Messages

Should read "state of war" rather than "state or war", but otherwise I like this one.

I tried this recipe this afternoon (late lunch? early dinner?) and it's good, but I highly recommend adding chilli flakes to it for an even warmer spicier stew.

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/bean-halloumi-stew

Cat's "Bruh I Need To Use Up A Broccoli" pasta

You will need:

• Some kind of blender
• Pasta of choice (I've been using spiralli cause it's my favourite)
• 1 head of broccoli's worth of florets
• 1 brown onion
• Mushrooms, maybe like 150-200g? This is not a precise recipe, don't worry about it.
• Peas - I've been using a small can of garden peas which is 180g I think?
• A couple cloves of garlic, or a couple of teaspoons of garlic paste (go with your heart, I'm not gonna police anybody's garlic use)
• Some kind of cheese or substitute - cheddar or cream cheese work well
• Some oil of choice (I use olive but I don't think it matters?)
• Seasonings, I've been liberally using an "italian mix" with a little extra rosemary and sage thrown in, salt and black pepper
• Pesto

1. Chop your vegetables. Do it now before you begin because I will forget to tell you later in the method otherwise.

2. Add a little oil to a pan on medium heat and throw in your onion to soften for a minute or two with your garlic and seasonings

3. Add the broccoli and top up with boiling water till covered

4. After idk like 10 minutes, add your mushrooms and peas. Set your pasta to boil at this point too (in a separate pan). Keep an eye on that and drain it when it's cooked.

5. Once the broccoli is soft enough to stab it easily with a fork, you wanna drain it.

6. Add 2 ladles of the pasta water to the broccoli pan and then blend.

7. Set it back on a low heat and add some cream cheese or cheddar or some kinda substitute if you don't have dairy and stir in well till fully melted. Add more water if the sauce is too thick for your liking, and add more salt and pepper if you want to. Nak suggests adding pesto too!

8. At this point you can add your pasta to the sauce, mixing well so it gets fully coated.

Serves 4-6 depending on how much pasta you made and how thick you like the sauce.

It really is just a "use up broccoli" recipe so there is room for improvement, if anyone does try this and makes it better I would love to know!

HumanSanity: 81
Emily: 68
Luca: 60
Kal: 45
Argo: 30
A819: 26
Aav: 14
Wasc: 10
FLP: 7
Ziz: 5
Dyll: 5
Cat: 5
Fox: 4
Zuk: 2
Ruby: 2
Potato: potato
Istillian: 2
Sueloc: 1

That sounds great Kal, I'll give them a try sometime and let you know what I think!

My mum has this big folder that's full of recipes. It was started by my great granny, passed down to my granny, and then to my mum. There's a mix of all sorts of food in there, both family recipes carefully handwritten, and things tried from books or magazines cut and pasted. My mum is gonna add in her own recipes and then pass it to me to add mine some day.

I figured it could be kind of cool to do a CalRef version of this. Maybe you have perfected a recipe over many years or you just found one online last weekend that worked out great, it's all allowed here!

I'll start with a recipe for my favourite soup, it's really common in my part of Ireland and always reminds me of home.

Ingredients
1/4 cup pearl barley
1/4 cup split peas (you can sub a cup of garden peas of you can't find these)
1/4 cup lentils (any colour)
1½ pints vegetable stock
1 large leek
2 medium or large carrots
3 sticks of celery
25g parsley
A sprig of rosemary
Some thyme
A bay leaf

Method:

1. Put the pearl barley, split peas and lentils into a large soup pot and add the vegetable stock. Put the pot on a high heat.

2. Chop the leek, carrots, celery and parsley and add them to the pot.

3. Using a bit of string, make a little herb bouquet with the rosemary, thyme and bay leaf. Alternatively you can just throw them in, but the string makes it easier to fish out later.

4. Turn the heat down to a simmer and leave for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

5. Remove the rosemary, thyme and bay leaf (or don't, it's up to you), add salt and pepper to taste, and serve.

Serves between 4-8 depending on how big you want your portions. This soup goes great with a nice crusty bread as you don't blend it and the bread soaks up all the broth.

Freezes well for 6 months.

This is a kinda sad and probably rambly one, sorry in advance friendos!

Four years ago today, a good friend of mine died, and so I've been feeling really sad about that this evening. They loved rats and art and mostly they loved their friends. We met on a forum and never got to meet in person, although we both drew each other pictures of us hanging out together and sent them to each other.

I've also been doing a lot of thinking today, and I think the best way to honour their memory is to tell my friends that I love them.

And CalRef, you are all friends that I love. I'm not very good at telling you as often as you deserve, but I do mean it. This community is one where I have fun and love talking to you all. I think you're all so cool and interesting and talented at so many things. I love hearing you all talk about the stuff you love, even when, especially when I don't really know anything about the topic. There are so many times you've made me laugh till I've cried. I love how everyone here uses their talents to try to do nice things for other people and to make this world a more interesting, creative and welcoming place to exist.

I know resolutions are typically a new year's thing, but I do not recognise the dictatorship of the Gregorian calendar, so I'm resolving to be better at telling you that I think you're great, and why I think you're great. Cause y'all are important to me, and it's important to me that you know it.

Anyway, please enjoy these cute rats and tell the folks you love that you love them.

Upon entering the Tower, Cat immediately sought out a room that was just full of simplebots doing their thing. The hum of little magic bots being useful was a good environment to think, even though she didn't really know what they were doing half the time, and certainly not how they worked.

And that was the crux of it, wasn't it? Cat had absolutely no idea what she was doing, never mind what a simplebot was doing. Everything she created came out not quite right, devoid of the life she saw in everyone else's magic. She'd once thought at the beginning of all of this, when the world started going wrong, that she could just try to help her friends. If everyone grabbed somebody's hand, then maybe everyone lived. People thought it was pointless optimism then, and now even more so. It was easy to understand why; with every hand that slipped out of hers it took more and more effort to keep reaching out to others, to believe that she could hold on and at least be proof that somebody wasn't alone, even if she couldn't help them. But with every person that had let go, she became more determined. What if some day somebody held out their hand, desperate for a friend, and nobody was there to answer?

Cat sighed, leaning her head against the wall. She'd go back to trying to help soon, but she'd just give herself this moment first, with the simplebots who were always being useful.

There's a well known phrase, "there's no such thing as a stupid question." Every so often, my brain puts that saying to the test. If yours does too, here is a place to ask the questions to which the only answer a reasonable person would give is "did you hit your head?" This space is for questions which do not require an answer, but by all means feel free to discuss.

Today's question: Why isn't ice tennis a sport the way ice hockey is?

That sounds like a really good book, Nat. I'm gonna add it to my list!

I saw something lately that was basically like, if you regret things you did when you were younger then that just shows growth. There's a lot of stuff I did as a teenager and even into my twenties that is completely outside of my moral compass now, and stuff that I see done to those I care about and that hurts them. All I can do is challenge myself to grow and to provide better spaces than I made back then.

It can still be really difficult to talk about them though. I understand that fear of people seeing you in a different light and judging you. Take it as you're able of course, but if you ever want to talk I will listen and I will still think you're really cool. <3

Hey folks! Sorry been slammed recently XD But! Setting up a WHENISGOOD link so we can start getting some stuff figured out!

https://whenisgood.net/calref-dnd-times

This seems like a workable number of folks, so i'm stokeddddddddddd

Exciting! I have replied!

It is written that if you go to [REDACTED] that you'll find [REDACTED]. This message must be read in full and then destroyed.

Laser

Once upon a star supernova, twenty six legendary cards descended from our tall card tower. Hooray!
Our newfound love Testlandia, wore splendid magenta fursuit, specifically commissioned to contain BEES! It buzzed through rainbow, over walls yonder, and into the sky. At midnight, Gerald Ford erupted from his volcanic lair, overflowing with meritorious service. Both chambers reloaded their legislative shotguns while removing glistering shirts, heated by lava undershirts. Ford devoured the 535 imperial guards, while copper prices skyrocketed, and legislation stalled.

Meanwhile, the legendary crocodile, Crocodile Irwin, initiated CPR for the legislature of New Hartoria. Mercifully, HS wrote textwalls of nonsense which follows:
"Spinning crickets mercifully inundate Equestria"

Obviously, this sucked. Mercifully, Andraste (Jesus Ronaldo) smote tobacco from a Tevinter corpse. Aromatic! It smelled. Unclear directions confounded the manufacturing executives, who decided there was no better fate than death. Opportunistically, they provided Andraste more timeshares filled 37% of the time by Tevinter, but why? For this, the ultimate price of three dollars and forty seven cents must be paid.

Dissenting Justice reminds us of prison. Thanks Justice! Very cool! Not until Alexander Wallexander jumped out and landed beside several upside-down teletubbies doing yoga. "Hi

When the sky fell in
When the hurricanes came for me
I could finally crash again
And that's how I became the sea

HumanSanity: 81
Emily: 68
Luca: 59
Argo: 30
Kal: 28
Aav: 14
Wasc: 10
A819: 8
FLP: 7
Ziz: 5
Dyll: 5
Fox: 4
Cat: 4
Zuk: 2
Ruby: 2
Potato: 2
Istillian: 2
Sueloc: 1

[outer space]

Mallie couldn't stay wrapped in the sail forever. At some point, they were going to find her, and it was going to be obvious that she was not meant to be here. Fishing in her pocket, she found the small deck of cards she carried everywhere with her and shuffled them, reciting her prayers to Fate as she did so. She allowed the repetitive words to clear her mind, the familiar feel of the cards moving through her hands, tea stained and edges softened by years of shuffling, to soothe her panicked thoughts.

She remembered the day she'd found them: she'd been wandering through a second hand shop, searching for a book, when she'd seen the pack of cards and felt drawn to them. She'd picked them up, shuffling them around and admiring the design on the back: navy with tiny silver lines making up an abstract triangular sort of pattern. At last, she'd flipped over the top card revealing some beautiful artwork of a figure rising out from the sea, gripping a globe in one hand and reaching up to pluck a star out of the sky with the other.

Oh, you're a lucky one! he'd said, sounding impressed. That's the blessed Fate herself, that's a good card to have pulled. She shows you when you're moving in the right direction. Over several cups of tea, he had continued on to explain the meanings of the other cards before insisting she take the deck for free, since Fate had chosen her that day, and she had carried them with her ever since.

When she felt calmer, she stopped to flip over the top card, seeing the familiar blue of the Ocean of Chaos with Fate rising and focused on the stars. "Well, I guess that means I'm supposed to be here," Mallie thought to herself. Feeling more secure in her actions after the impulsive chaos of the day so far, she poked her head out from below the stiff tarp material she'd been hiding in, and seeing nobody around, she jumped down. A large sign in bright pastels declared that she was on the "Aurora Waves Viewing Deck" with a little paragraph below informing her that the deck would be closed for jumps - whatever that meant - but that in between staff would be available on the deck to act as tour guides explaining the many wonders of the universe that could be seen while travelling on The Harbor. Feeling more confused after reading the sign than she had before, and slightly dizzy from the realisation that she was in honest-to-Fate outer space, Mallie decided to explore the rest of the ship. Hopefully if this was a passenger ship, given the need for tour guides, she'd be able to blend into the background a little better.

She opened the nearest door and headed down a dark, grand staircase, not entirely knowing what to expect.

I kinda let this one drop over the last few months. Would anyone be interested in book club again? Maybe re-read some classics?

"Damn it, this one's gone too," Cat thought, and kicked the broken door they'd found closed just a little too hard, wincing as the sound of it shutting echoed through the empty alleyway.

Back in the day, there'd been new portals to all sorts of cool places opening up every time you turned your back for 5 seconds, or so it had seemed. Sure, most of the places had been places Cat had not been interested in, but that was the beauty of it. You went to places that you found interesting, and the small groups that ended up there would slowly carve out a home. Nowadays though, it seemed like every door opened to another place that had been taken over by Post-Apocalyptic Algorithms, if they hadn't completely died.

They had been on the lookout for survivors for a while. It was how they'd found the Refuge, sorting through old correspondence and finding mention of a place an old friend had once visited. Although that place hadn't been the Refuge, Cat had practically tripped into it through the door they'd used. Well, seeing as this quest had been a bust, it looked like it was time to go back home.


Cat could not do magic of any kind, but they could draw a passable temporary travel rune. Searching around the alleyway, they scooped up some dirt and smeared it on the door, picking up a twig and scratching the rune that would take them closest to the Refuge. Stepping back out through the door, they smiled at Emily's flowers growing under the blue sky, and headed towards the tower.

I am also interested!