next week: same time, same place ...

so celebrating election day totally threw me off my game and made it impossible to function for the rest of the week. i blame rt quinlan's.

with that, i bring you photos of food:



roasted red pepper coconut soup [Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special: More Than 275 Recipes for Soups, Stews, Salads and Extras] it's pretty hard to take satisfaction from making this recipe when i didn't actually roast the red peppers, i just opened a couple of jars [which were, admittedly, tricky jars]. that was the difference between a meal that takes an hour to make and one that takes like 20 minutes. the taste? the taste is the same. street cred shot. anyway, roasted red pepper soup is among my favorites. i'd have preferred that it was a little more spicy, but that's my own fault for not taking the moosewood cookbook people up on the suggestion of adding more cayenne pepper to taste.




pumpkin pancakes with honey raspberry syrup [via]: so today was the first annual pancake day here, and i woke early and began making this special raspberry syrup that was messy and by the end i looked like i'd slit my wrists and done a pollack all over the stove. but it was good. then came the pumpkin pancakes: ginger, cinnamon, and all sorts of things that say "fall" and "yum."

what. a. nightmare.

the batter was super thick, even though i followed the instructions. it was virtually impossible to get the insides done. chuck cut his cake open and found it didn't pass the toothpick test and decided on raisin bran instead of the opportunity to get worms. i threw the cakes in the over for an hour and ended up eating something like pancake shaped pumpkin bread. it was good. but not as good as it should have been.

here's a particularly gruesome after shot:



but i got right back on the horse and made this for dinner:



curry cauliflower soup [also from moosewood, but available on this person's site]: THIS WAS AWESOME! MAKE THIS.


WATCHING MOVING PICTURES
The Life Before Her Eyes : for about one hour, 25 minutes this movie is incredible. uma thurman stars as a woman who is losing her mind on the 15 anniversary of a massive school shooting at her high school. it's told largely in flashback, where
evan rachel wood stars as the young uma. she's young, a troublemaker, has a very christian best friend with whom she has the sort of conversations that occur between stoned philosophy majors five years their senior. when the gunfire starts, they are in the bathroom talking about boys, applying lipstick, considering what it mans to be comprised of 70 percent water. they hear the gunshots and the screams and stand waiting and terrified until the shooter finds them in the bathroom and asks which one he should shoot. a cardinal rule of writing is broken in the last five minutes and it is unforgiveable. in a lesser movie i could have let it go. but this ending pissed. me. off.

Morvern Callar: 2002: morvern callar finds her dead boyfriend laying with his wrists slit between the kitchen and the living room. instead of calling the police, she goes through his stuff, opens christmas presents he'd left, eventually takes money from his cold, dead, back pocket and goes to a holiday party. eventually she tells her friends that he left her. and eventually she chops up his body and buries him. and then she takes the novel he wrote, deletes him as author and inserts her own name. then she proceeds to live the high life. motivations? not sure. this movie is better to think about than actually watch.

NOVEMBER PROJECTS
nanowrimo: i quit at exactly 3000 words, but wrote 1,400 more just to justify that i was doing the right thing. i'm erasing that 1,400 words and tending to the first 3,000 in a less structured way. i will miss my nightly tea, blanket, laptop fest.

dorothy parker: well, holy hoppin' sassafrass. [a more specific response to what i've been reading would require standing up. maybe next week? same time same place?]