Another weekend comes and goes, and the clock ticks…ticks…ticks towards the middle of November. Agh!
So, anyway. We wound up doing very little on Friday night, which was pleasant – it offered some nice time to wind down. Datahawk continued her visit into Saturday, and we spent the day bumming around the house. I made some nice pancakes for brunch. I highly recommend whipping the egg whites – it makes a huge difference in the texture of the finished product. Also, I recommend keeping a can of Saco’s Buttermilk Powder around for those recipes where you just need a little buttermilk. It keeps for months, too.
For dinner, we met Ed and Chouette for dinner at Reza’s. The food was quite tasty, but we found unfortunately that Persian is not a good cuisine for Takaza – too much onions mixed in. Afterwards we walked around a bit and allowed dinner to digest while Chouette talked programming stuff by phone with Hartree. We found a (relatively) new ice cream place on the 5300 block of N. Clark, just up from the Starbucks. They carry ice cream from a small operation in Madison, WI, and it is absolutely divine. I had a hot fudge sundae made with Zanzibar chocolate ice cream (three different kinds of cocoas and almost black), which Dan got a cup of some delicious cinnamon ice cream. Their baked goods looked pretty good too.
Ed and Chouette offered to give us a ride home but we declined, figuring we’d take the Foster bus. Well, we found out too late that the Foster bus had stopped running two hours earlier. Ah well – exercise wasn’t going to kill us. We walked the 2.5 miles home, and it was actually quite pleasant.
On Sunday, Data took her leave. After a suitable amount of procrastinating, lazing about, etc., Linnaeus joined Dan and me in a venture down to Sam’s Wine and Liquors for a, um, pre-MFF reconnaissance mission. Man, one of these days I’ll get out of Sam’s for under $60, but I haven’t managed it yet. I picked up a lovely bottle of apple wine and a bottle of the extremely tasty Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royal cognac. We’ll have these in our room at MFF, of course 🙂 Afterwards, we attempted to navigate the zoo that is the parking lot in front of the adjacent Whole Foods Market, leading to many and varied comments on my part on the intelligence of the average driver there and how the world would be improved with their swift and efficient eradication, preferably in the most painful way possible. Nevertheless, we were able to park and we picked up a very tasty bacon-wrapped pork tenderloin with basil for dinner. We headed home, cooked up dinner, and life was good.
Today is a nice, slow day, for both Dan and myself (a welcome change for Dan!). He had some car trouble that I’ll let him talk about (since he never seems to post to LJ – {poke, poke}), but all is well. I’ve got some grocery shopping to do tonight, and we’ll probably take at least one evening after work this week to do some shopping in the Schaumburg area; there’s a couple of items that I want to look for around there.
Man, it feels like it’s 2 PM for some reason…
Buttermilk powder is useful in bread, too. We keep it in the freezer in an airtight container. Lasts indefinitely that way.
I’ve found the buttermilk powder doesn’t measure up to the real stuff. Better than nothing, I guess, and at least it keeps. I should compare it with yogurt, or maybe ordinary milk + lemon juice, assuming curdling doesn’t ruin the latter.
I mostly use buttermilk for cornbread. The recipe in the Moosewood Cookbook is most excellent.
Oh absolutely, the real stuff is better. Especially the really real stuff, rather than the cultured kind they sell at the grocery store. But if I can get the genuine article, I’m gonna drink it straight. Haven’t had that opportunity in a long, long time.
Huh? What? Ice Cream?! We’ve actually got two fantastic ice cream places in town. Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream does fabulous things to dairy.
The Babcock Hall Ice Cream Shop is just fascinating. It’s a part of the Agriculture deparment. If you go ’round the back of the counter and down a few hallways, I shit you not, you will find the processing machinery and the cows. Best Ice Cream Evar!
–kit
Yep, it was ice cream from The Chocolate Shoppe. Very tasty stuff. I’m told that they have 110 flavors that they rotate through – if they’re as good as the ones we had, we’ll definitely be going back!
And I know all about university dairies – I lived near Clemson University in SC for the better part of ten years, and their dairy always had the most fabulous (and freshest!) ice cream and milk. Man, I miss that.