Luzula

I wrote a fic! Not sure whether to tag it with Ewen/Keith or Ewen & Keith, thus the "Ambiguous Relationship" tag. In the process, I discovered there was only one fic in the archive labeled with Ewen & Keith, so I ended up putting that tag on it.

Applicatione Animi (2403 words) by Luzula
Fandom: The Jacobite Trilogy | The Flight of the Heron Series - D. K. Broster
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ewen Cameron/Alison Grant, Ewen Cameron & Keith Windham
Characters: Keith Windham, Ewen Cameron, Alison Grant (Jacobite Trilogy)
Additional Tags: Ambiguous Relationships, Post-Canon, Domestic, Romantic Friendship
Summary: Friendship, and what it can mean.

I haven't written in months, but recently I started writing a short fic, just to see if I could. And lo, I can! \o/ Am also considering the Trick or Treat Exchange (it's only a 300 word minimum). Three days left to nominate...

I promised flail photos, and they are coming, though I can't say my flail is very pretty. We also now have a sickle, which is much prettier! : D I am not a communist, but I am tempted to invite people to a work day featuring grain harvesting and a building project that involves nails.

Anyway, reading! I have been reading very little during 2026, but here is what I have read so far. Reviews are mixed up with farm reports, where applicable.( Read more... )

We have cucumber excess. What we've done so far:
- eat as snack,
- general salad ingredient,
- use as substitute for zucchini in zucchini cake (but now we have lots of zucchini as well),
- tzatziki
- cold cucumber soup, run in a blender with yoghurt, onion, garlic, olive oil, mint, and fennel,
- cucumber salad with soy sauce, garlic, and sesame oil,
- juice it and make a cocktail with gin, sparkling water, sugar, and lemon (I guess this was interesting to try, but it was not my favorite).

Further ideas?

Two of our ducks (Evita and Evelina) have been brooding together on the same nest. We've been warned that this can cause problems with them trampling the little ducklings, but four of them hatched and it has gone well. I checked out the nest this morning to see how many eggs were still left and whether there were dead ducklings. There were two eggs they had abandoned in favor of their living ducklings, and a dead one which was only partially out of the egg and hadn't gotten its head free. And then there was a small body which I also thought was dead at first--and then I saw that it was very feebly trying to move. It was clammy and chilled and very small when I picked it up, and I really didn't think it would live. But I cupped it against my stomach to give it body heat, and after a while it began weakly to cheep and move a little more. I carried it in a scarf around my waist. Now it is a cute fluffball which has begun to grasp the concept of feeding, and which loves to cuddle! I suppose that in a few days it will be pooping everywhere. We are debating whether to try to put it back with Evita and Evelina, but elected not to do so tonight as it had gotten too dark to be sure of their reaction. Pretty sure it will have imprinted on us now.

I didn't take a photo at the very beginning, but it's still looking wet and bedraggled in the first photo, and in the second it's dry and fluffy. If you zoom in you can see the egg tooth!

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Suggestions for gender-neutral names starting with E? I've thought of Elliot so far, but I'm not entirely convinced.

Den nya gröten av Sébastien Boudet (2025) (translation: The New Porridge)
Very inspiring book on how to use cereals! It's like discovering a whole new area of food. The author has also written a book on baking. What I've used the most is to crush whole grains of wheat (or emmer, einkorn, dinkel, barley, oats, or rye) in our mill such that you get both large fragments and a bit of what's basically flour. This happens naturally when you grind it. Then you soak it in water overnight, but importantly you should use only half the amount of water as compared to grain (by weight). The purpose of this is to shorten the cooking time next day, but also to improve nutrition as the phytates get broken down when the grain thinks it's starting to germinate. The next day, you fry the grain in fat to get a browning reaction, then slowly add liquid and salt and cook under a lid until soft. This is the basic form, like a more delicious and flavorful version of bulgur. Keep the added liquid to a minimum. The flour component contributes a pleasing slight stickiness, like the starch in sticky rice. You can also of course do it without crushing the grain first, if you don't want any stickiness, but then the cooking time will be a little longer. Or you could sift away the flour.

This basic form can be used like rice, bulgur or pasta to accompany a sauce or stew or stir-fry. But you can do a lot more with it:
- Make a more flavorful, fiber-rich, and nutritious breakfast porridge than you get from oatmeal. For this you should soak the crushed grain in equal amounts of water, rather than half, to get a wetter consistency, and also add more water in the cooking step.
- Make an all-in-one "bolognese": after the first frying step, add chopped tomatoes/passata, chopped onions, some other vegetables of your choice, herbs of your choice, black pepper, some white wine, and either fried minced meat or cooked beans. Great for feeding a lot of people.
- Make a salad: after the grain is cooked, add chopped vegetables and legumes of your choice, then mix with a dressing of tahini, olive oil, pomegranate syrup, lemon juice, salt, and chopped parsley. At the end, add pieces of feta cheese and sprinkle with toasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds.
- Make a "risotto": fry the grain in lots of butter, and add chopped onions and celery, and dried bolete mushrooms. Add whatever other vegetables and legumes you want (or bacon). For the liquid, use white wine and stock alternately. At the end, add copious amounts of shredded parmesan.
- Make this (but modified to use crushed grains).
- Make this (but modified to use crushed grains).

So I'm sorry to promote something delicious that requires you to have a grain mill and access to whole grains, preferably from local organic farmers! But really there are so many other good things you can do with that, like bake awesome bread! Do consider it. There are small tabletop electric mills that are a lot cheaper than the one I got. Next step: grow the grain ourselves. : D

We have acquired a household grain mill. First, and most shallowly, it is very pretty. We got a 25 kg sack of landrace wheat grains from a local farm, plus various other whole grains, and now we can make bread from freshly ground flour, which is exciting! It really does make more delicious bread. We can also grind a lot of other things, such as coffee, acorns, maize, dry legumes, nuts, etc. Aside from breads, I have discovered the world of things that can be done with roughly ground/crushed grain, which can also be done with the mill! You soak it overnight to improve nutrition and reduce cooking time, and then you can use it to make various risotto-like dishes--I bought a whole cookbook just about this (Den nya gröten by Sebastian Boudet). I'll post a recipe some time. And it's also very exciting to try emmer, spelt, einkorn, and other kinds of grain you can't usually buy in grocery stores. We're growing various kinds of grain ourselves this year on a small scale. BUT there is a reason milling was mechanized, and I think we'll eventually get an electric motor and a belt to drive the mill.

Here's an unusual (to me, at least) bread recipe I tried recently, which was unexpectedly delicious:( Read more... )

For something completely different, have a link to an interesting long essay on math and AI and the nature of math and mathematicians.

It's been insanely busy around here, mostly of course for E, who is setting up his market garden, but also for me, since I have consequently been taking most of the responsibility for the household vegetable beds. Have some photos!

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Now You Know by Anais Mitchell, which I stumbled on today, is SUCH a middle age song. It sounds like someone in perimenopause. It's not hitting me personally head on (among other things I don't think about children that way) but I found it gripping and beautiful.

Our flock of twelve ducks now number thirteen and occasionally fourteen. Duck #13 is the neighbours' sole surviving duck after the others were taken by a fox (probably). He was keeping them outside. Ours are in a polytunnel inside an enclosure, but I think a determined fox could still get inside. Augh, I hope they survive the winter. Duck #13 is white and looks a lot like our Elsa, but smaller and with a more orange beak; we call her Lill-Elsa (Little Elsa). She has seamlessly merged with the flock.

The occasional #14 is a female wild mallard who seems to be considering the advantages of domestication: free food, water, and shelter! But she comes and goes. One might think our ducks would correspondingly be hearing the call of the wild from her, but no. They like their comforts now. The snow is thawing and I thought I'd make them happy by breaking up the ice in the small pond for them, but when I herded them outside to see it, they just stood there and looked at me like I was committing animal abuse, and hurried back to the polytunnel as soon as I got out of the way. Sigh.

As for me, I am too busy and am looking forward to things calming down a little soon. At least I hope they will.

Still not reading much, but I did read some books during the past two months!

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (2025)
Listened to the audiobook for my book club. This is the first book in a while that grabbed me in a page-turney way, and I enjoyed it a lot! I'm sure it can be picked at, and we did so during book club, but for me it was mostly notable in being a book I was immersed in while reading, which for me these days is rare.

The Sleeping Soldier by Aster Glenn Gray (2023)
When I first started reading this, my feeling was that "yeah, I read a lot of posts on the author's DW about this book, and I guess the book is exactly what I was expecting it to be". Like, in a way I felt as though I didn't even have to read the book. But this feeling passed when I got into the particulars of the characters and their relationships so that they felt real to me, so that it wasn't just about the Idea of the book any longer, and then I thoroughly enjoyed it. (The Idea of the book being, if you haven't heard of the book before, the contrast between what was allowable in male friendships in 1860 and 1960.)

I also listened to about half of The West Passage by Jared Pechaček (2024), also for book club. I feel like the book had a lot of Gormenghast DNA, and I enjoyed the weird worldbuiling, but I didn't end up finishing it.