First page!!!

As you may or may not know, I've been working for about a year on producing a graphic novel. It's been taking a long time because, well, step 1 is learn to draw. Please have a look at my novel ExMormon if you'd like to see what level my art skills were at a few years ago.

Anyway, I finally reached the point of having enough preparatory work done to produce a page that will appear in the finished work. Even though it's my first page, it's actually page 25. Please have a look:

Autumn Pumpkin Quinoa Salad!

This is probably the best recipe I have invented so far!

If you love it when the Autumn foods (pumpkins, squashes, chestnuts, unusual mushrooms, etc.) start arriving in the supermarket -- and/or if you look forward to Autumn for the pumpkin-spice lattes -- this is going to be your new favorite Fall salad!

It would make a good side-dish if you're hosting a Thanksgiving dinner in which some guests are vegetarian or vegan. However, if you're planning to serve this for Thanksgiving, I must apologize in advance for giving all the measurements in metric -- that's just how we roll here in Europe.

Ingredients:

3/4 Liter (750 mL) vegetable broth
300 grams dry quinoa
250 grams diced pumpkin or squash
1 apple (diced)
2 onions (diced)
100 grams mushrooms (chopped)
50 grams pumpkin seeds
4 teaspoons nutmeg
2 teaspoons ground cloves
2 teaspoons ginger
2 teaspoons cinnamon
salt to taste
chopped parsley
olive oil

First, prepare all the ingredients, since that's the part that takes the longest:

Put the quinoa in the broth and bring it to a boil. Then add the pumpkin/squash, apple, spices, and salt and cook on low heat, uncovered, until the liquid has been absorbed by the quinoa (about 15 minutes). While the broth is simmering, sauté the onions, mushrooms, and pumpkin seeds in olive oil. Once both parts are done, mix them together and add the parsley (and maybe add some more olive oil).

This can be served warm or chilled.

Here are a few notes about the recipe:

• If they don't sell pumpkin seeds for cooking in your area, you can maybe substitute some type of nuts. But don't just use the seeds from the fresh pumpkin unless you know it's a type that has good seeds (and you know how to prepare them).
• Pretty much any type of pumpkin or squash can potentially work in this recipe except spaghetti squash or those jack-o-lantern pumpkins (that aren't really for eating), so try something local and seasonal!
• The pumpkin in the first ingredient picture above weighed more than a kilogram, so it's actually way more pumpkin than you need for this recipe. But you might as well skin and dice the whole thing at once, and set aside the leftover part to make pumpkin pie or soup later.
• I like to use umami in place of salt in most recipes. I used both when I prepared this salad. 

Enjoy!!

Steampunk Surprise: "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage", by Sydney Padua

I am so happy that my husband bought me a copy of this book!

I had been seeing it around, but I was really hesitant to pick it up.

Why?

Well, as a woman in software engineering, I'm painfully aware of what a controversial figure Ada Lovelace is. She's been hailed as the inventor of computer programming -- which has led to some incredibly virulent backlash, accusing her of having been some sort of hack who merely copied down other people's ideas without even really understanding them herself.

Now, let's not kid ourselves. If a man had written the article Lovelace wrote, There's no way we'd see the same sorts of ferocious efforts to prove him incompetent. OTOH, if it had been a man, we hardly would have heard about him at all. He'd probably be accepted as the "father of computer programming" by some... in kind of a footnotey, nobody-cares kinda way. But in my line of work, it's dangerous to talk about sexism unless you want a ton of it to rain down on your head, so I wasn't terribly interested in miring myself in this controversy. Thus a book that looked like it was probably a sunny-and-dry retelling of team Lovelace's side of the story didn't jump out at me as something that would be appealing.

Boy was I wrong!!

Surprisingly, the author used the oldest trick in the book for dealing with an acrimonious controversy: present the evidence. The primary sources. And then even-handedly discuss the controversy in light of the evidence.

Now, if that sounds more boring to you than "a sunny-and-dry retelling of team Lovelace's side of the story," here's the genius of it -- it's not boring at all -- it's wildly fun and entertaining!! Quite sincerely, I think the author of this book has invented a new genre, and a brilliant one at that. Here's how it works:

Padua took various primary sources (contemporaneous writings by or about Babbage and/or Lovelace and/or other famous people they met) and wrote fictional scenes around them (including some set in the author's invented alternate universe for them). Then Padua wrote footnotes that interact with the story by giving the rest of the (real) story.

This is an absolutely brilliant way of synergising the best parts of history and historical fiction. Plain history has a difficult relationship with objectivity, and is at its driest when striving to be objective. Historical fiction is fun and can leave objectivity aside -- but constantly leaves me curious about which bits are historical and which bits are fiction. The author of this work found the magic formula to combine them!

This work is at once great and truly pioneering. If there's a canon of graphic novels, this one deserves a top slot.