Apparently nobody loves me on the weekend. My fault really for slacking on the updates. That would make a good blues song, no? "Nobody loves me on the weekend..."

And I think I've fucked the dates all up on the filenames for these things. Suppose it doesn't matter all that much.

Failed to go get new Tiny Marsupial yesterday because the lady who's got her didn't write me back. Damn. Of course, it probably would have been mighty clever of me to get, say, a phone number.

Did go to the folks' for dinner and cake. And a present. Because amazon didn't ship hardly anything. One CD. Which is fine, but one thing makes a bit of a problem: the book for the Book Club was in that list, and now I don't know what to do. Because if I wait, it won't get here in time. And if I don't wait I will have 2 copies of it. Yes, I know, I could go to the library. There are several problems with that. First is that I haven't the foggiest where my library card is, I got it years ago. Second is that the library near me is a little on the skimpy side, and I sort of doubt they'll even have it, since their fiction collection seems to focus mostly on the Danielle Steele variety. And third the other libraries in the world are really quite far from me, and I'm about as likely to make a special trip to the El Gigundo Can't Find Anything But Rare Esoteric Texts About Medical Equipment Library, also known as NYPL (pron. "nipple") as I am to spontaneously rewrite the book verbatim by channelling the non-dead Margaret Atwood.

Dinner fine. I hate being moderately disappointed, though. It's actually easier to be extremely disappointed for me. I'd rather be totally let down expectations-wise than have something fall just a little short.

I should explain this. My mother always makes My Favorite Meal for my birthday. This happens to be a very simple old-style Italian basil pesto. My grandmother used to make this, and I always loved it. And in restaurants they *invariably* fuck it up, because apparently restaurant chefs are largely incapable of accepting a simplistic dish, and decide that it can't possibly be any good with that few ingredients, so they should throw more stuff in it.

Pesto made properly, as in, the way an Actual Italian Person in Actual Italy would make it, has exactly four ingredients, not counting the pasta: Basil (truckloads), olive oil, garlic, and a little bit of parmesan cheese. I usually throw a small amount of parsley in to temper the basil a little bit. Really cheap pesto uses a lot of parsley, with the not unexpected result that it tastes like parsley. Garnish with pignoli nuts. And more cheese, if desired.

This is FAR too few ingredients for your standard New York City chef. I have seen them throw in, among other things, CREAM (the worst offense by far), butter (second only to cream in offensiveness), sun-dried tomatoes (WHY??), walnuts, lots of parsley, onions, and more. Most of them are trying somehow to Frenchify what is a deeply and irrevocably Italian dish. Either that or Foofify a very simple dish.

So anyway, last night my father made the pesto. My father is actually a good cook. The problem with him is that he does not cope well with approximations. He requires highly specific amounts. A dash does not work. A pinch, a bunch, "flavor to taste" are not useful measurements to my father. Thus he approaches cooking sort of like chemistry.

The result of this was pesto that was probably correct to the mole (chemistry measurement I couldn't tell you how much it was if my life depended on it) of ingredients but just didn't taste quite right.

Tomorrow I have to go to Jersey again. It would seem that various persons are planning to take me for drinks tomorrow night, that being my actual birthday, and tonight Boy is grilling me a steak.

He's funny. He just now left to go purchase necessary dinner-making ingredients. And he asks me what kind of steak to get. Heh. We have this Foreman-knock-off grill. I was like...well, just tell the butcher you want to grill a nice steak and he'll give you a fine cut. He says "but no, what kind?" So I was trying to explain that probably not filet mignon, since it's not great on a cheap electric grill, but that flank or strip or all kinds of other cuts would do just fine.

This update is highly mundane. It's been a mundane weekend.

Speaking of which, I love this.

At least dinner last night was a helluva lot better than Friday. And my parents really did go all-out. My mother schlepped all over the city because she wanted to get truly excellent raspberries to put in the cake. In the cake. For those non-bakers out there, in baking, with fruit? Typically you don't need the absolute BEST fruit in the whole world, since when you mash or cook them down it all sort of is the same. I mean, you don't want rotten fruit, but it doesn't have to be gourmet either.

Got the dog's UTI pills yesterday. She seems better already. Although she's been puking a lot lately. I think she may have a little virus. At least I'm not sailing on lakes of pee anymore.

Also got the cats special fancy food. Usually they get Fancy Feast, which is fancy (and expensive) enough for a couple of natty housecats. But there's this highly special food that Nutro makes called "gourmet classics" that I swear are better food than I usually eat. Titles like "Hunter's Stew with Duck (or Pheasant)". Seriously. And the ingredients lists always have the meat stuff very first. The cats go insane for this stuff.

Enough of my mundanity. I'll try to be more interesting later.

- onehanded