The man, the legend (click to enlarge).
Why I Love: My Dad
Hatch ’em, match ’em, dispatch ’em.”
— My friend, the Rev. JT, deconstructing pastors’ duty toward their flock
Prosatio Silban and the Fellow Seeker
(Four printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)
SOME MORNINGS, THE FOOD BAZAARS in many-quayed Soharis are a-bustle with moneyed and caffeinated customers; others substitute sustained novelty for their pitiful lack of custom.
Prosatio Silban sighed inwardly. The beefy cook’s galleywagon had been parked for three days near the entrance to the bayside city’s main victual market. While the first two days had been reasonably profitable, he was beginning to despair of the third. It’s still early yet, he reminded himself. And fortune’s wheel has many turns.
He considered his painted menu board, which advertised eighteen modest but effective satisfactions for the appetites of hungry marketgoers, under the three-color declaration “The Cook For Any Price.”
5 Thoughts: Lessons Learned by an Autodidactic Home Cook
1. THE SMALLER THE KITCHEN, THE greater the discipline. And the organization.
2. Thrift rules. In other words, there are no such things as “leftovers” — only the beginnings of future meals. (Thank you, Tamar Adler, for this bit of back-pocket wisdom.)
3. Keep your most-used recipes hanging over your main prep-counter/stove. Keep also a folder for (annotated!) recipes already cooked, in addition to filing future-use recipes by preparation media (“skillet,” “sheet pan,” “slow cooker,” etc). Organization, remember?
An Arrow Escape (A Prosatio Silban Tale)
(Four-and-a-half printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction.)
THE LAW IN STONY-HEARTED Tirinbar mandated that all escaped slaves and their liberators were to be killed when located – but that could not deter Prosatio Silban from trying to do the right thing.
The beefy cook, born and raised in the less-pitiless parts of the Uulian Commonwell, acted with decency as a matter of course. But when the slight, copper-skinned young woman appeared late one evening on the figurative doorstep of his buopoth-drawn galleywagon (parked in the only location he could find, which had turned out to be a seldom-visited spot hard by the mountainside city’s main marketplace) his first motivation was profit.
My Contribution to the War Effort
IT’S JUST A LITTLE BLOG called
“Metaphorager.”
I hope it offers respite.
Prosatio Silban and the Mapping Lesson
(Five printed pages. If you’re new to these tales, here are the preface and introduction. Enjoy!)
NIGHT, AND THE CLEAN SMELL of salt. Slap of waves and wind-flapped canvas. Creak of leaping timbers. An urgent overhead call, and a soft but substantial splat.
I just served that, Prosatio Silban thought in mild vexation, and grabbed a nearby mop.
It was not the beefy cook’s first brush with someone else’s seasickness, and in fact he himself had suffered from the Mariner’s Malady for the first three days of his current adventure. For he was aboard the Golden Rose, working his passage around and across the Rimless Sea by helping out in the galley (and environs) as needed. Right now, that meant standing vigilant on the weather deck with seedcakes and a hotpot of yava to ballast the crew’s queasy stomachs – and a ready mop for when he couldn’t.