Couldn't you make the Tonks less WASP? Like, Andromeda is obviously as WASP as you can get but there's no reason I can think of why Ted couldn't be a POC. So Dora would be biracial which would play wonderfully in with the rest of her fluid personality and give more nuanced understanding to a POC Neville.

Interesting. I don’t feel my humor is any different than it ever was, but I’m close to it so what do I know.

German who lived in Munich for 25 years here. Am wheezing in horror at this pie abomination. Also the opinion of locals about the Wiesn (yeah, nobody but tourists says Oktoberfest, sorry) is both "horribly overpriced spectacle for tourists, work makes us go each year, we hate it, make it stop" and "that's OUR party, of course we're going, it's tradition, here are seventeen paragrafs on where to get the best Brathendl".

Oh! So kind of like the Christmas Market in Chicago. “Don’t go, it’s horrible, but if you do there is only ONE CORRECT PLACE to get potato pancakes. Wait, I’d better go with you, I do need to do some holiday shopping.”

thegollux re: dumplings

serious question: what is the benefit to pre-cooking half of the chicken stuffing. this feels like food poisoning waiting to happen.

It’s actually a way of keeping the filling cohesive inside the wrapper while avoiding food poisoning! :D 

So, the thing is, when raw ground meat is boiled or steamed inside a wrapper like this, it coheres into a little meatball inside the wrapper, so it doesn’t just fall apart all over your plate when you bite in. But in order to fully cook ground meat inside a wrapper, you generally have to cook the dumpling until the wrapper is way overcooked, making it gummy or tough. 

There are other solutions, like binding the meat up with egg or a sauce, but they don’t give quite that same texture, and can get difficult to wrap, so the solution is to cook SOME of the meat, so some is already pre-cooked, and leave just enough raw to hold the rest together while it boils/steams. You don’t have to cook as long to be sure the meat is fully cooked through, but you also don’t get the “this turned into a pile of crumbled meat on my plate” issue. 

spaci1701 re: dumplings

I'm very jealous. I've only got a hand cranked pasta roller and it's very challenging to roll sheets by yourself - just not enough hands. The best part of doing your own filled pasta is that you can make all the really weird filling combos you want. So far my fave has been Sheppard's pie pierogi.

That sounds amazing! 

Yeah, Mum asked if I was sure I didn’t just want a countertop version, where the same amount of money could buy me a wider roller, and I said that it came down to hands -- if you’re cranking with one hand and feeding with the other, you need a third hand to catch the dough. 

junker5 re: dumplings

Does your mixer have a name? He looks like he has an awesome personality, like DumE orSci’s Calcifer! 😊 The dumplings look amazing.

LOL! No, I never bothered naming him -- I usually only name things if I’m going to be referencing them in conversation with other people, and I never got into the habit of whimsically naming things because in high school I would do that and whatever I had named would break, so I stopped :D 

geekgirl76 re: dumplings

Yum! Side question, how do you like your soda stream? I'm a carbonated water junkie and I'm seriously considering one, even though I have a rule about no appliances that use propriatrary inserts. (though, with the internet, I suppose that's not as big a deal as it used to be, someone, somewhere would either start selling them or create a hack.)

There are definitely adaptors you can buy to hook it up to a non-proprietary CO2 canister, but between the perils of dealing with pressurized canisters and the inconvenience, I’ve never bothered. Sodastream makes it super easy to return your canisters (the only issue right now is supply) so I don’t mind if I’m paying a slight convenience fee for that. Now, that said, you also have to buy proprietary water bottles, some of which aren’t dishwasher-safe, and you’re supposed to replace them every 2-3 years, and those aren’t cheap, so bear that in mind. (If you want the machine washable ones, you have to buy a specific type that only fit a certain number of the machines, so do your homework before buying.) 

I do like my sodastream -- that’s their cheapo version and I’ve had it for 10 years, which tells you something about its durability. Especially if you don’t care about flavoring and just want carbonated water, it’s great. The flavor syrups are hit and miss; a lot of them for me have an acrid aftertaste, and again supply right now can be an issue. But the nice thing about having plain carbonated water is you can make your own flavorings. I often make super-concentrated tea and add a shot of that, or just sprinkle Pure Lemon in. 

Anyway yeah -- it’s not the most ideal setup but I do feel like I save a LOT of money and packaging waste with them. 

lionheartmadre re: dumplings

can i just say i love how you gave your mixer a retro fighter plane look? cause that's frikken awesome.

Thanks! I wanted to decorate it up a little and asked Mum for some decals for Christmas one year, and she really came through :D 

katriel-tumbles re: dumplings

Kreplach FTW. I've never had or made them (a tragedy for this Jew) but I get the feeling they're simpler than they seem.

The dough is a little tricky, because it’s got eggs in it which makes it sticky, which in turn makes it a little more difficult to work with without making the end product rather tough. But yeah, if you can get round the dough issues it’s not that complex. 

fanmouse re: dumplings

Finland: piirakkaa, India: paratha, both similar to pierogi. (I am facinated by how similar the words are in the different language families.) Good luck!

Look, I'd rather have a polar vortex now than a -40 one in January

You make a compelling point but I remain mad about it. :D 

geekgirl76 replied to your photo “It is the ninth of May. THE NINTH. OF MAY. We are TWO MONTHS into...”

Yikes! Bad time to tell you I actually have the starting of a tan, up here in Edmonton, then.

Yeah, but you have to live in Edmonton, you deserve a tan for that. 

synebluetoo replied to your photo “Well, it took all winter and some of spring, and got held up by a...”

It's very important to have at least one mistake in any string project- stitching or knitting or anything, because evil can only travel in straight lines. Therefore you must fumble at least one stitch so it cannot be cursed.

LOL, that’s what I thought when I made Egregious Mistake Number One. It started to feel like a weird justification, as I went on :D

spaci1701 replied to your photo “Well, it took all winter and some of spring, and got held up by a...”

That's really awesome! I've never even thought of doing all the back stitching of a pattern first - I can see how it would really make the colours easier to fill in. I don't think I could do it that way but it's a brilliant idea.

Yeah I have to admit it was not easy. I also started from the top corner like a heretic, but I’ve never been able to figure out the advantage of starting in the middle, so. 

i-ddpej replied to your photo “Well, it took all winter and some of spring, and got held up by a...”

Out of curiosity, how are you doing your half stitches? Just the usual cross-stitch way, with short vertical lines on the backside? If so, you should know that you'll probably need to put some effort into blocking it at the end to get it back to square. (I ask because it looks like it might already be warping out of square, with the bottom-left/top-right corners being wide and the top-left/bottom-right corners being acute. It's a typical result of wide-scale halfs.)

Good to know! Some of what you’re seeing is based on the angle I was holding the camera (poor, but I’d already put the thing back in the hoop by the time I realized it) but I wouldn’t be surprised if it does have some distortion. It still has wrinkles from the excess being folded up and clipped while I worked on the hoop, too, so blocking would need to happen anyway.

Gonna have to google how to do blocking eventually. :D 

sagedarkwoods replied to your photo “Well, it took all winter and some of spring, and got held up by a...”

Dear gods that's gorgeous. The snakeskin shoes even!