challah back girl ...

i seem to have had a much more well-rounded week than i recalled. [i actually write these up as they happen, thus the length. thus the fact that they are labeled for skimming ease.]

MAKING FOODS


pumpkin stew, vegetarian times: now THIS was a huge success, not to mention the street cred i get for MAKING A MEAL IN A PUMPKIN! red peppers, tomatillos, onion, garlic, hominy and some spices, dump it into the pumpkin, stick it in the oven for 2 hours. this was my first experience with hominy and also tomatillos. this is exactly why i always make vegetarian foods:

1. chopping vegetables is a hobby;
2. so is squeezing a garlic mincer;
3. i get to learn about things like hominy, tomatillos and -- last week -- miso. this is much more fun that just shoving a chicken into the oven or boiling hot dogs.

full disclosure: this soup did not make that hot of a leftover. but fresh was fantastic.



challah: i'm as stunned as you are that this turned out. as i was 'braiding' the bread i was thinking how fortunate that the dough was not a child's hair and that said child was not in any sort of beauty pageant. then, it came out of the oven looking awesome. let that be a lesson to parents.

[on the other hand, i tried to make a butternut squash purreed soup. this is my second go-round with butternut squash and all i can say is at least i didn't cry this time, which is significant progress, but not enough. ... butternut squash, i'll see you next fall when i've had time to forget your wrath.]

TASTE TESTING


i'm a sucker for pretty cans. i'm two deep, favoring the pomegranate blackberry.

MOVIE WATCHING
Paranoid Park 2007: gabe nevins plays alex tremaine, who looks more like a mii than my actual mii, in a short movie made longer by it's intense pore exploration and slo-mo shots. tremaine revisits the events of a night he spent on the sidelines of an illegally-made hardcore skate park, and an unfortunate accident that ends with a security guard's upper half of his trunk being forcefully severed from the lower half of his trunk ... including a scene where a pelvis-less man shimmies toward the young skate punk, pulling himself by his elbows. if played at regular speed, this would be a 20 minute shortie.

chuck nailed it when he said: this movie is for cutters.

Crumb (Special Edition) 1994: a documentary on the artist r. crumb, famous for his drawings of amply bosomed, butted and legged women and his mousy sexually deviant men. i was completely enthralled at this man's agoraphobic family -- including a brother who sits in the lotus for hours at a time, and every few weeks consumes a long string of cloth -- which takes three days to "pass" -- as a sort of internal cleanse. mostly wondering if he reuses the same string over and over, or if he has a bag filled with scraps.

READING THE INTERNET
"morrissey nfl" [via]: i can only hope that when the nfl wanted to use this song, morrissey thought they meant futbol football. and then, [via] morrissey is writing his autobiography for the same reason tori spelling wrote her's. "So much crap is written about me, it's hard to live with sometimes," he said. "It all gets burned down in history and becomes a part of your legacy." [although he said it with that kicky accent and without mentioning his mom.]

report: smiths close to reunion [via]: my favorite paragraph of this story is: Morrissey has repeatedly ruled out the idea of reforming the group during interviews, once claiming: "I'd rather eat my own testicles than reform The Smiths - and that's saying something coming from a vegetarian."

redesigned book covers [via]: bookninja's contest for a reinterpretation of a book covers includes a santa-hatted mariah carey on the cover of "i know why the caged bird sings" and a pornograhic take on "the handmaid's tale." pretty funny stuff.

what haruki murakami talks about [via]: Q&A with one of my favorite writers from the san francisco chronicle. he's just so damn cute and i love his lifestyle. "You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream."

cookingwithrockstars is my new favorite web site: nada surf smokes tomatoes; new pornographers guy can't cook; ben gibbard of death cab talks about peanut butter and veggie dog sandwiches; jenny lewis is almost vegan.

TAGGED

also, last week i was tagged by mojito to list seven random things about myself. here goes nuthin':

1. the song copa cabana was stuck in my head for most of 1999-2001. this was excruciating.
2. ever since the word 'mucus' was said in the same sentence as 'milk' by my friend daisy like a week and a half ago, i've been off milk. can't do it. nuh uh. not at all. soy milk, fine.
3. for some reason, i find the song "trapeze swinger" by iron & wine very upsetting. i can barely get through the whole thing without involuntarily weeping. this is not, as far as i know, a sad song. nor has it been the soundtrack for any troubling times in my life.
4. about 98 percent of the time i can guess the price of my groceries to within 60 cents.
5. i believe that this year, i will make my third attempt at completing nanowrimo. i've finished once, but two years ago my computer broke right in the middle of a very experimental genre.
6. sometimes when i'm doing something i really enjoy -- like cooking or running -- i have to remind myself that i actually like what i'm doing.
7. i'd like to take a vacation to 1984.