Reccing stories and food

[jlh]

Saw Casino Royale on Sunday and immediately read astolat's Bond/M story Queen of Spades which I urge everyone to go read as it is amazing. Also incredible is Close Your Eyes and Think of England, monimala's Veronica Mars/James Bond crossover. (No really, it totally works. There's even Mac!) I was thinking of writing a whole thing about the new Bond and gender and sexuality, but I have too much school writing to do so that will have to wait for another time.

What I will write about is a slash gripe. I recently read a Studio 60 Matt/Danny that contained many of the stereotypical complaints about slash. Harriet is a shrieking homophobic harpy for no discernible reason while the story doesn't actually deal in any way with Matt's feelings for her; Danny is oddly submissive and will do anything for Matt and thinks to himself that he loves Matt better than Harriet, which to me is an odd misread of their actual relationship; and Matt is a selfish, emotionless asshole, when on the show he's actually incredibly emotional all the time. I think you can write slash that respects canon het relationships, and for that I point you to this superlative Danny/Rusty Ocean's 11 story, Confidence Men, which has a whole present and history of Danny/Rusty that doesn't have anything at all to do with Tess.

A losing dish on Top Chef this week really inspired me—Cliff's chicken sausage and sweet potato hash. I made it with a chicken/apple sausage and about a cup of diced cooked sweet potato and a little bit of shallot, seasoned with salt, pepper and cinnamon, then I fried an over-easy egg to put on top. OMG so good. To keep it quick I cooked four sweet potatoes and then diced them all at once, and keep that in a tupperware in the fridge with the sausage in a ziploc and the sliced shallot also in a ziploc, both tucked into the container with the potatoes. Everything is already cut up (well, I take the sausage out of its casing as I go) and in one container, so I just grab that and an egg and I'm good to go.

It's going to rain today. It's December. This is wrong; it should be snowing. What is with this warm weather, anyway?

Comments

[mahoni.livejournal.com]

That hash sounds goooooood. So what do you do, just toss everything into a saucepan and cook it until the sausage is cooked through? And do you bake the sweet potatoes, or cook them some other way?

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I bake the sweet potatoes in the microwave, on a paper towel. They come out very moist that way, and since I'm cooking them in something else I'm not looking for that crispy oven-baked skin anyway. Much less waterlogged than boiling, too. At my store the chicken sausage comes in packs of seven, and the four sweet potatoes I cooked should make about 7 cups of dice. (I picked up from a friend of mine that when I get shallots I dice them all up and freeze them in a little bag and pull out a few just whenever I need them, which is handy since I love shallots. Now I'm almost out, so I defrosted the last bit and I'm rationing them out to go with the 7 sausages, because I'm anal like that.)

I put a little oil in a small non-stick frypan and cook the shallot and the sausage first, breaking up the sausage, and when the sausage is nearly done (which takes about a minute) I add the potato since it doesn't need to cook, just heat through and brown, and season with S&P and cinnamon. Then I turn the hash out of the pan, put in a pat of butter, and fry my egg.

It is so good, because it's a little sweet, not from added sugar but from the sweet potatoes, shallot, and the apples in the sausage. I'm sure that a little parsley would be good in it, but I don't have any. I do have some cilantro but I'm not sure that would go so well with the sweet.

[evil-erato.livejournal.com]

You are making me hungry, and this overly dry scone seem like sawdust. Thanks? ;)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Harriet is a shrieking homophobic harpy for no discernible reason while the story doesn't actually deal in any way with Matt's feelings for her;

Or perhaps to put it more accurately, the story deals with Matt's feeling for Harriet by turning her into a shrieking harpy?