#Glorious

I've had a ton of fun preparing stuff for the Food, Glorious FOOD! Unofficial Challenge. For me, the culmination came on June 1st, when I assembled all the products to make a bread bowl full of sour rye soup. Why not make it before the deadline? I was having so much fun testing new stuff and... got carried away and lost track of time. XD

Here is a special candy treat made by and for the loved ones:  

A massive shoutout to Makenzie Turney a.k.a. moonflower-writing, who hosted the challenge and a massive thank you to all participants. You can find the submissions in the comment section -- all 20+ bursting with flavour and an inspiring story to share.

I managed to find a few species of edible flowers and leaves. Even though there were too few rainy days, I started a series of articles with Foraging inspirations. Mushrooms, pt. 1 -- the lookalikes. Plans for next parts include: peculiar looks and unique biology. Stay tuned for more!

Variables, variables, variables galore. This was my favourite this month as I uesd the Food challenge to write down some quantity-related names. Tables and Content trees were in play as well, but admittedly I didn't give them as much love.

A handful of new articles on food, which inspired me to go a bit further into where the food comes from, how it is processed and how it shapes the lives of people in my world.

The map and the short story have to wait. Apparently it was not their time, yet.

The large portion of the experiments is now done and time for actual cooking and writing will start tomorrow. Looking forward to it, since I'll be making one of my favourite dishes, but with a medieval/ancient twist on it.

No good luc with the elderflower lemonade. The flowers withered super fast as I saved them for later (for the lack of time). Wood-growing mushrooms start to appear but there is yet too little rain for typically foraged species (Porcini, Chantarelle) to be found in my neighbourhood. There's news of Chicken of the Woods making its appearance around Poland, so maybe visiting a more remote deciduous wood is an idea.

When visiting my parents I collected grape leaves of 4 different varieties, having some bigger ones (more tanic and hard) and smaller (glistening, acidic and fragile). They are waiting in salted water untill I make a use of them, possibly for something similar to dolmas mentioned by ShadowPoenix. ;)

With Foraging inspirations. Mushrooms, pt. 1 -- the lookalikes I'm starting a series dedicated to #ForagingInspirations. Prepare for a fair dose of nerdy knowledge. Mushrooms are strange but also interestingly strange and can serve as a prop, right next to plants, animals and forces of nature. The article includes some real-life lookalikes, how they can be mistaken and whether the mistake will be deadly or not. I've included a short scene example at the end.

This is how the unrendered variables look like in the text (specifically in Euclid) by Angantyr

The above examples are "Type Simple", which means you get two fields: ey (which you see above) and Value (which appears as a tooltip). What gives even more flexibility is the "Type Rendered", which permits the use of BBcode, containers, etc. With containers it gets very powerful, since I basically get a segment, which can be CSS tailored in a thousand and one ways. But even with the ability to fit "aloud" boxes, tables and such, this gives quite an edge and enables one to have a big portion of information to be maintained in a single place. I have used these for content warning boxes. More on that in the next update.

More stubs and notes on which flavour pairings worked and which did not. Finally getting down to writing, after the foraging article is published. So now all hands on deck with the Food, Glorious FOOD! Unofficial Challenge.

I'm happy to announce, that this week was very productive! The kitchen has officially been reestablished as my laboratory to experiment with flavour, shapes and texture. I particularly loved the desserts and some of them will likely appear more often in real life. This challenge started off as an experiment to add some cooking traditions to Ædeos but inspired me to look more into "I wonder how this ingredient could be transformed into something new and interesting?" The battle continues and this week will mark some recipe wrap-up in the form of drafts of articles.

I made a first run of elderflower lemonade! The taste is almost there but needs some acidity to balance the swetness. The elderflowers are in full bloom, so this week will go under the flag of flavoured syrups. The robinia flowers were good in pancake dough, but not great. It's gave them a bit of that flowery fragrance but not enough to be truly memorable. Some other recipe called for a paste made of petals and sugar, so I may try that as well.

This week I'll be visiting my parents and the grape vines I planted a couple of years ago. Young leaves can be stored in salted water and used as a wrap for any type of filling (meat and or rice is the one I stumble upon mostly). Beech leaves are getting tough, but some still have some tartness to them, so I'll get a buch as well.

And last, but not least, my foraging-inspired article no.1 is aaaalmost finished. I will be focusing on wild mushrooms and their lookalikes, what makes them similar and different and how can you include them in a story. To get you started, here are some of the stars of the upcoming article. Can you recognize some edible mushrooms? How many are edible when raw? Which one is fermented and eaten?

Saved energy for this week. ;)

Stubs for the Food, Glorious FOOD! Unofficial Challenge have been prepared, as were th first runs of recipes!

I had a long week of pondering how to tackle Food, Glorious FOOD! Unofficial Challenge to expand my worldbuilding and came up with several ideas. It sprouted with both, something sweet, and savory. Some products had to be purchased (I don't have my own source of bacon nor honey), but thankfully, the some could be foraged in the nearby forest. First tests will start this week with articles being published some next week or so.

Hot and cold, hot and cold. With early spring came earlier summer and the elderflowers and robinias are already blooming. Time to prepare some wild lemonade and flowers in pancake dough. Bird eye cherry is almost done blooming and I may be late for foraging flowers for oxidation and almond-like flavoured tea. Pine cones are green and tender and soon will be ready to make a pine-cone syrup. Little to no mushrooms, though... Let it RAIN!!!

I made a good progress with the article about taking inspiration from mushrooms but it's getting too big, so... I'll have to think of ways to break it down into smaller, easily consumable portions.

Categories got some love and with that a new thing learned -- each category has a page of its own. They can be customized via a drag&drop design tab. The default is Table of contents | Articles (blocks) | Maps/Timelines but unneeded fields can be dropped altogether. There are 5 custom content fields + the usual ones:

Still playing with it to logically navigate the readers and make browsing through the world much easier. But since for that I'll need index Tags, the changes are not implemented yet, and probably won't until a week or two (I fear that even more, but we'll see how it plays out).

No progress in this field, though the preparations are set up and aligned with the Food, Glorious FOOD! Unofficial Challenge.

Definitely taking part in Food, Glorious FOOD! Unofficial Challenge by moonflower-writing. Foraging wild plants gave me some ideas on how to cook something quirky and tasty. Fingers crossed I will be able to find something wild. If not, I'll just grab something from the market. A wild idea would be to chain several prompts together to make something delish. We'll see, we'll see.

Despite a fairly dry spring, there was enough rain for mushrooms to appear, so spring/summer mushroom foraging is likely to be on my list of "MUST DO" for the upcoming weeks.

An article or two about using plants and their toxic lookalikes for spicing up a story is under way!

May will be a good time to put Content Trees, Tags and Variables to good use. The plan is to focus more on Variables and prepare some standardized content, especially for the geographical regions. I have a plan for Generators as well but that's lower on the priority list.