(no subject)

[opusculasedfera]

Beginning to bake things to give away this Christmas, and spending a lot of time being unnecessarily judgemental online recipe websites. Fudge recipes are the worst offender. I have no problem with people altering recipes to suit dietary restrictions, but why would you bother to make a frozen slush of spinach and banana and pretend that it was fudge? Just make a fruit ice and be done with it. Or apple sauce mixed with peanut butter. If you want to put that on a sandwich, have fun, but why pretend that it is fudge, a dish made from the interaction of sugar and dairy to create something that isn't quite caramel, but isn't totally unlike it? I just want to be able to filter out all the people who get all self-righteous about cutting the sugar out of things that are literally made of sugar.*

Also, what on earth is the point of making things eggnog flavoured? Especially cake. Eggnog tastes like milk and eggs and both those things are already in cake recipes! I can't imagine that adding heavily preserved eggs and milk would make any particular difference to a batter, unless what you were missing was the taste of those preserved chemicals. Just flavour things with nutmeg and be happy. Nutmeg is delicious and can be enjoyed outside of eggnog, I promise.


*(Actual diabetics have my sympathy, these people are clearly not diabetics, or are going to be very sad ones when they realise that the maple syrup they believe to be a magical panacea is actually made of sucrose.)


In less grumpy news, I watched Pitch Perfect, which is as delightfully femslashy as everyone said, but also, why did no one tell me that the love interest is totally a Manic Pixie Dream Guy? Because he really is. He shows up, and is wacky at the protagonist, and tells her to have more emotions, and then she wins him back at the end by being very good at the thing she was always very good at which he did not actively help her with at all (you could maybe count him as a muse, but only in the most inactive sense), and totally not saying sorry! He is way less important to her narrative than music and her (all female) musical partners. I was kind of sorry her final mashup wasn't all ladies, because that would have been more thematically consistent, but it was definitely worthwhile fluff that was actually as lady-centric as it claimed to be!


Also Princess Monster Truck has been going around again, and I hope she brings you as much joy as she does me.

Comments

[joatamon]

Manic Pixie Dream Guy

I absolutely had not thought of him in this way, and you're so right! Nifty :)

(I really need to watch Pitch Perfect again)

[opusculasedfera]

I kept expecting him to have an arc or do something jerkish that she'd have to forgive him for because that's what women are allowed to do in relationships, and then he didn't, he was only inspirational, and it was lovely!

[joatamon]

she'd have to forgive him for because that's what women are allowed to do in relationships

This is also... something I've never thought about. Huh.

[opusculasedfera]

I mean, perhaps this is a function of my not spending a lot of time interacting with het romances, but I feel like that's a thing? Women's romantic arcs either seem dominated by women having to apologise to men for things that aren't that bad (you know: gosh, I'm sorry I totally was invested in the career I said I was invested in when we started dating!), or learning that she's sadder without this dude than with him so she'd better forgive whatever dick move he made, regardless of what it was. Not that forgiveness isn't important in relationships, but the men involved don't seem to be doing nearly as much soul searching and they actually did the dick move.

To be more concrete, the arc I was half expecting, what with the whole plot about Beca leaving memory sticks with mixes on them at the radio station, was that Jesse(?) would steal one of them, perform it at the semi-finals while her group was still doing bland stuff, and that it would end with her winning in the final with a better mashup, plus her being able to forgive him because she's better anyway without him ever having to say that he shouldn't have stolen her work. I was delighted to be wrong! But I wasn't expecting ALL the important conflict to involve the Bellas because usually movies don't allow that.

Does that make sense?

[joatamon]

Totally makes sense! I'd just never noticed that theme in fiction before - I'll be keeping my eyes open in future.

I don't know whether you read Linda Holmes over at the NPR Monkey See blog, or the Jezebel site, but this definitely chimes in with a lot of what they have to say about expectations on women in fiction (and life).

[opusculasedfera]

I've read some Linda Holmes, and some of Jezebel, though I find it hit or miss. I'm glad you think it fits: I was mainly disclaiming that I'm most used to the portrayal of women in SF or other genres so I don't want to pretend I'm an expert on romcoms when I don't watch many of them!

[james]

Oh my God, fudge recipes. I had a co-worker who insisted he had the Perfect Fudge Recipe and he would talk about how to stir it and keep the heat just right and how you couldn't make it when the humidity was off because the fudge would be ruined. Then he'd bring in some fudge that he said was perfect and I'd eat some and think "this is very bland, unexciting fudge." I never told him that, though. He was so proud.

[opusculasedfera]

Oh dear, that does sound awkward! I almost prefer the recipes that are intensely perfectionist about the method though, to the ones that are so obsessed with making it simple that at the end you look at their streamlined product and find they have actually accidentally made ganache or peanut butter frosting or some other perfectly reasonable sweet which is nevertheless not fudge-like in the least.

[james]

I just felt so bad for him because he clearly put the time and effort into making it excellent, and yet I think the ingredients he was using were the wrong ratios for really excellent fudge. It turned out the right texture and consistency, but the taste was very bland and made me wish I had the cheater fudge with marshmallow creme. :-/

[arduinna]

... someone is calling spinach-banana slush "fudge"? Good grief.

[opusculasedfera]

They were indeed! Because naturally, what people care about with fudge is that it is a soft cube! Any other soft cubes can, therefore, be substituted!

Or at least this seems to be the prevailing attitude on recipe websites, who are all obsessed with making fudge "healthy", as though no one will survive the experience of eating real sugar and cream fudge and having to stop because that much sugar at once makes them feel slightly unwell. Much better to have essentially a frozen smoothie. I can totally eat a whole smoothie! It's foolishness.