1. 5,000 blog hits and counting! Yahoo! To celebrate I made anna-panna-cotta. Followed my ice cream idol, David Lebovitz’ recipe. (His twitter is pretty good value.) Made it in bunches of little glasses and teacups. Though popping them out of their makeshift molds seems the traditional thing to do, I like leaving a little room at the top, then putting whichever topping right in the glass and eating it straight outta there. A few weeks ago I thought, hm, I bet you could reduce real-sugar-mexi Coke into a really sugary yummy sauce and put it on panna cotta. NOPE. Turns into tar. Too lazy to make a real sauce, so I blended strawberries, OJ, brown sugar, and cinnamon and poured it on top. Real good then.

2. I got the coolest friggin’ book. On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee. (Having looked it up on Amazon I now feel very ripped off and want to order it online and return my copy. Supporting the local economy, supporting the local economy, independent booksellers need love too, soothing myself.) Chef Eric of Nectar lore had recommended it long ago, but I kind of may have forgotten about it. Hoping to find a rogue copy of Ad Hoc at Home at the McCall bookshop, I saw it and decided I needed that giant book in my life. EXCELLENT PURCHASE. Especially for me, little curiosity-kins. As my dad knows from first-hand irritation, I’ve got a lot of questions. A lot of which are too obscure to articulate into Google-able form. McGee’s getting me all straightened out. It’s got everything. I’m on the milk chapter. We’ve covered the history of milk and dairy products, kinds of cows, yak butter, milk molecules, and I’m only four pages in. Flip to any page and you’ll get why an egg gets hard when you cook it, why animal muscles taste the way they do, how ice cream works at a molecular level, and so on and so on, a veritable bible for the culinarily curious.

p.s. Wondering why I’m blogging so much lately? Online summer school, procrastination, boredom. Perfect blogging storm.

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