Babies 'R Us

Here is a picture of my friend's adorable baby boy (you know who you are, missy!) wearing the Little Bubbles sweater I made for him during my prenatal visit to Seattle last year. It's a bemusing reminder that I really did used to knit. Like, complete projects even!

Happily, it is still a little too big for him, so they'll get a few more months of use out of it before it becomes too small.

I'm also pleased that I got to use some of these buttons I bought on eBay, which I think are lots of fun on baby boy clothes. It even fortuitously matched the blue on this sweater. (If you click on the photo, you can see a larger shot of the puppy dog on the button.)

Speaking of creatures which require midday naps, I stayed home from worked today, as my cough was just unrelenting and I thought it would be nice not to cough all over my coworkers. Again.

I suppose I am getting somewhat better since today's naps amounted to 3 hours instead of yesterday's 5-1/2 hours, and I am going slightly stir crazy.

And on the bright side, I found out about this goofy panda video that was captured by CCTV where a wild giant panda calmly wanders into a farmer's pig pen and starts gnawing on discarded meat bones. (Pandas being the rock stars they are, you can also see the farmer bring him an extra meat bone.) The panda then wanders calmly out after finishing its meal.

You will not be surprised to hear that this piece of video made the news in Australia, the UK, (of course mainland China), Taiwan, and the US.



It's a good thing I seem to be gradually improving on my own since my GP is out of town and the guy who is covering him has an appointment desk that doesn't return calls (I left 2 messages and will be having a talk with my doc when he's back). Yes, that sucks (I particularly like the part on the new guy's website where it says my call is important to him -- my sweetie's response: yeah, but returning calls is NOT) so as you can see, I am trying to keep myself amused.

For example, I dug out these dinner photos from Les Halles Downtown, coincidentally taken from the weekend before I got spectacularly laid out with my respiratory trifecta. My friend Walter (who has since become the proud papa of twins Isabella and Alexander, and will thus be unlikely to have time in the future for such leisurely evening meals out)

I persuaded Walter to throw caution and Lipitor to the wind by starting with a shared portion of Les Halles' pork rillettes du Boucher, a "shredded pork confit" I once likened to French ham salad and so rich that I couldn't survive a portion larger than an appetizer since "confit" is the code word for "ADD more fat and cook IN IT"

He then proceeded to have a delicious portion of steak au poivre...

...while I opted for a HALF portion of mussels mariniere (I've never figured out who could put away an entire FULL portion, since while utterly delicious, the very generous portions of mussels at Les Halles intimidate me), filching the occasional fry from Walter's plate to help round out the baguettes in the bread basket for the mariniere sauce: white wine, shallots, and garlic. YUM!

Somehow, we managed to find room for profiteroles (Walter)...

...and sorbet (me) -- green apple and cantalope (the green apple was more interesting, I thought)

Eyeing Walter's steak au poivre made me decide to defrost a steak from the freezer and use a recipe from the March 2010 issue of Cooking Light (thank you MyRecipes.com) for maple and soy-glazed steak, my only substitution for the marinade being Chinese hot chili paste instead of sriracha (which I don't have). So yummy that I, um, ate the whole steak (!) and forgot to take any pictures before the devouring. Oops.

Does this mean I am getting better?