Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Snapshots of food

Here are some of the dishes that Elliott has made over the past couple of weeks. My culinary output has been null (unless you count microwaving or making cookies, which I don't). And let's not even talk about my literary diet. I did get Naomi Novik's Empire of Ivory and Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, but I'm not optimistic about starting either of them soon.

Anyway, food!


Elliott proudly stirring the absolutely fantastic chicken tikka masala, almost an exact replica of the one we loved at Pakwan in San Francisco.


Yummmmmmmmm. Maybe we'll (and by we, I mean Elliott) attempt homemade naan next time.


Absolutely amazing stuffed pork chops.


With gravy on top and bacon braised cabbage on the side. Elliott really likes to stress his German heritage sometimes.


And because that wasn't enough food, we also made an onion and leek tart, which was very simple and very tasty.

Ooof. I'm full just from looking at those pictures again. The stuffed pork chops, cabbage, and onion and leek tart recipes are all from Chow.com. The chicken tikka masala recipe was just something I googled.

Okay, back to my civil procedure casebook now. Whoo.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

I'm back. Again.

Sorry for the radio silence. Law school is taking up all my time and sorta getting me down. I'm hoping that I get over it soon and refocus on the reason why I'm subjecting myself to this in the first place.

Anyway, look for food pictures soon! Elliott and I have been cooking up a storm on the weekends that we see each other.

Monday, October 01, 2007

Speaking of spam

Here's some more, specifically, on what this blog is purportedly about: books.

I read most of David Sedaris's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim over the weekend, which is very good but definitely not my favorite book of his. As a whole, I'm not very interested in stories from or about his childhood. I feel a little squeamish reading dysfunctional accounts of someone else's childhood (the same reason that I've never read any Augusten Burroughs).

And now, a book meme.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and Punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : A Novel (94)
The Name of the Rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (79)
War and Peace (78)
Vanity Fair (74)
The Time Traveler’s Wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The Kite Runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (67)
Atlas Shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury Tales (64)
The Historian : A Novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (63)
Love in the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault’s Pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A Clockwork Orange (59)
Anansi Boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The Grapes of Wrath (57)
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & Demons (56)
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (54)
To the Lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver’s travels (53)
Les Misérables (53)
The Corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (52)
Dune (51)
The Prince (51) [I think that reading parts of it very closely in a political theory class counts, don't you?]
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir (51)
The God of Small Things (51)
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A Confederacy of Dunces (50)
A Short History of Nearly Everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49) [Not sure if this deserved to be italicized. I mean to finish it one day!]
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : A Novel (47)
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46) [Optimistically bolded. I think I'll finish it this semester.]
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the Road (46)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity’s Rainbow (44) [There should be a style for books that intimidate the hell out of you. I think that The Satanic Verses would qualify, too.]
The Hobbit (44)
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The Three Musketeers (44)

Man, that was so embarrassing. Not the number of books of I haven't read but the number of them that I've picked up and couldn't bring myself to finish. I'm not so much a devourer of books as a page-nibbler.

A new week, a new season

It's Monday again, which means that it's time for torts torts torts torts and SPAM. Fortunately, there is a lovely crispness in the air and the promise of a new Radiohead album in 9 days! And only four and a half days from a three-day weekend.

Life is all about the anticipation of the next pleasurable moment.