Shish Kabob…

Tags

cooking, cucumber salad, grilling, meat on a stick, recipe, shish kabob

At least, meat and vegetables on a stick. This more a collection of thoughts than an actual recipe, although I will be sharing what works for me. In the end, I think there’s a lot to be said for winging it, making do, adjusting things to your preference, so I’ll be giving guidelines. I’ll also be sharing a bonus cucumber salad recipe!

First off, let’s talk about the marinade. I like to get everything done the day before, or the morning of. I put the vegetables and meat together. I like the way the vegetables loose liquid and add to the general mishmash of favors. I put everything in a lasagna pan (goddamnit I miss cheese), so that’s a what, 9″x11″? When I’m done with the marinade, I might have a little under a inch of liquid, but with everything in it, after an hour or so in the fridge, the pan will be close to full.

Now, what do we put in the marinade? I like to think of it as consisting of several components:

1) Salty (soy sauce, actual salt, and a lot of things like Worcestershire and mustard are pretty salty, so keep that in mind when choosing/adding your salty ingredient)

2) Sweet (I like to use honey or brown sugar)

3) Sour (vinegar, lemon, lime)

4) Pungent (I’m going to put mustard, garlic, Chinese five spice, in this category)

5) Filler (I use Old Crow and vegetable oil)

I also tend to add some spice too, either some Sriracha or fresh peppers. You can blend things together, adding fresh spices too, as long as you keep in mind that they all go together. For instance, I’ll add fresh thyme to almost everything except this, and I wouldn’t add fish sauce to something that had lemon, mustard, honey, etc.

This has more of an Asian vibe to it. All amounts are approximate. Also, there are a few unique flavors in here (the Worcestershire has tamarind in it, and there’s nothing quite like fish sauce).

Zest and juice of one lime

O.5 cups soy sauce (I’d use something cheap)

0.25 cups Worcestershire Sauce

0.25 cups honey (I wouldn’t measure it, too sticky)

1 tablespoon or so of rice vinegar

A couple (four isn’t a couple, is it?) of cloves of garlic (smashed)

A couple (this time I really mean two) of hot peppers with seeds (I like to get different kinds)

1 tablespoon or so of Chinese five spice (love the stuff from Penzeys)

0.75 cups Old Crow (Don’t get curious and drink it, it’s cheap bourbon. My father tried it and he was appalled. Of course I stood there repeating that I kept it for cooking but he drank it anyway.)

0.5 cups vegetable oil

I normally mix it with my fingers at this point because the honey is annoying and just hangs out wherever you dumped it. Then I add the final marinade ingredient:

1 tablespoon or so of fish sauce (not so into putting my fingers in it at this point)

If you wanted to, you could throw in some cilantro, probably mint too.

Now, for the vegetables. I like to get, a bit over a pound of crimini mushrooms (a little more flavor than the button for about the same price), 2 peppers (I prefer sweet to green), and 2 onions, sweet, reserving half for the cucumber salad.

I cut everything into pretty big chunks and often leave a few sections of onion together. The mushrooms I pop the stem off and wash.

After you’ve tried very hard not to make a mess mixing all the vegetables in the marinade, its time to add the meat. I generally go for about 2 lbs. skinless chicken breast. It would probably be good with pork. I don’t know about beef though–it just seems like it would be really easy to overcook.

I try and get the meat mixed all around with everything before fussing with it and getting most of the meat in the marinade and the mushrooms settled more toward the top (they really soak up the marinade). I find the best way to do this without making a complete mess is to use your fingers. Cover it and pop it in the fridge for a day or so (I wouldn’t do longer than overnight).

I’ll go mess with it when I think of it, coating the mushrooms, stirring stuff around.

Next day comes the fun of loading everything on skewers, woo! I generally find I have some vegetables left over. I try and use up all the mushrooms (my husband’s favorite) and meat. My advice is not to squash the mushrooms too much or they’ll fall off.

I tend to cook these on a lower temperature grill  (400 is about as low as I can get my grill). I idly baste, stopping around the third or fourth time I turn them, because SALMONELLA! Sometimes I’ll try and grease the grill before hand with varying levels of success. The biggest problem I have with them is everything sticking. I’m all ears if you have any ideas.

I tend to cook them until everything is looking nice and brown, with the edges of things often blackening. Just keep it on low and make sure it doesn’t catch fire (We really need a new grill. I’ve completely given up trying to make sausage.) and you should be good. I tend to check on it in intervals of 3 to 4 minutes, as I do most things. If one kabob is looking done and the others aren’t (it happens) I’ll pull that one off and snuggle it up in tinfoil to keep it warm.

Now, for the bonus salad (I should note raw onions can be rough on those with sensitive GIs). Make day you’ll be eating it.

First, put together the dressing:

3 tablespoons brown sugar

2 tablespoons water

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

0.5 tablespoons soy sauce (well worth using the good stuff)

Mix, and keep mixing it now and then to incorporate the sugar.

For the salad, wash 1 seedless cucumber (I’m serious, use the seedless), and 1 chili (I like something long and just a little spicy, like a serrano). Get out your half of sweet onion (you’ll be using about a third of one).

Make sure to use a sharp knife, and slice everything as thinly as possible. I layer everything in a 8″x8″ pan. First, cucumber, then onion, cucumber, onion, cucumber, hot pepper (I think the thinner you slice it, the hotter it’ll be, although it also depends on the pepper), cucumber, etc. until you’ve got most of your onion and all of you cucumber in there. It looks pretty! Give the dressing a good swirl and pour it over the salad. Let it hang out for a couple of hours at least, and use a spoon to add a little extra dressing on top.

Warning: it can be super spicy, and the longer you keep it, the spicier it gets. The first time I made it I had a hot pepper, thinly sliced. My husband tried to eat it, wept, and admitted defeat/spat it off the deck.

To DRM or Not to DRM?

Tags

drm, e-book piracy, piracy, self-publishing

I’m sorry, I know someone probably already used this title. I couldn’t think of any dick jokes. For that matter, everyone loves ripping off Shakespeare for their titles (I could probably write an article on Smutwriters about everyone having Shakespearean puns as titles).

If you’re new in the self-publishing world, you’ve probably asked yourself this question. I remember for my very first story, the very first time I used KDP, I looked at that little box with it’s attached warning that once you make a choice, you can’t change your mind!

I didn’t hesitate though. I opted for DRM free, and I always will. The reality is, I’m way more likely to annoy a legitimate customer than prevent someone from pirating my book. I mean, c’mon, nerds are smart. They enjoy solving problems like this and then sharing their solutions with others. I remember at my husband’s job, they blocked Gmail. He immediately figured out a way around it, and discovered that now chat was enabled, so we could discuss the grocery list while when he had some downtime (I know, married life is sexy, calm down and take a cold shower).

There’s also the ubiquity of piracy. Like, if you asked me whether I pirated anything, I would probably say no. I mean, I don’t, do I? But we all have a few burned CDs around, we’ve probably watched some free hentai online, and probably watched a pirated movie at a friend’s house.

The thing with piracy, it kind of blends into sharing. I mean, I wouldn’t expect Charles Seife to get indignant about people lending his books around to friends. And it’s not a bad thing either. When my husband and I were first dating, he lent me Decoding the Universe which I loved. I’ve since bought it as a gift for family and friends. Of course, the modern version of CD is a zip-drive. You give your friends a bunch of MP3s, and if you’re like me you probably end up spending some money on some new music.

So, part of my stance about piracy is due to my natural attitude to shrug my shoulders, and think it’s really nothing to get my knickers in a twist about. Some people might not buy my work, but they probably wouldn’t have bought it anyways. Some other people might end up buying my work, which is awesome. If they pirate half of my work, and purchase half of it, that’s still money I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

The reality is, with places like Literotica, there’s tons of smut out there for free anyways, and some of it is surprisingly good. People will give away free awesome smut. That’s not going to stop people from buying smut though. And just because you might be able to pirate my work somewhere, it doesn’t mean people aren’t going to buy it.

The Big D

Tags

cutting, depression, inspiration, mental illness, suicide

Trigger warnings: suicide, depression, cutting.

It wasn’t an easy time. I remember when I called my parents to tell them where I was, there was this schizophrenic girl leaning over my shoulder babbling about Jesus. There was also a very nice bi-polar soccer mom who seemed much too sane to be there. The woman I shared my room with would wake me up slamming the nightstand, looking for her smokes. I didn’t have much in the way of clothes with me either, and at the time, just one friend (the same one who told the RA that I was suicidal) to get me more. I remember really wanting my clove cigarettes (it’s okay to laugh, that’s funny, and humor is how I deal with things anyways) though whether or not I got them, I can’t remember.

My panicked parents got in a car and drove down to fetch me while I filled out worksheets in group therapy. I hadn’t told them much on the phone, so they were happy to arrive, finding me a little on the skinny side, but intact. It was in February. I don’t remember if my birthday got celebrated that month. In fact, I feel like there’s are vast swaths of “I can’t remember”, and I’m not really bothered by it.

The second semester of my freshman year, I was hospitalized for being suicidal.

It sounds awfully dramatic. It’s not like they’d found me in a bathtub full of pink water, or foaming at the mouth from an overdose. I was just suicidal. Left to my own devices, I probably would have locked the door to the room I shared with my roommate and made a go at my wrists (instead of comforting myself with cutting).

It only took me three and half years to get my B.S. in biochemistry. It’s not something I think about very often. You graduate from high school (2000) and four years later you have some manner of bachelor’s degree (2004). I never felt like an overachiever, just that I was playing catch-up, trying to get things back on their natural course. The trip to the hospital, everything that happened after, was just kind of a hiccup in the scheme of things.

I can’t say when it–the depression–started. I knew when the cutting started. In high school I was a goth and I used to show off my neat little rows of red. Completely lame, I know, but there came a point where I stopped doing it because my friends were doing it, and did it because I liked it. It was like the ancient art of bleeding, draining out the bad blood; or just evening things up, getting enough bad on the outside to match my inside.

I’m fairly certain that I was a bit queer and melancholy as a child, more suited to Edward Gorey than sunshine. At least, that’s how I felt. Looking back, I’m not really what sure my parents could have done to help me. Giving children (and teenagers) psychiatric medications is tricky business, and finding a decent therapist a crap shoot. It’s not that I wasn’t happy either. Depression doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as happiness for you. I just felt different, strange, always painfully shy, not understanding how to act with a group of children. Not that I know what to do in crowds now. I had a lovely little wedding with only close family at my sister’s house, and I still felt awkward.

The hormonal changes of being a teenager was like giving that strangeness a shot of steroids. No wonder I became fast friends with cutting. To this day, my hips are littered with scars. Ever practical, I opted for somewhere less visible than my arms (where I sometimes see scars on strangers). Shopping for swimsuits does give me a bit of trouble.

It was probably that plodding sense of practicality that led me to mumble my desire to die to my friend. On that fateful day when I was hospitalized for being suicidal, I pulled out my insurance card when the nurse asked if I had a plan. There was that awkward moment when she clarified, “No, to kill yourself,” and I mumbled something about slitting my wrists.

I was aware, prior to my stay at the hospital, that something wasn’t normal. I’d even been to a therapist who sat behind a desk and made me feel uncomfortable while I fiddled with these toys on her desks, the kind with the little steel ball in it. We never really got anywhere when it came to dealing my feelings. Instead I would check off lists in Seventeen and come to the conclusion that: yes, this was a problem.

There was a lot to learn when I got home from the hospital. I spent months reading in bed with my cat. I spent a week with my sister. What I remember the most was creeping by her husband’s study while he sat inside reading Barron’s. I don’t think he said a single word to me the entire time I was there. Not that I knew what to say to him, or to anyone really.

I had a psychiatrist who worked in a mental hospital, who talked to me about books and prescribed me some different meds when I told him that I thought the Paxil was making me crazier. I had a therapist I had to drive forty-five minutes and make one hair-raising left turn to see. I liked them both a lot. Now, over ten years later, I realize that the people at the hospital had carefully selected both of these people to help me, and they knew what they were doing.

I can’t say I’m sad to be in my thirties. My twenties felt like a constant struggle, making lists of things I could do that would make me feel better and trying to cross them off. Switching meds. Trying to find someone to see. I’ve always had crap luck finding people on my own. I’ve been told I was depressed because my life had no meaning (after I said I was an existentialist) and I didn’t need medication (just a baby, a husband, another degree, who knows). I’ve had therapists who were just nice but better suited for small children. I went to an appointment for a psychiatrist only to discover another woman was slated to see him at the same time (he was running an hour late and I started chit-chatting with people in the waiting room to see if this was the norm). I was given paperwork to fill out while the woman went to see him. Clearly, I was another fee to wring out of an insurance company, and not a patient, so I left.

I stopped taking my meds about a year ago and was forced to admit that I’m altogether a more pleasant person on Wellbutrin. Not that the trade-off was worth it for me. The past few weeks have been rough. It seems, about once or twice a year, I find myself immobilized by that same numbness, unable to do much more than read (I can’t write when I’m depressed; I often wonder if people who claim sorrow for a muse really know what it feels like). Sometimes I would mix it up, and lay on the dog and read, or read upstairs. Obligations gnaw at the back of my brain like an angry ferret (I’ve been reading Harry/Draco slash I’m ashamed to admit–it seems I’m partial to the angst/romance ones with a mature rating) and I’m happy to let them, to flip on Bravo’s Housewives and cozy up with my netbook and give myself another head ache.

Dealing with depression isn’t really about being happy or unhappy, it’s learning to crawl out from under it when it does decide to bitch slap you. It’s not letting the knowledge that you’re going to have to do it again prevent you from acting. It’s knowing you failed yesterday but this day you’re going to do better. It’s knowing you can hide in a book or a bottle for a few days, but after that you need to get your shit together. It’s knowing that you can’t pick up a razor blade again, but maybe if you write about it, it will help. It’s knowing that a moment will come that will make it all worthwhile for you.

In the end it’s always stupid shit that makes me happy. My husband sitting down in the room where I always write to take off his boots after work so he can talk to me. Going over to see my sister and her kids and their puppy and planting roses. My dog losing his shit over a Jollyball because bulldogs have a thing about balls, especially Jollyballs. My friends checking in on me. The fact that I have perfected making meatloaf. The fact that even if I bawled and had a couple of beers, I still wrote about this. Knowing that even though my parents will never talk to me about me being suicidal or get over it, we can still bullshit about dahlias and grilling.