2: What movie have you watched most recently? What did you think of it? My brother and I are watching Wake Up, Dead Man right now! It’s his first and my third time watching the movie (I’ve been bugging him to watch it so I can talk at him without worrying about spoilers). I love a good murder mystery and I really enjoy the dialogue and delivery in these movies. This one’s a little more emotionally heavy than either of the others but it’s just as beautifully crafted.

3: what are you looking forward to right now? Quick, easy answer is I’m looking forward to rewatching Glass Onion–it’s going to be a nice bit of humor and chaos after this one. A little farther out, I’m looking forward to picking up flour on this week’s grocery trip and getting back into some baking, and next week I’ll be added to a really fun complex new project at work, and in February my treat to myself will be The Cyprian by Mercedes Lackey, and when spring comes I’m going to grow so many eggplants and marigolds.

11: what kind of music is stuck in your head a lot lately? I’ve been working on my fandom playlists lately, listening for how I want to order the songs within each of them. I can’t tell if it’s harder to order them the first time (I’ve turned my Arthur/Eames Inception playlist around enough by now to wear it smooth like a river rock) or to add songs later to an order I’ve settled on (I added ‘Be Your Shadow’ by the Wombats and 'Oceans’ by Twin Atlantic to my Ghost/Soap CoD playlist last week and I’m still not sure I’m happy with both their placements). More specifically, the stand-out earworms from those playlists are probably 'The Draw’ by Bastille and 'Amsterdam’ by Nothing But Thieves, respectively.

5: what is my favorite drink? Tea! I grew up on iced sweet tea, and it turns out I also really like a variety of hot black teas. This summer I made a lot of tea with fresh mints (pineapple mint: very good. chocolate mint: incredibly good. apple mint: weirdly grassy but not bad? unidentified mint I stole from my neighbor’s plot because somehow his lasted much later in the season than mine: a little sharp but very refreshing with lemon added). This winter I’ve been drinking a lot of oolong blends. It turns out I really like a little floral + a little fruit in a hot tea.

7: favorite way to travel? I love the train. I love traveling on the ground (looking out the window is one of my favorite things) but I do occasionally get anxious in the car even if I’m not driving, so trains are better. And trains have a really good sound and vibration to them too! I’ve also enjoyed big ships, but trains are the absolute best.

13: something I learned recently? My brother collects old glass and he showed me this 1910-1915 Codd-neck bottle that was so cool. I’ve seen ramune bottles before, but I didn’t realize the design went back so far or that the old examples had such fun swishes in them! This bottle is incredibly pleasing in the hand.

I looked them up on wikipedia also and learned a ton about different check valves.

Yesterday we did a really thick curry-gravy and ate it with chicken nuggets and crinkle fries, and it was so good. And yes, it could’ve been elevated by making my own spicy roasted potato wedges and pounded pork cutlets, and onions and peas and maybe carrots in the curry, but really sometimes there’s no beating dino nuggies & dip.

Today I made red sauce with olives and feta and mushrooms and a ton of this really awesome Greek herb seasoning combo we found at Costco, and we put it over fresh pasta. I would’ve loved to cook a couple eggs in it shakshuka-style and maybe to serve it with some Texas toast on the side, but just the sauce was still plenty good. I timed it just right so the feta was half-melty and it mixed in beautifully.

Tomorrow it’ll be mochiko chicken and glazed carrots with huli-huli sauce, with roasted parsnip and potatoes on the side. I’m not great at frying things yet, but last time 100% of the chicken pieces were edible and I think this time I can get at least 80% very pleasant as well. Roasted parsnip & potatoes I do love, but due to price & availability constraints it’s more like one single parsnip with potatoes for bulk. If I had magic ingredient access, it’d be roasted parsnips and plantains instead.

Speaking of plantains! I’m going to make sancocho sometime in the next week or so, and I wish I had the knowledge and ingredients to make it the way I used to get it from the farmer’s market. I know I’m looking for specifically a Puerto Rican version, and a couple recipe bloggers seem to think the Goya frozen sancocho veggie mix bags aren’t awful, but I wish I could do it up proper. Fresh plantains and potatoes and cassava, and the specific pale winter squash the man there used, and unfortunately I don’t know the difference between yautia and malanga roots enough to know which of those it was :( And big chunks of beef and maybe some oxtail! I’m going to make an entirely edible version with my cheap freezer ingredients, and once I’ve made it once I’ll be able to start refining my recipe for my personal tastes and reminisces, but wouldn’t magic be nice!!

Other magic ingredients I’d love to have: ripe persimmons and scuppernong grapes, manchego cheese, fresh garden peas and sugar-snap beans, proper salt country ham, and the really small bright scotch bonnet-esque peppers the vegeble man had for a hot minute last year that he sold as “HOT $2s”. I’ll be really honest and say if I got sudden magical access to any of those probably I would just eat them straight, but if I were cooking it’d be something like: peeled whole persimmons on sweet cornstarch flummery; scuppernongs are really just for eating on a porch but also you can if you’re impossibly indulgent peel and freeze them and drop them into very lightly lemoned sweet tea to use as ice cubes; manchego potato croquettes or maybe manchego-stuffed mushrooms. both? something like a scotch egg but it’s a little fried potato-crusted cheese-stuffed mushroom bite, that could be really fun. anyway it’s hard to go wrong with manchego; lots of peas and a few snap beans in a nice light primavera-y pasta, and then a few peas and lots of snap beans in a quiche; country ham with collard greens and baked mac & cheese; and those little scotch-bonnet-y guys tossed in a super-hot cast-iron with pineapple chunks and shrimps.

18: Are you musical? Play any instruments or sing? Would you ever perform for an audience? I am musical, or at least I love music–I can and have learned to play instruments (clarinet, saxophone, guitar) but I wasn’t ever more than adequate with any of them, and I only really loved my guitar. I do very much love to sing. I sing all the time at home and around my friends, but I freeze up horribly in front of An Audience. I made it through marching band (my clarinet era) only by thinking hard about how anonymous I was in the group of us moving in uniformed unison. Scary.

11: what kind of music is stuck in your head a lot lately? Song of the day! I gotta get back in the habit of posting those. This ask came in on the 30th, I think? So the recent song then would’ve been “Cairo” by San Fermin, which my sister played for me while we were in the car. Today’s song of the day is “Amsterdam” by Nothing But Thieves.

8: favorite month of the year and why? September! I love the weather–where I live now, September is cool but I’m not freezing yet, and it’s humid in a pleasant way rather than muggy. When I was growing up in the South, ‘muggy’ was the strongest impression of summer and then in September was when the wind finally started to blow and the rain would actually fall. A glorious transition. One of the houses we lived in had a sweetgum tree in the yard, and I remember my first autumn there, watching the leaves turn and the gumballs fall and the storms shake the branches. There’s a sweetgum outside my window where I live now, too–one of my favorite things about my current apartment–and even though autumn here comes a lot faster, September is still a good time for my beloved tree. And it’s my birth month!

13: what’s something you learned recently? Okay, it took me a lot longer to type up these answers than I was expecting, but I remember very clearly shutting tumblr down after reblogging this ask game to play Trivial Pursuit with my siblings, which means the most recent thing I learned after getting this ask is: 'the first welded sculptures in the United States were made in the 1950s by’ David Smith. I went and looked him up after the game and I like his work a lot. Some very interesting shapes in there.