Day 33 - Ideas and A Recipe

A relaxing Mother's Day, even if allergies, long days and excessive heat are causing serious sleep deprivation.

Today's Progress: 344 new words on In Flight, LOTS of editing, and some nonfiction outlining.

I intended to flesh out some of the opening scenes of The Man Who Ran Away, but I wanted to note down some ideas I had for nonfiction.  I had an idea about my deep-seated urge to blog:

For now, when I get that blogging urge, I need to channel it into book form.  Later, I can excerpt blog posts from it if I like, but I realize I have a really hard time adapting posts into book form.  I've tried many times, but the amount of work involved in turning a bunch of small, spontaneous, informal projects into even a medium sized formal one is more than I want to handle.  Much easier to write them in book form in the first place.  Then it is a small project to adapt an excerpt into a blog post. (Or even chop up the whole thing and make it a blog series.)

One of the projects is going to be a Dialog Workbook.  It will be a very different approach from what you usually see -- instead of giving people a bunch of rules and guidelines toward better writing (which will apply to some people and not to others) it will be a series of exercises a young writer can use to study the kind of writing they want to produce, so they can see how it works for them.

If that goes well, I might do the same with other aspects of writing.

I also did some drawing yesterday and today, but nothing I want to show you yet. I came up with some illustration ideas that excite me, though. If I do them you'll hear about them a little later. (Also see them.)

Finished up the day by digging more into In Flight.

Eating, Watching, Reading

Made Chicken Wings for my mother, and also bought some of Ben and Jerry's new "core" ice creams. Karamel Sutra has Chocolate Super Fudge Chunk and Caramel ice cream with a caramel core.  I also made popovers to serve the ice cream with.

Here is my Chicken Wing recipe.  It is incredibly tasty, and a great alternative to fried hot wings.

Camille's Hot Wings

Basting marinade: I use approximately equal amounts fresh squeezed lemon juice, dry sherry and Sriracha hot sauce.  The juice of one lemon will get you enough sauce for 8-12 wings.

This ratio makes it pretty darned hot, and you could use as little as half the amount of hot sauce and still have a very nice glow. And the flavor is really great and really strong even if you use no hot sauce.  Also, I strain the lemon juice so I can use a squeeze bottle to baste with at first, but it's fine to use the pulp.  I also keep about a half cup of sherry in reserve to pour into the pan to keep the sauces from burning later on.

I line a large baking pan with tinfoil for easy clean up (again, you don't ahve to do this), then place the chicken wing pieces in it.  The pan should be big enough so that the wings are just barely touching.  They will shrink a little as they cook, but you don't want to crowd the pan. Place them skin side up.

Spoon or squirt about half the marinade over the surface of the wings. 

Stick it in a 360 degree oven for 20 minutes. Then pull the wings out and baste on the rest of the marinade.  Pour a little sherry into the pan if the juices are drying out.  After this, use a bulb baster to baste the wings with the pan juices every 10-15 minutes.  Pour in a little more sherry if the juices start to dry out.  (Don't drown, them.  You want about an 1/8 of an inch of juices most of the time. You should have to tilt the pan to use the bulb baster.)

It will take 40 minutes to an hour to cook them. They get really succulent if you don't cook them too fast, and you keep the moisture in the pan.  However, you'll want some browned/crispy skin, so I usually turn the heat up toward the end to about 375 or even higher.  This marinade should also work fine on the grill, but the wings will be drier.

NOTE: even if you don't particularly like bleu cheese dressing, you might want to try it with this:  The sour-sweet-rich flavor of the wings goes really well with the bitter-sour of the dressing.  It's like a flavor explosion if you have them together.  I usually also serve this with rice and celery, carrot and sweet pepper sticks.

Watched Columbo while doing all this: "The Most Crucial Game" episode from Season 2, with Robert Culp. Culp is defiinitely my favorite Columbo killer. I may talk about that alter.

In the menatime, it is too hot tonight to sleep.  Maybe I'll get more writiing done.

See you in the funny papers.