity that allows you to move and cut the logs without destroying them. Check to make sure that the top of the logs isn’t ‘doughy’ looking or you’ll be cursing when you come to cut them; then the final product, while entirely edible, will look funny – sort of ‘pregnant’. If they are doughy, toss them back in for another 5 minutes at least. Cool the logs to the point you can comfortably handle them, peel gently from the aluminum foil, and transfer to a cutting board and then slice in half inch slices. The original recipe says “Cool logs completely” but I don’t find that works at all well. An electric knife makes cutting easy. Otherwise the most laborious part is cutting up the logs without rendering them into expensive crumbs. The technique for doing this is hard to describe and really depends on the knife you are using and how klutzy you are. An even, fairly swift ‘rocking’ cutting motion is best – do NOT saw, and don’t try to cut them too thin. Think “paper cutter at work”. Place the cookies flat on the three cookie sheets and bake another 15 minutes at 350 until golden brown. For extra crispiness turn off the heat and let them sit for a while longer, otherwise pull them out and let them cool completely before you put them in containers.

Tomorrow…. Entirely Evil Chocolate Cake

They were stuck together. No word on what it took to separate them but they look completely exhausted.

Last night I sat and watched Buffy season 1 again with the kids and thought to myself, this is entertaining. Not because of the stuff we were watching, which was so so… but because every time the guy who plays Angel came on the screen my daughter would mimic having a seizure, and it made me think about the hordes of young men, real and imaginary, that I had a crush on when I was a wee tad, this next comment deleted. And I guess it is completely irrelevant that her non boyfriend, whose name I can’t even put here unless I want to see what the top of my skull looks like from the inside, looks just that little bit like Angel and having seen him I can confirm this. And he called last night. Between the palpitations and the subdued shrieking and squirming, I am amazed she survived the evening.

 

This is Mt. St Helens, from a LIDAR image. That’s a truckload of magma every second, folks. The dome is moving up very slowly and smoothly, but what goes up eventually comes down. An explosion or periclastic event is now unlikely, but a dome collapse (god help ya if you’re flying downwind) is probably in the cards sometime over the next 5 – 10 years. At that point all of the ice still on and in the crater will abrumptly melt (sp deliberate) and you’ll get a column of superheated steam and ash about 15K meters high.

So the other day Katie comes in singing, to the the tune of the Colonel Bogie March:

Scrotum

It is a piece of skin

Scrotum

It keeps your testes in

Scrotum

Don’t overload ’em!

Or you’ll explode ’em

And then you’ll

have none.

The sheer grandeur, elegance and poetry of this brought tears to my eyes. I mean, compared to gangsta rap. If you think this poem is disgusting and stupid and jejune, get the heck off my website and scrape your eyeballs against something else. Katie was surprised to learn that the girl had never heard an earlier version of this….The one that starts with Hitler, has only got one ball… etc. So she shared that. Cultural history as transmitted by teenaged girls. Sigh.

Pic is random.

pic is something random. My fan community sez MORE PICTURES. I am but the hopeless slave of my fans.

I hear Ayurvedic medicine has heavy metals in it. I’m going to withhold judgement until I see who funded the research.

The second or third year I was on line I was the recipient of a many times forwarded flaming email. The person accused of malfeasance and rishathra (good luck following the reference if you’re not an SF fan) had his email address cheerfully provided in the hopes we’d all pick on somebody we didn’t have to face. So I emailed him and said, seeing as how you are person in a position of responsibility, why don’t I let you tell your side of the story?

The result was an impassioned, cogent and grateful description of how he had attempted to discipline a student for various infractions with respect to class time behaviour – and this of course was at the university level – and this flame war, which had drawn emails from as far away as Japan – had been the result.

Entertained and somewhat abashed, I reread the original email. I emailed the prof back and told him to keep on trucking.

Not everything that has a typo in it is a lie. Not everything that’s printed on glossy paper is the truth. Everybody, including me, has an agenda. However, for reasons that make life easier, I prefer to keep my agenda in view. Items slide off, and ooze back on but I try.

Speaking of hidden agendas, which we weren’t, if anybody has the time to follow the rawstory.com story about the guy who wrote the principal of a Southern Christian school about the slavery pamphlet used as curriculum please do so. You will see elements of my earlier anecdote. Anybody who wants to suggest what SHOULD have been said in the response letter instead can write me. I have my ideas, starting with staying civil. Sheesh. Leftists are always looking for places to dump their bile, and really, the best place is private conversation. Civility, when people aren’t shooting at you, is the only way to go. Hey, I was SERIOUS about a Unitarian gun club… who’s with me?

I’m up to my freaking armpits in Buffy.

I light a candle for all the men and women involuntarily part of the global sex trade, most specifically the ones held in the US and Canada and Israel, which are, after all, democracies with functioning police forces. So far. Check out stories about the Israeli slave-sex trade on the internet. Gave me a completely different view of the world.

I don’t get it. How does making a 4 storey high soldier out of Christmas lights help us get in the holly jolly mood? I mean it’s amazing, and actually almost aesthetically pleasing…. but. How does it support soldiers with inadequately armoured Humvees? I must be a complete Philistine, I don’t get it.

we aren’t going to TO

I do associate Christmas with family, and Leo and Linda are family, so here you go. I think this pic is adorable.

This is how you get around the ONE SALAD BOWL PER CUSTOMER rule at a salad bar. Note the vegetarian goodness of it all, never to mention the serious understanding of what comestibles possess the necessary strength (remember the famous four stresses – tension, torsion, compression and shear) to hold the load. As I have said MANY MANY times, it’s not the stupid customers you have to watch out for. It’s the clever ones with time on their hands…..A bowler bob to Brooke-who-recently-took-up-banjo for passing this one along.

After MANY MANY years of being a good girl, I am now a Buffy fan. One lousy DVD, and now I have 5 seasons to catch up on. Glen, you’re a freaking menace, did anybody ever tell you that?

Had dinner at Glen and Marilyn’s last night. DAMN that was good. The best part was the basement. Why? Because that’s where Marilyn hauled out the single most berloody amazing piece of fetish gear – which is not fetish but working gear, which makes it even MORE fetishy ifn you know what I mean – that has ever smote my eyeballs. It’s RIDING ARMOUR. Picture if you will parallelogram dense-foam lozenges all sewn together into a protective vest which covers in the front down to your noogies and in the back past your tailbone. NOW picture that it’s hunter green. NOW picture that if you wore a green body suit underneath and a bug mask, you would be wearing the most scary costume in history and IF you were motivated to outline the lozenges in both white and glow in the dark paint you’d be a scary sight indeed at the club. Marilyn, what do you want for it!!!??? I’m a craving it! Want picture!!! Ah shaddap, me.

Ah, there are so many pictures I COULD post, but sincere and calm reflection leads me away from that.

I don’t want to go to Toronto. I want to BE THERE. But I don’t want to travel there. Travelling on passes at Christmas is excruciating. Not having a real bed to sleep on when I get there is unpleasant to contemplate. Not having a vehicle is not really a problem, but the weather might be. The fact that Katie doesn’t want to go doesn’t help. And she has more than one good reason not to want to go, including ones that I can’t post here.

The fact that family vacations turn into an extended mix of the world’s ugliest domestic argument might have something to do with it. The fact that Paul, normally the soberest of men when it comes to expenditures, goes completely berserk during vacations (whether or not he buys shoes) might have something to do with it. The fact that I just don’t want to have to be completely emotionally dishonest for an entire berloody week might have something to do with it. (Don’t forget to keep that smile on your face). (That’s why I quit church…. why do I want to re-up in a different location?) The fact that I HATE FLYING has a lot to do with it. I’ve tried, since that little ol’ plane crash back in 1988, to overcome my complete panic stricken loathing of aircraft in all forms. I have even succeeded to the point that I don’t need happy pills or alcohol to get on a plane. But that means I like it? NOOOOOO! You’re in a pressurized flying bomb full of diseases and devoid of adequate space or nourishing food. The fact that it’s maintained by honest and intelligent people means squat to me. Is it rational? Compared to driving a car, or god forbid, riding a bicycle in this burg? NOOOOOO! Pay a shorter visit? I have a better idea. I’m going to stay home. I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want any demands made on me. I don’t see anybody lining up for the privilege of spoiling me, so I’m going to do it myself.

Off to Sin City last night; I was the only person in the joint wearing faux snakeskin so I felt quite pleased with myself. Got myself some proper boots to complete the outfit as really, flat shoes do *not* work in that environment. Had a bit of a time getting Paul in; unless he’s stark naked he looks pretty square, but I picked him up a rather extreme T-shirt at Fetwear. I think I’m going to buy him a black Utilikilt, they completely rock and there was at least one other guy wearing one; with the black tshirt I got him it would be a fetching get up indeed. I’m crazy for kilts. Paul says he’s going as an aviator the next time. (Hmph, he said there was going to be a next time.) A couple of tuxes, one with a full face mask; a latex Sailor Moon outfit, a lot of nice looking half naked women. I really enjoyed myself and what I enjoyed best was NO attitude.

Very young crowd, very hiply turned out. There’s a dungeon in the basement and stuff was happening, but I guess I just don’t have much in the way of being a voyeur… after about 5 minutes I got a big case of “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” and went back upstairs. Very much liked the bar and the layout; we parked ourselves by the washrooms (which appeared to be somewhat unisex… go figure!) and so got to watch everybody on the top floor go by at least once and of course some more often than that. Did a little dancing, but had to bail after one very long tune because my feet were annoyed with me. If it wasn’t for the expense (it’s only 10 bucks to get in but assembling an outfit, especially like some of these folks, is a major expenditure) and the fact that not everybody gets off on loud Techno I’d recommend it to anyone. I think my favourite piece of clothing was a white bunny fur bolero that would not have covered the chest of a two year child. I think there’s a word skimpier than skimpy, but I can’t think of it right now…. A) it glowed under the blacklight B) the woman wearing it was a size zero but some people look really cool at that size and she was one one them and C) she looked happy!!! and so did her bf who was wearing an all white women’s stretch women’s outfit and a total glam rock makeup job. I loved them; they really looked cool and totally themselves. I think the individuation of everybody is what is so nice. Paul was particularly knocked out by a women in trad 16th century Japanese style makeup. Stunning woman, gorgeous costume, and drop dead makeup. People who affect the bored hipster look ick me out – she gave Paul a radiant smile when he complimented her on her get up.

Didn’t get home til 2. Bad girl.

Katie stayed at Janna’s last night – talked to her briefly this am. She’s close to Mike’s place, isn’t that convenient? Off to Mike’s to move the hot tub at 2pm. Looks like it will stay clear, thanks to a special mercy of Providence. Then off to eat something wonderful and Glen and Marilyn’s. And get kitten therapy, I hope. Kitten therapy is good too. I should do something about dessert, I am supposed to bring dessert. Mmmmm dessert.