Last Weekend

Fall semester classes start this week.  On one hand I am looking forward to getting back into the classroom.  On the other hand I have enjoyed all of the reading and cooking I have been doing. If I were independently wealthy...  Anyway here is what I did to enjoy my last free weekend for a while:

Had pizza and beer at Classic Italian Pizza.

Read while sipping an iced mocha at Solo Cafe.

Had jerk chicken at Taste of the Caribbean.

This lunch was awesome!  Too bad the place is run very inefficiently.  That probably won't stop me from going back though. The sides are rice, cabbage, and fried plantains.

For dinner I made a shrimp po'boy and some french fries.  Tasty!  I think I am finally getting the hang of frying things.  Usually when I try to bread and fry anything, what-ever-it-is usually sticks to the pan and the breading peels off. I forgot that I had okra pickles, but I ate them when I used the leftover shrimp to make another po'boy for lunch on Sunday.

Since I had buttermilk left over from last week's muffin making and Saturday's shrimp battering, I made another batch of soda muffins.

It is hot and icky here so what do I do on Sunday?  Make baked pasta so that I have to run my oven for a while!  Good thing the baked penne with vegetables is so tasty.

Heading in to late summer means that is also green chile season.  I picked up a couple of pounds and roasted it and packed it up in baggies.  I now have frozen green chile to turn into green chile stew
when the mood strikes.

I certainly ate well this weekend.  Overall I made about half of what I had in mind to make while on vacation this summer.  I will still plug away at the list because I have yet to do things like make salsa and a summer vegetable stew.  Guess there is always next weekend.

Summer Reads

My goal every year is to average reading two books per month.  I think this is a reasonable goal but it is one that I have not met three out of the last four years. Looking back at my reads list for this year I see a lot of short books/booklets and graphic novels.

Starting about two years ago I started reading The Sandman by Neil Gaiman.  I finished the original series along with Endless Nights this summer.  In those eleven volumes there was rarely a story I'd call a dud.  Sometimes I felt the art was sketchy, but the stories--oh the stories!  There was a lot of good stuff here.  This year I've read Batman Earth One which is another telling of Batman's origin.  I enjoyed this one too.  The take on Alfred in this volume was new to me, and interesting.  I also picked up the Birds of Prey collection Of Like Minds.  It was interesting to read a comic written by a woman (Gail Simone) about women.  In one panel they are taking about their boy problems and two pages later they are kicking the snot out of some dude.  Nice!  Recently I picked up a copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (Volume 1) by Alan Moore.  I was vaguely familiar with this title from the movie that was released some years ago.  I thought it was a neat idea to bring the different characters of literature together this way.  With the exception of Alan Quatermain I have read the books and stories in which all the other characters in the Moore comic appear.

I wanted some treas so on Saturday night I made a batch of soda muffins (a copy of the recipe is here).  They were very tasty fresh from the oven and smeared with strawberry jam.  I warmed one in the microwave Sunday morning and wasn't impressed.  Warming them in the oven was a much better option.

At a loss for what else to make last weekend I settled on making green chile cheeseburgers.  When I was a wee lad in college we would make the trek from Socorro, NM to nearby San Antonio, NM to go to The Owl Bar.  I enjoyed the burgers there.  No pictures of my burgers though.  Sorry folks!