Round 7

So for some reason I've been having a craving to make blueberry muffins. Et voila! My local supermarket across the street (how convenient is THAT?) helpfully obliged me with a sale on blueberries: 2 pints for $3.00 and of good quality!

I used a recipe from The Joy of Cooking (did you know they have their own website? I didn't) which my sweetie's mom gave to me (she was appalled when she heard I did not have a copy). This recipe advised adding more oil if I planned to eat/serve these over the course of a few days instead of immediately. (It also told me to reduce the sugar/brown sugar from 2/3 cup to 1/3 if I were to add blueberries -- I missed that footnote: whoops! --> extra sugar)

However, changing the amount of oil from 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup turned out to be a wee bit excessive: it soaked completely through the paper liners and left little pools of oil in the muffin pan. (It also made 15 muffins instead of 12, possibly because I don't have the GIANT "Texas-sized" muffin pans.) We'll see how it holds up when I return home late tomorrow night, since I am staying at my mom's tonight, post-chemo. Maybe I'll freeze some...

That was yesterday morning, when I woke up for some unknown reason at 6:30am (again) and decided, "So hey, what the heck, I'll make muffins." Last night was my monthly Princeton Women's book club meeting, where I had yummity lobster ravioli at Cucina Cafe, in the MetLife Building above Grand Central, or the Pan Am Building to us old-timers (hey, did you know the "M" and "L" on the MetLife sign each weigh TWO TONS?!).

Apparently, it is now the Nova Scotia Lobster Festival in NYC this summer (May 22nd - Sept 6th). Since I had just had scallop risotto the night before with my friend Sam at Le Zie in Chelsea, I opted for the 5 immensely plump lobster ravioli (~$14) while two of my friends had lobster risotto ($14.50) and our fourth had broiled lobster with butter ($19). Everyone was happy with their food, so I may need to wander over there again this summer, since our next book club meeting isn't until Sept. 17th (just like schoolkids, we have summer vacation too).

Tomorrow night, I am meeting with some other friends for a new and different book club at El Castillo de Jagua in the Lower East Side. Since we are reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it seemed only fitting that we meet at a Dominican restaurant. The book is quite gripping but also a bit frustrating, since it uses many Spanish/Dominican idioms without translation or explication. Sure, I can gather positive/negative connotations from context (and the remnants of four years of high school Spanish) but I lose the precise flavor of the insult/praise. I mean hey, if a book requires its own annotated glossary/website to help us poor non-Latinos out...at least I have enough comic book geekiness to get all of THOSE references. So instead of stopping after every page to look up stuff, I've taken to writing down or highlighting unfamiliar terms for looking up later.

Speaking of the book, I need to finish the 2nd half (!) but since I am going in for chemo today (my penultimate round! wahooo!) that's usually at least a few hours of waiting around. Time to go shower and get ready... ciao!