Year: 2014

Oatmeal-Yogurt Pancakes with Blackberry Crush

/ Shane / 2 Comments

The first Friday of the month is reserved for recipes. You can see additional First Friday Food posts here.

The Reason:

Pancakes.

Also, if you’re some kind of crazy person and you need a second reason, I just so happened to stumble across this recipe on the day we had bought some random blackberries for no reason at all.

Kismet.

Pancake kismet (the only kind I’m interested in).

The Journey:

The thing that originally piqued my interest was the oats. It turns out, they just sort of disappear into it; you really can’t tell they’re in there. So it’s a great way to include something a little different than your standard flour.

blackberry pancakes

They have yogurt in them too, and since I absolutely love the Russian yogurt pancakes, that was a draw. The nice thing about this one, though, is that it uses a lot less yogurt. We often don’t have enough yogurt on hand to do the yogurt pancakes.

Plus the fruit topping, although you could really put that on any kind of pancakes. The first time we made it we also had homemade whipped cream, which really was the magnum opus of pancakes. (Obviously, it works with strawberries as well as blackberries.)

cooking strawberries

The Verdict:

These are my current favorite pancake. I think we made them 4 weeks in a row. I cannot overstate how delicious and wonderful they are.

I keep meaning to reduce the butter, but somehow I never quite get around to it…

strawberry pancakes

The Recipe:

Recipe from the Whole Grains Council:

For the Blackberry Crush:

  • 2 cups fresh blackberries (or other fruit)
  • 1/4 cup turbinado sugar
  • 1/4 cup maple syrup

For the Pancakes:

  • 1 2/3 cups white whole-wheat flour
  • 2/3 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
  • 2 tbsp granulated sugar
  • 1 1/4 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 heaping tsp baking soda of soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 cup Greek yogurt, plus more for garnish
  • 1 cup whole milk
  • 4 tbsp unsalted butter, melted, plus more for the pan
  • 2 large eggs

To make the Blackberry Crush:

  1. Combine the blackberries and sugar in a medium bowl and mash slightly with a fork.
  2. Strain the juice into a small pot and reserve the berries.
  3. Heat the juice over medium heat and simmer until it is thick, syrupy, and easily coats the back of the spoon, about 8 minutes.
  4. Remove from the heat and stir in the maple syrup. Cool slightly, and pour over the berries. Adjust the sweetness with additional maple syrup if needed. Set the syrup aside.

To make the pancakes:

  1. Whisk together flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl.
  2. In a separate bowl, whisk together the yogurt, milk, the melted butter, and eggs. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients, and whisk in the wet ingredients until well incorporated. The batter should be thick, with little tiny bubbles on the surface.

Queen

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Like so many young men of my generation, I was introduced to Queen via Wayne’s World and Bohemian Rhapsody.

Wayne’s World came out in 1992. Back around that time I bought a lot of cassette tape singles. I used to hang out at NRM music in the mall, and I think the tape singles were $4 apiece (you whippersnappers and your $0.99 instant downloads). I bought the single of Bohemian Rhapsody and I remember telling my mom she had to hear this amazing, cutting edge band known as Queen.

“Yeah,” she said, “I’ve heard it. How did you hear it? These guys have been around for a long time.”
“No way,” I said. “This song just came out.”
“Shane, this song was out when I was a kid.”

I didn’t believe her, couldn’t believe her. This song was cool! No WAY my mom could have heard it before.

I remember that, after a heated argument, my mom finally did somehow convince me that Queen had been around for awhile. “Well then, they were ahead of their time!” I declared, stomping out of the room. Of course, Bohemian Rhapsody came out in 1975, and Freddie Mercury was dead by the time *I* ever heard that song, but we didn’t have smart phones back then to look that kind of thing up.

(Side note, the reverse side of that tape was The Show Must Go On, which is probably now my favorite Queen song, so you whippersnappers don’t know what you’re missing with your “only buy the song you want” nonsense!)

There is just something about a Queen song that, when you hear it, just makes you start pumping your fist in the air and bobbing your head (and maybe there is something to that, since Another One Bites the Dust is literally the rhythm of your heart).

Could there be a more perfect stadium rock song than We Will Rock You / We Are the Champions? Who hasn’t rocked out to Another One Bites the Dust? Who hasn’t harmonized to Fat Bottomed Girls? For my money, no tv theme song will ever top Princes of the Universe (“I am immortal! I have inside me blood of kings, YEAH!”).

Queen was ahead of their time, man. That front man, that stage show, that sound. So many hits. Their sound is still unique. The show may go on, but we’ll never have another one like Queen, my friend.

I make my kids listen to Queen. I don’t care that their hits are 40 years old. I want to ride my bicycle, and I want to ride it where I like, thank you very much.

Pen Snob

/ Shane / 5 Comments

My pen ran out of ink on my flight home the other day. I mean *the* pen. The gold Cross pen with my name engraved on it that I’ve used to write the first draft of every story I’ve ever written (yes, I write every first draft long hand).

I quickly moved through the 7 stages of grief while searching through my bag for a new pen. A regular, mundane NON-MAGICAL pen. As I wrote for the rest of the flight, I tried to decide if I really cared. On one hand, I’m not one to put a lot of stock in the power of “things” and the words were flowing just fine with this other pen. On the other hand OMG MY SPECIAL MAGIC PEN.

I had all but decided that I didn’t care and I’d just use regular pens from now on, but when I got home I found some spare ink cartridges in the back of the drawer.

Pen, you’re back! I love you! I never meant those horrible things I said! I’ll never leave you. Never! ::smooch smooch smooch::

ARG THE INK CARTRIDGE DOESN’T WORK!!

There was one more ink cartridge that does, in fact, work, except it’s blue ink. Hideous, ugly, blue ink.

I’m really trying to decide which is worse: writing in the horrible abomination known as blue ink, or just grabbing another pen. I don’t really think my special pen has special powers (and my acceptance list sort of proves THAT little assumption), but the main upsides are 1) it fits perfectly in my notebook and 2) everybody in the house knows better than to touch my sacred pen. Most pens disappear almost as fast as you can find them, but not this one.

Sara can testify to how stingy I am with the use of this pen.
“Hey, give me that pen, I need to write this down really quick.”
“Uh…this pen?”
“Yeah, really quick, I just need to write something down.”
::Me sloooooowly taking the pen out and reluctantly handing it to her while she looks at me funny::
“Okay, are you done? Give it back.”

I actually don’t even remember where this pen came from. I think it was maybe a graduation present or something? I asked on Facebook, but nobody remembered. Dad, maybe? Well, whoever you are out there that gave me this pen, know that I’ve become irrationally attached to it.

So, yeah, I’m writing in blue ink now.

Not more than 3 or 4 days later, I lost my pen at work. It wasn’t a special pen, just one I grabbed from the supply cabinet, but it was fat (despite my skinny little writing pen, I really prefer fat pens) and wrote well and I liked it. I actually searched around for it but, not finding it, grabbed a new one from my desk drawer.

Oh, the horrible abomination of this pen. Ohhh, the torture. I cannot even begin to describe how awful this pen was. I shudder to even recall how uneven the ink was, drawn across the page in letters that faded in and out. AHHHHH!

No big deal, we’ve got a whole supply cabinet full of pens. There weren’t any that matched my previous one, but surely one of the 6 or 7 varieties in there would suffice?

NO.

I ended up test-driving all of them, and only one was tolerable. They were all either super cheap ballpoints that couldn’t draw a smooth line to save their lives, or fancy-schmancy gel pens, which I cannot suffer for even a minute. Yes, this took a significant amount of time and NO I couldn’t work until this was resolved!

Luckily, a co-worker found my pen, so it is once again in my possession (it’s a BiC ReAction 1.0 in case you’re wondering).

So apparently I’ve become a pen snob. Like, the worst-of-the-worst, super duper snobby pen snob. I knew such people existed, but I never thought I would be one. In my defense, I’ve written a lot of words in pen over the past few years, so I do perhaps have a bit more use for a good pen than the average Joe.

Well, I yam what I yam, and what I apparently yam is a pen snob.

Quote Monday is looking for a fight

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Me: “Get some sleep, so your body can fight off those invaders.”
Evie: “Is Darth Vader one of them?”
Me: “No, I don’t think so.”
Evie: “Well, he is a vader.”

Sara: “What did you do at school today?”
Ollie: “Why do you always ask me what I do at school?”
Sara: “Because I love you.”
Ollie: “Well, I love you more than you love me, but I don’t ask you what you do at work.”

Me: “I don’t think you’d want to fight a lion. One time a lion roared at me and I turned into a little puddle of jelly.”
Ollie, rapt: “How did you get back to normal? Did you go through a machine that fixed you up?”

Evie, in regards to a class election: “Her thing to get elected was that she would make the world a better place, but I didn’t vote for her because I think the world is already a pretty good place.”

Writing, Year 5

/ Shane / 2 Comments

My writing anniversary is March 1st. Every year on March 1st, I write a post about how the previous year went in terms of writing.

This year:

Stories Written: 8
Number of [Submission-Ready] Words: 18,600
Number of Story Submissions: 93
Number of Rejections: 79
Number of Acceptances: 3
Postage Costs: $4.24
Revenue: $127.82

Total:

Stories Written: 26
Number of [Submission-Ready] Words: 104,600
Number of Story Submissions: 268
Number of Rejections: 252
Number of Acceptances: 5
Postage Costs: $120.83
Revenue: $272.70

First off, let me say that it’s a pain in the rear to calculate all of these things in March instead of January. All the tracking tools are set up for calendar year. I do kind of like the tradition of my “writing anniversary”, but I don’t know if the hassle is worth it. On the other hand, everybody does “year end review” posts about their writing in December or January, but *nobody* does them in March. Market, cornered.

Same caveats as usual. I actually have 2 stories finished, but not quite yet ready to submit, so I’ll take credit for those next year.

First and foremost, I helped adapt a story for the Pulp Stage. That’s not registered under the “acceptances” above, but it’s pretty dang cool and I’m extra proud of that. More acceptances this year than last year too, even though it totalled less money. Lets hope that trend continues to grow.

Got an Amazon author page this year too, which was awesome, and a Goodreads author account. I feel like a real author more and more every day (it’s all about the external validation I tell ya!)

Lots more stories and words than last year, which feels good. I’m excited about almost hitting 100 subs this year! I had no idea it was that high. Obviously more inventory makes more subs easier, so hopefully I will cross the 100 barrier this year. It seems like only yesterday I was celebrating my 100th rejection, and now I’m almost to the point of getting 100 per year.

I will say that in some ways, after a few acceptances, rejections can be harder to swallow. I’m getting acceptances at a rate that, two years ago, I would have killed for (as in, any at all). But now, especially when I get a lot closer, I sometimes feel the sting more keenly. First world problems I guess.

I’ve also (Internet) met so many amazing authors this year. (Especially on twitter. My goodness are you people prolific tweeters! I can do almost nothing except monitor my twitter stream. I’m almost to the point where I’m overwhelmed again.) Many people I aspire to write like, to be like. It seems like any issue of any magazine, any anthology, any random shelf of books has people whom I (Internet) know. That’s kind of crazy. There’s really something to be said for commiserating with people who are in the same boat as you. For so long I did this in solitude, it’s really been a wonderful, eye-opening experience to discover I have this shared experience with other people. I feel like I’ve soaked up so much knowledge just by being around other writers.

I would say that in general I feel like my writing improves quite a bit all the time. Even though I’m still not selling a high percentage of stories (one day I’ll crack a 2% acceptance ratio, mark my words!), I feel like, on the whole, they’re just exponentially better. On the other hand, I was on the verge of trunking a few stories that I went back and re-read, and I still like them quite a bit. So, trunked they were not (others, not so much).

It’s kind of like learning to play guitar. In the beginning, you’re worried about strum and finger positioning and whatnot. It takes all of your concentration to do those things. However, eventually you get to the point where you don’t have to think about those things at all. At that point, you can start to concentrate on other things, maybe trying a more challenging chord or playing a little something extra in between notes. You can’t tackle everything at once; you have to master one skill before you can even think about trying the next one. The good news, however, is that you eventually master things to the point where you feel foolish for ever having struggled with them.

Early on, I had a real problem with endings. I think that I’ve got that down now. I think my beginnings have improved quite a bit, though of course this is something that I think you can always continue to work on. I’ve got planning and outlining down, I think I’m pretty good at pacing and plot, and I think I’ve improved a lot at titles. I can usually pretty reliably guess at the length of an idea, which is something that I really thought was an amazing, if not impossible, skill when I was just starting out.

I think the main thing to focus on in the next year is emotion and characters. This is something I’ve really been thinking a lot about lately. I think I also go very light on description, which might be a weakness, or might just be part of my style, I’m not sure yet. Still, I think I can improve on that as well.

I really do feel a lot more optimism than usual right now about my writing. Perhaps the acceptances have just boosted my confidence more, but I feel optimistic about my chances much more often. Each story I write seems so much better. I really feel like I’m going to have a breakthrough soon as far as getting certain dream markets.

Here’s to hoping!