So I Just Started Reading Mistborn...

Hello and welcome to Cooking with Kaly.  I decided I wanted to make chouta. It was an adventure. 

We know that the meatballs are made by mixing flangria with ground lavis, forming it into balls, battering it and frying it.  To create these meatballs we therefore need something to represent flangria, something to represent lavis, and a way to put it together without egg (since eggs are unlikely to be used in cheap street food on Roshar.)

I happened to have ground turkey in the freezer that I had gotten on sale at some point. It seemed like a reasonable stand in for flangria. Given the range of ways lavis is used, I feel like corn is a reasonable earth analogue, so ground lavis gets to be corn meal.  I mixed the 1.5 lbs of meat with 1/4 cup of cornmeal, 1 Tbsp chili powder, 2 tsp cumin, and 2 tsp oregano, formed it into small balls (maybe a heaping Tbsp of meat per ball?  I didn’t measure), then covered them and put them in the fridge for a while to let the flavors meld.  

Before cooking them, I rolled them in cornmeal, dipped them in water (some but not all of the cornmeal will fall off), then rolled them in the cornmeal again.  I fried them in a thin layer of canola oil in a cast iron skillet until they were golden brown.  The cornmeal gets all crispy and the flavors are great.  I’m a big fan of these meatballs. (note:the plate in this picture is small, the meatballs are not giant. There are also a lot more meatballs not shown)

For the flatbread, I mixed 1 cup mashed potatoes (since tubers seem to be common on Roshar) with 1/4 cup cornmeal, a heaping 1/4 cup flour and 1 tsp baking soda. I kneaded the mixture until I had a dough that I could press out into a decent sized flatbread.  This made enough for 2. Transfer the pressed out flat bread *carefully* to the frying pan and make sure you don’t try to flip it too soon or it will tear and be a mess. This made a decent flatbread. I think the recipe needs work though.

I used the pan drippings from frying the meatballs to make the gravy, but I didn’t have any good broth to use so it came out a little bland.  I think drippings gravy is the right idea here, I just didn’t do it well.

Overall verdict: This definitely feels like street food. It was tasty and has the potential to be amazing once I get the flatbread and gravy right. Nomnomnom. It’s not going to win any awards for being good for you, but that’s not what this is about. 

Hey guys. Iredomi posts their cosmere fanstuff over on sebrukiscrossbow and this includes a collection of lovely cosmere inspired poetry. This is me reading one of their poems. You can find the text of the poem in their original post here.

Pixely critters from hanging out in the Steel Ministry on iscribble.

Shallan's Journey: Chapter 3, In Which Pattern Declares English Full of Lies

Shallan heard her name and glanced up warily. The group was clearly asking Albus about her, but she had no idea what they were saying and was already trying to process too many things to want to add anything else. The stove woman noticed her looking up and came over with a plate of...something, a fork and a glass filled with a drink that appeared to be some sort of orange juice or wine. Shallan realized that she was hungry and took a deep breath to calm herself before offering the woman a small smile and accepting the plate with a “Thank you” even though she knew it wouldn't be understood. She inspected the food and realized quickly that she had no idea what it was, though at least the utensil was mostly familiar. She took a bite and contemplated it. It was very different, but at least it was edible. The woman gave her an encouraging smile and said something Shallan couldn't understand before bustling back over to the discussion at the table.

As she ate, Shallan worked on talking herself down. You had already figured out you weren't on Roshar. The plant and animal life here is very different – the plants don't retreat into the ground and there are chickens that travel in fire. Of course the food is going to be different. The whole world is different. That also means they are going to have different sensibilities and different ideas about who should do what jobs. Shallan groaned quietly. On an intellectual level that seemed straightforward enough, though it wasn't going to make it any easier to navigate this world. Maybe it would be easier to handle if she viewed the situation as a scholar. She reached this conclusion as she finished her meal, so she carefully set the plate on the ground next to her, opened her sketchbook and began to document what she had seen so far. In addition to helping Shallan organize her thoughts, the acts of writing and drawing always helped to calm her.

Hermione rolled her eyes at the argument raging around her. She supposed it could be possible for the Death Eaters to try something similar to whatever was going on as a way to get a spy into the order, but she really didn't think they were that clever. Dumbledore's story also had too many details that made it clear that this new girl was not from anywhere they had ever heard of for the spy theory to be plausible. She watched the new girl as she pulled out a notebook and appeared to begin writing in it. Hermione smiled. That was something she would do. If you don't know what is going on, read, and if there is nothing to read, write down anything and everything.

Hermione noticed that Dumbledore was now standing quietly off to the side and shaking his head as he watched the argument unfold. She knew he would get his way eventually, he always did, but she supposed that if they didn't get the argument out of their system now it would just start again later. It probably would anyway - from what she could tell the Order seemed to spend an awful lot of time arguing. She pushed her chair back from the table and quietly approached Dumbledore. “May I take the new girl, Shallan, I think you said, up to the library?” He nodded his agreement to her, but kept his attention on the argument.

She smiled as she walked over to Shallan and collected her plate to take it to the sink. Shallan was sufficiently absorbed in her writing that she barely seemed to notice. When Hermione returned she greeted the girl, “Hi Shallan,” and when Shallan looked up pointed to herself “Hermione... Her-my-oh-nee.”

Shallan smiled tentatively back and repeated carefully “Her-my-oh-nee...Her-my-oh-nee...Hermione.” Storms! she thought, at least their language seems to use the same sounds, but they go together in such strange ways.” She watched curiously as the other girl, Hermione, mimed sitting at a table and writing and then gestured towards the stairs. Shallan nodded, tucked her sketchbook, which she was now treating as a notebook, and pen into her bag and stood. She didn't mind sitting on the floor, but she also wouldn't say no to having a proper table or desk to work at.

Shallan followed Hermione up two flights of stairs and a little ways down a hall to a room she decided must be Hermione's bedroom. Here Hermione dug a new notebook (it was always a good idea to have notebooks on hand, and they were so much more practical than doing everything on scrolls) and a few pens and pencils from her trunk before gesturing further down the hall. At the end of the hall Hermione opened a door and gestured for Shallan to enter. Her jaw dropped open as she looked in the room. “Pattern! Look at all of the books!” She stepped into the room and looked around in amazement as Pattern detached himself from her dress to explore the library as well.

Hermione's eyebrows shot up as she heard Shallan exclaim excitedly and saw something seem to float away from her. As Shallan looked around the library, Hermione walked cautiously but curiously toward the... thing? creature? that was now floating around the room. As she approached it she asked, mostly rhetorically, “Hello, and what might you be?”. She was somewhat surprised when the... whatever it was... buzzed back at her with something that almost sounded like it could be words. “I don't know why you are talking to me. Surely you know I won't know your language, you storming girl.”

Shallan turned at Hermione's voice and Pattern's buzzing and saw her examining Pattern with a bewildered look on her face. She laughed slightlyand walked over to join them. “Pattern,”she said pointing at her spren. Then she looked at Pattern pointedly, “This is Hermione. She seems to appreciate writing and books. We should be nice to her. She might be able to help us learn their patterns.”

Pattern swirled around more quickly and responded, “She can't understand what we say anyway.” Shallan raised her eyebrows at him and Pattern began to swirl more slowly again before drifting slightly closer to Hermione and buzzing, “Hermione.”

By this point Hermione was staring wide eyed at the two of them. Her mind was racing as she tried to make sense of what she was seeing and hearing. Dumbledore had said something about Shallan's companion, but seeing it was something else entirely. Apparently Shallan had a constantly changing sentient, talking fractal as a friend, or at least companion. Hermione knew that figuring out how to communicate well with Shallan was going to be a challenge when she decided to rescue her from the chaos downstairs, but now she began to think that she was in even farther over her head than she had realized. She wasn't sure if this Pattern was going to make things easier or harder and bit her lip in concentration wondering where to start before finally nodding and gesturing to the room around her, “library.”

Shallan nodded and made a similar gesture around the room and repeated “library.” They repeated this process with a table, chair, book, pen and pencil before Shallan realized there was no way she was going to remember everything and pulled out her sketchbook. She sat down at the table and began making a list. Hermione sat next to her and watched as Shallan drew small pictures representing each of the words they had covered and then drew out an elongated symbol next to each. After finishing with the library words, Shallan added a small portrait of Albus with his name and Hermione with hers. She then sketched the woman who brought her food and looked questioningly over at Hermione as she pointed to the picture. Hermione broke out into a grin as she realized the elongated symbols must be Shallan's form of writing.

“Oh that's brilliant!” She then pointed to the picture and said “Molly.” Shallan repeated, “Molly,” back and wrote it in next to the picture. Hermione grabbed her own notebook, flipped it open to the first page drew a quick sketch of a book and wrote “book” next to it. She then gestured between the two notebooks. Shallan grinned and nodded as she pushed her notebook over so that Hermione could write each of the words using her script. Pattern hovered over them buzzing with excitement. When she had finished, he commented, “Mmmmm...patterns..not perfect, but close...”

Shallan looked up at him curiously. “What patterns do you see?”

“Mm, her small symbols mostly pair with yours. But not all... chair has too many...”

Shallan thought about this for a second before nodding to herself and flipping to the next page of her notebook where she wrote out each letter of the Alethi alphabet while Hermione watched curiously. Shallan then pointed to the first symbol and spoke its sound while looking at Hermione expectantly. Hermione repeated the sound and drew the appropriate letter or blend of letters next to it. When they finished, Hermione pursed her lips. The chart they had just made was mostly accurate, but not completely. She pointed to the letter “g”, which she had written next to the symbol Shallan had indicated was for the hard g sound and gave both the hard and soft g sounds. Shallan raised her eyebrows. Hermione thought for a moment and then pulled over her notebook and said “gem” as she wrote the word, underlined the “g” and repeated the soft g sound. She then repeated the process with the word “gap.”

Shallan sighed. Of course. Hermione's script wasn't completely phonetic. That would have been too easy. Well, at least it did actually use letters and she wasn't going to have to learn a huge collection of glyphs. They made another pass through the chart with Hermione giving some of the most common alternate ways to form the sounds. Pattern watched this process somewhere between amused and annoyed. “Mmmm, this is a terrible pattern. Full of all kinds of lies.” Shallan glared at him.“That may be, but it is going to let us understand the people here.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon naming objects to slowly increase Shallan's vocabulary. Shallan found the process to be a strange combination of tedious and exhilarating. There were so many words to try to remember, but learning something new was always exciting.

Dinner that night thankfully involved many fewer people than lunch had. Hermione introduced Shallan and Pattern to Molly, Ginny, Ron, Fred and George and made the twins promise to at least give Shallan time to adjust before including her in any pranking. She told them about how they had spent the afternoon and asked Mrs. Weasley if they happened to have any pictures books that might be useful for helping Shallan learn English. It turned out that the Weasley's had a large selection of picture books that could read themselves to children, so there was an expedition to the burrow to collect them and bring them back to headquarters.

Ron had no patience for spending the day helping Shallan and Pattern with English, and Hermione angrily kicked out the twins after Pattern caught them teaching Shallan lies, but Hermione, Ginny, Shallan, and Pattern spent the next several days focused on getting to a point where they could communicate things that required more than gestures and pointing. Whenever Shallan felt like her capacity for new words and grammar was saturated, they took breaks during which she would teach the other girls a little Alethi.

Pattern naturally caught on more quickly and so occasionally wandered off to discover what kinds of lies the twins were creating. The fact that he was able to warn Ginny and Hermione of the pranks the twins were setting up helped the girls to accept him and quickly become fond of him despite the fact that Shallan was unable to satisfactorily explain the idea of spren. Ginny giggled that having Pattern as a friend was way better for spying than those extendable ears her brothers had created. Shallan laughed along and thanked the Almighty that there weren't other Cryptics here to bond with the boys. She could only imagine where that would lead.

J is for Jella tree.

"The basin was fairly well sheltered, the slopes covered in Jella trees.  Their strong branches grew spindly leaves – long spikes of pink, yellow and orange, so the trees looked like explosions of color. Shallan had read in one of her father's books that the trees drew in crem, the used it to make their wood hard, like rock." … "Jella trees here rose high, their hardened trunks colored the light brown of crem. The needles sprouted like a thousand tongues of fire from each limb, though the nearest ones pulled in as she approached." From Ch 45 of Words of Radiance

Hello tumblr Cosmere fandom!

This last weekend was the MIT mystery hunt and this got me thinking.  Branderson's world building has given us all sorts of lovely systems that could be used as the basis for puzzle-hunt style puzzles.  Are there other puzzle hunt type people around the tumblr cosmere fandom?  If I were to actually turn one/some of the puzzle ideas floating around my head into reality, would there be people interested in poking at it/them?

I sat down to work on the “Sh is for Shalebark” page and got the basic layout and text done. Then I started contemplating which kind of shalebark I wanted to draw.  I’m bad at decisions, so you get this instead... If you want to know more about Shalebark, the Coppermind page is good :-) 

Hey Cosmere fandom, it’s book rec time.

The book series in question is the Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie. In order, the books are Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy.

It’s a space opera with significant focus on character and relationships. The POV character is Breq, an aro-ace space warship AI in a human body who sets out on an impossible journey to kill the Lord of the Radch (the local 3000 year old space emperor) to revenge her beloved Lieutenant. Along the way she (unintentionally and reluctantly) collects people (humans, ships, aliens,…) in a gloriously messy found family.

* It’s super queer 

* Characters actively struggle with depression, anxiety, addiction, etc.

* Almost everyone is a PoC

* For the sake of Propriety everyone wears gloves and bare hands are super scandalous. 

These books are amazing and you should strongly consider reading them. The audio book versions are also fabulous.

If you’ve already read them, I’ve been Radch posting on my other blog (RithmatistKalyna) and I would love to talk with people both about the books/characters/tea sets/etc and all of the Cosmere crossover potential.

MOAR CHALKLINGS