I'm afraid the blog fell into the gap between our late Thanksgiving and my obdurate refusal to do anything for Christmas before Thanksgiving. I stand by my choices, even if I'm only now slowly getting back to my writing and critiquing and blogging. I suppose this happens every year.
Another thing that happens every year at our house is gingersnaps. Lately, it's rare to even see gingersnaps in the grocery stores. I think this is because they are so uniformly unappealing, dry as cardboard and nearly as flavorless. Ironically, my cookie press gingersnaps look like cardboard but taste delicious, spicy and sweet!
It's a strong cookie for a season that is both blissful and a little stressful. So, have a little yin for your yang, a little Krampus with your Santa. Enjoy!
Gingersnaps
From The Fanny Farmer Baking Book
¾ cup vegetable shortening
1 cup sugar, plus extra to roll the cookies in
1 egg
¼ cup black strap molasses
2 cups flour
2 tsps baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 tblsp powdered ginger*
1 tsp cinnamon
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and cover a couple cookie sheets with parchment paper.
Beat together the shortening and 1 cup of the sugar. Add the egg, and beat until fluffy, then add the molasses. Stir and toss together the flour, baking soda, salt, ginger, and cinnamon, and add to the first mixture, beating until smooth.
Gather up bits of the dough and roll them into 1 inch balls,** and roll them in the sugar. Place about 2 inches apart on the prepared cookie sheets and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the cookies have spread and the tops have cracked. Remove from the sheets and cool on a rack.
* I suppose you could grate the ginger, but the powdered is stronger, and I like a cookie that bites back. Buy the best ginger you can find.
** for cookie press style (pictured above), load up the press. If individual portions don't easily drop off, just squeeze out a long ribbon of dough and cut it into squares with a knife or a pizza slicer. Sprinkle sugar on top and bake for about 7.5 minutes.
¾ cup vegetable shortening
1 cup sugar, plus extra to roll the cookies in
1 egg
¼ cup black strap molasses
2 cups flour
2 tsps baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 tblsp powdered ginger*
1 tsp cinnamon
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and cover a couple cookie sheets with parchment paper.
Beat together the shortening and 1 cup of the sugar. Add the egg, and beat until fluffy, then add the molasses. Stir and toss together the flour, baking soda, salt, ginger, and cinnamon, and add to the first mixture, beating until smooth.
Gather up bits of the dough and roll them into 1 inch balls,** and roll them in the sugar. Place about 2 inches apart on the prepared cookie sheets and bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the cookies have spread and the tops have cracked. Remove from the sheets and cool on a rack.
* I suppose you could grate the ginger, but the powdered is stronger, and I like a cookie that bites back. Buy the best ginger you can find.
** for cookie press style (pictured above), load up the press. If individual portions don't easily drop off, just squeeze out a long ribbon of dough and cut it into squares with a knife or a pizza slicer. Sprinkle sugar on top and bake for about 7.5 minutes.
A spar can be the mast of a ship (also what two people do when they go through the motions of hand to hand combat – similar to the kind of motions she and the alien are relentlessly going through as well).
Johnson includes a couple lines of poetry, which I recognized as Shakespeare. At first I thought they might be taken from The Tempest. Thanks to the Internets it was easy to track down. They're from
Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
It's clear that the entire poem informs Johnson's story on many levels (more than I'm glossing here).
Looking at the sonnet, the only concrete images in it have to do with seafaring:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark (i.e. lighthouse)
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
And,
It is the star to every wandering bark (i.e. a small boat – something like a lifeboat…)
Here love is described as constant but also distant, untouchable. Like dead Gary or the idea of him or her last image of his body frozen in space.
The sonnet backs into its topic with a negative:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
And Johnson, begins by describing what the alien is not:
“The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal.”
The middle of the sonnet describes what love is (the pole star, a light house, unmoving and distant)
The final couplet is a strange negative statement, which is a little harder to parse. (Does it proclaim his love since the poem stands as proof that he did indeed write/love? Is it an admission that his feelings have changed and therefore are not constant and he is no longer in love? Is this a poem of illicit love to his male lover and the last couplet serves as a kind of plausible deniability?)
Regardless of how you read it, it’s the same negative positive negative binary pattern that’s all over Spar."
Check out Anaea's reading of this one here.
If you're trying to become a better writer consider "critiquing" the very best stories you can find. Come on over to the Craft Crucible and join the conversation!