French Cooking. . . Felicity Style
I’ve successfully managed to NOT get into the Tour de France this year, which is excellent as five hours a day of additional TV (regardless of what I’m also doing as I watch) is laughably implausible at the moment. However, I did still see the first cooking segment by enthusiastic French chef Gabriel Gaté, and decided to make it. More or less.
The actual recipe is for Dutch Gouda Tartlets with mushrooms, ham, and onion. The recipe opens with instructions to make shortcrust pastry.
Mine is. . . different.
Dutch Gouda Tartlets (sans gouda, dutch-ness, mushrooms, ham, onion, and pastry):
1. Make sure you have enough bread defrosted (probably the same number of slices as you have in your large muffin tray – for us, 12).
2. Make a cheese sauce using butter, flour, milk, and pre-grated mozzarella (and ideally a thermomix). Add herbs/garlic/whatever makes it taste good to you (it’ll be fine with nothing added). You can use the proportions from the original recipe, or any white/cheese/béchamel sauce. Or a jar from Woolies.
3. Dice and cook some bacon (or just use ham 😛 Or tinned tuna/salmon. Or refried beans. Or whatever).
4. Add some kind of cooked vegetable/s – at different times I’ve used grated carrot, avocado, cauliflower, and/or bok choy.
5. Cut crusts off the bread and push them into the muffin tin spaces.
6. Pour cheese sauce mixture into bread “cases”, sprinkle more grated cheese on top, and cook in a hot oven for 10-20 minutes.
Done.
Miss Three puts the bread into the muffin tray, and get excited at the idea that we’re eating muffins.
Steamp-ow!
Before people figured out anaesthetics (still a very tricky art in 2015), surgery was all about speed. A “good” surgeon could amputate a limb in under thirty seconds. Yay?
Right now I’m working on another steampunk interactive tale – which will be free once it’s done. The above article was excellent for my research. Luckily for my protagonist, his story begins in 1854 – so chloroform is in common use. Unluckily, the real historical figure upon which the protagonist is based was on the run at the time of his amputation, so he was awake the entire time.
Peter Lalor is that protagonist, by the way. How could I resist writing about such a fascinating individual, who took centre stage more than once in crucial moments of Australian history – and who had an arm lopped off at a point that can only be described as “terribly inconvenient for him, but excellent for steampunk writers with a penchant for attaching mechanical limbs to people”?
What to wear?
In the world of interactive fiction, I very quickly discovered Emily Short, who is a clever, thoughtful, and successful writer/reviewer/blogger. In one of her reviews of a particular IF story, she went on a tangent about how she goes to gaming conferences and wonders how to dress and act in such a way that she doesn’t get idiots approaching her to give her lectures on the biz.
I’m yet to go to a proper game conference, but I go to a lot of writer/reader/fan ones.
I love a good costume, especially steampunk – which I also write. A corset tends to make any body type look better, so that works for me. Steampunk is such an easy and versatile look to do that I can take it anywhere, and people will often walk up to me saying, “Cool earrings” (or whatever), which is code for, “Hey, I like steampunk too.” And then I’ve found somebody I know I can probably talk to, even if I’m at a conference or event that tends to look askance at the entire fantasy genre (it happens in writing circles, believe me). I’ll often go in knowing I’ll be the only one in a corset, and that some people will think I’m a moron for wearing one (that was certainly the case at the CYA Conference I attended last weekend – possibly the best networking conference for writers in Australia). But ultimately it works for me very well – people tend to assume I’m a steampunk expert, in fact, which amuses me.
Costuming is a convenient path that tells people, “I’m serious about this.” Emily Short isn’t into costumes, so her choice of outfit is a great deal more complicated and subtle.
Along with the corset, I also consciously adopt an “I’m an enthusiast, not trying to be sexy” style and posture – complete with a deliberately subordinate position towards most people I talk to (generally in the form of being somewhat admiring of their wisdom and/or costume), although I’ll launch into teacher and/or helper mode at the drop of a hat (eg. When someone is too shy to approach someone, I’ll suggest we go talk to them together).
Sexy is well beyond me, and I know it. I never liked it anyway. On a really good day, I can turn “massively overweight” into “epic and magnificent”, and I’m proud of that.
This is my corset of choice at the moment:
I wear it quite loose so I can get it on by myself (with considerable difficulty). I was running late at CYA and carried it out with me in the morning, putting it on in a crowd of high-up publisher types as we waited for our taxi. One of the other writer types helped me, fortunately.
Buckles are cool.
CYA was amazing. It seriously had representatives from every large publisher in Australia (except Allen & Unwin), plus several of the best medium-sized publishers and three very good agents. I talked to literally every single one, and it was very quickly apparent where I should (or should not) send my books. Useful!
Felicity Banks 