Sun, 2010-04-04 15:19

So…

Just in case you wake up on a Sunday morning
And you decide to go all out on breakfast
And along with the sausage and eggs and grapefruit
You decide to make scones

Just in case you decide to make the scones free-hand
And you decide to base them on Irish soda bread
With big handfuls of zante currants or chopped dried apricot bits
And just a hint of caraway seeds crushed with the blade of your kitchen knife

Only you decide to make them Scottish soda bread
Using one cup all-purpose flour
And one cup of delicate organic “quick cook” rolled oats
Blended first in a food processor
With two and a half teaspoons of baking powder
Half a teaspoon of salt
And maybe a tablespoon of table sugar

Then blending in 4-6 tablespoons of cold butter
Then adding the currants (about a cup)
And the caraway (maybe half a teaspoon)
And half a cup of milk mixed with half a cup of buttermilk or plain yogurt
Tossing very lightly, until just moistened
So it forms a (suspiciously) sticky, loose, thick batter

Then letting it stand a moment so the moisture absorbs
Before pouring it into a roughly circular shape on a non-stick baking surface (silpat, parchment paper, or non-stick baking pan)
And sprinkling a handful of flour over the roughly-textured top
And using a knife or block scraper dipped in more flour to cut your circle into triangles
And then baking at 450 degrees for roughly 10 minutes or till golden brown around the edges

If you do all that…
If you do all that as I did…
If you do all that as I did you’ll learn…

That coarsely ground oat flour doesn’t bind as strongly as gluten-rich flour does
You’ll learn instead that you get incredibly fluffy, delicate scones
Beautiful, astonishingly complexly flavored (from the currants and butter plus an ethereal hint of caraway) yes,
But so fragile they’ll almost fall apart in your fingers
Into big, soft, steaming, deliciously buttery crumbles…

That feel wonderful and taste taste divine
When nibbled from a partner’s bare skin

Why ask me how I know this…
When you could try it yourself?

—-

Recipe: Figleaf’s Lightest-Possible Scottish Soda-Bread Scones

Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit
Prepare a cookie sheet with something non-stick (parchment paper works well)

In a food processor blend till almost completely smooth

- 1 cup all-purpose flour – 1 cup “quick cook” oatmeal flakes – 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder – 1/2 to 1 teaspoon salt – 1 tablespoon sugar (optional)

Add and process till nearly smooth again

4-6 tablespoons cold butter (half a stick more or less)

Stir in

- 1 cup currants, raisins, chopped dried apricots – 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon crushed caraway seeds

Add

- 1/2 cup milk – 1/2 cup buttermilk or plain (unflavored, unsweetened) yogurt

Mix well — more than you would for all-flour biscuits (unless you want to try the partner’s-bare-skin trick)
Let stand for a minute
Form into a rough circle on the baking pan
Sprinkle with flour (the batter will be very sticky)
Repeatedly dip a knife or block scraper in flour while slicing into six to eight slices

Bake 10-12 minutes or till golden brown on tops and edges
Remove from oven, Let stand for five minutes
What I should have done: If you’re going to take photographs do so now, because it’ll be your only chance.
Serve

Enjoy your weekend

Mon, 2009-12-21 23:00

Following up on my personal story in my previous post. In that post I mentioned that when I was what amounted to a wandering wastrel, often homeless, perpetually jobless, hitch-hiking endlessly and aimlessly hoping to find work, or more often parties I was hooking up for sex with two and sometimes three partners a month. Occasionally two in a weekend.

Which I’m pretty sure most people who think in terms of “seed spreading” and “track records” that would be considered a pretty good one.

You know what’s funny though?

It’s funny in a highly indicative way.

Because I believed hook, line, and sinker in male sexual scarcity, the Two Rules of Desire and the whole dominant paradigm of women as the“no-sex” class I didn’t think that was very good at all.

In fact I was miserable!

I thought I was a sexual loser.

Because…

Because in the dominant paradigm it’s not how many women you’re partners with.

It’s how many you aren’t.

And how hard it is to find them.

And how much work it is to get into their pants.

And how if someone has dark hair you think you’d be better off if they were blond.

And how if someone has blond hair you think you’d be better of if their hair were red.

And how if they’re tall and willowy you think it would be better if they had bigger breasts.

And if they’re busty you think it would be better if they had long legs.

And so the whole time you’re a happy, healthy, sexually active man with on the order of dozens of generally highly intelligent, attractive, often adventurous, and generally highly-compatible partners…

You’re conditioned… even if only conditioned by yourself… to believe you’re a loser.

Because (to borrow pickup-artist parlance) there are “higher status” guys out there — rock stars, or millionaires, or playboys or… something — with even more partners than you.

You know what’s really funny though? Once I started to “settle down.” Meaning I’d found myself a job, and an apartment, and stopped freewheeling around the country, I started making up all sorts of stories about how nobody would go out with me. Because I didn’t have a car. Because I only worked in a pizza place. Because I wasn’t well-enough dressed. Or not a good enough musician.

This hadn’t been a problem before. The people I’d hooked up with while, say, hitch-hiking through Washington D.C. or north New Jersey or central Virginia hadn’t worried “hmm, he doesn’t have a car so I don’t want to be talked to, romanced, kissed, held, undressed, made love to.” They thought “mmm, I want to be talked to, romanced, kissed, held, undressed, made love to.”

But once I got it into my head that I had to be materially successful… where I was the one defining what success meant… I didn’t even give them the chance. I cut myself off.

Of course I assumed it was the women I had crushes on. The women I “knew” wouldn’t give me the time of day. The women I tried to be “nice guys” around.

Want to know another funny thing?

I run into some of those women every now and then. And in retrospect I’m… pretty sure they’d have been happy to go out with me. If I’d let them… if I’d let myself.

In other words it wasn’t so much them as it was me.

I could have turned into an MRA, easy as pie. One of those guys who’s so fueled with bitterness at his “low-status” condition he… well… creeps virtually all his potential partners. Fortunately I’d had a healthy dose of experience, of partners who were into early 70’s feminism — not always pleasant (sometimes not at all) and so while I was sequestering myself, and really clueless about how the whole thing was working out, I didn’t blame individuals in particular or women in general.

Instead I kind of bumbled along, chilled a little, got a little more integrated into my community, figured out where to start hanging out, and started meeting people, some of whom became sex partners, more of whom became friends. Then a few years later I moved out West, went to college (in my mid-20s) and meeting those same kind of progressive women I’d had such great encounters with years before. And while I was never as wild again as I had been I had some great relationships. Again some sexual, others not.

It wasn’t till just recently though that I finally figured out who’s fault it was that I was never getting “enough.”

It was my fault. For buying into a whole heaping pile of dominant paradigm.

Another funny thing? I’m pretty sure I could be a lot more sexually active these days. With a fair number of partners — maybe more than I ever was partners with in my wildest days.

But you know what? The last funny thing?

Even if I couldn’t I probably wouldn’t mind.

Know why?

Because now I know that’s not the only way to measure my worth.

Because I know it wouldn’t be about “getting lucky” or “scoring” or talking anyone into something she didn’t really want to do. Because she was turned on when she was around me. Because she knew I got turned on being around her. And because that’s how good sex really works.

In no small part I’ve got feminism to thank for finally getting that.

2nd wave feminism. Especially 3rd-wave feminism.

Even, the more I come to understand what they’re really talking about, a lot of radical feminism.

Pretty cool.

A lot of men could have that too.

They just have to open the doors of the prisons they construct for themselves and the people around them.

And walk out.

Wed, 2009-05-27 17:13

Photo by Flickr user itspaulkelly. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In a recent post about withdrawal I recalled the definition from the days before it was even remotely permissible to let someone know that you masturbate, let alone see you do it, as…

...a brinksmanship-y technique where the man gets as close as he can to orgasm during intercourse and then, somehow, clearheadedly pulls out in such a way and in enough time for his otherwise hands-off ejaculation to occur such that no semen comes in contact with her vulva, let alone is released inside her vagina.

This is but one of a variety of reasons I was a bit leery of the prospect even though I’m a proponent of not coming inside a partner when only low-reliability (annual risk of unwanted pregnancy for “typical” use is greater than 10%) contraception is used.

To which Emily H. of The Clothes That Got Me Laid said in comments (emphasis mine)

WAIT, WHAT? People think the withdrawal method means the guy is supposed to pull out at the last possible second?? & then have an “otherwise hands-free ejaculation”? Well, no wonder people think the withdrawal method doesn’t work. No, no. I’ve never met a pullout method user from back in the day who thought it worked like that, let alone seen a hands-free orgasm of the type you allude to. The way it is supposed to work is, the guy pulls out when he is getting close, then basically finishes up by jerking off (onto his lady companion’s boobs, perhaps). I will defer to the superior wisdom of some guy from Vice magazine on this one: “True pulling out means you have to beat it for, like, 15 seconds.”

I’m just SO GLAD to hear her say that! I think she got the quote from this page. If so I’m not going to vouch for any of the other advice they offer. Just this.

“True pulling out means you have to beat it for, like, 15 seconds.”

Kudos to Vice Magazine. My only quibble (actually it’s a pretty big one) is that, unlike maybe 90% of porn, there are other perfectly lovely ways to give him an orgasm. Fellatio, frottage, friction from hands, toys or other body parts by her — since we are talking mostly about contraception here — in addition to him “beating it being obvious choices.

But, one way or another, yes, 15 seconds seems like a sensible… and also humane/reasonable limit. Any closer and, yeah, the risk of pulling out too late must skyrocket.

One more factor I’m guessing is not taken into account by current research.

—-

Incidentally the other day I mentioned that there are at least two ways men can have orgasms that in terms of pure physical pleasure are more intense than ejaculating inside their partner’s vaginas. Several people asked what those methods might be.

Before I got there here’s a quick clarification: there are different ways to enjoy sex with someone; there are different ways to experience pleasure. And while intercourse is emotionally, delightfully intense for me the actual orgasms are lovely they’re almost never the best part. (This could be because the emotional and non-orgasmic elements are so nice.) Anyway, what I had in mind when I said what I said was plain old genital-orgasm sensation.

And with that clarified two methods that have sent me over the moon have been slow manual stimulation after extended, emotionally and physically intense sexual activity and slow oral stimulation after extended, emotionally and physically intense sexual activity. Where those extended, emotionally and physically intense sexual activities might include, but not be limited to multiple bouts of intercourse in multiple positions.

I might add that whereas the cliché “money shot” in modern porn may have familiarized (and even, evidently, enamored) several generations with the idea of men coming outside their partners body the evident requirement that semen be visibly projected, preferably onto the patiently-presented body of the ostensible “partner” in order to “prove” ejaculation happened and maybe to “mark” the other actor or actress for the behalf of the viewer tend to… limit the available techniques. Also the evident inversion of status in porn means the ejaculating actor rather than his partner produces it himself.

All well and good I’m sure, and I’d be the last to deprive someone else of his or her heart’s delight of porn-style money-shot ejaculations with a partner. But there are other ways to do it.

Someone partner who shall remain unidentified in time or time-zone thinks (or at least used to think) it’s seriously cool to cup one hand on top of the end of a partner’s erection while she got him closer and closer with the other because she likes the feel as he jets up against the palm of her hand and then rains back down over himself. You usually don’t see that in porn but, at the risk of putting a too much I in the TMI, it feels… lovely for the recipient as well.