replaced by every day

I really have no good explanation for why it's been... (counting)... more than six months since I've posted anything. Christine stayed with me over the summer, which made the months of June through August pretty eventful since it was a new experience for her being in California, and a new experience for me having my sister as a roommate. After she left to go back to school and Alan came back from his internships in D.C. and Atlanta, I sort of settled into a pretty uneventful (but not unpleasant) routine, both at work and at home.

I've posted only slightly more frequently in my LiveJournal in the past six months, but if you read through my posts there you'd get pretty much the same idea -- most of the entries I post on LJ, aside from the occasional "what happened to me today" post, is either about food/cooking or my newly-acquired appreciation for anime.

Speaking of food and cooking, the other day I bought Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything. I bought it at the Borders in downtown Palo Alto, but only because I had an American Express gift card that was going to expire at the end of the month. I'm not sure if all credit-card-sponsored gift cards are like this, but this one was an "options points" card or something, which basically meant that you could only use it at a limited number of retail/catalog/online vendors. Amazon was one of them, but I could not figure out how to redeem the card during the checkout process, and according to the gift card website, the card had to cover the entire Amazon purchase -- you couldn't cover any overages with your own money. So, people, the moral of this story is, gift cards are stupid, especially ones that have an expiration date.

Anyway, so Mark Bittman's book! I've started to amass a little collection of cookbooks, and whenever I get a new one, I peruse it pretty thoroughly before attempting to cook any recipes from it (seriously, I find cookbooks make for very relaxing before-bed reading). Bittman's book contains quite a few tips and tricks that I've never read or heard anywhere else, like throwing your kitchen sponge into a dishwasher or laundry load, to keep it disinfected (so simple! how come I've never thought of this?). And apparently you can make biscuits with sour milk! I didn't think sour milk was good for anything! There's a lot of practical advice for the home cook, written in a friendly, down-to-earth tone, which I like.

Here's a funny excerpt from the chapter on pasta: "If there are leftovers, by all means refrigerate them. You can reheat pasta in a microwave, oven, or non-stick skillet, without additional fat (you can eat it cold, too). All of these methods are frowned upon by the pasta police, but I'd wager that even three out of four of them are closet eaters of leftover pasta. Yes, it will become overcooked and somewhat mushy, but you're hungry, right? It's fine; enjoy it. The pasta police are busy elsewhere, hassling people for using spaghetti where tradition calls for capellini."

I found that paragraph hilarious, enough to make Alan listen to me read it aloud later (even though he didn't really find it as amusing). If you didn't really find it funny either, well, stay tuned for my next post. Maybe I will talk about something more meaningful, like who I voted for in the primaries and why!