autumn recipe hunting.

Since the cold weather and rain (and oh how it rained) have hit Seattle, I'm hankering for some nice warm fall dishes to cook.

From Real Simple, here are a few that caught my eye. If I make any of them, I'll be sure to post pictures.

• Butternut Squash Soup With Sage and Parmesan Croutons: My dad grew butternut squashes this year, and gave me a gorgeous one. We ate one of them yesterday roasted, with some butter and brown sugar, and it was delicious. I don't know why I didn't like squash as a kid.


• Corn Chowder: I love soup. Chowder is especially good, but I've never tried making it myself.


• Coconut, Shrimp, and Corn Chowder: Mmm. Chowder+Shrimp!


• Chicken Pot Pie: And now that I own like 50 million ramekins, I'll be making plenty of pot pies this year.


• Potato Chip Cookies: They kind of look like pecan sandies. I guess that means that the "sandy" part is the potato chips?


• Caesar Potato Salad: I like caesar salad. I like potato salad. I guess the person who wrote the recipe does too. Put em together?


• Rustic Apple Tart: Never done a tart like this, but I do love me some tarts.


• Pumpkin-Leek Soup: Another option for that pretty pretty butternut squash. It's currently my table centerpiece (because Sophie won't eat it.)

Any other autumn recipes that you guys like making?

card shark.

My mom plays this game called hand and foot (apparently it's kind of like canasta) that requires 5-6 decks of cards. Since her birthday was (ahem) yesterday, I decided to make her a bag to carry her cards around.


Isn't it cute?

I came up with the idea to use the black suits for the letter "a" in each word while I was taking a bath yesterday night (always have great ideas while I'm in the shower/bath), and then photo documented the process after I got the stencil made. There's a sequence of photos at flickr, starting here. And the part I'm particularly proud of is the island (aka whitespace) on the letter "d".

fall walk. (bonus, now with photos!)

I went to brunch this morning at Portage Bay Cafe in South Lake Union. Since it's down by where the new Amazon offices are going to be (starting May 2010?), I figured that I'd see what the walk would be like.

And since it was really pretty out then, I took my camera with me for a little photo fun. Unfortunately, my camera battery decided to crap out on me after about 10 photos, so I only have about 5 that turned out well. Maybe I *do* need to purchase a new little point-and-shoot. Either that or a new battery for my little Olympus.

There are some additional notes on flickr about these photos, but not much. (Oh yeah, and I tried out the flickr map-it feature. Kinda cool, but at first glance, the user interface is a little buggy.)


I can't help feeling like there's a way to get the sky to still look blue in this one, even though it's so over exposed. I may try to play around with it more, but knowing how lazy I am, probably not.



Feels like there should be zombies walking out of this one. I also kicked around some of those leaves. That was fun.

This was around the time when my camera battery decided that it was "red and flashy", so I turned off the camera, and jostled it around to see if that'd help. I got three more photos out of it, two of which are below.


I think I've seen this tile of cement with the fish prints in it before, but when I stumbled (fall, get it?) across it this morning, it was a surprise all over again.



This was the photo I really wanted to take, but I didn't do a great job of it (also possibly that the camera wasn't trying very hard since the battery was nearly dead). It's a really pretty view of downtown as you round the corner on 5th Ave N that I get to see most mornings on my way to work (via Metro 3 or 4).

Photo walks are fun; I'll have to remember to take a few more while there are still some pretty colors out.

Also, I'm getting a kick out of the oxymoronic quality of the phrase "fall walk". Color me nerdy.

the happy hooker.

The Scarf


Cast of Characters
Me: Me.
GSC: Grocery Store Clerk.

The Story
This is the exchange I just had at the grocery store.

GSC: That scarf is beautiful. Did you make it?
Me: Yes! It's crocheted.
GSC: It's very nice. Did you use a pattern from a book?
Me: Yes, it's on a pattern in a book called, uh...
(pause)
Me: The Happy Hooker.
(pause)
GSC looks slightly bewildered.
Me: It's from the people who do the Stitch and Bitch books.
(pause)
GSC looks even more bewildered.
GSC: Uh, okay.
GSC walks away.
Me: Oops.

Epilogue
I really should be ready to tell people that my scarf pattern is from a book called the Happy Hooker when they compliment it. Or rather, be ready for the reaction. Either that or just tell them how to make it (ch 204, two rows of dc and then 5-dc shell across 4 st) and leave out the fact that it's from the book with the sassy name (unless they look like they can handle it).

food, food, and more food.

This looks delicious:
.

I did, however, have a perfectly delicious egg with bacon this morning, courtesy of Julien (Michelle's fiance). Michelle had a crepe with hers, I had wheat toast. I may have to rethink this no-bacon-in-my-house rule, because it really is quite delicious. And, at least bacon is recognizable as meat, whereas breakfast sausage is not necessarily.

Other bacon was also eaten this weekend: I tried the bacon maple bar at Voodoo Donut this weekend. And yes, it was delicious. A little too much for me (I had about 3 bites too many, and required a salad when we got back to Michelle/Julien's apartment), but still a very good mix of salty and sweet, and a little bit of crunchy to boot.

Julien photo-documented it as well, and I think that he and Michelle were happy to have an excuse (me) to go try them. I should note, Michelle told me to look grim in the photo he took of us (we'd been talking about zombies), but we really were quite happy to be there.

Also accomplished this weekend was an apple tasting at the Portland Nursery, where we got to try 67(!) varieties of apples, pears, and Asian pears.

Some of my favorites were: Ambrosia (for eating, may be a cross between a Red and Golden Delicious), Criterion (for pie), Empire (for eating, a cross between a McIntosh and a Delicious), Fuji (really, one of my all time favorites), Galer (would be good with cheese), Honey Crisp (apparently a cross between a Macoun and a Honeygold), Liberty (sweet, but browns quickly when cut - good for ciders), McIntosh (originated in Canada in the 1800s!), Melrose (a Jonathan crossed with a Delicious), Rome Beauty (for eating and baking), Rubinette (cross between a Golden Delicious and a Cox's Orange Pippen), and the Splendour (an Australian Golden Delicious, very sweet).

For the pears, I liked the Bosc and the Concord, but I think I would have liked some of the other ones had they sat out for a few days (they were too crisp). Of the Asian pears, I'm partial to the 20th Century Pears, but the Hosui were also quite good.

Yep. And that's only a sample of the ones we ate! Never knew I could eat so many types of apples all in one room. Could have used some cheese or something to go with them though. Cheese makes everything better. :)

all things cheese.

A coworker of mine (who may or may not wish to remain anonymous) alerted me to a website called Cheese or Font, where they give you a name and ask you whether it's a cheese or a font, and then let you know which it is and how many people got the answer right/wrong. Fun! Difficult, but fun.

Also, I signed up for an icanhascheezburger account so that I could keep a list of my favorites. Yesterday, I found this one that I particularly like:


moar funny pictures.

If you're registered with ICHC, you can friend me here.

who are *you* writing for?

I often have these thoughts that I can't get out of my head until I say them out loud. Does this happen to anyone else? Usually, they're things that I probably shouldn't say (since I've somehow managed to stop myself from blurting it out the moment it comes to mind), but I become so focused on it that I have to get it out one way or another.

Yesterday night I had one of those thoughts and it wasn't entirely appropriate to post as my facebook status (my first inclination), so instead I emailed it to a friend of mine. I think it was much better that way.

Tonight, I had another one of those thoughts, but it's vague enough that I'll post it here: Don't feel guilty.

The thing is, we do have to take into consideration the audience for whom we're writing.

In an article in this last month'sWIRED, Clive Thompson wrote an article titled Clive Thompson on the New Literacy that talks about whether recent generations have lost the ability to write coherently with the advent of microblogging and texting and the like. He interviewed a professor of writing at Stanford and she indicated that today's "young people" write way more than any other generation since we now use computers for a good portion of our socialization. In the past, people would graduate from high school or college, turn in their last research paper, and never write again.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

In addition, the professor found that today's student/writers are good at "what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across." Because of this, Thompson figures that students today have a different understanding of what "good writing" is.

It's possible that's true -- I chose to not write something to my facebook crowd, and instead sent it to a close friend. I'm not sure if that constitutes good writing though. I figure that there are a lot of people out there who are just writing into the vast junkyard of the internet (me included), where it's not entirely clear what or who your audience is. And, when I do have a defined audience, it's tough to censor myself. I know of people who censor their audience instead (ie, only allow non-work friends to see their status updates). Either way, I suppose we shouldn't feel too guilty about it. At least we're writing.

(BTW, here's an article from WIRED in 2006 where the author clearly dislikes what the kids these days are doing to language. Well, kids and business majors.)