October 2009
October 30, 2009 at 10:46 am
PastaQueen reviews Voskos yogurt.
October 28, 2009 at 10:07 am
Yesterday was my 29th birthday (thanks in advance for the well wishes), which means a year from yesterday will be…the one year anniversary of my 29th birthday! Actually, this is more commonly referred to as your 30th birthday and while I know this is considered a BIG DEAL, I am not all that concerned about it at this moment.
I figure people freak out over their 30th birthday for two reasons: 1) They look at their lives and are unhappy with what they’ve accomplished or failed to accomplish. 2) They fear old age, illness and their ultimate mortality. As for number 1, I am pretty happy with what I’ve accomplished at this point in my life, so no worries there. As for number 2 – HA! Illness? Old age? We are old friends. We have drinks every Friday night together.
I am always befuddled when a 28-year-old friend of mine tells me, “I found a white hair today!” as if this is shocking information. I found my first white hair when I was 21, and my older [...]
October 26, 2009 at 4:50 pm
One of the annoying things about having a chronic illness (of which there are about eleventy billion), is that I never know if I’m having a bad day because I am sick or if I’m just having a bad day. I know I had bad days before I got my headache over a year and a half ago. I know there were days when I didn’t want to work out or go to work or be involved with any sentence that included the word “work.” So, I would assume I’d have days like that now even if my head didn’t hurt all the time. Yet, I always blame any foul temperament on the headache.
Today has been a rather BLAH day. I just now finally got up the will to reply to some of my emails that have been sitting in my “Respond To” folder for days. And that is only partly because I got my ass out of the house and drank a tall coffee at the Barnes & Noble cafe (although the barista always [...]
October 23, 2009 at 9:46 am
There is a Halloween store set up in the corpse of the old Circuit City building. I can’t remember if such stores existed when I was a child, but in the past few years they’ve become popular in my town. The Halloween stores appear out of nowhere at the end of September, rent a huge empty space left by a recently deceased store, and then just as quickly disappear by the first days of November, making me wonder if they existed at all. You never know where they’ll show up next year, so you just have to keep a lookout for the big yellow banner hanging outside your local strip mall.
I went to the Circuit City Halloween store yesterday to look for a costume for the Run Like Hell race that is only a week away. It was odd to see rows of ghost masks and sexy nurse costumes lining the walls store, instead of the rows of flatscreen TVs that I remember. It was rather depressing to look at all the female costumes that [...]
October 21, 2009 at 9:12 am
I didn’t intend for this blog to suddenly become PastaQueen’s book review bonanza, but that’s how everything landed, so let’s just go with it, ok? My friend, Stephanie O’Dea, who blogs at A Year of Slow Cooking just released her first cookbook, smartly titled Make It Fast, Cook It Slow: The Big Book of Everyday Slow Cooking. Please note the usage of the word “slow cooker” and not “crockpot” which is a trademarked term that we will avoid for fear of litigation.
Steph sent me a copy of her book, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone, or rather kill half a peck of apples with one recipe.
I dug out my mother’s slow cooker, which is literally older than I am, and grabbed nine apples from my freshly picked peck, to make the Apple Crisp recipe on page 402. This meant I got to use my favorite kitchen appliance, the apple slicer!
My knife skills are nothing to brag about, so I spent at least 15 minutes peeling the skin off of the apples, [...]
My latest tweets
"What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams and what we do to make them come about." - Joseph Epstein
