Recipe: Millet Fritters with Spinach and Cheese

I like food. I really like cheap food. I also like food that tastes good and is good for you, but most of the times when I'm making stuff the "cheap" wins out. Of the wide assortment of weird exotic grains that they're telling you to eat because they're "good for you" whole grains, one of the least expensive is millet. It's still about 10 cents more per serving than brown rice but compared to quinoa and amaranth it's still damn cheap. Also, at least in my opinion, millet tastes better, especially when fried. Even if it's mostly associated with animal feed, it's worth giving a chance.

With a lot of health food recipes I've seen, there's a call for other exotic ingredients to go along with the weird grain that may themselves be expensive. Like, what the hell is halloumi? Where am I supposed to get it? This recipe, aside from the millet itself, uses very common ingredients that you probably have on-hand. So, give it a try:

The fritters (left) as part of a bento. 

Ingredients:
1 cup dry millet
2 cups water
1 bullion cube (either chicken or vegetable flavor)
3 eggs
1 medium onion
1/2 cup spinach, frozen
minced garlic to taste
pinch of salt
flour
olive oil
mozzarella cheese (optional)

1. Cook the millet using the two cups of water and the bullion cube. I have a rice cooker so I used that and set it to the "brown rice" setting. If you don't have a rice cooker, use the directions on the back of the packaging or online directions if you bought in bulk.

2. Lay out the millet in a sheet to cool off -- about 30 minutes

 3. While that's happening, dice your onion as small as you can. Thaw your spinach and break it up into pieces.

3. Crack open three eggs into a large mixing bowl and beat until mixed. Add the millet, onion, and spinach, and mix well. Then add the garlic and salt.

4. Add the flour a tablespoon at a time until you find that the mixture just sticks together well enough to form patties. They don't have to be big patties, about the size of a bottom of a drinking glass.

5. Heat up some olive oil in a pan with a lid on medium-low heat. Add the patties, making sure they don't touch, and cover, cooking for 5 minutes. Uncover and flip the patties over, cooking for another 5 minutes

6. Stick a fork in 'er, she's done. Sprinkle with mozzarella cheese if desired. These keep a few days in the refrigerator.

Gallery Experience

On Wednesday I attended a gallery opening at a gallery my friend works for. Though the gallery is very new, I'd attended some gallery events before. However this was the first where I had actually had artwork in the show.

RAD!, currently in the gallery. It's a paper cutting.

It's a very weird experience. My friend had asked me to send in my art, so I did. I didn't really think that much of it, even though I spent like 30 hours on the pictures and even longer on finding frames. Despite doing all this crap I never really thought of myself as an "artist". I was a writer, maybe, not really. The main reason I could never think of myself as an artist was because I never really prioritized making art. I prioritized school, which after elementary school had nothing to do with art, I prioritized writing, sometimes probably more than I should, but I always thought of art as more of a hobby than anything that could be anything more. I enjoyed looking at all of the art there and was very impressed by a lot of them (particularly Bly and Rowan Pope -- even though only Bly was in the show I've seen both of their works, and they're amazing). It felt weird because I did not have a lot of the 'art school experience' a lot of the younger artists in particular had, and also I have no fondness for paint and could not relate to a lot of the media troubles most everyone else had as painters.

Now that I've done it once I do want to try again, even though framing in particular is hell. It's the same as writing, I guess. Make more and more and more, and submit, submit, submit. Maybe I will post more art here, sometime. It's not like writing where putting it somewhere makes it unsubmittable, I think.

Ebooks Abroad

I have a lot of strong feelings about ebooks and ereaders. However, as I'm finishing up my studies in the Netherlands, I've come to realize how valuable and practical owning an ereader can be.

There are a lot of people who claim that ereaders are going to kill paper books, and that that's terrible, because there's no beating the feeling of having a book in your hands, and it's also terrible for used bookshops. There are lots of issues with ebook price fixing and the horrors of DRM. A lot of the issues surrounding ebooks are confusing and do not have clear answers because it's all new technology.

However, there is one thing that ebooks do remarkably well -- they give reading material to people who are not in the physical proximity to purchase it.

I do not speak Dutch. After over six months in the Netherlands, I can understand some things, and maybe read food labels. My understanding is not up to par to a native speaker or even a second language speaker. I had to keep stopping myself from going into bookstores because I knew that there would not be much for me there. While most bookstores had an English and other foreign language section (I do read French, so that was an option), these sections are typically small and have a very limited selection.

If I didn't have an ereader, my choice of books here would be between A Game of Thrones or Fifty Shades of Grey. With an ereader and an internet connection, I could browse and purchase from a bookstore or borrow from the library the same selection of books I had at home. This was a pretty amazing revelation, and something that I, and probably many people in opposition to ereaders, take for granted. For an immigrant or second-language learner, ebooks can be an incredible resource. With ebooks, people around you not being interested in the language you want to read do not limit your selection of reading material.


While some ereaders only support Latin characters, the new editions of Kindle also support Cyrillic, Korean, Japanese, and both traditional and simplified Chinese characters, with the number of ereaders supporting different scripts and the number of different scripts likely only to increase in the future.

While the current market for ebooks and ereaders has many flaws and virtues, this is a facet of it that every article I've seen on them overlooks. For anyone going abroad for extended periods, I would definitely recommend an ereader.

Rise of the Guardians and the Problem of Evil

source: collider.com

Yesterday I saw the movie Rise of the Guardians after much pestering about the glorious animation. And it was glorious, and I did enjoy it very much despite not exactly sharing all of the traditions in the movie, and I was glad to have the opportunity to see it in theaters.

But the ending of this movie bothered me very much, actually. First, let me give a quick rundown of the plot:

A guy revives and is declared "Jack Frost" by the Man in the Moon, and for hundreds of years is invisible to all mortals and causes snow days and general mischief. Elsewhere, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the Sandman are guardians of childhood wonder and do things like give kids presents and hide Easter eggs and make good dreams to preserve childhood wonder and protect the children of the world. However this is thrown off by a bad guy, the Boogeyman or "Pitch", who exists to ferment fear in the minds of children, and seeks to destroy the Guardians because he wants to be believed in and feared. Jack Frost is chosen by the Man in the Moon to be a Guardian and to help the existing Guardians defeat the Boogeyman; however, Jack Frost also wants to be noticed and have a purpose so he sympathizes with the Boogeyman. After much havoc and drama, he sides with the Guardians, eventually becomes believed in by children, the Boogeyman is banished to his underground lair because even though "[kids] believe in him, [they're] just not afraid of him." All is well, and the story ends.

It's beautifully animated and a nice story, but by the end I honestly thought there would be some sort of reconciliation with Pitch, about fear being necessary. Because the Guardian's existence is based on belief, the fact that "I believe in you, I'm just not afraid of you" could have been very powerful. Fear needs to exist for bravery to exist. Kids overcoming their fears is a big deal. He might not have been a nice guy and brought candy and presents to kids, but he still could have been important, without need to banish him forever and ever.

I guess I shouldn't have expected it, there weren't really any hints of there being any good in Pitch, just that Jack Frost and the audience were sympathetic to his (selfish) need to be noticed. Pitch existed in the dark ages and made things terrible for all children, making them all live in fear until the Guardians existed. So there's really no reason he should be allowed to continue to do anything. He's just a terrible creature, inside and out.

Or... is he?

Flash Fiction: Flowers

The way I write is usually to churn out as much as possible and hope that whatever I end up with is sort of good. I think I learned this from NaNoWriMo (which I dropped out of this year, actually. Long story), but still, it's kind of useless to write so much and never share any of it.

I have been sitting on this for a while. In fact, I've been sitting on a lot of things for a while. However, because this one I really have no intent to send anywhere, I figure that, after a month or two of waiting, I should post it here.

Here goes nothing.

They gave me flowers. I remember that much. I remember being so surprised at the flowers. Not just a daisychain, either, but a full assortment. They were actually very pretty when they put them on me, in all those gorgeous springtime colors, and the woman who fixed it on me had even gone so far as to wipe the blood off my chin. I'd bit my tongue when I had heard my name, I'd bit it hard, hard to keep from screaming or saying anything dumb and now blood ran down my face and my mouth tasted like raw meat. The taste was only making the airy feeling in my head and fading vision worse. It had dripped onto my tunic and down and down until I had a red river falling down my front. The flowers could only mean one of two things, as there were only two things one did with flowers like these: they lay on things that were either buried or burned.

I guess I'm glad I don't remember the rest of it, the axe hacking into me or the beauty and pain in being burned. Instead now I just watch the fires in their little homes, and I watch the big one every year. I watch the cleaving and the blood and the burning as I watch the girls make the pretty wreaths, whispering about boys and parents and songs, and, in the faintest of whispers, who was next, who was next.

I think if I was too angry, I would not keep my flower crown. I would not go back every year to watch the singing and the burning, even though every time I smell the smoky flesh I cringe and sometimes even weep. If I were too angry, I wouldn't be there, all the time, to greet my new family, my fresh fellow ghosts.

 Any comments are welcome, I guess.

Your Vampires Suck Sucks

I am going to use this opportunity to complain about a trope I don’t like. Probably not the best or most creative use of my time, but here we go.

This trope is Your Vampires Suck.

Your Vampires Suck doesn’t only apply to vampires, but it mostly applies to them because they’re the supernatural creature that gets this treatment the most. Really, all the setup the trope needs is a supernatural creature and pop-culture based around that creature, and vampires are likely an easy target because they’ve managed to inundate Urban Fantasy for the past several years.

Your Vampires Suck means that somewhere within the story the old legends on some supernatural creature are debunked, usually by calling any part of the folklore “silly superstition”. Most of the time this is meant to be clever or humorous and prove that the vampire, or supernatural creature, is more powerful than expected. They can go over running water, walk in the daylight, eat garlic, whatever with ease, and may flaunt it in the face of the puny humans carrying their ancient tome of magic lore.  But the problem is this is often not clever or funny. It may have been funny or clever the first couple times, but it probably wasn’t. Vampire folklore has evolved from digging up blue, bloated corpses that looked like they had eaten their shrouds to hideous shapeshifting monsters with hairy palms that eat babies to sexy nightclub owners that like to nibble on patron’s necks. “Vampire” is a vague term, despite the fact that some purists always argue for Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which sways from extremely well-researched to barely researched, so no one is quite sure what he was smoking when he wrote it). Also, I would argue, that taking time out to talk about how your vampires are different from every other vampire detracts from the story.

Let me explain. There’s a series by the BBC called Sherlock in which Sherlock Holmes and John Watson go around solving crimes in modern day London. It’s a great series and I highly recommend it, but here’s the thing – there’s never any mention of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories. If they did, they would slow the story down. It would be horrible at every turn to have to be reminded that this happened in a fictional book before, that this is so much like the story!

Now, I know Sherlock Holmes isn’t vampires. But, if it isn’t okay to mention how something is always the same as the stories, why is it okay to mention how it’s always different? It’s distracting to have to rely on other sources to prove how original your version of vampires is because, honestly, not that many people have actually read Dracula. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, you have no idea what people know about vampire lore, and no reason to assume that all someone knows about vampires is from “movie vampires”. They may have only read Anne Rice, or Stephanie Meyer, or Bram Stoker, or devour vampire literature and have had this Vampires You Suck lecture a thousand times, or they may be getting their doctorate on European Folklore and have studied vampires from the very beginnings of the legends into the modern day. Folklore is many and varied. The same beings often don’t have the same powers from story to story, and yet make no assumptions on the listener’s knowledge. As the narrative of folklore shifts, there’s no attempt to reconcile the older stuff; There’s no reason to. It’s folklore. There’s so much lore floating around, especially on the internet these days, that there’s no excuse to assume. The assumption may make sense from a certain perspective, but sometimes removing something that makes sense actually makes the story better, as in the Sherlock example. There’s no way that nobody in London would comment on a Sherlock Holmes and a John Watson running around solving crimes in modern London, but nobody does, and this ends up as nothing more than a musing in the back of the audience’s head rather than something that grates them in story every time it’s mentioned.

Your Vampires Suck sucks because it makes too many assumptions of the reader thinks about vampires (or any supernatural creature) and can pull someone too seasoned or unseasoned out of the story. Even if the trash talk is actually clever, the cost just isn’t worth it.

This has been a part of the TVTropes Blog Hop. Please go read all of the other entries. This one is very uncreative and the other ones are much better.