weekend recap

Friday night was a lovely social evening of the sort I haven't had in a while. aroraborealis was in town and nminusone and I met up with her and the lovelytikva (and Brodie) and dragoncrunchies for mezze at Zaytinya (another restaurant run by the folks behind Jaleo and Cafe Atlantico). The food varied from "this is pretty good" to "ohmygod, I could die happy right now", the white wine/vodka/pomegranate juice cocktail was tasty (and dangerous, it didn't taste alcoholic at all), and the company was a lot of fun. I'm reminded of how much I really enjoy going out for dinner with friends and spending the evening talking and laughing and enjoying good food, I don't manage to do that nearly as often as I should.

After heading home and making a quick stop at Wegmans, Chris and I went to go see "V for Vendetta". I actually thought it was reasonably well done, but then I'm not a purist about these sorts of things and can be happy without a direct book-to-film translation. I had some quibbles with a couple of changes they made, but overall I didn't find it particularly disappointing.

Yesterday Chris and I decided to raid Tyson's so we could hit The Body Shop for smelly stuff for him and Sephora for "make your skin look better and minimize wrinkles" stuff for me and then continue with the mezze theme and have dinner at Lebanese Taverna in Tyson's II. After dinner, we came home and curled up on the sofa to watch "Matchstick Men".

Today's accomplishments have consisted entirely of cleaning off my desk a bit and shredding a bunch of paper and doing a little bit of gardening just in time for the possible snow on Tuesday. Sheesh. Given the time, I doubt there will be much more accomplished than that. Perhaps some laundry and hopefully clearing out the guest room a bit, and definitely cleaning up after the various pets.

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I've noticed I haven't felt much like writing here lately, and I've been particularly bad about commenting and even worse with responding to email. My moods are up and down, mostly down. I suspect it's in large part hormonal, but there've been some changes in my supplements lately that probably aren't helping much. I've been pretty grumpy today for various reasons; digging in the dirt helped, but it's getting too dark to continue and that leaves me with housework that I really don't much want to do. Meh.

(no subject)

pecunium, cover your eyes. ;)

From the Post on Saturday:

Recipes are increasingly avoiding the use of terms like "cream", "braise" or "sauté" because people don't have the slightest clue what they mean.

Basic cooking terms that have been part of kitchen vocabulary for centuries are now considered incomprehensible to the majority of Americans. Despite the popularity of the Food Network cooking shows on cable TV, and the burgeoning number of food magazines and gourmet restaurants, today's cooks have fewer kitchen skills than their parents -- or grandparents -- did.

I don't cook very often and never really learned any serious cooking skills, but at least I know what "simmer" means. I don't think dumbing down recipes to avoid terms that might be unfamiliar is really doing anyone any favors, I would much prefer to see the correct terms used to encourage some basic level of competency. Include a glossary with your cookbook if you really think your target audience won't know what it means when you direct them to dredge a chicken breast in flour, but the level of ignorance about proper cooking terminology is only going to increase if you skip the opportunity to educate people who might not already know the terms you're using. If you're bemoaning the fact that people don't know what to do when you tell them to cream the butter and sugar, how exactly is it improving matters to avoid using the term altogether and instead simply say "beat the butter and sugar using your mixer"?

(no subject)

Here's a little musical accompaniment for my last post, courtesy of Vincent Price. Blame also_huey for making me aware of it, but you have only yourself to blame if you click on through.