In lieu of an actual entry, have some Otis and Franklin!

1. Dinner at L&N Wine Bar. My parents took me and Neil to (belatedly) celebrate my birthday. You know that kind of high feeling you get when you've eaten just the right amount of really amazing food and had a couple of glasses of wine? Yeah. Tuna Humphries is my boyfriend.

2. Erin Keane read from her new book of poetry, The Gravity Soundtrack, at the Jazz Factory. Not only is she a fellow Erin, she's a fellow Germantown resident. And a damn good poet. I really, really loved her work.

3. Lotsa Pasta - I know this place has an entry in my Guide to Louisville, but I went there Saturday and feel compelled to mention its awesomeness once again. I stocked up on edible birthday presents for a friend and also picked up a pizza, some frozen pizza dough, and a package of spinach gnocchi. I had to leave when I felt I could no longer fight the urge to toss every delicious or interesting-looking item into my basket.

4. The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters - The whole premise of this book is that if you use high quality, seasonal, and preferably locally-produced foods, you don't have to do much to them to create delicious meals. I can cook inasmuch as I can follow a recipe, but I never learned a lot of the basics of cooking. (Most importantly, perhaps, I've never learned to properly use a knife. I've never cut myself, but both Neil and my mother gape in horror anytime they see me cutting vegetables.) Alice Waters gives a lot of those sorts of basics: how to use a knife, what sorts of cookware you should have, how to care for your cookware, how to store different foods, etc. But the main point of the book is that if you learn a few foundational techniques and what's in season when, you can pick up whatever looks good at the farmers' market and build a meal around it without much effort.

For an example of what I love about this book, let's look at the chapter entitled "Four Essential Sauces." The four sauces are vinaigrette, salsa verde, aïoli, and herb butter. Alice writes:

These four sauces, though basic, add so much flavor, dimension, and color to meals that I can't imagine cooking without them. Any one of them can pull a meal together and turn a simple plate of meat and vegetables in to a finished dish; and they're so easy to prepare that once you've made them a few times, you'll never have to look up these recipes again.

That's how I want to cook. I want to go find an awesome piece of fish somewhere and decide to mix up some herb butter to put on it and then just do it, instead of fumbling with recipes. I also love the idea of eating what's seasonably available. I'm hoping that with the help of this book Neil and I can transform the way we cook and eat. Because frankly, the bulk of what we've eaten the last few months has been Lotsa Pasta's pizza and ravioli (oh god, the walnut and gorgonzola ravioli; what bliss!). While I know that Lotsa Pasta makes these products with much better ingredients than Tombstone and Chef Boyardee, the reason we eat this way - we are too lazy and/or busy not to - remains the same, and I don't like it. So I'm hoping that fixing delicious, good-for-us, simple foods will become something that I enjoy and am good at.

I finally updated the photos page. Now it links to my Flickr account, where you can see photos in nice neat sets and leave comments and stuff. Enjoy!

So I said I'd been having thoughts about turning 27. This is the first birthday that bothered me a bit. And I'm a person who generally thinks it's very dumb to get upset over birthdays. In fact, I've been sort of looking forward to my 30s, because I've heard from so many people that they're much better than the 20s. But 27 just makes me think, "Wow, I can't believe I'm this old!" I don't think 27 is actually old by any means. Rather, I think I'm shocked that I've gotten to this age this quickly. I was talking to 30-year-old friend recently; neither of us could get over the fact that when we met I was 2 weeks from my 15th birthday and he was 18. And now we're 27 and 30! How did this happen? It doesn't seem like it could have possibly been that long. And that's what bothers me, I think; it seems like in a blink of an eye I'll be 37, and in a few more blinks I'll be dead. Well, more than a few, I suppose. It's just weird to have so much life behind me already and that it's gone by so quickly.

This is a sweet story.

67 years later, a love renewed

I must admit, I'm a total sucker for this sort of thing.

In other news, I turned 27 yesterday. I have a lot of thoughts about that, but they'll have to wait.