Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
Are you traveling this holiday season? Take a cue from The Lord of the Rings and make these lovely lembas. The magical bread baked in the elfen hearths of Middle Earth, were meant to sustain elves, hobbits and men for long journeys.
Just in time for the first Hobbit film coming to theaters, now you can bake lembas in your own kitchen.
If you want to go all out, snag a package of frozen banana leaves at the grocery store, defrost and dry them, and wrap around your lembas to keep them fresh for the midnight showing. (In other words… Maybe don’t wrap them in any old leaves… I’m not sure we have the same vegetation on normal earth as it does on Middle Earth.)
Enjoy!
For this lembas recipe, you need:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
Line a jelly roll pan or half-sheet pan with parchment paper and spray with butter spray.
Whisk together flour, 2 TBS sugar, baking powder, salt and one teaspoon of lemon zest and one teaspoon of orange zest. Cut butter into the flour until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. (You can do this in a food processor to save time)
Whisk together 1 egg, ½ cup half and half and yogurt.
Mix wet into dry slowly until a sticky dough forms. You may not need all of the wet ingredient mixture.
Press dough onto prepared sheet and form into a large rectangle, slightly less than an inch thick.
Whisk together remaining egg and milk, then brush pastries with egg wash.
Crumble sugar and citrus zest between your fingers until fully combined. Sprinkle over dough.
Run a knife through the dough to cut into 8 equally-sized rectangles.
Bake for 16 minutes at 400 degrees.
Cool completely before serving.
Emma Carew Grovum is a data journalist working at the Chronicle of Philanthropy in Washington, D.C. She previously worked as the Digital Editor for The Cooking Club of America and blogs at kitchendreamer.blogspot.com Emma loves Star Wars, pandas and all things Joss Whedon. Find her on twitter at @emmacarew.
This week has felt disproportionately long. Maybe it’s because my birthday is coming and I wish I could run away from it. I don’t want to get older, but yet, it’s what humans do. And with no time machine in sight, well, yeah. It’s happening.
I’m celebrating the only way I know how: with copious amounts of ice cream. I’ll let you know how that goes, because there’s a DIY coming that makes sense of this caloric binge-fest, but that will have to wait for the weekend.
Until then, here’s the things that have been making me happy.
I’m not sure how else to explain this… so I’ll let the New York Times do it:
Cosmic Supermom Discovered
“Scientists have found a cosmic supermom. It’s a galaxy that gives births to more stars in a day than ours does in a year. Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-Ray telescope to spot this distant gigantic galaxy creating about 740 new stars a year. By comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spawns just about one new star each year.”
Yeah, that’s exciting. While everyone else is freaking out about the “supermom” - I’m way more excited about the star babies. SO MANY STAR BABIES. I feel like that was a toy of my 80s childhood, but Google is failing me. Anyone else remember something like this?
Get Out of a Writing Rut
I’m notoriously manic about my writing methods. It’s all binge and purge. (Sorry for the gross analogy, but it’s true.) I write in these psychotic whirls of emotional vomit and then I go through these crazy edits that leave me with very little copy. Then, I get irritated with myself and the inevitable distaste for said habit leads me to skip the keyboard altogether. I needed a boost to get back at it. These 30 tips from crazy great authors really did help.
I just wanted to share this picture of my Lord of the Rings LEGO set with you because those damn shorty legs get me every time. SQUEE.
Hey, did you know I was a tech contributor for Apartment Therapy? Gee, hucks, wow. There’s lots of good stuff to read there, including this:
Don’t Be Afraid of Neon in the Office
Mini Smartphone Projectors: Bringing Movies to a Backyard Near You
(Picture via NASA’s Chandra)
