...which will inevitably be ruined by the dirty footprints of my nonsensical ramblings. So it goes.
I did mean to write a few mid-Break posts, but I inevitably got distracted and started doing something else, which doesn't say much about my work ethic but is probably fairly expressive of how my Winter Break went overall. Which isn't a bad thing, of course; I had a great time hanging out with my family, and I got to do all the appropriate "Sasha's Winter Break" things: cook/bake, eat delicious food, visit relatives, sink into the couch, watch tv, maybe see people other than my family?, read, go on the internet, watch more tv, freak out about the future. I'd say it all worked out pretty much as usual.
[Under the cut: the inevitable food photos and tv-viewing recaps, and maybe even a little about this year's classes, if you're lucky. Or unlucky. Or neither one nor the other.]
Sooooo. In my last post, I believe I mentioned that Lovely Sister and I cooked my mom a Top Chef-worthy meal for her [age redacted]th birthday. And god, that was an awful post — seriously, except for the moose comic, that thing was all over the place — but the salient point is: who wants to see the pictures???
Okay, well, you don't actually get much of a choice, because I'm posting some of them anyway. Pretty much your only options are to look at them, to scroll past them in the hope that I'll actually start talking about something interesting, or to click the back button and get away from me and my crazy.
This is the edamame hummus, one of our appetizers. (We also had a cheese plate and a dish of whimsically-cut melon with prosciutto.)
The broth for the green tea miso soup, the filling for the shiitake-arugula ravioli made with wonton wrappers, and the yeasted carrot bread that would eventually become pudding.
Lovely Sister and I plating the ravioli with fresh arugula and balsamic reduction.
The tuna, avocado and edamame sushi. (Between the ravioli and the ceviche, we served a cucumber-green tea-lemon pulp granita as a palate cleanser, but I don't have pictures of that.)
Plates of the double-carrot bread pudding, served with toasted coconut ice cream.
If, like on Top Chef, one of us was a winner for this meal, it would probably be Lovely Sister, since the courses that she took charge on were all definite winners, and of mine, most were pretty good, one was a highlight, and one was eh. One of my dishes (the bread pudding) may have gotten the highest overall score, but the average of hers was far higher than mine. Then again, it really highlighted our talents: neither of us are slouches, but she shines at cooking, whereas I tend to focus mostly on baking.
Not that you care. Anyway! Let's see, what else did I do this winter? Well, I celebrated Chanukah at home; went to my dad's place for Christmas; rang in the New Year with a pretty dress, Pride & Prejudice, and Dick Clark; went to my grandparents' house for second Christmas; saw The Muppets (the movie) twice; finally saw Die Hard; was not at all productive; watched a lot of TV, as I have previously mentioned.
And when I say "a lot," I mean that I'm actually rather proud of how much I managed to catch up on. Usually I always say that I'm going to watch things over break and then I get distracted away from it, but this time I soldiered through like a boss, catching up on Once Upon A Time and Eureka, slamming through Generation Kill, marathoning approximately 20 episodes of Community in a single day, sailing through season 1 of Horatio Hornblower (four 2-hour episodes, and yes, pun intended), watching season 2 of Sherlock, and getting addicted to Revenge.
I had a great break. I remain madly in love with Community (I thought it really started to pick up at the end of season 1, all the way through season 2; I felt like it hesitated a little at the beginning of season 3 — mostly the first three episodes — but it started to really pick up with the genius Remedial Chaos Theory).
I thought Generation Kill was brilliant — powerful and often funny, albeit sometimes in a, "You have to laugh so you don't scream at how screwed up this situation is," kind of way — which means I'm probably going to have to watch The Wire, both because it was made by the same people and because season 2 has PJ Ransome, who plays Ray in GK and is the character of my heart, in that he is mouthy and snarky and and offensive and hilarious and absurd. How can you not love a character who at the drop of a hat will go on a rant about how world peace could be achieved if people would just have sex more often?
Horatio Hornblower fulfilled all my longings for adventure on the high seas! and probably means that I'm going to have to watch Battlestar Galactica eventually so that I can stare at Jamie Bamber more. I'm shallow sometimes, okay.
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| Jamie Bamber is the one on the bottom right; you can't see him very well. |
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| It's a dumb poster. I know. |
It's just... difficult, sometimes, to focus on other things (and read dense academic papers) when they're occasionally so far away from the few true loves of my life. But I do like the classes I've taken so far — my schedule last semester was beyond amazing — and hopefully I'll enjoy this semester's lineup as well. Plus, the things I'm learning manage to find their way into other things I talk about, whether it's new perspectives on -isms (racism, sexism, etc) and various -phobias in media, or the fact that I now want to write a story set in a world in which the primary form of economic relations is gift exchange, rather than commodity exchange. So I soldier on, and make time for TV and all that other good stuff when I can.
: a Treatise Upon Discussions of the Future With Relatives and Family Friends Who Have Kind Intentions. (That was supposed to be this week, but all 1215 words of this post and I got distracted.)[Original tags for this post: baking, break time is the best time, Food, if the internet is my signficant other then TV is my piece on the side, once again I spend far too long rambling, pretty pretty pictures, totally self-indulgent, TV,winter break, yes this is how my brain works]
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