AAAAAAAAAAAUGH*
They’re sending me another set of galleys.**
Remember I told you they’re reissuing SUNSHINE?*** I hadn’t realised they were resetting it . . . although they may not be. One of the little mysteries of the printing process is that merely LIFTING a set of pages from the drawer equivalent and laying them on the worktable equivalent to create a new edition with may somehow draw brand-new typos and other bewitching errors out of the swirling perilous publishing ether, I don’t know, I guess like foxgloves attract bees and hellhounds attract dirt and mayhem and too much magic attracts thunderstorms and earthquakes.†
So any minute now there’s going to be a another thump at the cottage threshold and it’s going to be SUNSHINE.
And meanwhile this is me, having hysterics in the corner.
+ + +
Speaking of comfort food, which I should be, and of sorbet, sherbet and ice cream, which we have been, and of posting old favourite recipes that I can no longer eat because of dairy or some other banned substance, which I said Playing with Your Food was going to give me the excuse to do, I give you:
The Butterscotch Sauce. There Is No Other.
½ c thin/single cream
1 c dark brown sugar††
1 tsp vanilla
three grains to a pinch of salt
2 T butter
Cook cream and butter gently in a bain marie/double boiler half an hour, stirring occasionally. Add other ingredients and stir well. Chill and then beat well. It gets all lovely and gudgy and thick. . . .
My addendum from thirty years ago reads: If this lasts long, you’re sick.
I have no idea where the recipe came from originally. It was given to me by the admirable woman who used to make it for me every time I fetched up on her threshold†††. For civilised behaviour’s sake you glop it over ice cream–or cake; it’s glorious over spice cake or gingerbread–I am/was quite capable of going after it naked with a spoon.‡ The week/fortnight I’m having I may do it again, and if my digestion kills me, then I won’t have to read proofs.‡‡
* * *
* The General All Purpose Cry of Anguish Header. I’ve used it before. I will use it again. Life is like that. Okay, my life is like that.
** Or page proofs. I’ve been thirty years in this business and I still don’t use the jargon correctly. As far as I’m concerned, I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it. It’s typeset pages with my words on them and I have to read them.
*** With a woman in a red dress chained to a wall on the cover. Sigh. I’m told this will sell. Well, I like the wall.
† True. Ask any working mage. And a real nuisance it is too.
†† Wimps may prefer light brown. Feh.
††† Probably also with a thump.
‡ You can read that any way you like. This is a very intense and passionate butterscotch sauce.
‡‡ Oh–no–bother it, I have quite a few books to finish before anything kills me.
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I have consulted my printing-press operator husband and says they’ll only have to reset things if the publisher requests a change, otherwise they should have everything on their PC or film, assuming they’re going with the same printers.
*shrug*
Publishers sound so cruel with their galleys and page proofs!
He’s being logical and sensible. He does not work in book publishing. Am I right? (If he DOES work in book publishing, tell me WHERE. I will ask Merrilee to move me there at ONCE.)
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No, not in publishing, sorry. His company is quite evil enough! (I’ll email you the name if you like, and the standard rant that goes along with how much I loathe them. But the ferrets do need to eat.) I’m not sure who does printing for Ace and all, but his company does stuff for Harper Collins and the last Harry Potter book. (At least. They might have done the others before they bought Jeff’s old company.) They’re pretty big.
Jeff’s machine tends to print smaller runs. Boring tax stuff and some textbooks. He’s just the guy who makes sure the plates are set, the ink’s there, the rolls of paper are on right, and a bunch of other stuff I won’t pretend to understand. :)
I ALWAYS love a good rant. :)
I know moderation doesn’t work with sauces of this kind. I am lucky in that I like most of my things naked (take that as you like it), so icing and butterscotch don’t do it for me…
Chocolate sauce has to be bitter, as do raspberry coulis and balsamic reduction (goes particularly well with strawberry sorbet). But that pretty much sums up my sauces. I will take chopped toasted/roasted nuts as well.
LOL! I *prefer* my butterscotch sauce . . . as soup! I don’t much want to mess it around with cake! If I want cake I’ll have CAKE!
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And see: short entry: we aren’t dead yet, nor threatening you. Way to go Robin!
Sounds like a time for head-down-tail-up!
Thanks for the butterscotch sauce recipe. mmmmmmm I think that will be very nice over my caramel mud cake. Thankfully they have started selling DARK brown suagr again (it went off the shelves for over a year after a cyclone hit the sugarcane areas.)
Well you can make your own with a little molasses.
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Yeah I know… but that is more *work* ;) I think I added treacle to one particular recipe that *needed* that dark brown sugar. Hehe.
*Work?* Throwing in one or a few T of molasses???
I’m not sure where this one came from–it always tastes a bit odd to me, but I can attest that some people really love it! My husband works for a spice/seasoning company, so I’m always looking for new recipes that contain lots of spice.
CURRY AND CARDAMOM COOKIES
1 cup butter or margarine
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons curry powder (sweet, rather than hot)
½ teaspoon cardamom
1 ½ cups chopped walnuts or pecans
Cream butter and brown sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat until incorporated. Sift dry ingredients together. Add to creamed mixture, a third at a time. Stir in nuts. Divide dough into four rolls and wrap each in waxed paper. Refrigerate at least 4 hours (may also be frozen). Slice into quarter-inch slices and place on ungreased baking sheet. Bake in preheated 350°F oven until golden (12 to 14 minutes). Let cookies cool 2 minutes on baking sheet, then remove to racks and cool. Yields six dozen.
Hmm. This is an experimenter. ‘Curry powder’ can be almost anything. I like cardamom and coriander in sweet things, not so much turmeric and cumin. And that’s only the beginning.
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Ha! Another reason to stop telling us to kill you–you have BOOKS to finish! How wonderful. More books. :)
YOu guys sound JUST like Peter. He’s always refusing to kill me too.
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Remember: we LIKE you. All of us. And Mr. Dickinson is kind of your husband. Generally speaking, loving husbands like to keep their wives for as long as possible.
Yes. How very odd. :)
Okay, if that’s the way you want to think about it, we’re only refraining from carrying out your wishes because we like you for your BOOKS.
But remember that it’s NOT TRUE.
You are VERY PERSISTENT, aren’t you? Any bulldog in your ancestry? :)
No, and I’m probably not French either. Though I could be.
I’m as stubborn as Microsoft Word, how is that?
Is thin/single cream what we call light cream here in America?
Sounds right. It’s the bottom end of the cream range without being half and half. I might add however that the original recipe is American and calls for ‘thin’ cream.
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As someone who doesn’t digest cream very well, I have to mention the Swiss obscenity that is triple cream. They measure its goodness by whether a wooden spoon will stand upright in it. However the pain is worth it (as are the clogged arteries) if you can have it with freshly gathered fruits of the forrest and wild strawberries.
How do they make it? It sounds like the English clotted cream. Which will hold a spoon.
I have no idea at all. Very Swiss – secretive and full fat. And then there are the chocolates (I avert my gaze with pain). Luckily it is now so hot here (forty degrees yesterday) and my apartment bakes in the sun all day, that chocolate only sounds exciting in ice cream form. But the Triplezahn, I’ve had it three times, I will remember it always, but luckily I can’t get my hands on it here. Swedish Brunette will have to give you her take on it.
I wonder why it’s called Butterscotch. I understand the butter part, but not so much the scotch. I looked it up in my favorite online etymology dictionary (okay, you got me, I have a linguistics degree) but there were no entries. Also, I ordered a big ole stack of Sunshine and Chalice for my store. I know how much you hate the logistics of it all, but I assure you my customers appreciate your work!
I don’t hate ANY logistics that sells books. :)
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Thanks for this recipe, which contains NO CORN SYRUP. When I was young, my mother used occasionally to make something similar–it was referred to in our house as “gunk” and was eaten on toast, as one might eat maple butter, and maybe on waffles or even ice cream–it’s been a long LONG time. She stopped making it by the time I was a teen-ager–maybe because the dentist started looming and those were the days before anyone had dental insurance.
Referring to Susan from Athens’ comment–I’ve made strawberries in red wine and had balsamic vinegar on top of vanilla ice cream (actually quite good) but have not had balsamic with strawberries. Ours should be in soon, I will have to try it.
Try the good stuff. The older it is the better and you only need a drop of the good balsamic vinegar (i.e. twenty years or more – a hundred year old stuff is divine and worth its weight in gold). If you only have the cheaper stuff available reduce it by boiling it down (it only takes a very short time for the quantity you will need).
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“With a woman in a red dress chained to a wall on the cover. Sigh. I’m told this will sell. Well, I like the wall.”
—- This made me laugh fairly hard because it reminded me of a movie I saw once with a very annoying sex scene. The one detail that really stands out in my mind is the lamp on the nightstand next to the bed where things were happening; I focused on that lamp so fiercely that it’s one of my strongest memories from the movie.
“One of the little mysteries of the printing process is that merely LIFTING a set of pages from the drawer equivalent and laying them on the worktable equivalent to create a new edition with may somehow draw brand-new typos and other bewitching errors out of the swirling perilous publishing ether,”
—– Sometimes I think that all you have to do is leave typos alone in a dark corner, and they’ll start reproducing. Sort of like dirty dishes. And with annoyingly short gestation periods.
Yay on managing a short entry! And I’m excited about the butterscotch. I’ve always liked the idea of butterscotch, but have generally only had the cheap store-bought kind (you know, that comes out of a squeeze bottle and shows up at birthday parties and such). What is thin/single cream?
Some useless confusing rabble concerning books…
I was perusing books on Amazon (always dangerous), and after getting caught in endless loops, I decided to look at the “recomended books” based on what I had bought, already owned, etc. Based on the fact that I owned Sunshine, a book called Firethorn was recomended to me. I looked through the page, got the usual vague drabble about the book, and went to look at the reviews. Big mistake. I don’t know when the last time that I read such conflicting views on a singular novel; everything from the amount of sex to the brutality to the “realism” and romance. I was utterly perplexed.
So, as in times of confusion, I went back to the page of my beloved Sunshine, to see what people had said about it (her). Here was an even more extreme case of conflicting reviews. While trying to restrain myself from wanting to rip these people (knocking Sunshine? WHAT were these ppl ON?) a collective new one, I read what some of the “problems with it were”, and got even more confused.
I’m really not sure where any of this is going, except to say that if that is the kind of “betraying your audience”, why haven’t you written 13 sequels, I’m so offended sh** you get, you have a not so distant relative who is a saint. I wondered if some of these people even READ the book. And, being thouroughly dejected at the current state of the human population, decided to come here and make sure to tell you that there are (not only a few) people who love your creations exactly BECAUSE they have heroines who are freaked out bundles of raw nerves, lots of loose ends and mysteries, and endings that may or may not be the “norm”. *sigh* So, my “what did you do to help the population today” is going to be to get Firethorn and read it myself, rather than rely on the not-to-be-relied-on general public.
*sheepish look* sorry, this vent got rather long… =S
Well, have you found out yet that I wrote a *plug* for FIRETHORN? I write plugs about once every twenty years. I think it’s a gorgeous, fascinating book . . . but it’s bleak as *hell*, and if your feminism is of the straight and narrow type, it will make you nuts. I was a little bothered myself about just *how* . . . well, you’ll see. But I think she gets away with it because she’s set up a very real world. And she can, you know, *write*. I’ll forgive a lot to someone who can ACTUALLY WRITE. This is why I am such an evil cow of a reader, generally, I CANNOT overlook Absence of Style, Words that Go Clunk in the Night.
And one, or another, of my pet peeves is readers who damn you for not writing the book THEY wanted to read, and failing to read the book you DID write. On my SOON TO BE BEAUTIFULLY REORGANISED AND TIDIED UP web site there’s an imaginary interview, in which the answer to the question, what single thing would most improve the quality of your life, I answer, that readers would learn the difference between this book didn’t work for me and this book sucks dead bears. . . . And I’ll add to that a pet peeve about readers who DEMAND EVERY DETAIL (or are mad at you for failing to provide it) without realising that if you nail something to the wall, you KILL it.
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Hmm, that makes sense that it was recomended to me then. As soon as I either get a paycheck or convince some family member that Christmas came early, or happen to find it in my library (not likely =P) I will get around to reading it. If I decide I don’t like it, I’ll go back and read Sunshine for the umpteen gadjillionth time. Or another comfort book, which will most likely have jittery raw-nerved female protagonists and creepy not-human, not-ALIVE, erm, “problems”.
Words that go clunk in the night *twitchspaz*. I like that… it’s how I feel most everytime I have to read other ppls papers in English class, and you want to think “how are you in COLLEGE?”
“This is why I am such an evil cow of a reader, generally, I CANNOT overlook Absence of Style, Words that Go Clunk in the Night.”
YES. And I can think of quite a few Very Published people whose prose I find completely unreadable. (You have to wonder about their editors . . .) One of the plusses of the physical bricks-and-mortar bookstore is that the buyer can skim a book and discover this before shelling out for it.
Well, their editors are thinking ‘best seller’. I understand the desire for trash/fluff/brain bubblegum but I DON’T understand being deaf and blind to style. (The world needs more Georgette Heyers.) I think Dan Brown is unreadable for example, but he’s laughing all the way to the bank, so I’m telling Pollyanna to get stuffed (briefly).
At the rate you’re going, for the next census, you can give your occupation as ‘galley slave’ …
“The Butterscotch Sauce. There Is No Other.”
You do realise that I’m going to have to throw caution to the wind and buy a new double-boiler saucepan now! I can’t not make this one. You have a lot to answer for, woman!
However, by way of a low-cal counter-balance, how about a Salad Elona?
One medium cucumber (preferably a fairly thin one, so the seeds aren’t developed too much)
1 1b good ripe-but-still-firm strawberries
1 T white wine vinegar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Peel and thinly slice the cucumber. Wash, hull and thinly slice the strawberries (aiming for the same thickness slices as the cucumber). Arrange the slices of cucumber and strawberry in pretty alternate overlapping circles on a flat serving plate and sprinkle with the white wine vinegar. Season to taste with a little salt and pepper. Chill for an hour before serving.
When I first saw this in a book, many moons ago, I thought what a strange – but beautiful – mix it was. However, it is really delicious and goes very well with cold salmon or chicken in particular.
You have a lot to answer for, woman!
******** Mwa ha ha ha ha. :)
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I will have to try the butterscotch sauce. Yum.
Stupid question, printing presses are still set??? It’s not digital?
Happy Solstice!
I think jmeadows’ husband works in a proper printing press? –But no, it IS all digital in big corporate book publishing any more, which therefore makes even LESS excuse.
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The way I understand it, a machine burns images of the words onto metal plates, and when the printing press guys are ready, the plates stuck on the presses and loaded with ink for when the paper comes flying by. (Nightmare papercuts!)
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Martial art papercuts! :)
******** So any minute now there’s going to be a another thump at the cottage threshold and it’s going to be SUNSHINE.
dum dum DAAAAH!
Through the locked door our heroine hears the villain approach;
fotsteps slow, and then silence – her nerves stretched to breaking point she listened intently to the silence and then…
THUMP!
It was the sign of the black galley, a thing that could neither be fought nor fled. She knew at that moment her doom was sealed.
(Sorry! Couldn’t resist! Apologies to Robert LS/Treasure Island!)
******** And meanwhile this is me, having hysterics in the corner.
Noooo! I love ALL your books. I am already signed up for Chalice and Sunshine (again) and I don’t care about the cover – well, alright, I’d let the girl go – but your books are pretty much perfect and my only wish would be that you could write more!!!
Any support you need, moral, immoral or cyber is yours. Just keep looking after yourself and use your time as you see best.
And pleeeease don’t have any more hysterics (and if you REALLY need to have them – make it out in a field or a bluebell wood, somewhere where it is extremely refreshing to just let rip! You’ll feel much more refreshed than in a corner, honestly :) )
my only wish would be that you could write more!!!
******* So do I, you know . . .
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Would posting a sugar free version of your Butterscotch be alright?
You can’t–it won’t be ‘my’ butterscotch any more. You’re welcome to try to invent *a* sugar free butterscotch, but I’m dubious . . . my ban on ugly chemicals includes most if not all the sugar substitutes.
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I use Agave Nectar, which is of course, from the Agave or Century plant. When fermented, it becomes Tequila. When not fermented, it is a lovely syrup, sweeter than sugar. It doesn’t affect energy levels as is doesn’t absorb into one’s bloodstream as quickly or sugar or honey. There is some evidence that it actually evens out blood sugar levels, although I’m fairly sure the sugar crane growers lobby has shut them down. Anyway, I agree with you, chemicals are bad. Especially sucrolose. Foul stuff.
I think I’ve heard of it, but that’s about all. There are so MANY of them . . . and so many of them ARE foul stuff. Including several that were originally heralded as the healthy answer to sugar.
” *** With a woman in a red dress chained to a wall on the cover. Sigh. I’m told this will sell. Well, I like the wall.”
I take it this is the front cover, and not the author portrait on the back… ;-)
Snork!
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Can I just clarify something? It’s the cream and the *butter* you cook together first? Not the cream and the brown sugar?