I wasn’t feeling too well Monday of last week, so I stayed home from work and took it easy.  In my case, this involved watching movies for most of the day, staring somewhat ironically with “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and continuing with “Good Night, and Good Luck” and then finally “Requiem for a Dream.”  That last one is one twisted movie, and I think I’m going to leave it at that.  If you’ve seen it, you know exactly what I mean, and if you haven’t, let’s just say you’ll probably never see a more accurate and shocking portrayal of addiction committed to film.  It was pretty disturbing, and I don’t think I’ll be watching that movie again for awhile.

Aside from haunting surreal movies, things are going quite well overall.  Hanne’s now back in classes, the beginning of the end so to speak.  This is her last year of law school, and so she’s got a lot of work ahead of her, both in terms of the piles of schoolwork that she has to look forward to as well as the job search that she’s trying to convince me isn’t making her somewhat nervous.  She’s submitting her CV into what amounts to the shark tank that is the legal community, not because they’ll devour her, but because they have a tendency to rip you to shreds.  Her experience and grades will likely get her a number of interviews (and quite possibly a recommendation from a federal judge that would get her an interview even without potential employers even looking at her grades once they see that and her class position), but she’s probably not going to hear back from a lot of them.  It sucks, but that’s how law firms seem to work.

Last weekend I had a craving to cook for Hanne.  We’ve been cooking a lot more recently, trying to use up the produce we get from our biweekly Organics to You box, but without being able to drink a beer while I’m cooking it just doesn’t feel…right.  I’ve associated beer and cooking for so long that I’m actually craving beer while I cook.  I know that people say that when you start craving alcohol you might have a problem, but the thing is, I could easily drink beer while I cook and then not while I eat or after dinner.  There’s just something soothing about beer with cooking.  It might be that it soothes my nerves of timing the meal, or it might be that it helps my mind organize things, or it might just be that it makes something I tremendously enjoy even more enjoyable, but I missed it enough that I cooked a very expensive meal for Hanne.  A 3 lb. pork loin cut specially for me by the New Seasons butcher, a delicious “wet” green bean dish, sauteed potatoes with balsalmic vinegar, and a nice stainless steel roasting pan purchased especially for cooking the meal…that I then went and scratched by cutting the meat in the pan.  Sigh.  OK, so maybe cooking while drinking beer does have its limitations.  On the other hand, it’s stainless steel, so I can probably just buff it out.  Probably hurt the knife more than the meat, after all.

I picked up soemthing recently that I’ve wanted to try ever since I first read about it.  There’s a particular fruit called the “Miracle Fruit” that came to my attention via a New York Times article Hanne forwarded to me, and this little fruit that’s native to Africa has some interesting properties: it changes how food tastes.  Specifically, it binds to your taste buds and makes sour foods sweet.  It’s particularly good for people who like sweet foods but can’t eat them for health reasons (diabetics, especially), but a new movement called “flavor tripping” has started where people gather a bunch of different foods, eat the fruit, and then try as much as they can.

The fruits themselves only grow in warm, humid climates and they’re quite expensive to boot, but I picked up a couple of boxes of pills made from the fruit and corn starch.  Hanne and I tried them last night, and though we didn’t have a wide array of things to try, we were able to suck on wedges of lemon and lime easily and they tasted like lemonade and 7up, respectively.  I’ve never been able to suck on raw lemon or lime without wincing before.  Tabasco sauce, while still spicy and peppery, tasted like a sweet BBQ sauce.  I was even able to eat a spoonful of (balsalmic) vinegar.  It was really, really trippy.  We need to gather some additional things to try and give that another go.

I’m really looking forward to this weekend, mostly because it’s a three-day weekend and I’ll have three whole days to decompress.  Of course, I’m not sure what compressed me in the first place, but let’s not get caught up on semantics.  On Saturday my sister is moving and Hanne and I will probably head over to help her, but the rest of the weekend is wide, wide open and I’d like to keep it that way.  Maybe I’ll even cook again!  Less beer this time, though.  I might brew this weekend, as the guy who runs my local wine shop said he had some fresh hops from his yard to give me.  That would be fantastic, and I’d love to make a fresh hop beer.  Dried hops give a very strong bitterness (depending on the variety, of course), but fresh hops provide a much sweeter aroma.  If I can identify what hops they are I could enter my beer into Bridgeport Brewing’s Hop Harvest Homebrew Challenge, but if I don’t know what they are I’ll use them as a finishing hop, add in some processed hops, and make a fresh hop Imperial IPA.  That would be phenominal.

Speaking of beer, I bottled the beer I brewed for Dan’s visit this week, and straight from the fermenter, it was quite good.  He arrives in three weeks, so it should have just enough time to bottle condition and carbonate.  I’m really looking forward to trying it.

Hmmm, I just escorted my coworker downstairs on his way to the emergency room.  I think I’ll leave it there, as I’m not sure I have anything else that can top that.