My version of Ellsea's pasta thing is getting more and more complex every time I make it. Tonight's version includes the standard butter, heavy cream, shredded parmesan, spinach and fettucine ... but it also includes sliced mushrooms and shrimp. I'll probably think of more variations on the theme next time, too. Here's the recipe as it now stands (in units for the U.S.):
1. Half a stick of butter (4 tablespoons)
2. a pint of heavy cream
3. shredded parmesan cheese - I basically just keep sprinkling it into the pan until it looks right
4. around 10 small portabella mushrooms, sliced
5. one bag spinach (in the U.S., these are sold in the bagged salad section already washed; very convenient. Each bag is worth about 3 side salads, I think.)
6. one 10 oz bag of medium-sized shrimp
7. a 14 oz package of fettucine noodles (just over 300g)
8. freshly grated black pepper
9. garlic powder (or minced fresh garlic. That's what's going to get put in next time, methinks!)
10. nutmeg
Melt butter in pan. Cook the mushrooms in it. Add cream. Add spinach. Add pepper, garlic powder, and nutmeg. Add parmesan.
Meanwhile, boil fettucine noodles. A minute or so before it's done, dump in the shrimp. When shrimp is pink, drain the water. Put noodles and shrimp into the pan.
Stir and enjoy. :)
No wonder I hate cooking. I always keep improvising until it's so elaborate that it's too daunting to actually make anymore.
Meanwhile, while I was digging through my blog entries to find the first version of Ellsea's recipe for this, I noticed that the number of read counts on them are astronomical. Are those numbers accurate? If so, good lord I must have a lot of groupies! *nervously waves hi* :D
In other news, I'm still not doing any writing. (I guess technically that doesn't count as news.) Roleplaying is starting to encroach to the point of strangling me, though. Heh. So much for a good sense of balance! It all started when my favorite GM was bored and decided to start a new game. Of course I wanted to join it. I didn't think I wanted to join it but the perfect character for it popped into my head and now I'm too attached to the idea to let it drop. *le sigh* Unfortunately I can't drop out of any of his other games because all of them are linked to each other, so if I want the whole story, I have to be in all of them. It would be easier if I could just read it without playing, but I can't do that - if I'm not playing, I can't summon up the interest to just passively read the game no matter how interesting it might be.
I guess that explains why I don't do a whole lot of reading of 'real' books anymore. Too passive, maybe? That's kind of a weird concept, but the truth of it is that I've barely read any fiction in the last few years unless it was somehow related to one of my games.
So now I've got my own game with 14 characters in it, helping another game by running 2 characters there, and playing 11 characters in 6 other games. Soon to be playing 10 characters in 7 games; in one of his current games I have 3 characters, and I've asked to replace those three with a single character that has the same plot function to make it easier on me. And of course nothing is likely to die anytime soon; I chose my games too well. :/ There is one game (2 characters) that I might quit at the end of the current in-game night, but that's all I can really drop.
Someday I'll get back to doing 'real' writing again, though I don't see how in the foreseeable future. Maybe during the Novel Dare this summer I can talk them all into letting me go slack for a month...
2006/02/01
I guess I should post something
It's been a while since I last wrote anything here. Then again, I haven't done any writing to speak of since November, either. I tried to add some more to the bus story, get that finished off, but didn't manage to get myself motivated enough. I didn't do anything for Nanofimo at all.
I did manage to lose what little of the bus story I'd written on my Alphasmart, that I hadn't bothered to save to my computer. The battery ran all the way down. :( I don't think I lost all that much, though, and I wasn't all that attached to the paragraph or two of bus story I didn't have saved elsewhere. I can write them again later.
Last year I spent December and January burnt out on writing. I tried to keep working on Temple, but it just didn't go. At all. So this year I'm not feeling all that guilty about doing nothing in December and January. I need recharge time. Trying to write last year just meant I continued to be burnt out for several more months after that. So this time around, I didn't even try.
This time around, I feel like I'm ready to tackle some kind of big project again. I don't know what I want to do yet, though. Maybe all the things I would've done for Nanofimo - finish off the bus story, finish off the two Nanos I attempted this year that didn't go anywhere near as well as Temple did, even though I wrote 75k words toward them. I also sort of want to start something new, too. But I haven't a clue what.
I would sign up for the February challenge here (is there one this year?), but I'd kind of like this website to look at least back to the way it was before. It's just not the same with everything broken and arranged funny.
Meanwhile, roleplaying is going extremely well. I finally finished chargen (character generation) in my game, which means that now I'm on to the fun part of actually running the game and roleplaying. There are six werewolves and seven vampires. All of them are awesome players (and well they should be, being the survivors through an extremely nitpicky chargen gauntlet). Plot premises are starting to hook in and take off. It's going to be a blast. :)
My favorite GM also returned mid-January. He was running four games before; one of them is completely dead and deleted, two have now been restarted, and he plans to restart the fourth one sometime soon. Then I'm also playing in two other active games, and helping run another game. That's 9 characters in 5 active games where I'm just a player, plus 2 more characters in a game that's basically dead except that a few people keep posting to it anyway. My high-writing-quality game that I've mentioned here many times. Posting rate seems to be down to one per week, total, and a lot of people didn't come back after Christmas break. I've already sort of written it off in my mind and moved on, so I don't know what I would do if it actually did come back to life. With several key players missing, though, I don't know that it's salvageable. The GM isn't around much either.
I did end up joining the Inquisitor game that I was trying not to join. It's being run by one of my players, and he's really cool. I'm enjoying it a lot.
So grand total is: 11 characters in 6 games, running 1 game, helping run 1 game. (Supposedly I'm going to have a character in it too, but the main GM is perpetually busy with everyone else (the game has around 40 characters) so I don't think I have to worry about that anytime soon.)
All in all, I feel like I've finally reached a good balance in amount of roleplaying. Boom and bust isn't as much of an issue as when I was just a player, because there's always something I can be doing in my own game even if there's nothing going on anywhere else. Nothing moves too fast for me to keep up, except for my own game, where it doesn't matter as much because ... well, I'm running it. ;) If I don't post, nothing moves forward. Nobody can skip over me. ;) And since chargen is over, I'm no longer constantly trying to keep up with all my players who post within hours of my updates and thereby necessitate that I update again.
And not only do I have a good amount of roleplaying going on, not too fast and not too slow ... I also have time to do other things. Like, eat. Cook. Clean. Maybe even sleep. And write. :)
I did manage to lose what little of the bus story I'd written on my Alphasmart, that I hadn't bothered to save to my computer. The battery ran all the way down. :( I don't think I lost all that much, though, and I wasn't all that attached to the paragraph or two of bus story I didn't have saved elsewhere. I can write them again later.
Last year I spent December and January burnt out on writing. I tried to keep working on Temple, but it just didn't go. At all. So this year I'm not feeling all that guilty about doing nothing in December and January. I need recharge time. Trying to write last year just meant I continued to be burnt out for several more months after that. So this time around, I didn't even try.
This time around, I feel like I'm ready to tackle some kind of big project again. I don't know what I want to do yet, though. Maybe all the things I would've done for Nanofimo - finish off the bus story, finish off the two Nanos I attempted this year that didn't go anywhere near as well as Temple did, even though I wrote 75k words toward them. I also sort of want to start something new, too. But I haven't a clue what.
I would sign up for the February challenge here (is there one this year?), but I'd kind of like this website to look at least back to the way it was before. It's just not the same with everything broken and arranged funny.
Meanwhile, roleplaying is going extremely well. I finally finished chargen (character generation) in my game, which means that now I'm on to the fun part of actually running the game and roleplaying. There are six werewolves and seven vampires. All of them are awesome players (and well they should be, being the survivors through an extremely nitpicky chargen gauntlet). Plot premises are starting to hook in and take off. It's going to be a blast. :)
My favorite GM also returned mid-January. He was running four games before; one of them is completely dead and deleted, two have now been restarted, and he plans to restart the fourth one sometime soon. Then I'm also playing in two other active games, and helping run another game. That's 9 characters in 5 active games where I'm just a player, plus 2 more characters in a game that's basically dead except that a few people keep posting to it anyway. My high-writing-quality game that I've mentioned here many times. Posting rate seems to be down to one per week, total, and a lot of people didn't come back after Christmas break. I've already sort of written it off in my mind and moved on, so I don't know what I would do if it actually did come back to life. With several key players missing, though, I don't know that it's salvageable. The GM isn't around much either.
I did end up joining the Inquisitor game that I was trying not to join. It's being run by one of my players, and he's really cool. I'm enjoying it a lot.
So grand total is: 11 characters in 6 games, running 1 game, helping run 1 game. (Supposedly I'm going to have a character in it too, but the main GM is perpetually busy with everyone else (the game has around 40 characters) so I don't think I have to worry about that anytime soon.)
All in all, I feel like I've finally reached a good balance in amount of roleplaying. Boom and bust isn't as much of an issue as when I was just a player, because there's always something I can be doing in my own game even if there's nothing going on anywhere else. Nothing moves too fast for me to keep up, except for my own game, where it doesn't matter as much because ... well, I'm running it. ;) If I don't post, nothing moves forward. Nobody can skip over me. ;) And since chargen is over, I'm no longer constantly trying to keep up with all my players who post within hours of my updates and thereby necessitate that I update again.
And not only do I have a good amount of roleplaying going on, not too fast and not too slow ... I also have time to do other things. Like, eat. Cook. Clean. Maybe even sleep. And write. :)
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