I hope I win! And more.

Tonight is when winners of all of the what seemed like hundreds of materials/handmade gifts giveaways I entered will be announced! I do hope I win something! I still need to conquer the last of the handmade list...

On another note, I am just so INTO the gift I finished last night for my dear friend's birthday in two weeks. I can't say anything more and it's killing me! Today I'll take a ton of pictures in anticipation of that future blog I'll be writing.

Last night I used the recipe found on Posie Gets Cozy bloggy for Baked Rigatoni with Eggplant and Sausage. My eggplant sure didn't end up looking like Alicia's, and honestly that was my first and last time cooking eggplant. I really don't like it! I think if I had fried it a little more (but I fried it for way longer than the recipe called for, and they still turned up squishy and weird) then maybe they would have been good. Or maybe if eggplant had a better taste, the texture wouldn't bother me so much. Anyways, this isn't a rag on eggplant; I'm sure it has a place but not in this dish next time I make it. And I will make it again as it was super delish. Mike agreed that perhaps artichoke hearts or zucchini would be a better fit. Of course we enjoyed this dish with the last drops of Fieldbrook Winery's barbera, and opened (and tried not to finish) the lovely 2003 Turnbull syrah. Yummms. Sausage was cooking when I took this picture. I used whisky fennel chicken sausage for a healthier version rather than the traditioal pork sausage. Eggplant is so pretty - I do wish I liked it better.

It smelled amazing, with the freshly grated parmgiano reggiano on top and the fresh basil leaves (from my garden!) mixed in with the tomato sauce.

Just delicious! And now I have my meal for the rest of the week until payday. I will try and not pick out the eggplant. Maybe a re-heat of leftovers in the oven will make them tastier?

Old Tapes

I was just watching a movie with Mike tonight and an ad came on for that Notorious movie about Biggie Smalls aka Big Poppa the fat rapper guy that was shot dead and it inspired me to pull out my old cassette tapes. Mike was astound that a) I've kept and moved with my hella old tapes for a over a decade and b) the sheer number of them fill two old boxes full. I found a couple of recorded and re-recorded tapes from back in the day. You know, when you buy a cassette, say Boyz II Men's Cooleyhighharmony, and record over that (after you put scotch tape over the two little anti-record holes on the top) with some awesome Power 96.3 Jodeci song or in later years song after song from KXGO - primarily he Rolling Stones then re-record over that with your own personal musings, but leave a few spaces between re-recordings so you can still dig on the Stones.

Sophomore year my best friend Shaunna and I went to a yard sale and bought a small (for the time) tape recorder with built-in microphone. The following month (May 1997 to be exact) was audibly covered - from my weekend stays at their house in Eureka to our evenings out with the friends and instruments and cigarettes and music and pot and the occasional six pack of beer shared amongst at least 10 friends. The recorder wasn't allowed at school, and honestly it probably wouldn't have fit in Shaunna's backpack. We talked about teen angst, taking huge trucker shits that clog up the toilet, endless strings of quotes from Beavis and Butthead to Forrest Gump to Dirty Dancing and the fact that one of the boys didn't like us recording because "what if the cops found this, man?!?" Not like we were doing anything remotely bad or illegal, except for that random sixer, the toke everyone had in their pockets and the walks around the neighborhood late at night past curfew. I wonder if other people did this - before ipods, cell phones, even daily use of the internet. How cumbersome it all seems now compared to the current days of fast fast fast information, yet so much more innocent. I'm nostalgic now after hearing those tapes of the end of that sophomore year, before Shaunna moved to Arizona, and before we all grew up. I don't want to go back, that's for sure, but I do enjoy listening down memory lane. I wish I had a picture scanned in from those days that I could post here now, but I don't because I'm still not that techie. Perhaps I'm trying to preserve a teeny bit of that sophomore innocence by not adapting completely. Like my dad, who refuses to own a cell phone and who still doesn't log into the home computer. Ever. Will I be one of those old ladies who doesn't understand a thing 'young kids do these days?'