Category: Uncategorized

Gluten-free 5 minute chocolate cake for 2:

From our local co-op newsletter, this recipe. I don’t care for chocolate all that much but I really enjoyed this. Of course, its advantages are also its disadvantages (5 minutes! 2 servings!)

Mix together:
4 Tbsp. rice flour (I used all purpose GF flour)
3 Tbsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. xantham gum
2 Tbsp. baking cocoa
1/4 tsp. baking powder

In separate bowl, mix:
1 egg
3 Tbsp. milk
3 Tbsp. oil
splash GF vanilla extract

Combine both mixtures in a large microwave safe mug. Toss in 3 Tbsp. chocolate chips, if desired.

Microwave for 2.5 – 3 minutes. The cake will rise over the top of the mug; don’t be alarmed. Allow to cool and tip out onto a plate. (I ate it hot, not waiting for it to cool.)

Ingredients:

• 1 cup boiling water
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 10 oz pitted dates
• 1-1/2 cups Pamela’s Baking & Pancake Mix
• 1 tsp baking soda
• pinch of salt
• 8 oz soft butter (1 stick)
• 5 tbsp sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla

• 1/2 pint whipping cream
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 4 oz butter

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350º.

Pour boiling water on dates and baking soda let sit for 5 minutes.

Grease and line a round pan with wax paper. Beat sugar and butter until airy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat again until well mixed. Stir in Pamela’s Baking ; Pancake Mix and salt with a spatula until well mixed. Add date mixture. Pour into pan. Bake 30 minutes in center oven.

Let cool 5 minutes then invert onto a serving plate.

For the sauce, melt butter and sugar together then add cream and simmer while stirring for 3 minutes. Pour on the cake and serve with fresh whipped cream.

Whipping cream to serve.

 

My nose, it has a flavor, and that flavor is…eeevil!

What is this eeevil of which you speak? May I subscribe to your newsletter?

Screw eeevil, somebody help me climb this thumb-monkey.

To dream the impossible dream…to climb the unclimable monkey…to

Y’all are just freaking weird, you know that right?

Not weird, eeevil! How many times do I have to…ooh, sritchy…

No, she’s right, y’all are weird.

Weird and eeevil. I have the car keys! I just have to figure out how to reach the pedals…

These were all taken yesterday: 1/11/13

(Original provenance unknown, possibly food.com)

3 eggs, at room temperature

1 (14 ounce) can pumpkin

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 teaspoon ground ginger

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon ground allspice

3/4 cup whole-fat eggnog

1/2 cup heavy cream

approximately 2 cups (gluten free) ginger snaps (we used Pamela’s brand)

1/2 cup butter, melted (1 stick)

 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Prepare the crust

Grind the gingersnap cookies until they resemble coarse cornmeal

Mix in melted butter

Press mixture into a 10 inch, deep dish pie pan

Bake in preheated oven for 10 minutes.

PREPARE THE FILLING:.

Separate three of the eggs

Using an electric mixer, beat the three egg whites on high until stiff peaks form

In a separate bowl, combine three egg yolks pumpkin, both sugars, cinnamon, ground ginger, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, eggnog and cream.

Gently fold the egg whites into the pumpkin mixture

Pour into the prepared crust.

Cover the edges of the pie dish with foil or a pie crust protector

Bake in the preheated oven for 90 minutes

Cool on a wire rack at room temperature. DO NOT cool in the refrigerator- the pie continues to cook through while sitting at room temperature.

Voila! Your pie is ready to serve. Easy as pie!

The pie can be kept covered in the fridge overnight.

1. The pie

 

• 1 (14 oun
• 1 (14

The wonderful comics creator Gail Simone has dubbed today Cosplay Appreciation Day, and I’m completely down with that. As a novelist I don’t often see my characters get cosplayed, but I love it when I do. Also, for anyone who doubts the way I feel about Cosplay, may I just point you at this post in which my lovely wife and I borrow Neil Gaiman’s lamppost for a bit of Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe Cosplay. And, yes, that’s me standing in a freaking snow bank without a shirt on because that’s the way the costume ought to be done, dammit.

Photo by Matthew Arron Kuchta

Updated to add this shot of Laura and I from nearly 20 years ago as Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas:

Further updated to add the photo credit: Photo by Tesla Seppanen

I’ve got a new book coming out in two weeks, which must meant that I’ll be doing launch events.

Nov 29th, 7:00 pm, a reading and signing at the Har Mar Barnes and Noble in Roseville MN

Dec 1st, 1:00 pm, I shall be at Uncle Hugos in Minneapolis signing books with the wonderful Kelly Barnhill. Yep, that’s right, two Kellys for one low price.

If’n your not able to make either of those Uncle Hugo’s would be more than happy to arrange for you to get a book signed while I’m there, or to send you a generically signed one if you should like afterward.

If you’re looking for excellent Irish music at an unbeatable price, let me point you at four albums now available on a free/pay what you want basis (with any proceeds going to charity) all from my late friend Michael Matheny’s trio, Gallowglass.

His remaining bandmates Ken Larson and Lojo Russo are also old friend of mine and they played a final memorial show for him Saturday September 29th with Ray Yates sitting in for Mike, and a whole tribe of guest musicians along to play an old friend out. They did him up proud. They also announced that they were making the whole Gallowglass catalog available free with any money that anyone wanted to donate for the downloads going to Mike’s favorite charities, greyhound and cancer research.

So, if you’d like to hear the fabulous work they did back in the day, you can find it at: http://gallowglassirishtrio.bandcamp.com/

Some things you don’t want to write because you know you won’t do them justice. Some things you don’t want to write because writing about it will make it true. Some things you don’t to want write because they will cut to the bone. Sometimes you write anyway, because you have to try, because the truth is owed and the blood and bone. This is one of those times.

I haven’t seen as much of Mike in the past few years as I would have liked. Our paths diverged some time ago, but he was one of my oldest friends and knowing he was in the world was always a comfort, and seeing him a pleasure. That comfort is gone now and the pleasure will live on only in memory and all of us who loved him are diminished by his loss.

For many the first thing Mike will bring to mind is his music. He was a great musician and I always loved to hear him play. For others it will be his sense of humor, or his gentleness, or a thousand other things. I can’t fix my own memories to any one thing, though his sense of mischief runs deep in my own memories of Mike, perhaps because I knew him first when we were young.

We met the summer I turned fifteen, at Renaissance Festival school, though we didn’t grow close until the year after when I started driving with Mike and Sean as my most frequent passengers. We spent a lot of time together over the next seven or eight years.

The memories are so many and varied it’s hard to know where to start. Driving aimlessly around Minneapolis in the middle of the night, drinking endless gallons of Mountain Dew at Davanni’s and Pizza Hut or sitting in Mike’s room or Sean’s. Warhammer, listening to him first playing around with a guitar, wandering around Festival together. Arriving at the Colorado Festival after a sixteen hour drive and leaping straight into the back of another car to drive to Boulder. Sitting across a coffin shaped coffee table at my first apartment tossing black cat firecrackers at each other and giggling. Co-writing the opening of a fantasy novel by plugging two keyboards into one Mac and trying to outdo each other. Him talking me into my first ear piercing…and on and on. A thousand memories and all of them precious. But if finding a starting place is hard, coming to the end is infinitely harder.

The thought that I will have no more new memories of Michael hurts me. Knowing that I’ll never see the wicked smile he so often shared, or hear the soft chuckle, or simply know that he is out there somewhere smiling and laughing and making music–that is a truth I do not want to face. It costs in blood and bone and soul, and though I have written thousands of pages I find myself all but bereft of words at this loss, knowing I can never to do justice to the memory of an old and dear friend.

Michael Matheny was my friend, we helped each other grow up. I loved him, and he is gone, and the world will be a darker place with his light gone out of it.

Finally put up the wonderful maps that Matt Kuchta did for me for the Fallen Blade series. Click on the links or the thumbnails to see full size.

Tien

The Eleven Kingdoms

Lee’s memorial was amazing, with laughter and tears and technical difficulties that led to pure beauty. There was a real magic to it that I’ve never seen at any other service, and for that Laura and I are both deeply thankful.

The service was held at the Bread of Life Church for the Deaf, a classic little fifties Midwestern neighborhood church. We got there early and sat outside in the car for a few minutes. I wore a formal black kilt rig for mourning because I was going to be giving a part of the eulogy and because Lee loved the kilt. Laura wore pants and was a bit less dressy, and I think that the reversal of traditional gender roles there is something that Lee would have loved. She loved shaking things up.

Laura and I took up station at the church entrance to greet Lee’s friends and the members of her communities as they came in. We wanted something to do—we’re both much happier when we have something to do, and there was the guest book to point out and the sticky door to manage for the many wheelchairs and walkers. The funeral home folks handled a lot of that, but the turnout was huge and they were happy to have us helping, especially once the crowd really started rolling in.

Right from the start this funeral felt more joyous than any memorial I’ve ever attended, mourning and sadness, of course, but also a celebration of a woman who really LIVED. Not quite an Irish wake, but so much more than merely a memorial. The mourners came in every size and shape, and more than one species. There must have been a dozen service dogs, and they really helped lend an air of love and community to the crowd. And it was a crowd, a standing room only crowd. Lee was loved by so very many people, and an astonishing number of them turned out. She loved the color purple, everyone knew it, and many honored her memory by wearing her signature color. Even the church honored her there, it being Lent.

The service opened with the assistant pastor signing, and the pastor interpreting in spoken word from the pews. It felt exactly right. Then it moved into a more typical format with a few bible verses read by family and another piece by the pastor, all interpreted in ASL.

Then the pastor, Susan, went into her homily and that’s where the magic really started. The pastor started with a story about how Lee had her name legally changed from Leone to Lee, because if Lee didn’t like something she changed it. There were a lot of nods at that and some laughs, and few muttered “yeahs.” Then Susan said that this was the point at which she would normally have talked about the deceased resting peacefully with god, but that though Susan believed Lee was with god she didn’t think there was anything peaceful about it. She was quite sure that Lee was demanding to see heaven’s accessibility policies. The whole room roared with laughter, and something changed then.

What had been a sort of coalition of mourners, with many smaller groups joining together to say goodbye, suddenly became a community celebrating a life. And it went on like that with many tears and a continued laughing rumble that was impossible not to love.

When Susan finished, I was up first. I read the appreciation that I wrote in Lee’s honor, and it was perhaps the hardest reading of a life that has included a lot of time on stage. I couldn’t even introduce the piece, because I knew that if I took one step beyond the words written on the page I was going to cry my head off and not be able to speak a word. As it was, I managed all right, and didn’t really break up until the last line, at which point a little crack in the voice was okay, as was crying my way off the stage.

I wrote my appreciation for me and for Laura, and most of all for Lee, because I loved her and I needed to say goodbye. It was an emotional snapshot of a decades long relationship. I expected a few others to read it because most things I write are read by at least a few, but hadn’t really expected anything more to come of it. But it apparently struck a chord in Lee’s communities and with the family. Dozens of people have expressed how much it meant to them over this past week, and it has been humbling and edifying and a bit scary to see my work reflected back at me in a way that I rarely encounter.

Lee’s boss, Alan Peters, followed me, giving a more traditional sort of eulogy and doing it up proud. I was both impressed and moved by his ability to speak clearly and strongly with tears rolling steadily down his cheeks, something that is simply beyond me. He talked about Lee and their friendship, and her work in improving accessibility for everyone. He also talked about her absolutely glorious laugh, and the whole room laughed and cried with him.

Last up was Lee’s brother-in-law Michael, who read out a resolution passed by the Minnesota state legislature in honor of Lee. He was clearly as nervous as it is possible to be about being up there, but again, he did her up proud. Neither Laura or I had heard anything about that beforehand and it was a moment of great pride and a punch in the gut at the same time. Lee would have loved it, but she wasn’t there to know. There have been a lot of those punches this week. Lee was an incredibly joyous person and a bit of a ham and she would absolutely have loved all the attention she’s been getting. But she’s not there. Instead, there is a hole in the world that can never be filled.

After the eulogies, the pastor did pastor things and then put in a CD of Amazing Grace. It went about ten words in and then started skipping. Nothing ever went smooth in Lee’s life, and a technical glitch at her funeral seemed somehow exactly right. I know that she would have loved watching Susan signing the skip over and over and over. The room roared once again. Susan tried to fix the problem, but it just wasn’t happening, and she eventually gave up. There was a long moment of silence then, while Susan contemplated what to do next.

And then, just before Susan could break that silence, an absolutely glorious soprano voice started singing Amazing Grace from somewhere in middle of the church. Within a few words the whole crowd was singing and it was pure magic, a truly touching tribute to a grand lady. I couldn’t sing because I was crying too hard, and honestly, given my singing voice, that’s no great loss. After the song finished we followed the casket out to the waiting hearse—given Lee’s life it really ought to have been a Metro Mobility van, and it really ought to have been late—but the hearse works too. We all gave our final goodbyes, many people making the ASL sign for love and touching the coffin.

Then we went back inside and watched slides from Lee’s life and told stories of her. One young woman who had made a point earlier of coming over to tell me how much my appreciation meant to her, somehow convinced her smart phone to cough up a video of Lee that she hadn’t been able to get to run before that day. It was of Lee getting a birthday gift, and it had that Lee cackle that we all loved so well. Another person imagined that the pearly gates had better have a wheelchair button installed if they didn’t want a world of trouble from Lee. And so it went.

Somewhere in there we introduced the people who are taking over from her as staff to her cat Marygold, to the person who had preceded Lee in that role and they all talked about Lee and her cats and exchanged pictures and email. Another of Lee’s friends, the poet Morgan Willow brought us a limerick she wrote for the occasion—Lee loved them. About a million people told Laura and I how much they had heard about us from Lee and how much she adored us. There was chocolate everywhere, another of Lee’s loves—I think we must have found fifty pounds of it squirreled away in various places in her apartment. Dogs were admired, hugs exchanged, and in general it was a perfect mixture of the bitter and the sweet.

Goodbye Lee, you came, you saw, you conquered, and we will miss you forever.