carpe diem...et rosae

I can be a bad influence.  I don't mean in that You-Should-Do-Drugs-'Cause-It'll-Make-You-Cool kind of way.  Rather, I encourage people to choose the better of two evils when locked in an internal conflict of conscience.  For example, the following conversation occurred at work today:

Colleague:  I really want to go to Sampan for lunch, but I shouldn't.
Me: Why not?
Colleague:  I brought a sandwich, so I was just going to get soup.
Me:  Okay...
Colleague:  Aw man.... I just remembered how good their soup dumplings are...[self-flaggelation follows]
Me:  You should go.
Colleague:  No, I should eat my sandwich, otherwise it will go to waste.  I'll just go tomorrow.
Me:  You don't know tomorrow will come - no one is promised tomorrow.  If you want to go, you should go today. [little horns start to poke up from under my hair]
Colleague:  You're a bad influence.
Me: Yes.
Colleague:  But I'm having dinner with my cousin after work, so the sandwich will go to waste.
Me:  The sandwich you were eating earlier?
Colleague:  Yes.  But I still have half left.
Me:  Okay, but it's 4:30 right now and you're working until 9, so you won't have dinner until 9:15 at the very earliest.  You'll be back here at 5, you'll eat your other half-sandwich around 7 because you'll need a snack to get you through until dinner.
Colleague:  You're a bad influence.
Me: Yes.

With that, Colleague headed out the door for his lunch of Kimchi Fried Rice and Soup Dumplings at Sampan.  He came back 30 minutes later with a satisfied smile and the last bite of an ice cream cone that had been his dessert poking through his lips.

I try to live by that whole "carpe diem" thing.  Some people think it's morbid when I point out that we don't know that we'll have tomorrow, but it's true and I'm just trying to be realistic - you don't know.  People close their eyes on their last day every day - if today is mine, I want to know I had a good one and didn't say, "eh, tomorrow," as though I had a limitless supply.

Actually, one thing, before we move on to happy things - here is a clip from Brandon Lee's last interview before he died quite unexpectedly on the set of "The Crow."  You can skip to minute 5 for the part that is relevant to the first part of this post.

Now, Angst also likes to live in the Now, and doesn't want a single opportunity to eat something he shouldn't to pass him by.  Enter the newest object of his hungry lust:

Two or three times a year (anniversary, birthday, and/or Valentines day), Mister ignores that Angst likes to destroy my roses and gets them for me anyway.  At that point, Angst commences to stalking them, so we have to take them in the bedroom at the end of each night.

Yesterday was Mister's and my fourth wedding anniversary, which we celebrated by me working until 9pm, freezing my butt off as I walked home, and then hugging some and deciding to go out tonight instead (when I was home from work much earlier).  Nevertheless, he did a bunch of sweet things for me - he got me my beautiful roses, changed the kitty litter and lit a smelly candle, and turned on the heat so I'd be warm when I got home from work.  He's a keeper!

After a full day of trying to find somewhere to fill the void of Horizons and wishing Vedge was open, we ended up at La Fourno, having an enjoyable Italian meal.  I will say, they have some of the most creative and substantial salads I've seen - we had some trouble finding the lettuce under all the grilled veggies!  There was nothing terribly outstanding but I do have one little word of advice for my friends at La Fourno: wine should never be served in a heated glass.  They really need to work on differentiating "cellar temperature" from "pizza oven behind this wall" temperature.

cereal thief and tomato fail

Angst has an unnatural obsession with my breakfast.  I mean, I guess it's somewhat natural in that he always thinks he wants to eat what his humans are eating, but he is over-the-top lusting after my cereal.  He begs for waffles, occasionally for oatmeal, rarely for fruit, but he is absurdly insistent about his "need" for my cereal.  It doesn't matter what cereal I'm eating, either.

He sidles over to my desk area to start his hunter gymnastics.  Here is my set-up in the apartment: I have my piano against the same wall as the oven, then the bench, which doubles as my desk chair because there is exactly enough room to swing around to face either the piano or my desk.

Angst has this strategy for stealing a bite of my cereal which involves him jumping up on the piano and lurking behind me for a minute...eventually, he climbs onto the bench beside me and tries to pull my hand (holding the cereal bowl) toward him.  If and when that fails, sometimes he climbs up on the desk in front of me and stands in front of my computer display and on my keyboard until I move him.

He's such a naughty little beast.  No mystery here as to why there's cat hair on my piano keys...

Anyway, after my little cereal thief tried to steal my breakfast, I went off to work and had the privilege of having lunch at Pure Fare again.  Today I tried the Zucchini Noodle Salad, which consisted of thin but perfect "noodles" made of finely julienned (probably spiralized) raw zucchini, plenty of nutty edamame with some cherry tomatoes and red peppers, possibly a little too much cilantro, and a divine lemon-miso dressing.  It was both beautiful and delicious, and if I hadn't been lunching with a colleague, I would have taken a pretty picture.  I'm not quite ready to wear my Food Blogger Princess crown in public just yet.

Tonight's dinner, then, was the only thing left: Vegetable Chili from The Low GI Cookbook.

Looks delish, doesn't it?  It was, actually, which surprised me.  I've made this before, so I was quite aware that it is a good recipe (which is why I chose to repeat it), but something went terribly wrong this week, either in my grocery list preparation or execution, and I came up with no tomatoes tonight.

I've never made chili without tomatoes and realized upon finding no tomatoes in my home that I was not quite sure I could pull this off.  However, Mister had already braved the cold mist accumulating outside in order to pick up the tortilla chips I also forgot to get, so I couldn't back down.  I simply had to figure out how to make chili without tomatoes!

Well, I said I wanted to stretch for MoFo this year, and I had intended that as incentive to create bona fide recipes, but it's always good to know how to compensate for missing ingredients, so I put my brain to good use and came up with these changes:

• I added some frozen corn to give the chili a little more bulk.  I contemplated dicing an apple but then I thought Mister might not appreciate me incorporating fruit into his chili.  I may try it in the future, though, because now my mind is a little stuck on that idea.
• To add the tomato "flavor" in the absence of both fresh and canned tomatoes, I added a generous amount of the Spicy Hot V8 still in the fridge from our Harira adventure.  It totally worked.