Leather-Bound Galaxies

I sometimes put cake here, and sometimes literary quotes, and sometimes food I cook, and sometimes pictures of David Bowie, and sometimes things that happen to me, but not often, because not much happens to me other than cake and literature and food and pictures of David Bowie. Sometimes I paint things on my face. If any of that interests you, please feel free to stay.

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Oh look, it’s a cake I made. It has strawberries. And more sneaky hiding strawberries in the middle. Yeah.

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Jurassic Park bento :) Tamagoyaki, nori t-rex skeleton, red pepper, mange-tout (with garlic and chilli flakes) and spinach undergrowth, cannelini beans with honey and soy sauce (dinosaur eggs), carrot flowers (cooked in a little vegetable stock), toasted sesame seeds, Japanese sticky rice, and strawberries. The sauce bottle has soy sauce in it, mostly for the spinach, which is otherwise unseasoned, and also for the rice.

I was in a bit of a rush by the time I was putting it together, hence the messy mange-tout, which I’d intended to be rather more elegantly presented leafy undergrowth, and imperfect circle of peppers. The taste wasn’t affected, though :)

[leatherboundgalaxies]

It is the last week of the university term and I have so much work I need to do and so I am doing almost literally anything else. Help.

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Who that thus lives with a continually divided Being can remain healthy? I work hard, I do the duties of common Life from morn to night, but verily I raise my limbs, ‘like lifeless Tools’. The organs of motion and outward action perform their functions at the stimulus of a galvanic fluid applied by the Will, not by the Spirit of Life that makes Soul and Body one. Thought and Reality are two distinct corresponding Sounds, of which no man can say positively which is the Voice and which is the Echo.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his notebook of 1804-1806, grammar and punctuation regularised. (In Seamus Perry, ‘Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection’)

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Vegan hack!

For anyone who, like me, craves macaroni cheese but hasn’t found that craving satisfied by the vegan recipes they’ve tried so far, you should know that a fair approximation can be made with Bouillon vegetable stock powder and - magic ingredient - coconut yoghurt.

Coconut yoghurt like this: http://www.coyo.co.uk/ (the one I used, but there are lots of different brands), and Bouillon like this: http://www.hollandandbarrett.com/shop/product/marigold-swiss-vegetable-vegan-bouillon-powder-60070273

Cook the pasta as usual, drain it, then add the coconut yoghurt to the same pan. Turn the heat all the way down low and then put the pan back on it. To begin with the yoghurt will melt to a thin milky consistency, but as you heat it it’ll thicken up. Add Bouillon to taste, and once it’s all thick and coats the pasta just like a delicious bechamel, it’s done.

Obviously it doesn’t taste like cheese, exactly, but it’s got a tang from the yoghurt, and a salty flavour from the stock powder, as well as the vegetable flavour. Plus, it feels just like the comfort food I want from mac and cheese.

[PS: Full disclosure: I’m not a proper vegan, I’m just vegan some of the time. I don’t want to get any sort of credit that I don’t deserve. But please don’t not try this because of that! >_> ]

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Vegan Week day 1 - Dark soy sauce, garlic and miso baked tofu with sweet potato chips (also baked). I don’t know how I did it, but the tofu was actually amazing. Soft and chewy and salty and caramelized... Some sort of accidental vegan witchcraft.

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Ooh, you're cold as ice, baby, but when you're nice, baby, you're so amazing in every way.

Lana Del Rey, ‘Freak’ (Honeymoon, 2015)

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Yet nothing can to nothing fall, Nor any place be empty quite, Therefore I think my breast hath all Those pieces still, though they be not unite; And now as broken glasses show A hundred lesser faces, so My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, But after one such love, can love no more.

John Donne, 'The Broken Heart'

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Experimental gory face paint.

If you could ignore the fact that my hair is a mess that’d be great thanks >_>...

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.

Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Midnight pink cupcake baking.

I’ve always loved pink cake, for some reason.

[leatherboundgalaxies]

We baked a delicious sort of rectangular tart with puff pastry, a little pesto on the bottom, then caramelised red onion, then char-grilled aubergine and sun-dried tomato, then haloumi. So good.

It turns out ‘Jus Rol’ puff pastry is actually suitable for vegans. You could probably switch the pesto for vegan pesto (Sacla has one) and the haloumi for smoked or marinated tofu and make it a good vegan dish, too.

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Each day demands we create our whole world over, disguising the constant horror in a coat of many-coloured fictions

Sylvia Plath, ‘Tale of a Tub’, 1956

[leatherboundgalaxies]

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - O Children

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - O Children No video, just the song. The picture is Nick Cave when he was a child.

[leatherboundgalaxies]

I know, who broke my heart for her when the wild thought, that she denies and has forgot, set all her blood astir and glittered in her eyes.

W. B. Yeats, ‘To a Young Girl’, 1919

[leatherboundgalaxies]

And in time, as one reminds the other of the past, a life lived much to fast to hold on to how am I losing you? A broken house, another dry month waiting for the rain, and I had been resisting this decay, I thought you'd do the same. But this is all I ever was, and this is all you came across those years ago, and now you go too far. Don't tell me that I've changed because that's not the truth, and  now I'm losing you. Fragile sound. The world outside just watches as we crawl, crawl towards a life of fragile lines and wasted time. And so I cry as I hold you for the last time in this life, this life I tried so hard to give to you. What would you have me do? But this is all I ever was, and this is all you came across those years ago, and now you go too far. Don't tell me that I've changed because that's not the truth, and  now I'm losing you. Where I used to end was where you start. You were the only one, and now I see your eyes move too fast. You were the only one. Careful hands and wandering without that much to say. Your words are empty as the bed we made. Is there another way? Oh love, is there another way? But this is all I ever was, and this is all you came across those years ago, and now you go too far. Don't tell me that I've changed because that's not the truth, and  now I'm losing you. And now I'm losing you.

Mumford and Sons, ‘Ditmas’

[leatherboundgalaxies]

I painted my face for a last-minute costume. The party theme was London tube stations, so I went as the Kew Gardens station, with a flowery top (not on yet in the first picture...)

Face paint is fun.