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Adventures In Photogenic Cuisine, Part the next

Tonight we made four-cheese farfalle, which is fancy-pants talk for bow-tie pasta and cheese, but ooh boy, is it good. It's a recipe from the Gourmet magazine cookbook, and involves pecorino Romano, mozzarella, Fontina, and Gorgonzola, along with half a stick of butter and most of a pint of whole milk. A triumph. Our arteries are hardening as we speak, but this one's a keeper.

We're also beginning to get our act together on the wedding-planning front. I hope everyone likes Chinese food.

Curse Of The Golden Flower

Went to see the latest movie from the director of Hero and House of Flying daggers last night - apparently the most expensive movie ever produced in China. We were hoping for a good kung fu movie, but were a bit disappointed. It's certainly a spectacle, but the plot isn't very satisfying. All of the characters are murderously insane, and most of them die by the end. Pfui. Maybe Stephen Chow will have a new movie out soon.

Culinary delights

Lots of excitement this weekend... Yann organized an expedition to Sardine, the new French restaurant down on the waterfront. It was pretty good. They've got Anchor Steam on tap, which is a good start, and both the trout I had and the salmon Anita got were excellent. Yummy desserts, too: molten chocolate cake with almond ice cream, and star anise creme brulée. We stayed away from the "oyster of the day".

We were there with a rather startlingly blond group of microbiology grad students. Madison may be the only place in the world where a person at one end of the table can start a sentence with "I went to a Norwegian college..." and a girl at the other end of the table will say, "Really? Me too...", and it turns out they went to different schools. And the conversation is largely about the quality of the lutefisk served at the dining halls. Oy.

And we ended up the evening with an epic game of Carcassone (won by Anita), which lasted into the wee hours of the morning. Ah, youth! I remember it well.

Required Reading

Everybody needs to stop what they're doing, truck on down to the library or bookstore, and get themselves a copy of Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril. Absolutely brilliant.

I mean to say, what's not to love about a book where Lester Dent and Walter Gibson (creators of Doc Savage and The Shadow, respectively) team up to solve the murder of H.P. Lovecraft in 1930's Chinatown? It's got kung fu villians, hideous monsters, blonde bombshells, lurkers in the darkness, conspiracies, and cowboys. Everything a red-blooded American boy could ever want.

And now I've got to go track down some old Doc Savage novels. Excuse me.