recipe experimentation: baked cheddar-mascarpone macaroni

We tried out a recipe for home-style oven-baked macaroni and cheese last night, the kind with a béchamel sauce that contains a bunch of shredded cheese that you then bake for 25 minutes with breadcrumbs on top. We used cheddar and mascarpone with parmesan topping and it was delicious, but as soon as I put it on my plate I was like, "It feels wrong to eat this without mashed potatoes, fried chicken, biscuits, coleslaw, and collard greens on the same table" (even though since my appetite is small and coleslaw and fried greens disgust me I would typically eat only the macaroni and mashed potatoes and chicken). A potluck or catered meal of that kind, or a restaurant, are the only sorts of places I would typically encounter the dish, which wasn't one my mom made.

Normally I would just make a salad to serve with it, but minimizing how often we go to the store means buying less fresh produce and the greens are almost entirely going into salads for the bunnies. So - roasted vegetables? Fruit salad?

It would be really good to have a greenhouse, and I've been wanting one more and more lately - we go through so many fresh greens year round that I'm not even sure we could grow enough of them in the small flatpack greenhouse we've got! The greenhouse was bought last summer by MIL and it remains unbuilt; we need to order a truckful of gravel to make the footing to build it on before we could start anyway.

reading & writing and especially fic

I've reached the second to last Nero Wolfe book and stalled halfway through because I'm reluctant to finish all of them and not have any left. This isn't unprecedented... I've never watched or read the last Poirot story either, and it took me several years after acquiring the box sets to watch the last few eps of Due South I hadn't seen from old VHS and of TOS that I didn't remember from tv reruns. (I also haven't watched season 3 of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, but that's not quite the same because the quality was already dipping in season 2 because they ran out of finished novels to base them on. But not unrelated.)

It's harder with reading though, especially because I have made notes on them and have a list of them and they're all here on my phone. So I'm sure I will finish them - probably this week.

I also reached the point where my irritation at combing through the unfiltered pairing tag for new Good Omens works eclipsed the positive value of the increasingly rare fic I wanted to bookmark, so I removed the bookmark from my mobile browser shortcuts. In the period where the speed of good Good Omens fic was slowing down I also read a whole bunch of It 2 Eddie/Richie fixits (without watching It part 2 and without reading It!) and a whole bunch of The Witcher fic, but I got a bit tired of that too. What fanfic, then, am I reading now?

I'm reading Highlander fic. Why not! It's probably been ten years since I've read very much of that at a time...

Speaking of Old Fic, around the time I initially got into Highlander, when I was part of a group watching episodes of it from a friend's box set in 2005-6, I was also writing Gary Oldman/Tim Roth slash with my pal Lilah. I think we were initially inspired by Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, but then there was that series of photographs with the two of them writing messages to each other on their faces.

There was a livejournal community, but it didn't have much activity aside from us. There was one other person who wrote a couple of ficlets, all short, but I didn't know them very well; and at the time I think that was all of the pairing in existence. Lilah and I were working on different fics in the pairing and we encouraged one another. I think I finished three, and she finished one or two, and we both had more WIPs that we never finished, and then I also wrote a story based on Meantime, the Mike Leigh-directed tv movie in which the two of them first costarred in 1983. That semester I was taking an intensive Swedish class that took five hours a day and only one other course, and I had a lot of free time and wrote a great deal of this stuff longhand at the university (that was before I learned to knit or crochet). The result was an extraordinarily high wordcount in a relatively short period of time, with the additional feature that very few people besides the two of us had written any of it. I guess maybe that changed over time? I haven't checked, but both of us have been getting a minor flood of new kudos on the stories in question for weeks now - before the quarantine hit Finland or Holland, at any rate. Evidently someone mentioned them somewhere, but why? Isn't the last time they had anything to do with each other like... approaching 30 years ago now? I have gotten one solitary comment out of the kudos flood and am tempted to ask them, but it feels a bit rude...