This all began with ribs.
I was looking for something to throw on the grill for dinner and found a 2-lb package of boneless country-style pork ribs in the freezer. After deciding it looked promising, I pulled it out to thaw, and then thought: Okay, what goes with ribs?
Red beans and rice, obviously.
Looking for just a little taste, to see if you’ll like Stupefying Stories? Check out SHOWCASE #1, our 99¢ sampler plate, now free on Kindle Unlimited! From science fiction so hard it clanks to magical fantasy so whimsical it sweeps you away to Neverland, this book has a little bit of everything, to show you what our special brand of fantastic fiction is all about. Get it today!
This is where everything began to go askew. I checked the pantry and found that while I had plenty of packages of different red beans and rice mixes on-hand, they all had sodium levels that were through the roof and not one was gluten-free. I’m supposed to be on a restricted-sodium diet, and while I’m not gluten-sensitive myself, I have enough friends and family members who are that I decided to make it a point to make a batch of low-sodium gluten-free red beans and rice from scratch.
I mean, how hard can it be? It’s just beans and rice, right?
One
of the reader reviews really nailed it: “It reads like the first three
episodes of a great science fiction show you wish someone would make.”
While we’re all waiting for some clever person at Amazon or Netflix to
wake up and option this property, you can do your part by encouraging
author Matthew Castleman to write even more of these great stories! He wants to write them! Encourage him to do it!
CHECK IT OUT! READ IT NOW! IT’S FREE, ON KINDLE UNLIMITED!
Thus began my quixotic quest to find a recipe for gluten-free red beans and rice online. The Internet, it turns out, is full of such recipes, to the point of being incoherent noise. Some of the recipes called for very specific or even preposterous ingredients that left me wondering, Seriously? You put that in red beans and rice? For love of God, why? And most of the recipes are written just like this, as chatty, breathless, disjointed paragraphs…
THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, by Eric Dontigney
From bestselling author and frequent Stupefying Stories contributor Eric Dontigney comes THE MIDNIGHT GROUND, a terrific paranormal thriller. Rather than say more about it I’ll just say, “Check out the reader reviews and ratings.” There are more than a hundred of them out there, and they’re overwhelmingly 4- and 5-stars. (If you get nothing but 5-star reviews, you’re either not trying hard enough or else buying reviews.) THE MIDNIGHT GROUND is available on Kindle, Audible, and in trade paperback, or FREE on Kindle Unlimited.
Separated by ads. After a while I began to realize that most of the web sites I was finding these recipes on were sponsored by the makers of the very specific and/or preposterous ingredients called for in the recipes; even the ones that claimed not to be.
SCOUT’S HONOR, by Henry Vogel
From acclaimed “swords and planets” author Henry Vogel comes Scout’s Honor, the book that launched his bestselling Terran Scout Corps series. If you like your heroes brave and true, your heroines smart and feisty, and your space opera plots racing ahead at breakneck speed, you’ll love the Scout series.
Just 99¢ for the first book in the series!
Or perhaps the latter web sites were just monetized to the point of distraction. And the chatty, nattering, get-to-the-damn-point-already style of writing common to these sorts of sites, which a reader criticized in my post last week, The Ten-Minute Low-Carb Personal Pizza, wasn’t a flaw or evidence that the writer was an airhead. It was a feature.
From the acclaimed author of the Scout series comes The Fugitive Heir, the book that launched his bestselling Connaught Family Chronicles series. If you like your space adventures with a bit less Burroughs and a bit more Heinlein, check out The Fugitive Heir!
Just 99¢ for the first book in the series!
The entire point of the web page was not to get the readers to the actual recipe, which when finally found was typically a list of a half-dozen ingredients and a half-page of instructions. It was to make the reader scroll through ad after ad after ad…
Having fun yet? Why not bail out of this parade of ads now and check out our magazine?
Scrolling’ scrollin’ scrollin’
Keep them readers scrollin’
Remember, if you’re not paying for a product, you are the product. Or rather, your eyeballs, delivered to the sponsor, are the product. Thankfully most sponsors settle for getting your attention, not any actual body parts. Although that will likely change in the not-too-distant dystopian future.
Judith Field writes wonderful, sweet, smart and charming contemporary urban fantasy stories, which we’re always delighted to find in our inbox. For some reason this collection of her stories never sold well in the U.S., though; perhaps her stories are just “too British” to appeal to an American audience. Or perhaps not: perhaps, if you subscribe to BritBox, and especially if you liked Rosemary & Thyme, you might want to take a closer look at this one.
Check it out, please. Consider reading a few stories. It’s free on Kindle Unlimited now, so you can sample it and pick and choose stories as you please.
Eventually I said “[intercourse] this, gleaned the general sense of the information I needed from a half-dozen or more different online recipes, and began construction.
Step 1. Starting with a pound of red beans—
Crap. I’m out of canned red beans. I have plenty of dried red beans, but all the recipes for using dried beans begin with starting them soaking yesterday, to have them ready for use today.
Just buy a damn book already, okay?
If you already have SS#25, take a look at one of the books on the Friends of Stupefying Stories list.
There are dozens of books in the StupefyingSF bookshop. Audio books, too. Check ‘em out!
Hmm. I don’t seem to have a working time machine right now, but do have an instant pot. Maybe I can use the instant pot to rehydrate the beans? A quick Internet search for instructions on how to make red beans and rice using an instant pot—
Opened up another bottomless rabbit hole of sponsored sites. Okay, screw that. Black beans will have to do. Next step?
Step 2. Using [name redacted]® brand Cajun seasoning—
Say what? Does every damn step in every set of instructions call for using some name-brand product? (With helpful links suggesting exactly where to buy it.) And precisely measured amounts of this or that name-brand seasoning?
Oh, that poblano pepper looks good. Maybe I’ll need to bolster it with a green bell pepper later. I’ll decide when it’s cooking.
And precisely measure amounts of oregano and thyme? What is this “precisely” nonsense? I’ll just go down to the oregano patch and grab—
To my considerable surprise, oregano survives Minnesota winters quite nicely, provided I bury the oregano patch in leaves in the fall. The rabbit-resistant fence around the raised bed works very well for keeping the leaves in place and the oregano bedded and protected through the winter.
Sometimes the sage survives the winter. Sometimes not. If it doesn’t, no big deal. I can always plant more in the spring. It’s not like I use a lot of sage.
Speaking of surviving winter, be sure to read “Finding Spring,” by Sippora Coffeldt. You’ll find it in SHOWCASE #1, our 99¢ sampler plate, now free on Kindle Unlimited! From science fiction so hard it clanks to magical fantasy so whimsical it sweeps you away to Neverland, this book has a little bit of everything, to show you what our special brand of fantastic fiction is all about. Get it today!
Then… Bay leaf? That was unexpected. But okay, the consensus is that red black beans and rice requires some number of bay leaves. No problem.
One of these years. It hasn’t happened yet.
JIMI PLAYS DEAD: TWO STORIES ABOUT SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK & ROLL, by Bruce Bethke
Speaking of movies and ancient undead things from the distant past, remember
45 r.p.m. records? Remember how when you bought one, it was like
rolling the dice? Sure, the “A” side was always the hit single you
wanted, but the “B” side… Yeah, it might be something brilliant
you’d overlooked before and were overjoyed to discover and share with
all your friends. Or it might be a turkey like “Tapioca Tundra.”
Here,
then, in a special hit single package, is “Jimi Plays Dead,” Bruce
Bethke’s beloved and Nebula-nominated story of an obsessed guitarist who
will do anything to sound exactly like Jimi Hendrix. But on the B
side you’ll find “Buck Turner and The Spud from Space,” Bethke’s
published but forgotten tale of airport bars, garage bands, kids with
dreams of making it big, and of an alien who comes to Earth seeking
intelligent life, but through an unfortunate miscalculation ends up
landing in Hollywood.
Is “Buck Turner” brilliant? Is it daft? Is it just begging to be optioned and turned into a low-budget YouTube short? (Bethke thinks so. Just two sets and three speaking parts. C’mon, doesn’t someone want to take a crack at it?)
CHECK IT OUT! READ IT NOW! IT’S FREE, ON KINDLE UNLIMITED!
Oh, those two little peppers look about right.
Add to that some garlic, celery, red onion, cooked brown rice…
At last, I had my ingredients together and was just about ready to begin making my beans and rice side dish, while taking plenty of photos and careful notes detailing exactly how I did it.
When it started raining, and I had to scrap my plans
to slow-cook the ribs on the grill and come up with a hasty
improvisation instead. So I didn’t shoot any more photos or take any more notes.
§
Ultimately, my low-sodium, low-carb, gluten-free beans and rice from scratch came out tasting just about right, but looking a bit off. I suspect it’s because I failed to include all the Red Dye #5, thiamine mononitrate, hydrolyzed corn protein, disodium guanylate, and silicon dioxide all the commercial mixes insist are necessary. Shrug. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
So tonight, I’m going to try making a low-carb, low-sodium, gluten-free garlic ginger chicken stir-fry from scratch.
I mean, it’s just garlic, ginger, and chicken, right? How hard can it be?
If you like the stories we’re publishing and don’t like being carpet-bombed with ads, become a supporter today. We do Stupefying Stories out of pure love for genre fiction, but in publishing as in tennis, love means nothing. To keep Stupefying Stories going at this level we need to raise at least $500 USD monthly, and rather than doing so with pledge breaks or crowd-funding campaigns, we’d rather have supporters. If just 100 people commit to giving $5 monthly, we can keep going at this level indefinitely. If we can raise more, we will pay our authors more.
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