Hot Water Bottles and Apple Pie à la Eve

"Ô Eve, where have you been?" you will ask, staring in wonder. "You who tell such palpitating stories of zombie schoolchildren and of various pirate mice, what adventures kept you away from your blog?"

"My child," I will say, and my voice, wise and soft, will strike awe in your heart like the roaring thunder. "My child, I've been sick like a dog, how sucky is that?"

 ***

 There was the fever, which caused Drunken English (more so than usual), and the thousands of boxes of tissues, and the offerings to the porcelain god. Eventually there was a doctor, who told me that what I was doing (resting, drinking soup and getting cuddle-raped by my cat for hours on end) was the right thing to do and to keep doing it, which didn't help a lot, to be honest. (Next time I'll keep my money to buy some David Hasselhoff paraphernalia.) There was better days and worst days, headaches the size of a politician's ego, and a wonderful Lord and Master who kept the hot water bottles coming.

***

Since there is no adventure to tell, I'll share with you my super secret recipe of Apple Pie à la Eve.
If you are afraid of butter, hello, meet your worst nightmare:

APPLE PIE A LA EVE 

( november 2011 - subject to change, since it was mostly random) 

WARNING : no cinnamon was harmed in the making of this pie.

Sorry, you cinnamon torturers, but I like almonds better.

Crust:
- 2.5 cups of flour
- 1/2 cup of butter
- the yolk of an egg
- 2 tsp of powdered almonds
- 2 tps oil
- 2 tsp milk
- 2 tsp sugar
- salt

Frangipani:
- 4OZ. of powdered almonds (= 1 cup of sliced almonds + blender)
- 1/2 cup of sugar
- 1 egg
- 1/4 cup butter

Filling:
3 big apples


1- The Crust: (or, how capital letters can make anything sound ominous)
  
a. In a big bowl, mix the flour and the butter with a wooden spoon.
b. Add the salt, sugar and almond. Mix again.
c. Then the milk and oil. Keep Mixing.
d. Then the yolk. Notice how that spoon is not quite effective, sigh, and use your hands to crush those resisting clumps of butter into submission. It's fun and you get to make a nice big ball of dough.
e. Coat you pie dish with butter and flour (or, if you live away from civilization, like me, use a cake pan), and flatten your dough right there in the pan. It's no use to use a rolling pin, it will tear. So use your hands again, ladies.

Tip: you can keep your ball of dough in the refrigerator, but it will harden. Microwave it for a minute and it will once again become as firm and supple as Taylor Lautner's bottom.)

2- The Frangipani: (or, the wonderful deliciousness of gods, second only to Nutella.)
a. Put in bowl, mix, spread on the dough.
b. Fight the cat to get the right to lick the spills.

3- The Filling: (or, turn on Lord of the Rings and get a beer.)
a. Make your husband peel and slice the apples. Dip them in orange juice to keep them from getting brown.
b. Place prettily on top of the frangipani.

4- Bake: (or, you know the drill.)
Bake at 400 degrees F for 45 minutes. Note how the timing is perfect for a thorough thank you to the apple cutter. And by that I mean a nice quiet cuddle in front of an episode of Leverage.


ENJOY!



Nota Bene : My beta reader is at work: all mistakes and bad jokes are mine. Feel free to correct them or scold me on his behalf.

Evil Coffee and Ninja Mouse

(My internet is back and seems to want to stay! Woohoo!)

Each year, Carmen Chopp organizes a "Creative Writing and Illustrating Workshop" at Rosehill Elementary School in Lenexa, Kansas. This year, 9 authors and artists volunteered, including the incredible Kristi Bernard, who explains the whole concept better than I could ever do in this article.

This is how my day went:

I woke up way to early for comfort (at least for mine, since I hadn't seen a morning in far too long) after a night of nightmares. No surprise there. Since I was a teenager, I've had nightmares every time I was stressed out about the day ahead - and I am a very stressed person. They're basically a montage of everything that could go wrong.

It actually saved me a lot of trouble a couple of times when I had forgotten to pack my student ID for an exam. My subconscious remembers what I've forgotten and reminds me none-too-gently during the night.

 

I had little sleep and was a bit of a zombie myself when I arrived at Rosehill Elementary.
AND THERE WAS NO TEA. Don't get me wrong, we were welcomed warmly, with delicious food and buckets of coffee. And it would have been enough for normal (weird), coffee-drinking people, however I know the truth: COFFEE IS EVIL. It lures you in with a delicious smell of awesomeness, but when you drink it, it is bitter like HELL! (It is so evil I am caps-locking. I never caps-lock. OK, maybe I do. But only to highlight the most horrible things.) (Like coffee.)
I survived college on caffeinated soda (and lost teeth to prove it), and eventually surrendered to my family's tradition of drinking tea by the gallon. (And I'm talking about hot tea here, not the strange cold American one.) (I'll probably do a post about tea in the future, just so you know.) (And I should stop abusing parenthesis, even if they are fun.)

I feel like I've digressed somehow.

Carmen introduced me to my escort, Colin, and promised me tea for the break, the angel that she was.

Then it was time for the dreaded moment: class. Which wasn't dreadful by any means. At least not as the instructor. I visited three classrooms and met kids from 4th, 5th and 6th grade. I introduced the project of Princess Penelope and the Pickle Festival, and talked about character creation. We started with the basics of drawing a mouse and ended with them creating a character for that universe.
It was quite wonderful. They had awesome and hilarious ideas, like a 4000 years-old ninja mouse:

A mouse who plans to become the Empress of All Cheese:

An unemployed, overweight mouse who watches TV all day:

And Super Mouse, amongst others. And talking of super-powered mouse, did anyone else watch this?

One of the teachers did the tutorial along with her students and ended up drawing an awesome trendy French mouse that just might appear in the book. (With her permission.)

There was a break (with tea) after the second class, and a luncheon in the library after the third, where I met a pirate-hatted lady who represented NaNoWriMo. She told me it existed in France too - I didn't even know! Here goes my excuse for not doing it! Oh well, I'll just have to be honest now, and admit that words intimidate me.

All in all, I had an excellent morning. The kids were great, the organization was perfect. Where do I sign for next year?

Special thanks to:
1- All the students who made the lessons fun by having fun themselves.
2- Carmen, the godess of workshop organization and of emergency tea.
3- Colin, who had to sit through the same class three times, and got really good at drawing mice,
4- The 5th grader who told me that she liked my accent at the beginning of the first class, thus erasing my fear of not being understood by the students. (It was still touch-and-go sometimes, but I had a likable accent!)
5- The girl who drew the cutest mouse ever just for me, but didn't sign sign it, and now, for the life of me, I can't remember her name. But look how cute it is!

Of Mice and Pirates

There is three things you need to know about today's post:
1- We just celebrated our third anniversary, and my Lord-and-Master bestowed me with my first ever graphic tablet. I'm working on getting to know her (I named her Tabby), and it's still a bit awkward, as first encounters often are, but she's a keeper.
2- I went to RenFest on pirate day, a couple of weeks back, and discovered the Jolly Rogers, masters of piratish singing and classy humor. (Or not.)
3- Because (or 'thanks to') Penelope, I'm obsessed with mice.



And here is the result:

(click the image to make it bigger)

Posing for the illustrator, are Bart-who-thinks-he's-a-bad-ass, Carlos-the-crab-who-knows-better and the Sassy Sally. (My naming prowess knows no bounds.)

What I'm working on right now:

Character design for the book Princess Penelope and the Pickle Festival by the talented Kristi Bernard, to be published at the beginning of 2012.


The story is adorable, and I hope to do it justice!

New Blog! New Pastels! It's the Day of Newness!

That's the part where I should introduce myself (Eve, bonjour, nice to meet you!), my hobbies (Drawing, reading and attempting to sew), my job experience (Mostly in logo design and advertisement, though I am working on a children's book right now.), in a professional and grammatically correct way.

Oh, well, so much for that.

I'll leave the writing to people who can and concentrate on the drawing. As it is, I am proud enough to have managed to set that blog up. It only took me... weeks. Weeks of deciding that other things were more urgent than trying to figure out what to say in the first post, mostly.

So now I'm band-aiding it. I heard it got easier after that.