readsalot

Food successes from the weekend: haddock filets coated with herbes de provence and fresh breadcrumbs, excellent spicy fried chicken, and very good buttermilk biscuits. (There were vegetables, too, but steamed spinach, zucchini, and broccoli aren't all that exciting.)

The rhubarb pie failure mode this time was because I didn't put enough water in the dough, though I used the maximum amount in the recipe--4 tablespoons. So it kind of fell apart. It's still reasonably tasty, though.

I'm most of the way through The Gone-Away World, as recommended by firstfrost. It's just as good as she says. Today, while I was reading, I got to a point where something very strange happened. Just as I was thinking, "hey, maybe it's because x...", the narrator thought the same thing, and dismissed it. I love it when the characters actually think of wild hypotheses! It's so great!

I went to the Funimation website to try to watch some episodes of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, and discovered that there's a second Gunslinger Girl series! woohoo! So I watched an episode, and it was great. Details later, if anyone's interested.

We had a quiet night at home last night, because I didn't want to deal with the snow and the cold. So I made mustard chicken with a potato chip crust, mashed potatoes, and zucchini with garlic, and it all came out very well. We had a nice bottle of champagne for toasting, and we watched Across the Universe, which was great.

I've been reading reviews of the movie, and it seems like everyone either loved it or hated it. The reviewers who hated it all seemed to dislike the new arrangements of the songs. I thought that most of the new arrangements were excellent and gave the songs new meanings, that the principal actors were also very good singers, and that the action around the songs was mostly perfect. My favorite was probably "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" recast as a song of unfulfilled yearning, second to "I've Just Seen a Face", which went with joyous dancing in a bowling alley.

My accomplishment for today: potato latkes. Which are delicious, but every time I have to use my food processor to grate things, I think about buying a new food processor. My twenty-year-old Sunbeam model still works perfectly well, but the feed tube is a very narrow oval shape that nothing will fit into without major trimming.

Because it's been very difficult to find coin laundries anywhere nearby, I washed a bunch of clothes in the sink last night. O, the glamorous life. I'm hoping they'll be dry enough to pack tomorrow morning.

This morning, after getting up and transferring the wet clothes from hanging around the bathtub to the closet, I took my breakfast coupon and went in seek of food. The excellent buffet restaurant had a very long line, and the Japanese restaurant had a shorter but still noticeable one, so I went to the food court, which had both Japanese and Western food. I got miso soup, two different kinds of fish, shu-mai, noodles, rice, and a glass of what I think was guava juice. All good, but I may try to get up earlier and try for the buffet restaurant tomorrow.

( and the tour begins )

Tomorrow we go to look at Mount Fuji. I don't know what the internet situation will be like for the next few days, but I'll update again when I can. I'm getting tired of this keyboard's betrayal, so I'll sign off now. (I just typed this whole thing for the second time when the first time through went into some kind of weird wide Unicode thing that I couldn't get it out of, and now the keyboard has gone into a mode where it keeps trying to turn my typing into hiragana.) They don't have the English language mode installed on this machine, which makes life difficult.

Japanese class is over! I have free time again!

The final was last Tuesday, and I think I did ok--there wasn't anything on there that really surprised me, but I'm just not sure I got everything right. I know that I got one of the listening questions wrong, because I successfully parsed it several hours later and realized that the answer I'd given was the exact opposite of the right one. Oh well.

I went out to dinner Friday night with a bunch of classmates and Sensei. We'd originally planned to eat at Bluefin, but they were unfortunately closed due to a leak. So, we went to Kaya, since Japanese food was also available there. We had gyoza (good), agedashi tofu (good), potato croquettes (unbelievably yummy--where have you been all my life?), sushi (which I don't eat), jap chae (tasty), some kind of spicy fish soup (good soup, and good fish, but the mussel that was in my serving was kind of rubbery), and vegetable tempura (ok--carrot slices were too thick to have gotten cooked properly, but the other vegetables were good).

Food diary: ( cut for length )

Edited to add: the turkey meatloaf was very tasty indeed, as were the tomatoes. Oh, and I forgot to mention the pluot-blackberry cobbler I made earlier today. I overdid it a little bit on adding ginger to the filling, but I like ginger, so it's all good.