Category: General

ok, sorry, i STILL haven’t had time for posting. I SUCK.
but here is my thing at present: i need to buy a new folder/folio for work, because the cheap-but-highly-useful one i’ve used for the last umpteen years has cracked a bit and now catches on my sweaters when i hold it on my hip — and pulls in my work sweaters, which are actually attractive and mildly expensive, are Not Okay.
Googling has been distinctly unhelpful. I am willing to invest in a nice thing if necessary and justified. Suggestions from the peanut gallery, please, as to where I can find an object meeting these criteria:
– holds standard 8.5×11 pad of lined paper on one side
– has simple flap on opposite side to hold random bits of paper, printouts, notes, etc. No fancy-ass special compartments, slots, mutliple tabs, etc. need apply — just a doohickey that I can easily and quickly slide my papers into.
– attractive. ideally, fabulous retro-modern or brightly colored (orange? green? red?) but i am flexible on this subject. simple black will do.
– not made of plastic. plastic splits and causes snags in sweaters: Not Okay, see above.
– simple and slender and lightweight
– durable. this object is going to get carted around all over, shoved in bags, taken to client sites, whipped out in airports, dropped on the floor, etc. and it needs to remain presentable and professional looking.
– not thick, padded, zippered, “executive” or otherwise fugly
Can you help me, Internet?

i swear to god, they must have slipped a little cocaine back into the recipe when they made Coke Zero. It’s like happy in a bottle. Sweet, cinnamony, and LOTS of caffeine: it can fix any crappy unmotivated afternoon, or jumpstart a morning that is unresponsive to applications of hot milky tea.

so… the wedding was completely awesome. Everything, even the things that we screwed up, did half-assed, or just didn’t think of, worked out completely perfect. We’ll post for real about a lot of the wedding stuff, especially the eats, but for now we are on honeymoon in NYC.
Which means that we are slacking off as majestically as possible.
We have barely left the (absurdly swank) hotel room, since it has air conditioning, expensive linens, free champagne, and Utz cheez balls that our friend K gave us before we left. And wireless internet.
We did leave once, this morning, to wander out into Soho — which is disgustingly hot and humid this week — looking for food. We found a rather good Dominican dive on Lafayette & Spring, La Nueva Conquista, but that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that we have discovered in the course of our excessive slackery that expensive champagne mixed with Vitamin Water makes a surprisingly good drink. We’re holed up in the room, looking out at the bright midday sun, lolling on the cool white sheets in the airconditioning, drinking lemon-lime electrolyte Vitamin Water because we’ve just come in from the heat. And then tallasiandude joked that we should put in some of the leftover free champagne and make wine coolers, ha ha ha. So of course we did, and they’re not completely disgusting, but the key is that they make you feel GREAT. Well hydrated AND a little bit buzzy, just the thing for a lazy hot afternoon with not a single thing to do.
And let me tell you, having not one single thing to do is the greatest luxury i can imagine right now. We’re having a great time. More later.

Yesterday i picked up the first installment of vegetables from our local CSA in Waltham, which was all manner of green leafies (more on that later), plus pick your own snap peas. Which i am now eating while working on the computer, and words do not express how delightful i find that fresh-pea flavor. I will not buy peas fresh in any market, because they are always stale and starchy by the time you get them, and so I rarely get to enjoy the treasured treat of my childhood, fresh raw spring peas. But these little guys are just lovely! Yay.

The other night, tallasiandude was in his office eating some candy when I wandered in to ask him something. I saw the M&Ms in his hand and leaned down to snarf a couple up. Whereupon i realized, far, far too late, that they were actually Skittles.
Blargh!
I had to spit them out in the bathroom trashcan. Them is some nasty candy, made all the nastier when you are expecting delicious dark-chocolate M&Ms. Eesh.

Hot Fuzz may be the best movie of the summer. Woo hoo! From the people who brought you Shaun of the Dead, but this time with more guns!
(watch out — that link comes with sound…)

we had dinner the other evening at the house of a friend in Concord, and unfortunately for him the basement had flooded due to the excessive amounts of rain we’d been having. However, that caused him to open up several rather lovely bottles of wine, just to see if they were undamaged, of course.
He’s supposed to email me a list of what we drank, because – duh – i can’t for the life of me remember. But here’s what we ate.
First course was a terrific salad that I first had at a dinner party in Chicago. It was so awesome i demanded the recipe, and ran out and bought the book they told me it came from (Second Helpings, from the Union Sq Bistro). It’s a crazy mixup of beet & carrot matchsticks, peppery greens (i used some arugula to stretch the watercress), and a honey-mustard-thyme dressing studded with pecans. I wasn’t multitasking too well — life is still a little insane-o — so i burned the pecans in my attempt to toast them, but i tried again and got it right the second time.
Main course was a skirt steak with a Cuban-style sauce of peppers, tomato paste, raisins, almonds & a little cinnamon & clove. Simple as can be, really, and tasty. Simple is good, too, because i was barely on the ball enough to get everything done and timed right — happily our host followed around after me doing all the things that needed to be done. 🙂
That may have to be his moniker for this website, The Host. He is the host with the most, it is true, what with the fabulous wine cellar and all.
Anyway. The steak was served with a bit of rice with lemon and parsley, and some green beans. By then we were probably into our 3rd or 4th kind of wine, and one of our party, not even drinking but very pregnant, hit the wall and needed to go home to bed. So we took that interlude as the opportunity to fix the entirely unnecessary but delightfully excessive third savory course, a bizarre hybrid of frico and homefries that I got out of the Gourmet magazine from a couple of months ago. Lydia Bastianich puts grated montasio cheese in a nonstick skillet, tops it with cooked potatoes and onions, and puts on more cheese. When it gets crusty on the bottom, you flip it and crust up the other side. Totally rocking — crunchy, cheesy, AND starchy. mmmmm.
Dessert was pineapple granita, made to use up the huge can of pineapple juice that has been lurking in my kitchen, taunting me. I sprinkled on some of the magic cinnamon that our friend K brought back from Vietnam, which is so magical that i can smell it whenever i walk through the kitchen, without even opening the spice drawer. It was just the perfect thing after the meaty, cheesy heft of dinner. I am not writing particularly well today, my apologies… still quite distracted… but don’t want to neglect all you people who are kind enough to read my ramblings. And this really was a delightful evening of collaborative cooking and wine nerding and good conversation with friends. It would be a shame to have left it undocumented for the interwebs.

Apparently Hot Doug’s has been openly serving — *gasp* — foie gras hot dogs despite the city-wide Chicago ban:
http://theedge.bostonherald.com/foodNews/view.bg?articleid=191880
The man has passion for what he does. You have to respect that. That and the fact that he fries potatoes in duck fat twice a week.

Hi everyone. Tallasiandude pointed out to me this morning at breakfast that there are NO POSTS AT ALL on this blog anymore because the last one is more than 30 days old, and that is just sad.
So, since as of last Wednesday we have actually finally moved to the new house (which is extra-beyond awesome, more on that later), we have a bed and a shower and a semi-set-up kitchen, and we don’t actually have any specific nightmarishly-urgent task to complete, I actually have two minutes to spare for (dare I say?) Leisure Activities.
And so I will post about our moving-day dinner.
We have a friend, DZ, whose birthday is March 14. He now lives in Seattle, but when he lived here he would have an annual Pi(e) Party on his birthday. This is genius on so many levels: it’s a pun, it’s exceedingly nerdy, and there’s PIE. Everyone would make pies and bring them along, often with a pi symbol cut into the crust to vent steam. (It is awesome to party with crafty creative nerdy types.)
Anyway, he’s not here this year so there was no Pi(e) Party for us to go to, which was good in any case because we had the movers coming that day, and we were up to our ears in furniture and boxes and kittykats trying to escape into the shrubbery. Which of course is hungry business, and so as night fell we needed to forage for some dinner. And we wanted to have some pie, as it seemed only fitting.
And so we settled on the Deluxe Town Diner, a fine old enamel traincar diner in Watertown, which has excellent pancakes of many types at brunch. And which also turns out to have excellent food at dinner.

The fried chicken was extremely crunchy and came with deliciously creamy skin-on mashed potatoes and buttery-garlicky broccoli. The meatloaf was non-standard, containing sauteed veg such as carrot and celery, but this made it quite savory and yummy; it also came with the fab taters and some spinach prepared similarly to the broccoli. Both green vegetables were perfectly cooked crisp-tender, which is rare and wonderful.
And of course, at the end, there was pie.

Mixed berry pie, in homemade crust, with vanilla ice cream. Yum. And then we went home and fell into the bed and slept.
Later that week, we scrambled around and set up the house a little bit, because we had NoodleFest ’07 scheduled for the weekend (post to follow), and so I leave you with a photo of our living room in progress. (Do i hear cheering? Screams of joy and pleasure at its fabulousness? Oh, sorry, that’s me.)

I’ve stumbled upon this article by Michael Pollan twice now — once in my friend Ryan’s Visualizing Science blog, and then again this afternoon, when my friend shr accidentally messaged me a link to it that he had intended to send to his lovely wife. I’m taking it as a sign of its relative significance, so I figured the least I could do was post a link to it, so here you go.
A bit depressing, but a good read nonetheless.