Pizza Diavola

A photo post, to celebrate having working wireless and to provide some filler material for my brain tonight. Taken with the camera on an LG Chocolate phone. Images below the cut.

Monday, June 2

I had copies of my apartment keys made for a friend (should’ve done it a lot sooner, but oh, well, it didn’t occur to me), and found a cute, tacky tourist kitsch SF keychain to put them on while I was getting lightbulbs at Walgreens (they stock an amazing amount of touristy SF junk). The best part of it is that the round thing in the center spins: on one side is a cable car and on the other, the GG bridge!

Friday, May 31

OMG SHOEZ! I got an awesome, full length black dress from BCBG last June and for various reasons, never got around to wearing it (my friend AP told me it’d suitable for the company holiday party. Shortly before the holiday party, I pulled it out of the closet, tried it on, and thought, “It’s a lot lower cut than I remember it being,” and emailed some friends asking if it was appropriate for a work function. Unanimous response: NO. So it went back into the closet.). I hadn’t even had it hemmed yet, because I didn’t have shoes to wear with it. However, on Memorial Day, AP and I had our yearly “AP’s frustration at the meager contents of PD’s closet boils over and she makes good on her threats to take me shopping” outing and I got these fabulous shoes from Charles David. And now I’m going to take the dress to be hemmed so I can wear it and my OMG SHOEZ! to Das Rheingold when the summer opera season starts up. I also got a pair of fabulous brown heels, which are sort of wedges and sort of not.

Thursday, May 29

The Whiffenpoofs of 2008 were singing at the University Club. The Whiffs are the senior mens’ a cappella group and they were stopping by SF as part of their post-graduation world tour. They sing quite nicely, and yet, there was one song about a drunken, homeless, single mother dragging her kids to Yale because that’s where their daddy was, and then being seduced (by a couple drinks) by a Harvard man and abandoning the Yale man’s tent on the 50 yard line (at the Yale Bowl, the football stadium) for the Harvard man’s treehouse. It got a lot of laughs, of course. Sexism is funny! Tired stereotypes and rape are funny! I was standing there, listening and thinking, “Is there no place free of misogyny?”

Sunday, May 25

Three views of the Marina from upper Fillmore. I couldn’t decide which one I liked best.

Saturday, May 24

The 24th was quite nice: one of my friends came over for dinner and then we went to SFS for a night of Brahms. Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) conducted the symphony in Brahms’ Geistliches Lied, Four Songs for Women’s Chorus, and Ein Deutsches Requiem. SFS Chorus sang, along with Laura Claycomb (soprano) and Matthias Goerne (baritone). We missed the songs, but Ein Deutsches Requiem was amazing! I’d been listening to the Berliner Phil recording from 2007, and it was so much better live. The SFS timpanist was fabulous and I loved the crashing, triumphant “mit Freuden, mit Freuden” in the first movement. The second and last movements were also great.

But I digress. I made tagliatell’ alla bolgonese for dinner, with fresh pasta and the bolognese from scratch. The picture is of the soffritto, the minced garlic, onion, carrots, celery, thyme, and sage, in the stock pot with olive oil. I like using my chef’s knife and slicing things up–I love the feel of my knife sliding cleanly through things–and I hate running across pieces of onions in sauces and risotti, so everything’s minced quite finely. My friend asked, “What’s this orange thing?” when we were eating dinner, and when I said that it was a carrot, responded, “What! I’ve never seen anything minced so finely outside of a restaurant.”

And for dessert, a cherry clafoutis made with Chelan and Brook cheeries. Some extra noodles are visible up top.

I changed ideas for dinner a few times: first, I wanted to make roasted pork belly (and did a dry run for myself, and it’s a good thing I didn’t go with that because it turned out merely okay) and granita di caffe, then I wanted to make shrimp etouffee and a pine nut torta, and in the end, wound up doing neither. The clafoutis was inspired by the fabulous cherries that are now in season and running across Muffintop’s recipe. The tagliatell’ alla bolognese was the result of thinking hard about making shrimp etouffee, deciding that I probably couldn’t stomach handling whole shrimp (and I needed whole shrimp to use the shells for stock), and going back to fresh pasta and bolognese as something reliably good but sufficiently out of the ordinary as to be worthwhile for a nice, pre-symphony dinner and worth making. It was the first time in a couple months that I was excited about cooking, about making new things and finding new recipes. Between work, work crises, work, and personal crises, I was tired for a long time. Things have since stabilized, although they are by no means resolved. The excitement I felt about cooking was a good sign, an indicator that I was pulling out of the fog. We’ll see if progress continues apace–I have an emotional breakdown scheduled for later in the month, but I might be too busy to have time for it until mid-July.