Just back from a really nice family Thanksgiving dinner, up at my Grandma's house. Food, yum. Turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, beans, rolls... it was all there, except for the sad omission of pumpkin pie. No pumpkin pie! I am scandalized! T did make tasty brownies and some excellent soft gingerbread cookies, though, so I am pleasantly stuffed with dessert. But I think we may have to rectify this situation and make some pie for ourselves this weekend.

Even more important, of course, was the company, with the special addition this year of oswulf, who was in town with his wife for the holiday. Most of the local family were there, too, and it was good to see them all, but D isn't just my cousin -- he was my best friend for many, many years. So the opportunity to hang out with him for even a few hours is precious. I am lucky to have a family I enjoy spending time with.

I'm lucky in so many ways, really, and it's good to have a day to reflect on that. It's been a tough year for me and mine, but that doesn't negate the many things I have to be thankful for: solid marriage, financial stability, steady job that I mostly like, good relationships with co-workers and family, and so many good friends, including those of you reading this entry right now. You've probably all noticed by now that I don't tend to get emotional on people, but that doesn't mean that I don't love you all. And so here's a round of Happy Thanksgiving, all around. I'm grateful to be a part of this community.

We tried a new tea shop today! Always a sign of a banner weekend. Ku Day Ta Tea Lounge (great name). The tea itself was of high quality and well-prepared, and the food was all tasty and in reasonable quantities. On the downside, the service was indifferent, which is a serious strike against any establishment that calls itself a "tea lounge" -- that designation suggests a particular level of comfort and service, and both of these qualities were seriously lacking. Also, if I'm paying afternoon tea prices, I expect refills of hot water for my tea, which were not provided.

It was more than worth an outing, and I would go back (with expectations adjusted accordingly. And a sweater -- it was really cold there for some reason). Still, the quest to find a tea shop that I enjoy as much as Lovejoy's continues...

Also accomplished this weekend: shoe shopping, a trip to the used bookstore, laundry, grocery shopping, playing with AO3 (on which more later), quality time with friends and with T, and some much-needed lazing around the house by choice rather than by force. Not accomplished this weekend: much in the way of writing. My plan to finish at least one story per week in November has now officially bitten the dust, along with both daily writing and daily LJ posting. This cold (which I think at this point has morphed into allergies) has a lot to answer for.

Another night of good company and yummy foods. This time, we went to an Asian fusion place in Union Square.

Also I bought yet more shoes today. What is it with me and shoe purchasing over the last year or so? There was once I time that I hated buying shoes and only did it when I absolutely had to. The Clark's store in San Francisco Centre has a lot to answer for... Sadly, they didn't have the shoes in the right size and color, so they're being shipped to me from Walnut Creek. Free shipping, no less. That's service.

Last but not least, AO3 Open Beta starts tomorrow! Looking forward to playing around with it. Will this be the killer app that finally gets me off FF.net once and for all? Stay tuned to find out.

I have never been much for reality shows. I watched a little Survivor, got hooked on The Apprentice for a few seasons (it went downhill pretty rapidly, but the first season was actually kind of awesome), dabbled in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Trading Spaces. But the only reality show I have ever truly loved is Top Chef. T is into it as well, and it's a show we particularly enjoy watching together: we talk about the food, and the personalities, and speculate about what will happen next. Plus, he gets to watch Padma, and I get Tom Colicchio, which I think is completely fair. I confess it: Tom Coliccho is probably my biggest TV crush right now. His Diet Coke ad may be one of the best things ever.

( Spoilers through last night's episode behind the cut. )

So far, a quite enjoyable trip. Flight was delayed by over an hour and a half but was otherwise uneventful -- I think I even slept a little. I got in around 9am, and then we left for our road trip to Vermont, where we had much yummy ice cream and cheese and maple sugar candy. The sun eluded us for the morning, but around lunchtime the clouds cleared and we found ourselves experiencing a lovely summer day -- we even got to take down the top of the convertible while we tooled around Waterbury. Then we got home late and crashed.

Today was a lazily-exploring-Boston day: pancakes for breakfast, pedicures, walking around downtown, having tea at the public library -- they have a really nice cafe where they serve afternoon tea; it was tasty, if a little heavy on the sweets as opposed to the savories. This evening, we met up with concertinette and her husband for dinner, and then they came back to amybang's for some excellent hanging out and chatting and playing with the kittens. Did I mention the kittens? There are two, they are nine months old and totally adorable. A moth came in, and watching them chase it was both hilarious and adorable. They didn't catch it, but they're still half looking for it to come back. I can tell.

Tomorrow we head off to Cape Cod, another place I've never been. We're taking the ferry to Provincetown (yay boats!) and spending the night at an inn. I won't be bringing the laptop, so I'll bid you all adieu for the next couple of days. Adieu!

( Spoiler, oh yes. )

That is all.

( Well, okay, maybe a little more. )

Stupid recession, messing with everything I love. First it was books. Now, it's chocolate:

The Hershey Co. said Tuesday it plans to close Scharffen Berger's West Berkeley manufacturing plant as well as the San Francisco factory that makes Joseph Schmidt chocolates and consolidate production at other facilities.

They say they won't stop making it, and they're still committed to high quality, and blah blah blah, but I don't buy it. And I loved the little Scharffen Berger factory. The tour was fascinating, one of my must-visit recommendations for people coming to the Bay Area. I wonder if they'll close the little store in the Ferry Building, and if the chocolate will still be any good.

Of course, we all knew that Hershey's would be the downfall of Scharffen Berger and Schmidt eventually. But it seems particularly bastardly for them to take advantage of the recession as cover. Boo.

The cats taking intense interest in a photo shoot...



The cupcakes were really good, btw.

And so another November draws to a close. I did manage to blog every day, but I didn't feel terribly inspired by it most of the time. Probably because I got so mired down in the election during the first half of the month and work stress in the second half. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get more fic written, although there are three WIPs that should appear sooner rather than later. I hope.

I have managed a nice lazy holiday weekend, which was good. Grocery shopping, the Ferry Building for lunch yesterday, and we've cooked every night -- although tonight we're just heating up some pre-made ribs, but I did make cornbread from scratch, and it smells yummy. Lots of reading, some good spacing out on TV; we caught Star Wars on TV on Friday (you are never going to get me to call it A New Hope), and The Empire Strikes Back is buffering up now. I always forget just how much I love those movies. I always meant to snap up the non-special edition trilogy when it came out on DVD, but I never got around to it. I should check and see if they're still available.

So that was my four-day weekend. I hope you all had a great one as well -- safe travel to all who have not yet returned home!

I hope everyone who celebrates the holiday had a lovely Thanksgiving, and that everyone else enjoyed their Thursday off.

Ours was fairly typical -- drove up to Santa Rosa for dinner at my grandma's. My uncle roasted the turkey, and it came out great. Potatoes, veggies, gravy, rolls, pumpkin bread and two kinds of pie for dessert. Tasty all around. The family has had a pretty good year, as these things go, so it's nice to get together for a low-stress celebration. It's especially good to be able to gather at Grandma's; for awhile it looked like the inevitable downward slide of aging was going to take her, but not only has she stabilized, it seems that her health has actually improved over the last couple of years. It looks like family gatherings will have to be at her place from here on out, though, because traveling is hard on her, so if it's not in her home, she can't be there. Fortunately Santa Rosa isn't too far -- maybe an hour and a half to two hours, depending on traffic.

I am a bit jealous of everyone who got to cook their own Thanksgiving meal, though. T and I talked about that on the way up: that we haven't ever pulled together a big holiday meal of our own, and it doesn't look like we'll have an opportunity in the foreseeable future (see above re. Grandma and inability to make it down here -- she couldn't even get to my wedding). For the most part, I love Thanksgiving food, and I'd love to plan the menu to my own tastes and then undertake the feat of making it all work. Of course, the potluck route is certainly less work, and it's nice that I didn't have to shop during yesterday's rush or spend any time yesterday or this morning cooking (we're typically responsible for bringing beverages to our family holiday meals). There are definitely advantages. But I still want to give the whole shebang a try sometime.

Back in January, SE and I placed a bet on the outcome of the presidential election. Not because we wanted different outcomes -- far from it! -- but because she felt that the American people were not yet ready to elect a president who wasn't a white man. I accepted her wager: if McCain was elected, I would owe her a bottle of wine (to share, because we would be needing it!); if not, she would take me to tea.

So today, I collected: we had a very posh tea at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. I've had high tea at the Fairmont in San Francisco, but never San Jose, so it was a new venue for all of us. Good quality tea, tasty scones with lots of Devon cream, very very fancy tea sandwiches (the ham with fig was my favorite), and a selection of little French pastries, all while seated in cozy couches in the lobby of the hotel. Very nice, although the atmosphere would have been better if football hadn't been playing on a huge TV screen over the bar. Overall a nice little escape and celebration, followed by a trip to the used bookstore and its semi-annual 25% off sale and then some Chinese food for dinner.

My to-read pile is really out of control. I thought I was being nice and moderate by getting only 6 books, but then I also borrowed a volume of manga from SE ("Black Jack" by Tezuka), and then I got home and saw how many books I still have to read from my big Amazon haul a couple months ago, and once again I am despairing of ever catching up. I also really need to get some of my older books sold -- I have an overflowing box in the bedroom, and another bag hiding in a cupboard (it used to be in the bedroom, by the box, until Lexi decided one day that 5:30 AM would be an excellent time to start pouncing on it). Of course, once I get rid of those books, what will happen? That's right, I'm going to turn them into more books. And so the cycle continues.

T embarked on a new cooking adventure today. He asked his co-workers what he should try next, and they had three suggestions: bread pudding (bleh), poppy seed poundcake (which works for me, as long as it's lemon and not almond), and creme brulee. It didn't take him long to select the last option. I immediately accused him of wanting an excuse to play with torches and light things on fire, and he didn't deny it. Not even a little.

So he made the custards before dinner, and then after dinner, while they were cooling, he decided to practice melting sugar. He pulled out his blowtorch from architecture school (something to do with smoothing the edges on plexiglass for models), which is bigger than your average kitchen torch and much more industrial looking, and lit it using a flint that looks exactly like what we used to light the bunsen burners in my high school chem lab. Then he shook some sugar onto small pieces of aluminum foil and got to melting. Although it was hard to get a even coating of sugar on the foil, he still managed to melt parts of it. Some sections were still to granulated, but others melted into the nice glassy surface you want on creme brulee, and the results were definitely tasty. In a couple of hours, we'll pull one of the pots of sugary, eggy goodness out of the fridge and see if we can get it to work on the real thing.

For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed baking. Cooking can be fun too, but I'm less into it; it takes a lot more creativity, flexibility, and seat-of-pants experimentation than I'm comfortable with to be a truly good cook. Baking is more about following a recipe, executing methods and procedures just the right way every time, and that works much better for me. Plus, you have delicious baked goods afterwards, so it's really a win-win situation.

T, on the other hand, is much more of a cook than a baker. So I was surprised when, back in August, he decided to bake a pie for an apple pie tasting at his work. It was an experiment -- a "skillet apple pie", which had no bottom crust, and was topped with something more like biscuit dough, and it was tasty (especially the apple filling, which I liked a lot)... but it wasn't what people expected out of a pie, and it came in last.

So T went on a mission: learn to bake, and to do it well. First, he bought a cookbook. Then, after spending about a week reading it, he settled on his first attempt: devil's food cake. With chocolate ganache frosting and caramel sauce. On reflection, this was probably a bit ambitious -- preparing three separate recipes (the layer cake, the caramel, and the frosting) and assembling the lot ended up taking a lot longer than he anticipated, and he was up past 3am.

( But it was worth it. )

His co-workers loved it, I loved it, even my co-workers loved it. (I got some good effort out of the student workers that day, I can tell you.) Flush with his success, he continued on to other things: gingerbread, pumpkin pie (twice, which is fine with me because I looooove pumpkin pie), and a fromage blanc Bavarian, aka cheesecake:

From Baking

And that's only the things I have pictures of -- he's also made brownies, pot de creme (a baked chocolate pudding), and right now a chocolate mousse souffle cake is setting up in our fridge.

It's been interesting to watch him at this obsession. Although we're slowly running out of room for cookware, and I'm about done with weekly trips to Bed, Bath, & Beyond. And if he keeps baking at this rate, he might have to start rolling me down the stairs. Fortunately, he takes most of his wares to work, where they are well appreciated. I've made a couple things from the book, too, but I was not super-enamored of the chocolate chip cookie recipe -- I like my cookies thick and soft, and these are thin and chewy (although the oatmeal-chocolate-orange zest combination of flavors is definitely tasty). But today, I gave a Cook's Illustrated cookie recipe a try, and was most satisfied with the results (the secret? melting the butter first). So I'm not ready to cede the title of family baker to T yet.

I've created a gallery of photos documenting the dinner we had at The French Laundry last week.

( Cut for a selection of pictures and more details than anyone could possibly want to know. )

Lovely evening out. Very very very good food. (This is an understatement.) Most definitely worth the trip. Now I am stuffed and quite sleepy. More details, with pictures, soon. Good night.

When I woke up and got out of bed, it didn't take me long to figure out that something was up, because T, who usually sleeps through this moment, was awake and looking at me funny.

Then he informed me that he was up late last night and, for the heck of it, checked OpenTable. And just happened to pick up a reservation for tonight... at The French Laundry.

The French Laundry, which is widely regarded to be the best restaurant in the Bay Area. Not one of the best, the best. Opinions do differ, of course, but if you had to ask foodies to name their top picks? This would be at or near the top of pretty much every list.

Normally to get a reservation, you have to be on the phone the day they open up two months in advance, and good luck even making that. So naturally when T saw this, he snatched it up, because we've been talking about doing this for years and who knows when we get another chance. (There must have been a cancellation -- he said it was the only day available for a month, which is as far out as Open Table goes.)

So tonight we make the pilgrimage. I can't imagine it will live up to the hype, but I'm willing to give it a chance to try.

Today we had dinner at a churrascaria, an all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouse where waiters bring around various cuts of meat on giant skewers and slice them for you, at your table, using small machetes. The effect is like being served meat with swords, which is pretty awesome. The meat was pretty darn tasty, too. A little pricey, but fun.

And now I head into a family weekend. July 4th is my grandma's birthday, so we'll be going up to Santa Rosa for that, and then we head over to Davis for T's family reunion. It's one of those big "all the aunts and uncles and cousins and everyone but the kitchen sink" type reunions, so it's fun, but also a bit draining because a lot of these are people I either don't know at all or have only met once or twice. I do like T's family, but his father is one of 13 children, so there are an awful lot of those aunts and uncles and cousins and so forth running around.

As a result, I don't expect to be around much, or at all, between tomorrow morning and sometime Sunday. So I wish a wonderful weekend to all!

Back in college, one of the ways we used to amuse ourselves in the dining hall was to play a game we called "Three Great Tastes that Taste Like Crap Together." The idea was this: find three different ingredients, each of which tastes just fine with the others in pairs, but if you put them all together, they are inedible. I brought the game with me to California, and it still comes up every so often.

I don't remember who introduced me to the game originally, but it turns out that we aren't the only ones who play it. The page's author calls it "The Incompatible Food Triad" and says it was introduced to him by a philosophy professor in the 1970s. He discusses the difficulty of the problem -- and it is hard, play around with it awhile and you'll see, I've been trying for over a decade and have yet to come up with a satisfactory solution -- and then invites people to submit their ideas. The other possibility he raises, which I have also considered, is that it might be an unsolvable problem. Maybe it's not literally possible to come up with such a combination. Of course, that seems like something you ought to be able to prove, and no one has managed that, either.

Anyway, I'm mostly tickled to learn that this thought experiment that I've been playing casually for so long turns out to have a little bit of a following -- it's even in Wikipedia. Thanks to P for the link.

Ganked from friede

1) WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE FOODS?

Pizza. Lasagna. Steak (especially with potatoes and mushrooms). Dark chocolate. Cinnamon rolls. Burritos smothered in red sauce. Cheeseburgers. Cheese just generally. Dungeness crab. Good bread.

2) WHAT FOODS DO YOU HATE?

This is a long list, but some of the highlights are: Bananas, apricots (all stone fruits really), spinach, lamb, cilantro, black pepper, goat cheese, most fish.

3) FOODS YOU LIKE BUT ARE EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT?

Kraft Macaroni and Cheese tops this list. Not the "good" organic or high-end brands, either; I don't really like them at all. The ultimate comfort food. Also hot dogs, but only the all-beef kind.

4) STRANGEST FOOD YOU'VE EATEN AND ENJOYED?

I'm not coming up with anything. I'm just too much of a picky eater.

5) COOKING FAILURES THAT STILL RANKLE?

Probably the first time we tried to make chow mein and burned all the noodles into the pan.

6) INGREDIENTS YOU DON'T WANT TO CONSIDER LIVING WITHOUT?

Cheese. Chocolate. Sugar. Tomatoes (oddly, I don't really like them raw, but cooked they form the basis for many of my very favorites).

7) CUISINE YOU'D LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT?

Chinese. T and I have experimented a little with Chinese cooking, to the point where we have a couple of dishes in our regular rotation, but I'd like to have more.

8) FOODS YOU HATED BUT HAVE GROWN TO LOVE?

Broccoli. I figured that one out as a teenager.