gluttony!

what was supposed to be a night of yoga turned into a night of 2 bowls of pasta, 1 cupcake, and jeopardy's tournament of champions. the questions get WAY harder in the tournament of champions. tonight's semi-finals featured one of those super-anxious contestants that jerks off the buzzer. it's really distracting.

for dinnie we had a spinach, potato, and gorgonzola pasta, loosely inspired by something posted on smitten kitchen that caught my eye. thinly sliced yukon gold potatoes are drizzled with olive oil, salt, fresh rosemary stripped off the stalk, and pepper and then roasted at high heat in the oven. sauté a red onion with 2 bags of chopped spinach and some garlic in a bit more olive oil. cook off your pasta, toss everything together with a bit of gorgonzola (leftover in my case) cut into bits. loosen with a bit of pasta cooking water if desired (not really necessary) and add more cracked black pepper.

this weekend is my mum's 60th birthday and we're having some of the kdubsguelph tdot crew over tomorrow night for some chattin', relaxin', battlestar galactica-in'. my bro the s-dawg is going to come over too. we're probably going to order in. anyway, the convergence of these two events meant that i had another incentive to fire off a GIANT batch of cupcakes even though my mom wanted to get a cake from some dodgy chinese pastry place in pac-mall. chinese baking tends to be THE WORST. sorry to be culturally insensitive, but it's kind of true. i mean, it's okay if you don't have that western-bred taste for the pure saccharine delight of sugar - if you weren't weaned on high fructose corn syrup and instead spent your formative years in a faraway land where legumes are a de rigeur player in the mealtime finales. i hate chestnut, red bean, and green tea flavours in cakes. i don't mind those elements in chinese desserts, but i don't like the mash-up between cultures. i also don't like that a lot of chinese baking relies on sponge cakes or genoises. that's my least favorite cake genre. i like a sturdy, all-american, good, ol' fashioned, CAKE cake.

to that end, i made a batch of golden cupcakes with a salted caramel buttercream. it's like the yang to my usual go-to celebratory cupcake recipe, the devil's food cupcakes with the brown sugar buttercream.

i didn't even get any knitting done! bogus! i got the new alison bechdel collection, 'essential dykes to watch out for' and i've been voraciously consuming it. it's a retrospective of seminal DTWOF comics over the years (bechdel took a hiatus from doing the regular serial last march, to focus on a new memoir book and other projects.) i EFFIN LOVE THESE COMICS.

eep! the dotytron is coming downstairs expecting me to watch tv with him. i have to let him down gracefully.

fin.