Food is Hard: WAFFLES

These are the best waffles you’ll ever eat*

* your mileage may vary, no guarantee implied. But they are really REALLY good

Cue up Waffle King by Weird Al

I got the original form of the recipe from The Woman’s Companion Cook Book, then one night I didn’t realize we were low on eggs. But I knew you could substitute apple sauce, which we had. And they were AMAZING. So that’s the recipe you’re getting here.

delicious, delicious waffles

Yes, you can also make them into pancakes, but waffles are better.

Makes about 12 waffles or a shit load of pancakes

Ingredients:

Dry:

  • 4 cups all purpose flour
  • 6 tablespoons granulate sugar
  • 3 teaspoons baking powder
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 3 teaspoons cinnamon

Wet:

  • 3 cups milk
  • 3 eggs
  • 3/4 of a cup of unsweetened applesauce
  • 1 cup Canola oil (or similar neutral tasting oil)

Mix all the dry ingredients well, then add the wet ingredients. The batter will be a bit lumpy. Make into waffles (or pancakes, if you’re a heathen)

They’re so good you don’t even need to add any topping (I prefer brown sugar)

You can freeze these. Just put a bunch of them into a large ziploc, no paper between them necessary. Heat in the toaster. I have no idea how long they last, because I always eat them within a week.

They’re not super filling, so eat with something else (some juice and a handful of nuts would probably make a pretty good breakfast. I usually have one waffle and then some cereal and berries)

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Food is Hard: My meatball recipe

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Edit: Updating this for the food is hard series

Meatballs are basically meatloaf in ball form, but I don’t like meatloaf and I do like meatballs. *shrug* I dunno. This is a composite of a couple different recipes I’ve seen.

half eaten meatball

Silver’s Eat Alone Meatballs

1.25 lbs ground turkey
1.25 lbs ground beef
1 cup-ish whole wheat bread crumbs (I did two pieces of bread in the food processor. Pretty sure it was more than a cup)
1 egg
1/2 onion, diced (threw it in the food processor too. Onions kill me)
3 or so cloves of garlic, minced (in the food processor.)
1/2 cup-ish shredded carrot (I did a double handful of baby carrots, in the food processor)
1/2 cup parmesan cheese
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
2 tsp basil
2 tsp parsley
1/2 tsp red pepper

Mix, form into 2 inch balls, cook at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. I put mine on wire racks on foil lined cookie sheets, but they didn’t make as much of a mess as I expected.

meatballs out of the oven and cooling

Mess with these! I’ve used white bread instead or saltine crackers. Pretty sure the bread is a filler so you can leave it out to be gluten-free, or replace with rice.

If you don’t have a food processor, just cut stuff up as small as you can.

I’ve tried putting zucchini in it, but it didn’t turn out well. The zucchini was too wet. You may have ideas on how to fix that (maybe just the peels?)

These freeze really well, last a long time in the freezer, and taste good cold or hot.

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Food is Hard: Books & Tips

If you’re like me and deciding what to eat is HARD and making anything that’s more than two steps is SUPER HARD, then this is for you.

Tips:

Make things you can freeze (I’ll be posting some recipes soon). A lot of things can be frozen if you think you can’t finish all of it before it spoils. Can’t finish that loaf of bread? Divide it into bits you can finish in a week, wrap it up in plastic, and chuck it in the freezer. Defrost in the fridge later.

Convenience foods are your friends. Whether that’s a frozen meal, pre-cut veggies, canned chicken – that’s all stuff that makes getting food into you easier & that’s all that matters.

If you can afford to and you have the space, canned foods are great. Canned chicken or tuna, some frozen veggies, and some bread, rice, or pasta is a good meal.

Make a list of foods you like that are easy and keep it on the fridge so when you can’t think of stuff, you can look at the list. Mine would include miso soup, peanut butter & crackers, bread & cheese, and rice & veggies.

Two books I like:

Cooking is Terrible: This isn’t recipes so much as ideas. But they’re good ideas.

Just Bento: She just came out with a second one, but I haven’t read it yet. It’s full of recipes that are yummy, many of which you can freeze. Browse through the website for lots of recipes too. Most of them are Japanese inspired. Warning: there is some talk of “health” and calories. I ignore all of it because I’m more concerned with getting food into me, but you may not be able to.

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Conlang Stuff

I’ve uploaded the newest version of the Nyjichun wikis! There is now one for the grammar and one for the lexicon (aka, all the words). They are SO a work in progress and are full of notes to myself and half-finished stuff.

In addition to that, I recently made a twine game for a jam on itch.io. I redid my conlang Tynthna. It now has actual IPA sounds and a few more words than it did before. And lots of sound recordings! Which may or may not be accurately said! (when in doubt, the orthography is canon). You can play it in your browser on itch.io.

That makes three conlangs that I’m sort of currently working on: Nyjichun, Tynthna, and Ie. I’ve also done a tiny bit in Ylis (the language of the Thunderian capital) lately, because I needed to be able to say Thunderian for on A Heroic Moment without actually referencing Thundercats. (It’s Lunderka for singular and Lunderkusa for plural – and that’s literally the only words I have for it right now, because the old version was from before I knew what IPA was).

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Papercraft Progress

I haven’t made any more customs, but here’s some stuff I’ve built lately:

Clockwise from top left corner: IT, Paper Totem by Admskt, Rumbolt, handlink from Quantum Leap, and Tubby Eat Coin
  • IT is from Made in Paperland (site is in Russian). I have an original I’m going to make inspired by it, based on the Kaypro II computer.
  • Paper Totem was a platform toy by Dolly Oblong.  They’re not easily available anymore. This was one of the customs.
  • Rumbolt is from Fold Up Toys. It was really fiddly to make.
  • The handlink is from mikedaws.
  • Tubby Eat Coin is from Zerolabor. I have two customs sketched out for it, but I’m not sure if I’m going to make them.

I’m on a papercraft Discord, where we share models that aren’t available anymore (like the paper totems)

Nanibird custom and Happy Turtle

Nanibird is another platform toy, which is no longer available, like at all. This one is by Ivan Ricci at Kawaii-Style (site is in Italian). There are two more by them, but I’m going to make the other Nanibirds smaller.

Happy Turtle is by Fold Up Toys again. It was fun to build.

Some detail shots below the cut

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Recent-ish Stuff

I’m running two communities on Dreamwidth that you should check out.

I was given the Writers Cafe from the previous admin and I made Just Create. Every Friday I post a check-in to share what people have done, seen, made, or read and then Saturday or Sunday they each get a session for making stuff. 

If you’d like a community to encourage you on, come check them out.

We had a roadrunner in the yard. If you haven’t seen them in person, they’re pretty large birds – probably the size of a parrot.

Roadrunner sitting on a fence
Closer view of a roadrunner sitting on a fence

I also finally finished the sampler I started before I went to the Netherlands! (I worked on it very intermittedly). The plan was for every line to be a different stitch, but one of the ones I planned didn’t look good as a straight line so I reused one.

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Papercraft Challenge – Heartbreak

As I said before, I’ve gotten into papercraft models. I also decided that as much as possible, I wanted to do a custom for each model I have (or at least a lot of them) – thus the Papercraft Challenge!

I showed the WIP of ex-tyrannomon before which I only need to build now. (It’s the pink thing to the left up there)

I finished a simpler one first and here it is:

It’s based off the voodoo model from MadeinPaperland.ru (site is in Russian).

I altered the template in Adobe Illustrator and I think it’s adorably creepy. Because the Made in Paperland said for personal use only, I kept they’re label on it and I won’t be sharing the template.

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WIP Preview

I’ve gotten into papercraft models. One thing I want to do though is to customize each model as well as building whatever designs I have (I’ve got more than 200 although I may not do them all)

Here’s the wip of my first custom along with the two I downloaded

Two paper models of velocirapters or tyrannosaurs standing over the printed out modified template

Once I’ve got it finalized I’ll have the template here and on my DeviantArt. Since I’m getting back into Digimon, it’ll be ExTyrannomon the plushie version of my favorite dino-digimon.

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Darn cat!

Look what Spooky did!

(She knocked it off the books I was using as a stand. Once I have a good job I’ll replace it. For now I’ll use my smaller monitor as my main monitor)

#firstworldproblems

The butthead cat:

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Some more art!

I just scanned all my sketchbooks, so I’ll be posting some of that. Right now, something I just finished:

Head shots of Wild Rush from three angles, plus a rage study

(CW for mentions of child abuse and manipulation)

His instinct from growing up in his abusive family is to hide his emotions. Once he got out and was the biggest baddest villain on the block, he used his emotions to get emotion and to scare people into doing what he wants (…which he may very well have learned from his parents).

He’s usually genuine with Daisy and you can often seeing him glance at her to make sure he’s being alright.

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Shard-verse Art

Just a sketch of Charles being a cutie. I redesigned nem to be a bit more obviously mixed-race in black & white (neir coloring hasn’t changed).
head and shoulders shot of a mixed race enby with a short afro

You can’t see it, obviously, but I also made nem chubbier and less body-builder-esque. Specifically to appeal to a friend of mine. (Also, Shard-verse needs more fat-rep. Right now it has, like, Sevvy. Who is awesome, but not in the main stories. And apparently I never posted the picture here.)

So here’s the picture of Sevvy with Anita:

Very fat somewhat black woman being hugged by a smaller white woman. The black woman is reading a book and is dressed in pants, button-up shirt, and vest, with very tall strappy heels. The white woman has her hair in a braid and is wearing a knee-length skirt, a shirt with ruffled sleeves, and mary-janes. Contessa Seffora de Sant’Anna & Anita Trevino. Sevvy is the awesome woman in front. Anita is Ostanes/Iosis’ mom. Sevvy is basically everyone’s teacher (she’s, if not immortal, really long-lived). (Neither of them show up in the chapters posted, but I think Anita is mentioned).

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