An exciting weekend in the life of yours truly.
This weekend was full of food and Ikea. Oh yes indeed.
Derek finally decided to pay me a weekend in the exciting depths of New Jersey, where we may not have New York's night life, but we do have lots of strip malls and Chinese/Russian/Indian/etc supermarkets.
To demonstrate Jersey's delights, I made Derek an Indian dinner on Friday, consisting of a split pea-white bean-and-carrot curry-spiced soup (my own made up recipe, not actually Indian except the curry spices), aloo masala, and a general-type curry. He liked the soup best even though that was just an experiment. It also turned out way thicker than I meant it to (I even pureed it to make it creamier, but after I refrigerated it, I still had to mix it with water when reheating). Upside: when undiluted, it can apparently be used as paste for sandwiches.
Then Saturday we went to Ikea, where Derek got himself another beer mug and who-knows-what-else, and I got a bunch of tea lights, soup bowls, and a nice black wooden box for my records. I had just been keeping them on top of the record player, so having decent storage is very exciting.
We then went to my much beloved Hong Kong supermarket (an aisle dedicated entirely to soy sauce!) and got food stuffs to make a more far-east Asian dinner. It ended up a mixture of Thai and Japanese: tom kha soup, green salad with ginger dressing, and sushi. We also bought some fancy sake that came with cups, so we were all set.
It was all quite delicious. Unfortunately we drank too much and took turns falling asleep on each other (me, during the movie we watched; him, right after).
Then today, we woke up very late, and I made pizza and a bok choy stir fry that we carried over to a potluck dinner/meeting of Food Not Bombs. Derek stayed for all of 15 minutes till he had to catch his train home so he could be united with his true love: his computer parts arrived over the weekend, and he couldn't wait to get home to build his new computer. Pah.
By the way, when we were driving to Ikea and I took the wrong turn and got lost, Derek said that he thought it was funny I was such a feminist because I was the most helpless person he'd ever met, and would make a perfect damsel in distress. I just want to say that I may get lost dammit, but I could figure stuff out without help--it would take me like an hour, but I could do it! Beside, my feminism simply means that I think another girl could help me out as well as some guy. It has nothing to do with my own ineptitude at life!
And finally--another purchase I made this weekend:
Retractable makeup brush from The Body Shop, made with synthetic materials. I LOVE it. It is gorgeously soft, and works if anything better than animal-hair brushes. My old brush was a Bare Escentuals brand that was made of animal hair (I only found this out like, a year after buying it), and even though it had gotten ragged and damaged beyond belief (seriously, it looked like a scraggly broom), and I'd been putting off getting a replacement because all the synthetics I'd seen looked harsh and generally sub-par. This one is absolutely lovely though. I encourage any of you who use these types of makeup brushes to get the synthetics from Body Shop--they have a whole line of them. Sephora says that all their brushes, including the squirrel-hair ones, are "cruelty-free" in the sense that the animals the hair is harvested from are not killed--but that's a bit like the reasoning that water boarding is not torture because no bones are broken. Whether they "comb the hair out" or shear it off, I do not know of any squirrels that particularly enjoy being either combed or sheared, or that would let anyone do that without being locked up in restraints. Not to mention it is highly doubtful any such squirrels are raised in truly humane conditions. Taklon brushes for the win!
Derek finally decided to pay me a weekend in the exciting depths of New Jersey, where we may not have New York's night life, but we do have lots of strip malls and Chinese/Russian/Indian/etc supermarkets.
To demonstrate Jersey's delights, I made Derek an Indian dinner on Friday, consisting of a split pea-white bean-and-carrot curry-spiced soup (my own made up recipe, not actually Indian except the curry spices), aloo masala, and a general-type curry. He liked the soup best even though that was just an experiment. It also turned out way thicker than I meant it to (I even pureed it to make it creamier, but after I refrigerated it, I still had to mix it with water when reheating). Upside: when undiluted, it can apparently be used as paste for sandwiches.
Then Saturday we went to Ikea, where Derek got himself another beer mug and who-knows-what-else, and I got a bunch of tea lights, soup bowls, and a nice black wooden box for my records. I had just been keeping them on top of the record player, so having decent storage is very exciting.
We then went to my much beloved Hong Kong supermarket (an aisle dedicated entirely to soy sauce!) and got food stuffs to make a more far-east Asian dinner. It ended up a mixture of Thai and Japanese: tom kha soup, green salad with ginger dressing, and sushi. We also bought some fancy sake that came with cups, so we were all set.
It was all quite delicious. Unfortunately we drank too much and took turns falling asleep on each other (me, during the movie we watched; him, right after).
Then today, we woke up very late, and I made pizza and a bok choy stir fry that we carried over to a potluck dinner/meeting of Food Not Bombs. Derek stayed for all of 15 minutes till he had to catch his train home so he could be united with his true love: his computer parts arrived over the weekend, and he couldn't wait to get home to build his new computer. Pah.
By the way, when we were driving to Ikea and I took the wrong turn and got lost, Derek said that he thought it was funny I was such a feminist because I was the most helpless person he'd ever met, and would make a perfect damsel in distress. I just want to say that I may get lost dammit, but I could figure stuff out without help--it would take me like an hour, but I could do it! Beside, my feminism simply means that I think another girl could help me out as well as some guy. It has nothing to do with my own ineptitude at life!
And finally--another purchase I made this weekend:
Retractable makeup brush from The Body Shop, made with synthetic materials. I LOVE it. It is gorgeously soft, and works if anything better than animal-hair brushes. My old brush was a Bare Escentuals brand that was made of animal hair (I only found this out like, a year after buying it), and even though it had gotten ragged and damaged beyond belief (seriously, it looked like a scraggly broom), and I'd been putting off getting a replacement because all the synthetics I'd seen looked harsh and generally sub-par. This one is absolutely lovely though. I encourage any of you who use these types of makeup brushes to get the synthetics from Body Shop--they have a whole line of them. Sephora says that all their brushes, including the squirrel-hair ones, are "cruelty-free" in the sense that the animals the hair is harvested from are not killed--but that's a bit like the reasoning that water boarding is not torture because no bones are broken. Whether they "comb the hair out" or shear it off, I do not know of any squirrels that particularly enjoy being either combed or sheared, or that would let anyone do that without being locked up in restraints. Not to mention it is highly doubtful any such squirrels are raised in truly humane conditions. Taklon brushes for the win!