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Society and I do seem to have our problems
So, most of today was terrible. I am sick, circumstances are stressful, I didn't sleep much and the nightmares were particularly bad when I did. Two major bright spots I wish to remark on:
1. Roddy McDowall as Dr. Jonathan Willoway in The Fantastic Journey (1977). I discovered the show through links-of-links on the internet; it was referenced as a precursor to Sliders (1995–2000), though in some ways it reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones' The Homeward Bounders (1981). The main cast hail from different points in Earth's history: having fallen through cracks in space-time (the Bermuda Triangle, in the case of the pilot), they are now journeying across a landscape of "zones" linked by mysterious gateways, each zone variously populated by other strays from past and future history, not all of them human; the way out is supposed to lie in "Evoland," so they are traveling east to find it. I skipped the first two episodes and started with the third, where the cast solidifies and the internet indicated that the show got good, or at least as good as it was going to get for its ten episodes and cult following. In the sense that it is low-budget, often clunkily scripted, and not necessarily subtle in its treatment of genre tropes and moral issues, we can argue about how objectively "good" that comes to. But the show has the property of some id-driven fiction where the shape of the stories can be seen through the shortcomings of their production and there's enough in the stories that's emotionally/intellectually compelling, or at least after five episodes I'm still watching. There is exactly one female character and one character of color among the protagonists, but the female character has agency (and inconsistently utilized telepathic abilities) and the black character has knowledge and authority (he's a doctor and his medical skills are plot-relevant), so that's better than not. And it has McDowall as a villain-of-the-week adopted into the main cast, where he makes a pleasing contrast to the essentially nice people around him.* I suspect him of growing out of Lost in Space's Dr. Zachary Smith, but Willoway is less of a bluntly comedic character and a more complex one. He isn't a snake in the grass—he doesn't scheme, he doesn't backstab, he's not always out for himself—but he is touchy, unscrupulous, and not wholly dependable, with some socialization issues to accompany his scientific talents. On the other hand, he can read ancient Greek and he's willing to use his amorality for good (he plays a very convincing double agent, partly because he's exaggerating only a little when he scoffs at the time and place that did not recognize his genius). Being played by McDowall, he runs a nice line in waspish irritation and light-voiced irony, leavened by his very real intelligence and a surprising perception when it comes to people. No matter how goofy the rest of the show gets, it's a clever dynamic, and I can see how it might have been taken up by later television that preferred its protagonists in ethical greys. Discovering that his scientific work helped found a better future, Willoway is shocked and touched, then defensively dismissive: "A lot of good that does me now . . ." And shoulders his pack and moves on, into the unstable whenever.
* Varian comes from a peaceful, enlightened future, Liana from a mythic, technologically superior past, Scott's a bright, all-American kid whose biggest source of angst is his separation from his parents. Fred is the wariest of the original four, but I can imagine that a young black man who's just graduated med school in '77 has reasons to be wary; he's a responsible, snarky physician. Willoway was lording it over an empire of stolen androids when they met him. He gets better.
2. WooRi sent me home with way more rice than I needed for my soft tofu stew (sundubu jjigae?) with pork, so I made the leftovers into improvised rice pudding.
Improvised Rice Pudding
Preparation:
Have a small container of steamed rice from an excellent Korean restaurant sitting uneaten on your dining table. Decide it would make a great base for rice pudding. Improvise wildly and estimate at least two measurements in hindsight, having paid no attention at the time. Regret nothing.
Rice pudding:
2 cups steamed white sticky rice
½ cup whole milk
½ cup condensed milk
1 egg
1–1½ teaspoons vanilla
cinnamon to taste
In a small saucepan, stir together milk, condensed milk, and steamed rice. Cook for ten minutes over medium-to-low heat until thickened, stirring intermittently and fiddling with the burner whenever the mixture starts to bubble at a viscosity more resembling lava than dessert. Belatedly search for recipes for rice pudding on the internet and write them all off, because they presume starting with uncooked rice. Beat egg in a spare coffee cup. When the rice and milk have thickened, becoming creamy rather than slurry, add beaten egg, vanilla, and a generous quantity of cinnamon (cinnamomum verum because we don't keep anything else in our kitchen, but cinnamomum cassia if you like it or it's what you've got). Stirring constantly, cook over medium heat another three to five minutes, until egg and milk have become custard. The color of the pudding will alter slightly from flecked white to warmly cream. In terms of consistency, it should just pull away from the saucepan when vigorously stirred with the same soup spoon you've been using from the start because for some reason it didn't occur to you to reach for a whisk. Remove from heat, split with husband who is fumingly angry about NASA, dash some more cinnamon on top if you feel like it. Eat way more rice than usual, also dairy. Keep on not regretting.
I do not think this recipe would be difficult to recreate from scratch—I would cook the rice in milk, add the condensed milk near the end of the process, keep the rest of the ingredients as they are. At some point I will determine the coconut-milk version of the recipe and then I will make a lot more of it. But this took fifteen to twenty minutes and it was great.
I've watched a lot of '70's television. I must sleep.
1. Roddy McDowall as Dr. Jonathan Willoway in The Fantastic Journey (1977). I discovered the show through links-of-links on the internet; it was referenced as a precursor to Sliders (1995–2000), though in some ways it reminds me of Diana Wynne Jones' The Homeward Bounders (1981). The main cast hail from different points in Earth's history: having fallen through cracks in space-time (the Bermuda Triangle, in the case of the pilot), they are now journeying across a landscape of "zones" linked by mysterious gateways, each zone variously populated by other strays from past and future history, not all of them human; the way out is supposed to lie in "Evoland," so they are traveling east to find it. I skipped the first two episodes and started with the third, where the cast solidifies and the internet indicated that the show got good, or at least as good as it was going to get for its ten episodes and cult following. In the sense that it is low-budget, often clunkily scripted, and not necessarily subtle in its treatment of genre tropes and moral issues, we can argue about how objectively "good" that comes to. But the show has the property of some id-driven fiction where the shape of the stories can be seen through the shortcomings of their production and there's enough in the stories that's emotionally/intellectually compelling, or at least after five episodes I'm still watching. There is exactly one female character and one character of color among the protagonists, but the female character has agency (and inconsistently utilized telepathic abilities) and the black character has knowledge and authority (he's a doctor and his medical skills are plot-relevant), so that's better than not. And it has McDowall as a villain-of-the-week adopted into the main cast, where he makes a pleasing contrast to the essentially nice people around him.* I suspect him of growing out of Lost in Space's Dr. Zachary Smith, but Willoway is less of a bluntly comedic character and a more complex one. He isn't a snake in the grass—he doesn't scheme, he doesn't backstab, he's not always out for himself—but he is touchy, unscrupulous, and not wholly dependable, with some socialization issues to accompany his scientific talents. On the other hand, he can read ancient Greek and he's willing to use his amorality for good (he plays a very convincing double agent, partly because he's exaggerating only a little when he scoffs at the time and place that did not recognize his genius). Being played by McDowall, he runs a nice line in waspish irritation and light-voiced irony, leavened by his very real intelligence and a surprising perception when it comes to people. No matter how goofy the rest of the show gets, it's a clever dynamic, and I can see how it might have been taken up by later television that preferred its protagonists in ethical greys. Discovering that his scientific work helped found a better future, Willoway is shocked and touched, then defensively dismissive: "A lot of good that does me now . . ." And shoulders his pack and moves on, into the unstable whenever.
* Varian comes from a peaceful, enlightened future, Liana from a mythic, technologically superior past, Scott's a bright, all-American kid whose biggest source of angst is his separation from his parents. Fred is the wariest of the original four, but I can imagine that a young black man who's just graduated med school in '77 has reasons to be wary; he's a responsible, snarky physician. Willoway was lording it over an empire of stolen androids when they met him. He gets better.
2. WooRi sent me home with way more rice than I needed for my soft tofu stew (sundubu jjigae?) with pork, so I made the leftovers into improvised rice pudding.
Improvised Rice Pudding
Preparation:
Have a small container of steamed rice from an excellent Korean restaurant sitting uneaten on your dining table. Decide it would make a great base for rice pudding. Improvise wildly and estimate at least two measurements in hindsight, having paid no attention at the time. Regret nothing.
Rice pudding:
2 cups steamed white sticky rice
½ cup whole milk
½ cup condensed milk
1 egg
1–1½ teaspoons vanilla
cinnamon to taste
In a small saucepan, stir together milk, condensed milk, and steamed rice. Cook for ten minutes over medium-to-low heat until thickened, stirring intermittently and fiddling with the burner whenever the mixture starts to bubble at a viscosity more resembling lava than dessert. Belatedly search for recipes for rice pudding on the internet and write them all off, because they presume starting with uncooked rice. Beat egg in a spare coffee cup. When the rice and milk have thickened, becoming creamy rather than slurry, add beaten egg, vanilla, and a generous quantity of cinnamon (cinnamomum verum because we don't keep anything else in our kitchen, but cinnamomum cassia if you like it or it's what you've got). Stirring constantly, cook over medium heat another three to five minutes, until egg and milk have become custard. The color of the pudding will alter slightly from flecked white to warmly cream. In terms of consistency, it should just pull away from the saucepan when vigorously stirred with the same soup spoon you've been using from the start because for some reason it didn't occur to you to reach for a whisk. Remove from heat, split with husband who is fumingly angry about NASA, dash some more cinnamon on top if you feel like it. Eat way more rice than usual, also dairy. Keep on not regretting.
I do not think this recipe would be difficult to recreate from scratch—I would cook the rice in milk, add the condensed milk near the end of the process, keep the rest of the ingredients as they are. At some point I will determine the coconut-milk version of the recipe and then I will make a lot more of it. But this took fifteen to twenty minutes and it was great.
I've watched a lot of '70's television. I must sleep.
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Mmm, Korean food.
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Thank you! I have just been diagnosed with a horrible sinus infection and prescribed some heavy-duty antibiotics, so I'm hoping!
Mmm, Korean food.
I will take you the next time you come to Boston, if you like. I have eaten at WooRi twice and both times they have been delicious. Also they serve like five different kinds of gimchi, which I'm sure is nowhere near as many as exist in the field, but it's more than I usually see on restaurant menus.
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I'd like that! I don't get Korean often anymore because I think only one place has it in Baton Rouge--I didn't find out about it until a couple weeks ago and still haven't gone. It's a Hawaiian restaurant rather than a Korean restaurant, which I hadn't thought to check. However, I am hoping they really do serve that thing with Spam and gimchi, which I grew up eating and still feel fond of.
The kinds of gimchi I grew up with are:
ggakdugi (daikon? gimchi, only instead of daikon we call it mu)
mulgimchi ("water gimchi," it's not spicy at all and is more vinegary)
the usual cabbage gimchi (baekgimchi maybe?)
oigimchi (cucumber gimchi)
But I'm sure there are more, plus every family/household/lineage has its own recipe, I think. My mom used to mock my dad because he wasn't 1337 enough for the usual spice level of her family recipe. (Not that I could tell! I have suck spice tolerance for an individual of Korean descent.)
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Thanks!
I'd like that! I don't get Korean often anymore because I think only one place has it in Baton Rouge
*pencils in one Korean meal for Readercon*
It's a Hawaiian restaurant rather than a Korean restaurant, which I hadn't thought to check. However, I am hoping they really do serve that thing with Spam and gimchi, which I grew up eating and still feel fond of.
I feel like there should be a decent chance of Spam at a Hawaiian restaurant.
ggakdugi (daikon? gimchi, only instead of daikon we call it mu)
mulgimchi ("water gimchi," it's not spicy at all and is more vinegary)
the usual cabbage gimchi (baekgimchi maybe?)
oigimchi (cucumber gimchi)
Looking at their online menu, WooRi does both cucumber gimchi and the ordinary cabbage kind—I'm guessing the daikon/mu variant is what they call "radish kimchi"—and then there's something called "white kimchi," which could be the non-spicy kind? Or could be something completely different? I could have sworn I remembered a fifth, but if so, it's not on this menu.
I don't see gimbap, but I think I will order the seaweed-wrapped potato noodles the next time I'm there. It's seaweed.
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Yes! I grew up being told mu is "white radish," although I don't think it has any relation to "regular" radishes. But, I mean, I didn't know the word daikon growing up. The "white gimchi" might be baekgimchi, which is less or possibly not spicy, but is not the same as the non-spicy mulgimchi, which is actually served in the vinegary broth/pickling liquid/???. Sorry, vocabulary fail.
Mmm, gimbap. I miss it being a street food in Seoul. Seoul has great street food. The basements of department stores, too, which are more like malls except (usually) with super-better-awesome food options than the usual food courts in US malls. But I may be biased. :D
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And what you're saying about the Roddy MacDowell character and his relation to Dr. Smith in Lost in Space has got me thinking about that character *type* and the range in it. You were saying that Roddy MacDowell's character doesn't scheme or backstab, but is unscrupulous and not always reliable. Who's the character in Firefly who's a little bit like that? The one I like. Not Mal, not the guy with the battling dinosaurs, umm....oh fine, let me google him.... Jayne! He's like this too, don't you think? On this spectrum, anyway? And I'm wondering what other shows have a character like this.
Here's to a lessening of stress....
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Please feel free to recreate and experiment! I think it is a very basic recipe; I made it with the first ingredients that came to mind. I would have put in cardamom if I had some ground—I have green cardamom pods, but I think I would have wanted them in the initial cooking stage with the rice from scratch.
Jayne! He's like this too, don't you think? On this spectrum, anyway?
I don't know! I've seen very little of Firefly—two episodes and a movie—and years ago. Mostly I imprinted on Wash. That turned out well. Talk about Jayne to me?
And I'm wondering what other shows have a character like this.
Well, I just went straight back to mythology . . . Max Eilerson from J. Michael Straczynski's Crusade (1999)—the short-lived Babylon 5 spinoff—is this archetype, I think: a corporate archaeologist for the famously exploitative Interplanetary Expeditions, currently working as the xenolinguist for the Excalibur. He's a former child prodigy, brilliant, successful, abrasive; he runs most of his social life on withering sarcasm and intellectual intimidation while, iceberg-like, the larger portion of his emotional life is still floundering its way out of defensive, geeky adolescence. He watches a lot of alien porn, still cares for the ex-wife from the marriage he crashed and burned, loves the hell out of the cat she took with her in the divorce. He can be breathtakingly short-sighted and selfish, not exactly counteracted by years of being a company man rather than Earth's last altruistic hope for survival. At least once that I recall he places the ship in appalling danger by trying to make a profit from an alien find; he has to be stopped from poaching the secrets of another galactic treasure. He clashes regularly with the captain; he clashes regularly with his colleagues. He also stays awake for nights on end when an alien plague threatens the crew, living off protein bars while he cracks the code of a logbook written in an unknown language. He was my favorite character. I was also fond of the technomage Galen.
Here's to a lessening of stress....
Thank you. I hope so! It turns out I have a sinus infection, so I've just started the antibiotics and with any luck I will feel better by the end of the week, not worse.
[There was previously a lengthy comment here about Willoway, but it exceeded the character limits even when excerpted by itself. Thanks, LJ.]
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I've seen more than two episodes, but still only a handful, and my memory is as strong as wet toilet paper, BUT
I found him a somewhat welcome corrective to a kind of aspartame sweetness in the show overall. Whereas Mal seemed (to me; I know I'm in the minority here) awkward in his cowboy language, only every now and then remembering to stick in an ain't or to use don't instead of doesn't, Jayne felt like the real thing. His self-interested behavior was what I would expect from at least *someone* in a crew of smugglers. The problem with not just Mal but the group overall--except for Jayne--is that their hidden hearts of gold aren't hidden at all; they're right their on the surface. I felt like the writers didn't trust us to discover the goodness in the characters and so signposted it screamingly from the very beginning--except for Jayne.
This makes it sound like I disliked the show, which isn't true. I thought the plots of the various episodes I saw were fun. But I saw a lot more weakness in it than a lot of people did.
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That's a great line.
The problem with not just Mal but the group overall--except for Jayne--is that their hidden hearts of gold aren't hidden at all; they're right their on the surface. I felt like the writers didn't trust us to discover the goodness in the characters and so signposted it screamingly from the very beginning--except for Jayne.
He sounds like a valuable jolt of emotional grounding, then, as well as an interesting character to watch. So his self-interest is genuine, but he's also capable of more kindly behavior?
I thought the plots of the various episodes I saw were fun. But I saw a lot more weakness in it than a lot of people did.
I had worldbuilding problems with the show—I enjoyed the Chinese profanity, but it felt like there should have been more evidence of cultural fusion than just the dialogue. Like, some regular Asian characters couldn't have hurt. I was never sure how their absence was supposed to be explained. [edit] I can't believe I remember that when I can barely remember some of the main cast's characterizations. It must have really stuck out.
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Yeah; my hazy recollection is that he's got a streak of pretty strong devotion to Mal.
I had worldbuilding problems with the show Me too. I heard, re: the Asian profanities but no Asian characters, that they'd intended to make there be more Asian characters, but that that got nixed somewhere along the line, and so you had the leftovers (language, writing), but not the characters themselves. I don't know whether that's true or just a plausible explanation created for something that otherwise would be pretty dang inexplicable.
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Adapted from e-mail to
I like everything about this development, including the character himself, but writing-wise I really like the way it's worked into the show. Willoway doesn't integrate into the group immediately. It takes them a little time to trust him. The next episode opens with the discovery of a ring of Greek ruins, presumably constructed by some ancient Greeks who passed through this zone one day three thousand years ago; while everyone else settles into exploring-foraging in the accustomed division of labor, Willoway volunteers to stay behind and check out the ruins and no one is quite sure he isn't shirking. As it turns out, he really does just want to look around the temple—pediments inscribed with a line from Pindar, Jonathan Willoway's your man—but when he stumbles across a cache of energy weapons and is taken up for sacrilege by the temple’s present-day suppliants, the rest of the group has to decide whether his life is worth antagonizing a clan of armed and dangerous children for. (Obviously, yes, because the alternative would be unethical and out of character for everyone who isn't Willoway, but it's clear they would have preferred to avoid the choice altogether: it would have been nicer for everyone if he could have spent a couple of weeks proving himself before something like this happened.) The episode after that is the one with the double agent plot, which involves Willoway sucking up to a militaristic, imperialistic, ambitious consul to such a degree that even Varian begins to doubt his own judgment in trusting the scientist, because it's more or less exactly the behavior you would expect from a man who once commanded his own robot army. It's a successful deception partly because it's so close to the truth: Willoway is lying through his teeth when he praises the virtues of the military mind and modestly claims credit for the atom bomb, but he's not faking much about his self-presentation as a man who despises the time he was born in because it didn't appreciate him sufficiently while he was around to enjoy it, and the chilly, easy cynicism that so attracts Consul Tarrant is not retconned as anything other than Willoway's own. He's not as sentimental as the others. Altruism, negotiable; he can be sympathetic to people in specific, especially once he's gotten to know them, but people in the abstract or general do not exert much pull on his heartstrings. His good qualities are his brains, his resourcefulness, his resilience—we never hear him whinging about the loss of his robot army, even when it’s clear that the physical hardship of backpacking eternally across an ever-changing landscape is not high on his list of life goals—and the fact that he is not an instinctively honest person, because it gives him a leg up on the trickiness of the world. ("It takes a thief to catch a thief," he says confidingly before embarking on his seduction of Tarrant—without telling his traveling companions, of course.) It does not hurt that he's charming, disarmingly funny, and often shown as vulnerable; he's not without physical courage, but it is characteristic Willoway that when he's discovered after successfully defusing a demented computer, he's leaning back in his chair with his feet up on a console, the picture of devil-may-care day-saving, whereas the last time the audience saw him he was curled up underneath some shelving with his arms over his head just in case he'd screwed it up and they were really all about to blow to smithereens. A semi-antihero like that is God's gift to a character actor and McDowall runs with him for all he's worth. I just wish he'd had a chance to run longer.
I realized last night after I'd put up this post that several of the reasons I love Willoway now are the same reasons I loved Loki of the Norse myths in second grade: he's the clever one, the half-outsider, the one you can never be really sure of; the trickster in a committed relationship with sticky situations. This depressed me when I thought of it, because it seemed I hadn't changed in twenty-seven years, but on reflection I am not upset. I think characters like that are worth loving.
[There!]
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A semi-antihero like that is God's gift to a character actor --I'll say!
we never hear him whinging about the loss of his robot army, even when it’s clear that the physical hardship of backpacking eternally across an ever-changing landscape is not high on his list of life goals ---ha!
The more you write, the more I like him.
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Thank you. Tricksters are a necessary part of the world. And so are characters who aren't plainly one thing or the other: neither is the world they reflect.
The more you write, the more I like him.
I find him very likeable! I also find him complicated, which is rare and sometimes more important. Last night before bed, I was talking sleepily to
The last two episodes are not the strongest of the series.* They suffer from the loss of Katie Saylor, the actress who played Liana; she became ill during filming, the character might have needed to be written out if the show had continued, and her absence really does change the dynamic of the core cast: there's an aspect missing. Additionally, the script of the last filmed episode would have been flimsy no matter what, involving as it does a society of people so peaceable that not only are theft and lies unheard-of among them, they build their houses without doors (they can't conceive of personal space being invaded without permission) and their leader doesn't even understand the concept of murder, which creates something of a problem when a pair of twenty-first-century criminals crash-land in their zone and the more aggressive and violent of the two decides to take his "innocent prey" for all they've got, including their lives. Anyway, Willoway is the first to be suspicious of them. He quickly deduces that they're not the professional pilots they claim to be; he talks Varian into investigating their crashed spacecraft and finds evidence of their true status. And then he's reluctant to interfere. He's willing to tell the pacifist leader of their discoveries and even urge him to take action, but that's as far as it goes. "Nobody really appointed us as policemen." And this could either be boundary-respecting (no one should force their ways on another culture; they haven't been asked to get involved) or completely morally irresponsible (look, it's not our problem) and because it's Willoway, it could go either way. Eventually he goes along with the effort to stop the killer, of course. But it's not his first impulse. The goal of their travels is Evoland, not solving the problems of every society they encounter along the way. It's also quite possible that on some level he considers a community of people who can't imagine a reason for doors too stupid to live.
[Comment limits are not my friend.]
* From the third episode through the seventh is a very strong run, showcasing each of the main characters in turn: Liana and Willoway in "Beyond the Mountain," Scott in "Children of the Gods," Varian in "An Act of Love," Willoway again—and his strengthened relationship to the rest of the group—in "Funhouse." (Liana was introduced in "Atlantium," which I haven't watched yet.) The eighth episode, "Turnabout," is unfortunately an unmitigated A-plot disaster, as it attempts to grapple science-fictionally with misogyny, gender roles, and women's liberation in the space of forty-five minutes on mainstream TV in 1977. It's pretty much saved by the B-plot, which at least features Willoway being a clever computer scientist. (Apparently he worked at different points for NASA, JPL, and Caltech, none of which actually helps when he can't get the replacement parts for a burnt-out artificial intelligence. Hence the defusing.) "Riddles," the ninth episode, is nowhere near as awful—it contains the first hint of an overarching series plot, rather than just a zone-of-the-week picaresque—but Liana is badly missed and its futuristic take on a haunted house comes too quickly after the sinister carnival of "Funhouse." Backstory for Fred and reminder of Willoway's essential ambiguity notwithstanding, "The Innocent Prey" is just a disappointing note to go out on. A rough patch of a couple of episodes wouldn't have mattered so much in a full season. In a truncated ten episodes, it's frustrating.
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The Borg have forever changed my interaction with the word "assimilate," and now I'm thinking about the difference between assimilate as we usually use it--which is to moosh something into the collective so thoroughly that its individuality is lost (in Willoway's case, his edge would have/could have been lost, if that-style assimilation had occurred) and what the Borg claim, which is that your uniqueness will become part of the whole--I mean, it amounts to the same thing, except they seem to be promising, and wanting, to use and adopt whatever's unique and beneficial, which would mean that they'd *use* Willoway's cynicism and edge.
Okay. Now that I'm done derailing the conversation with the Borg, can I also add that the *names* in this show are also excellent. I was already thinking that about Willoway (which I want to repeat over and over: Willoway Willoway Willoway), but Varian too! And Liana.
Maybe he has an I-can't-miss-this-train-wreck fascination with what will happen if you take the dry tinder of a hopelessly trusting society and put it to the match of a hopelessly exploitative duo.
--And comment limits may not be your friend but I appreciate your subverting them with a rather awesomely long footnote.
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I thought of another example—from books—of whom I am also very fond: Prewytt Brumblydge.
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I feel like Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader could have been this type of character if he hadn't [been] reformed. And maybe Doli from The Book of Three is an example? Though he's more simply a good-hearted grump.
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2. UGH TED CRUZ
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I eat chilled rice pudding, but I prefer it warm—I think of it as a childhood/comfort/invalid food, meaning I don't want it cold. We ate it straight off the stovetop last night.
2. UGH TED CRUZ
I KNOW.
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Remove from heat, share equally with husband, pedantically footnote use of verb . . .
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See comment to
[edit: HTML, my old enemy]
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All ten episodes are on YouTube, posted in five-part chunks by two different accounts. Have the pilot. Quality, whatever: they are clearly someone's very old VHS rips, but I don't feel bad considering the show's utter unavailability on home video. If this show existed on DVD, I would buy it.
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Tapioca was made like floating island: the yolks for the custard, which was folded into the beaten egg whites. Not too sweet.
Now I'm hungry.
Nine
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I can vouch for the efficacy of just making rice pudding if you want it.
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Can one do without the vanilla without changing things too much? (If it's only as flavor enhancer, I can ditch it without trying to guess at a substitute. I can't use almond extract, either, alas.)
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Feel free to adapt, rework, deconstruct! I figure for the coconut version I will start by cooking the sticky rice in the coconut milk and seeing if that yields a thick enough pudding or if I need to add other delicious sweet non-dairy things to it, like, I don't know, red bean paste. It will probably be difficult to resist adding mangos at some stage.
Can one do without the vanilla without changing things too much?
Absolutely. I used vanilla because I don't own rosewater. I don't see any reason the pudding needs flavoring with all the condensed milk and custard in there, plus whatever spices you want to add; I just thought it would taste nice.
(If it's only as flavor enhancer, I can ditch it without trying to guess at a substitute. I can't use almond extract, either, alas.)
Allergies?
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Allergies?
Yup--almond more so, but vanilla too. So many things want a little vanilla extract, and for most of them it can be dropped, except for when it turns out to have been a vital flavor-balancing component.
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I do most of my cooking with goat's milk, but if you don't like (or can't digest) milk at all, I recognize that doesn't solve the problem.
Red beans sound good, too, with or without the sweetening that the paste gets.
It's definitely the way I'm leaning right now. I've made red bean paste with
Yup--almond more so, but vanilla too. So many things want a little vanilla extract, and for most of them it can be dropped, except for when it turns out to have been a vital flavor-balancing component.
Yeah, that's not the case here. I'm just curious: are you allergic to almond and vanilla themselves, or to the formulations used in extracts?
somewhat tl;dr
are you allergic to almond and vanilla themselves, or to the formulations used in extracts?
I don't know what the allergist's prick test uses--I mean, an extraction per se, but not necessarily the same prep that goes into bottles sold in the baking aisle. Vanilla as included in vegan and soy-free chocolate provokes rosacea. Almonds and almond butter provoke mild anaphylaxis--stronger rash, nasal drip, and thick tongue/throat; I haven't had cause to use almond extract recently, so I don't know whether the reaction would be the same. (I've done minor experimentation because few of my allergies are at the dangerous anaphylactic level, though they'd get there if I kept consuming relevant provocations. Like, I thought I could still have dim sum occasionally (soy/peanut and shrimp), and no, best not.)
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I have been made very happy in the last few years by the increasing availability of sheep's milk and goat's milk yogurt. Recently there is a ridiculously named sheep cheese—Lamb Chopper—that I am very fond of. I do not test either lactose intolerant or allergic to casein, but cow's milk worsens my chronic digestive problems; I spent about ten years not drinking milk and not eating as much cheese as I would like before I discovered that I think goat everything is delicious and sheep isn't bad, either.
somewhat tl;dr
Is not; I asked! Thank you for answering.
Vanilla as included in vegan and soy-free chocolate provokes rosacea. Almonds and almond butter provoke mild anaphylaxis--stronger rash, nasal drip, and thick tongue/throat
Bleh. I was wondering what the chemical overlap between the two flavorings is.
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:D Not a bad realization to have, especially in an area where one may buy such things fairly readily.
Chemical overlap: probably there isn't--I have an inconveniently lengthy set of strong-smelling oils on my allergen list. I think it's vanilla and those together, and almond and another nut together, and soy/peanut together....
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Gotcha. I am glad they are known allergens and therefore reasonably manageable. That sounds very near a list of things that people put in everything whether you are expecting them or not. (I'm not allergic to soy, but I keep finding it in places I wouldn't have bet on.)
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Yuuuuup. Keeps life interesting.
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I simply cooked the sticky rice in coconut milk - it didn't require any other thickeners.
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Fantastic!
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