Fish Wednesday: Manic Depressive Edition

Salmon and Peas

In spite of the fact that there is some excellent news to be had around the NEV HQ, it’s tempered with some rather less than excellent sides. The dominant household trauma is around a new furnace, a must fix now situation that will empty the coffers of my hard earned dollars, money I had hoped to spend on something rather more romantic than than a large appliance that will ensure I do not see my breath when I stumble out of bed on those cold February mornings. Along with the unanticipated investment in my home, there’s some more personal stuff that has left me with a big heavy suitcase full of sadness, and not the wheelie kind of suitcase that you can toss in the overhead.

You’d think that things both excellent and awful would cancel each other out, leaving me with a sort of manageable stasis, but instead, it is a roller coaster ride of high places with vast views and stomach wrenching plunges to unexpected depths. This is all a lot of metaphorical smoke blowing, what I ‘m saying is that things are 17 kinds of crazy lately. And in order to manage that without completely losing my mind, I have been back in the kitchen.


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Hoopla, Hullaballoo, Ballyhoo

Don’t you love the word “hoopla”? It’s so fun. Dictionary tells me it’s similar to ballyhoo or hullabaloo, another pair of excellent words with a lot of vowels. I also like the Shakespearean phrase “much ado about nothing” though what I am after here is a smallish ado about some smallish bloggy things where maybe …


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Leningrad, 1990

It was 1990. Things were changing fast in the Soviet Union. There weren’t a lot of tourists in Leningrad and there certainly wasn’t much infrastructure for us. Did we stay in a hotel that was mostly brown? Was the dining room full of hookers in the early evening? There was brown bread for breakfast, sour …


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Seattle’s Honore Bakery

It’s official, I’m a snob. The reason for this epiphany? The baked goods at Honore. Now, granted, I didn’t try everything. Only four things: the cannele — a tiny custardy bundt shaped goody with gooey insides, the chausse de pomme — essentially an apple turnover, the koign imman — I’ll come back to this, and …


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