Ten Kinds of Cheese, Louisa May Alcott, and A Decent Pair of Scissors

There's Lewie chillin' in the garden while Kelly First and I picked tomatoes for dinner. He's not much help when it comes to picking tomatoes. He always blames it on a lack of opposable thumbs, but I think it's just pure laziness.

 

Those are some of the tomatoes! Look at those beauties. The big ones went into this tomato concasse:

 

That was intended to accompany Kelly First's rendition of Jennifer James's goat cheese ravioli with tomato concasse and garlic confit with basil. 

Here's a wordless story about goat cheese ravioli.

 

  

Hmmmm. I may have skipped a few steps in there. And I'm not showing you the full extent of the spread which also included a salad, bread, olives, and a peach clafouti with vanilla ice cream for dessert. And I'm definitely not showing you the aftermath of the feast, in which four shameless people devoured a feast for ten. Man, do we eat well. In addition to the two kinds of goat cheese that went into the ravioli, we also made a few ravioli with goat feta. And we had parmesan crackers that I made. And there was parmesan and manchego to go on top of the ravioli. And then there was the cheese plate that Kelly put together. Dave counted up ten different kinds of cheeses with our dinner.

Are we mad or what?

I woke up with a cheese hangover this morning--which was not helped by the two big bowls of vanilla ice cream that I had for breakfast. I am no longer allowed to have ice cream in the house, by the way.


The Rest of the Day

This morning, I helped Dave get ready for his trip to see his mother. That necessitated a trip to Target to buy a Wii with a fitness board, or whatever it's called, for him to give to her for her birthday. Yes, I know it sounds funny that Dave is giving his mother a Wii for her birthday, but it's actually quite a serious present. She has Parkinson's Disease, and recent research suggests that using Wii and Wii Fit in particular can potentially help Parkinson's patients. (All research funded by the makers of the Wii, no doubt.) Anyway, he's gone up to see her and deliver the Wii. What a good son, no?

In the afternoon, I skipped out on a much needed walk in favor of reading a book online, something I have never done before. I was prompted to do it by a random blog entry which mentioned Louisa May Alcott's young adult novel Eight Cousins. I first encountered the story in a set of books that one of my mother's friends passed on to me when I was about eight years old. I'd lost track of the set, but I found the novel online, so I spent the afternoon reading it. It was not entirely unpleasant to read a novel online, so I went ahead and read another Alcott novel, An Old-Fashioned Girl that I also loved when I was younger.

Strangely, after finishing up Eight Cousins, I went to sort through a random box of books from the dreaded storage unit and guess what I found. No joke. It was the set of Alcott novels that I thought I'd lost track of. No freaking joke. That box of books has been sitting on the patio for the last week, waiting for me to sort through it.

Scissor Sisters

The last useful thing I did this afternoon was watch a bunch of youtube videos from a woman named Kandee Johnston. (Yes, she claims that Kandee is her real name.) She's a makeup artist in L.A. and she's just this happy little elf of a woman who makes these cute little youtube videos about hair and makeup and style concerns. In one series of videso, she takes a pair of scissors to a handful of t-shirts and voila, comes up with a bunch of cute little '80s-style tops to wear.

You know where this is going, right?

Here's a story:

When my cousin Josh was about three, he got his hands on a pair of scissors and, boy, it was like he got the key to unlocking all the secrets of the universe. He cut open his beanbag chair, I seem to remember. And he cut several inches off his curtains. I think he cut his own hair. And most famously, he cut the whiskers off the cat.

Me, I just cut up a bunch of old gym t-shirts. They look pretty cute, too, if I do say so myself.