Lost In The Middle Of Somewhere ... Else

The Rabbits have me cooking on Fridays with purplerabbit.

This is both nerve-wracking and very good for me. If I'm alone in the kitchen I start to panic, but all I need to avoid that is company if I'm reasonably sure of what it is I'm trying to do, or else that nobody else knows any better than I do. If I am wary I wait until uncledark comes home, so he can instruct me.

So far I usually make pasta, because that's what I'm confident at. When we've made other things, PurpleRabbit has taken the lead.

Tonight I made it up as I went, trying to make something similar to the polenta they serve at Pomodoro:

I cut sun-dried tomato and garlic polenta into slices and then cut out the middles with a little cookie cutter. I wrapped pieces of fontina and sage leaves in prosciutto and stuffed them in the middles.

But then I had a bunch of extra polenta, fontina, and prosciutto, so I filled the rest of the dish with the spare, and poured roasted garlic alfredo sauce on top. I baked it all at 350 for half an hour, and then took off the foil and baked it a bit longer so the cheese would melt.

To put on top, I chopped up roma tomatoes, and mixed it with a bit of chopped onion, dried basil, and salt, with extra virgin olive oil, and as an afterthought added feta cheese. It needed more salt than I expected.

Finally I tried crisping the remaining sage leaves in olive oil and butter. That worked perfectly, and they're sooo goood. I want to take a whole sage bush and crisp them for snacks.

All put together it was quite yummy.

Next time I think I should put the sauce down first, and not try to make stuffed rounds, but just crumble all the polenta and shred the cheese to make a more ordinary casserole. Same flavors, better presentation. I wish the tomatoes were more flavorful, but overall it worked really well.

I'm very proud of myself. I made dinner and it wasn't pasta.

-E-

For those in the home audience, today was my very first day of Graduate School.

Yes, I was very, very nervous, but not panicked as I feared I might be (yes, I fear fear itself sometimes - panic attacks are like that).

( The class sounds like it will be highly useful, and I'm glad to see my friends from my time in undergrad )

So, I'm back "home" academically, and glad to be. This will work. Whatever isn't already set up is just hoop jumping, and I'm good at the rest of it.

Wish me luck!

-E-

For years I've had nightmares about being on a bridge as it breaks, or is flooded, or just goes somewhere I don't want to go. I have no idea if that's at all related to my current emotional dilemma.

Life is going quite well for me, overall. I'm happy with what I'm doing, the relationships I do have time for are working quite well. I have a sense of clarity about where I'm going in many ways. I feel like I've come through a year of tremendous change much improved, and am still making progress, though at less of a breakneck speed.

( So why do I feel so horrible about certain things? )

This whole thing feels so stupid, but I can't seem to get any gauge of where to draw the reality line internally on it.

-E-

"Earth to Ember! Earth to Ember! Please ground in!"

Oops!

Okay, I knew I'd hit a certain degree of radio silence, but it has been brought to my attention recently that said silence is being interpreted rather differently than I expected.

It seems that all the love and time and effort and growth I'm putting into and getting out of my time at the Rabbit Warren is looking somewhat more like I've gotten buried under a burdensome pile of bunnies.

Nope nope nope nope nope [/muppet alien voice]

( Quite the opposite! )

Please bear with me - the Ember is Under Construction!

-E-

This is slightly edited from a post I made to LiminalNation. All I did was remove the references that made it contextual to LN.

*Deep breath* Okay, here goes, and I hope this isn't oversharing, or stupid, or whatever...

( About sexuality, gender, orientation, etc. - mainly mine. )

So NOW what do I do? Crawl into a hole and hope nobody notices?

-E-