Aug. 24th, 2008
Bennett's Pure Food Bistro (review)
Aug. 24th, 2008 12:06 pmOmaha and I went to Bennett's Pure Food Bistro on Mercer Island, a restaurant that specializes in gourmet meals prepared with local foods and products with low food miles (except the wine; France is okay for the wine, apparently.)
We started with an order of crab cakes, then Omaha ordered the Salmon with Lemon Risotto and saute'd vegetables, while I had BBQ Pork with Mac & Cheese and saute'd vegetables on the side. Neither of us ordered any wine: Omaha doesn't drink it, and I was driving.
The crab cakes were a marvel of presentation: two small crab cakes on a plate of mixed greens with two swaths of sauce: an orange sauce, and a pesto, and both were very delicious. But it was tiny food for the price.
Then came our meal. The BBQ pork was tender, and the sauce had little high notes of basil and coriander that you just don't expect in a BBQ sauce. The Mac & Cheese was gently baked on top, and had some bleu in it, so I rated it incredible. Omaha's salmon was delicious, but she thought the risotto had a bit too much lemon in it.
There's one thing about the restaurant, though: it's loud. I didn't enjoy that feature at all. I'd been there once before with the very lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kaelisinger and we'd gotten a seat along the front windows near the bar. It's much quieter there: make sure you ask for those seats if you have that opportunity.
We started with an order of crab cakes, then Omaha ordered the Salmon with Lemon Risotto and saute'd vegetables, while I had BBQ Pork with Mac & Cheese and saute'd vegetables on the side. Neither of us ordered any wine: Omaha doesn't drink it, and I was driving.
The crab cakes were a marvel of presentation: two small crab cakes on a plate of mixed greens with two swaths of sauce: an orange sauce, and a pesto, and both were very delicious. But it was tiny food for the price.
Then came our meal. The BBQ pork was tender, and the sauce had little high notes of basil and coriander that you just don't expect in a BBQ sauce. The Mac & Cheese was gently baked on top, and had some bleu in it, so I rated it incredible. Omaha's salmon was delicious, but she thought the risotto had a bit too much lemon in it.
There's one thing about the restaurant, though: it's loud. I didn't enjoy that feature at all. I'd been there once before with the very lovely
kaelisinger and we'd gotten a seat along the front windows near the bar. It's much quieter there: make sure you ask for those seats if you have that opportunity.
Use their own resources against them!
Aug. 24th, 2008 07:09 pmDrew at Fark points me to a wonderful, amazing, lovely idea. The American "Family" Association (which would just love to destroy my family) has put out a call to its tribe: help destroy Hallmark. I'm not much of a Hallmark fan, but they've announced that they've started a line of gay wedding cards and that's certainly fabulous news, and the AFA has naturally cranked the shrillmachine to 11. Donald E. Wildmon is calling for action, dammit. He lies: "Hallmark is a private company obviously driven by greed. Let them know you do not appreciate Hallmark promoting a lifestyle which is illegal in 48 states."
Homosexuality, despite Wildmon's fantasy, is not illegal in any state. Heck, gay marriage isn't even illegal in many states. It just isn't recognized: there's a difference, and Wildmon knows it, but his mouthbreathing tribe is unfamiliar with the distinction. As the saying now goes, the election this year is between those who do nuance, and those who don't.
Anyway, the AFA has provided a lovely bit of astroturf to send Hallmark Chairman Donald J. Hall "a message". Go use it and tell Mr. Hall that you heartily approve of his fabulous taste and his glamorous marketing decision.
Homosexuality, despite Wildmon's fantasy, is not illegal in any state. Heck, gay marriage isn't even illegal in many states. It just isn't recognized: there's a difference, and Wildmon knows it, but his mouthbreathing tribe is unfamiliar with the distinction. As the saying now goes, the election this year is between those who do nuance, and those who don't.
Anyway, the AFA has provided a lovely bit of astroturf to send Hallmark Chairman Donald J. Hall "a message". Go use it and tell Mr. Hall that you heartily approve of his fabulous taste and his glamorous marketing decision.
The AFA is evil, but I wimped out...
Aug. 24th, 2008 07:21 pmWell, I wimped out. I didn't use Wildmon's engine, but I did send an email to Mr. Hall at sgronb3@hallmark.com:
Mr. Hall:You should do the same.
I understand that Hallmark (and yourself) are currently under immense pressure from the American Family Association over your recent decision to start a line of marriage and matrimony cards to gay and lesbian couples.
I support your decision. It serves a valid market made of men and women who deserve your company's support in expressing their feelings. I'm sure your cards will be as fabulous as they have to be to appeal to such a design-aware market.
E. M. Sternberg, Seattle, WA
My beloved friend kaelisinger and I went out to a concert last night to see William Pint and Felicia Dale, a pair of shanty singers who were completely wonderful; good with the crowd, good with their instruments, and just a whole lot of fun to listen to. I have see if I can get the girls and Omaha to go with at their next concert, which will be Saturday, October 18th. They sang mostly 18th and 19th sea shanties, with a mixture of other popular tunes thrown in, and some modern reworkings of the same, mostly on guitar and hurdy-gurdy. I was fascinated to watch them.
The girls came home from summer camp and got off the bus weather-worn, scratched, desperate for a bathroom. Yamaraashi-chan just said, "Hi, Dad," in a low, tired sort of voice. After I got a Slurpees into the two of them, though, they were much more lively and regaled me with all the horrible things that had happened to them at summer camp: skinned knees, bug bites, waking up freezing in the middle of the night because a blanket had gotten kicked off. And they sang. Oh, they sang, on and on, the most inane, time-killing songs the camp could find, and it was wonderful to have them back.
But through it all, I've been, well, kinda bleah. I think I'm having a mild depressive phase. Nothing serious, I don't think; just a soft sense of burnout, although I'm not sure of what, exactly. I haven't been coding or writing my brains out too much the past week; quite the opposite. I had a blast with Omaha on the mountain trails, but everything else is just not too appealing right now: cooking, coding, writing, sex. All of those just feel like effort.
I'm sure I'll get over it. I always do.
The good news is that my desktop has mostly recovered from its severe case of death. I have back my old crypto layer and can watch movies. No sound yet, though. The kernel was still good-- the only thing that was-- so I was able to boot up using the Gentoo 2006 disk, but download the Gentoo 2008 overlay into the OS directories (/usr and /etc), then ran an upgrade on the core. So far, so good. Running a fresh install of Gentoo is slow, and I tend to have kooky settings installing, say E17, TeXLive, and Wine, but so far over 300 packages have gone in (Gentoo tends to count every subsystem as a package, so installing Gnome installs 120 packages; Firefox gets eight or nine on top of that). So at least that's coming along nicely. I'll know tomorrow if there are any more crises to deal with; I tend to run the installs overnight, since Gentoo's a build-from-source distro.
kaelisinger and I went out to a concert last night to see William Pint and Felicia Dale, a pair of shanty singers who were completely wonderful; good with the crowd, good with their instruments, and just a whole lot of fun to listen to. I have see if I can get the girls and Omaha to go with at their next concert, which will be Saturday, October 18th. They sang mostly 18th and 19th sea shanties, with a mixture of other popular tunes thrown in, and some modern reworkings of the same, mostly on guitar and hurdy-gurdy. I was fascinated to watch them.The girls came home from summer camp and got off the bus weather-worn, scratched, desperate for a bathroom. Yamaraashi-chan just said, "Hi, Dad," in a low, tired sort of voice. After I got a Slurpees into the two of them, though, they were much more lively and regaled me with all the horrible things that had happened to them at summer camp: skinned knees, bug bites, waking up freezing in the middle of the night because a blanket had gotten kicked off. And they sang. Oh, they sang, on and on, the most inane, time-killing songs the camp could find, and it was wonderful to have them back.
But through it all, I've been, well, kinda bleah. I think I'm having a mild depressive phase. Nothing serious, I don't think; just a soft sense of burnout, although I'm not sure of what, exactly. I haven't been coding or writing my brains out too much the past week; quite the opposite. I had a blast with Omaha on the mountain trails, but everything else is just not too appealing right now: cooking, coding, writing, sex. All of those just feel like effort.
I'm sure I'll get over it. I always do.
The good news is that my desktop has mostly recovered from its severe case of death. I have back my old crypto layer and can watch movies. No sound yet, though. The kernel was still good-- the only thing that was-- so I was able to boot up using the Gentoo 2006 disk, but download the Gentoo 2008 overlay into the OS directories (/usr and /etc), then ran an upgrade on the core. So far, so good. Running a fresh install of Gentoo is slow, and I tend to have kooky settings installing, say E17, TeXLive, and Wine, but so far over 300 packages have gone in (Gentoo tends to count every subsystem as a package, so installing Gnome installs 120 packages; Firefox gets eight or nine on top of that). So at least that's coming along nicely. I'll know tomorrow if there are any more crises to deal with; I tend to run the installs overnight, since Gentoo's a build-from-source distro.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}