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dolorosa_12I'm so far behind on this, so let's attempt to catch up somewhat.
Challenge 6 is Top 10 Challenge — a list of top ten anything. I was going to do something music-related, but a better idea popped into my head this morning:
Top 10 things to do with tomatoes
1. Grow them! They are so easy to grow, and you don't even need a garden. My dad used to grow them on the balcony of his apartment, I know people who grow them indoors, and of course if you have the space, they can be grown in container gardens, vegetable gardens, or greenhouses. You can see lots of examples of the tomatoes I've grown over the years, on my Instagram,![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
ronnidolorosa. They taste far better than anything you can buy from supermarkets (although I am lucky enough to have access to great shop-bought tomatoes via a guy who sells them from a stall at the market during the summer months — he grows about twenty different varieties).
2. Use the biggest, ripest, most flavourful tomatoes you can find and roast them until they are soft and caramelised in the oven, and use them in tomato-based pasta sauces. They taste much richer than tinned tomatoes.
3. Make pan con tomate.
4. Cut them up and serve them as a salad with chopped spring onions, chopped chives, sea salt and pepper, and a drizzle of olive or good-quality sunflower oil.
5. Make Olia Hercules's recipe for 'lick your fingers' ripe fermented tomatoes.
6. Take the most flavourful tomatoes of any variety you can find, and slice them up. Spread a piece of bread with good quality hummus (the best is if you make it yourself), then lay the slices of tomato over the hummus, sprinkle with sea salt, pepper, and chili flakes, drizzle with olive oil, and eat, delighted with your life and your choices.
7. In one frying pan, toast breadcrumbs, salt and chili flakes. In another pan, fry garlic, chopped fresh tomatoes, and chopped flatleaf parsley. Squeeze the juice of one lemon over the tomato mixture. Cook spaghetti or linguine, then add it to the tomato pan with some reserved pasta water, and toss to combine the ingredients. Serve the pasta, with the breadcrumbs mixture scattered over the top.
8. (I haven't got to the point of making my own sundried tomatoes yet, so) buy a jar of the best sundried tomatoes you can find. Eat them. Keep the oil after the tomatoes are all gone, and use it for cooking or salad dressing.
9. Spend all morning swimming at the beach. Then return home for lunch, take some sharp cheddar cheese, and slice it. Slice some tomatoes, and lay both on some slices of cheap supermarket sliced bread (I prefer multigrain here, but any type of sliced bread is fine) and put it together like a sandwich. Spread butter over the exposed outside side of the bread, then fry in a frying pan until the bread is crispy and golden and the cheese is melting. Slice diagonally and serve, and nostalgically remember all your childhood holidays in Broulee.
10. Go out into your garden on a warm summer's day, and harvest all the ripe tomatoes. The scent of the leaves and stems will stay on your hands, and will smell amazing, like the bottled heat of summer abundance. Contemplate which of the above things you will do with the harvested tomatoes, and eat a few while you're standing in the garden, bathed in early morning sunlight.
Challenge 7 is LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.
1. I am a very consistent, methodical person, in the sense that I am very good at building and maintaining consistent routines and habits, to the point that if I've determined that I'm going to do a certain thing on/by a certain time, unless there has been a catastrophic natural disaster, or I'm seriously injured or unconscious in hospital, that thing is happening on/by the specific time. Because I am Like This™, I never commit to doing anything (whether that's verbally to other people/in writing or even in the privacy of my own mind) unless I know already that I am capable a) of doing it and b) within whatever timeframe (or consistently, repeatedly if it's something like an exercise routine or whatever). The drawback of this is that I get completely destabilised if — once I've committed to a certain thing — something outside my control prevents me from doing it. (Case in point: I had essentially committed in my own mind to completing each Snowflake Challenge within the two days from which it was posted, but then the mods posted Challenge 6 late on Sunday, after a time of day when I stop being online, I couldn't do it on Sunday, and I spent half of this week feeling low key wrong because it had thrown off my intended plan for the challenge. Snowflake is meant to be a low-pressure, fun challenge: hahahahaha not for me!)
2. I don't really know how to describe this, but I am very, very good at deferred gratification. I feel it's sort of related to 1, but basically if I have a bunch of things I need to do, the less fun stuff is happening first, as quickly as possible. If I have a task due in a week that will take a few hours to complete, it's going to get done in the first day of that week, so that then it's gone and not hanging over me for the whole week. If I have a task that will take a whole day to complete, due in a week, it's getting split across the first couple of days of the week until it's done, so that it's not hanging over me for the rest of the week. I've been like this all my life, whether the task is academic (e.g. assignment, essay, etc), administrative, cleaning, daily exercise, piano practice when I was a kid, etc etc: if it's the work of less than an hour, it happens first thing in the morning and then is done, if it's a longer piece of work, it gets split into manageable chunks (for academic writing, whether that was an undergrad essay or my whole PhD, that was 1000 words per day — I always began writing straight away and edited on the basis of secondary reading, rather than doing lots of reading first and only writing afterwards), the chunk is done first thing in the morning so that the rest of the day can be devoted to whatever I wanted, for my professional working day, I always shunt as much difficult/time sensitive/intellectually complicated tasks into the earliest part of the working day as possible, doing progressively less and less taxing tasks as the day wears on. This has served me extremely well, but the drawback is that while I'm very good at keeping these feelings hidden and remaining professional, internally I really struggle to work on any shared tasks with people who are procrastinators. (Internally I'm always just screaming, but why wouldn't you want to get this done as quickly as possible so that it's not an item on your to-do list hanging over you?)
3. I'm a good cook, which is useful because I like good food, and it would be a lot more expensive if I couldn't cook it for myself!
Challenge 6 is Top 10 Challenge — a list of top ten anything. I was going to do something music-related, but a better idea popped into my head this morning:
Top 10 things to do with tomatoes
1. Grow them! They are so easy to grow, and you don't even need a garden. My dad used to grow them on the balcony of his apartment, I know people who grow them indoors, and of course if you have the space, they can be grown in container gardens, vegetable gardens, or greenhouses. You can see lots of examples of the tomatoes I've grown over the years, on my Instagram,
ronnidolorosa. They taste far better than anything you can buy from supermarkets (although I am lucky enough to have access to great shop-bought tomatoes via a guy who sells them from a stall at the market during the summer months — he grows about twenty different varieties). 2. Use the biggest, ripest, most flavourful tomatoes you can find and roast them until they are soft and caramelised in the oven, and use them in tomato-based pasta sauces. They taste much richer than tinned tomatoes.
3. Make pan con tomate.
4. Cut them up and serve them as a salad with chopped spring onions, chopped chives, sea salt and pepper, and a drizzle of olive or good-quality sunflower oil.
5. Make Olia Hercules's recipe for 'lick your fingers' ripe fermented tomatoes.
6. Take the most flavourful tomatoes of any variety you can find, and slice them up. Spread a piece of bread with good quality hummus (the best is if you make it yourself), then lay the slices of tomato over the hummus, sprinkle with sea salt, pepper, and chili flakes, drizzle with olive oil, and eat, delighted with your life and your choices.
7. In one frying pan, toast breadcrumbs, salt and chili flakes. In another pan, fry garlic, chopped fresh tomatoes, and chopped flatleaf parsley. Squeeze the juice of one lemon over the tomato mixture. Cook spaghetti or linguine, then add it to the tomato pan with some reserved pasta water, and toss to combine the ingredients. Serve the pasta, with the breadcrumbs mixture scattered over the top.
8. (I haven't got to the point of making my own sundried tomatoes yet, so) buy a jar of the best sundried tomatoes you can find. Eat them. Keep the oil after the tomatoes are all gone, and use it for cooking or salad dressing.
9. Spend all morning swimming at the beach. Then return home for lunch, take some sharp cheddar cheese, and slice it. Slice some tomatoes, and lay both on some slices of cheap supermarket sliced bread (I prefer multigrain here, but any type of sliced bread is fine) and put it together like a sandwich. Spread butter over the exposed outside side of the bread, then fry in a frying pan until the bread is crispy and golden and the cheese is melting. Slice diagonally and serve, and nostalgically remember all your childhood holidays in Broulee.
10. Go out into your garden on a warm summer's day, and harvest all the ripe tomatoes. The scent of the leaves and stems will stay on your hands, and will smell amazing, like the bottled heat of summer abundance. Contemplate which of the above things you will do with the harvested tomatoes, and eat a few while you're standing in the garden, bathed in early morning sunlight.
Challenge 7 is LIST THREE (or more) THINGS YOU LIKE ABOUT YOURSELF. They don’t have to be your favorite things, just things that you think are good. Feel free to expand as much or as little as you want.
1. I am a very consistent, methodical person, in the sense that I am very good at building and maintaining consistent routines and habits, to the point that if I've determined that I'm going to do a certain thing on/by a certain time, unless there has been a catastrophic natural disaster, or I'm seriously injured or unconscious in hospital, that thing is happening on/by the specific time. Because I am Like This™, I never commit to doing anything (whether that's verbally to other people/in writing or even in the privacy of my own mind) unless I know already that I am capable a) of doing it and b) within whatever timeframe (or consistently, repeatedly if it's something like an exercise routine or whatever). The drawback of this is that I get completely destabilised if — once I've committed to a certain thing — something outside my control prevents me from doing it. (Case in point: I had essentially committed in my own mind to completing each Snowflake Challenge within the two days from which it was posted, but then the mods posted Challenge 6 late on Sunday, after a time of day when I stop being online, I couldn't do it on Sunday, and I spent half of this week feeling low key wrong because it had thrown off my intended plan for the challenge. Snowflake is meant to be a low-pressure, fun challenge: hahahahaha not for me!)
2. I don't really know how to describe this, but I am very, very good at deferred gratification. I feel it's sort of related to 1, but basically if I have a bunch of things I need to do, the less fun stuff is happening first, as quickly as possible. If I have a task due in a week that will take a few hours to complete, it's going to get done in the first day of that week, so that then it's gone and not hanging over me for the whole week. If I have a task that will take a whole day to complete, due in a week, it's getting split across the first couple of days of the week until it's done, so that it's not hanging over me for the rest of the week. I've been like this all my life, whether the task is academic (e.g. assignment, essay, etc), administrative, cleaning, daily exercise, piano practice when I was a kid, etc etc: if it's the work of less than an hour, it happens first thing in the morning and then is done, if it's a longer piece of work, it gets split into manageable chunks (for academic writing, whether that was an undergrad essay or my whole PhD, that was 1000 words per day — I always began writing straight away and edited on the basis of secondary reading, rather than doing lots of reading first and only writing afterwards), the chunk is done first thing in the morning so that the rest of the day can be devoted to whatever I wanted, for my professional working day, I always shunt as much difficult/time sensitive/intellectually complicated tasks into the earliest part of the working day as possible, doing progressively less and less taxing tasks as the day wears on. This has served me extremely well, but the drawback is that while I'm very good at keeping these feelings hidden and remaining professional, internally I really struggle to work on any shared tasks with people who are procrastinators. (Internally I'm always just screaming, but why wouldn't you want to get this done as quickly as possible so that it's not an item on your to-do list hanging over you?)
3. I'm a good cook, which is useful because I like good food, and it would be a lot more expensive if I couldn't cook it for myself!
no subject
Date: 2026-01-15 05:42 pm (UTC)Ooh, I'm also good at deferred gratification as you explain it! Alex and I both work this way, and listening to us talk about it, James always shakes his head and tells us we're ludicrous XD
no subject
Date: 2026-01-15 09:54 pm (UTC)