I'm pretty sure it's the continuing smoke in the air that's causing my constant dull headache. It feels similar to the constant low-grade headaches I used to have from poor sleep, but with louder tinnitus. I periodically take analgesics but don't know that they help.

* * *

I have a lot of cookbooks, most of them historic. And given that I'm not doing SCA cooking any more, it would be nice to be getting some use out of them. So when I was staring at some lovely eggplants from the garden and thinking about lamb, my mind turned to a cookbook I hadn't yet used: Scheherazade's Feast: Foods of the Medieval Arab World by several members of the Salloum family. This isn't a scholarly edition of a historic text, but more of a coffee-table book that gives a background for medieval Arabic culinary literature, a discussion of various aspects of culture and cuisine, and then a careful selection of recipes in translation and modern adaptation. And when I thought "lamb and eggplant" I said to myself, "I bet that book has something relevant!"

Sure enough, the dish titled "Stuffed Eggplant" was just what I was looking for. I further adapted the recipe to see if I could use mostly ingredients I already had, and the major place I compromised with in minor changes of the spices. This is all from memory, since I made the dish almost a month ago (which is 10 years in normal time-passage).

Prepare dried chickpeas by soaking them for a couple days and then coarsely grinding them. The recipe called for both cubed lamb (for the broth) and ground lamb (for the stuffing) which I somehow didn't clearly notice in advance, and since I couldn't get ground lamb easily I just ground my own. Saute lamb in oil with onions then add water to cover, add salt, ground coriander seed, and a cinnamon stick and cook into a broth.

At this point I had to pull the lamb out of the broth with a slotted spoon to use it in the stuffing (the original recipe calls for cooking it similarly before preparing the stuffing, so all it meant was there was less meat in the broth). Mix the lamb and ground chickpeas with cumin, pepper, spice mixture, saffron and cinnamon.

Prepare the eggplants by slicing the top off then carefully hollowing it out. Stuff with the stuffing. Close the hole at the top (I had some smaller Japanese-style eggplant as well, so I slice off small rounds to use as a "plug" then held it in place with toothppicks.) Place the eggplant in the broth and  simmer for about 40 minutes, periodically moving the eggplant to keep them from sticking to the pot.

Serve sliced into rounds with the sauce spooned over them.

Notes: I had more stuffing than I could use, so I just dumped it into the broth while it cooked. So my broth may have thickened more than intended because of the chicklpeas. It was very tasty. A bit heavy as a sole dish (which is how I tend to cook for myself) and would have worked better as "one slice per diner with other stuff on the side." The eggplant held up fairly well to the cooking, and by the time the "plugs" had dissolved, the stuffing had firmed up a little and didn't leak out. Would I cook it again? Not sure. The recipe was a bit fussy and complex compared to how I usually cook on my own.

* * *

The biggest ongoing project in the last month has been setting up the new, independent channel for my podcast (The Lesbian HIstoric Motif Podcast). My current podcast group/host will be going away and I wanted to make sure to keep all my older shows available. So of course I went a little overboard and re-mastered the shows to have a new intro/outro that explains the context and removes direct references to the host/group. The transfer also gave me a chance to standardize my show notes, since I needed a new version of everything for the new site. I got all that set up before announcing the move (at the beginning of September) and the rest of the month has been actually setting up the new account and starting to upload all the older shows.  (Which also involves lots of revisions to the related blog entries.) I'm doing one month's episodes every day and am slightly more than halfway done.

Starting in November, I'll be releasing the show in parallel on both channels so I have two months to really talk up making the switch. Then in January I'll both be releasing only through the new site, but I'll also implement some format changes. I'll be going to 2 shows per month (rather than a weekly show), not counting the 4 fiction episodes. The essay shows will be essentially unchanged, but I'll be combining the interviews, book rec shows, industry news, etc into the "On the Shelf" episodes. This takes a lot of the pressure off needing to have an interview *every* month, though it's still my goal. It also means I can be more casual about asking my guests to mention book recs since it won't be a separate show.

After the backlog is transferred, I've promised myself to do some more formal setup of social media promotion of the existing material, not only for the podcast but for the blog.

Just a reminder for those who haven't been bombarded by the information elsewhere that the call for submissions for stories to be published on The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast will close at the end of January 31. (Realistically, it closes at the point when I open up my computer the morning of February 1, in the Pacific Time Zone. But I don't advise cutting things so close that you need that information.)

CfS: http://alpennia.com/lhmp/essays/call-submissions-2020-lesbian-historic-motif-podcast-fiction-series

 Sometimes you send a query out into the universe and the universe writes back and says, "We'd love to have you on our podcast!" I had so much fun doing this interview with Sarah at Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Check it out!

 (LHMP #161 Traub 2016 Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns)

Usually I just post the link to the week's LHMP entry, but this time I think I'll reproduce my entire introduction

* * *

This is a very theory-intensive book -- historiography rather than history, and not well suited for the casual reader. But there are some great discussions that made it worth tackling. The writing is very dense and my summary only touches on the outlines of the discussion rather than its specifics. Although theories about how we study and interpret history might seem rather removed from the process of writing lesbian historical fiction, from another angle, the two fields have a great deal of overlap. Consider the question of whether our approach to history is focused on finding identity with our own specific experiences and relationships, or whether we are seeking to understand and appreciate people whose lives have connections with ours but also wide areas of difference. Do we seek to find/write "lesbians in history" from a very narrow definition of the word "lesbian" or do we seek to find/write themes of women's same-sex relationships expressed in a multitude of ways? Do we consider sexual activity to be a necessary defining aspect of those persons we study/write under the rubric of "lesbian" or is it only one of a cluster of important themes? Historical fiction (not just lesbian historical fiction but the entire field) has a pervasive uneasiness around how closely similar historical figures need to be made to modern mindsets in order to be sympathetic to modern readers. In the specific case of lesbian historical fiction, this concern can work to delegitimize the very concept of lesbians in history, just as some historical theories work to erase lesbians as a topic of valid study. And that's why I love finding the parallels in books like this to my own thought processes around the project of writing.