Thursday, November 22, 2007

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Lots of various little things to report, but for now, I'll leave it at a brief list of what I've been up to this last week or so:

1. A visit to Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst, MA.

2. Several very nice pints at the Northampton Brewery.

3. A hectic re-entry into The City, which involved me, unfed, having to race from train to home to school to show the undergrads a video about bossa nova.

4. Shopping for our very low-key Thanksgiving, which involved a crazy trip to Whole Foods, during which I witnessed water pouring from the ceiling, a fire alarm, and people shouting at each other near the fish. I left without buying anything and had a much more civilized experience at Citarella (where I bought several lovely-looking rainbow trout for tomorrow, iconoclast that I am).

5. Witnessing Jenny make some lovely carrot soup, and giving myself a nasty blister making caramel sauce. Take it from me: when Joy of Cooking says "stand back," stand back!

Perhaps tomorrow I'll have something to report on two firsts: my first time cooking stuffed fish, and my first time making bread pudding (for which the caramel sauce is intended).

5 comments:

Rob said...

Oh, yeah, caramel is basically edible napalm. It's insanely hot and sticky. Shudder.

And man, oh, man, getting to shop at Citarella is such a huge incentive to chuck everything and move to NYC. What are you stuffing the fish with?

T said...

Yeah, the adhesive glob of caramel was pretty unpleasant, but strangely, the wound doesn't hurt a bit now. If I'd had the foresight, I'd have started photodocumenting it, as it's gone into several interesting stages by now. Luckily, it's small--only about a centimeter in diameter.

I'm stuffing the trout with a bread/mushroom/celery/herb mix. I'd have liked to get a bit fancier with it, but we planned for an all-purpose sort of thing since I didn't know what kind of fish I'd come home with.

Citarella *is* wonderful...but aside from a few choice items and the nice guys behind the fish counter, it's nothing that can't be supplied by a good Whole Foods or something of that ilk.

T said...

Which is not to say that it wouldn't be absolutely, terrifically fabulous if you *did* move up here (except that who knows where J & I will be after we've finished the PhDs....)

Lauren said...

Ooh, I definitely want to hear about the bread pudding you made. I absolutely love bread pudding, and I really, really wanted to make a pumpkin version for thanksgiving, but I actually couldn't find canned pumpkin here in Dublin! (Ok, I didn't look -that- hard, but I did look...)

Anonymous said...

my caramel apple experiment didn't go so well. I escaped relatively unscathed, though I may not be able to say the same for the knife and the bowl.