Finally cooking!

It's so easy to get really good food in my neighborhood, and I realized that it has been weeks since I've actually cooked something in my kitchen.

I decided that I'd start back into it easily and made a nice lamb dish in my crockpot this morning so we had food ready and waiting for us at Girl's Night tonight.

A few people have asked for the recipe, so I've scanned it in for you here. It's from the book "Not your mother's slow cooker cookbook" by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufmann. The only change I made is to use boneless lamb stew meat instead of lamb shanks. I also forgot to add salt and pepper and lemon zest at the end today, but it was still delicious.

I feel old

I was discussing Gardasil today with a colleague, and I am too old to get the vaccine. It's recommended for girls 9-26, so I can't be vaccinated against HPV. That sucks.

For Alex

It tastes like toasted coconut in liquid form, with little pieces of coconut meat floating in it.

Coconut overload

I've acquired a fondness for Roasted Coconut drink.

You can find it at Asian grocery stores, but lately whenever I go in I can't find the right type. Friday Micaela and I went for pho (at Viet Huong, which is delicious) and stopped in to the supermarket next door just to check. We found one dented can of the drink, but Micaela went on a mission to find more. I am now the proud owner of entire case of Roasted Coconut drink! Yay Micaela!

Snow!

'Tis the first snow of the year, and almost the first snow of the winter. We had a teeny flurry in December that melted as soon as it hit, but this looks like it might actually stay around for a few hours. Yay! Winter might actually be arriving (with a whimper)

Another reason I'm sleepy

Friends who call me at two in the morning.

I have a new rule effective immediately. If you are not in immediate physical distress or need to go to the hospital, do not call me after midnight. It's not polite.

Things that make Dena sleepy (part 126)

Staying up 'til 2 am playing with my new Sony Ericsson Walkman cell phone even though I needed to get up early for work this morning.

The weekend of meat

This Sunday marked the first annual Martin Luther King Day Turducken Dinner. We all got together and purchased a turducken and had a lovely potluck turducken dinner Sunday night.

And just to keep the stereotypes going, the girls were in the kitchen cooking and the guys were playing football on the Xbox.
Much good food was made and had by all, including rosemary foccacia with blue cheese and honey, brussel spouts, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, cheesy corn (Karin will not give us the recipe for this, but has promised that upon her death we can ask her mom for it), green bean salad, tofurkey (for the vegetarians), homemade black forest cake, and bread pudding with whiskey sauce.

After eating so much that we could not move, I broke out my brand new Cranium game and proceeded to be soundly beaten by the unstoppable team of mAy and Gridley. Sebethis and I made a remarkable comeback late in the game, but were unable to overtake Team Smarty-pants.


The feasting did not stop there! Yesterday (on the actual MLK Day) we traipsed off to Fogo de Chao for all you can eat meat. Dee-licious! As you can see by Steve's face!

And now I should go on a diet for the rest of the year (except for Dining Days this week and Restaurant Week at the end of the month). But I won't. I know myself too well.

50 Book Challenge

So, it looks like some people are working on a challenge to read 50 books during the year. I laugh at such a paltry number, but it did get me to wondering how many books I actually do read. I'm going to keep track of all the books I read this year and you can follow along by visiting my book journal page, which I have also listed in my sidebar under "50 Book Challenge"

Life theme song

So, supposedly the number one song on the day of your 18th birthday is your life theme song. And I get:

Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-lot


And yay, my pretend boyfriend Jonathan Coulton has done a cover of my theme song!


Check your life theme song out here

Happy New Year!

Many many happenings in the past week or so, so hold on to your hats:

Christmas Karaoke - I had the traditional Christmas sleepover this year with Jen and Kim, and spent Christmas Day morning rocking out with Kim's brand spanking new karaoke machine. God, I suck at singing!

Saturday I screwed up my courage and went to Ansill, a restaurant specializing in the icky parts of animals, with Grimmgirl and her friend. They don't actually advertise that way, but that's what it is, pretty much. The ickiest stuff I tried: bone marrow and sweetbreads. The bone marrow was surprisingly yummy, and the sweetbreads were okay, but I didn't like the sauce they were in that much. I'd actually go back again. It was a day of foodiness, as that morning I went to a Korean grocery store with Micaela to shop for her New Year's blowout. I bought some delicious radish kimchee and marinated beef, she bought a ton of Bul-go-gi and spicy chicken.

Which leads me to the party. It was a nine o'clock do, so one would assume that people would have dinner before going, no? Anyway, here's some of the food that Micaela made:

Anyway, it was a fabulous party and we watched the fireworks from her rooftop and we all drank way too much and got home way too late.


New Year's Day was the second annual Corner Gas-athon, so I spent a lovely day lying on a couch watching 11 episodes of the show and eating leftovers. It was exhausting, I tell you!

And the big News of the Week:

Welcome to the world, baby Simon!

He looks just like his dad - Congratulations Alex and Janet!

A strange sense of melancholia

I'm feeling... strange. I just got back from seeing "The History Boys" with Sebethis, and I thought it was brilliant. Thought-provoking, uplifting and then... the ending. It wasn't bad, far from it. It was just that the whole movie had such a sense of hope and aspiration and dreams as the boys went through the preparations for taking their entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge. And at the end (stop here if you don't want to know)...

...we find out how mundane their lives turn out to be. Even if they aren't mundane. Even though they did succeed, it felt like such a loss. Of the possibilities that are there while going to school. Of the potential futures. Of the subjunctive moments. I feel sad and as if I've lost something. I was choked up at the end not because of any one event, but because of the loss of something ephemeral and something that I felt very personally. And it's not that I'm unhappy because I'm definitely not. It's that there's part of me that I was that I'm never going to be again. There will always be possibility and moments, but those particular ones were a product of a very specific time and place, and they can't be relived, only reinterpreted.

The agony of being a cover model

How Did I End Up On The Cover Of This Romance Novel?

Last week at the supermarket, while shopping for my weekly supply of three dozen eggs and 12 pounds of mutton, I spotted a rack near the checkout...

Funny by itself, even funnier when you go to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and read about the Duncan Larksthrush fanfic contest.

I used to know these...

I got hooked on the Geography Challange this week. Disgustingly, my highest score is 80%, and my average is around 50%. I might suck at it, but it's highly addictive.

How awesome is this?

I get a daily email newsletter called Shelf Awareness, and in today's edition was the following article. What a brilliant idea!

Weller's Readers in the Window
Cool idea of the day. Every afternoon through Christmas Eve, volunteer readers sit in the windows of Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore, Salt Lake City, Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

"Decorated like a living room, the window is warm and comes stocked with snacks and hot drinks," the paper wrote. "When the store set out criteria for the window, it asked for all kinds of families--however people defined the term. So far, readers who signed up range from teenage friends to couples on dates to a grandfather and his grandson. 'It's everyone,' said Jennifer Nielsen, who is in charge of decorating the store's windows and coordinating the readers' shifts. 'All the customers have loved it.' "

Most people read, silently or aloud, but some have played board games or chat. Friends and family of readers receive a discount on purchases while the readers are reading. Readers themselves receive a discount after their face time is up.

All better!

Everything is back on track and I'm no longer depressed (or very stressed). Yay! That was a bad six days I just had, and it was more than enough anxiety for one lifetime.

Now back to our regular programming:

Cute baby animals!

I have a acquired a food fairy

Yesterday at the end of the day there were two massive chocolate bars waiting on my desk. Today I step away from the department for five minutes and when I come back there is a slice of cherry cream cheese bread on my desk. A girl could get used to this...

I guess the upside to being awfully stressed and depressed is that people feel the need to feed me. They also do lovely things like arrange to have an adorable two-year-old pay me a cheer-up visit.

I'm trying not to be tiresome about everything that's going on so as not to become that whiny girl. Times like these make me realize what wonderful friends and family I have. Thank you everyone - I do love you all, and I'll try not to take advantage of your broad shoulders too often.

Oh, for goodness sake

Sometimes there just have to be common-sense limits, don't you think?

Lawmaker aims to allow the blind to hunt

Durian

Smells bad, bad for you

Sing it out!

I saw this on Neil Gaiman's blog right before Thanksgiving. I think it's fantastic!