readsalot

What I learned today: using soft flour in a free-form pie (the kind where you plop the filling in the middle of a circle of crust and then fold the crust up around it) means that the whole crust will develop leaks and blackened pie juice will end up everywhere. It's kind of sad looking. The pie will probably be ok, but all of that lovely juice is gone forever. Sigh. I should have remembered that this worked perfectly well with all-purpose flour the last time I tried it, but I had so many pie crust failures in the last six months that I used the soft flour by default.

In other news, I just finished a vampires-in-boarding-school novel called Evernight. Not great. The first half really dragged, and then the first-person narrator suddenly revealed that she knew a lot more about what was going on than had been implied--I really dislike it when the first-person narrator conveniently doesn't think about a lot of things during the beginning of the story. I think the only time that worked was in Nine Princes in Amber, because amnesia is a valid excuse.

I will probably stick with the manga Vampire Knight for my teen-age vampire fix from now on. It's entertaining, and even though it's completely absurd it still feels more believable than Evernight.