Right now I can't sleep, because I can't breathe. I had a bit of a sore throat earlier in the week, and hoped I wasn't coming down with something, but obviously I was ( Read more... )

I am the worst at planning parties! There were 3 people who could come, so they came over, we all ate way too much food, talked, and watched Treasure Planet on Netflix. I think a good time was had by all ( Read more... )

Now that I've had people over lots of times, I've figured out what the hardest part of planning is. It's not the food. Even if it takes me a couple of days to put together a 7-course banquet, most of the time just a few dishes you can throw together in an afternoon are fine. In fact, if you tell people to bring food, you don't even really need ( Read more... )

I asked a local fishmonger a few weeks ago if he would show me how to butcher a fish for sashimi. The stars finally lined up, so now I've made my first sashimi ( Read more... )

I checked out a public pool today. I want to learn how to swim, and that means practice. I quit the gym that I'd been in after they stopped offering private swim lessons-- I tried their group lessons but felt so uncomfortable that I thought I'd be better off looking elsewhere altogether. In any case I am now looking for a place to practice ( Read more... )

OK, next time I hold a gathering, I'm not even going to post about it here, because it's becoming so commonplace ( Read more... )

The school librarian just bought a book of vegetable-based desserts. I am of course familiar already with many of the dessert possibilities of pumpkin, zucchini, and carrot, but these books also do less-familiar ones, like cucumber, tomato, and sugar snap peas. Since it is actually aimed at children, most of the recipes are relatively simple, but ( Read more... )

Tomorrow is burnable trash collection day, and since food waste counts as burnable trash, that makes tonight a very good night to clean out the fridge. I threw out the following ( Read more... )

If you can count having two friends over for dinner as a dinner party, today I had my first one! I'd wanted to do one for years and years, and now that my apartment and my kitchen are finally coming into shape ( Read more... )

I was with a friend the other day and I mentioned that pine honey is really good. I bought some Greek fir honey from Follow the Honey, a honey store in Cambridge, a few years ago, and even though I only ever used it for normal things, I enjoyed its rich sweetness and piney scent every time I had it. The friend said that he'd never had pine honey ( Read more... )