I wonder why more people don’t combine ingredients from multiple cultures into one meal like I do. I find such lovely combinations that way!

For instance, I’ve been making pasties lately. That’s pronounced with a long “aa” sound like father, not the short “a” of paste, mind you. It’s a traditional meat-and-potato hand pie type thing popular in a handful of spots around the world, most notably Cornwall in England, where it was invented, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a place settled by a high number of Cornish miners and where I lived for a bit as a kid. It’s a quintessential lunch food: filling, easy to pack, good warm or cold, fast to eat, and so on. I’ve been making them a lot lately for just that use.

But well, I don’t like sticking with just one recipe. I like to experiment. Sometimes with simple things, like my swapping out the traditional rutabaga for other sweeter roots, namely golden beets and parsnips. Other times more complex, like my attempts to fuse the deliciousness of pasties and enchiladas (it’s a long story).

It was in that latter experiment that I hit gold. Enchiladas are frequently made with corn tortillas, and what would you know but that I’ve also been playing with a bag of Maseca lately, a special corn flour that’s used in just about every corn tortilla out there! And I’d tried out a pizza dough recipe that uses it lately, so I knew it substituted in as easy as can be for regular wheat flour. So, in an attempt to add more Mexican flavors to the experimental pastiladas, I swapped out a third of the wheat flour for the Maseca.

And lo and behold, I ended up with a dough that was both easier to work with and tastier. That, like, never happens. You usually get one or the other. The recipe I’ve been using for the pastie dough tended towards swapping between sticky or crumbly, either clinging to the rolling pin and tearing apart or cracking at the edges when I rolled it thin enough. But adding in the Maseca made it exactly the right springy consistency where it rolled out nice and easily but stayed intact the whole way through. And the Maseca adds a marvelous extra dimension to the flavor of the dough that just works perfectly! It’s even sturdier than the plain flour dough when baked, which is perfect for anything that needs to survive a commute!

I love it when things work out. English recipe with a Mexican twist. Who’da thunk.

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Rocks!

Yay rocks!

I like rocks!

It’s so sad. I don’t see too many rocks these days. I spend most of my time within a mile of where I live (ok, most of it is within feet of where I live.) And this area is wetland.

So, you want mud and plants and water and all those lovely wetland things? I got plenty! Rocks, well, um, they sink. Even in mud, the rocks will slowly work their way out of sight. There certainly aren’t any large rocks around here, which is quite the pity.

I did see a few rocks the other day. There were a few brought up by tree roots near the local creek. Since the creek’s there, it actually creates a patch of drier ground around it by being where all the water goes, and that drier ground can support rocks better. Well, until the next time the creek shifts.

I know where I could go for rocks. I mean, there’s several mountain ranges in the area. But they’re a bit outside the zone I spend my time in, and the bus routes don’t really go there. At best, I can look at them from a distance, these giant rocks.

Well, at least I could theoretically look at the mountains, if there weren’t so many trees in the area. The local wetland IS stable enough for trees after all, even if they’re short by west coast standards!

The post I’m totally looking through my photos, drooling over the ones with rocks. appeared first on Under A Rock Art.

…You know, I really don’t have much to say about flowers. I’m not interested in them enough to learn their names, much less all the interesting trivia that I’m sure is out there. The main thing I care about is how pretty they look in a photo.

So yeah, I like this flower because the petals are slightly green! Isn’t that nifty?!

The post It’s got leaves! They’re green! appeared first on Under A Rock Art.

I do love how magnificently white this calcium carbonate is. Especially since it’s a fleeting thing. You see that darker stone in back? Same mineral, but with a touch of oxidization. As soon as the water stops flowing over the stone, it reacts with the air, turning into dull grey flakes. Quite different from the pebbly white it starts out as.

There’s probably some deeper lessons I can pull from this, perhaps something related to the color white and purity, or maybe how destructive oxygen is. But I just wrote “some” as “soom”, so I think I shall leave it at that and get some much-needed sleep.

The post The Cleanest, Purest White in Nature appeared first on Under A Rock Art.

Bah, I don’t feel like writing. Don’t really feel like doing much of anything. Today has been brought to me by the letter “Meh”.

So yeah, have a flower!

What the hey, have lots of flowers! Go and, I dunno, look at them or something.

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