Entries tagged with bunny melt

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bunny melt

high tea and bunny melt

Yesterday afternoon we joined friends for their traditional high tea and bunny melt. The half-price bunnies, perhaps knowing their fate, had fled the stores this year by the time Pesach ended, but others had had better hunting. In the end this turned out not to matter anyway because after the "high tea" part we were all too full for fondue.

Ralph and Lori had acquired burnt almond torte mini-cakes from Prantl's. This is one of my my favorite cakes (if not my favorite), so that was a pleasant surprise. (I hadn't known they did single-serving cakes.) Lori had baked some wonderful scones, and there were other items too (including some nicely-spiced devilled eggs).

There were also some interesting candies. There was the white chocolate with miniature jellybeans embedded; you might not think that would work, but it does. (I think the jellybeans were mostly of the spiced varieties.) And then there were the miniature bunnies; the dark-chocolate ones had a red filling (raspberry?), which led to some curiosity about what was inside the orange ones. It was a light-colored cream filling, declared by another guest to be "white meat". Funny, it didn't taste like chicken.

We hadn't had time to prepare a food contribution. We considered bringing tea but didn't. That turned out to be for the best; there was quite a large quantity there already and it looked like our hosts would not have welcomed more.

This was fun. I should really get my act together to host gatherings; high tea need not be only on the Sunday after Easter, after all. :-)

Entry tags:

bunny melt

Last Sunday was Easter, so today was

ralphmelton and

lorimelton's annual bunny melt and high tea. It was quite a bit of fun, I met some new people (coworkers?), and the food was spectacular. (It's a pity no one thought to take pictures before we started eating.)

Lori suggested that this ritual meal needs a haggadah. I'll bet we can do something with that! This is the chocolate of affliction (leftovers at half price!); let all who are up to date on dental insurance come and eat. Ma nishtana: on most days we dip at most once but on this day we dip dozens of times; and on most days we eat our fruits plain but on this day we eat them with sugary goo. Four cups of tea is easy. I need to come up with something for the magid (the telling of the story). Err, that would require a story. :-)

In the evening some of us played a game that was new to me, Rum and Pirates. Each player (the game supports five) has a supply of pirates, which can be placed on the board to direct the active piece toward various special spaces. These spaces might provide victory points (or chances at same), or they might provide tools (such as money and free re-rolls of the die). The game is fun and not too complicated. According to the box it plays in 60-75 minutes; we took 90 but three of us had never played before. The game has a lot of parts (mostly chits), but -- unusual for such games these days -- it actually comes with a suitable plastic holder with the correct number of subdivisions. Most games give you a random assortment of compartments (or none at all) and you end up using zipper bags, which is a hassle if you have a lot of different types of pieces. Anyway, fun game; I'd definitely play again.

Entry tags:

bunny melt

bunny melt

This afternoon we joined

ralphmelton,

lorimelton, and several others for the by-now-traditional post-Easter bunny melt and high tea. We started with high tea, deferring the bunnies until later, and almost goofed: people were pretty full come slaughter time, but we proceeded anyway and were rewarded with a yummy fondue.

Lori made little tuna-salad sandwiches that were tastier than typical for tuna salad; the secret was that she used one of the spiced tuna fillets that come in foil packets, instead of canned tuna. That worked well! Half of the devilled eggs were nicely zippy; Ralph color-coded them, sprinkling paprika on the ones that had chipotles in them. There were many tasty baked goods, including cherry scones, English shortbread, and orange-flavored tartlets.

They had a nice black tea that was under-specified on the label; it was a black English tea (loose leaves, not bags), but beyond that, shrug. There were other teas too, but I liked this one so I stuck with it.

Before sacrificing the bunnies to the fondue pot it is customary to say a few words. Dani got the best laugh with something like "we dedicate to a higher purpose this bunny that wasn't good enough to be sold at full price". :-) Ralph told of a past bunny melt where a friend who wasn't there this year had blindfolded one of the bunnies before dealing the death blow with a larger-than-needed knife. The fondue is nice, but much of the fun of the bunny melt comes in the, err, execution.

It was a lovely afternoon during which we succeeded in keeping Louie (the most ambitioous of their cats) out of the food while chatting with friends and meeting a new co-worker of Ralph's. Bunny melts may only come once a year, but maybe we should have tea more often. (Maybe we'll host one and try to keep Erik out of the food. :-) )

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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:

short takes

Recently

apod (astronomy picture of the day) has had some stunning shots.

I found a large display of half-price Easter candy in the grocery store today when I went to get lunch. We were hard-pressed to find chocolate bunnies in a different store Tuesday, and decided then to settle for chocolate chicks for the annual bunny melt. So I picked up a couple bunnies today so we can be all proper about it. (The bunny melt involves the ritual slaughter of half-price bunnies followed, soon thereafter, by fondue. My friends are delightfully twisted.)

I used to file spam complaints, but it became clear that talking to the originating sites is a bad idea and the independent services required too much work, usually cut-and-paste into browser forms. Now that my mail provider is using a blacklist based on SpamCop, I decided to reconsider them. I figure it's in my best interest, as well as being a community service, to report spam that makes it past SpamAssassin to the organization that's producing our blacklist. Much to my delight, SpamCop now accepts forwarded email for reports. Unfortunately, you then have to go to a confirmation page when their auto-responder confirms receipt; this is apparently part of an effort to keep the spammers from attacking them with DOS attacks. (They also require a real email address.) It's not onerous, though, and it does let me see what information they distilled from the spam (along with running commentary like "yum, this spam is fresh!" if you send it in promptly).

Why do car speedometers compress the useful part of the scale so much? My current car uses about 300 degrees of a circle to display 0-160. More than half of that represents speeds I will never reach. It would be much more useful if they gave me more space for the lower part, either by a graduated scale (if the mechanics behind the dial permit it) or by truncating. In my previous car, the 12:00 position represented approximately 50 MPH; in my new car, that's 80.

This Pesach I sampled three different sorts of (identifiable) store-bought macaroons. The results: Manischevitz chocolate: good (thanks siderea). Rokeach almond: ok. Shabtai almond: yes!! (thanks lefkowitzga). The orange peel adds a lot to the flavor of the last. Pity I didn't find these earlier, but I'll know for next year.

Entry tags:

weekend

Friday night there was a bat mitzvah at services. I would be really, really happy if the congregation would institute two rules for Friday-night b'nei mitzvah: (1) no "parental greeting", and (2) the kid's d'var torah must be longer than the thank-you section. ( small rant )

Saturday morning one of our occasional attendees (a young man) told me that he's moving to Arizona in a couple weeks. It sounds like he's connected with the community there, which is good. I would be intimidated by moving, alone, across the country. I wish him well, and I told him to send email when he gets there.

Saturday night after dinner we went to

lefkowitzga's to hang out and play games, including the longest hand of Uno I have ever played. I was getting droopy around midnight (and knew we'd be meeting my parents in the morning), so we left around 12:30 or so.

Today was my father's 65th birthday. Our anniversary was a couple weeks ago. So we all went out to brunch and each of us thought we were treating the other. It was pretty funny. They gave us a nifty cheese knife and a very good vegetable peeler (Cutco). Good tools in a kitchen make a big difference! We took the cheese knife (along with some cheese) to Ralph and Lori's this afternoon; the knife was excessive for the soft cheese we were bringing, but the geek factor of playing with sharp objects prevailed. :-)

This afternoon was the annual bunny melt (and high tea). It was much fun, and we had vast quantities of food. The cats mostly behaved, though one of them (I assume Louie, but I didn't see it) attempted a close encounter with the remains of the fondue and was tossed across the room for his sins. Or so I gather; I wasn't in the room at the time.

I discovered this afternoon that I am still having hardware problems. My CD burner won't burn, and reading from a CD in the drive for more than about 30 seconds (I was attempting a software install) causes the machine to reboot. More side effects of the meltdown, I presume. It's all under warranty, but I don't want to be without my machine for several days again. Given that it's followup from the last repair, I'd really like it if I could make an appointment for a specific time to get it looked at. In other words, I want to wait in line at home. I'll bet I can't, but tomorrow I will call and ask.

Tonight Dani and I watched two more episodes of B5 (first season), "Signs and Portents" (important episode) and "TKO". I didn't care for "TKO" the first couple times I saw it, but this time it worked pretty well for me. (I never disliked the shiva plot; it was the martial-arts plot that didn't do anything for me.)

I had a geeky moment with the former plot. There is a point where someone says she's going to recite the "mourner's prayer" in English instead of in Hebrew. Last time I asw this episode I remember thinking, on hearing the English, "hey, that's not the mourners' kaddish". This time I recognized it for what it was (El molei rachamim). Cool; I'm getting literate. :-)