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Food

• Beet-dyed challah — I was making challah regularly for a few years to use up an excess of duck eggs, and the visual of a horrifyingly red-pink loaf has me wanting to do it again. For a work potluck, perhaps.
• Spain’s Burnt Cheesecake Breaks All the Rules — I've made a version of this several times (it's very good) and it's neat to see where it originated.
• Another heatwave is coming, so I prepped some cold/easy foods:
  • A tweaked version of this kale-lentil salad
  • Cold noodles, served in a communal bowl of ice water with individual dipping sauce bowls and a platter of toppings and sides — this week it's hardboiled eggs; raw cabbage massaged with salt and fish sauce; cubed daikon and carrot fridge pickle with garlic, chili-garlic paste, soy sauce, and balsamic vinegar; sliced melon. All I have to do when I want some is boil water for the noodles and plate everything.
  • Muesli with yogurt/overnight oats. This always ends up being a collection of pantry bits, and my current batch has steel-cut oats, thick-cut rolled oats, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, almonds, golden raisins, cinnamon-cardamom sugar, a spoonful of coconut cream, and homemade mesophilic yogurt.
  • Low-effort burritos. It doesn't take long to grab the tortillas, rice (arroz rojo with black beans and frozen mixed veggies), beans (refried from a can), cheese (grated cheddar), and salsa verde from the fridge, assembly-line some burritos, and heat them up in a skillet until they're crispy.
  • Mugi-cha. Toast/roast a bunch of barley until it's anywhere from golden brown to dark brown (but not burnt). Bring 1/3-¼ cup of the toasted barley to a boil in 8 cups of water (that's how big my pitcher is), turn it off and leave it to steep. Strain and refrigerate, topping up the pitcher with water or ice since the barley will have absorbed some of the water. You can also throw in a couple black or oolong teabags while it steeps if you want caffeine.

Mental Health™

• Book of Lamentations — the DSM-5 analyzed as a dystopian novel
• From The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, a mood:

Another [story idea]: THE DAY OF THE TWENTY-FOUR CAKES: Either Kafka lit-mag serious or SATEVEPOST aim high: woman at end of rope with husband, children: lost sense of order in universe, all meaningless, loss of hopes: quarrel with husband: loose ends, bills, problems, dead end. Wavering between running away or committing suicide: stayed by need to create an order: slowly, methodically begins to bake cakes, one each hour, calls store for eggs, etc. from midnight to midnight. Husband comes home: new understanding. She can go on making order in her limited way: beautiful cakes: can't bear to leave them. Try both styles: do it to your heart's content.

Archiving, Browsing, Curation

• Life in the Stacks: A Love Letter to Browsing
• An Accumulation of Nameless Energies
• use computers to store data
• Why Cookbook Stores Are the Antidote We Need Right Now
• Archival Futures: The Archive as a Place and the Place of the Archive

Weird stuff

• isopods will inherit the earth
• A history of Simlish, the language that defined The Sims
• This Sweet White Flower Is Actually A Sneaky Carnivore, Scientists Discover
• Two Homestuck-likes I've been reading lately — The Tapestry and Vast Error
• New fursona just dropped, it's Monstrum Philip: #WeeklyLinks