Our Stunning Conclusion

My potato bread does, in fact, kick impressive amounts of ass. (I may make it again tomorrow.) The soda bread is a bit ehh and dry, but I was kind of expecting that. Gangs of New York is still a pretty excellent movie that is woefully encumbered by a pointless, gratuitous, generic romantic subplot pastede on yay (and the last ~half hour should be its own extended music video or something).

From the Experimental Kitchen: not-a-Bellini-or-mimosa

We often have mimosas (mimosae?) with breakfast when people have stayed over, just 'cuz. Now, I like those fine, but I like Bellinis even more; but for some reason peach nectar is far, far harder to find in this time/space locale than when I was growing up. Papaya nectar I can find, but not peach; go figure.

This morning, since I had a bunch of getting-on-for-overripe pears that needed to be et, I thought I'd try it with pear nectar instead (something else I often would see as a kid). I peeled & cored them and stuck them in the blender and hit "liquefy". Whe it reached as homogenous as it was going to get, we added to champagne. This did not work so well as I'd hoped. The pears had been very sweet and flavorful, but for some reason this did not come through in the concoction. M noted that pears are tricky to use in cookery, and end up more subtle than you'd expect, which is why commercial pear nectar has a lot of sugar added. I said "ah hah" and glorped some Cointreau into the mix; this answered quite well.

A cat built entirely out of wood

I have been sitting here playing CoH, as I do. And Ranger came up and meowed for snuggly lap time, as he does. And he started rubbing his face against mine (which makes for *interesting* computer play, as you might guess) as usual.

What is different is that, ten minutes after he jumped down and went about his fuzzy business, I started breaking out in hives all over my cheek and arm, where he had been rubbing. If he was an outdoor cat, this might make some degree of sense; he could have gotten into evergreen sap or yew needles or something...but there is nothing in the house I am allergic to, at all.