29 April 2003

Yesterday, I am not at all sad to tell you, was all about food. This is partly because I am not a very good drinker, so the wineries were interesting and tasty but not as dominant as they might have been if I'd been dedicated to getting N tastes of Merlot in me. But there was an olive oil shop. Ohhhh my. They took the tasting thing and ran with it, setting out tiny dishes of each product with little cubes of bread and plastic tasting spoons. That was very wise. We came home with raspberry curd, green peppercorn mustard, red wine vinaigrette with walnut oil, cabernet and roasted garlic marinade/dipping sauce, a wedge of roomano cheese (yes, roomano, not romano), and a jar of the same eggplant Merlot balsamic vinaigrette tomato sauce Mark brought back last time. My mom said, "I thought you were cleaning stuff out to move?" Well, we are. But we have months of cooking between now and then, and this stuff looked good. In the spirit of living in my real life and all that.

The meal at the CIA was, I think, the single most expensive meal I've ever had. The gift certificate we had from Dan defrayed a big chunk of that cost, but it was still staggering to look at the bill before applying that. Uff da. And I find that I don't aspire to eating meals that cost that much -- it's not what I associate with living well. The food was tasty. Very tasty. My favorite was my first course, a crab salad with avocado sauce and slices of grapefruit. Oh my, that was nice. But in general, I'd rather get fresh things at home and make meals myself, going out for a reasonably priced restaurant meal every once in awhile. I guess in some ways, this Culinary Institute meal showed me that what I want is mostly either what I have or what I have specific plans to get. Which is good to know.

The tiny smoked salmon bits on the crispy potato with the creamy herb stuff were awfully good, too, though.

Before we even left home, I had a tortilla with Nutella and strawberries for breakfast and gorgonzola-walnut tortellini for lunch. Those were good, too.

Anyway, my estimated time of Liz is maybe five or ten minutes, so I'm going to throw a few things out of the way and watch off the balcony for her. There'll be pictures from yesterday when we get around to getting them off the camera and cropped and all that. My priorities this morning are elsewhere. Have a good Tuesday.