Thai Chicken Ginger Sausage

with asparagus and corn. The asparagus was from Miss Sue, and although I am no big asparagus fan, even I could appreciate how fresh and good it was. Wasn't the corn pretty?

Scrambled Goose Eggs

with brown rice and salad. Something about the combination of the eggs and rice tasted sublime to me, so I demanded that my spouse surrender his portion as well. Mmmm.

Happy Birthday to Me

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Originally uploaded by tinyloop.

Actually, tomorrow (Sunday) is the magic day, but I'm celebrating all weekend. Check out my cake! Designed by my daughter, not made by me. It was (is) delicious.

When the Cat's Away

the mice eat whatever they want. I had stir-fried rice, cabbage, mushrooms, and tofu. Yum.

Red Eye

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Originally uploaded by tinyloop.

In real life the button is in fact red, but the yarn color is pretty accurate. Perhaps not as sexy as "Worm i' the Bud," but still satisfying. Man, I love me a way to use scrap yarn.

Lamb Chops

with spinach and barley. When I last posted about barley a loyal reader wondered whether I didn't find the flavor of barley a little...muddy. The answer is yes. So last night I played around a little and came up with the following solutions: a) rinse the barley thoroughly before cooking, and b) cook in half chicken stock, half water. Much improved.

Spinach and Feta Sausage

with quinoa and roasted vegetables: orange cauliflower ("Fiestaflower"!), red peppers, and shiitakes.

Frittata

of turnip greens and bacon. With baked sweet potatoes. O, baked sweet potatoes: why do I eat anything else.

"Worm i' the Bud" Brooch

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Originally uploaded by tinyloop.

'Member a while back when I said I was thinking about brooches? Here is the first fruit of that idea. It would be hard to overstate how pleased I am with it, and not just because I finally found a use for the snake button I've had for over a decade. You can expect to see a *lot* more in this genre.

Socks for a Patient Husband

My husband, having watched every other family member receive one or more knitted gift, has never once complained about being neglected. So, although I had originally planned these for someone else, they are his.

And are they ever lovely! The pattern is very simple, fits beautifully, and looks wonderful.

Also: Cherry Tree Hill Supersock. It is a glorious thing when a woman and her yarn find each other; I could knit with this elastic, beautiful, glossy yarn for years.

The husband in question is mighty pleased.

Fight Club (1999)

How do I feel about this movie? I love it. Just to prove I'm not dumb I'll note right now that the movie's premise is absurd: it's about a bunch of guys so totally anti-corporate and primal that they want to...look like Brad Pitt! And impress chicks with how good they are in bed! How very punk rock. If you let go of that, though, there is a lot of fun to be had and mostly it's because Brad Pitt never, ever, looked cooler. Right there at the center of a movie all about rejecting consumerism and destroying its major outposts is Pitt, whose major effect on everyone I know who saw the movie was to make them want to hit the gym and go shopping. Whoever did his costumes should have gotten an award. Ed Norton is also, as always, I'm coming to think, a joy to watch. But the real thing is David Fincher, a man with all kinds of visual ideas (and an abiding love of filth and rot) and the smarts to use them well and understand actors at the same time. I'm the only person I know who saw, and liked, "The Game," so deep was my Fincher loyalty at one point. Seeing this movie again reminds me why.

Incidentally, it's also fun to see it knowing the plot twist in advance. I wish I could report that I saw that twist coming a mile away the first time around, but I didn't at all. I never do. I think the only plot twist I ever predicted was in that M. Night Shamalyan movie about the people in the forest surrounded by monsters.

Roasted Vegetables

(turnips, radishes, shiitakes, red peppers, and broccoli rabe) with brown rice and a side of bacon. Have I mentioned that we are members of the Bacon of the Month club?

Pointy Egg

Dude, have you ever seen a pointier egg?

Steak

Big, beefy ones, with brown basmati and asparagus.

Sauteed Sole

with brown basmati rice and roasted vegetables: cauliflower, carrots, and shiitake mushrooms. You know what I'm going to say about that last.

Pasta

Specifically, whole wheat egg noodles, with parmesan and butter. Also salad. Takes me back to grad school days!

Crab Cakes

with brown rice and roasted vegetables. I've said it here before, and I'll say it again: roasted vegetables are the way to live. I threw together some carrots, radishes, and shiitake mushrooms, doused them in olive oil, and popped them into a 400 degree oven for an hour. They came out transformed into an oily, crunchy, intensely sweet and nutty concoction dying to be salted and eaten ravenously. I obliged. A word on the radishes: normally I just throw them away, so objectionable do I find them. As my daughter says, "radishes are good for turtles." But last night I decided to gamble on my theory that there's no such thing as a bad roasted vegetable, and what do you know—delish.

Grilled Grouper

with brown rice and salad mix salad. Our CSA has started delivering again! I tell you, spring is nothing but good news. The fish was also glorious; I never know what makes fish work, but when it does, it's magic.

Pork Chops

with sauteed brussels sprouts and barley. It might have been nice to have eaten all at the same time, but we don't ask for the moon with three children around.

Scrambled Goose Eggs

with parsley and tarragon. Also asparagus, corn on the cob, quinoa, and bacon. Goose eggs are incredibly rich and tasty due to a nearly 50/50 ratio of yolk to white. Yum.

Farmer's Market Eggs

Spring! To me it means: Miss Sue's birds are laying again. Miss S. is the presiding deity at our local farmer's market, and her birds produce the best eggs one can get. I know because I am always in pursuit of good eggs, and have tried all the ones I can find. Miss Sue's win, hands down. The only catch is that everyone else knows this too, so one has to get to her before six AM on a Saturday in order to get any. And my spouse does this for me! All season! Friends, this is the kind of thing that gives a marriage legs. Pictured are goose eggs, and brown and green hen's eggs.

Buffalo

steak, with brown rice and roof lettuce salad.

In Praise of the Swatch

This photo is a good illustration of why you should always swatch before starting a project. Not only do you get to know your yarn, your needles, your gauge, etc., but you get to practice. See the cables at the bottom? The way they sort of wander around for no apparent reason? That's not what they're supposed to do. The tidy little interlaced bundle at the top, my second go at the pattern, is what we're shooting for. Incidentally, the bottom is also what happens when you're knitting while watching "The Matrix Reloaded" and kind of want to see that freeway-top-of-the-truck fight scene; the top is when you've switched to "Practical Magic" and don't care at all what you miss.

Omelette

with spinach, shitake mushrooms, gruyere, and tarragon. With brown rice. How did I arrive at the omelette filling? Well, I consulted my simultaneously instinctual and carefully researched sense of flavor and texture balances both classical and avant-garde and arrived at a nuanced medley that...oh, you know I'm kidding. I used what was leftover in the fridge.

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Anyone who knew me at a certain point in my life will remember my bug-eyed, raving, fanatical devotion to "The Matirx." This is a movie I saw five times in the theater; it is the reason I first got a DVD player. I have no idea how many times I've actually seen it. It's hard once something really new has become old to remember what it was like before. Now all movies of a certian kind look a lot like "The Matrix," but at the time nothing did. I saw it blind, on a whim, having heard nothing about it—and it just transported me. My fanaticism had everything to do with my psychological, shall we say, idiosyncrasies at the time, and has since ebbed, but I'd still happily watch it any time. "The Matrix Reloaded" is a whole other kettle of fish. What do we learn in this sequel? Well, for one thing, you can multiply the villain all you want, but when your hero is an un-killable superman fight scenes tend to lose their suspense. Also we learn that Zion is populated entirely by 18 to 24 year-olds and looks, on a Friday night, a lot like one of those early-90's Calvin Klein orgy ads. Principally, however, we learn that Keanu looks good in a skirt. This is not an incidental point, because it relates to my overwhelming impression seeing it this time around, to wit: the Wachowskis are fond enough of women, and have no objection at all to using them, but they are heart-and-soul homoeroticists. Nothing makes them happier than pushing around blank-faced, doe-eyed Keanu. Remember the bug scene from "The Matrix?" You found it hot, right? So did they, and they find all kinds of ways large and small to recapture the magic. Look for Keanu's long, grommet-studded spine lying in bed, Monica Bellucci bullying him into a lingering kiss, the Oracle fondly teasing him for being, as she first put it, "cute...not too bright, though."

Seeing TMR on high-def also teaches me one more thing: CGI looks really cruddy on high-def. Watching the scene where Keanu and multi-Hugo go at it is like watching a movie be regularly intercut with its own video game.

V for Vendetta (2005)

This movie has a lot going for it, and should have been fun. I mean, Hugo Weaving for heaven's sake! The Wachowski brothers! But Weaving is trapped behind an immobile mask for the whole movie, and the script is a monument to moral incoherence. This is a movie that fancies itself a timely allegory for the fight against government tyranny and groupthink, focusing in particular on the inevitable slide into abduction and torture common to all paranoid, totalitarian systems. And yet torture is also the means by which the hero supposedly expresses his love and frees the soul of his beloved! (Naturally, the heroine is tortured; for some reason filmmakers persistently equate violence against women with metaphor. See "Boxing Helena" for evidence that this is not only a male-director problem.) It's doubly discouraging to watch a movie whose principles one largely agrees with fall into such a ridiculous mess. Look for a nice glimpse of Sinead Cusack, however, as well as a good bit from Steven Fry, though neither of them can escape the moronities of their respective characters.

Lamb Chops

broiled. With roof lettuce salad and baked sweet potatoes; I had mine with coconut oil and salt. Unbelievably good.