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Corned Beef And Green Coffee
It’s St. Patrick’s Day and I just love going overboard on the holiday kitsch.
Green Coffee
My older kids are going back to school tonight, so we’ll probably stop for Shamrock Shakes but I thought I’d make a pot of green coffee to celebrate the day. No biggie. Just add some green food dye and a couple of drops of peppermint oil before brewing and BAM! You’ve got some lovely green coffee for St. Patrick’s Day.
Corned Beef
While corned beef is an Irish-American tradition for St. Patrick’s Day, my wife isn’t a big fan. We’ll be having ham for the family members who don’t care much for corned beef and corned beef for those of us who do.
Unlike the ladies in the video above, I’m perfectly satisfied to go the quick route and cook up a corned beef brisket from the grocery store. I don’t agree with the assertion that it’s too salty. Serving it along with steamed cabbage and celery will cut down on the perceived saltiness of the overall meal.
My son doesn’t care for cooked carrots and we don’t have any around anyway, so celery is an ample substitute for carrots in our case. The celery provides the crunch of a carrot while still providing a light counterpoint to the savory taste of the corned beef.
As for the potatoes, I like the little roundy potatoes in with the meat but the wife and kids like green mashed potatoes instead. The great thing is that in this case, everybody can be happy. I’ll be putting the roundy potatoes in with the corned beef to soak up the broth as well as whipping up some lovely green mashed potatoes for those who prefer them.
What’s a holiday if not an excuse to make tasty food that everybody loves?
The Quiet Man
This is a St. Patrick’s Day Classic
I love cuddling up with my wife to watch this annual treat.
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger. ~Rainer Maria Rilke
Perhaps I flatter myself that skydiving, driving in ice storms and having a van fall on me is sufficiently dangerous to qualify me for a great work of art. Even if it’s not, simply plunging into one’s own imagination is definitely a dangerous act.
Sometimes, writing by the seat of one’s pants can pay off in streams of drama that wouldn’t have occurred through structured thought and planning. On the other hand, with no plan or expectation whatsoever, you’ll find yourself getting painted into corners. That is also a danger in pursuit of art.
Dead end roads of fictional travel are the most annoying kind. In the real world, you can turn around and get back on track. In the fictional world, you wind up pinching off another world of the multiverse. Going left instead of right. Going forward instead of hunkering down and holding your position. All decisions lead to another unfulfilled realm of the multiverse.
The problem is, creating all of these quantum bubbles leaves unanswered questions that have nothing to do with your intended destination. You can start having deja vu in failed plotlines that insist on being included or even jamais vu where you’re trying to get somewhere specific in the plot and you’re just hopelessly lost.
I’ve gotten to a point in my pantsing of the current draft of Sentinels novel 1 of 5 where the characters are simply acting up too much and driving me off into an unviable tangent.
In fairness, life is sloppy. Plans rarely run to plan. Even so, nobody’s going to want to go on a completely haphazard ride to gosh-knows-where.
Time to shift gears and become a plotser. One of the things that INTPs absolutely thrive on is world-building. We love structure and process and frameworks and so forth. It seems that I need to get the bones of the story wired up so my characters can get with the program.
While I sort that out, check out this trailer for one of my favorite Star Trek episodes. It definitely is in keeping with the notion that life is sloppy.
Here’s another holiday favorite of ours.
Star Trek: Voyager, Season 6 Episode 17
Tom Paris gets careless on the holodeck and holy heck breaks loose
Well, we got to sit down for a lovely St. Patrick’s Day dinner together as a family this evening. My older kids have headed back to finish their semesters. It’s a rare treat to have all six of us around the table for a tasty, hot meal. I’m glad we got to do that.