Feels like forever since I’ve posted. Sorry.

Went to a butcher on Friday to buy rabbit. Dittmer’s in Mountain View. What a cool little place! Oh, their porthouse looked good enough to eat raw. Their frozen cases were filled with really amazing things, too. So many organ meats! I was delighted. I’m going to have to go back there and buy lots of weird things. Er, once I have an idea of what to do with them.

So I made the rabbit curry over at Lydia’s yesterday. I thought it turned out really well. I took a chicken recipe and substituted rabbit meat. It worked. The meat was slightly sweeter than chicken, and the texture was slightly different, but it was really good. However, butchering a rabbit sucks. I got the guy at Dittmer’s to cut it into eight pieces, and then I tried to further deconstruct it. I wanted smallish, boneless pieces of meat, but that didn’t happen. Lydia ate the boneless bits I was able to cut away, and Zack and I each had a hind leg/thigh piece. I will post the recipe probably tomorrow. It was really quite good.

A trip to Lydia’s wouldn’t be complete without some anime, so we watched an episode of Maria-sama ga Miteru, or The Virgin Mary is Watching. First of all, that’s a creepy title. Secondly, that’s a boring anime. I guess it redeems itself with pretty character designs, although the animation wasn’t all that great. Lydia said she might give it a second chance, maybe, and I said there were better ways to spend 23 minutes. Then we watched the hour special of Yakitate!! episodes 11 and 12. I figured out the two “mysteries” of the baking competition very quickly, which delighted me and Lydia. The first was that was that Azuma had chosen margarine, and the second higher fat content butter doesn’t always translate into the best butter to use.

I tried on some of Lydia’s wigs- a long ash blond, a long black, and a short brown. I looked uniformly awful in them. I was very sad. Oh, and I lost an earring. That was sad, too. But happy- Lydia converted my extra-large Derrida t-shirt into something actually wearable. Huzzah!

So Lydia’s having this contest. Make her a bunny, and you’ll win a buttload of cute. Generally, I’m one to refuse cute, but Lydia’s concept of cute is a good one. What can I do with a bunny that Lydia would like… hm, hm, hm… oh, I’ve got it! I’ll make her a rabbit curry! That combines two things she likes.

Are you free on Saturday, Lydia? Or is that too close to when you’re leaving for Hawaii? Otherwise I can just take pictures and tell you how good it was.

Quick post before I go to bed. First day of work was good. I had an artichoke and soup for lunch. Tomorrow we get pizza. D&D was pretty awesome, greater rage kicks so much ass. We all almost died again. We’re so good at that. I retired a d20 because it kept critically missing saves.

Today is Kenny’s birthday. That means it’s a week before I’m officially old. Happy not-mid-twenties, Kenny. I’m totally with you.

Last day o’ freedom. I’m cooking a bunch of stuff, but not anything new. Just getting prepared for future lunches. Tomorrow night is D&D, so I’m not going to be cooking anything. I want to make more sourdough bread, but I still have a lot left from my not-so-good batch. Jon was talking about it with Rob, his coworker who gave him his starter, and they say to move my oven rack closer to the top. Also, to make sure my oven’s getting up to 500. I forgot to put my oven thermometer in when I baked the bread.

I’m making the apple-rutabaga soup again (I had leftover vegetables, and what else was I going to do with them?). This time, I remembered the apple. I’m trying to lighten it just a little. Half a stick of butter, half and half instead of cream, and no maple syrup.

Well, my bread has just finished baking. I screwed up the crust, it’s all pale. But it’s nicely sour with a decent crumb.

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

Ah, the d10! While you aren’t actually a true regular polyhedron, you are the only die that makes logical sense–metrically speaking. Chances are, others see you as over-analytical or a goody-goody. While that may be true, you also have a gift for patience and tolerance. Growing up you probably had a calculator wristwatch that you never really needed to use (since you were faster on your own), and you probably aced all your classes (except for gym). You use the metric system almost exclusively, but are able to quickly convert in mid-conversation for the sake of your backwards Imperalist friends. You’ve coded in at least two different programming languages, and have created more original gaming systems than you’ll ever admit. You’re generally not a show-off, but you do take pride in being called either a geek or a nerd.

(Well, I agree with the last sentence, but the rest of it? Not so much.)

And now, links.

Japanese Katamari Damacy commercial (bottom link). It’s for the first game, and you’ve probably already seen it. I don’t care. Download it again! It made me laugh a lot.

MST3K on Cheap Seats (bottom link, “Creative Breaking Championships/K-1 Fighting”). Cheap Seats is a show on ESPN Classic that, unfortunately, kind of sucks (which is very sad to me, because I have enjoyed the Sklar brothers’ stand-up in the past). They’re having Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett on as guests, which is awesome, although it doesn’t negate the fact that the show isn’t all that good. I do like the episode description, though. “Cheap Seats also welcomes a few very special guests to the show to give some commentary of their own. It’s a mystery that is grounded in science but full of theater. ” This is just a preview, I’m going to watch the episode over at Jon and Ryan’s because I don’t get ESPN Classic. I hope it’s good.

Jon made me a batch of starter last night, so that means I can now make kick-ass sourdough bread just like him! Well, hopefully. I’ll be posting the recipe and technique, but I don’t know how starter is actually made. There’s an article on it in the latest Cook’s Illustrated, I believe, but I just took a shortcut.

The dough rises in loaves overnight. Jon had said that he sometimes has problems with them spreading too much. One solution, I guess, would be to buy those wave-like pans and rise the loaves in there. What I did was cut up a 2-liter soda bottle into two tube halves. Hopefully they’ll stay stiff enough when the dough’s in them. We’ll see. I’ll be baking tomorrow morning, I think.

Now that I actually have a job, I can post about this, originally written at the end of February.

At the end of March or the beginning of April, I’m either going to have a party to celebrate the one-year anniversary of this blog and my 25th birthday, or move. (Probably not going to have a party- it’s a little late now.) Yes, I’m thinking about leaving Menlo Park for the sunnier climes of Mountain View. It puts me farther away from my brother and sister-in-law, but closer to my other friends (well, except Lydia and Zack, this’ll add another ten miles to the trip to the East Bay). So I’m browsing through the apartment listings online, and I am just astounded by how poorly laid-out many of these kitchens seem to be. Clearly, they were not designed by anyone who actually cooks. It’s like you don’t actually need counter space to work on, nonsense! I mean, look at this picture. There’s two square feet of usable counter space. With a mixer and food processor, there’s approximately zero. This doesn’t even count as a kitchen. I think my cutting board alone would overfill that tiny little bit of space.