A bread-based meal
14 May 2021 12:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeThanks to 120 Ways of using Bread, I made a meal out of half a packet of stale bridge rolls :-p
First course, Cheese Rissoles with cabbage salad -- these are very ingenious as well as being (relatively) economical, since they use a chopped-up tomato to provide the necessary moisture to bind the mixture together.
They should have been deep-fried, but I managed to get away with pan-frying them as flat rissoles rather than the round balls recommended.
Second course: Chocolate Bread Pudding. Nothing like 'normal' bread pudding baked with suet and fruit; here the bread is used to thicken milk, which is then flavoured with an ounce of chocolate (in my case I also added a teaspoon of cocoa, as the chocolate was a left-over mini Easter Egg rather than being best quality!), sweetened, beaten with a single egg, and then baked in the oven until the resulting custard sets, which may be some time!
I also got two new (second-hand) shirts; one is pink and the second one really needs its collar stand unpicked and reversed, as the collar fold is visibly worn, but beggars can't be choosers. They are both quite nice quality fabric, and I very badly need replacements for the two shirts that recently wore out altogether.
Meanwhile, in Phantom terms, the chandelier has fallen at last (this time it actually falls *on* Raoul and Christine, because Hertha unintentionally distracts him at a critical moment). So we are at the end of Act 1, finally -- but not of the chapter, because from Hertha's point of view this episode doesn't end until they have got safely home again (and she and Raoul conceive their child in the mutually-shared trauma of the aftermath, although that remains implicit; it *could* have been conceived at any point in the story so far, and quite possibly was, but it's a dramatically satisfactory conclusion to be drawn).
Also, it's not the end of the chapter because chapter length ;-p
This chapter (Six?) is actually longer than I thought it was, because the previous one ends in a slightly unexpected place with Christine still only on the verge of spilling the beans about the Phantom and his lair. But the chandelier still falls a relatively short way into the chapter, so a decent amount of aftermath needs to be covered in order to balance it out.
I did *not* intend to get involved in yet another complete retelling of the original plot, however traditional these are in the fandom -- but while this may not be a novel-length story, at the current rate of progress it's bidding fair to turn into one of the longest I've done, which coming immediately after Arctic Raoul doesn't do wonders for my creativity or publication rate. From a purely pragmatic point of view, so far as the fandom is concerned I've virtually disappeared off the radar since 2018, despite the fact that I've actually been writing "Phantom" fic non-stop over all those years.
And of course I *have* disappeared off fanfiction.net entirely, which is where my established audience was -- although given that the average account there only remains active for about six months, most of them had probably gone already.
I have been uploading The Choices of Raoul to AO3, mainly because I discovered that I already had a conveniently converted HTML version on my website, and to date have received *no* comments whatsoever, which is even worse than the two comments I got on the original FFNet upload -- I don't know if it's because everyone in the fandom has already seen it before, because AO3 seems not to have a culture of commenting (and *I* haven't been commenting much, despite the fact that it's actually easier now there than it was on FFnet by the end), or because stories that involve removing the Phantom from the equation entirely simply aren't that popular (or viewed, if that's your 'tag').
Although one thing I discovered was that AO3 for some reason (unlike FFnet) does not notify the author when bookmarks are added to the work, although it does send notifications for the rather more minor (because not creating a link/recommendation from elsewhere) addition of kudos. So I have to gauge its success by the fact that no fewer than four people turn out to have created bookmarks to it (albeit the text of the most recent one implies that people definitely have seen the story before and are hence unlikely to start commenting on it afresh!)
It's going to be pretty disheartening if/when I start uploading material from Hertha's story and still get absolutely zero feedback, however...
Chapter contents:
Ch1 (published): takes us up to "I must get my hat"
Ch2: (the one with the massive cuts in it): takes us up to the return to the dressing-room
Ch3: covers the rest of that night and the following morning
Ch4: the period between "Hannibal" and "Il Muto"
Ch5: "Il Muto" from Carlotta's croak up to more or less the start of "All I Ask of You" (although events are closer to Leroux here, in that in the presence of his wife Raoul doesn't try to calm Christine's hysteria with promises of love, and as a side-effect Christine gets to give a lot more detail about the Phantom -- well, she needs to 'betray' him somehow, other than by getting engaged to the Vicomte!)
Ch6: "Il Muto" redux, chandelier crash and aftermath. End of Act 1...
Act 2 should, I hope, be shorter, because there isn't so much backstory needing to be worked in (and the backstory is, as in Christmas as it ought not to be and If I Were Vicomte, a large proportion of the actual *content* of this fic, given that we already know how the canon events play out!)
On the other hand, I need to cover to at least some degree the events of the six 'missing months' of Hertha's pregnancy, between the disaster of "Il Muto" and the masquerade ball. How do the relationships between the characters develop? Hertha has pretty much made it openly apparent to the reader that she is in love with her 'best friend'/husband (although she hasn't let the word cross her mind) by the end of Ch6; at what point does she herself work it out? Can we use some of the incidental bits I excised from Ch2, and didn't rip out in the specific hope that they might be usable somewhere else (e.g. Raoul's father dancing with Hertha's mother, the estate and landscape at Beauvais)?
Oh, and while the towel-tomatoes are now sprouting all over the place, the six seeds that I planted in the egg-carton are now showing sprouts as well -- despite their roasting. (The towel sat on top of that same radiator for quite some time before I realised the side-effects of the central heating's having come on in the winter, so apparently they can survive the process unimpaired, although I'm pretty surprised!)
First course, Cheese Rissoles with cabbage salad -- these are very ingenious as well as being (relatively) economical, since they use a chopped-up tomato to provide the necessary moisture to bind the mixture together.
They should have been deep-fried, but I managed to get away with pan-frying them as flat rissoles rather than the round balls recommended.
Second course: Chocolate Bread Pudding. Nothing like 'normal' bread pudding baked with suet and fruit; here the bread is used to thicken milk, which is then flavoured with an ounce of chocolate (in my case I also added a teaspoon of cocoa, as the chocolate was a left-over mini Easter Egg rather than being best quality!), sweetened, beaten with a single egg, and then baked in the oven until the resulting custard sets, which may be some time!
I also got two new (second-hand) shirts; one is pink and the second one really needs its collar stand unpicked and reversed, as the collar fold is visibly worn, but beggars can't be choosers. They are both quite nice quality fabric, and I very badly need replacements for the two shirts that recently wore out altogether.
Meanwhile, in Phantom terms, the chandelier has fallen at last (this time it actually falls *on* Raoul and Christine, because Hertha unintentionally distracts him at a critical moment). So we are at the end of Act 1, finally -- but not of the chapter, because from Hertha's point of view this episode doesn't end until they have got safely home again (and she and Raoul conceive their child in the mutually-shared trauma of the aftermath, although that remains implicit; it *could* have been conceived at any point in the story so far, and quite possibly was, but it's a dramatically satisfactory conclusion to be drawn).
Also, it's not the end of the chapter because chapter length ;-p
This chapter (Six?) is actually longer than I thought it was, because the previous one ends in a slightly unexpected place with Christine still only on the verge of spilling the beans about the Phantom and his lair. But the chandelier still falls a relatively short way into the chapter, so a decent amount of aftermath needs to be covered in order to balance it out.
I did *not* intend to get involved in yet another complete retelling of the original plot, however traditional these are in the fandom -- but while this may not be a novel-length story, at the current rate of progress it's bidding fair to turn into one of the longest I've done, which coming immediately after Arctic Raoul doesn't do wonders for my creativity or publication rate. From a purely pragmatic point of view, so far as the fandom is concerned I've virtually disappeared off the radar since 2018, despite the fact that I've actually been writing "Phantom" fic non-stop over all those years.
And of course I *have* disappeared off fanfiction.net entirely, which is where my established audience was -- although given that the average account there only remains active for about six months, most of them had probably gone already.
I have been uploading The Choices of Raoul to AO3, mainly because I discovered that I already had a conveniently converted HTML version on my website, and to date have received *no* comments whatsoever, which is even worse than the two comments I got on the original FFNet upload -- I don't know if it's because everyone in the fandom has already seen it before, because AO3 seems not to have a culture of commenting (and *I* haven't been commenting much, despite the fact that it's actually easier now there than it was on FFnet by the end), or because stories that involve removing the Phantom from the equation entirely simply aren't that popular (or viewed, if that's your 'tag').
Although one thing I discovered was that AO3 for some reason (unlike FFnet) does not notify the author when bookmarks are added to the work, although it does send notifications for the rather more minor (because not creating a link/recommendation from elsewhere) addition of kudos. So I have to gauge its success by the fact that no fewer than four people turn out to have created bookmarks to it (albeit the text of the most recent one implies that people definitely have seen the story before and are hence unlikely to start commenting on it afresh!)
It's going to be pretty disheartening if/when I start uploading material from Hertha's story and still get absolutely zero feedback, however...
Chapter contents:
Ch1 (published): takes us up to "I must get my hat"
Ch2: (the one with the massive cuts in it): takes us up to the return to the dressing-room
Ch3: covers the rest of that night and the following morning
Ch4: the period between "Hannibal" and "Il Muto"
Ch5: "Il Muto" from Carlotta's croak up to more or less the start of "All I Ask of You" (although events are closer to Leroux here, in that in the presence of his wife Raoul doesn't try to calm Christine's hysteria with promises of love, and as a side-effect Christine gets to give a lot more detail about the Phantom -- well, she needs to 'betray' him somehow, other than by getting engaged to the Vicomte!)
Ch6: "Il Muto" redux, chandelier crash and aftermath. End of Act 1...
Act 2 should, I hope, be shorter, because there isn't so much backstory needing to be worked in (and the backstory is, as in Christmas as it ought not to be and If I Were Vicomte, a large proportion of the actual *content* of this fic, given that we already know how the canon events play out!)
On the other hand, I need to cover to at least some degree the events of the six 'missing months' of Hertha's pregnancy, between the disaster of "Il Muto" and the masquerade ball. How do the relationships between the characters develop? Hertha has pretty much made it openly apparent to the reader that she is in love with her 'best friend'/husband (although she hasn't let the word cross her mind) by the end of Ch6; at what point does she herself work it out? Can we use some of the incidental bits I excised from Ch2, and didn't rip out in the specific hope that they might be usable somewhere else (e.g. Raoul's father dancing with Hertha's mother, the estate and landscape at Beauvais)?
Oh, and while the towel-tomatoes are now sprouting all over the place, the six seeds that I planted in the egg-carton are now showing sprouts as well -- despite their roasting. (The towel sat on top of that same radiator for quite some time before I realised the side-effects of the central heating's having come on in the winter, so apparently they can survive the process unimpaired, although I'm pretty surprised!)
no subject
Date: 2021-05-14 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-14 08:49 pm (UTC)It is a bit awkward when you just want to register that you've seen and read something. Weirdly, I got an email from my now-inaccessible LiveJournal account the other day to tell me that "Someone likes your entry" -- that definitely wasn't a feature when I was posting there regularly, so unless it's some kind of promotional scam by LJ to contact lapsed users (I can't see any evidence of 'likes' on the actual page), they must have added it recently.
I had another bread-based meal tonight, about thirty years less 'vintage', based on the cordon bleu cookery of my 1960s "Good Food on a Budget": sausage braised on a bed of saged onions (uses white breadcrumbs) accompanied by Franklin's potatoes (layers of boiled potatoes baked in bread sauce, topped by browned crumbs).
I've still got one and a half date-expired white rolls left, which I need to use (I've already had to cut off some mould). Maybe I could make a suet pudding of some sort; some of the recipes suggest making suet dought with 'fresh white breadcrumbs', but I never have any.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-16 09:37 am (UTC)Could you toast the remaining bread, grate it and keep the breadcrumbs for later use?
no subject
Date: 2021-05-16 01:23 pm (UTC)Good idea; I don't have much left (I put a roll and a half into the plum duff, and jolly tasty the result was too), but I've stuck the remaining half-roll into a low oven to dry out.
I usually just use wholemeal flour when a recipe wants dried breadcrumbs, but it isn't quite the same.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-16 08:27 pm (UTC)The chandelier falls on Raoul and Christine? Poor darlings. I love that Christina gets to tell much more about the Phantom - a very sensible thing to do. Hertha, from what we know about her, does sound like someone who would make the whole thing a bit more sensible.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-17 12:00 am (UTC)I read somewhere -- and remember being surprised at the time to learn -- that "All I Ask of You", *not* the title song, was apparently the first number that Lloyd Webber came up with for the show, and the one that he was going round showing people who were getting excited over it and saying it was going to be a hit. So Christine and Raoul's love was central to the "Phantom" concept from the very beginning...
Hertha is definitely 'the sensible one' -- and occasionally resents it ;-p
Having Raoul and Christine actually injured in the chandelier fall seemed like a promising idea -- but like so much else, it can't have any major plot repercussions, because all the scenes I've imagined for the story, including the climax, rely on events having played out more or less exactly as in canon previously :-(
It's not so much a question of staleness for the readers as of the fact that I've already done at least three 'parallel to canon' retellings: "If I Were Vicomte", where the whole gimmick is that Raoul not being a Vicomte doesn't help him in the least, "Christmas as it ought not to be", which gets around the issue by featuring three pre-canon Christmases and one post-canon, and "Blue Remembered Hills", where I was horribly constrained by the necessity of pre-ordained plot points and having to invent a B7 equivalent, rather than letting events play out according to the characters' actions -- and vowed never to do a 'retelling' again!
The other issue is that, while the fandom apparently loves the retelling trope, it seems to me that there are an *awful* lot of fanfics out there already in which a more 'sensible' female OC is inserted into the story in order to fix everything (or as a superior alternative to Christine for the Phantom's benefit) :-(
I thought Hertha seemed like an interesting concept at the start, too, which was why I set out to write it with such enthusiasm; I'm just not convinced how much potential it's actually got in practice, as opposed to the idea of its being a thrillingly angst-filled premise. I mean all you've really got is the viewpoint of an outsider looking on -- as opposed to the "The Daaé Case", where the outside observer's presence not only gives us a fresh perspective on the canon characters, but inherently derails the existing plot to produce a very different set of events.