Peaceful Lentil Soup and Comforting Velveeta Sandwiches

Honestly, I didn't know what would hit me with the Comforting Velveeta sandwiches recipe. I knew that when I read the short story that accompanied it, "Native Foods," that it was basically a grilled cheese sandwich.

Today, my day off, I decided to cook the Velveeta sandwiches and Peaceful Lentil Soup ("Rising an Arab Father in America") for dinner while Mom and Duncan were off at work.

Native Foods: Mensaf Leben

So far in this journey to cook my way through The Language of Baklava, this recipe has proved the most challenging. Not that the dish is difficult to prepare, but it requires a lot of time and someone to help you.

Webcomic Rec: Mare Internum

This weekend ended up being difficult to participate in the Language of Baklava challenge, as I worked through the weekend. However, fear not! I'm conspiring a huge meal for this weekend, and I can't wait to try it out!

Instead, this week I'll focus on a webcomic recommendation: Mare Internum by Der-Shing Helmer.

For those who loved The Martian, this webcomic is fantastic. The story explores the story of two Martian researchers, Mike and Rebekah, who discover an underwater sea in the planet Mars.

Webcomics are an endless source of fascination for me, as I absolutely LOVE how the Internet has changed the comics industry. Though thousands of webcomics exist, I end up only following a select few. I binged through the Mare Internum archive a few weeks ago, and loved it. Everything from the script, the artwork and the update schedule are fantastic. The only warning I give: the opening sequence begins with a character contemplating suicide, and the background of one of the characters is pretty dark.

Though, to be honest, I'm pretty much a sucker for beautiful artwork and outer space survival stories (along with a strong script and character backstory), so it's a no brainer that I'd love this comic. I love how it's a great mix of hard and soft sci fi (the creator has a background in biology), and can't wait to see where it goes! It's still ongoing and updates about 1-2 times a week, so hop on board!

Eventually I hope to create my own webcomic, so I love seeing how other people create their comics!

April Book Update!

From what little I've experienced of being a writer (albeit on the side, and whenever I can) is that experience provides so much of the details that make the writing come alive. This means that sometimes I do crazy things to be sure that I know what I'm talking about, even if the character I'm writing doesn't.

Even with my primary genres being epic fantasy and science fiction, I feel like experience is even more important. Details ground readers in a fantastic world otherwise foreign to them, and those details can come from anywhere. 

For those who don't know, I'm currently in the editing  process for the first book of my epic fantasy trilogy, currently named The Hymns of Creation. While I have other writing projects, this is my main project that I've worked on since high school. Wow! Over seven years old and still going!

Some examples:

• Traveled for four months in the United Kingdom (though for school, I applied much of the experience to fiction, mainly for anything I wrote that was located in London). 
• Learned how to discover my location using the stars (astronomy class, for a character who needed to discover his location and had nothing else). 
• Learning how to cook: there's nothing that brings a fantasy world to life better than sensory details. Thinking about how much goes into food, and what ingredients are available, actually help build the world by forcing you to think about what is available in a character's environment. 

What I'd love to do:

• Get in better shape and start hiking. A lot of epic fantasy includes characters traveling over long distances. How long would it take to travel someplace by foot? Hard to know unless you do it yourself.
• Visit the rice terraces in the Philippines not only because they look cool, but because of certain elements in the epic fantasy trilogy I'm currently writing. 
• Visit a vineyard and really interview a winemaker. Thanks to Dad, I've written a character whose profession is a winemaker. I've gotten in touch with someone from Clos des Amis, a local winemaker, to participate in the bottling process. Just waiting for a bottling collaboration on the weekend! 

Finding the time and energy to edit this book has been exhausting. It was hard to find time before Dad passed away, and without him it's even harder. But even through the exhaustion, and even through everything that has happened, clarity has arisen. I see the superfluous text, and I eliminate it. I begin to see how all of my experiences, as short as my life has been, can create something that speaks to others.

I lend my characters my practical experience, dressing them just a little with words and details to make those experiences reality. And yet I also lend them my grief, which breathes life into them in a way I never thought possible. All these details, of hiking and baking and wine-making, don't mean much without the emotional details. And through this writing, through this editing process, I hope to pour out every tumultuous emotion I've felt over the past few months into these characters. It is this process that is making this book so difficult to revise, but I believe that it will make it stronger.

Hot Lunch: Nostalgic Chicken Livers

Out of all of the random facts I know, there has always been one that's stuck with me: the invention of the fork allowed people to not touch their food. By dressing up meat and arranging it neatly on a plate, and by consuming it with cutlery, its true nature is hidden. We forget that it was an animal, or a plant in the ground, because we've made it look appealing. Cooking chicken livers reminded me strongly of that, as I went from this:

To this:

This element is touched upon in "Rising an Arab Father in America," when the father and his brothers attempt to kill a lamb, and their botched attempt results in no lamb shish kabobs for dinner. 

In the short story "Hot Lunch," the author recalls a time when she attended a Catholic school. A nun, upon learning that Diana's father is Jordanian, becomes attached to Diana because her family is from "the Holy Land." The nun is invited to the Abu-Jaber house and has a meal with them, excited all the while that she would be eating the same kind of food that Jesus would have eaten.

In addition to reminding me that how we prepare, cook and dress our food hides the fact that our food comes from an animal, this story reminds me of how people, upon learning that I am half-filipino, always ask, "well, then, you must know how to cook great food!"

Food associates closely with identity. Say lumpia, and you think Filipino. Look at pita bread, and we think Middle East. When we eat from other countries it's mostly for enjoyment. But sometimes, the food becomes a way for us to understand other people. Recreating these recipes brings Abu-Jaber's stories to another dimension. But how else can I understand her stories without eating the foods from her childhood, the food that Jesus could have possibly eaten? Without knowing what chicken livers taste like, how could I possibly understand why she describes them as "nostalgic"?

Most of us won't have to kill our own meat (however, I have done this with Rainbow Trout, which I shall write about later), but when you look down into that bloody bowl of  chicken livers and wonder how anyone could have possibly thought that this was a good idea, cooking reminds us that it is a process that takes time and energy.

So now I'm reminded that several chickens gave their lives for this hot lunch. How can I look at my chickens straight in the eyes again?

Be careful, Siopao, or else I'll turn you into a hot lunch!


Recipe:

• 1/4 cup of butter 
• 4 medium onions, thinly sliced 
• 1 pound of chicken livers 
• 1/3 cup of lemon juice 
• Salt and pepper to taste

Abu-Jaber recommends singing softly to the chicken livers as they simmer, but in case you don't want to sing out loud you could listen to Egyptian singer Dina El Wedidi.