The Last Month: Things Happened and Mistakes Were Made

There' s a few things I wanted to mention:

If you shop at ShopRite you can get coupons from their web site: http://www.shoprite.com/. (Thanks Rebecky!)

When you make the squash and potato torte, bake first, then freeze. After assembling the tortes a few months ago, I froze one, and we baked and ate the other one that same night. I baked the frozen one a few weeks ago. It went straight from the freezer to the oven. Then straight from the oven to the garbage can. After baking, the torte was a hot, wet (and gray) mess. What a waste of food, time, and energy.

The CSA? Done. I told "Bob" that he didn't have to go to all the distributions at the end of the season. So he didn't. We wasted about three weeks' worth of money, but it was better than him beating someone about the head and body with a yellow squash out of sheer frustration with the wilty moldy lettuce and rotting onions. There was a survey, but I begged him not to complete it. No need to have such animosity on record somewhere.

What else?

We went to an art nouveau jewelry exhibit earlier this month at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Too beautiful and very intimidating craftsmanship.

R.I.P. Precious (2001 - 2008). Our beautiful Leopard Gecko died this past week after a prolonged illness.

I have to update the "'Tis the season..." section of this blog. I expect it'll be mostly an exercise in using the delete button.

There was a "home economics" article in The New York Times this week:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/garden/20math.html

The people featured in the article are the usual cast of entitled rich people that N.Y. Times journalists tend to pal around with (and think of as "regular" folks) . Read the comments section for better tips and a much broader demographic.

Both Ina Garten and Giada de Laurentiis came out with new cookbooks. I hope I get them for Christmas (hear that Santa "Bob"?).

We'll be making some dishes to bring to mom's for Thanksgiving: Martha's Mashed Potatoes (yes, that Martha) and cranberry dipping sauce (c/o Alton Brown). Stay tuned.