In My Life
Getting Organised
Being ahead of myself feels like such an accomplishment. I’m not done scheduling the entire September as I had hoped I’d manage. However, I’ve generally had at least two to three days buffer ahead of me in terms of blogging. Considering that alms all the posts I wrote in my two years of blogging were written within 12 hours of publication, that is huge progress. Also, check out the iPad screen in the photo above! I’ve put together a blogging planner that works for me.
Food, Food, Food and More Food
Roast Potatoes | Chocolate Cake | Braised Beef
This week was a very productive one in the kitchen. I decided to experiment a fair bit and prepared dishes I had never prepared before — at least not like this. For some reason I always shirked roast potatoes. The ones I’ve tasted in the past were always so oily, I hated them. Well, I found that reducing the oil for basting a little and dabbing the potatoes after roasting can make all the difference!
Then there was the 3-layer chocolate cake. Mind you, I don’t own any spring forms, which explains why the edges are so rounded. That’s also why I didn’t attempt layer cakes until August this year. After compensating for the extra gaps with more cream though, you couldn’t really tell that the layers didn’t have straight edges. In true me fashion, I ditched chocolate cake recipes and improvised with the compositions. I’m happy to report that everything turned out great nonetheless.
Lastly, I successfully braised beef! I last attempted beef stew three years ago. The meat turned out far from tender. Perhaps I was a tad impatient back then. I was an undergraduate cooking in the common kitchen during study week. A lot of people were vying for the stove to cook their Maggie Mee. They didn’t appreciate me hogging the kitchen in our block.
Either way, this time round I added a huge dash of patience to my yet again improvised recipe and ended up with beef so tender, it fell apart just with the nudge of my fork. Success!
Society6
While this wasn’t planned, I found myself setting up shop on Society6. My username’s sephina. So far I’ve got one design with red carnations that I photographed earlier this year up on Society6. I’m not exactly sure which direction I wanna head into but I do want to integrate some of my photography somehow. Some ideas are floating around in my head but so far they’re concepts. I’ll update this space again when I’ve got more concrete things going. Though I do love the clock enough to possibly want it for myself.
Book Haul
There also were two new additions to my bookshelf this week; both review copies, courtesy of Pansing Books. A Thousand Nights by E.K. Johnston publishes towards the end of October and is an Arabian Nights retelling. I’ve been looking forward to it for months, so receive an ARC was a pleasant surprise.
Trouble is a Friend of Mine by Stephanie Tromly was released a month ago. It wasn’t on my radar but after I read the preview chapter on Amazon, I figured this one’s got humour. I love good humour in books, so I look forward to reading this one soon.
On the Blog
Blog Posts
Upon looking up Drama by Raina Telgmeier in the public library catalogue, I found that it was pulled from the shelves. It’s now under review, possibly for LGBTQ themes. Since I’t had some requests for it, I explained how to take #bookthroughphone photos and how to improve them. Looking back, I summed up my August and shared my childhood favourite for Mise-en-scène.
Book Reviews
I reviewed Vicious by V.E. Schwab and let me tell you, it was glorious! It’a about everything I usually don’t care for and certainly wouldn’t read but not knowing this before I started led me to enjoy it tremendously. Definitely give this one a shot, even if you’re not into superheroes. In my continued search graphic novels, I picked up This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki & Jillian Tamaki. Despite the beautiful artwork, that book left me cold. The plot was so stagnant, it bored me.
Around the Blogosphere
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Mishma @ Chasing Faerytales considered if ARCs have become a symbol of blogger status. She concluded yes and I do agree with her to a large extent. Publishers won’t give ARCs to a blogger if they don’t fit into their marketing campaign. Bloggers who do review ARCs have proven themselves in terms of dedication, maturity of the blog, audience growth, etc.
However, just because a long-time blogger doesn’t review ARCs, that doesn’t mean they’re a lesser blogger. Perhaps they live outside the zones of territorial rights or don’t even want to review ARCs in the first place. The important this is is that neither is superior and if someone shares their ARC hauls, they shouldn’t be shamed and envious remarks and drama should be kept in check. The whole point is publicity and that includes posting photos on social media to generate hype.
- Anastasia @ Blogger’s Bookshelf showed off broken spines. She didn’t set out to break them but they do have history. Still, I’m pretty set on keeping my books in their best possible condition, no matter how much character broken spines might show.
- Meg @ Cuddlebuggery designed reimagined covers for The Raven Cycle. They are absolutely stunning to behold! If only these weren’t merely a personal project but were for print.
- Renae @ Respiring Thoughts set out to only read books by non-white authors in August. Now that the month is over, she shared what she learnt and took away from this endeavour.
- Steph @ Cuddlebuggery wrote an exposé on Samantha Reed, a blogger who plagiarised many book reviews from other bloggers. Plagiarism is a serious offence and needs to be dealt with accordingly. The reason Steph outlined everything that happened is that despite sending out emails of apology, Samantha didn’t make good on her word to make amends. She thought it important to warn everyone, in case other reviews have been plagiarised too without the reviewers’ knowledge.
What are you doing to me with those food pictures? *drools* THAT CHOCOLATE CAKE. Gorgeous pictures girl :)
Your blog calendar is lovely! I think it’s very photogenic ;) Also, yay for cooking up a storm! I really admire people who have a knack (and the patience) to cook or bake, and what you’ve made looks delicious.
Josephine, the cooking goddess. *fist bump*
And that clock! OH MY GOODNESS WANT. If only I could use it though. :( My dorm doesn’t allow any hanging things, and my mom’s not going to accept any unneeded clocks.
That monthly calendar looks so good!! Do you mind if I ask where you got it from? Or if you made it yourself, how? Hope you enjoy the rest of September :)
Thank you! I made it myself using Excel and Photoshop. Have a splendid September too, Tracey!
i love how your planner’s set up in the picture with your ipad! did you create it yourself or use an app? i currently use a notebook from muji that’s helping me quite a bit… i’m still not that super organized, machine-like blogger i’d like to be but there’s definitely some more structure in my blogging since using my planner.
and there you go, josephine, making me hungry as always. i love hearing about your experience in the kitchen just because i really can’t cook so it’s so wildly different to me but also so interesting to read about how you tweak recipes and your trials and all that stuff. the chocolate cake and the potatoes look great! so does the braised beef. i definitely know who to go to for cooking / baking advice if ever i run into trouble in the kitchen now!
have a great week josephine! <3
Yep, I made it myself using Excel and Photoshop. I can’t say I was ever organised before I determined to pro-actively change that last month. It’s still the early stages but I hope that I can make it a habit.
Well, when I was in high school, all I did was bake. It’s only in uni that I started cooking out of necessity. And now that I’m out of it and have some time on my hands I decided to give cooking a go. With practice it does get easier :) I suggest trying simple recipes first to build the confidence.
You too, have a wonderful week, Annie!
Oooooh, the blogging planner is so pretty! How did you create that? I’d like to think that a pretty planner like that would get me motivated to create posts, but in all actuality, I would probably just get distracted by making it the most beautiful planner page ever.
Thank you, Jackie! I used Excel and Photoshop. Prettiness aside, what makes this work for me is that I included checkboxes that help me track the stages I’m at for each post.
Hooray for your cooking successes! That chocolate cake looks fantastic. Do you usually write down what you’re doing while you improvise?
Hah, if you think Anastasia’s book spines are bad, you would be horrified to see my most-read books from growing up. :P
Most of the time I plan what I’m gonna do beforehand and write everything down. Then if I alter anything in the process, I note it down. Trouble is I tend to write on loose sheet of paper. Haha. Once in a while I collate everything into a notebook or the Paprika Recipe Manager app which syncs recipes between my Mac & iPhone.
Somehow I’m pretty okay with seeing children’s books with massively broken spines. Mostly because it show that they’ve been read, considering that many children don’t bother or even know how to prevent cracked spines.
I have SO many loose pieces of paper with improvised recipes on them. I will have to look at Paprika Recipe Manager, as I haven’t heard of it before. When I spilled water on my laptop earlier this year, I lost hundreds of bookmarked recipes, so I had to start over from scratch. It would have been nice to have something backed up to my phone.