12 of 12: July

12 of 12! July. Chad Darnell. Yup.

6:51 - Up.

7:43 - Everybody loves a girl with her own tire gauge and needlenose pliers...right?

9:03 - Welcome to San Francisco! Happy July! Here are your mittens.

10:40 - The Standard Deviants production office: where the magic happens.

11:17 - Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW, one of a number of things I brought back with me from LA.

12:30 - Picking up lunch at kitchenette. Yup...that's a garage. Where I got my lunch.

12:34 - That's "no relish," as in green olives, because they are the fru-its of the de-vil, as are all brined vegetables.

12:42 - Grilled eggplant and heirloom tomato sandwich with feta on green-onion slab bread, with a side of Vietnamese-style caramel corn (caramel, peanuts, fish sauce, chiles, lime). Not cheap, but not bad.

6:23 - Traffic meltdown in the East Bay. Quick! Shorter and red, or longer and yellowish?

6:37 - Aaaand longer and yellowish wins it.

7:30 - At least dinner's waiting for me when I get home. ...I am Don Draper.

8:40 - A walk in the wind, minus headphones, because one can really only listen to so much NPR before things get a little crazy. Obviously.

People, sometimes I look at this poor sad lonely blog, and I get weighed down by how much I haven't said here. Like how I moved and what I'm doing and where I'm living, and how I actually did last month's 12 of 12 but was too busy to upload it until it sort of seemed too late. It's so hard being me!

I can't do those things, but I can tell you about some things I'm pretty into these days, because if there's anything I enjoy, it's making others love the things I love. Here are some of those things:

- The Hemlock Ring
When you're a new knitter, there are certain projects that you think, if this is what knitters do, knitters must be crazy people. Things like, I don't know, lace blankets based on doily patterns from 1942? That said, a good stern blocking and extra-pointy bind-off edge make me feel like a fiber arts badass.

- Espinacas con garbanzos!:
Aha! You wouldn't click if I said "spinach with chickpeas," but this is not just spinach with chickpeas. This is tangy, and spicy, and Spanish, and totally deserving of a gratuitous exclamation point. I make it without the bread, but with a link or two of the orangest, most Spanish-like sausage I can find, and it shocks me every time with the depth of its deliciousness.

- The Civil Wars:
I went to a couple of their shows around LA in December and January—my roommate and I are tangentially acquainted with Joy Williams, having worked with her family and occasionally with Joy herself at summer camp—and fell instantly in love. Now their new album is number one on iTunes (just ahead of Mumford and Sons' Sigh No More, which is also pretty great), allowing me to be both thrilled for them and insufferably smug for knowing allllll about them, like, a month ahead of time.

- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I KNOW. I'M SUCH A REVOLUTIONARY.  But no, really, the entire reading world is not lying to you about this series. I may not sleep until it's finished. (I also just finished Life of Pi, which I loved for completely different reasons; perhaps someday I will read something not from the Book Club Favorites! shelf, or whatever.)

See? Was that so hard? Let's do this more often, shall we?

If I had a blog, this would be a really big day for me.

I realized recently that I've completely fallen off the blog-reading wagon.  It turns out that, as far as my own reading habits go, enthusiasm for the blogs of total strangers corresponds directly to having a job I'm trying to avoid; in a sense, I guess it's a good thing that I'm out of touch with these corners of the internet. Theoretically, I am so busy doing work I like and/or trying to get work I like that I have completely forgotten to snoop through the lives of people I've never met. (I speak the truth! Productivity is my middle name! These are not the droids you're looking for!)*

With this in mind, I've trimmed my blogroll—I got rid of the site about the hipster stay-at-home dad with the super-cute kids, the celebrity fashion site that exemplifies all that is great and good about the internet but that I somehow never actually read, and Mindy Kaling's sadly defunct shopping site (I guess this is what happens when you are hilarious: you sign a seven-figure development deal with NBC and stop needing to write for free about ridiculous Things You've Bought That You Love). I kept a couple of knitting blogs—as one does—but mostly I refined my collection of food blogs. Because that is something I never get tired of: the urge to make ridiculous, complicated, and/or expensive dishes because somebody has a really nice camera.

First, I added Smitten Kitchen, because leaving SK off the blogroll any longer would be like telling my (theoretical) really awesome boyfriend of five years that I'd really prefer to keep our relationship "just between us." Consider this my very own food-blog Jumbotron proposal: I cook from Deb's blog all the time. To wit: for dinner tonight, my family ate mushroom marsala pasta with artichokes; before dinner I'll have a bit of the Guinness chocolate cake I whipped up this afternoon—for the second time in two weeks. SK is my first line of defense against lack of recipe and/or inspiration, and also now includes frequent but not content-diminishing pictures of the cutest baby of all time, and I'm so pleased to have made an honest blog of it. Our love is pure and true!

I also added Thursday Night Smackdown, with which I have been acquainted approximately an hour and a half, and which I can already tell is good people. We're talking the Invisible But Obvious Membership in the International Siblinghood of Poached Egg Obsessives kind of good people, which is, I think, akin to finding a whole spate of long-lost cousins on the internet—cousins who like their eggs runny and plopped on top of all manner of non-breakfast foods, even, which is even better.

So I guess this is a step in a positive direction: finally, somebody's found something useful to do with that new Information Superhighway, if by "useful" you mean "including leafy greens, lots of champagne vinaigrettes, and recipes that requires ice cream makers I don't own."

Not that, you know, non-food blogs aren't worth reading. Despite my own lull in making the rounds, there's lots of good writing to be found that has nothing to do with what to make for dinner. And everybody likes a good sporadically-updated, non-subject-oriented yet cat-heavy life chronicle, right?

....Right?





* Note that this does not include the many and varied (yet also somehow redundant) social networks out there: Facebook and Twitter and Blip.fm and Goodreads and that horrendous hipster time-suck Tumblr, which I don't even USE but cannot stay off of, regardless. What if something awesome happens on the internet and I miss it?

Making stuff

I made risotto tonight. I did it partly as silent treatment on the script I'm working on (giving it a taste of its own medicine--YEAH, SCRIPT, I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU), but also because I bought zucchini at the Saturday farm stand that has apparently opened across the street from my apartment. And really, in August, when it's 90 degrees and 85 percent humidity outside and in, why wouldn't I want to stir rice on a hot stove for an hour?

I used to make risotto all the time--in the way that some people keep on hand the ingredients for, say, a quick spaghetti sauce or a grilled cheese sandwich, I decided awhile back to make sure I was always stocked up (a little risotto humor for you, there) on rice, onions, chicken stock, and white wine. It's a time-consuming staple--about an hour, start to finish--but it's versatile, one batch keeps me fed for a long time, and it comes with a pleasing sense of Making Something. It's you and the rice and some cooking music and a glass of that wine, like a little starchy kitchen party. And as a bonus, there are few greater motivations for getting through the morning than pulling a Tupperware full of cheesy ricey goodness out of the work fridge. I rarely use a recipe anymore--it's pretty standard, no matter where you look--but I used this one to confirm my quantities after my time away. Delicious.



I also pinned a sweater to the floor this weekend--at long last, I finished the February Lady Sweater, and for lack of a better place to block the lumpy-bumpies out of it, I laid it out on a few layers of towel/bath mat/carpet in the living room and pinned it into submission. All seems to be going well: it's almost dry, the inexplicable short side has lengthened out just fine, and Sherlock has done an admirable job of not batting at the pins. Vintage buttons are on their way via Etsy. Weather-wise, I won't be able to wear it for another month, at least, but all indications are that this may bypass "teachable moment/objet d'art" and go straight to "wearable garment." I call this a win.

Two lists

Things I Have Not Done Lately:

- Written in this blog (obviously)
- Written anything else to speak of (alarmingly)
- Knitted
- Watched TV except for Chuck and Bones, neither of which will be denied
- Gone to bed on time
- Cleaned the bathroom or the floors

Things I Have Done Instead:

- I have no idea. Seriously. Wherefore art thou, April?
- Gone with church community group to Georgetown retirement home for hilarious conversation-and-singalong time, wherein musical age gap is revealed. All present can sing chorus and first verse of "America the Beautiful," and that's all.
- Attended and enjoyed This American Life Live ("live" in the sense of "at the same time at different theaters"); finally admitted vague crush on Ira Glass. (Ironically, Live re-runs at theaters nationwide on May 7. You should go.)
- Designed and built a website.
- Became hooked on easy and delicious Asian noodle salad; set personal record of finishing package of tofu in two days.
- Got head/chest cold; stopped running; felt like blob; ran anyway
- Replaced The New Pornographers' "The Laws Have Changed" with Bon Iver's "Skinny Love" at the top of iTunes most-played list.

That is all.

Weekend in

I spent most of this weekend at home. I mean, I did go out--I saw The Reader with a friend; I went for a run; I grocery shopped; I went to church--but mostly I've been indulging my inner homebody and hanging out with the cat. (Don't worry: Glenna visited last weekend to make me get out. Proof here and here!) Let's just say there's something to be said for the joys of a little at-home time, as follows:



This is not a cooking blog. I'm an avid consumer of other people's writing about food (Orangette and Smitten Kitchen keep me in recipes), but...trust me. From a girl who eats either sausage/onion/apple stir-fry or boiled kale as weekly standbys, you don't really need to know what I'm eating all the time.

But then there's this recipe, one I've been using forever, one which never lets me down. This is the kind of recipe you could make when, say, the entire population of a small country is coming to your home, or when you simply own more Tupperware than any normal human should. It's a little time-consuming--brown rice! From scratch!--but it's worth it, especially if you want to have lunch taken care of for the next two weeks, at least.

Curried Brown Rice with Chicken and Apples

1 TBS oil
2 lb. chicken, chopped
3 medium granny smith apples, chopped
2 onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 TBS curry powder
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 c raisins
5 c chicken broth
2 c brown rice
salt and pepper

In a large (no, really, LARGE) pan, heat oil. Salt and pepper chicken, and brown in oil. Remove from pan. Add apples, onions, garlic, curry, and cumin; saute five minutes. Add broth and raisins. Bring to a boil; add rice and chicken. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer until rice is tender, about 60 minutes.

Eat. FOREVER.




I started a new sweater, the February Lady Sweater, a couple of weeks ago, but I've been cruising through it this weekend with the help of Friday Night Lights, Dollhouse, season four of Doctor Who, and (and now for something completely different) Harvey. It turns out that this kind of bulky lace is really fun to knit, and zooms past--all those holes! I despair of the time when it will actually be warm enough to wear this, but others have assured me that the day will, in fact, come.

The victory here is that the in-progress version actually fits; this whole "trying things on" concept is the joy of the top-down sweater. I am not sure that my spatial brain really gets how top-down raglan sweaters work (starting with a single row and ending up with the three-dimensional shoulders of a sweater is clearly magic and has no basis in rational geometry), but I am all for it.

So...there's that. Health food and handknits.

And, in conclusion, a gratuitous shot of the cat:



He has no shame. Ah, well.

Just another Monday night

Yep, definitely Monday night. I checked. Just finished Monday. Tomorrow's Tuesday. Sounds about right. And yet, so many moments of happy, all in one night! Only the bullet points can contain my joy:

- Home, clothes changed, and to Whole Foods and back by 6:45

- Whole Paycheck carries both (1) bratwurst AND (2) kale, unlike Giant AND Safeway some grocery stores I could name. (Jimmy Dean's does not a sausage section make, my friends.) And they have a parking garage, and even a left-turn arrow to get you across the scary Wisconsin Ave. rush-hour traffic. It's a wonderland!

- Sweet housewarming present from dear friend Stacy waiting in my mailbox. A much-loved book from a kindred spirit is heartwarming, indeed.

- Downright swoony Bratwurst with Creamy Apple Compote. If I die an early death, people, you will know it was the German food.

- Knowing the answer to Final Jeopardy, for once.

- Chuck. How is one to contain oneself with Bruce Boxleitner, Morgan Fairchild, and Dixon from Alias all appearing in one big three-ring circus of geek? I propose an entire episode dedicated to the Elder Awesome dinner party. Here, I'll say it: the Awesome/Bartowski clan eating dinner is plot enough for me. Subpoint: Sarah and her feelings, "whatever they may be," kill me. Sub-subpoint: This show is the best iPhone ad ever. What if someone chains me to the counter of a frozen-yogurt store, huh? What'll I do then? Call for help like a big noisy dork? THAT'S IT. I'M GETTING THE PHONE.

- Having a hotshot techie friend who is not only knowledgeable enough but nice enough to fix your wireless internet over the phone. Thanks, Luke. I would say, "You have no idea what this means to me," but I know you do.

I am warm and happy. Of course, that could also be the wine. Either way, yay.

Cast the first stone

My parents gave me a pizza stone for my birthday. This makes a certain amount of sense: they are pizza-stone people. They like a good crispy crust. My family made pizza from scratch every Sunday night when I was little, and, as my mother pointed out, the pizza-making urge has not exactly tapered off for me. I half-live off Trader Joe's Bag O' Dough, part-skim mozzarella, chopped tomatoes, and garlic.

The instructions for my pizza stone call for a 15-minute preheat at 450, then a moving of the raw, assembled pizza from your handy-dandy cutting board or pizza peel (I guess pizza-stone people are also pizza-peel people?) onto the heated stone. And, you know, I'm pretty sure the whole "transfer raw pizza onto super-hot ceramic surface" part of the process seemed suspect from the beginning, but because I am a law-abiding citizen (ha, see how I snuck that in there?) and because I believe pizza-stone makers may know more about pizza stones that I, I decided to follow their clear and authoritative directions.

And now I have a very important announcement to make, for the good of all who read and bake: RAW PIZZA DOES NOT SLIDE. THERE IS NO SLIPPING, SLIDING, COAXING, STRETCHING, OR JIGGLING UNCOOKED PIZZA FROM PLACE TO PLACE. Perhaps this is an American thing. Italian pizza may float across the kitchen, for all I know. Here in Oakland? Less so, and I don't care how much cornmeal you put down. That stuff is sticky.

Which is how we end up with this:



Note that there is not a piece missing from the amoeba pizza. That's the whole thing. Also, if you could see, there are some toppings that were rolled underneath the crust during the move, so that it's not so much garlic-herb as it is garlic-herb-tomato-mushroom-spinach-garlic again-cheese crust. And say what you will about cornmeal not burning, but the sad, preheated cornmeal on the unused stone is what my grandmother would graciously have called "dark brown." I'm just saying.

So next time, preheat, then assemble on heated stone while avoiding being burned? I will be the master of the pizza stone. Just you wait. In the mean time: delicious, misshapen amoeba pizza. Yum.

Dinner

Cold soba noodles with soy/mirin dipping sauce?

Or lemon-pepper pappardelle with olive oil and parmesan?

At least I picked a genre: noodles + two ingredients.

(SO HUNGRY. MUST DECIDE.)

Squash blossoms

This morning at the Grand Lake farmers' market, I bought squash blossoms, one of those foods that falls under category of things I'm dying to cook with but don't know how to prepare (see also: fern, fiddlehead). We'll call them Theoretically Fun Foods.

First of all, say it to yourself a few times over: SQUASH BLOSSOM. SQUAAAASH BLOSSOM. SQUASH. BLOSSOM. It sounds like an insult, or something George W. Bush would call some poor (wrinkly, orange, delicate) intern. It's like a whole little saga of tragedy and redemption, right in the name. You know how Hemingway wrote his six-word story ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn")? Squash blossoms are like that, only vegetable.

And just look at them! They look so exotic and also vaguely geriatric--wrinkled, obviously fragile, and yet surprisingly sturdy at the base. People stuff and deep-fry them, which sounds sacrilegious for something so fine and so summery; I plan to chop them up and toss them into a frittata, and to try one raw just to get the gist. They smell good, which shouldn't surprise me (flower, duh) but does anyway (looks like wet, orange laundry).

Wish me luck. Will report back.

More than the sum

You all know I love evening crew practice. (Mostly.) It's the most sane thing in the world, somehow: cool air, black water, the thunk-THUNK of oars feathering and squaring, the rush of bubbles under the hull of the boat. But sometimes, I'll admit, the best part of practice is coming home from practice.

Last night I started to make Julia Child's Potage Parmentier (potato-leek soup), but ran out of time before a date with Persepolis at the Parkway, and ended up shoving the whole pot into the fridge for finishing today. After practice tonight, I pulled it back out and put it on to simmer while I ran through the shower.

Now, Potage Parmentier comes to me from Julia via Julie and Julia, my personal favorite snarky food memoir. Here's what Julie (in my mind, she's just Julie now, as Julia was just Julia to her) has to say about it:

"Once the leeks and potatoes have simmered for an hour or so, you mash them up with a fork or a food mill or a potato ricer. All of these options are far more of a pain in the neck than the Cuisinart...but Julia Child allows as how a Cuisinart will turn soup into 'something un-French and monotonous.' Any suggestion that uses the construction 'un-French' is up for debate, but if you make Potage Parmentier, you will see her point. If you use the ricer, the soup will have bits--green bits and white bits and yellow bits--instead of being utterly smooth. After you've mushed it up, just stir in a couple of hefty chunks of butter, and you're done. JC says sprinkle with parsley but you don't have to. It looks pretty enough as it is, and it smells glorious, which is funny when you think about it. There's not a thing in it but leeks, potatoes, butter, water, pepper, and salt."

My thoughts exactly. I don't understand exactly how boiling potatoes and leeks to death makes them look, smell, and taste so fantastic, but it does. I thought maybe the butter was to blame, since it's, uh, butter, but the truth is that the whole thing smells pretty amazing even before the butter goes in. Apparently I've been underestimating the flavor concentration of two major vegetables. I'm sorry, leeks and potatoes. I should never have doubted you.

And so after an hour of sprints up and down the center of the lake, of wrestling a seventy-foot boat down a bi-level dock and back up again, of dodging seven-seat's backsplash, of my not-quite-not-sick lungs rattling like a consumptive's, I was nothing but pleased to come home to a little bit of slightly green, slightly chunky, very leek-y and very potato-y soup. There's not much better.

Super Benriner!

Today I became the proud owner of a mandoline--the kitchen gadget, not the bluegrass instrument. A coworker offered me hers, since she never uses it, and so I arrived at work this morning to find this on my chair:



I...don't really know what's going on in this picture. Is that woman flashing a gang sign at me? But she looks so nice! And she assures me that dried cut radishes also OK, and that sharpness of the cutter makes my cooking chore enjoyable. So I guess I trust her? I don't know. (Also, it's been a big week for me and kitchen gadgets. I bought a blender/food-processor last weekend, and OH, THE SOUP I HAVE MADE. And hummus. Did you know you can substitute peanut butter for tahini in hummus? And it's not peanuty at all. What a relief.)

In other news, I'm sick. Ugh.

Making and unmaking

So, I am greatly saddened, kind of, to say that I probably will not be finishing my novel this year. (Again.) See, the deal I made with myself was that I would do NaNo IF I had no other pressing writing assignments. And when I had no other pressing writing assignments, it went pretty well. But then I got one--something I can't talk about yet, but be assured it'll be all over this space if things work out--and, well, 1,667 spent elsewhere each day start to add up. So I'm cooling it. Plus, my Novel Voice is, I'm sorry to say, kind of boring. Sorry, Self.

The good thing about dropping out of a crazy masochistic writing event is the amount of free time I suddenly find on my hands. It seems I'd been neglecting books, movies, actual food that requires actual cooking, a crafty project or two, and maybe some people. No more! This afternoon I made this much chili:

So if nuclear winter hits this week, I think I'm good to go (corn muffins optional).

I also knitted myself a cabled beanie, which ended up being more like a cabled yarmulke. Before:
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After:


This is the joy of small knitting projects: find that your beanie should actually have a propeller sticking out of the top? Rip back to the ribbing; you'll be fine. I think a couple of extra repeats of the cable pattern should make the poor thing at least reach my ears. Note to self: Things that stretch sideways shrink lengthwise. Words for the wise!

And now it's on to Christmas cards and Christmas music and probably a viewing of White Christmas or two. Not to mention The Noise. Are you ready? I...am not. But at least I have some time to think about how unprepared I am.

Submit!

I went with friends on Saturday night to a French restaurant in Berkeley. I tried a little of the foie gras appetizer, despite foie gras definitely being among the official Top Five Foods Liz is Unlikely to Eat, Ever--that rare combination of ethical squeamishness and general liver-y grossness being especially potent.

One of my favorite books, Julie Powell's Julie and Julia, has this to say about liver: "Now, this is going to be a stretch for some people, but I believe that calves' liver is the single sexiest food that there is. This is a conclusion I've come to relatively recently, because like almost everybody else on the planet, I've spent most of my life hating and despising liver. The reason people despise liver is that to eat it you must submit to it--just like you must submit to a really stratospheric f**ck. Remember when you were nineteen and you went at it like it was a sporting event? Well, liver is the opposite of that. With liver you've got to will yourself to slow down. You've got to give yourself over to everything that's a little repulsive, a little scary, a little just too much about it. When you buy it from the butcher, when you cook it in a pan, when you eat it, slowly, you never can get away from the feral fleshiness of it. Liver forces you to access taste buds you didn't know you had, and it's hard to open yourself to it."

I thought about that passage as I cut my portion into tiny pieces--my parents will recognize this maneuver, called "surgery" in our house--and ate it. The good news is that foie gras doesn't taste anything like creamed chicken livers on toast. It tasted like the caramelized onions it was cooked and served with, but Julie is absolutely right: the underlying flavor is, all at once, delicious and disgusting, too much in a way that makes you think, "that's really tasty, and maybe I shouldn't be eating it." It really tastes like a body part in a way that is spookier than any meat I've ever eaten.

The thing is, too, that afterwards, the sensation sticks with you: after the foie gras, I munched on mesclun with grapes and blue cheese, pommes frites, and a really delicious coq au vin, followed by part of a pear poached in wine and served with ice cream. This was a meal not to be trifled with, including some totally justified Altoid action at the end. And yet, coming home pleasantly full, what taste wouldn't quite go away? The foie gras. And here's the weirdest part: foie gras invaded my subconscious. I woke up in the early morning on Sunday and realized that I'd been dreaming of fatted goose liver and caramelized onions, and wondering whether I was somehow being haunted by the spirit of some really angry (and overweight) goose. No joke. Submit to the liver, indeed.

Eight Things

Oh, my! I've been tagged! Whatever shall I do?

Rules: Give 8 random facts about yourself, then tag 8 more people to do the same thing.

The facts are these.

1. I always eat colored candy in reverse-rainbow order, starting with purple (or brown, if we're talking M&Ms) and working my way up to red.

2. I keep a mental list of alternative careers just in case the wordy writing-editing thing fails me. Thus far: librarian, florist, movie location scout, professional driver on a closed course.

3. My friend Maggie and I like to pretend that we're going to start an all-girl punk cover band called Israel and the Minor Prophets.

4. Top Five Celebrity Crushes, Fall 2007 Edition: John Krasinski, John Corbett, Jon Stewart, Zach Gilford, Lee Pace. Orlando Bloom visits when he has a few days off, but he's awfully busy with all that swashbuckling he does.

5. I hand-wrote most of a novel in the seventh grade.

6. I'm not much into shoes, but I adore cute purses.

7. I am a starboard rower, which means that a) my oar goes to the left, b) I sit in an odd-numbered seat (usually 1 or 7), and c) my right arm is bigger than my left.

8. I used to be grossed out by the Presbyterian tradition of dipping sourdough communion bread in grape juice, but now I like the way it tastes.

I don't think I have a combined total of eight bloggish friends, so: if you have a blog and want to consider yourself tagged, do so. If you don't have a blog and want to consider yourself tagged, well, either or Blogger or Wordpress could probably oblige you...

To the faraway towns: An English photo-essay

Well, helloooooooo!

I'm back.

I had a great trip, gallivanting around, seeing lots of English things, eating delicious food, and very carefully not getting blown up. All good things, if I may say so.

Christine and I went here:

and I was tremendously graceful clambering up onto the lions. I was. Are you saying you don't believe me? Fine.

We also went here:

(that's King's Cross Station, Platform 9 3/4, if you can't tell) and took a series of mildly embarrassing but totally necessary photos. I'm dying to know what kind soul decided to put up the sign and the cart and to not even charge! Or were they just pestered into it? The world may never know.

We tracked down 84 Charing Cross Road. This is all that's left of Marks & Co.:

but at least it's not the Pizza Hut next door, as previously thought.

We went to St. Paul's cathedral, which I think might be the most beautiful church I've ever been inside. I loved it. Plus: a crypt, 300-something steps to the second deck, and John Donne's grave. Win!


We also saw Mary Poppins in the West End (forgettable except for the completely awesome "Step in Time" tap-dance number), went to the Tower of London, checked out Kensington Palace, walked across the Bridget Jones Millennium Bridge, and visited all of the state-run museums. Going to the art museums with Christine was fun, since she a) cares and b) actually knows things about art, whereas I just get bleary and bored. I was, however, disappointed to find that the Elgin marbles at the British Museum are not, in fact, spherical.

And the food! First of all, I love European hotel breakfasts. There's something about muesli with whole milk or a croissant with jam and yogurt and tea that makes me feel especially civilized, and yet ready for a long day on my feet. Maybe it's that I would never dream of drinking whole milk or eating plain yogurt in the States. I'm not sure. Either way, it's delicious. There's also my mild obsession with bangers and mash: sausages, mashed potatoes, and gravy. The Brits have comfort food down, I'm telling you.

I also need to make one thing clear: I love pubs. I don't understand why we in America can't make pub culture work for us. Why do we have crazed and/or totally depressing bars when we could just as easily spend our evenings ensconced in the plushness of leather and dark wood, good friends, salty food, and a nice pint of cider? Doesn't everybody like a nice game of darts? Is this not an obvious choice?

London was fun.

But eventually I left London and went here:


and hiked from here:


to here.


It was fantastic. Doesn't it look fantastic? I walked the Coffin Track, which was the road used to transport dead bodies out of Ambleside before they had a consecrated church. I stopped off at both of Wordsworth's houses (and I don't even like Wordsworth all that much) and made friends with an older gentleman on the trail. When I got to Grasmere, I ate fresh bread and root-vegetable soup, and the rain started just as I caught the bus back. Good times.

On my last full day in England, I went to Bath. First I ignored the advice of Rick Steves and the fine folks at Lonely Planet and went to the Jane Austen Centre. I knew it would be lame, and it was, but I couldn't not go, could I? Jane Austen lived in Bath for five miserable years and set Northanger Abbey and part of Persuasion there. The Centre was mostly concerned with the BBC miniseries, and the docent actually made a snotty remark about the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice, which I thought was...uncalled-for, especially from a woman without anything directly Austenian to offer. Afterwards, I walked up the street to the house Jane Austen actually lived in, which is now a dental surgery:



And on a girl's last day in a foreign country, when she just can't take another historical site, what is there to do but wander in the rain and shop? I didn't buy anything, though I actually considered checking my carry-on for the flight home just so I could bring a vintage cake stand with me. Common sense prevailed.

Bath is beautiful, all honey limestone and Georgian everything:


Doesn't it make you want to wander in the rain and shop? Pretty.

So that was my trip to the UK, minus a couple of lostness incidents, a trip to the British Film Institute, baked beans for breakfast, and everything else crammed around the edges. Coming home wasn't totally unwelcome, but I had a great time and I've already got some itinerary points in mind for a return trip. A fine place. Cheers!

12 of 12: May

Sooper-speshul Saturday 12 of 12! Very exciting in theory; not really all that exciting in practice. But:


8: 15 - The obligatory waking-up picture. We've moved on to cotton sheets and tank tops this month, which is a step up, I'd say.



9:30 - My new, semi-bad weekend habit: lazing around in bed with my computer. Wireless and a functioning laptop battery have ruined me for anything productive before 11 a.m.



12: 15 - Post-haircut. The temptation to somehow Photoshop in some lipstick here was absolutely absurd. Note to self: in future, do not look like well-styled zombie in photos.



12: 27 - Wandering the streets of Alameda after the haircut. Alameda's like Stars Hollow--every time I get my hair cut there, they always seem to be having a festival of some kind. It's kind of bizarre.



12:34 - Thrift-shopping for a bit.



12:42 - Nanette Lepore? In Alameda?



1:12 - Testing out a new taqueria with a vegetarian burrito. All taquerias must win me over with an acceptable veggie burrito--only after they've shown their trustworthiness with beans and rice can we move on to meat (chicken, then carnitas if they're really good). My burrito was huge, but not super-authentic. Real burritos shouldn't have cheddar cheese in them.



3:32 - A trip to the Target in San Leandro. I like it better than the fancy two-story one in Albany (though Albany's escalator for carts makes it a close contest). This one has a more diverse clientele, and has yet to fail me in the area of DVDs under $10. Thumbs up, San Leandro!



4: 25 - On the way home from Target. A sunny day in the Bay Area.



7:40 - Lasagna for dinner with my friends Helen and Bill, and then...



10:23 - ....off to the Starry Plough for some music! This is the Shelley Doty X-tet. They were good.



11:47 - Plum Crazy, who were talented, funk-wise, but also a little jam-bandish for my taste.

Good weekend, all!

Haiku Friday

Pleasant evening
browsing bookstore in twilight,
then mashed potatoes.

Bring me the finest tamales in the land!

There are many things I cherish about living in California--In-N-Out, the beach, fog, perfect weather 300 days a year, the color of the hills in August--but one of the benefits of California living about which I'm most vocal is the taqueria/taco truck. What do people do, exactly, who don't have constant access to authentic Mexican food? Now, I'm a little picky (okay, a lot picky) about meat in general, so it's not like I'm even partaking of tongue tacos, but I have a strong belief in the right of all human beings to have good carnitas, or even just solid bean/rice burritos, and I can't help but think that people living in taqueria-less regions aren't quite living full lives.

Which is why I was so utterly excited to see that an elusive legend has returned: TacoTrucks.net, a website listing and rating Oakland taco trucks. It's been offline for quite awhile, much to the dismay of my coworkers and I. The new version isn't quite firing on all cylinders--it only deals with East Oakland and Fruitvale right now--but we're hoping it'll be including our neck of the woods soon. And, actually, the current incarnation may be helpful, since the best Mexican food in Oakland is obviously in Fruitvale, where I never, ever go. Maybe I'll take an exploratory trip down there and come back with something tasty (especially since Day of the Dead is coming up. Wooo, pink-sugar bread!) Welcome back, taco trucks!

Haiku Friday

Warm black-sesame
mochi with powdered sugar:
best dim sum ever!