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We went shopping at some great outlets today to complete Dave’s wardrobe transition from uniforms to quite dashing Kenny Cole-style outfits. He has done a fabulous job selecting sharp shirts and ties, and some really cool shoes. He’s enjoying wearing civvies and picks out his outfits each night for the next day. He even irons…what a guy 🙂 Sam really enjoyed playing on all those cheesy kid rides, and I didn’t have any change at all. He had such fun just pretending 🙂 Lots of people stopped to chat with him, and he flirted with some ladies 🙂 I took a movie of him “driving” which I know the grandmas and great grandmas will enjoy!

I was busy in the kitchen today satisfying a manic desire to cook some local dishes for dinner this weekend. The strange fruit of the week (soursop) became a sorbet, after peeling off the scary skin flecked with huge, dark, spiny bumps. I was afraid of what I might find inside. The meat of the fruit is white, flesh-like (as in soft, but sinewy and hard to pull apart). There were lots of large, black, slippery seeds to pop out from the sinewy, flesh-like pulpy matter. Since I had no blender, I had to mash it with a fork to create the “puree” for the sorbet. I also messed up the sugar syrup in reheating it to try to get it out of the pan. It went right past the nice syrup that it was and back into granules. Oh well. I mashed those up, too. Note to self, don’t reheat your syrup to make extraction easier. I mixed the pulpy, granular mess with vanilla yogurt and made a surprisingly good sorbet 🙂 It will cap off the dinner of misoyaki buttefish we’re having tomorrow night (hence the picture of mirin, sake and miso).

We’ve been eating well this weekend…I’ve been CRAVING cilantro (I know, I’m a freak) since buying it at the farmers’ market Thursday, so I made an avocado/cilantro/guac remoulade (? sounds good!) to go with the t-bone steaks dave grilled (mostly because we forgot to buy chips to eat the guac with). We also had a fresh spinach salad (also a farmers’ market purchase). So yummy! The avocado/cilantro au jus was very tasty despite Dave’s misgivings.

My first wild yeast starter got into some mischief while we were out. As we were driving home, I grew very curious about how my bread dough had risen. I was hoping the starter was vigorous despite being very young. Turns out it was plenty vigorous. It popped its lid off and jumped off the shelf over the stove and landed on the counter, then crawled out of the container and onto the paper towels. The bread was very tasty, even though I had many handicaps (no baking stone, no couches for rising, no thermometer…). The simple life is good 🙂

(Matt – the initial caps are just for you…)