Entries tagged with restaurants

Entry tags:

weekend

Friday night was our "mostly musical Shabbat" service, which we're now doing on the first Friday of each month (except maybe not in the summer). We have a home-grown band, now, which is fun. Some day I may join them. (I'd bring the drums, not try to play dulcimer. There would be too many logistical challenges around transportation and tuning for the dulcimer to be feasible.)

Saturday we went to the AEthelmearc Academy (SCA event), which was held at Seton Hill College (universtiy?) in Greensburg. It's a really pretty campus. (Looked to be pretty unfriendly to wheelchairs; I'm glad a local member who was using a wheelchair last year isn't using one now.)

Dani spotted a poster on campus advertising a field trip to Giant Eagle and WallMart. The campus is not exactly downtown, so while you could walk to those locations, it'd be a shlep and you wouldn't want to do it carrying groceries. So this makes sense, but it never would have occurred to me.

The event was pleasant. There weren't many classes that particularly interested me, but I ended up at some that were pretty decent. One of the classes I specifically wanted to attend got cancelled, unfortunately (instructor didn't make it to the event). The overall feel was pretty casual; I've seen university-style events that were higher pressure for the instructors, but this didn't seem that way.

The school provided the food. It was very good for catered food -- not really medieval in content or ambience, but no one expected it to be (given the catering) so that's not a problem. It did look like they ran out of some things before everyone got through the line; I assume this is due to the too-common SCAdian tendency to take large portions.

At the end of the day they put out some fruit and bags of potato chips/pretzels/etc, and there were a lot of leftovers. I noticed that our college students were grabbing some extras; when the autocrat announced that people should take the leftovers home, they went into full starving-student mode. It was kind of cute -- kind of like Halloween, sack and all. :-)

The event ended around 6:30 (no feast). We failed to find a local restaurant without a long line, so we just headed back to Pittsburgh. (Well, first we bumbled around a little, because the directions to the site didn't reverse neatly and, ahem, some drivers just won't ask for directions. But we found the highway entrance and all was good.)

After we dropped off our passengers Dani and I went to Indian Oven, a newish restaurant in Squirrel Hill. It replaced Platters and is, alas, no longer kosher. It has a significant vegetarian and adequate vegan menu, though.

We both got samplers (meat for him, veggie for me), and we both liked the food a lot. Service was a bit slow due to a sub-optimal waiter:customer ratio. But I'd definitely go back. The vegetable korma (ordered at a spice level of 7) was nicely zippy and not mushy. The mattar paneer (one of my standard benchmarks) was nice but not excellent. The raita was very good, as were the green and red chutneys. The spiced tea (with cream) was evocative of chai.

This afternoon I finally took down the sukkah. Sometime before next year I'm going to take the vertical poles to be cut down a foot or so (a friend has the relevant power tool for cutting metal tubing), so that next year I won't have to do awkward things involving a ladder to put it up. I don't need my sukkah to be 8 feet tall; 7 would be fine.

Tonight was a pleasant dinner with ralphmelton and lorimelton. Dessert was a nice pumpkin cake with whipped cream; Lori mixed some powdered ginger into the cream before whipping it, which added a nice effect. I'll have to remember that. (Ok, whom am I kidding? When's the last time I whipped cream rather than buying it that way? But hey, I might...)

Entry tags:

Shabbat (mostly)

We sometimes have baby namings at Shabbat services. This week we had one (for a family I don't know); the two mothers and their other two children gathered on the bima along with the newest addition to the family. I did not hear anyone say anything about the makeup of the family, either negative or positive -- it was just another family. That's refreshing.

The morning torah-study group reached the part in Numbers where God gives prophecy to the seventy elders so Moshe won't have to do everything himself (this is near the end of chapter 11). The text tells us that in addition to the seventy, there were two men -- Eldad and Medad -- who also got in on this, though they didn't join the others at the tent of meeting. Joshua hears about this and gets upset, apparently because they're encroaching on Moshe's territory or something. But since prophecy is clearly something that is done at God's instigation -- or, at the very least, with God's cooperation -- how could that be? I don't see anything in the text to imply that Eldad and Medad did anything; it's not like they were stow-aways or something. My read is that they were in the camp going about their business and -- blam -- they were prophesying. We didn't get to most of the commentaries today, so we'll return to this next week.

This probably means we`'re going to also talk about the people gorging on heaven-sent quail next week, because that's next in the text. My rabbi pointed out the coincidental timing with Halloween. :-)

Someone said that the Christian denomination whose members sometimes "speak in tongues" are basing that on this. Apparently (and I welcome correction here!), the idea is that when God talks to you it transcends language, and you say things that sound like coherent text to you but gibberish to everyone else. I'd heard of speaking in tongues before, of course, but didn't know it was tied to the idea of prophecy. (I wasn't sure what it was.) I always thought the point of prophecy was to convey God's words to everyone else (the prophet is just a vehicle), which would require doing so in a language your listeners understand. If this description of speaking in tongues is correct, that seems to be something that's about the speaker personally (and God), not about a message to the community.

Tonight after Shabbat we went to Hunan Kitchen, the successor (or reincarnation, or something) of Zen Garden in Squirrel Hill. It's no longer a purely vegetarian restaurant, but there are still plenty of vegetarian dishes on the menu. The meal was good except for the sizzling-beef incident. Someone at another table ordered something that comes sizzling in a skillet; apparently something went wrong and the dish emitted a great deal of smoke only after it got to the table. Everyone in the place was coughing. It was actually kind of funny, as the cough migrated outward from ground zero. (We weren't affected for the first minute or so, but then we were a little.) I didn't notice what happened to the dish in all this.

Entry tags:

restaurants,
sigdoc

SIGDOC, first evening

Tonight at the opening reception I spent some time talking with Bob Newman. In doing the "so what does your company do?" thing, I told him about CoMotion and CPOF and he seemed very interested. He sees what we do as "design of communication" -- not all communication involves words, after all, and the principles that apply to organizing data are sometimes the same ones that apply to organizing documentation. This is a good point. (Unbeknownest to me, the "DOC" in "SIGDOC" actually changed from "documentation" to "design of communication" a couple years back, in part to attract a broader audience.)

It turns out that Bob is the chair of next year's conference, and the theme is "documenting and designing for pervasive information". He would like to see a paper submission from us. Now maybe he says that to all the writers, but it's worth thinking about. (And the conference doesn't conflict with the high holy days next year either, so I could theoretically go.)

After the reception a couple guys from SAS in Raleigh and I headed out for dinner. One of them had been to Memphis before, so we let him guide us to Beale Street. It's hard to tell from just tonight's data points, but my tentative conclusion is that vegetarians are just SOL in this town, or at least on Beale Street. (I haven't looked into the hotel restaurant yet.)

The hotel is pretty spiffy, especially for the price ($95 plus tax). I have a two-room suite with microwave and fridge, though there are no dishes so I assume the microwave is intended for frozen dinners or something. There's a TV in each room (which is two more than I need but there's plenty of space so I don't care), and free network access (wired) in the room. The one downside is that my room is just off the lobby and it's noisy in the outer room, but the noise doesn't seem to carry into the bedroom so I don't care all that much.

This laptop is much worse than the one I borrowed this summer in one respect: legibility. More specifically, I can't find any controls, physical or digital, that affect contrast and brightness, and the defaults are harsh (to me). Dell laptop running XP Professional, in case anyone's got ideas. (The "native" resolution is also high for such a small screen, so I've got fonts cranked up both at the OS level and in my apps. But still, the brightness makes it hard to use.)

Entry tags:

harp music, and random bits

(For those who've asked, "random bits" are longer than "short takes".)

Last night I adapted a piece of music for (folk) harp for the first time. Mind, I don't play harp -- but I've been around those who have enough to have some basic clues, so when a friend asked me if I could render a four-part a-capella piece for harp and singer for her wedding, I agreed to give it a shot. It was an interesting exercise; harp is kind of like piano in terms of how you think about the hands, but has the twist of also having to plan for when to flip the sharping levers for accidentals. (Doing so requires that you take one hand off the strings, so right after a long note is a good time to do this.)

After I completed my first draft I talked with the harpist. She says she doesn't have sharping levers. Oops; how did I miss that? So I'll see if I can arrange around them. At which point we move from "music that is a subset of the original" to "music that is slightly different from the original". Fortunately, it's rennaissance music and I know how not to do anything egregious there. Still, it's a fun challenge.

One of my cats (Baldur) has taken to meowing persistently in the early mornings (around 6am), almost every day, for minutes at a time. He's 11 years old and this is a recent change (last couple months). I have been unable to correlate it with anything else going on in the house. His last physical was in January and he was fine, and he doesn't do this at other times. Do the kitty psychologists in my reading audience have any theories?

Today my shell-account provider had a scheduled OS upgrade. When they came back online, SSH was behaving oddly for me. It told me the host key had changed (not surprising), and I chose the "accept for this session only" option. (Hey, I'm paranoid -- even though I know that should be ok, I want to see the right things happen before making the permanent change.) At that point SSH bounced me on a permission error (I never got to the password) -- repeatedly. On a whim, I said to just accept the key -- and everything was fine. What the heck? Now that I think about it, though, I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to me a few years ago -- so maybe if I write it down this time I'll actually remember next time.

Asian restaurants tend toward the "spiciness on a scale of 1 to 10" meme. Of course, one restaurant's "7" might not resemble another one's "7" -- or even its own on a different day. But there's a bigger issue: is this supposed to depend on the dish you order? What does it mean to order Moo Goo Gai Pan to a spiciness of 9, or Kung Pao Chicken to a spiciness of 1? If you do that, does the cook just shrug and make the dish normally, or what? (Mind, I have little personal experience with numbers in the bottom two-thirds of the scale...) This thought brought to you by the data-collection effort going on at my place of employment to attempt to determine the pattern, if any, of spice levels at the nearby Thai restaurant.

I enjoyed this entry on the dynamics of ladies' nights at bars.

Why can't people who use auto-reply systems when they're on vacation learn to configure them to not send such messages to posters on mailing lists? Sheesh. For mail that was sent directly to you, go wild -- but if I post to a mailing list with several hundred subscribers, I really don't need to be told about the ten specific subscribers who are on vacation this week.

Entry tags:

random bits

Turnout for choir practice has been small for a while, and for a few months I've been the only person on my part. I'm actually enjoying that; I think I'm doing a good job with it, and it's easier for me to blend with the rest of my section. :-) (Sadly, we just lost

ommkarja, a fine alto, to the west coast. Hope your drive out is going smoothly!)

Sunday night we joined a crowd at Joe's Basement for dinner to celebrate Ralph's birthday. Mmm, good food. It turns out they no longer take reservations for the Pope Room and our party was too large anyway. I forgot to hunt it down so I could find out what the fuss is about. Given the level of kitsch in the rest of the place, it's got to be pretty impressive!

Sunday morning I was beginning to think thoughts about window air conditioners. Sunday afternoon the temperature dropped more than 20 degrees in one hour. Today brought frost warnings. Ahem. Someone failed to read the spec; this is not normative spring weather.

Someone I know just returned from an assignment in the middle east, where he encountered a peculiar weather phenomenon. He observed that there was a lot of dust in the air and that there was impending rain, and that the latter should take of the former. Well, yes and no -- it rained mud. :-)

I now have evidence that my intermittent "monitor" problems are actually graphics-card problems. I'm guessing the connection is a little loose, because I have found a reliable place on the side of the CPU case where a gentle rap fixes the problem. It's nice to know that the monitor I just replaced (for other reasons) is still in good shape, though. Eventually I'll sweet-talk Dani into carrying it down two flights of stairs and it can replace the definitely-flaky, smaller monitor on the file server. We have VNC running on it so it's not that big a deal, but still...

Entry tags:

weekend

This year's bunny melt (hosted as always by

ralphmelton and

lorimelton) was a great success. The fondue was easy to manage, neither too hot nor too cold, and we had vast quantities of food. We also got to see

dr4b, visiting from Seattle, which was nice. Note for next year: it looked like a pound (or maybe a pound and a half) of chocolate bunnies will suffice. (I think we had another three pounds or so that didn't get melted down.)

Saturday night at a restaurant we were given a "pager", a gadget that would flash when our table was ready. (And this was with reservations. :-) ) The pager is a hunk of plastic that also serves as a coaster; it says so right on it. (I guess they want you to go into the bar and wait.) While waiting, we read the advertising on the coaster, which said that such-and-such brand (yeah, I've already forgotten -- not very effective advertising) was the perfect pager for restaurants, bars, something else, and church nurseries. Church nurseries?? Dani tried asking the hostess (she said she'd be happy to answer questions), but she had no enlightenment for us.

Saturday's mail brought a letter from my health-insurance company with a $7 coupon for Allavert, an OTC allergy drug. (If the coupon is for $7, I shudder to think what the stuff actually costs.) The letter first said that OTC drugs are better than prescription because you don't need to see your doctor -- and then went on to say that before changing medicines you should consult your doctor. Their spin-meisters need some remedial training. Of course we all know that the real reason they're doing this is that OTC drugs don't involve any insurance pay-outs. I think I would have respected them more if they'd pursued a "...and that helps us keep your rates down" line of reasoning, but they didn't.

We've now (re-)watched B5 through the end of season 3. I suppose you could say it ends on a cliff-hanger. :-) We have B5 season 4 and West Wing season 3 DVDs waiting for us now. We tend to be pretty busy and only see a couple episodes of anything per week, so this will last a while.

Short takes:

The bachelor and the dust bunny, via metahacker.

"There's an amazing variety of things to do in Pittsburgh. It's just that all those events share the same three parking spaces, and two of those spots are staked out with folding chairs." -- innerbitch_rss.

Entry tags:

restaurants,
viz

short takes

Happy birthday

lorimelton! We just returned from a celebratory dinner.

RoboHelp is probably not the doc tool for me, but I've got another 14 days on my evaluation copy to decide. It becomes increasingly clear that if I want to improve the feature set for my documentation, I'm going to need to venture into the land of DocBook. I hope they've got one well-documented, simple example somewhere in all of that information.

I am taking advantage of everyone else's holiday to banish the marketing-ish overview in my doc set to its own doc set (named "marketing"), so I can replace it with one more suitable to a technical audience that has already bought the product. I haven't really deleted anything, so anyone who wants to take over the new document and make it even more marketing-ish is free to do so. In fact, I encourage it. I think my change will be a fait accompli before the proponent of the marketing-uber-allis approach notices. Bwahaha.

There was no choir practice last night, so we went out to Chaya for dinner. (I might have cooked if I had remembered tonight's outing, or if I had found out before 8:15 that there was no choir.) Mmm, good sushi and a chef who understands the directive "kosher species only". It's rare that I can order a platter instead of a-la-carte at a sushi bar. We saw a couple of my coworkers, though they didn't notice me until Dani asked who I was waving to and I named names. Then we went home and watched two more episodes of Babylon 5. "The Long Twilight Struggle" just gets better every time I see it.

Tomorrow night we're going to see RotK. Should be fun.

Entry tags:

restaurants

foody bits

ommkarja and I had lunch at Mallorca today. I would like to figure out how to replicate the tuna with pepper sauce (pepper like in black, not like in bell). The fish was very moist and tender; I wonder if it was pan-seared rather than baked.

They have huge bottles of wine running along the wall. Huge, like in a gallon or more -- and good wines; this is not the cheap stuff that you would expect to come in gallon bottles. (I saw no price list. I suspect it follows the "if you have to ask..." rule.) Our server helpfully explained that if we got one of those bottles and finished it while there, it would be on the house. Our response was something like, "nah, not for lunch on a work day". :-) This did lead us to speculate, unproductively, about the maximum group size and meal duration that could be used in such an effort.

Tonight after the board meeting I baked banana bread for a party on Saturday night. (I need to make a salad for a different party on Saturday night, but I'll just do that before we go.) The turkey breast for Shabbat dinner is pre-cooking now (Ralph, it's the recipe you fed us not long ao). I feel so domestic on Thursday nights. :-)

And I got my latkes tonight (shul fund-raiser). Mmm, latkes.

Entry tags:

weekend

Busy weekend!

( Simchat Torah )

( SCA: baronial investiture )

( Sunday with family )

( Sunday dinner )

All in all, a fun and busy weekend.

Entry tags:

dinner++

Tonight we went to Sitar (which does not seem to have a web site; tsk) with friends. It's an Indian restaurant with a nice variety of tasty dishes. Definitely recommended. Alas, they did not have the goat that Dani was seeking, so he had to settle for lamb. I got tandoori fish (I'd never heard of non-chicken tandoori). On reflection, that probably wasn't smart kashrut-wise; I failed to remember that a tandoori oven is clay, not metal. Oops. A couple other people got vegetarian dishes, so we were able to share.

The descriptions of dishes, while being passed, suffered some signal degradation: "one of the lamb dishes", "vegetarian something-or-other", "meat, um chicken?, with spinach", and so on. Fortunately, we were all somewhat aware of what had been ordered, so we only needed to disambiguate, not fully specify.

Later my mother called to try to figure out when we can get together. (Her birthday is Saturday.) This turned out to be challenging:

Her: Saturday?
Me: It's Rosh Hashana. Sunday?
Her: Your father has [schedule conflict]. Next Sunday?
Me: Well, Yom Kippur is that night, but we could do lunch.
Her: If that's a problem, what about Saturday the 11th?
Me to self: Do I want to explain to them about eating in the sukkah?
Me to her: Um, that's Sukkot. Let's go back to that previous Sunday...
Her: What's Sukkot?
Me: One of several holidays that are going to complicate this exercise for the next few weeks. :-)

Later I ended up explaining Sukkot to her anyway (quickie version) and she said it sounded neat, so if we decide that next Sunday doesn't work, they'll come out for Sukkot lunch or something.

Entry tags:

restaurants

Zen Garden

Dani and I went to Zen Garden, the new vegetarian restaurant in Squirrel Hill, after Shabbat tonight. I've been wanting to check it out for a few weeks now.

It was good if unconventional. Most of the items on the menu seemed to involve fake meat (I noticed chicken, beef, ham, duck, lamb, and shellfish variations). Most of the dishes were "oriental-oid", though there were other things too. I'm surprised that they didn't raid the Indian cusine for dishes, a lot of which are traditionally vegetarian and wouldn't have required modification.

We started with an assortment of dumplings. Dani then had the "zen salad", which was a nice mix of veggies and fruit (including fresh mango) with a tasty dressing. I got the "sizzling special" (I don't actually remmeber what the noun was, but it was "sizzling" something and under the "chef's specials"). This was an assortment of conventional stir-fry veggies with crispy wheat gluten in an orange-szechuan sauce. It was tasty but not as zingy as the little "hot food" icon next to the menu entry implied.

I have never before encountered wheat gluten as a thing unto itself, and I don't really know what it was that I ate. (I haven't checked Cookwise yet.) It had the consistency of fried tofu, sort of, and was pretty good (though I think that was aided substantially by the sauce, as is tofu). I know that wheat contains gluten by default and that there are recipes for gluten-free bread for those who can't tolerate it, but I guess I had mentally classified "gluten" into the "chemical" bucket, along with things like sodium and caffeine and vitamin D -- things you might add or subtract from food, but not food in its own right. You learn something new every day. :-)

Naturally, I haven't a clue how to explain this meal to my nutrition-tracking software. On the possibly-faulty theory that the wheat gluten is probably meant to be a protein source, I treated it as tofu. (I asked, and they do not have any sort of nutrition information that they can give to customers.)

Oh, and dessert. I had tofu cake. I am not making this up. It resembled cheesecake, and came topped with blueberries. It worked.

I would happily go back there again. There are a lot of things on the menu that sound intriguing.

I think they are technically vegetarian and not vegan, unless the cheesecake on the dessert menu was a fake. (I didn't ask.) I didn't notice obvious animal products in most of the items on the menu, though -- the cheesecake may have been the only indicator of non-vegan status.

Entry tags:

short takes

Friday night my rabbi gave a wonderful sermon. At the oneg I told him he should put it on the web site so it could be shared more widely (he does this very occasionally), and he said he had done it all from notes, not a written copy. Drat!

My torah portion (for the Shabbat after next) is in pretty good shape. I was able to do the whole thing, with some hesitation but no non-recoverable errors, from the unpointed text tonight. Not cold, though; I practiced for a while before doing that. I'm meeting my rabbi for study on Wednesday and I'll chant it for him then (he asked to hear all of us).

A new vegetarian restaurant called Zen Garden opened yesterday a few blocks from home. Unfortunately, while they're usually open until 11 on Saturdays, last night they closed early due to some logistics stuff. (They got a lot more people than they expected, they said.) So we'll have to check it out some other time. Soon, I hope; I picked up a menu and it looks pretty good. And an all-vegetarian restaurant means I don't have to worry about cross-contamination in the kitchen; I can eat there and be confident of kashrut issues.

Tonight we watched two more episodes of Babylon 5. We've now covered up through "A Distant Star". There have been many episodes that I'm enjoying more on the re-watch (actually re-re-watch, and sometimes re-re-re-watch) than I did before. Some of it's time (been a few years); some of it's picking up subtleties that I missed before; some of it's probably the absence of commercial breaks.

My scanner is acting up. It might be time to bite the bullet and just acknowledge that scanner technology has improved significantly in the last, um, six or seven years. :-)

Entry tags:

weekend

Saturday morning's Torah study was very interesting. I'm planning to write more about that separately, later.

Saturday evening was

ralphmelton and

lorimelton's party. I had a lot of fun chatting with people (and eating yummy food). The mix was a little different from their last few parties -- more neighbors, fewer co-workers, and few SCA people. I guess most of the SCA folks who would otherwise have been there were at Ice Dragon. (I've lost my stamina for Ice Dragon. It's far away, it's very large and busy, and now I can't even eat unless I shlep food from Pittsburgh. I was disappointed to miss Katja's peerage elevation, but will have to make it up to her at some other event.)

Before the party we went to Chaya, a small Japanese restaurant that we haven't managed to go to before now. (They've been there for about a year, I think. But they only have about 5 tables, and they don't take reservations.) On a lark, and because we were in Squirrel Hill, I asked the waiter: "If I ordered a sushi platter but wanted only kosher species of fish, would that be meaningful to you?" He said sure, no problem; they do it all the time. Wow! A sushi place where I don't have to order a la carte! I enjoy getting the "variety plates" because they let the sushi chef use his judgement about what's good/interesting today.

And the sushi was wonderful -- fresh, generous portions, and amazingly-good wasabi and ginger. (They grind the wasabi themselves -- no powdered mixes need apply.) I would happily go there again.

Tonight we are hosting Sunday dinner, as the party probably trashed Ralph and Lori's house (and/or them). I have put the power of modern technology to work: the crock pot and the bread machine are both preparing dinner while I write this. And I guess it's about time to give the washer and dryer some attention.

Entry tags:

restaurants

Buca di Beppo

What a strange restaurant. I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Last night, to celebrate lorimelton's birthday, a bunch of us went to a restaurant I had not previously heard of, Buca di Beppo. Now let's start with the name. For some reason, I had trouble maintaining this name in memory, because there were no hooks. Those weren't personal names or place names I'd ever heard before, and they weren't familiar-sounding words, and the pattern suggested that at least one of them should have been recognizable. I actually internalized it as "two two-syllable 'B' words connected by an article or preposition", and figured there wouldn't be two places in the same block that matched that description. So, off we went.

The neon sign out front said "elegant dining". We met ralphmelton at the door and said that we hoped we were dressed well enough (we were wearing jeans); he said not to worry. Lori then led us inside, where we got our first glimpse of the decor. She particularly wanted to show us their statue of David, to demonstrate once and for all that "elegant" had a different meaning here. Most replicas of classical statues that I've seen have not been painted bright purple. This particularly statue was not especially unusual for the place; I saw several others, all brightly-painted, some augmented with other decorations. (I believe it was Venus who had the flower garland draped around her neck.)

The walls were completely covered with photos, paintings, tchachkes, strange newspaper/magazine clippings, and assorted goofy stuff. I saw a sign addressed to the staff that said "food is not a weapon", and another that said "state law forbids threatening customers and their children". This does not begin to describe the decor, really.

The restaurant is on three floors and is divided into a bunch of small rooms. Lori said she hoped we didn't get the "pope room". Pope room? Yes, so-named because of the large statue of the pope in the center. We never saw it; I assume it wasn't treated any more seriously than the parts of the place we did see. We ended up in the "cardinal room". This did not involve birds. (There was no statue; the name derived from the hat hanging on the center wall.)

Really, though, "X room" (for any value of X) would imply far more of a unifying theme to the room's contents than is accurate. Maybe each room is simply named for its most prominent piece.

On our way to our table we walked past the kitchen, and the hostess made a point of saying that it's an open kitchen and we were free to walk in and look around. (I assume they had some areas blocked off from customers, for health-code reasons if nothing else.) I should have gone to take a look, to satisfy my curiosity about the logistics, but I didn't.

The food (Italian) was very good. Note, though, that this is not a place to take a date, unless you're double- or triple-dating. The food is served family-style, and each dish you order feeds 4-6. Our group of 11 ordered three entrees, two salads, and a couple appetizers, and there was some food left over.

The cheese-stuffed manicotti was very good, as were both salads (one mixed greens, one ceaser). The other two entrees had meat in them, so I didn't eat them, but those who did had good things to say about both. The garlic bread was tasty and actually had perceptible real garlic, not just garlic powder mixed in with the butter.

We brought our own birthday cake and the staff loaded it up with candles. They also brought a large candle in a two-foot-high holder and put that right in front of Lori. She had to stand up to blow it out. I wondered what the staff was going to sing, in these days of copyright/royalty demands on the traditional melody, but we started singing before they could take control. We sang and they shouted Lori's name at the appropriate time.

It was a fun evening. I would go there again, if we had a large-enough group. You could do it with six, if everyone can agree on one entree, but eight is probably better.

Entry tags:

movies,
restaurants

Harry Potter

Last night we joined

lefkowitzga and

tangerinpenguin for dinner at PF Chang (very good!) and Harry Potter (ok).

Food: PF Chang is apparently a chain, and they have some "signature" dishes. One of these is the "lettuce wraps", which are sort of like moo-shoo but with lettuce instead of pancakes. We got the vegetarian ones and they were very good. The "ma-po tofu" was also very good, with a tasty sauce that was not especially hot. (I would like to learn to cook tofu like this, and I don't know what the secret is to get pieces that are firm, almost "crispy" on the edges, and thoroughly cooked.) We also had the baked fish (tilapia, yesterday) with ginger. Mmm, ginger. The carnivores at the table ate two other dishes that I can't comment on.

Movie (without spoilers): It had some very funny bits (including a great one at the very end of the closing credits). Technically and acting-wise, it was pretty well-done. It was entertaining. It was not as good as the first one. And it had some character behavior that was either nonsensical or insufficiently justified; I gather it's the same in the books, which I have not read. So overall, it gets an "ok" from me.

I can suspend disbelief pretty easily for most things -- technology, alien worlds, magic, alternate history, even hard sciences to a degree. Just show me the ground rules of the story's world, and I can roll with it (even Star Trek, most of the time). But I've found that I cannot hold out against characters who behave in ways that do not fit with their characters as we've been given to understand them. I can't easily suspend disbelief about behavior. And in this movie, either some key characters (one in particular) behaved nonsensically, or their motivations were not sufficiently explained.

( Here there be spoilers. )

Short takes:

That phoenix is pretty cool!
That poor owl -- not even a seat belt. :-)
How did they do the elf? Was it a puppet, or CGI, or what? It worked well as comic relief. The part at the end was fun.
I was surprised to see Haggart with a fairly normal pet, after last time.
"Can you tell me?" "Yes." Perfect.
I take it that Hermione is similar to Jason Fox in her attitude toward school. :-)
Oh, and this was definitely a much classier grade of commercials than I was used to. The trailers were a mixed bag (there's some animated thing coming up that looks really, really stupid). But no LOTR trailer! There was supposed to be an LOTR trailer!

Entry tags:

short takes

We went to a new (to me) restaurant today, Atria on Rt. 19 (Dormont? Mt. Lebanon?). There's one near where Dani works. I had a very good tuna salad -- grilled? tuna with lettuce, apples, dried cherries, walnuts, and a tasty dressing that I couldn't identify. It's one of their seasonal specials, though, not part of the regular menu. (The regular menu seemed to be short on things I can eat, but I could find something there when this salad goes away. And I've got to remember to find out once and for all if catfish is kosher; I've been told both that it is and that it isn't, and I need to remember to just ask my rabbi.)

Last night we went to Serena's 60th-birthday party. We saw Thaddeus, who I haven't seen since his wedding about a year ago. He's doing well, and is trying to make a business of glasswork. (He makes beads and jewelry and similar small items. He's good, from what I've seen. I wonder how you build a market in that area.)

I have leftover cookies. It was my turn to bake for the kiddush Saturday, and I took some to Serena's party. I wonder what the best way is to dispose of the rest without eating them myself. I've been good so far; it would be a shame for that to stop. :-) (Maybe I'll take them to work.)

It appears to be impossible to buy a matching desk (not computer desk) and hutch from a single supplier. I think I should just give up and mount the bracket-style shelves above a plain desk. Sigh.

Seth and Karen should be happily married by now. Mazel tov!

Entry tags:

restaurants

food discovery

Hey, we finally have Thai here on the south side! From the menu: "Thai Me Up: you're bound to like it". In about half an hour I'll know if the food is as good as the name. :-)

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games,
restaurants

for the DDR crowd

Pump-it-up dreams

As you might conclude from the above, the choir crowd went to Dave & Busters last night instead of Gullifty's. The food was decent. There aren't that many places that can satisfy all our constraints: serves food after 10, not smoky or noisy, and provides options for a vegetarian and someone (else) who's lactose-intolerant. This seemed to work, though I didn't look closely at the meat options to see if there were sufficient non-dairy ones among them.

After we ate, Chris demonstrated Pump It Up and got Gail to play one round with him. It looks like it would be fun; maybe next time I'll try it. Or maybe I'll try to sneak over to Chris' or Deanna's house, ask the occupant to set up the game and then leave, and try it out in private. :-) (At my current level of exposure, Pump It Up and DDR are basically interchangable.)

Entry tags:

misc

Dani and I went to Casbah tonight to celebrate our anniversary. It was very nice. I got the halibut with cream-tomato sauce (described as "tomato fondue") over herbed riscotti, which was fabulous. Dani got the lamb in mustard sauce, which he thought was good but not as good as the fish. We also had a plate of assorted French cheeses with names I can't even spell, let alonr pronounce, and two of them were excellent. Dani wrote the names down so we can go looking for them.

This morning we had another air-conditioner contractor in. Based on a tip we got from my brother-in-law ("Mitsubishi ductless"), we found this particular contractor (who actually wants to sell us "Fujitsu ductless" for about a third less). The way it works is they put a unit on an outside wall (up by the ceiling, where it's out of the way), run a small duct through that wall to the outside of your house, and run that down to a compressor. It's not a central-air solution, but this contractor thought that two of these (in specific locations) augmented by a ceiling fan in the hall would cool the second floor. I have no idea what this costs, but he'll send us a bid. Meanwhile, one of Dani's coworkers told him that window air conditioners have gotten much quieter recently, so we may try to go browsing. I don't know how Dani will evaluate noise, though, and he's the one with the noise complaint. I can sleep through a running window AC with no problem. Snoring bothers me; white noise doesn't.

We also had a plumber in this morning to look at a drainage problem we're having. He's convinced that we need to dig up our yard (and tear up our patio, and tear down our fence so they can get the equipment in) and replace the main sewer line. We declined. They want to charge us $10k (excuse me, $9995 -- sound suspicious?) to do this work; that's an awful lot of semi-annual $100 visits from people with snakes. I am curious whether there is a solution that involves blasting high-pressure water through the line periodically to clear out gunk, but I didn't think of that until this evening.

I came home tonight to find the bulb in the light socket under the basement steps "broken". It was off, so I thought it was burned out. I grabbed the bulb to start twisting, and a hunk of glass came off in my hands. (The plumber was working there, so I'm betting he bumped it with his snake or something.) This left me with the question of how to remove the remnants of the bulb from a socket that might or might not be live right now. (Hmm, which way is it toggled?) I couldn't trace the line to the breaker box, so we ended up having to power-cycle the house. Whee. But it's fixed now. Needle-nose pliers are your friend.

I think I will be disappointed by the end of the TV show "Earth: Final Conflict". With 5 episodes to go in the 5-year arc, the final battle with the aliens does not seem especially imminent. The final episode of the series is called "Final Conflict", suggesting that this is where the fight will occur. I had kind of hoped that the fight would happen a bit earlier so that we could see the effect of all of this on the people of earth (assuming earth wins the battle, of course -- this is Roddenberry, so I bet they do). I think we're going to end with a firefight and no afterward. That's disappointing.

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Shabbat report

Saturday morning at Torah study we were talking about "peace offerings" again, so I asked how often this was done. Was this a special occasion, or did you do this any time you wanted to eat meat, or what? (The rabbi had said something in passing about how this was your chicken for Shabbat.) He said it's a good question and he's not sure; he believes that if you were in the "temple district", so to speak, then yes, you had to take it to the temple as a korban, and give the priests and God their shares, before you could eat it. If you were farther away, though, he's not sure; he said it didn't seem likely that people were expected to come from all across Canaan, let alone points farther away. (Of course, in the desert no one was that far from the mishkan, so this wouldn't have been such an issue.)

Perhaps ironically, my mishna study group, which is doing Tractate Pesachim, has just gotten to the practical details of how so many lambs can be slaughtered in such a short period of time. Every Jew was required to bring a lamb on erev Pesach, which would then be eaten at the seder. Obviously people could team up (you can't save leftovers), so that's one per large family or perhaps pair of families. But that's still an awful lot of lambs, and they only had a few hours in which to perform the ritual. I'm curious about how this will play out...

Friday night we had a guest speaker who is involved with the Holocaust Center in Pittsburgh. (I didn't know we had one.) Sadly, he was not a very engaging speaker; he kept talking about his opportunities to get to know survivors and so on, some of whom were there that night, and I found that I would have been much more interested in hearing them speak. Oh well. Sometimes the pulpit guests work out well, and sometimes they don't. It frustrates me when I realize that I've lost the opportunity for a good sermon from my rabbi to one of the ones who didn't work out. (Ooh, I feel like such a groupie! But it's true; I almost always find what my rabbi says to be very interesting, and I look forward to his talks.)

Saturday my parents stopped by shortly after I got home. They were in the neighborhood and wanted to drop something off (Dani's Christmas present, as it turned out), and I invited them in for lunch. (On Shabbat I try to make sure there's extra food in the crock pot, so I have the option to bring someone home from services.) This was the first time they'd heard kiddush and motzi and stuff, and my father ended up asking me a bunch of questions about Shabbat. I think it's pretty nifty that he wants to know about this stuff. Among things, we went partway down the "what is forbidden work?" path.

Saturday night Dani and I went out to Prince of India in Oakland. We'd never been there before, but we had a coupon from the entertainment book and I'd been craving Indian food, so we tried it. I thought the food was pretty good, though not as good as Sitar. The service was slow. And we ended up not using the buy-one-get-one-free coupon because when we got there we saw a sign in the window that said "dinners half off 7-10pm". It's kind of the reverse of the typical early-bird special, I guess. We asked if that applied on a Saturday night and they said yes, so we took it. (The coupon doesn't stack with other offers, in case you're wondering.)

The food in general was pretty good; the papadam was excellent. I want to learn how to make that, but I've never seen a recipe. (This is that thin wafer made out of lentils. It usually has a bit of a kick from pepper. This certainly did.)