Saturday

Shabbat was mostly pleasant. Friday night the associate rabbi led the service, and he did a good job. (The senior rabbi was leading the learners' minyan.) I am pleased at the growth I've seen in him in the last four+ years. (I'm not sure, but I think ours is his first congregation.)

Saturday afternoon, after services and lunch, Dani and I went to visit our friend Christine. (Dani knows her better than I do; I basically met her through him. Most of our joint friendships run in the other direction, so I'm pleased when Dani introduces me to someone new.) Christine bought a house earlier this year, and this was the first we'd seen it. She also has a new dog, a Corgie, who is very friendly and very energetic. Her two cats were less than thrilled with this addition to the household.

Christine has a smaller version of the same problem Dani has: too many books and not enough places to put bookcases. She may be moving some books into a large walk-in closet in her bedroom simply because there's a wall there that can support a full-size bookcase. I can sympathize!

Christine strongly recommended a TV show called "Sports Night", which we have never seen. It's written by the same person who writes "West Wing", which is a major recommendation all by itself. Apparently it's running now on Comedy Central, but we don't get that channel. She's expecting to get DVDs of the show for Christmas, so maybe we'll be able to borrow them in a couple months.

Around sunset, a headache started to form and grew stronger over the next couple hours. Sigh. I had wanted to go to the debut concert of Small Axe, lrstrobel's new band, but by the time 9pm rolled around it was pretty obvious that the bar environment plus amplified music would not work well at that time. I hope they do other Saturday-night, as opposed to Friday-night, concerts soon! So instead, I vegged alternately in front of the computer and the TV.

( Pico-reviews )

food tricks

This evening we went to an SCA household dinner. The theme was "old foods"; since I had failed to come up with any ideas around the "green and fuzzy" theme, we opted for what we hoped was entertainingly-faked documentation instead. We knew the host likes devilled eggs (as do I), so we told her we were bringing "devilled dodo eggs", and brought a facsimile of the recipe in the original hiroglyphics to prove it. Ok, maybe Mark Twain's "Diary of Adam and Eve" isn't really a primary source. :-)

I wanted to color the eggs in some way, just to give them an unusual appearance. I thought that I would get a purple hue by simmering them for a few hours in beet juice (with some white wine to help leech out color), but what I actually got was brown, not purple. Which was ok -- just unexpected. (I boiled the eggs, then rolled them around to crack the shells, and then simmered those. I completely peeled one egg to act as a color indicator, so I could check progress easily. On the other eggs I got a nice mottled effect.)

I have seen deep purple hard-boiled eggs. It's a striking effect with devilled eggs -- a nice contrast to the yellow filling. I wonder whether the process involved natural agents or chemicals.

We should take a turn for dinner sometime in the next several months, so I would like to grab a date around Purim and do "disguised foods". As part of this, I need to hit up my friend Yaakov for his "ham" recipe; I visited him for Purim last year and had this, and it was a remarkable imitation of real ham! I'm especially impressed because I'm pretty sure Yaakov has never tasted the real thing. (He called it "vam", so I infer that it's really veal. I don't actually know; Yaakov can say "here, taste this" to me and I'll do it without further questions.)