Post The Fourth: In Which Yummy Secrets Are Revealed

  Well after yesterday's morbidly bitter dose of melancholic ranting I think we could all use something a little more on the sweet (if woefully bad for you) side! That's right all - it's time for our first and gods willing not last edition of  -

COOKING WITH ENDIRY! ( Endiry not liable for fires or heart failure)

Well here goes! The following recipes are both huge hits around my house and pretty easy to make (as in pretty hard to screw up)! First I'll be teaching you lovely folks to make my wonderful sweet cranberry corn bread, and then I'll be sharing my tea and chocolate cookie creations the I swear are simply to die for! Ready? Okay.

Izzy's Sweet Cranberry Cornbread

for the cranberries (optional really, even without them this recipe makes lovely sweet and fluffy cornbread)

ingredients:

• 1 1/2 or 2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries
• 3 tablespoons sugar (I use brown sugar as a personal preference though it probably doesn't matter that much)
• a pinch of ground cinnamon and cloves (optional)
• water or cranberry juice as needed (see below)

Finely chop the cranberries into small pieces - quarters or even eighths if you have the patience - and put them in a smallish bowl. add in the sugar and spices and enough water or juice to submerge all the berry bits and mix well. Let this mixture sit for about an hour - the longer you wait, the more the berries will soak up the sugar and spices and the sweeter they'll be.

for the cornbread

ingredients:

• 3 cups all purpose flour
• 2/3 cups white sugar
• 2/3 cups brown sugar (again a personal preference, feel free to substitute white sugar if desired)
• 1 cup yellow cornmeal
• 2 tablespoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 1/2 cups milk
• 4 large eggs, beaten
• 2/3 cup vegetable oil
• 6 tablespoons of melted butter

Once you've let your berries soak for long enough, go ahead and preheat the oven to 350degrees f. Mix together all the dry ingredients in a large bowl before adding the milk, oil, egg, and butter. Mix well. Next you're going to want to strain the cranberries from their bowl  (possibly several times if they've been soaking longer) since you don't want to add too much of the juice in the mix. Add them to the batter and stir well, then pour into a 16inch baking pan. bake it for 35 to 40 minutes. Let it cool a bit, slice it up, and enjoy!!

Izzy's Tea Cookie Chocolate Sandwiches

ingredients:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 cup white sugar
• a pinch of salt
• 3-5 teabags worth of tea, finely ground (black teas work best I've found, but experiment! find what you like!) 
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• a dash of milk or cream
• 1 cup butter, melted

• half a bag or so of semisweet chocolate chips

(I also added the tiniest bit of caraway and aniseed - sort of a family tradition. "Caraway for the devils, aniseed for the angels" like I was told, but both are an acquired taste so be warned.)

In a large bowl mix the dry ingredients well before adding the rest. Stir till the dough no longer sticks to the sides of the bowl. Lay down wax paper and shape into one or two long logs and freeze for at least an hour. Once the dough is hard enough to start slicing preheat the oven to 375degrees f. Start slicing cookies as thin as possible, placing on foil - covered cookie sheets (I usually rotate between 3 cookie sheets - while one's in the oven and one's cooling, I keep placing more cookies on the third.) Bake each batch for  5-10 minutes (keep a very close eye on them - they like to burn quickly!!!!!) and let them cool for about five before moving them to cool. Once you've baked all the cookies the fun starts.

Take the chocolate chips and melt them, making sure to check on them and stir as you do (something I wish I'd known the first time!) Once completely liquid, start spreading a thin layer of chocolate on a cookie, and sandwiche it together with another cookie, or if you'd prefer, simply edge each individual cookie with the chocolate for a slightly lighter treat. Either way finish and put your magnificent creations in the fridge to cool for a bit before serving. 

   And there you have it, loves. Two of my favorite recipes, a gift from yours truly to anyone out their with the patience to put up with me and read this!

Post Not-Quite-The-Third-But-Who's-Counting: Memento Mori

   Hello once more fellow lurkers of the wee hours and haunters of late night loneliness. Oddly enough when I'm not looking for more recipes for tea cookies or Finnish pulla; when I'm not rummaging about looking for some particular project I've just remembered from months ago; when I'm not playing the lute or crocheting up some new monstrosity - I guess I should put it simply and say "when I'm not keeping myself busy enough," my mind wanders. It can wander down many paths, some pleasant, most....not. Mine is a mind riddled with traps and pitfalls and treacherous neural footing along many pathways, even some of the most well trodden (perhaps them especially), that can snare my unwary consciousness in the morose quagmire of bitter memories, regrets, and all around depression. If I'm not careful I can find myself lost in its labyrinthine depths for weeks, feeling myself shrinking ever smaller as its ghostly monolithic walls slowly creep up around me, choking me, crushing my will to exist. Eventually I remember my way out, or in most cases nowadays I'm rescued by my Nathan, or by one of my other wonderful friends. Without them I may never have made it out, and I owe them my life at the very least.

   But more to the point. So as some of you may know, I lost someone incredibly dear to me a few years back. Actually I lost several somebodies, three to themselves, others to drugs (whether or not it was intentional, I'll never know), and others simply disappeared. We all came from bitter backgrounds,  shared a rather melancholic nature, shunned and were shunned by most (as gauchely cliche as it sounds) and  I'm sure these are the things that held us together as a group while it tore us apart one by one. What I'm trying to get at is loss, and lots it. More than someone of a mere twenty years ought to know. It become a part of me so thoroughly that I cannot look at something without realizing it's fragility, it's impermanence. I can't look at a friend without picturing their corpse, a city without seeing it as ruins, the world without knowing it must one day end. I can't even look at my beloved Miette, my precious little tortie kitten without the knowledge of her impending mortality biting at the corners of my eyes. This morbid tendency was something I would fight and fight for years. Even as a very small child I knew of death and it's inescapable finality. I wondered why my parents would so cruelly create something they knew would simply be destroyed one day. I knew that everything I did would be as forgotten as the innumerable majority of mankind who vanishes into obscurity within a generation or less. These realizations filled me with a a maelstrom of agonizing feelings - anger, terror, hopelessness - things no child should know.

   The loss of that special someone I mentioned cemented these feelings, put a face on that abstract heap of bad thoughts and etched its wretched mark on my mind and heart forever. I did things I regret, but it's the things I didn't do I regret the most. They're the things that always revisit me, pursue my empty thoughts and dreams like the Furies, chastening me, raking my soul over bitter coals and visiting upon me hells the likes of which the Old Testament would have been proud of. They're those nasty whispers that sometimes creep from the back of my head as I try to sleep.

   Walking around with these monsters eating at your heart and mind kills you slowly and painfully. I'd also like to take this moment to mention that I divulge all this not looking for pity, but rather to give context to what I'm about to go into - the beauty of loss. The incredible, awe-inspiring, all-around-you-all-the-time beauty that only tremendous loss seems to reveal. There's a certain aesthetic appeal in skeletons and trees in winter - in things that have had  everything stripped from them, revealing the stark and honest beauty of itself. As there is a beauty in these physical things, these ugly things, there is a joy in bitter loss. There are things beyond any words of my humble knowledge that only those who have lost can know. They show up in the smiles of widows, the laughter at wakes - a sort of poignant truth, a richer, fuller emotion than either joy or grief in their own right could ever be. It's odd but telling stories about our exploits and hijinks makes me laugh twice as hard now she's gone. It's more than a deeper appreciation - it's something I can't put words to, and doubt I'll ever be able to even if I were to live to see ninety.

   This overwhelming beauty in everything, the fleetingness that makes life that much more precious, the knowledge of being damned if you do or don't - those are what let me chase off the Furies of my regrets. They're the thoughts that pick me up as I'm being crushed by the looming walls of depression, the wings that fly me over the morass of woe-mongering and hopelessness that those foul recesses of my mind try to catch me in. They, along with all the other wonderful things and people in my life are what keep me going, what let me hope, what make me know that I will one day face death serenely and not fear it nor go rushing headlong for it. They are the blessing laid upon the curse of mortality, and for them, for that beauty, that fleetingness, and all the people alive and dead and yet to be born who loved, love, may one day love me, I am grateful.

Drink Me

pencil on sketch paper, drawn sometime last year or so

found poetic fragment

In his eyes you could see
He was lost in the night,
You could see that he'd been
At the end of all things,
And when a man goes
To that edge of the night,
He must leave behind
A part of himself
That he never knew he had.

So all that is left for him
Is to dwell forever,
A shade among shades
In the whispering night,
To wander without reason
Through that blackened library
Of all endings, justified by no means,
No eyes to weep, no voice to scream
To the unhearing starless skies,
The dead night of dead worlds.



found in a box of old sketches I was giong through last night

The Beauty of Ugliness, The Liveliness of Death

pen on sketch paper, drawn sometime around April or May

Post The Second: In Which I Bitch About Things And Think About Lunch

   Hello again internet (and a gracious thank you to a certain Theo as my first and hopefully not last follower) on this fine Sunday. Nathan and Artemus have gone to their job as singers at a church and I'm sitting in the back room next to Stella in the spot on the bed I managed to usurp from Jerry, staring at the celery and wishing it would chop itself for tuna salad. Anyways, yesterday was the day I had dreaded for about a month or two as the day Nathan and friends had decided to go to the Renaissance Festival in costumes which I had been so kindly "asked" to provide and had of course put off making until the night before. I finished around 7 or 8-ish something in the morning and finally broke down and decided to go myself despite having sworn I wouldn't this year. I actually had a pretty fun time for the most part despite being the only one out of costume (a strange reversal of norms) and of course I didn't get to do the kind of shopping I would have liked. I did wind up getting a pair of lovely troll ears made to match my skin and everything - they looked AMAZING! It was all going wonderfully until the end when poor Arte ran into his parents.

   I should explain - there's some rather nasty history there I won't go into and wouldn't know half of even if I did since the poor dear doesn't speak of it much. All I'll say is it must've been ghastly enough for him to move here of his own accord. Jokes aside though I felt utterly terrible for him - I still do. Making matters worse is the fact that I can never seem to say the right things around him - it's like my brain turns to jelly and all I manage to do is guffaw and spout idiotic catchphrases and the like. I wish I knew how to tell him that I really do care about him, that he's family to me. I wish I could explain myself to him sometimes, or that I knew what he was thinking and knew how to comfort him. I love him - something I do not say lightly - and I wish I knew how to say it without making it some awkward nightmare or making him miserable or uncomfortable.

   Truth be told he reminds me a lot of myself when I first managed to get away from my mother, when I first moved in with Nathan. I was 16, sick, practically shell-shocked. It took me years before I learned to trust people, before I realized that not everyone was only looking out for themselves. It took me so long to realize that his family really cared about me, that I was allowed to be human, allowed to be happy. I remember spending much of my first year in silent dread, wondering when they would've had enough of me, when they were going to kick me out on the street, or send me back to my mum's. I barely spoke to anyone, ate either nothing or too much, slept only about 3 hours a night. Being around my mum would make me physically ill to the point I'd often throw up.

   Seeing the look on Arte's face when he saw his parents reminded me of that feeling - that confusing, twisting, gut-wrenching tangle of miserable emotions ranging from hatred and fury to self-loathing guilt. I'd have given anything to spare him from that. Anything. He was silent the whole ride home until Nathan and James had stopped for something at a Walgreens. I tried to talk to him and found out that it was his mother's birthday making matters even more painful. I wish I'd known how to respond, what to say if anything even could be said. If he didn't hate physical contact so much (someting else I remember from my less than happy past) I would have hugged the bastard till he couldn't breathe. Instead we sat in a bitter awkward silence until the others came back.

   Other than that life's been good since Friday or Thursday or whenever it was I last posted. I was supposed to get my ears pierced today but my mum (who I've been trying to get along with once more) is sick and so I have no ride or money. I suppose that's nearly everything for now, and lunch is nearly ready so I believe I shall bid you all good day and enjoy some tuna sandwiches while watching Battlestar Galactica. Tschüs!

Greetings!

   Hello people of the internet. I guess I should go ahead and do a bit of introduction seeing as this is my first post. I am Endiry. I am femaleish. I am 20, marriedish, and running out of things to say about my self. Hmm. I'm part English, German, Swedish, and Algerian (something few people would guess), I like cardamom in my coffee and caraway in my tea. I love baking and made some delicious tea cookies yesterday, which were quickly devoured. I currently lack a computer and thus am forced to rely upon my out-dated ipod touch in all of my dealings with the world-wide web. I am currently looking for a goat to give to my father as a 'brideprice' to see if that'll finally get him to talk to me. I have a kitty in my lap and half a toasted turkey sandwich near my left elbow. Oh, and I find the very fact that I can express these things to you with nothing more than 30 or so repeating shapes on the other side of the planet completely awe-inspiring. 

   The written language - this is one of man's greatest treasures and here I sit prattling on about cats and ipods and spices in drinks. The ability to read little squiggles of letters and compose them into words in our brain, the way someone with enough talent can transfer thought from their mind to others, the incredible way we can take an abstract sound and give it meaning, not just to ourselves but to others, to millions - it's beyond astounding. Human beings fascinate me. The way they interact, communicate, create, the ways they have found to express their thoughts -  hell, the fact that we're capable of thought - it's one of those realizations that really fills me with a deep admiration for our species, as well as a faint regret that I could never learn everything there is to know about us, even if I lived to be a thousand.

   The stunning complexity of man, the mystery of him and his creations, these things are the things that haunt me at this 4:30 in the afternoon, as I sit here with half-sandwich forgotten, and cat purring away in my lap. These are the basic things whose facets I ponder endlessly everyday at the back of my mind as I make my tea with caraway, or coffee with cardamom. These are the things that spark so many questions without answers in reach as I make my cookies or turn-overs, as I crochet my blanket or watch my shows. These are the thoughts that form the backdrop of my life, and my perception of the world around me. I am Endiry, I am human, I am hopelessly rambling, and I am pleased to meet you all.