we are out of oat milk

@stealingyourbones has made some delightful food abominations, which taught me I can replace the water in bread with almost any liquid.

So I tried Miso.

The yeast loved it and frothed up super fast. Mixing miso broth with the egg and oil smelled funky. The dough didn’t rise any fluffier than usual but the texture feels good. Then I decided to roll in some black garlic and green onion. I’d add nori crumbled up but I ran out.

This is amazing. It tastes like if miso soup was solid. The flavor is immaculate. It’s just missing the nori flavor. I can add that next time because I am 100% making this again.

Yes! I love sharing recipes! @lady-jeleania

Here’s my Gma Vesta’s hamburger bun recipe:

1 Tbsp yeast

1/2 cup warm water (miso broth)

- mix together and let it froth up

1 1/2 cup warm water (miso broth)

1/2 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 egg

1/4 cup olive oil

- mix all together, then add frothy yeast

5 1/2 - 6ish cups flour

- mix in slowly with a fork until it’s hard to stir with the fork, then stir together with hands until it stops sticking to your skin when you rub your hands together.

- knead the dough about 10min until it starts pushing back (it gets springy)

Let the dough rest for 30min.

(I make a redneck proof box by microwaving a cup of water and quickly replacing the water with the dough bowl and shutting the door to give it a warm place to nap. Do not microwave the dough itself by reflex.)

Roll out the dough and add any flavors you like. For the miso soup bread I chopped up a couple black garlics, and a handful of green onion. Roll it up like cinnamon rolls, cut into 12, and roll each into a ball shape.

Stick in a greased 9x13 casserole dish and let the dough rise to double size. (About 40min-1hr depending on how warm your kitchen is.) (the redneck proof box won’t fit my casserole dish so I stick the rolls on top of the oven while it preheats with a dish towel over it.)

Preheat the oven to 350 and when the dough looks nice and squishy bake it for 20min.

You can brush butter on top if you want. That would look pretty and help a sprinkling of furikake stick after you pull it out of the oven. If you wanna up the miso taste you can also spread a very thin layer of miso paste in before you roll it up with the other fillings. I’m gonna try that next time.

I don’t think there is a whole lot I can tell you about The Painted Wastelands (2024) that you won’t get from the cover and the other art reproduction. This is very much an exercise in leading by the visuals and, baseline, if you pick up the book only for Tim Molloy’s art, you’re still getting a bargain.

It’s more than that, though, of course! It’s a hex crawl for Old-School Essentials, an exploration of a small part of a larger dreamworld, where people speak a strange new language and where traveling from one place to the next is as much a matter of will (applied in a new skill called Lucidity) as it is movement. The world is rich and strange. There are dangers (there are always dangers) but much of the interesting stuff emerges from the world and a desire to see it. There is a robust commerce in the Wastelands, many merchants to visit, many vending machines to peruse. At the start, players find a skull that helpfully acts as a tour guide (shades of Planescape’s mimirs) and I think that sets an immediate tone that pushes away from combat as a default pursuit. It’s nice. The fact that one of the two new classes is “cat” also reinforces this (at a high enough level, they can travel to other realities by jumping high enough; the other class is a dream mage, the oneiromancer, and they pale a little compared to the cat, honestly).

A lot of clear inspirations that I see. Clark Ashton Smith looms largest, maybe, especially his Zothique stories. Moebius’ comic work. Maybe the Remnant series of videogames? Luka Rejec’s work, especially how he mixes fantasy, psychedelia and 20th century machinery, is a close cousin.

Molloy’s art is the star, though. It’s colorful and intricate. His line work is bold without becoming overly cartoony. The world he creates is very designed, by which I mean there is an internal consistency in his visual language that reinforces the world. There’s also a curious stillness, like everything is moving in slow motion (like a dream!) but also in a way that prevents me from feeling that I’ve gotten all the details (like a dream!). No matter how many times I look at these images, they seem new.

No matter what I answer someone is going to be mad at me.