StephanieL

I was out of town at a conference the last couple of days, so I didn't witness this personally. N was having trouble sleeping last night, and about 2 AM she heard these weird banging sounds against the sliding glass doors in our bedroom that open up into the backyard. Good news: not a burglar. Weird news: it was 2 raccoons mating. When she banged on the door, they looked at her and kept right on doing their thing. They only left after N opened the doors and the house alarm went off.

Is that like that Cake Failures website?

Despite the hot weather, N still decided to cook (with the oven, yet). She made a frittata with prosciutto, potatoes, and basils, using eggs from someone's backyard coop that she got in exchange for iris cuttings.

Leftover lobster noodles from an epic Chinese banquet.

True, and sucking on lemons is recommended to increase saliva production (serious answer--it's what my dentist told me).

Snared a paperback copy of the I Hate to Cook Book (1965 Birds-Eye edition) for $2.99 at the local used book store.

Thank goodness he wasn't like his namesake (or, too bad his namesake wasn't like him).

There's such a thing as salivary gland stones. Ask me how I know.

Part of the fava bean haul went into tagliatelle with favas, ricotta, proscuitto, and Meyer lemon zest.

Right. Somehow my brain conflated a martini with a G&T.

It might not be too bad in a fitty-fitty, as long as you're using good tonic.

N knows about the blanching technique, but she's also not keen about getting them out of the pods in the first place. Last night, it took us the entire length of one episode of the Stax documentary to de-pod the haul.

We're growing favas, and N was going to let them all go unpicked because she finds peeling them a PITA. I love favas, so she extracted out of me a promise to help her shell them. I don't mind--it's kind of a mindless activity to do while we're watching TV.

From cancer. Only 53 years old.

I do agree with her take on Scoma's today. It's fairly close to my office; I've gone twice and it's been a pleasurable (if pricey) experience both times.

Another big-bowl dinner: quinoa, RG Buckeyes, merguez, roasted red peppers, cauliflower, and butternut squash, and probably other things I'm forgetting.

Yes, and fortunately it wasn't super dry. The 2001 appletini wasn't quite as awful as I'd feared, and the post-millennium one was good for what it was. During the 1990s and early 2000s, I wasn't drinking these weird cocktails (or much else) due to having a lot less money back then, and when I did have alcohol it was usually beer or maybe a vodka tonic. The room got quite rollicking after a while. Some folks had pre-gamed with a drink or two at Club Moderne beforehand (N and I had a couple of their NA offerings).

Went to a slideshow on "Martinis at the Turn of the Millennium" at Stookey's Blue Room last night (next door to Stookey's Club Moderne on Taylor & Bush). We were served 3 drinks (in small glasses, blessedly): a regular martini with a lemon twist, an appletini made circa-2001 style (vodka, sour mix, traffic-red cherry), and an appletini made post-millennium style (gin, Calvados, lemon juice, Luxardo cherry).

I watched the first episode of the 4-part Stax: Soulsville USA on HBO last night. Such great music. Looking forward to the rest of the episodes, even though I know the story ends on a depressing note. Fun fact: my first exposure to Booker T & the MGs was the original Blues Brothers movie--Steve Cropper and Donald "Duck" Dunn are part of the band.

A coyote decided to cross the streetcar tracks on The Embarcadero as I was riding to work this morning. While I know that coyotes have been spotted throughout SF, it was still a weird place to have my first sighting.

Have you both read the article about Jean Smart in today's Times Magazine?

Another Buy Nothing win: a terra cotta roaster large enough to fit a chicken. N has been wanting one for a while.

Want!!

My family would do pick-your-own strawberries in June, and my mother would freeze most of them along with some sugar. Come the following spring, we'd have strawberries in syrup with sour cream as part of our post-shul lunch on the first day of Passover.

Home alone this evening, so I made for myself a pseudo-shrimp scampi with pearl couscous on the side.