My weekend in three pictures

[dorchadas]

I used to write big chronicles of everything I've done in a weekend, and obviously that's not possible anymore because there's just not enough information. But since it was cold and rainy for all of last week, and then this weekend it shot up to 22°C on Saturday and 18°C today, everyone was out and about walking in the sunshine and I was certainly one of those people. Everything's closed but I still have things to do, and here's what they were:


I've actually appreciated the Plague Year in one way, which is that masks as a fashion item are now more acceptable. I already created a ninja look a month ago--which feels like roughly twenty years ago --using things I had sitting around the house, and when I went out grocery shopping on Saturday to gather ingredients for cooking, I put together another look: street samurai.

This was actually inspired by all the Alan Walker I've been listening to lately--take the video for Darkside as a good example--but of course, I had it in my wardrobe already. I just pinned the cowl up to function as a makeshift mask and then tied my hair in a high ponytail. Or, what started as a high ponytail and gradually slipped further and further down as I walked. I have a lot of hair, and the hand-me-down hairties that thosesocks gifted to me are lovely for most of what I do with my hair, but they're not quite strong enough to hold it all up.

I got a couple suggestions from friends, including start with two ponytails and tie them together and a trick with ribbons that thosesocks says she knows, so there may yet be hope.

I ordered some more clothing from MDNT45 recently, and they threw in some black masks for free with every order over a certain amount, so pretty soon I'll have my choice of a variety of masks, all of which are black. Hey, I have an aesthetic to maintain, and come hell or high water, fire or...uh, plague...I'll do it.

Also, speaking of Alan Walker, I'm very annoyed that I got really into EDM last year after the festival season and then this whole year is cancelled. At least I got to go see Illenium that massive three-day weekend last November.

I wonder when I'll get to do one of those again?

I made these last year at some point as a test of my ability to bake with matcha, and now that we're all stuck in germ jail and baking is apparently the new hotness, I wanted to try it again. The recipe is here, if you're curious, and while they're called green tea cookies, they're really a bit more like shortbread than cookies, buttery and crumbly. I used some of my culinary matcha and added some ceremonial matcha to even it out--there's no formal division between them, it's just that culinary matcha is usually worse quality--added water one tablespoon at a time when the dough wouldn't mix properly, and then left it overnight in the fridge. When I baked them, I forgot to leave one batch on the sheet to cool, so they were a bit more crumbly than they should have been, but they were still good. I should know, because I ate half-a-dozen to test them out.

I took the remainder, packed them up in tupperware with a note I wrote that said 隔離で抹茶クッキーを楽しましょう ("Enjoy matcha cookies in quarantine!"), and then went off to St. Boniface Cemetery for a walk with worldbshiny. We walked around the cemetery a couple times, which was almost empty even with the beautiful weather, mostly talking about things other than the Plague Year even with the enormous amount of conceptual space it holds in our lives, and when our time was done I walked with her over to Mariano's so she could do some shopping, where I left her with a pack of cookies and continued on my way. I dropped further cookies off with britshlez and lisekatevans before coming home for dinner.

The rye bread grilled cheese I made with spruce-aged Upland Farms Rush Creek Reserve were delicious; the $5 tomato basil soup in a box I bought at Jewel tasted like hot water. Let this be a lesson unto you all.

Hey, I own a home, so it's safe for me to eat avocado toast!

The same Jewel trip where I bought that watery soup, they also had avocados for 60% off, so I bought a couple and set them in my veggie bowl on the island. And since avocados have a short period of time before they turned to mush, I knew I'd have to use them for something. So the next day I bought rye bread, toasted it, sliced up the avocado, and made a delicious avocado toast!

I used to scoff at the idea of avocado toast not because I thought it was overpriced, or because it was trendy, but because I wasn't a big fan of avocados due to the texture. Somehow that changed in the last couple of years, or maybe I just had a bad avocado experience before and it stuck with me, but regardless, I've bought the occasional avocado since then and always to make avocado toast. Done well, it's delicious! Egg on toast is already really good, and adding the avocado gives it extra body. I had it with asparagus--pan-roasted this time, after meadowyravine told me she was horrified that I'd just throw asparagus in the microwave under a wet paper towel instead of properly cooking it--and coconut yogurt for dessert and it was all so good I'm going to do it again for lunch tomorrow.


And that, other than the first half of the streamed radio drama performance of Shaw's The Philanderer that worldbshiny did Foley work on but which I don't have a picture for, was my weekend! I hope everyone has a good week!