the early bird special

2009-07-10T14:47:00.000-07:00

Foods you can feed my boyfriend after he has his wisdom teeth removed:
1. Buttermilk Mashed potatoes.*
2. Chocolate pudding.**
3. Snickerdoodle Ice Cream***

*Peel four potatoes and cut into quarters. Boil in very salty water until they are as soft as a banana. Drain and plop right into the tupperware where you'll store them. Add 2 tablespoons of butter and 1/4 cup of buttermilk and mash with a hand mixer until smooth and creamy. I cannot understand why anyone owns or uses a potato ricer as I can't imagine that utensil creates a comparable consistency with the same minimal effort. Plus it is a pain to clean and I don't have a dishwasher. Add more buttermilk as needed and crack fresh pepper over the whole mix. It's not really necessary to use buttermilk for this recipe, but it sounds fancy and I happened to have some leftover from the red velvet cake I made for Kim's birthday last weekend.

**For the record, I make fabulous pudding from scratch, but Cody infuriatingly prefers Snack Paks which I'm positive contain no actual dairy or cocoa. Don't get me started.

***Yesterday, we visited third specialty ice cream shop to open within 5 blocks of my house in the last few months. BlueBird Homemade Ice Cream and Tea Room is run by a bunch of boys who appear to be about 22 years old and what they lack in behind the counter experience, they totally make up for endearing explanations of why they like to make snickerdoodle ice cream, even though the consistency of the brown sugar makes impossible for the ice cream to set up firmly. Then, they get bonus points for confiding that while in spite of its pleasant gustatory properties, their Elysian Stout Ice Cream smelled like wet dog. "But no, try it, you'll really like it!" Color me charmed. A scoop of soupy snickerdoodle paired with a scoop of peanut butter made me very happy, ruined my appetite for real dinner, and had the added benefit of not making Cody's mouth bleed any more than it already had.

2009-06-17T08:57:00.000-07:00

It pains me greatly that the breakfast burritos I make at home will never be as good as those bought from even a crappy Mexican food purveyor, like Blue Water Taco Grill in my office building. $3.10 will buy you an eggy burrito with sausage or bacon, but a small scoop of beans will cost you $.25 extra, which just seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, warm tortilla and fluffy scrambled eggs make this the best part of my morning on a jet-lagged and cranky Wednesday.

2009-03-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

You know what is more boring than blogging about New Years Resolutions? Blogging about how you're too busy to blog. Yet here I am, the end of March, with only brussels sprouts and oatmeal standing between this site and last year's content. If you care, sorry. Blame grad school. Blame work. Blame my insistence on maintaining some semblance of a personal life despite those two aforementioned timesucks.

I'm not going to pretend that it's profound or well thought out or interesting to anyone besides me, but there's always my twitter. Heck, Demetri Martin thought a joke I tweeted about Greek people was funny enough to retweet. That's as close to famous as anything anyone else that I know did this week. (It's possible that was a ghost-Demetri, but for the purposes of my daydreams about him being my boyfriend, we're assuming best case scenario. Hey! Cody said its ok!)

2009-01-18T16:20:00.000-08:00

It is inevitable that if you are a person who knows how and likes to cook or knit or craft or woodwork or whatever, at some point you will become that annoying person who looks at something nice in a store and say, "eh, I can make that better myself." Usually you will be right. There are few things in this world that are for sale that could not be personally made cheaper or of higher quality in your home. The trick, however, is knowing which things are worth your time, because unfortunately, everything you make yourself, be it flaky tender pie crust or a handknit computer bag, takes way longer than buying the same product of inferior quality in the store. For example, I can make both homemade rolls and homemade pasta, but in the complicated quality versus precious time formula (similar in format to the quadratic equation, except with more swear words and heart shaped doodles) buttermilk rolls are totally worth it and gluey homemade fettuccine just isn't that great compared to the fancy pasta I can buy at Pike Place Market.

Recently, I was inspired to make homemade instant oatmeal. Ridiculous, right? Hear me out. For most of last year, I would hurriedly make homemade oatmeal on the stove every morning before work. It can be done in about ten minutes, is a truly delicious and filling breakfast, travels to work and reheats in a tupperware beautifully, and is entirely worth the time investment. Oatmeal is wonderfully adaptable to whatever add ons you happen to have already in your kitchen: almost any fruit- fresh, dried or jammed - nuts and seeds, it all works. Nevertheless, despite one's best intentions, ten minutes before 7 am is still ten minutes, and it can be hard to work up the motivation or speed up the morning grooming process enough to make time for breakfast preparation. The obvious and widely used solution to this problem is instant oatmeal which is available relatively cheaply at virtually every grocery location. And I'm not here to knock store bought instant oatmeal, but it just has never really blown me away or become a fixture in my morning routine. Besides which, it's generally full of sugar and preservatives, which I won't pretend that I don't consume with vigor, but when possible, I like to save those ingredients for my daily intake of food pyramid items cupcakes and goldfish "fishy" crackers. I came across some instructions for homemade instant oatmeal not too long ago and decided to jump on that potentially time and calorie saving train.

To start, you're going to need:

7 cups oatmeal
1 box powdered nonfat milk
Salt

Also necessary:
"Fixins"

For this batch I used what I had in my pantry - dried cranberries, sunflower seeds and toasted slivered almonds. Clearly, most anything would do to the trick here. Like apple cinnamon oatmeal? Use dried apple bits and cinnamon. Like peaches and cream? Dried peaches. This isn't rocket science, yo. One blogger I read even said that he mixed maple syrup into his and it worked well, but I can't quite get behind that.

The only fancy tool you'll need for this is a food processor. I unfortunately, do not own one of these. For this project I made the mistake of borrowing my grandmother's food processor and received daily heckling phone calls asking for it back immediately thereafter. At one point she even asked me if I broke it and the was the reason I hadn't returned it to her yet. Why? Who really knows? My grandma is crazy. A few summers ago she accused me of stealing a pink towel and red plastic bowl from her apartment while she was in Greece. Then again, at this very moment, she is very kindly hemming several pairs of dress pants for me because I feel to busy/lazy to deal with it myself. So I'll give her a break, I guess. Temporarily.

Take two cups of the oatmeal and pulverize it in the food processor until you have oatmeal powder. Dump it back with the non-pulverized oatmeal and add the dry milk. If inclined, you can think deep thoughts about the oatmeal to powdered milk ratio, but since I'm not really interested in having half empty boxes of powdered milk hanging around, I find that a whole box (you know, the one about the size of a hardcover novel) is the right amount for 6 to 7 cups of dry oatmeal. If you make your oatmeal with salt, add a few teaspoons at this point. Add the aforementioned "fixins." Bam. You have enough instant oatmeal to make several dozen breakfast bowls. I put the entire batch in a gallon ziplock bag and keep it in my bottom desk drawer, spooning it out, half a cup at a time into my "work bowl." Look at me, saving the environment too. If you're more of a single serving type person, you can premeasure your servings into ziplock sandwich bags while you contemplate your resource consumption and wasting all that plastic. Whoa. Sufficiently high and mighty for you? Yeah, me too.

2009-01-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

New Years Resolutions are boring. Fact. That doesn't mean that they aren't useful or meaningful, granted, but there is nothing interesting in platitudes about healthy eating or renewed devotion to exercise or diligent housework. And by boring I don't mean that I'm just embarrassed to admit that a week of houseguests back to back with an exhausting headcold and many extra hours at work have left my apartment in a state unfit for company, just that there is nothing inherently electrifying in a discussion thereof.

That being said, I do hope to do all those pedestrian and grownup things in 2009: eat out less, cook in even more, put my laundry away after I do it and not just pick clean underwear out of a pile on my floor which badly needs a vacuum, put more vegetables and less fried food into my body, attempt to have a much lower percentage of my bloodstream be comprised of diet coke and beer, read more novels and watch fewer bret michaels based reality tv shows, blah blah blah, etc.

Killing several birds with one green leafy stone, I made amazing roasted brussels sprouts this week. This recipe is adapted from a crappy recipe I found on The Kitchn. My mom and I decided to serve brussels sprouts on Christmas Eve, and I foolishly prepared this recipe for the meal without giving it a test run first. Bad call. Barely blanched brussels sprouts sitting in a cold soup of lemon juice and olive oil are just not very good. The flavor combinations were a good idea, but the execution as a cold salad doesn't come close to working. We repurposed the leftovers the next day by roasting the whole mess in the oven with plenty of butter and had a much better dish at Christmas dinner. Since then, I've prepared this sprout recipe as a hot dish two more times to great happiness and success.

Lemon Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Preheat your oven to 350. Wash, trim and halve a pound or two of brussels sprouts straight into your dutch oven. Add a shallot or onion thinly sliced and several cloves of garlic chopped as finely as you have the patience for (I barely chop mine in half; peeling and chopping garlic is my very least favorite kitchen task). Zest a lemon and squeeze the juice over the mixture and salt and pepper generously. Add a glug or two of olive oil or softened butter and stir everything to coat. I also added some shredded zuchinni because I had it lying around. I like preparing roasted vegetables because they are especially forgiving of experimental vegetable combinations.

Cover the vegetables and place in the oven for 30 minutes. At that point stir and put back in the over for another 20 minutes or so. This dish keeps well and can be served alongside most things. I ate it plain the night I made it, for lunch a few days later with leftover sausage and potatoes, mixed into black bean soup the day after that, and on Friday night I threw whatever was left of it into the crock pot with a pot roast. Delicious and magical.

2008-11-27T21:37:00.000-08:00

The Thanksgiving Seasonal Cocktail: Don't Take it For 'Granate
Pun courtesy of Cody. I am cursed with an embarrassing love of puns, yet the general inability to spool them off all clever and impromptu. I am, however, gifted with cocktail invention skills.

In a cocktail shaker filled halfway with crushed ice, combine:
3 parts vodka
1 part Chambord
1 part Barenjaeger
1 part pomegranate juice

Shake vigorously. By the time you are making your second batch of this, you will probably be dancing around a little bit. This is helpful.

Add two tablespoons of pomegranate seeds to a glass and fill glass halfway with Diet 7 Up (or club soda, or clear mixer of your choice). Fill glass with pomegranate mixture from the cocktail shaker. Partake in other Thanksgiving day activities like mashing the potatoes or playing puzzle in the living room. Think about the things for which you give thanks. I have many.

2008-11-09T17:50:00.000-08:00

The week of Halloween, I tried to make caramel sauce and failed twice. Part of the problem is that I don't have a candy thermometer because I am a combination of lazy and stubborn, so I kept burning the sugar. Also, I think that my stove is old and ghetto and the heat is not consistent. Regardless, I am a little cocky and not particularly accustomed to such utter failure in the kitchen, especially not twice in a row. It was quite demoralizing. I had a couple Halloween parties to go to last weekend, and my brilliant plan was to bring sliced apples and homemade caramel sauce and be a hero. I went out and bought something ridiculous like 5 pounds of golden delicious apples for this plan and then stunk up my apartment with two nasty batches of unsuccessful caramel sauce. I rallied and brought Greek cheese plates to my party instead, but had a huge bag of apples to deal with and dispose of. Solution? Applesauce.

Amazing homemade applesauce starts with five or six apples, peeled, cored, and chopped up into pieces about the size of pencil erasers. Dump all your chopped apples into a big saucepan and put about a cup of water into the pan. Cover, turn the stove heat to medium, and let the apples sweat for about 15 minutes. Remove the lid and add between 1 and 3 tablespoons of of cinnamon, sugar and vanilla extract. Simmer the apples until the water is evaporated and the apples are soft and saucy. Mash some of the residual chunks against the side of the pan, and you could puree with an immersion blender, but I don't own crap like that and even if I did, I wouldn't want to wash it.

Applesauce is delicious hot or cold, plain or garnished with nonfat yogurt, mixed into oatmeal or shared with your friends and coworkers. Also, as an extra bonus, it smells like Christmas which is three quarters of what I'm looking for this time of year.

2008-10-31T17:14:00.000-07:00

Point: All kids are effing adorable no matter what they are singing

Counterpoint: No, no, clearly that is not the case.

2008-10-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

A Delicious Cheese Plate

This a a good thing to eat when you've just been to a funeral for the mother of one of your very closest friends. It's not that cheese actually makes the situation better or less raw and painful, per se, but it is very comforting to spend time together and try and laugh about the good things in the world.

Arrange on a plate the following items:

Rogue Creamery Garlic Cheddar
Pepper Jack
Cranberry Wensleydale
Sliced Salami
Very stinky Camembert style goat cheese
Safeway Select Whole Wheat Crackers

Consume the following items with a selection of microbrews, for example, NewCastle, Blue Moon Harvest Pumpkin Ale and New Belgium 2 Below. Because you are in California, you can sit outside in the backyard drinking beer and eating cheese, which is pleasant even in these unfortunate circumstances.

When your cheese and beer party is over, your friend may give you the very stinky goat cheese to take home because it is too pungent for her taste. Whatever you do, do not leave this stinky cheese in the backseat of your brother's car by accident. If you do, he will call you three days later with some choice expletives directed towards you.

2008-10-09T10:57:00.000-07:00

Sarah Vowell's new book, The Wordy Shipmates, a history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was released this week, and seeing as Vowell is, hands down, one of my top five favorite authors living today, this is great news. After spending two weeks in Massachusetts five summers ago traveling around the state in an oversized van taking in the sights and experiences of our crazy Puritan forbearers, I can hardly think of a topic that would make me more psyched. I started reading Sarah Vowell when my mom gave me The Partly Cloudy Patriot one year for Christmas, and was instantly struck by by how she is able to articulate all the things I love intensely about history and the world and express those things in a way that is wry and clever and emotional. The history in Sarah Vowell's books contain the kind of enthusiasm for history and its fascinating strangeness that propelled me through an undergraduate degree and caused me to erroneously think for about eighteen months that I was destined to attend graduate school and work towards my phd in European History. And clearly, that would have made me intensely unhappy in the long term.

Sarah Vowell writes the books I would want to create if I were smarter, funnier and a much better writer. I admire her because she obviously loves to write, but hates to promote her books; I've seen her speak at least half a dozen times and she always seems uniformly uncomfortable and exhausted. I think it partly the fault of how much she clearly hates being in front of auditoriums and mostly the fault of my own fangirl awkwardness that I have had at least two extremely strange and embarassing encounters with Sarah Vowell. The first was your run of the mill clumsy book signing where we were being bustled through the line and I stood there tongue-tied trying to think of something funny to say, when quite obviously she just wanted to go back to her hotel room. The second was painful though; at a 826 Valencia fundraiser in San Francisco, she was "selling" firm handshakes and friendly punches on the shoulder (Dave Eggers was selling hugs, but Sarah and her personal space issues quite clearly don't play like that) during the intermission.

My mom and I were out in the lobby, and there was no way that I wasn't going to donate ten dollars to 826 in order to have my hero, Sarah Vowell, deign to punch me in the arm. It was a win/win situation. We were standing in line for my shoulder punch, and I was growing quickly more and more nervous. What clever thing would I say to Sarah Vowell? How could I express to her in a quick sentiment that I knew she was hating being there, rubbing shoulders with the yuppie, liberal masses of San Francisco, but that 826 was a great cause and I totally respected her for that? When it got to be crunch time, I handed her my ten dollars, and my mom helpfully said "Oh, you should have brought a book to get signed." And I, suave wordsmith I am, uncomfortably stammered and looked at the ground, "It's okay, she signed it already." My shoulder was punched and it was seriously weird for everyone involved. Given these facts, if I had Sarah Vowell's best interests at heart, maybe I would stop buying tickets to her readings in the hope that everyone else in America would have the same idea and he wouldn't have to go on book tours anymore. Unfortunately, I cannot not go see her at Town Hall next Monday, because it is likely she will say something as funny as she did on The Daily Show this week. I told Cody that we wouldn't have to wait in line to have my copy of the new book signed, but if I am inspired to try and make a better impression on Sarah Vowell, then, well, all bets are off. I'll let you know how that works out for me.

2008-10-02T11:17:00.000-07:00

The world in terms of the number of mopeds and motorcycles per country (big ups to Greece, where one in five citizens owns a motorcycle):
The Telegraph has posted an awesome set of maps depicting "real world" demographics and facts such as land mass (I'm still shocked that this is such a new concept and that the deeply flawed Mercator Projection is still so prevalent), wealth by country, projected wealth in the future, carbon emissions, immigration and tourism. I can't remember when I started loving maps and whether it was because I found them fascinating or because I found them beautiful, but, man, the maps in this book are a just an excellent example of both. This is my perfect coffee table book.

2008-10-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

Because I eat a lot of yogurt in my daily life, the stupid Yoplait commercial with the woman talking on the phone to her friend about all the "desserts" she eats hits embarrassingly close to home. The woman is talking about "apple turnovers" and "boston cream pie" and you see her husband in the other room frantically rummaging through the fridge looking for these delicious things, but get it?! It's yogurt! Blerg.

Despite this, I've bought into the ruse far enough to consider plain fruit yogurt to be fine and good, but "lemon cream pie" yogurt to be a treat! I know, it's dumb. But you can imagine my glee at QFC this weekend when I saw the new flavor of Yoplait Light: Strawberry Shortcake. I promptly bought four little 6 oz tubs of it and thought about the wonderful treats I would have at work this week. Yesterday, my anticipation built all morning long. After lunch I would get to eat my Strawberry Shortcake yogurt. I rushed through my leftover sausage and mashed potatoes and gently braised brussels sprouts to get to the moment when my life would be changed by a yogurt dessert potentially more delicious than the real thing. Unfortunately for me, it tasted exactly like regular strawberry yogurt. Seriously. I think it's the same yogurt in a different tub. I feel that Yoplait has made a fool of me.

2008-09-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

Something Amazing: Whatever, Martha.

If you get the Fine Living Channel (I have no idea if this is part of basic cable or extended or the crazy 500 channel package I have, because I had never heard of it before today, which is a travesty, because I am about to tell you about the best show in the universe), you need to watch Whatever, Martha. This is a show where Martha Stewart's daughter, Alexis, sits around watching old episodes of the Martha Stewart show and being dirty and sassy about it. No seriously, it is an amazing concept and actually very funny in real life. Watching this show, I suddenly I realized that I am some weird middle ground hybrid between prissy, crafty Martha and inappropriate, snarky Alexis. Further, Alexis pretends to hate all the fussy things Martha does on her show, but after Alexis proves she knows a recipe for pesto off the top of her head, when her dopey co-host talks about how the hardest thing she can make is scrambled eggs, the look of incredulous contempt that Alexis shoots her is worth ten million dollars. Also, I like jokes about "rock hard" pillows. So sue me. Two thumbs up.

2008-09-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

I started reading Laurie Colwin this summer because of an article I read on Jezebel about marketing fiction written by women. The article talked about how, in the current literary climate, a novel written by someone with breasts will likely be encased in a pink dustjacket and placed on a table of chick-lit even if its subject matter does not fundamentally concern underwear shopping, boyfriend analyzing, social climbing, strategic bed-hopping and all the other topics that made nasty Candace Bushnell a brazillionaire. While I think this would give most well-read girls pause, upon reflection, I'm not vehemently opposed to idea. I am happy if this strategy enables talented women to make a living at writing, and I like to imagine people looking for the next adventure of a shopaholic being tricked into reading something that potentially has intellectual merit. Laurie Colwin was offered up as an example of an authoress who wrote "serious" books that happened to be about women and also happened to periodically employ humor.

That was enough of an endorsement to send me to the library to borrow Happy All the Time and Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object. Colwin was quite prolific, and with almost ten novels to her credit, it was difficult to know where to start, but those two seemed to be the most frequently acclaimed. I blew through both stories in about 48 hours apiece. Both hovered around the 200 page range and were not particularly taxing to traverse. I had a hard time with Happy All the Time, because I didn't like any of the female characters. They were all such difficult women. One of them was a stay-at-home wife who would frequently disappear for months long chunks of time to "be alone in the quiet" or whatever with nary a substantial explanation to her beleaguered husband. The other main female character was always either being nasty, suspicious and snide to her husband or crying about how she was worried he didn't love her. Both of these women turned their noses up at a peripheral lady character who had the nerve to passionate about organic food. I suppose the point of this was to show that women do not have to fit into a traditional mold of femininity and domesticity, waiting at home with hot meatloaf on the stove. Meanwhile, the husbands were the sweetest, most jovial dopes I'd ever encountered. How did they find their way to these women? The entire time I was reading, I couldn't understand whether Colwin was trying to teach me a lesson embodying ideals I believed in in two very unlikable women, or whether she really thought she was creating Bohemian, modern paradigms for us all to which we should all aspire.

The second book, Shine On Bright and Dangerous Object, was about a slightly more likable woman my age who has just lost her husband in a sailing accident. Within the first ten pages of this novel, it was clear that she and her dead husband's brother are in love, that they are inherently more compatible than she was with her dead husband, and that the two of them are going to end up together. No, seriously, we had to wait through 175 pages of them pretending to not be in love while she grieved and built her new life on her own terms and blah blah blah until she finally got drunk and made out with her dead husband's brother. And then, in the last couple chapters, after she finally permits herself to be happy with the dead husband's brother, she goes away to a musical summer camp for grownups where she starts an affair with a married pediatrician from Tennessee. I had been on board with the whole stupid storyline until she boned the doctor from Nashville. That just made me mad. The character justified it by saying that her relationship with the doctor was something completely independent and special from her dead-husbands-brother-boyfriend at home, assumedly to prove the point that her love for her dead husband is something unique and unconnected to her love for his alive brother. I knew from the beginning she was going to get together with the brother, and I was rooting for it, but I guess I'm too rigid and monogamous to allow the logic to follow so far that one relationship pairing has literally no bearing on another one.

Not surprisingly, the book I liked even better than either of these was Colwin's non-fiction-memoir-cookbook, Home Cooking. Several hundred pages of anecdotes, advice and opinions about the kitchen, this book was all my favorite things. This afternoon I picked up the sequel, More Home Cooking, from the library and three chapters in, it is quickly winning me over. The introduction was all about how all her favorite books have vivid descriptions of menus and food, and as illustration of this point, she mentioned what a infuriatingly underrated author Jane Austen is. "Everybody thinks she's just darling, but she is not just darling, she's really tough." And that sentence helps me to understand Colwin's intentions with her women a little bit better; just as Austen wrote women that expanded conceptions of the abilities and interior lives of Regency women, Colwin wants to create women who challenge our ideas of the everyday pedestrian heroine.

That doesn't mean I have to like them, though, because, man, they sound annoying.

2008-09-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

A Very Scientific Experiment

Two months ago I read a story in the New York Times about chocolate chip cookies. Now, I could no sooner pick a favorite kind of cookie among the chocolate chips and peanut butters and sugar with buttercream frosting and linzer filled with apricot jam and chocolate sandwich as I could pick a favorite pair of shoes or color of dahlia or episode of Veronica Mars - I just love them all so much - but chocolate chip is right up there with my brown suede peep-toe wedges and deep violet and the one where Logan and Veronica get together for the first time after Logan punches JTT who is an FBI agent posing as a high school student. I was less interested in the overly prescriptive recipe in the Times article as I was by their assertion that the quality and taste of these cookies could be increased exponentially by letting the dough rest in the refrigerator for 36 hours before baking. I've read a lot of cookbooks and bossy, but well intentioned, advice about baking before and had never been told to do any such thing, so I was intrigued. No one, not even the New York Times, will be able to convince me that any recipe for chocolate chip cookies is better than my Grandma Mariel's, but I could potentially be persuaded to mix up the baking process. Obviously, the only way to proceed was to employ the scientific method and ascertain whether Jaques Torres was full of crap or truly on to something.

As mentioned, I would be conducting this experiment using my cookie gospel of choice, my grandmother's Cowboy Cookie recipe. Cream 2 cups butter (or margarine), 2 cups white sugar, 2 cups brown sugar, and 4 eggs. Slowly mix in 4 cups flour, 1 t baking powder, 2t soda, and 1t salt. Finally stir in 3 cups oats and 12 ounces of chocolate chips. My original plan was make the cookie dough at about 7am on Sunday morning when I usually wake up, so that I could bake test batches exactly 36 hours later when there would be a gaggle of boys at my house watching Monday Night Football, but that plan was thwarted when I stayed out until 3 am with my cousins on Saturday night. Instead, by the time I woke up, drank a carafe of french press coffee, talked to my mom on the phone for 45 minutes while laying on the couch with a pillow over my head, and finally got myself organized to make cookie dough, it was 11 o'clock. Luckily, I was a history major and thus am not particularly into "scientific precision." Close enough for government work. At that point, I baked one test batch of a dozen cookies for 12-15 minutes in a 350 degree oven and departed to Madison Park with Megan to eat a shrimp and havarti omelet for brunch.

Monday night I baked 4 dozen more cookies and put the rest of the dough in the freezer to use later. I let the 36 hour cookies cool so as not to tip off the cookie testers, and gave everyone a "Cookie 1" and a "Cookie 2," with no details as to their potential differences and the instruction to tell me which they preferred.

See "My Very Official Cookie Focus Group":

Both Witold and Kevin Hannifan preferred the cookie from the aged dough. Kevin Lind thought the cookies that had been baked right away were superior, but he is a hippie vegetarian, so his taste buds are suspect in the first place. The first cookie definitely had a softer texture, but the aged cookie had a much more distinct flavor profile, it was much sweeter and complex and had a crispy outside but a moist middle. I can not speak to whether the texture was a result of the way it dough had aged or just that I overcooked the new batch a little bit.

The Moral of The Story: I did prefer the cookie dough that had matured in the fridge. Luckily, this complements my cooking style because I frequently make dough ahead of time to be baked at different intervals. Granted, my focus group was quite small, and was cleansing their palette in between tastes with nasty Coors Light, so I don't know that we can take any hard and fast rules from this experiment, other than that cookies are totally delicious.

2008-08-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

I have a tempestuous relationship with boxed cake mixes. I understand that they are sooooo convenient, and the taste generally lies on the more delicious end of the "decent" bell curve, but I believe in my heart of hearts that cake from scratch is empirically more delicious and really not that much harder to make. My feelings and opinions on boxed cake and pre-packed baked goods and their easiness versus laziness versus quality factors are exacerbated by conversation with my lovely boyfriend who thinks the most delicious things in the world are those crappy Pillsbury biscuits and blueberry muffins you make out of a box with a little tin of pin sized blueberries packed in sketchy corn syrup. Obviously, I will and have baked both of these things from scratch for him, and for the sake of domestic bliss he wouldn't dare admit it out loud, but I am very sure that in his heart of hearts, he would rather be eating the boxed versions. I do not understand this. It defies logic.

When pressed, I will concede that while I do not object to a boxed cake in certain circumstances, the true crime against baked goods everywhere is ready-made frosting. All tubs of frosting taste like garbage and are full of literal garbage for your body and, dudes, frosting is the simplest thing to make in your kitchen. All you need is powdered sugar, butter, and milk. Oh, but you love that crappy cream cheese and crisco flavored frosting Duncan Hines makes? Well all you need to make that is cream cheese, powdered sugar, butter and milk. Yes, it is that easy. What? You're too lazy to mix those things together and put them on your cake? Then maybe you should be going for a walk or cultivating a hobby or saving the world instead of making substandard baked goods. Yeah. I said it. The clear instances when boxed cake mix is forgivable, however, are numerous. The highest examples of these instances are when you take a boxed cake mix and ignore the directions on the back of the box, and instead, turn the cake into something magical. My favorite sexed up box cake recipe is caramel fudge brownies. A close runner up is The Liqueur Cake.

The Liqueur Cake is constructed thusly:

1 box Chocolate Cake mix
2 eggs
1 pint sour cream
1/4 c butter/margarine/vegetable oil
1 c liqueur (My favorite is Baileys, but Kalhua, Amaretto, Frangelico etc all work equally well. Also, a whole cup creates a very strong flavor in the cake, which is how I roll, but if you prefer a more subtle essence, use a 1/2 cup.)
12 oz chocolate chips (Again, go ahead and substitute white chocolate, cafe au lait, butterscotch or whatever flavor chips willy nilly.)

Combine all of the above ingredients in your mixer or bowl. Mix them together. Pour the batter into a greased bundt or tube pan, as regular flat cake pans will not allow the cake to rise evenly. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 45-60 minutes, until it done (toothpick comes out clean, blah blah blah, have you never made a cake before?)

I think this cake is most delicious at room temperature. You can serve it with whipped cream or ice cream or berries or dusted with powdered sugar. Just don't put any effing store bought frosting on it, ok?

2008-08-25T20:08:00.000-07:00

Obviously, the best way to make the most of these last few days of summer is to leave work early on a beautiful 85 degree day, make a pitcher of lemon drops, slather on some sunblock and sit on your patio in your bra (What? It actually covers more than my swimsuit top does, incidentally.) and sunglasses reading a book.

Hence, A Recipe for the End of Summer: The Lemon Drop

The first thing you need for a fresh Lemon Drop is real lemons. I only make this recipe when I have big attractive lemons from my parents house in California, about 5 or 6. From my experience, that will give you approximately a cup of lemon juice which I squeeze directly into my quart sized measuring cup to facilitate easy and precise mixology. The ratio for this drink is 2:2:1 lemon juice, vodka and triple sec, then sugar to taste. Ergo, one cup of lemon juice means a cup of vodka and half a cup triple sec. Add the sugar about a quarter cup at a time, stirring thoroughly and tasting after each addition, remembering that you will be drinking out of a sugared glass, so you want the drink to be slightly tart still. When you've reached desirable sweetness, rim your glass by pouring sugar onto a coffee saucer, moistening the edge of your glass and placing it firmly into the sugar. My favorite way to drink these are out of a pint glass over several cubes of ice.

Additionally, with August 2008 rapidly approaching its close, I feel like I can definitively state my most recent 5 Years of Summer Jams.

2004: Ratatat - Seventeen Years

2005: Gorillaz - Dare

2006: Lily Allen - Smile

2007: Justice - D.A.N.C.E.

2008: Little Jackie - The World Should Revolve Around Me

2008-08-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

Times when I spit water all over myself and it is clear to those around me that I am not getting anything accomplished:

More at The Guardian.

2008-07-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

I was pretending to be too cool, but watching the Blue Angels swoop and swerve from the 54th story deck of my office building was surprisingly impressive.

2008-07-29T20:52:00.000-07:00

As of last night, I have officially suffered through an entire unbearable season of "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria," the Canadian version. I still don't really understand why I stuck it out, other than the fact that I never cancelled the DVR recordings of the show, so every Sunday and Monday evening, without fail, new episodes would deposit themselves into my cable box, daring me to delete them just in case this was the week that the show became a worthwhile use of human energy. I know why I started watching the show; I love The Sound of Music. I am the kind of person who gleefully attends "The Singalong Sound of Music" every chance I get, and a reality show dedicated to singing the songs of my favorite Rogers and Hammerstein musical sounded like a great way to spend an hour every week. Unfortunately, this show was not a genius melding of the best parts of American Idol and musical theater. It was just a low-budget, vapidly stupid mess connected to the saga of the Von Trapps in only the very barest sense. Much like Season 4 of Project Runway, it was shockingly clear from the first episodes that one contestant was heads and shoulders above any of the others, and most of the season was devoted to maintaining the charade that Janna wasn't the best contestant when she obviously was. The only truly inspired performance in the entire series was when, on "Canada" week, Janna somehow and against all odds turned Nelly Furtado's "Turn Out The Lights" into this crazy, awesome call-and-response musical theater anthem. Other than that, it was shocking how tone-deaf and boring the other contestants were, how small and orange the judges and host were (see photo above), how utterly inept the entire sound, lighting and camera crews were, and mostly, how annoying and egomaniacal Andrew Lloyd Webber is. I had placed my faith so blindly in Canada and CBC, trusting them to show the world how to do a reality show singing competition right. Sadly, it looks like the unwashed masses in Canada rest around the same lowest common denominator as they do in the United States (I'm looking at you, Brooke Hogan!). And I guess that helps to explain how Little Mosque on the Prairie happened.

2008-07-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

Savory Sausage Bread Pudding

Seeing as I love things that are starchy and eggy and substantial, bread pudding is a no brainer. Rice pudding, for that matter, is also a long-time favorite of mine. Both can be eaten with lots of cinnamon and are uniformly palatable anywhere along the hot to cold spectrum. I was introduced to the universe of a savory bread pudding by Heidi of 101 Cookbooks with her recipe for Asparagus Bread Pudding and have made it several times over the last year. I love Heidi's website, and I enjoy the way she talks about cooking and living in San Francisco, but it drives me slightly crazy that all the recipes she posts involve three or more ingredients that not only do I not keep stocked in my (fairly extensive!) pantry, but would require a trip to a specialty grocery store to acquire. It might be a personal shortcoming of mine that I don't have 6 different obscure colors of rice in my cupboard, but I just don't. Because of this, I've enjoyed every recipe I've pulled off her site and recreated at home, but I can count the number of times I've done so on one hand.

Bread Pudding is a good thing to make when you buy those delicious two loaves of crusty French Bread at Costco every single time you shop there, even though you know there's no way you can eat both of them before they go stale. I'm not great at learning from experience; I usually make it 2/3rds of the way through one loaf before the outside becomes rock hard. With over a loaf of bread to use up in a short period of time, Heidi's recipe came immediately to mind, but not only did I not have asparagus, but asparagus falls into the category of vegetables that my boyfriend will not eat. What I did have lying around however, was delicious homemade sausage from Idaho. A little clicking around the internets landed me on this recipe from Cooking Light which I used as a basis for my dish. The awesome thing about improvising off an already "lowfat" recipe is that instead of my standard substitutions (less oil and butter, low/nonfat milk instead of whole, etc.), I don't feel naughty adding more delicious things to the basic recipe. For example, in this recipe, I probably used two or three times as much cheese as I was directed to, but overall it was less than three cups, so whatever.

My Sausage Bread Pudding started by browning about a pound of amazing Idaho sausage in a pan over medium heat. I chopped one and a half Granny Smith apples into bitty pieces and added that and one chopped white onion to the sausage, covered the pan to keep all that good vegetable sweat in, and cooked that on low for 10 or 15 minutes until the onions were translucent. In a big ole mixing bowl I whisked together 2 cups of milk and 4 eggs, grated some cheddar cheese in there, and salted and peppered the wet ingredients. Carefully, with your serated knife, cube the stale bread into pieces about an inch to half inch square. With this bread, I found it was easier to slice the bread a half inch thick and just rip the slices in to little pieces. There's no need to make this part pretty or uniform. Throw your bread cubes into the wet ingredients, add your sausage mixture to the bowl and stir until everything is wet. I added some extra milk and one or two more eggs during this step, because you want all the bread to be moist. Let the mixture sit for at least 10 minutes, and pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Spray a 9x12 baking dish with Pam and dump in your yummy soggy concoction. Now is the fun part: I grated three different kinds of cheese on top. For some reason, I had a ton of cheese in the fridge last week, so I just went nuts. Cheddar, mozerella, and parmesan, all yummy and sprinkled on top of the pudding like a generous coat of freshly fallen snow. Cook on the center rack for 45 or 60 minutes until your pudding is fluffy and set and the cheese is bubbly and browned. Remove the pudding from the oven and let it rest for 15 minutes before serving.

I ate this plain for dinner the night I made it, but when I packed it in tuppers for lunch on the subsequent days, I put a good sized square of pudding and then stuffed the rest of the space with fresh spinach. Two minutes in the microwave to warm up the pudding is the exact right time to steam the spinach and get some extra iron and vitamins into your meal. Obviously, Cody's lunch portions did not include the extra vegetation, but he concurred that it was especially delicious the next day.

2008-07-17T11:22:00.000-07:00

I'm learning that one of the things about loving books in a heartbursting way is coming to terms with the fact that there is no possible way I can read everything good and worthwhile being published, nor can I hope to ever consume the entire cannon of past amazingness. And that is ok and normal. Obviously, this is going to be especially important to keep in mind in September when I start grad school and will have to stop sleeping and possibly forgo casual pleasure reading altogether. The great news is that because I can't know everything in its immediacy, I will continue to discover "new" writers for the rest of my life, and each time I will sigh as I drop the completed novel and feel as if I am looking at the world in a slightly different and more complete way.

The newest author that I'm embarrassed I've only been reading for two months is Jhumpa Lahiri. My mom and I had the nicest drive back from Idaho in June listening to The Namesake on cassette tape in my little car. 369 miles from Cottonwood to Seattle only got us about halfway through the story so I rushed out to bookstore back in Seattle to pick up the novel and, oh my god, I loved it all so much. I don't know if I connected so fully with that book because the immigrant, ethnic experience in America makes me imagine what it must have been like for my Greek grandmother to move to Seattle in the 50's or if it is just because The Namesake is seriously that good. Shortly thereafter I devoured The Interpreter of Maladies, and have Unaccustomed Earth on my hold list at the library, but there are still 342 people in line in front of me, so I'm thinking I'll probably just break down and buy it.

This week I watched the film version of The Namesake, which I thought was pretty good. It's difficult to give an opinion of an adaptation of a book you love, because obviously the book is able to do so much more than the movie. You lament the places where nuance and backstory were sacrificed because it is entirely impossible to shoehorn all that into two hours, and yet you love the screenwriter and director for knowing how good this work of fiction is and desiring to give it a face. This book is so anecdotal and the sheer 30 year breadth is just so staggering that the entire time I was watching the film I was wondering if anyone who hadn't read the book would understand the leaping in years and perspectives, and realize that as a whole, the facets of stories actually fit together seamlessly and poignantly. Kal Penn's performance earned him a slot on my list of crushes, and his role in the film was unique from the other (excellent) actors in that his portrayal of Gogol Ganguli brought something new and sharp to the character that didn't exist or wasn't as fleshed out in the novel. Incidentally, I admire Mira Nair's adaptations of novels. I was one of the few people in the world that didn't hate her film version of Vanity Fair. I thought it was clever, pleasurable to watch, and didn't abandon Thackeray's main themes while shifting the focus and tone. Similarly, with The Namesake, I can't really imagine a different treatment of the material that wouldn't have turned the wonderfully complex and convoluted story into a trite, feel-good cliche.

2008-07-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, three months ago, I was under the impression that there was no way for me to love the visual imagery associated with Feist's "1, 2, 3, 4" any more than I already did. I mean, the video. Rainbow sequins? Choreographed goofy dancing? Magical. It's like she made that up in my favorite dream.

But then, oh then, last spring Feist visited the Colbert Report and not only made me squeal by interacting with total crush Stephen Colbert, but gifted him his own sequined jumpsuit before performing, and that miraculous image has been happily burned into my brain. And I thought: "Surely, this moment in time is the happiest that this lovely song will ever make me."

And lovely universe, sometimes you like to show me how very very wrong I can be about things, because on Monday as I was clicking around on the internets, I found this:

And if Leslie Feist bopping around with monsters and penguins and chickens in sunglasses isn't the greatest thing to ever happen ever, then, well, I guess I better work on getting out more.

2008-07-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

Below: The Big Krassowski

(our namesake is the one in the plaid pants.)

I don't really have a good explanation for the way that I have been gravitating towards recreational sports this summer. I am neither coordinated nor particularly athletic, and all I'm really bringing to the table strength-wise is a wardrobe full of knee-socks and a vocabulary of shockingly creative swear words. And yet, I agreed to play on a friend's softball team, and signed up for my own office's softball team later this summer. On Fourth of July, I lead the charge to trek to the park and play badminton before retiring to the hot tub with dessert. For the last three weeks, I've been playing Miniature Golf in an official league on Wednesday nights. Currently we are in 16th Place (out of 19, ouch.), but the leaderboard does not yet reflect our strong showing from this week. I can't really take credit for the low stroke count part of this week's strong showing, but I like to think I was partially responsible for the spirit points we were awarded. All this is fun, of course, but has reminded me that I am much better at dressing up and yelling than catching, putting or hitting balls.

2008-07-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

Deviled Eggs - (I just found out that another name for Deviled Eggs is Eggs Mimosa. I wish I would have been aware of that fact earlier so I could have been calling them that all along.)

If you would like to make your friends love you, I recommend bringing these to a barbecue, party or gathering of any sort. Peoples' responses will help you differentiate between the awesome people you like and the dogmatic vegan types. Just kidding. Sort of.

Boil six (or more!) eggs. My procedure for this is to place the eggs in the bottom of a pot, cover them with cold water, and heat the water on high until it boils. Once the water is boiling, wait 6-8 minutes, remove from heat and stop the eggs from cooking further by putting them in cold water. What I usually do is pour as much of the boiling water as I can out into the sink and run cold water into the pot. Let the eggs cool as much as you can. Ideally, you'd let them rest for half hour or so, but the time will obviously be dictated by whether or not you've planned ahead and if you were supposed to be at your barbecue 45 minutes ago.

Once the eggs are cool (enough), shell them, slice in half lengthwise and dump the yolks into a mixing bowl. Mix the yolks with a few tablespoons of mayonnaise, some mustard, a teaspoon or two of white vinegar, salt, pepper, paprika, and about a tablespoon of sugar per six eggs. Dude, the sugar is the secret in the recipe, it makes these eggs magical. You want this mixture to have the consistency of toothpaste, so add the wetter ingredients slowly and sparingly until you figure out what you're dealing with. Taste and adjust seasoning.

At this point, you can spoon the filling into your egg white cups with a little spatula and a spoon. Or, if you are too much of an over-achiever for your own good, as I tend to be, you can transfer the mixture to a pastry bag fitted with a large star shaped tip. Pipe the filling into your egg cups in a circular motion, arrange prettily and give the whole plate a sprinkle of paprika. Practice smiling graciously for when people tell that they have determined that you that you are a wizard disguised as a regular person for crafting these eggs.

2008-06-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

Last week, because I am possibly a creep who reads too many blogs, I made a recipe from Emily Gould's "famous secret blog" Heartbreak Soup. (I'm not going to get into it, because that's weird, but Team Emily, duh.) I know that the saga is over-exposed and that she got a lot of flack for the extremely long and confessional story she wrote for The New York Times magazine, but I thought it was fascinating and well crafted. Also, I adore a good overwrought food metaphor, and girlfriend is full of them. I deeply understand the impulse to connect what you eat and what you feel in a personal and convoluted way, because it appeals to my passive aggressive desire to communicate in symbolism rather than words. I also like talking about cooking in a way that is experiential and non-technical, because that is how I operate in the kitchen.

I followed Emily's recipe for chicken soup pretty closely, whole bird and all, except I went running while the delicious ginger broth was simmering instead of doing my laundry. Also, I subbed out some vegetables and added fresh carrots and celery and noodles to the strained broth before shredding and reincorporating the chicken meat. I added so much stuff during that last step that by the end the soup was so thick that I couldn't effectively skim the frothy fat off the top, which made delicious soup, because, man, there was a lot of olive oil in there. I loved the ginger in the broth and I made the soup Tuesday night and ate the very last of it for dinner on Friday, which was noteworthy because I hardly ever like a soup recipe so much that Cody and I don't need to freeze at least a few tuppers of it for later.

Chicken soup last week seemed frivolous and wasted on the healthy by this recent Monday night, however, when I truly was deathly ill with something evil tight in my sinuses and rough in the back of my throat. I reprised the chicken base of this soup to make myself some comfort food, Avgolemeno soup. Too sick to feel like stopping at the grocery store on the way home from work, I just used frozen chicken breasts. I didn't even defrost the chicken before browning it in a little olive oil and five cloves of garlic, and then dumping in four carrots, half a bunch of wilted celery, a chopped shallot, a quarter of a red onion, and two bouillon cubes, covering everything in water and letting the mixture simmer for an hour while slumping on the couch and watching my DVRed episodes of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" and sending Cody out for a lemon for the next step of the soup. Think about how this television show would be much cooler if they actually sang more than one Sound of Music song per episode.

After your mixture on the stove is brothy, 1-3 hours, remove the chicken and strain out the vegetables. Say thank you to the vegetables because you are sick and talking to inanimate objects, and put them in your yard waste bucket. Return the broth to your stove and turn the heat to medium high. Add 1 cup rice. While the rice is cooking, shred the chicken breasts with your hands into little bite sized pieces. Juice one lemon into a medium sized mixing bowl and use the microplane grater gifted to you by your best friend to grate a few teaspoons of zest into the lemon juice. Whisk four eggs and a teaspoon of flour into the lemon juice until everything is frothy. Return the chicken to the broth and wait for the rice to soften(approximately 15 minutes). While you are waiting for the rice to be ready, you can dramatically fling yourself onto the couch or the floor to make a point about how sickly you are feeling, because now Cody is back from the store and ready to be impressed by the severity of your discomfort. You can also adjust the seasoning of the broth with salt and pepper.

Next is the tricky part: temper the egg mixture. Scoop a cup of simmering broth out of your soup pot with a measuring cup and pour very slowly it into the egg bowl while quickly whisking with your other hand. This warms up the eggs so that they will not scramble when introduced to the hot broth. Take your whisk and the tempered eggs and pour that mixture slowly into your broth on the stove, whisking the soup in the big pot. At this point, the soup will turn from a brothy color to an opaque creamy white. Continue to stir the soup with your whisk for three to four minutes while everything gets thick and yummy. It is not necessary to bring the soup to a boil.

Once your soup is done you can serve in a big bowl with a piece of toast. I also recommend watching all those episodes of Battlestar Galactica that you've been missing because you've been out town every weekend for the past month, which is probably the reason you're exhausted and got sick in the first place. If you're lucky, when your boyfriend went to buy the lemon for the soup, he will have also bought two single serving pieces of red velvet cake, which is the perfect dessert to almost any meal, but especially Avgolememo Soup.

After all this is consumed, take a big glug of NyQuil. Be sure to put the extra soup in the fridge before the NyQuil step, because I'm pretty sure that what the apothecary gave Juliet was actually NyQuil, and you will undoubtedly pass out approximately 34 seconds after the sweet potion passes your lips.

2008-06-20T08:17:00.000-07:00

Seeing as I wasn't present in the courtroom, I don't have much to add about the R. Kelly trial and acquittal that isn't presented more accurately and cleverly than this excellent article from Slate, except to say that sexual abuse of 13 year old girls aside, I'm mostly disappointed that we won't be getting any Trapped in the Closet updates prison-style.

2008-06-19T09:18:00.000-07:00

Today, a little more than a month shy of our four year anniversary, Cody told Facebook that he is "in a relationship" with me.

The internet is weird.

2008-06-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

Another thing that should reassure me that I am firmly planted in my own generation is the fact that I am less scandalized and annoyed by the infection carrying whoring sea-donkeys on A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila and Rock of Love than I am by the waxy, dead-eyed, Stepford zombies on The Bachelor. I've studiously avoided The Bachelor franchise in all its incarnations, mostly because it doesn't seem very interesting. Cheesy rose ceremonies and prom dresses pale in comparison to giant novelty clocks, challenges involving roller derby, complete whack-job sociopaths and the careful dance that is maintaining the illusion that Bret Michaels is not going bald. For the last week or so, however, Vh1 has been running various iterations of the Bachelor pretty much non-stop, so while running on the elliptical at the gym yesterday I subjected myself to exactly 45 minutes plus cooldown of NFL quarterback bachelor Jesse and his quest to find true love on major network television.

I guess what offended me so much about the entire production was the sickening earnestness of it. The fact that a doe-eyed boy from Florida really thought that ABC would present him with his heart's truest soulmate, and he just had to be smart enough to correctly pick her out of a lineup of 25 identically manicured women. I would rather watch Flavor Flav, who I know for a fact has an existing long term girlfriend, pretend to seek a relationship with one or several insane skanks, because at least it is an honest sham. And the very worst thing, on this particular bachelor show, was it was the episode where the bachelor's "best friend from home" (a woman who looked exactly like every other contestant) revealed her identity to the remaining bachelorettes, and, dude, that was so annoying. The "best friend from home" spent a full ten minutes in the beginning of the episode crying about how sorry she was that she had lied to the other women on the show, and that she wanted to be forgiven, and that "there is no peace in deception." And while I might agree with her, come on, did you really not think about this scenario before it happened? Quit crying about it now. Holy crap. It's just tv, it's not like a real life relationship will result from this. Effing idiots.

2008-06-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

I generally don't worry about the cashiers in the checkout stand at grocery store judging me by my purchases, but that is probably because I usually buy sensible and non-remarkable assortments of groceries. Fruits and vegetables and 10 kinds of yogurt and sundry dry goods that do not become magical and fabulous until I take them home to my little cubby of a kitchen and squirrel them away in my pantry to eventually be turned into soups and casseroles and baked items. I'm getting to a cranky point in my 20s where I'm tired of most of the restaurants I used to love and nothing will please me like my own cooking does. I sometimes worry that that means I am slowing turning into my yiayia, which is obviously a terrifying concept.

So, the majority of the time my grocery basket looks like the shopping list of an old lady, albeit one who really likes seasonal beer, and I don't think that is anything to cause me considerable shame. However, last night, I must admit I was a little sheepish as I went through the checkout line with a little under a pound of asparagus, three tomatoes, a can of chocolate slim-fast powder and a box of red wine. I wanted to stop and reassure the cashier that I wasn't going to make a slim-fast shake for dinner to wash down my asparagus and wine, but of course that would have called even more attention to the combination. I guess all that means is that I am still firmly planted in my twenties and not in any danger of premature octogenarian status.

Close call, that one.

2008-06-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

OMG, I absolutely need for these people to be living in the White House right now.

2008-05-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

My office's kitchen boasts one of those space-station lookalike single serving coffee machines that create mediocre, nondescript, brown water fresh for you in less than a minute! Usually I avoid the Keurig machine like a a girl who sucks down triple shot Americanos and lusciously sludgy french press coffee with a gleam in her eye and a twitch in her leg, because, well, I am that girl. Other times, however, my credit card bill exceeds my monthly income and I start to contemplate different ways to save money. It is probably pretty bourgey of me that one of the first things that comes to mind when I try and tally up extraneous expenses in my lifestyle is espresso coffee drinks. I was pleased to see last week at Tully's (which was, as my grandmother likes to remind me, founded by a Greek here in Seattle) that they produce little coffee pods for the Keurig machine for a very reasonable price. Suspending disbelief for a moment, and hoping against hope that the sub-par quality of previous coffee made from this machine was due to the cheap pods and not the intrinsic abilites of an electronic thing that claims to be able to make tasty beverages from mysterious-plastic-pod-cups, I decided to give the Tully's brand pods a shot.

Verdict? Still totally gross. Sigh.

2008-05-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

Happy 71st Birthday to the Golden Gate Bridge!!

In the third grade, this landmark and personal savior to me was the subject of my ever research project, and thusly here is a short list of the few things I remember from that project, which was written in double-spaced-erasable-ink-cursive on approximately 5 pages of white lined paper:

a. The official hue of the Golden Gate Bridge called "International Orange," a color used only for this bridge.

b. As a result of the natural wear and tear of the salt air and ubiquitous San Francisco fog, the Golden Gate Bridge is constantly being repainted. As soon as the painters get to one side, they must start over again.

c. Before the bridge was completed, people got from San Francisco to their weekend homes in Marin county by ferry boat.

And. . . that's about it. But I'm sure the paper I wrote was as well reasoned and riveting as an eight year old could muster.

In high school I drove the Golden Gate Bridge daily to get to school and extracurricular activities in the city, which is, in retrospect, kind of the most amazing commute ever. Past the Marin Headlands, over the bridge, and through Golden Gate Park to arrive at campus within eyesight of Ocean Beach is something that a person can't truly appreciate until they are completely beyond the snotty teenager phase. The Golden Gate Bridge is also the site of my very first car accident, occuring in the fall of 1999, the first day my mother entrusted with taking the blue Ford Aerostar to and from school on a Friday. About 1/3 of the way across the bridge I dropped a cassette tape on the floor, and leaned to pick it up, smacking cleanly into the grey Jetta in front of me. Luckily the Jetta emerged unscathed. The bumper of the poor Aerostar, however, was shattered and I was in tears for half the day.

The best thing thing of all about the bridge, hands down, is flying into San Francisco sometime around dusk on a clear evening, and seeing the orange spans against the grey ocean, sunlight glittering on the water. I miss home.

2008-05-19T14:32:00.000-07:00

Two Springtime CakesMegan called me at 4pm yesterday inviting me to a six o'clock barbecue at Seth's house, giving me my choice of salads, drinks or desserts to bring and share. I thought about throwing together strawberry shortcake, but had used all the rest of my strawberries on Cheerios eaten on the sun dappled patio that morning. Pie was also briefly entertained, but would have required a trip to the grocery store. My pantry already had all the ingredients for this Velvet Spice Cake from The Joy of Cooking, even the cup of plain yogurt and cream cheese for the frosting. I recommend this recipe. It is very moist and fluffy, though I might double up on the spices next time. It was quite mild and with thick cream cheese frosting (my own improvised recipe) so mellow that you could barely discern hints of the cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg.

I decorated the cake with icing tips #67 for the ruffled leaves and #107 for the cranberry colored drop flowers. I brought the big cake to the barbecue with me, barely two hours later, and delivered the smaller bundt to my grandmother on the way home. I made one extra little bundt cake for my lunch today which was not frosted so prettily, but tasted delicious when I ate it out of tupperware just an hour ago.

2008-05-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

I was already getting ready to write my post about how The Midnight Organ Fight is my favorite album of the first half of 2008 and a strong contender for the entire year before I did some clicking around on the internets and realized that the band is made up of Scottish brothers Scott and Grant. It is well documented that there are few things I love more than sibling bands. (A short list of the precious few things I hold above sibling bands are fresh lilacs, seasonal beer, cute flats and chocolate cake.)

2008-05-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

After at least a year of admiring it in bookstores, Cody purchased the America's Test Kitchen Cookbook a few weeks ago. I think it illustrates some important differences in us that Cody's idea of the perfect cookbook is one that provides scientifically tested "best of breed" recipes, whereas I am mostly seeking the cookbook that has the recipes that taste just like the food my mother and grandmothers cook. Nevertheless, Cody's purchase inspired him to resolve to cook one new meal every week. He got off to a great start this week by cooking delicious dinners two nights in a row. Which leads me to. . .

Meals my boyfriend cooked for me this week:

1. Parmesan Encrusted Chicken Breasts - America's Test Kitchen Cookbook
This recipe required Cody to pound chicken breasts to 1/2 thick and coat them in flour, egg whites and thickly grated Parmesan cheese before pan frying them briefly and finishing the baking in the oven. The chicken turned out moist and tender, with a crunchy savory coating. The reheated extra breast I ate for lunch the next day was less crispy, but equally delicious. In the future, I would reheat the chicken in the oven rather than the microwave, if given the option.

2. Boeuf Bourgondien - The Joy of Cooking
Cody swore he saw a recipe with photos of this dish in the America's Test Kitchen cookbook, but when it came time to find the recipe to write up his shopping list, it was definitely not in there. I wonder if he dreamed of it. Sometimes I make up recipes in my dreams, like last week when I dreamt of creating a lasagna with lots of spinach and shredded chicken. Luckily, The Joy of Cooking had a detailed and delicious looking Beef Burgundy recipe. We ate this over egg noodles, which was perfect. We both agreed that the next time we make this recipe we will use way more carrots and other vegetables.

2008-05-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes My Coworkers are Magical People

Exhibit A: Toni Rose showed up to work wearing a pink shirt with a large red "A" on the chest. Toni explained by saying that her husband bought her the shirt and that the "A" stands for Andy. Toni claims to be fully cognizant of the existence of Hester Prynne and the associations her shirt might lead to, but I am suspicious. Toni suspects that Andy bought her the shirt to retaliate for the time when she bought him a pink button up shirt a while back, but the whole thing makes me pretty happy that my boyfriend is named Cody.

Exhibit B: I have a love-hate relationship with the canned music in the locker room at the gym. For the most part it is terrible, but at the same time I don't know where else I would ever hear LL Cool J and J Lo dueting on "All I Have," and sometimes I like to be reminded that that song actually happened. Today, in the locker room, I was getting changed and "Jungle Boogie" was being piped in over the speakers. As we are tying her shoes, Maren turns to me and says: "What is this song? It makes no sense. People don't dance in the jungle." And no, she was giving voice to a long-held (and perhaps just) contention with the lyrics of the song, girlfriend had literally never heard that song before. Maren is 23 years old, doesn't live under a rock, and I don't care what kind of music you seek out in your personal life, I absolutely do not understand how you can exist in the universe for that long without being subjected to all of the bigger hits in Kool & The Gang's catalogue. I mean, last summer, Kool & The Gang played in the street outside our office building for some stupid promotion or another! I bet they probably played "Jungle Boogie" three times. Maren should get an award or something.

Obviously, my team rules.

2008-04-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

3 Things About Otter Pops:

1. I bought a box of 200 Otter Pops at Costco last week! Hello, summer! Come to my house for Otter Pop Party!

1. I prefer the old packaging (above) with big pictures of all the Otter Pop personalities. When I was little, I always liked Alexander the Grape the best. Fruit Punch was my favorite flavor, but I never wanted to admit it because I thought Poncho Punch was a creep.

3. The shower gel I am using this week at the gym smells like Sir Isaac Lime.

2008-04-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

Hey, Khia, you know what sucks? Having only one breakout hit and having it be so disgusting and full of degenerate sexual acts that I am scared to even paraphrase the lyrics here because I know my mom reads this blog. Oh, wait, you know what is also terrible? Appearing on a bottom of the barrel Vh1 reality show about female rappers. Crap, it gets worse. Despite the fact that you are semi-famous for rapping about your personal proclivities, you are considered less of an authority on rap music than the dorky fat white judge, and you are a contestant on this show. Aw, Khia, what happens next? You get kicked off the show for cheating and not writing original lyrics?! Really? That is so tragic is is almost not funny. Almost. I still laughed pretty hard.

Also? This show, Miss Rap Supreme, is totally bizarre. I consider myself to quite experienced in deciphering the interpersonal relations and issues between reality television stars, but man, I have no idea what these women are always fighting about. I think that maybe they are just yelling because it feels cathartic. That's really the only reason I can imagine that two grown women would go from kissing each other to screaming loudly about which one is more of a "devil." Further, the premise of this show is that it is a rapping talent competition, and I don't want to sound like an old lady here, but I can't even tell if they're rapping well or not because they swear so much that it is all bleeped out. The presumptive front runner in the competition, a woman who goes by the name "Nicky2States," is repeatedly told by the judges what a good rapper she is, but I literally have no idea, because I haven't heard her speak a whole sentence that wasn't stripped of all meaning by the rampant bleeping. And while I am a connoisseur of the well placed expletive, Vh1, you are basic cable, not HBO. . . understand your limitations.

2008-04-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Greek Easter

This weekend, due to discrepancies between the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the date of Passover, the Eastern Orthodox churches celebrated Easter. I also celebrated in this holiday. Saturday afternoon my friends came over to my house and I cooked Greek food. I woke up at 6 am to clean my kitchen and grocery shop. I made moussaka, spanakopita, fassolakia, and a huge horiatiki salata, all served with yummy crusty bread. Serendipitously, this weekend also marked Nitsan's brief return to Seattle, so between him and many of the regulars, we passed the afternoon happily. The day was warm and and sunny, and I sat on my patio with several ladies, sipping ouzo and gossiping.

I had spent the entire previous week trying to conceive of a not-gross cocktail using ouzo, so that I could name it something disgusting like "Greek Passion" or "The Freaky Greeky." Alas, inspiration would not come to me. Kevin succeeded where I failed, however, by combining ouzo with Dr. Pepper to create the "Dr. Papanicolaou," named after the inventor of the Pap Smear who is also from the same village in Greece as my ancestors. The drink was surprisingly delicious.

Sunday afternoon, my yiayia and I went to her friend Clara's house for lamb Easter dinner, which was mostly pleasant. Clara is a fantastic ninety-four year old woman who is sassy and independent and I deeply believe that she is one of the few sensible forces in my yiayia's life. Clara's grandson just had twin daughters last fall, so two 6 month old babies were also a point in the awesome column. Slightly less good was the dinner table conversation which started with someone soliloquizing about how "Religion is a pyramid and there are lots of different ways to get to heaven", and an old Greek lady from Walla Walla said "What?! You mean the Muslims too?!"

Uh, yeah. Happy Greek Easter to me!

2008-04-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

On the topic of Forgetting Sarah Marshall: You see, I was never going to not see this this movie. I basically hyperventilated last summer when I read that Jason Segel was writing and starring in a movie with Kristen Bell, as they are my two favorite actors from deeply beloved fabulous but cancelled television shows, Freaks and Geeks and Veronica Mars.

I counted down the days until this film came to a screen near me, knowing that there would be puppets, Hawaii, and Jason Segel's junk (Sorry, totally TMI, but it's true). Thusly, I'm not really in a position to write an unbiased review of the movie. Of course I loved it! Kristen Bell was there! Obviously it was great! There was a musical about puppet Dracula in the movie! Jason Segel sang and played the piano! I wish I could have two boyfriends so I could date him too! Cody said it was ok! Should you go see this film? DUH! Yes! A million swoons.

2008-04-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

On the topic of things I have made:

Several weeks ago, I completed my very first grown-up sized sweater. The Puff Sleeved Cardgian from the lovely Stefanie Japel's book Fitted Knits, knit up pretty much as easily as the description promised. I chose this sweater as the first of several I intend to knit from this book because I am currently enthralled with short sleeved sweaters, and the pattern called for high economical knitpicks yarn. Further, top down in one piece, the lack of finishing work was a nice treat at the end of the sweater. I am happy with how it fits on my body, except the sleeves aren't nearly as fabulous and voluminous as I'd been expecting and hoping they would be. The only modifications I made were accidental, but don't seem to have negatively affected the overall end product.

Here I am, in my garden one morning before work, awkwardly posing in my sweater.
And the sweater, being blocked in my living room. I stretched the front slightly to make room for my bosom by drying the sweater over a small roll of hand towels.

2008-04-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

Greek Stuffed Tomatoes and Peppers
Cribbed and adapted from both my grandmother and mother's recipes

3 large tomatoes
3 bell peppers
1 pound ground beef or turkey
1 yellow onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp dill
Olive oil (honestly, who measures that when they're cooking)
1 cup rice
4 potatoes, peeled and sliced into wedges
Salt and pepper to taste

In a large saucepan, saute the the onion and garlic with as much delicious olive oil as you can pour into the pan without feeling fat (a tablespoon or two). Once the onions become translucent, add your ground meat. While meat is browning, slice the lids off your tomatoes and hollow them out. Dump tomato guts into the browning mixture. Once all the meat is cooked, season with salt, pepper and dill and add 1 cup of rice and a cup or two of water (the tomatoes will have added a good amount of moisture to the mixture, so your rice ratio will be slightly different than usual). Cover and wait for your rice to become almost soft. At this point, preheat the oven to 350 degrees and prepare a 9 by 13 baking dish by sloshing a little bit of olive oil in the dish. Slice the lids of your bell peppers and remove the seeds. Arrange your hollow tomatoes and peppers in the dish and set your potato wedges seasoned with salt and pepper around them. When the rice is almost tender, spoon the mixture into the prepared vegetables until they are full. Replace the vegetables lids, mostly because it is cute. Place the dish in your preheated oven and bake for one hour, or until the potatoes are golden brown.

If you have leftover filling, you can add a little more water and cook until the rice is completely soft. This filling is delicious and can be served on the side or saved for a separate meal.

Last night I made this dish for Cody and I, and I also prepped a soup for the crock pot. I'm making a black bean soup that I found the recipe for in the comments section of one of Heather Havrilesky's articles on Salon. I'm making the soup mostly because it looks delicious but a little bit because I think Heather is brilliant and an excellent writer and I accept most of her opinions in her weekly TV column as gospel. Yes, I understand that she didn't personally vouch for this recipe dumped in her comments section, but somehow I irrationally find it reputable by proximity. I'll let you know how that works out for me.

2008-04-09T10:23:00.000-07:00

SIBLINGS DAY!!
Today is a totally fake holiday, Siblings Day, which sounds like it is being pioneered and pushed upon the world by a sad woman who has faced much more familial misfortune than I. Nevertheless, I love my sister Diana and my brother George! And here are some pictures that show why!
Christmas 2007! We took this picture before we made brunch and drank mimosas.

1986! Look how fat George is! Also! Diana and I are not wearing shirts!

Christmas 1988! I scanned this picture from my grandma's photo album, and the next picture in the series is after we've opened presents and the living room is covered in wrapping paper. Also, George is naked and has a bow on his head.

2008-04-07T12:53:00.000-07:00

Despite my earlier grousing that my bracket was in the toilet, I am able to proclaim that thanks to a 100% final four and the glorious triumph of Memphis over UCLA, I could potentially win some money tonight. I am not very happy with UNC for losing to Kansas, and I'll admit that I said some not very kind things about Tyler Hansbrough and Sasha Kaun that I would definitely not repeat to their mothers, but I don't think either of those nice boys realized that the outcome of the game they played on Saturday directly affected whether I could win $1600 in my office pool. Nevertheless, I'm still a strong contender in a pool with my friends and the pool at The Comet, the latter of which could render me several hundred dollars richer. Which is nothing to shake a stick at.

2008-04-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

Click on the picture to read the full text of the press release, but the gist is that Random House is rereleasing a revamped version of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, the fictional subjects of a myriad novels in the Sweet Valley High empire. Futher, these notoriously innappropriately mature twins from Southern California are all updated for 2008. I didn't jump on this story right away, because I mostly don't care. Despite my voracious consumption of young adult novels as a pre-teen, I don't remember reading many Sweet Valley High books. They mostly came out in the 80's, so they were slightly before my heyday, and I think my mother was either vaguely or explicitly dissaproving of the subject matter. I know I read one or two, because I can recall a plot line about the twins pretending to be triplets to play a mean trick on a new boy in school, and another plot about one of the twins falling in love with a famous pop star. Mostly, however, at that age I just wasn't that interested in the travails of driving around in a sweet Fiat, chasing boys, and reapplying lipgloss. To an 8 to 11 year old me, The Babysitter's Club was much more glamorous, with their secret junk-food stashes and responsible personalities, and those were the overpriced paperbacks on which I spent my carefully hoarded weekly allowance.

Random House proudly trumpets several modern edits to the essence of being a Wakefield twin; for starters, a Jeep Wrangler is now the covet-worthy car they'll be cruising in and bickering over. Which I guess makes sense, because even the most casual viewer of My Super Sweet Sixteen knows that the kids don't give a shit about the environment and that coups are so passe. I still don't care about Elizabeth's journalistic aspirations, although I think her secret gossip website is probably a little too cheap and obvious of a rip-off of Gossip Girl. Most glaring and disgusting, however, is the brash assertion that the 80's Wakefields were fat, and that in 2008, the "perfect" size is no bigger than a 4. What? What?! I hate people sometimes.

2008-03-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

Black Eyed Pea Salsa

2 15 oz cans Black Eyed Peas, drained and rinsed
1 15 oz can Black Beans, drained and rinsed
One half red bell pepper diced
One jalepeno pepper, seeds removed, diced
Small bunch green onions, thinly sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons cider vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste

Combine ingredients in large bowl, stir and mash some of the beans coarsely with a fork. This recipe is especially good if you can make it in advance and let the mixture meld overnight. Serve with tortilla chips. Cody likes to make nachos with the leftovers.

Chunky Guacamole

5 large ripe avacados
3 roma tomatoes
1/2 small red onion
1 jalepeno pepper, seeds removed
1/2 large bell pepper, whatever color is on sale at the store
5 cloves garlic
1 lime
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Slice roma tomatoes in half, scoop out the seeds and discard. Coarsely chop tomatoes, onion, jalepeno and bell pepper into a large bowl. Add minced garlic. Squeeze juice of lime over ingredients, add avocado and mash with fork. Continue to mash / stir and add olive oil, salt and pepper. Serve with anything at all, because seriously, this guacamole is that good.

2008-03-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

Last night Katie took me as her special guest to see the Alvin Ailey Dance Company at the Paramount. I was thankful once again to the lovely people at Seattlest for being a big deal, because our tickets were phenomenal. Row F center aisle seats - the last time I was so close to the stage at the Paramount was when Belle & Sebastian was supporting The Life Pursuit and Kim and I had to flirt with awkward Canadian boys to fight our way forward in the crowd. Even then we were all the way off to stage left. So walking in last night, I felt pretty fancy, despite knowing little to nothing about modern dance. My formal dance experience begins and ends with an adult beginning ballet class, an unsuccessful foray into Irish Step Dance, and a childhood full of of competitive Greek Folk Dancing. See below:

So, I arrived at the Paramount last night with the very bare-bones background knowledge that can be gleaned from a Wikipedia article on Mr. Alvin Ailey and having a brief but informative discussion with Marie at Happy Hour about why what I was about to experience was important.

Overall, I enjoyed the performance. I thought most, if not all, of the costumes were pretty stupid. In the first dance, Firebird, the chorus looked like it was wearing dirty dockworking jumpsuits, and the main male dancers were wearing red spandex pants that were a fabulous color and would have been beautiful except for a bizarre strip of fabric that covered their nipples like a bra top and was very distracting. The second main dance had much better costumes, rich and gold with awesome bootie socks. Unfortunately, this was the Twyla Tharp choreographed piece, and the actual dance felt a little too cheesy and 80's for me. The final act was the one Alvin Ailey piece I had ever heard of, Revelations, and was as fabulous as it was rumoured to be, but the women wore these long skirts. While I understand how the costumes fit into the story and theme that the dance was telling, I couldn't help but be dissappointed that because the female dancers were covered in copious yards of fabric, it was difficult to fully appreciate the crispness of their movements and skill.

2008-03-26T10:32:00.000-07:00

As preface, two short things:

1. Last night I watched Across the Universe, which I did not think was a good movie. I get it, it was an intertwining of personal and generational experience, wrapped up in iconic blah blah blah, but it doesn't matter because it was straight up not interesting or pleasurable to watch. I loved the music though. I wish I would have had it on in the background while I was doing something that averted my eyes elsewhere, because I think then I wouldn't have been so annoyed with the whole thing.

2. After a 6 year hiatus, I have started to watch American Idol again. The only reason I have rekindled my relationship with this show on a trial basis is that thanks to my new DVR subscription, I can record the Tuesday night show and watch it free of all the infuriating product placement, sappy banter and boring backstory videos of the contestants' stupid families and hometowns. No one will ever be as charming and likable as Kelly Clarkson, so they should all stop trying and just sing already.

Now, as I said, I did not like Across the Universe. However, I watched the film shortly after watching two blessedly truncated episodes of American Idol where the contestants sang Beatles songs. The first episode was ok, with some decent performances, but the second week of Beatles songs was a hot hot mess with nary a passable moment to justify the show's existence. And maybe it wasn't fair to make those idiots pick two Beatles songs in a row to not butcher, but I refuse to believe that in the vast discography of songs written by Lennon, Harrison and McCartney, that it is really that hard to pick a song which is at least in your range.

And then my contempt for these mediocre Idol contestants increases with a viewing of Across the Universe, where almost every single song sounds fresh and new and exciting. And the actual film was a steaming-hot-pile-of-garbage-pie, but the actors were excellent vocalists and managed to sing those Beatles songs in different styles and arrangements without ruining Eight Days a Week.

The devil's advocate might argue that it's not fair to compare professional actors to the fount of America's best undiscovered and untapped diamonds in the rough, but the biggest scandal surrounding this season is that many of these contestants really are neither undiscovered or unvetted. Carly and Kristy Lee and one or two of those boys all had record deals and screwed the pooch with that, just like they did two weeks of Beatles songs. And I'm not arguing that I think that previous music industry experience should disqualify them from being on American Idol, I just think that it is a testament to how absolutely irrelevant to actual musical achievement American Idol is that it would give us this pool of failed mediocrity and try and pass it off as the best talent the universe has to offer at this very moment. (Ditto to the Grammys on that front as well.) And that millions and millions of my fellow citizens watch and know markedly more about the nuances of this show that has no reflection on the state of music as an art in our world than they know about the impending Presidential Election. Also, I hate how David Cook in his quest to turn everything into a rock anthem just sings cover songs of cover songs. That is annoying.

2008-03-24T08:59:00.000-07:00

Most of the year, the enthusiasm I attempt to feign for sporting events is rather forced and lackluster. I've been dating Cody for almost 4 years, so my personal knowledge of professional sports has been expanding, albeit at not a particularly accelerated rate. The one time a year when I get truly excited is NCAA March Madness. Part of it is that I like basketball, but have a hard time caring about the NBA, because of all the professional sports leagues, it seems like the NBA is one where playing as a team is particularly valued. Obviously, the unpredictable nature of the NCAA bracket is also a draw, where someone who doesn't know anything about the teams and doesn't go into the tournament with preconceived notions has just as good a chance of picking the winners as someone who thinks they've forseen the outcome based on past performance. Not that it has actually helped me win pools of money in any of the years I've been playing March Madness, but I appreciate the notion of an even playing field.

And thus, my bracket:
Rounds one and two are over and my bracket is feeling decidedly sickly. Specific teams that betrayed my trust were UConn, CSU Fullerton, Notre Dame and Marquette. One of the few losses sustained that I did not begrudge at all was Indiana and Arkansas. I had picked the Hoosiers, but had I known about the awesome and fantastic Steve Hill, well, I might have done something stupid and picked Arkanas to beat North Carolina. Case in point:

Um, totally sweet. Also, huge crush.

That being said, even though I'm wallowing at the bottom of all my bracket pools at the moment, all four of my Final Four picks are still viable, so I am alive. Further, I'm still feeling optimistic about Memphis, the team I picked to win it all because their superstar point guard, Derrick Rose, goes by the nickname "Pooh" and has a wizard tattoo. Yes. A tattoo of a wizard. And I think that's all I need to say about that.

2008-03-14T11:45:00.000-07:00

Cody and I watched The King of Kong last night, and it was as excellent as the reviews and recommendations from friends promised it would be. I never got around to seeing the film in theaters (which is why I'm undoubtedly a part of the crappiness of modern cinema. When 16 year old boys are the country's largest theater-going demographic, and I can't find the time or enthusiasm to visit the multiplex even with my free weekends and disposable income, no wonder they keep making crap like Meet the Spartans. Not that I plan on apologizing or ceasing to see most movies for practically free thanks to my Netflix account. Maybe in the future everything of substance or value will go straight to video and only the idiots will pay to see movies in the theater.), but it's been on my radar for months. Recently, interest was rekindled thanks to the bizarre and compelling interview with Billy Mitchell on The AV Club, and on Wednesday, the disc finally arrived in my mailbox.

As reported, the documentary hit all the right notes. It was at turns funny, sincere, heartbreaking and infuriating. No one will be surprised that I thought one of the strongest moments reminded me of a favorite scene from Pride and Prejudice. When Steve Wiebe is playing Donkey Kong and says hello to Billy Mitchell, who ignores him and observes to his wife that "He doesn't want to spend too much time talking to some people," obviously my mind jumped to the scene at Lucas Lodge when Mr. Darcy shuns our hero, Elizabeth. The difference being, of course, that sociopath Billy Mitchell did not eventually learn to correct his personality faults and lapses of judgement.

Well, that, and also that I have absolutely zero interest in seeing Billy Mitchell emerge from the pond at Pemberley in a wet shirt.

2008-03-13T08:55:00.000-07:00

Who cares whether or not SNL is Pro-Clinton?

A. Does anyone even watch SNL anymore? Are there really people whose political opinions are informed by a culturally-irrelevant late night crapfest? It's not like this is the Daily Show.

B. The Hillary sketch was really not that funny. It was awkward, forced and way too long.

C. Unrelated, but I was also disappointed by the much-touted Project Runway sketch.

2008-03-11T16:19:00.000-07:00

Things I forgot yesterday:

1. My new "work bowl" for meals at my desk. Sitting on the coffee table at home.

2. My gym bag in the locker room. I got all the way back to the steps of my building before I realized I was traveling a giant tote bag light. Ooops.

3. My pink umbrella hooked onto the coat rack. Thusly, I arrived home soaking wet.

2008-03-04T10:13:00.000-08:00

I watched 2 Days in Paris on Sunday night and pretty much hated it. I didn't want to hate it, but I couldn't find a single moment to cling to and say 'yes, these are my people, they act like normal human beings.' I have such a hard time identifying with people who make obviously poor decisions and insist on seeing them through. I also can not sympathize with being in relationships where your partner makes you miserable and all you do is bicker, yet you remain because you can not imagine an existence less miserable than your current misery. The people I've spoken with who enjoyed the movie say, 'Oh, but the film was so realistic and honest' or 'But the point was that they were such difficult people,' which I can see, but there was no counterweight to this couple's horribleness to one another, no redemptive factors that showed that we should care about whether they were unhappy as a couple or as single beings. Also, if this movie was a realistic portrait of your romantic relationships, then I'm sorry, that is truly terrible for you. I do not think that I like movies that fixate so pointedly on the dissolution of relationships.

Arguably Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind could be subject to the same criticism, but I think the difference there is that both Kate Winslet and Jim Carey's characters were likable on some level, the story showed a time when it was plausible to think of the couple as compatible, and the plot explicated on additional themes more philosophical and interesting than how hard it is to stay in love with a challenging person.

Everyone who reviewed this movie compared it to Annie Hall, which is obviously valid, but since so many other people who get paid to think about movies hit that note, I'm not going to waste my breath. Further, I didn't really enjoy Annie Hall at all, which most likely gives some insight into why I was so disappointed with 2 Days in Paris.

2008-02-29T13:46:00.000-08:00

My grandmother had a bridge and three teeth removed from her mouth this morning, and seeing no alternative that wouldn't make me feel neglectful, I volunteered to driver her to the oral surgeon. Overall, it was much less of a major production than the catastrophe I envisioned in my head, and the procedure was completed before I even returned from the pharmacy where I picked up her vicodin prescription. On the ride home, her mouth was filled with gauze, hindering her speech, and I was surprised at what a disorienting experience it was to have her be completely silent for a 15 minute stretch of time.

2008-02-27T06:36:00.000-08:00

OSCAR PARTY!!!

2008-02-26T15:48:00.000-08:00

For the last several months, I've been coming to terms with the fact that inexplicably, Cody and I are the only people we know who are watching The Wire. Look, this show is as good, if not better than The Sopranos, and the fact that you've got five whole seasons to watch should be a bonus, not a daunting task. But whatever. In this, the fifth and final season, it's been really great to watch the episodes a week early "On Demand," because obviously I'm not into delayed gratification. The only downside to that arrangement, however, is that after I watch the new episode on Monday night, I have to wait an interminable week until the following Monday to read what all my favorite columnists at Slate and Salon have to say about it, which doesn't even really make sense to me, because does anyone who pays for HBO not get "On Demand?" But whatever. This has been a difficult enough faux-burden all season long, but after last night's episode when I almost cried several times, and then did cry during the credits, I am dying for some Wire talk.

But instead, Michael K. Williams on being adorable and honey nut cheerios.

2008-02-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

So why is this happening?

2008-02-14T08:04:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day Muffins!

Sift together:
2 cups flour
1 tblsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp allspice

Mix in a bowl:
2 eggs
1 cup milk ( I used half buttermilk)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 cup chopped cranberries
2 tblsp orange zest
Several drops red or pink food coloring

Combine dry and wet ingredients, taking care to not overmix. Spoon into muffin tins or cups and bake in a 400 degree oven for 17 minutes. Bring to work and freak out your coworkers with your very pink muffins.

2008-02-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

Well, it's Monday morning and I just ripped a giant hole in my last pair of pantyhose. Awesome.

2008-01-30T17:58:00.000-08:00

I was holding off, because up until today, Edwards was my guy, and it took me until this past weeked to get utterly disgusted with the whole Clinton machine, but this evening after work I stopped by my local make your own t-shirt store and orded my Barack Obama t-shirt. Delicate pink, with his victorious visage in gold, please.

2008-01-26T18:37:00.000-08:00

I bought new nailpolish the other day. In English, the color is just "plum," and I'm no Francophile, but I'm pretty sure that the the botttle translates that in French to "Christmas Pudding." Um, what? That is awesome. I think that sums up the majority of the reasons why the French are fantastic and English speakers lacking.

2008-01-24T11:19:00.000-08:00

Soups I've made over the last several weeks, where I got the recipe, how much I have left and how good they were:

Minestrone - The Joy of Cooking (75th Anniversary Edition)

Super complex and delicious, especially considering how low-fat this recipe is. I love to make this recipe when I have a refridgerator full of random vegetables getting elderly, because everything tastes good simmered in chicken broth with beans and pasta and bacon. This soup is all eaten and gone.

Corn Chowder - The New Basics

Ross and Erin left this cookbook behind when they got married and moved to Hotlanta. I am physically incapable of not rescuing abandoned books, and cabbaging onto this one has yielded many more tangible benefits than that copy of stories about Buddhist women languishing on my bookshelf. This recipe was pretty good; it included bacon, red peppers and lots of onion with the corn and milk, but didn't really thicken properly. I have three small containers of this soup in the freezer.

Bean and Pasta Soup - The New Basics

Tomato based soup full of beans and orzo, I added chicken breast to this soup. This got very thick and on the second day I put almost a quart of broth in it to thin it out and make it more "soupy." I had a tupperware full of this soup from the freezer for lunch today, and it was even more delcious than I remembered. There are still two frozen containers of this waiting for future lunches.

Curried Sweet Potato Chowder - Better Homes and Gardens

Here's the thing, I love the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook; it contains the best sugar cookie recipe I have ever tried, excellent recipes for dips, a whole section on slow cooker recipes, undsoweiter. It is my second favorite cookbook after The Joy of Cooking because of its broad sweep
(TJOC is broader; it has instructions on how to skin and cook a squirrel!) and reliability; I've never made a bad recipe from this cookbook. But now the caveat, it took a couple interesting recipes for me to realize how "midwest" this cookbook is. For example, last spring when we had a Kentucky Derby party I prepared a rootbeer pulled pork selection for our guests, and for the rootbeer sauce, the recipe told me to use a cup of "chile sauce." Now, to me, the urban international food conusmer that I am, "chile sauce" means something like Siracha or Choloula, so I tried to prepare a serving sauce with an entire cup of that, and, not surprisingly, it was mouth scaldingly inedible. I had never before heard of this "chile sauce" that lives in a bottle next to the A-1 and isn't spicy at all. I had a similar experience when making this curried sweet potato chowder. I was expecting a soupy savory pot of something that tasted not exatly like the panang I can get from Thai Tom, but at least vaguely reminiscent. No. Not at all. This soup was tasty, but milky and sweet, not savory and substantial. Nevertheless, I ate it all, knowing that the tuppers frozen would probably never be defrosted for lack of enthusiasm.

2008-01-14T16:16:00.000-08:00

Sunday night on Masterpiece Theater they kicked off the public television opus known as "The Complete Jane Austen" with a production of Persuasion I had never seen before. Honestly, it wasn't a fantastic production; the 1995 version with Amanda Root as Anne Elliot is much truer to the text and a better representation of the novel, but I still loved it. I loved how they captured the tone and feeling of the book with a subtle, muted cinematography, I loved laying on my couch on a Sunday night knitting and watching some of my most beloved literary characters, and I loved the door opening wide open for me to talk about Jane Austen to everyone I know again.

And now, for the most magical thing I've seen all week: BOYFRIEND PARTY! It's not surprising that sassy Fitzwilliam and his wet t-shirt contest is leading the ranks, but it cracked me up that even Mr. Collins is deemed by some undefined subset of internet users as more desirable than George Wickham. Or maybe it's the bizarre 21st century "Hot or Not" qualitative judgement of the interactive page that baffles me. Either way, screw you, Hulk Hogan and American Gladiators, my Sunday nights just got way better.

2008-01-12T09:15:00.000-08:00

I've gained many things personally from changing my habits and going to the gym almost every day, not the least of which are muscle tone, increased endurance and agility, many ridiculous choreographed step routines from my favorite aerobics class and the ability to undress and shower in a room full of strange women. This last one, however, has lead me to what I think is the most important lesson I've learned at the gym over the last 8 months; most tattoos are awful.

Since I was 14 years old, I've been dreaming of different ways to mark my body in ways that would express my true essence to the world. When I was 15, the very coolest thing I could possibly imagine was to have my name tattooed on my back in orange flame writing. Uh, yeah. Seriously. Lucky for me, I had the kind of sensible and non-permissive mother who wouldn't even let me get my belly button piecered, so the matter of permanent body art was a non-starter. Let me repeat, orange flame writing. Mom, thank you. So, when I came to my senses roughly six months later, I was quick to grasp that taste is an evolving and ever changing concept, and ink scarred into your epidermis is not. Forward from there, I would envision typewriters on my forearm, and hearts on my abdomen, and victorian pen drawings of animals and chandeliers, always knowing that it probably wouldn't happen, and that was probably for the best.

The last several months have taught me that even if your tattoo is something deeply personal and important and a song to your dead cat or something, it still probably looks dumb when you're toweling off in a locker room full of strangers.

As evidence, here is a list of the terrible tattoos I've seen on women at my gym:
1. Pooh Bear, the size of a silver dollar.
2. Countless, seriously, countless Asian symbols littering the flesh of lily-white girls who I am positive do not speak any Asian languages.
3. The ubiquitous "sweet-tribal-tramp-stamp." Except I didn't need to join the gym to see this one, because I've been to college.
4. A zebra head? Just the head? Really?
5. Truly unattractive flowers. I can understand why you might want a tattoo of a pretty flower, but why an ugly, unrealistic one?

2008-01-03T16:40:00.000-08:00

Project Runway:
Ah, the requisite challenge wherein designers must make garments out of materials that should never be used for garments. I sort of wonder why the producers don’t abandon this genre of challenge, because the majority of designers just go the easy route making clothing out of whatever textile type materials they can scrounge. Last night was more of the same in this respect, with only Jillian using actual food products from the Hershey’s store. Christian seemed to be on board with the concept and spirit of the challenge by covering his dress with the brown inner wrappers of Reese’s, glistening with chocolate sweat. Everyone else tore apart pillows and larger pieces of Hershey’s branded merchandise to make dresses (Speaking of which, that store totally stressed me out with the insane, giant stuffed candy paraphernalia; who needs/wants that?! I will never ever go in that store).

In terms of favorite designers, six episodes in, I’m finally forming opinions and attachments (except for Ricky, I hated him and his stupid mesh hats from practically the first time I glimpsed him). Jillian wasn’t early favorite for me, but has been slowly winning me over. I thought I would get sick of smirky Christian with his silly hair, but so far I’m charmed by his sass. I’m glad creepy Steven finally left in the last episode, and I was bored by Elisa’s whole ‘I’m so free-spirited and unique’ thing. I can't decide if I really like Kit as a designer or if I just like her hair. I’m still livid that they kept awful Ricky over Chris a few episodes ago, but luckily that mistake was rectified by Jack’s untimely departure. I can tell that Rami is already a favorite to go all the way, but I’m not convinced his designs are really that interesting.

Okay, dicuss.

2007-12-31T13:22:00.000-08:00

It looks like we're just standing awkwardly, but really that is me ice skating with my sister, Diana, and my brother, George.

Other Christmas highlights included:
A retro kitten apron from my mom
Many many Tom & Jerrys
Rhymnocerous & Hiphopapotamus
Crab on Christmas Eve
Drinking beer and falling asleep on Tamara's couch
Etcetera

I’m back in Seattle after 10 truly lovely days in the Bay Area. I imagine that someday I will find a better way to articulate the hard spot in my throat and the empty, prickly sensation in my stomach that I get when I’m driving to the airport in San Francisco. I guess that that someday will probably coincide with the point in my life when I start feeling less torn between Seattle and the Bay Area. I keep thinking that all my problems will be fixed when I align my life in a way that facilitates me moving back to San Francisco, but at least when I throw a party here in Seattle, people show up. Even knowing that, I miss being close to my family in a terribly acute way; I saw them so much this fall that waiting until June for my brother’s college graduation seems interminable.

On my last day in town yesterday, my family and I walked downtown to see Juno with Angelica. As we intersected Magnolia we ran into Eric, who taught Boys’ PE at my grade school walking with his mother and new baby daughter. He was the first person to tell me that life and boys and the universe wouldn’t suck so much once I was out of junior high, or at least he was the first person to tell me that who I thought was credible and might actually know something about it. Even though his parents live on the same block as my parents, I hadn’t seen him in probably ten years, and I’ve frequently reflected on the advice he gave to me as an awkward and miserable 8th grader. I wish we would have exchanged email addresses or something.

In this, the last day of 2007, I feel like I should do some sort of philosophical round-up or re-cap, and maybe I will eventually, but for now I feel exceptionally lucky to be onward and upward of where I was at this point last year, or even worse, this time two years ago. Geographical problems aside, I feel on-track and on-task. And tomorrow I am going to plant tulips.

2007-11-28T11:38:00.000-08:00

Ill-advised things that I have bought because they had pictures of mountain goats on the label but in reality were not as cool as actual mountain goats and, parenthetically,the reasons why they were poor choices:
1. A warm 12 pack of Schmidt Ice (Duh, Schmidt Ice isn’t even good cold).
2. A tin of organic mints made by Paul Newman (Chalky texture, suspicious grey hue).

Things I have bought with mountain goats on the label that were exactly as awesome as actual mountain goats:
1. Several six packs of Scapegoat Ale. Hoppy and delicious.
2. Multiple cds and tickets to events where John Darnielle played music (full disclosure, no pictoral representations of mountain goats involved).

2007-11-20T22:19:00.000-08:00

Sunday night Kim invited me to Heron's fish-painting party at The Center for Wooden Boats. Fish painting, which I didn't know about before, is a Japanese tradition by which fish patterns are transferred to paper or textile with, well, a fish and paint. The evening started when Kim and I met at three different grocery stores looking for likely appearing fish. We finally settled on some gutted trout and two bottles of sake and headed down to the lake. There were several people there who were not only very nice, but also suspiciously good at making fish prints. I was very jealous of their red and coral and teal colored tilapia outlines on deep navy swathes of cotton. I, on the other hand, named my fish "glitter fish" and ruined a perfectly good t-shirt.

Also, line of the night;
Person one whose name I don't remember: "Who the hell thought of putting paint on a fish?"
Person two: "Someone who thought, 'Man, hippies are going to love this.'"

2007-11-19T07:23:00.000-08:00

This weekend, I saw friends and cleaned my apartment and cooked. I also watched a lot of tv. The breakdown is reflected below.

Movies I watched and will return to Netflix today:
1. The Lookout - As excellent as the reviews promised.
2. Bad Santa (Badder Santa Version) - I queued this up because my favorite review of Fred Claus went something like this; "If this movie were actually funny, it would have been Bad Santa. But it wasn't, it was Fred Claus."
3. Radio On - I'm not sure why I had this movie sent to me, but the best part was the ten minute version of "Heroes" that played during the credits where David Bowie sang in German. The film had a phenomenal soundtrack, but I just couldn't watch it. I guess I'm not alienated enough from society yet.

Movies I watched independent of my Netflix subscription:
1. Atonement - Kim took me as her guest to the SIFF screening of this film. It was easily one of the best I've seen all year. Even better than Superbad. It was so good I even stopped minding all the close-ups of Keira Knightly looking beautiful and pensive and chipmunky.
2. The Departed - First time I'd seen it since watching it in the theater last winter. Still good. The cast? Still suspiciously attractive.
3. The last 45 minutes of She's All That - No comment.
4. The middle 80 minutes of Stick It - Even worse than I possibly could have imagined. Actually, no, because in my imagination, this movie was funny and cheesy and a little bit clever, a latter day Bring It On. In real life, it was just mean spirited and clunky and painfully not funny.
5. Say Anything - Still not as good as good as Better Off Dead, except for the boom-box scene.

2007-11-15T08:44:00.000-08:00

If anyone genuinely wants the recipe Cody used to make Scotch Eggs last weekend, you probably are an eclectic enough cook to just go out and buy your own copy of The Joy of Cooking. If for some crazy reason you think that is not a good use of your money or resources (independent of your specific feelings about Scotch Eggs, which I am still skeptical of), then we probably won't be friends, but I'll give you the recipe anyway.

Also, we went to a party, and now our cooking is famous. (I made the guacamole, my lap is in the picture.)

2007-11-14T17:31:00.000-08:00

Last month I took an extremely horrible cooking class for French Pastries with Julia and Anne. Technically, it wasn’t painful or intellectually insulting to be there, but I couldn’t help but feel cheated that I was paying a lot of money for two sessions of essentially watching a woman make mediocre desserts in the common room of a depressing apartment complex in Everett. I hate Everett so much. Looking at the class fee, I had mistakenly assumed that we were paying for an experience that involved a commercial kitchen with plenty of counter-space for everyone to try their hand at lemon custard and crème brulee, when in fact, the seven of us were huddled around an island taking notes on a flaky pastry recipe that, frankly, was vastly inferior to the recipe my grandmother passed along to me years ago. But the real rub was revealed ninety minutes into the first class period when the teacher decided she had done enough teaching for one day and that we would have a better time watching a Rick Steves video about Paris. She claimed she’d seen it and that it was a really good way to learn about French food, but she was clearly lying because aside from the video beginning when Mr. Steves emerges from a Parisian butcher shop, there was not a single mention of food or technique. Not to outdo herself in ineptitude, the following week she was done cooking again before the allotted two hours had elapsed, so we watched the video again. From the beginning. Again. The same video. And her crème brulee didn’t set up and her cream puffs tasted pasty. Thank god there was wine.

In the end, I’m walking away from that experience over $80 poorer, with no recipes I would reprise to impress my friends and family and having wasted 5 hours of my life that I’ll never get back.

pumpkin photos, as promised! (thanks, Julia!)

2007-11-07T21:05:00.000-08:00

My pretend boyfriend, pumpkin-face Harry Potter. He looked creepy before the googly eyes; googly eyes are the second best craft invention after glitter.

Nice boys carving pumpkins.

Robot-face pumpkin.

The slimy insides of that white pumpkin led directly to Cody not being interested in carving anything on it. He was also inspired by Seth, (red blur to the right) who purchased a large green gourd instead of a pumpkin and cut a hole in the top and called it a beer cozy.

2007-11-07T20:06:00.000-08:00

Last night I went to an information session on the Master of Science in Information Studies program at UW, had the most delicious pumpkin beer at Big Time Brewery, ate Swimming Rama with prawns at Thai Tom and went to go see Jens Lekman in Fremont. All amazing things. Jens, oh, Jens, even with my overdeveloped English major vocabulary I don't know enough synonyms for the word "magical" to do that show justice. Jens was traveling with a giant band of attractive Swedish girls with hip haircuts and orchestral instruments and Floyd's Swedish doppelganger dj-ing from a laptop. Jens sang and told anecdotes and danced and played guitar and keyboards and I swooned and swooned and swooned over and over again. Towards the beginning, it looked like Cody and I were going to be stuck standing near a group of awful talkers, but the crowd shifted around and instead we were right next to an adorable girl that friendly and under five feet. The girl and her friends seemed charmed that we were worried about her being able to see the stage, and we danced together, and she told me about the time when she and Jens walked around an art museum in Chicago together. I imagine it was just like in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. (True story, I have never been to Chicago and have absolutely no idea which or how many art museums are there, so as far as I'm concerned, they were listening to instrumental Smith's melodies and looking at Seurat paintings.) The best stage banter came after Jens had played a solo-version of Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al" but omitting all the choruses; he said that he liked silly songs like that, but that he hated the chorus, and that he also hated Chevy Chase's stupid face. Total magic.

Other highlights of the past week include a crisp fall walk in the arboretum with Megan, the illustrious Toby Shuster, finally seeing the Pipettes with Elisa.

Tonight I'm making my first bolognese sauce from scratch, improvised from Mark Bittman's instructions. I doubled the recipe, increased the meat, and used turkey and lamb with beef instead of ground pork. I substitute ground turkey for most recipes, and I had some frozen ground lamb that I figured would give the sauce a little more of a Greek twist.

Hello, November!

2007-10-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

Cody and I made the most adorable Halloween pumpkins ever this year. And by “we” I mean that Cody got bored after scooping the guts out of his pumpkin and disappeared to drink beer while I got to carve two pumpkins. (Multitasking is one of my strong suits, I can drink beer and carve pumpkins at the same time.)

We were invited to Megan’s BYOP(umpkin) party and left our house ten minutes before the party started to go buy pumpkins and walk to her apartment. Safeway had a meager selection of gourds out in front of the store including some large misshapen orange pumpkins in tall cardboard bins, round pumpkins too small to make anything cool out of, and white pumpkins. We pulled almost every pumpkin out of the bin looking for a handsome one, took turns climbing into the bins trying to retrieve Cody’s cell phone when it fell out of his pocket and plummeted to the bottom of the pumpkin crevasse of hell, and finally decided on one tall orange pumpkin and one smaller white one. I had purposely picked out a tall pumpkin to fulfill my artistic vision; a pumpkin-face Harry Potter. Cody picked the white pumpkin because he was mad at the orange pumpkins for being in a bin that was laborious to fish a lost cell phone out of.

Pumpkin-face Harry Potter turned out exactly as well as I had hoped with the aid of some googly eyes and emergency nails when I cut the pieces too close together. The white pumpkin was carved with a robot with a heart for a chest. Hopefully pictures will be forthcoming. Hopefully I’ll just buy a new digital camera soon, because I’m tired of refreshing Flickr every half hour hoping that someone will have uploaded pictures of me or my craft projects.

We brought our pumpkins home and they looked even more charming when they were lit up in the hallway approaching the front door. For a whole week I lit the votive candles when I got home from work and make excuses to walk outside and admire the pumpkins in their full glory. Friday night tragedy struck when our landlord, Bessie, informed us via note on the door and that open flames were forbidden in the apartment complex, which seemed over the top, but I’d hate to be that girl that started the fire that wasn’t covered by the fire insurance and that consumed the worldly possessions of everyone else in the building (the majority of whom I dislike or have never met; beside the point). Saturday morning I ran into Bessie outside raking leaves and apologized for violating the candle rule, and that woman is the most amazing ever because she seemed genuinely sad when she said that she really liked our pumpkins, but her daughter had insisted that she enforce fire code.

I guess we could get some electric lights or something, but with Halloween two days away now it hardly seems worth it. Alas.

2007-10-27T15:09:00.001-07:00

The world is great:
1. Saturday morning brunch at Coastal Kitchen. Crab cakes, over-easy eggs, and way more sourdough toast than I would dare to take out of the plastic bread bag if I were toasting for my own breakfast at home. Excellent company as well, of course.
2. Shopping for books. Sometimes it blows my mind that despite our vastly overlapping libraries, Cody and I have such opposite taste in books. He picks up things that look like they will take concerted laborious effort to read, like a book by Mark Danielewski that you have to flip upside down every three pages or something crazy like that. I suppose he thinks the exact same thing as I buy a volume of Edith Wharton stories.
3. Running into my grandmother on the street, while she is walking down Broadway eating a Dick's burger with a bag full of treasures from the 99cent store. I don't believe I could conjure up a more adorable image of her if I tried.
4. Talking to my mom on the phone, obviously.

2007-10-25T10:30:00.001-07:00

Netflix is making a lot of money off me these days. I have the same three dvds at home that were delivered to me before I left for Greece. Last week I finally watched Word Wars, but it remains languishing with Little Children and Radio On on my coffee table. It feels stupid, because I know I would rather be watching a critically lauded or quirkily obscure movie than that same rerun of Scrubs I've seen three times, but I just feel like can't sit still long enough to watch a whole movie anymore.

Cody and I watched Word Wars, a documentary about semi-professional Scrabble players last Thursday night. Spellbound was so excellent, and also Wordplay, that movie about crossword puzzles, that adding a movie about scrabble nerds to my queue was an obvious choice. And it was mostly good, but I think that where Wordplay made the crossword obsessed characters seem endearing and relatable, the scrabble players in Word Wars just came off as bizarre and maladjusted. And obviously, in Spellbound, it's alright to be insane as long as you're simultaneously adorable and also under the age of 18. I'd be hard pressed to argue if there's an intrinsic difference between spelling bees, crosswords and scrabble playing that makes the two former appropriate all-consuming hobbies and the third creepy, or if it's all filmmaking that has left me with that impression. But, dude, there was this character in Word Wars that was in serious gambling debt because he bet large sums of money on long 36 hour scrabble matches, and that was less interesting as much as it was just sad.

Maybe I'll watch Little Children tonight, but between a Costco trip and watching 30 Rock, I probably won't have time. There's always this weekend, I suppose. Until then I'll just be easy money for Netflix, but at least I'm not accruing overdue fines.

2007-10-18T15:13:00.000-07:00

Saturday is my boss's birthday, so today I brought in this pile of technicolor cupcakes to create an occassion to eat sweets in the file room and precede the lunch celebration of pizza in the conference room. The cakes were the "Devil's Food Cake Cockaigne" recipe from The Joy of Cooking, a recipe which I began to rue bitterly after the fifth bowl I had to dirty to follow the instructions. After tasting the end result though, I can say with the certainty of a girl that clearly hasn't done any of the dishes yet that the mess is justified. It is absolutely one of the best chocolate cake recipes I've ever tasted. In general, I've yet to encounter a baked good recipe in The Joy of Cooking which produced anything less than stellar results. The frosting is my standard improvised buttercream, colored richly with the fancy food coloring I bought at that cookie store in Ballard. Half the cakes were nestled in plain ice cream cones, a technique I first saw at the 826 benefit earlier this summer but had never tried before. Spooning the batter in the cones and baking them is even easier than one would imagine, except the next time I do it I will fill each cone almost to full (rather than 2/3) hoping that the cakes would rise in fuller domes to approximate a real scoop of ice cream.

2007-10-16T16:39:00.000-07:00

I feel like I should make a big introductory post since this is my newest and theoretically most improved blogging venture; but I've been trying to write aforementioned prologue for at least two weeks now and I don't have much to say on the topic. I was talking to Cody and Colt last night about how I don't write much anymore, and I'm not especially happy about that. It's hard to know if it's a symptom of giving so much to other areas of my life, or just not being so self centered and damn interesting all the time. And I'm not deleting my Livejournal, but probably won't post a ton there anymore. So, yeah, um, hi. This isn't a very fortuitous beginning, but will hopefully cure the larger problem of my writer's block.