skywolf42 asked:
Hi Neil
Why did you stop making bagels?
What did the bagels ever do to you?
XD
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neil-gaiman answered:
I stopped because I went to New Zealand, and didn’t bring my sourdough starter. There’s frozen sourdough starter waiting in the freezer in my house in Scotland for me to return and start bageling once again.
Working with rye flour was fun, as it was closer to using clay than to using dough. They were not beautiful but they tasted amazing.
(Photos: before and after boiling, and after coming out of the oven.)
Neil, as a fellow bread maker, I’m begging you to share your recipe. Those look amazingly delicious and mine never turn out that well.
Here's my notes to myself from the time:
100 ml starter
200 grams rye flour
220 ml water
Mix well, cover with cling film, leave overnight.
Next day, add 50 g of Buckwheat flour, 50 g of Barley flour, 100 g of rye flour. 1 tsp of sea salt and 1 tbsp of maple syrup in 2 tbsp of water.
Mix well, cover with cling film, leave for a couple of hours in a warm place.
Put a big pot of water on to boil. Add syrup to the water. (I’m using date syrup.)
Take a bowl of water. Wet hands.
With wet hands, make a ball of dough, handful size — think medium snowball. Smooth it, make the hole in the middle, drop into boiling water. It will sink to the bottom, then rise. After a couple of minutes, turn it over in the water. After a couple more minutes take it out and put it on baking paper on a baking tray. I sprinkle the paper with flour.
Keep hands wet through all of this, as if working with clay.
Don’t crowd the bagels in the water pot. No more than 4 at a time. Give them time — they get puffier.
When all the bagels are on the baking tray (it makes 6 or 7) put them in the oven for about 16 or 17 minutes. Then turn them over. Back in the oven for another 6 minutes. And then they come out.
Off the tray. Let them cool, and then eat them.
There's no heat setting mentioned, because I was cooking them in an Aga oven which doesn't have fancy things like temperature controls, but is somewhere around 220C or 420F.
Anonymous asked:
how did you learn to write well?
ryebreadgf answered:
well first you have to be a very sad child
Spurious Latin plurals are fun, but we focus way too much on “any word that ends in a consonant followed by -us > -i”. Where’s the love for “any word that ends in a consonant followed by -a > -ae”?
Umbrellae.
Rotundae.
Bonanzae.
Arugulae.
Draculae.
Alternatively, treating -a endings as plural and singularizing them with -um, yielding:
Umbrellum
Rotundum
Bonanzum
Arugalum
Draculum.
Can also be lots of fun.
Most of my knowledge of Latin plurals comes from anatomy, and my favorite is definitely phalanx > phalanges. May I suggest:
sphinx > sphinges
lynx > lynges
Or, going the other way,
changes > chanx
forges > forx
grudges > grudx
amperages > amperax
One Tetris, two Tetrides.
One Honda, two Hondae
Pajamae
Sponges -> Sponx
Folx <- folges?
Latinx <- Latineges?
Spanx -> spanges???
alice-in-the-land-of-doubts asked:
Dear Mr. Gaiman, longtime fan here. I am currently in my home city of Kyiv, Ukraine, which may or may not become a war zone in the coming days.
Pretty much everyone I know is considering whether it would be more prudent to leave their homes and flee someplace safe and/or packing emergency bags (just in case). To be honest, this is quite a bit scary and rather surreal - to the point where instead of making actual evacuation plans I’m still thinking of how to smuggle at least two volumes of the Sandman Omnibus in our car. I finished it a couple of weeks ago and the ending of the main storyline moved me to tears. (I’ve read most of your other books years ago and I’ve read your “Pirate Stew” to my kid dozens of times, but I was never able to properly engage with the comic books - until audiobook came along and helped break the ice).
For a time being I’m staying home - with great view from my windows facing one of the probable targets of the possible airstrike.
Could you please share some words of wisdom/support or just wish us to get through these trying times safely (and with grace).
Thank you!
AM
neil-gaiman answered:
I don’t have anything wise to say, other than, civilisation is much more fragile than we imagine. Please, if you can, keep yourself and your loved ones safe. (Ever since I spent time working with Syrian Refugees, I’ve started automatically thinking about what my emergency bags would be, what has to be in them, and what I would need to bring if I have to walk for days seeking shelter.) Hope for the best, plan for and expect the worst. And all the luck in the world to you.
“The word “eclipse” comes from ancient Greek ekleipsis, “a forsaking, quitting, abandonment.” The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light.”
— Anne Carson, from Decreation; Totality:
The Colour of Eclipse.
(via xshayarsha)
Transcript: It reminds me of the “bike to work” movement. That is also portrayed as white, but in my city more than half of the people on bike are not white. I was once talking to a white activist who was photographic “bike commuters” and had only pictures of white people with the occasional “Black professional” I asked her why she didn’t photograph the delivery people, construction workers etc… id. the Black and [Latine] and Asian people… and she mumbled something about trying to “improve the image of biking” then admitted that she didn’t really see them as part of the “green movement” since they “probably have no choice” - I was so mad I wanted to quit working on the project she and I were collaborating on. So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards… it’s just being poor- but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something.“ -comment left on the Racialious blog post “Sustainable Food and Privilege: Why is Green always White (and Male and Upper-Class) (via meggannn). END TS
the same thing when you look at the ~tiny house movement~ versus, say, people living in trailers, or even just renting in apartments or sublet housing
I ever tell you guys about my ethically dubious radio show back in college? The Mad Dad Hour?
it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.
so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.
this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.
And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:
“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”
I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.
And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!
they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.
obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.
the phone immediately began to ring.
“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”
“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.
I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.
And thus, the Mad Dad Hour was born.
@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.
My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:
me: hi there, you’ve got TST-
him: *strained, wheezing dutch laughter*
me: hey, is everything o-
him: pfffHAHAHAAH YOU MAKE THEM SO MAD. THEY THINK SO LITTLE OF YOUUUUUUUU BUT THE MEN ARE THE ONES WHO ARE FOOLISH! HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE DUPED THEM!
me: sir i do not know you and i have never even seen you but i am in romantic love with you.
By Czeck writer Karel Čapek, inventor of the term ‘robot’ as well!
This is one of my husband’s favorite short stories. He quotes it from memory. I’m pretty sure he can recite the entire thing from memory.
This is a tremendously impactful short story and every time I see it, it serves as an excellent reboot button for my state of mind.