The simplest answer is that I’ve just become lazy. Posting blog entries has just felt like work for the longest time. And the longer one goes, the harder it is to catch one up. Like the latest on my vitiligo, for instance. It got horrible this year, all over my face, face is now repigmented, but arms and hands are bad, trying to solve this through diet–oh, and my fabulous doctor tested me for the MTHFR gene, and it turns out that I don’t properly methylate folate. There’s the brief rundown, but the problem is that I really don’t want to talk about it. And I feel like I should, just because by far the most hits on this site come from people with vitiligo looking for answers.

In other words, somewhere along the line the blog started to feel like an obligation. It stopped being fun.

But there’s something more, too. I started this thing at the tail end of 2004. While I am by no means a blogging pioneer, it’s fair to say that I was an early adopter. There was something magical about hitting POST at the end of a piece and watching it go live instantly. One didn’t know anything beyond basic stats. Who was reading it? Did anyone really care? It didn’t matter; that was, to me, part of the magic. It was about having a voice that was there for anyone who wanted to hear it.

These days, the interwebz is teeming with voices. They assault you when you land on a badly written eHow page looking for information. They attack you with completely meaningless information in status updates. They repeatedly punch you in the nose with the regularity of machine gunfire–TWEET! TWEET! TWEET!
I’m not discounting the incredible things that thoughtfully-used technology can do (like wikipedia, harnessing crowdsourcing to search for the tomb of Genghis Khan, and a whole host of other things). Information is great. The problem is that there’s far too much unedited information out there. And I started wondering how much I was contributing to it.

The simple fact is that blogging is an exercise in narcissism. I’m okay with that. In fact, I would argue that this narcissism is essential to the arts in general. You can’t create and disseminate without overcoming self-consciousness. Actually, I struggle with this in my own writing: For me, it’s not so much a question of, “Is it good enough?”–though that of course is always present–as it is of asking, “Does anyone really care?” And with traditional forms of self-expression designed for a mass audience, there’s an external check. An opinion piece sent to the local paper is published–or not. A call in to an NPR radio program is accepted by the screener–or not. A novel sent in to a publisher is purchased–or not. A blog post, a tweet, a Facebook update … none of those have external checks. It’s all ranked at the same level. And as a result, we’re drowing in a sea of opinions and worthless information.

Mine included.

Now this is not to say that I might not start blogging again. I just might.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t because I feel compelled to add:

I had signed up for another Facebook account because there were people I wanted to get back in touch with. But you know, reconnecting and Farmtown (yes, Farmtown, isn’t that pathetic?) just aren’t enough to make me want to deal with Facebook anymore. I’m pretty easy to find and don’t really need more ways to procrastinate.

I don’t want to have to fiddle with my privacy settings all the time. I’m tired of people I know who just happen to be conservative suggest I join the “Stop giving welfare to illegal immigrants” group. And I really don’t care what someone had for breakfast/lunch/dinner and how delish/yummy/nom nom it was. No offense. I know, I know, it’s a great way to connect, share pictures, blah blah. I just can’t find enough oomph to care. The fact is, all this social networking weirds me out a bit, and it’s pretty ironic that the bigger a reach my blog has (that wordpress-twitter-facebook integration), the more constrained I feel about posting anything real–i.e., not about chickens.

So for all those facebookers out there, enjoy it and have fun. You know where to find me.

It is a very odd-looking little egg. Here it is, in all its bullet-shaped glory:

And it’s so tiny that it barely registers on the egg scale:

And this plant hanger:

A hook for my closet:

And two hooks for the bathroom:

And then, of course, there is the Japanese gate that he just built, modeled off the one at Kubota Garden:

With two very cool hinges and a latch:

He had originally wanted to do a marble top for it, but decided to see if he could do something that looked like marble in concrete. I think it looks pretty cool–and we’ve both agreed that it looks like a Holstein:

It looked like a tongue when I threw it in the pot and simmered it for a couple of hours. It looked like a tongue after I took it out and sliced the base off to give to the chickens (they didn’t care). It looked like a tongue when I peeled the tough tough membrane off it, which was totally weird; it just sort of peeled off in these almost plasticky sheets. And it looked like a tongue after it was peeled and placed in a backing dish with some mustard, apples, and onions. There were still taste buds on the inner membrane. We cooked it, and it still looked like a tongue when we put it on the table and sliced it.

But when you cut into it, the meat looks like beef, and it was tender and delicious. I personally felt the need to peel the inner membrane off entirely because I just couldn’t get over the taste buds. If you didn’t know it was tongue, you’d have no idea. Well, except for Geoff, who came over for dinner and not only raved about how much he liked tongue, but snagged the tip. “It’s the tenderest bit,” he explained.

So will I do it again? Yes. But I think I would bake it using a different recipe. I had assumed we had horseradish, because who doesn’t have a jar hanging out in the back of the fridge? We didn’t. So it was a little bland.

And there you have it.

Now my grandmother used to cook tongue all the time. I remember it as being very tender and tasty. I never really thought about it that much, probably because it generally appeared on my plate already sliced and smeared with horseradish. But this … this hunk of tongue. Any recipe entails boiling it and then peeling the skin off it. It’s been taunting me from the freezer.

Well.

Last night, I pulled it out out the freezer and stuck it in the fridge This morning, Steve took the Pyrex dish out of the fridge and onto the counter because it wasn’t thawed. We stared at it wordlessly. Finally, he broke the silence. “I’ll eat anything,” he said. “But I have to tell you. I’m not really looking forward to dinner tonight.”

The thing is, a tongue is a tongue is a tongue. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from a pig, a cow, or a human. They all look the same. (Except of course for size, which led to some fairly ribald comments as we were contemplating it.) But I tell myself: How is it any worse to eat tongue when we eat other meat? The only difference is that it’s more easily recognizable for what it is. When I was 10 or 11, I went out to a fancy dinner with some relatives and ordered sweetbreads off the menu. To be totally honest, all that was going through my head was, “WOW! I like this place–you can have COFFEE CAKE or DONUTS as DINNER!” So yeah, I pretty disappointed when I got some meat in a buttery sauce. It was pretty good. But it wasn’t CAKE. Later on, my great aunt told me what sweetbreads really were. I just shrugged. It was okay.

I’m hoping the tongue is like that.

So here I go ….

“Zia, can you show me where those cake pans are?” Steve asked. “You know, the ones that have the sides and bottom that separate?”

“You mean a springform pan?”

“Yes, that. Where are they?”

“Why?” I asked suspiciously. “Are you baking something?”

“Kind of,” Steve hedged.

“Tell me what you’re planning on doing with it.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“I need to mold something,” he said vaguely.

“What do you need to mold?” Foot tapping.

“Concrete.”

“No. No way. Absolutely not.”

“But you have two, and one doesn’t work as well,” he wheedled.

“They both work just fine.”

“PLEAAASSE?”

I pulled her up, and with a sinking heart saw another broken egg shell. But then I looked a little harder, and there it was. Yep, a wee baby chickiepoo.

Looked a little harder–and there are two.

So she’s a proud mama, and has proved us all wrong. She’s not a cannibal or a killer.

Anyway, one of the perils of researching recipes online is the fact that one gets easily sidetracked. For instance, I went online this morning to get the proportions of beef bones to water to make stock. And before you know it, there I am on a page on how to make butter.

Well.

Why not?

Here’s the page (complete with an explanantion of why you shouldn’t feel guilty eating butter). His directions are nice and lucid, and include complete pictures. Should you not feel like clicking, the process of making butter is as simple as throwing heavy cream into a KitchenAid and whipping it until the fat sticks together

So here we are at the buttermilk whooshing out of the butter stage.

We just happen to have an antique butter mold and paddle.

With a nice little pattern inside the mold.

Pressed it in

And now it’s resting in the fridge, waiting to be unmolded.

*Update: It behooves one to read up on how to use a butter mold before one actually uses it. To wit: Apparently, you are supposed to soak it in water for 30 minutes before using it. Otherwise, the butter won’t pop out. Sigh.

Not so much.

Argh.

The really sad thing is that there were only four that were developing nicely, and this was one of those four. I have bad bad feelings about this.

If nothing hatches and she stays broody, I will buy some chicks and sneak them under her in the dead of night. Apparently, this approach sometimes tricks them into thinking they’ve hatched their eggs.

Of course, she’ll probably kill those too.