Playin' a little hooky

My good intention for the week was to start cutting out and sewing the Nara stuff, but the weather has been gorgeous all week and I couldn't bear being stuck inside and yesterday was Setsubun and I ended up doing laundry and eating eggs instead of consuming the auspicious sushi while facing the optimum direction.

So I slept in a little bit, then ran some errands at Target, picked up a nice bento at Yaoya-san in El Cerrito and drove all the way up the hill to see if I could find Tilden Park from Moeser Lane. I knew (and was proved correct) that Inspiration Point would be mobbed on a nice day, and my route up through the Berkeley Hills was clogged with bicyclists, so I found a picnic area that was completely deserted, made my best guess at which way was north-northwest, and sat down to eat my sushi and read a chapter of Selling Songs And Smiles.

Came home, watched an episode of Farscape - I'm not quite midway through Season 3 and loving it. It was always on Friday nights, and they kept moving it around, so I was never able to keep up with it when it was on.

Fired off a bunch of messages to various and sundry persons regarding permission to use their Twelfth Night photos on my website and/or the West Kingdom History Site. The latter will keep Hirsch happy. It will also document the fact that the West made a Laurel for Bein' All Japanese In Your SCA. I am SO using bovil's "class picture" shot. (He said I could.) It says so much about what my peerage consists of: The Tousando and Moe's Books.

I also sent Hirsch a copy of the fealty oath translation for the History site. I'll probably also put it up on my site someplace. You never know when someone might need it.

I Can Haz Fish Waffles

Finally busted out the new tayaki iron. Krusteaz Belgian Waffle mix works just fine, but even the small batch instructions made more batter than I needed, so that's in a plastic container in the fridge to be used for the next time - which could conceivably be as soon as tomorrow's breakfast. Red bean filling is traditional, but I put a dollop of sweet potato butter from the roadside produce joint on I-80 in Dixon and it was excellent. (The stand inside the mall in San Francisco's Japantown does them with red bean paste, chocolate or banana, but really, you could put just about anything you liked inside.)

Wikipedia says tayaki are only about 100 years old, which doesn't surprise me, really. Most recipes involving the use of eggs and sugar tend to date to after contact with Europe. Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan includes a section on a "Namban Cookbook," which includes various sugary sweets. The frequent instruction "heat from above and below" should tell you that the Japanese didn't bake before the barbarians introduced the concept of cake and biscuits. So yeah, total novelty treat and not period, but hey.

Anyway, it's the first time I've ever used a waffle iron of any kind. (My mother didn't do pancakes or waffles. She just didn't. Not surprisingly, this means I don't make them for myself either. Usually.)  It was surprisingly easy: grease the mold - I used a nonstick spray: fill one side of the mold about 3/4 of the way, add the fruit butter, then cover the filling with more batter, close the iron (the handle has a square ring on it to clamp the handles shut with) and lay it directly on the burner, wait until it smells like cooked waffle and turn the iron over. You do have to be careful about not overfilling the iron and you do have to pay attention with your nose to cooking time, but it wasn't difficult.

EDIT: Well that answers that question. The iron is specifically designed for filled waffles. If you attempt unfilled waffles, the dimensions of the fish body are such that the batter in the middle does not cook all the way through. Tasted all right with an application of butter and maple syrup, but the last bit of batter was sacrificed on a fish that got burned in an attempt to cook the body more thoroughly....