laurelnose:also @cliffsecord sent me an ask abt keir

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laurelnose https://laurelnose.tumblr.com/post/631603672228429824/also-cliffsecord-sent-me-an-ask-abt-keiras-brass :

also cliffsecord https://tmblr.co/m0ry3Q1vAwvJN1FsAJFmdvQ sent me an ask abt keira’s brass knuckles which somehow disappeared into the ether but i doodled Her

I’m pretty sure in one of the books, Yen and Geral

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Haha my worry is not about not being compliant with Witcher canon but rather uhhhhhh perhaps uhhhh revealing too much of uhhhh coughs nervously some dark corners of my id cough

I mean, standard erotica-writer disclaimer: I’m into stuff in fiction that I’m not into in real life, whatever sex I may or may not have in my actual life has little bearing (not none! but little) on what kind of sex I write about, and so on, and so forth. Really dudes, I’m not out here making boys somewhat-masc-aligned people cry all the time. But maybe uh. Maybe that needs to happen a lot fictionally. Don’t judge me.

busy

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Monday I have already forgotten what happened, but I did make 36 dried arrangements; it’s written on the tally sheet, so I know I did it. Oh, in the morning surely I cleaned the slaughterhouse and sharpened the knives, that’s what I do every other Monday, so clearly, that’s what happened. Yes, I did an extra-thorough job, because we’re due for state inspection one of these times, and I want it noted that I’ve been sweeping the goddamned ceiling this whole time but especially yesterday.

We did not get our inspection, though.

(cut tag won’t work on DW; cut for length and for discussion of chicken processing, which by nature involves animal death) (oh but there’s also a description of the Great Pumpkin Pie Experiment here so it might be worth a click if you’re a pumpkin pie enthusiast.)

We did process 310 chickens or so, which is as many as we ever do. We were short one or two people from our maximum, and while normally there winds up being a big backlog for the eviscerators, there wasn’t this time; several times I washed my hands and went out to the plucking table to hurry them along, because we could see a dozen carcasses on that table sitting there but nothing for us to do in our room. I think it’s that the person we were missing usually quietly does much of the work on that table, and also that Assistant Livestock Manager is injured.

Oh, IDK if I mentioned that– Assistant Livestock Manager, who I was calling This Big Boy for a while because it was funny (I will never find the entry where I wrote about it on here but some months back the former assistant livestock manager came back to help with slaughter and admiringly was exclaiming over a table or something just as the new ALM was wandering by; she said “oooh look at this big boy” and he said “why thank you” and did a little curtsey and it remains the funniest thing ever to have happened in that slaughterhouse)– anyway, TBB, as he’s now called by me, fell off the water wagon on Thursday and dislocated his shoulder, and had to go to the emergency room, and it was in the midst of the power being out region-wide, and it was all very dramatic and terrible. He’s back to work, and was going nuts with boredom at home, but he really can’t use the affected arm at all. He was running the plucker one-handed, and did not complain, but was clearly subdued, and we kept asking if he was overdoing it. Despite being a man in his early twenties, he is reasonably sensible about most things, so.

Anyway– we were done by noon, and then packaging was all afternoon and was exhausting and we did send TBB home from that, but only after hours of work.

We didn’t finish everything until 5:30. But everyone was excited for the evening because we did a big experiment: The Great Pumpkin Pie Experiment

There were five pies to be made. Three kinds of pumpkin grown on the farm, plus butternut squash, and the control was canned pumpkin from the store. Everyone followed the same King Arthur Flour recipe, which Veg Manager had previously tested and knew to be good. And, to remove that as a variable, Farmsister made all five crusts, so they were all the same recipe and same ingredients. (She has distinctive flour in her kitchen, among other things.) So, Veg Man made one, Farmsister made one, each of the two apprentices made one, and then TBB made one. (He had to have his roommate put the pie into the oven for him, since he couldn’t do it one-handed.)

Then after chicken day, we ordered pizza as per usual, and then had the five pies for dessert. (We invited Farmkid’s BFF’s family over too, to be impartial judges, but when it transpired that there was lard in the crust, her dad wouldn’t eat it because he’s vegetarian, so he really was very impartial as a judge and mostly provided color commentary, and was fed coffee cake instead which my mother had made with regular old vegetable oil because that’s how she rolls.)

VM anonymized the pies and brought them out to us in random order, and we scored them by number on a ballot sheet. Hang on, I have a photo, I have to attach it. It’s amazing.

[image description: a slip of paper with a grid on it, with five rows and five columns: the rows are numbered one through five and the columns are labeled “texture”, “sweetness”, “essence of pumpkin”, “color”, and are left blank for comments. I’ve scrawled some notes on two of the rows.]

The clear loser was the canned pumpkin; it tasted of nothing in particular, though it did have a good and very uniform texture. The fourth place finisher was the butternut squash; it was included because often that’s what’s actually in “canned pumpkin”, which is legally allowed because there’s very little actual difference between a pumpkin and a squash.

There was a clear favorite, but VM was dissatisfied with the trial; he felt there were still too many variables. One pumpkin (the New England Pie) had been processed in a food procesor, which had left too much graininess and had caused it to get poorer marks from the tasters, while the others had been processed with an immersion blender or standard blender. And the winner, which was the Long Island Cheese pumpkin, had been left overnight to rest in the custard form before baking, while the runner-up, the Long Pie, had not been given the same time to rest because the baker had not had the time.

But, the results were clear enough– Long Island Cheese was the winner, Long Pie the runner-up, New England Pie a solid third but some didn’t like the texture, and then the butternut squash was a fine pie but a bit lacking in pumpkiny flavor, for reasons obvious once you knew why. The canned pumpkin, even in a blind taste test, scored way lower; it just had no joy to it at all. So we were glad to realize that it does make a difference.

Worth mentioning– all of them were good pies, worthwhile to eat, and not in any way inadequate.

We have a lot of leftover pie…

Notably, we did not make an attempt using a non-pie pumpkin. Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins aren’t really worth trying to bake with.

For the record, New England Pie has the best-tasting seeds if you want to make your own pepitas, but Long Island Cheese has by far the most seeds per pumpkin, so if you want to go for volume you can’t beat that one.

anyway. today i spent the morning putting the slaughterhouse back together, washing eggs, washing more eggs, washing eggs, and then I made lunch, and then I spent the whole afternoon making more dried arrangements, to bring it back around in a circle.

I managed another 36. Which seems like a lot but they’ve been selling out the 40 I usually make, in a single market, each time, and there are two markets until I’m back in town again, so.