on tasting table: “Chef Josiah Citrin is now serving a five-course, all-foie gras menu ($185 per person) nightly until California’s foie gras ban goes into effect on July 1.”
i’m not sure how i feel about this. that’s kind of like working kids overtime before new child labor laws go into effect. i may have to boycott melisse… i have principles.
“The rise of online tools has challenged designers’ sense of CONTROL in every discipline: the user has become a designer.” – Ellen Lupton, Thinking With Type
formosa martini
singapore sling
fujian cure
tea leaf salad
chicken pops
eggplant
whole branzino (thai style)
black rice (minus the sausage)
chiang mai noodles
complimentary dessert (what?!? who does that?!? sang yoon, evidently)
i am making bread today. it has been nearly a year since the last time i made bread. the water, the dough, the folding, the measuring, the setting of the timer. i really enjoy making bread, but perhaps i just enjoy the measuring and setting of the timer. :)
i’m reading meggs’ history of graphic design and am quite enjoying the primer. today, i came across this passage: “Even as a boy in Bloomington, Illinois, Frederic Goudy had a passionate love of letterforms. He later recalled cutting over three thousand letters from colored paper and turning the walls of the church he attended into a multicolored environment of Biblical passages.” awesome.
you know when you’re traveling and rain suddenly stops or starts? that’s what it was like today but with cold air.
when i left the house on my bike, it was overcast, windy and cold. i instantly regretted not wearing my helmet liner and more clothes. as soon as i reached 13th and san vicente, all i saw was blue sky and the ambient air was significantly warmer. on my return home, around 18th st, it became chilly again and all i saw was an overcast sky. boom! cold again!
don’t tell anyone, but i’m starting to think that santa monica is too cold for me. i’m thinking of moving inland. (shhhhhh, don’t tell anyone. and *whatever* you do, don’t. tell. m.)
10.65 miles / 47.55 minutes / 13.2 mph avg
the wind and rain over the weekend resulted in drifts all over the bike path that thwarted me and my skinny tires. fat tire bikes had fewer problems powering through but i know better than to risk it as i’ve already fishtailed on sand before. i took speedway for a bit which was a nice change of scenery and didn’t smell too much like pee in an alley. i really enjoyed seeing the backs of the venice houses that face the ocean. i discovered people really like modern house numbers.
outbound: 7.3 miles (forgot to reset odometer then reset before noting aggregated time)
return: 7.59 miles (speedway) / 49.35 minutes / 9 mph
slower all across the board. d**n sand!
needs more sugar but execution was pretty good. champagne mangoes are the bomb!
blackboard eats offered us the chance to try a new coffee puveyor called crop to cup. we ordered two different kinds of ugandan coffee, both roasted and unroasted. today, thanks to the beauty of an easy saturday morning, we were finally able to compare the two.
no, silly, we didn’t drink the unroasted beans…i had roasted them in the behmor about a week ago on P2. 48 hrs post-roast would’ve been the optimal consumption window, but our twenty-first century lives got in the way.
ultimately, my roast was smoother but also flatter. it wasn’t overroasted, but lacked some of the notes of the preroasted bean. my roast was definitely darker, although not by much. it lacked the preroasted earthiness and funk. neither coffee was m’s “cup of tea,” but it’s always fun to do a taste test and try out new coffees, especially since i can’t remember the last time i had unroasted ugandan from 1000 cups and i didn’t have preroasted ugandan to directly compare.
outbound: 39.52 minutes / 7.28 miles / 10.8 avg mph (why does the distance keep changing?)
return: 40.34 minutes / 7.3 miles / 10.6 avg mph
i’m getting faster!