Okay, my pecan pie is out of the oven and looks pretty good. I got the recipe from Elise’s Simply Recipes site, which I read regularly via Bloglines. Her recipese always look so good and they’re very easy to follow. I’m a nervous cook and always take forever fussing around getting ingredients set up in advance, then repeatedly check and re-check before I finally start combining. I will say that her recipe is a snap to put together, much easier than one I saw that involved cooking the sugars on the stove first until they got to the “crackle” stage…
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Hey! Waggledance has its own website. It’s got a link to eBay, but that’s not really necessary; we can buy it at Binny’s in the British beers and ales section. It even has a little bee doing the waggledance, and some sort of contest (the eBay link didn’t work, but you can bid for stuff). Mostly the prizes are money-off vouchers that are only good in the UK.
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ARRRGH! Just an hour or so ago I ordered a Calphalon One skillet at Amazon, too! Oh, well. We don’t currently have the storage space for a whole new set…unless we tossed a bunch of our current motley set of cookware. Anyway, the chef’s pan will be dead useful for making “Clamageddon” and “Whatchagot” pasta sauces. This is a really good deal, though: there’s a further discount operating in the month of August, as noted on Elise’s Simply Recipes site: There are a couple promotional offers associated with this sale. First, Amazon.com has a August promotion in which if you…
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We’re making an attempt here at Chez Guique to be more active and eat better. We went for the bike ride the other night – 11 miles, not too shabby – and today I felt like a salad rather than a gutbomb at the office cafeteria. I stood behind a rather heavy woman who very slowly picked individual leaves of lettuce out of the bin in the salad bar. Then she very slowwwly and deliberately put 4 ladles of French dressing on her salad. I waited until she moved away, then added a couple of items and crunchy things to…
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Because Father Ted used it as an example in a recent sermon at Holy Moly, I’ve been wanting to see Chocolat again, and that’s a bit dangerous. Even more since I’ve been reading French Women Don’t Get Fat and getting a double dose of passion for chocolate, eating well, and living life to the fullest. It’s an interesting premise – eat as the French do, enjoy food, and still avoid getting fat. However, it’s pretty unworkable in practice here in the States, as much of it depends on daily walks to the nearest fresh farmer’s market, seasonal foods in great…
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Earlier tonight, we were hungry for a snack or appetizer before dinner (fried rice and soy-ginger tofu) was ready. On checking the larder, a veritable feast was waiting to be created from odds and ends of ethnic food. After some thought, we assembled our multi-cultural nosh: gefilte fish, wasabi sauce, wasabi peas, tortilla chips, salsa, and British bitter. This originally came about because we both had a yen for gefilte fish (heh) but had no horseradish on hand. But we do have powdered wasabi, which is actually a kind of horseradish (at least in the US. Eureka! After documenting this…
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So, week of vacation at home, day two. Where to start? Well, I got up earlier this morning. That was good and boded well. I fixed some tea (Twinings English Breakfast, and I’ll need more to get through the week) and had rather a lot of toast. Kind of on the Douglas Adams model of procrastinating, except that where he took serial baths, I made, um, more than two slices of toast. With butter and Vegit. Some time later, I wandered out to the garage and swept it out a little, looking over our junk and figuring out what can…
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Yeah, so I don’t have a “Beerhunter” category, and besides the kind of beer we like to bring home is pretty sustaining stuff, if not actually chewy. Tonight’s tipple of choice is a new favorite: Young’s Double Chocolate Stout. We found it a couple of weeks ago at the local Binny’s and picked it up on a whim – turns out to be one of our better impulse buys, because at the same time we bought other Young’s products: Waggledance and Oatmeal Stout. From this experience we’ve added a new favorite brewer: Young’s makes good stuff, Maynard. The unique thing…
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Friday wasn’t such a great time. We went to the holiday party for David’s company, and it seemed to start off well – lots of people, nice wine to drink, and they didn’t have the creepy, smarmy DJ that they’ve had in years past. They started things off with a fun trivia contest that got everyone at our table laughing and chatting more than in previous years (the employees yak just fine, but the spice tend to sit there trying to make conversation). And then they served dinner, and then I got sick. Sort of. It was really weird –…
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This post is rated “R.” Phew, had un petit crise earlier today when I started to make the onion dill bread – I had purchased cake yeast (that is, it’s pressed into a cake and has to be refrigerated, not that it’s just for making cakes). And when I opened the wrapper, there were three or four different kinds of fungus on it. At the time, I had already started cooking/melting the first few ingredients, so I had to turn everything off and run around for a while hollering “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK.” Then I got…