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there was much poker to be played last night…
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it was foggy this morning…
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you know you’ve met your match when you go to get popcorn and you are met with [url=http://www.orville.com/gateway?waf.action=P04ProductDetail&productID=1044&mnav=products]orville redenbacher’s cinnabon cinnamon butter popcorn[/url]. for even my insatiable sweet tooth, this box of popcorn was quite the challenge. not that i mind, i love cinnabon, but i can barely finish one of those things. but take the frosted goodness of a cinnabon bun and add it to popcorn and what do you get? dare i say that it is even better than kettle corn? dare i? i do believe i do dare dat.
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i did the second photoshoot for my pastry chef’s food photography a few days ago. i still haven’t processed all of the photos yet, but i did get a chance to take a look at a few of them. there were peanut butter and jelly filled cookies, muffins, a pumpkin chocolate chip bundt cake, a flourless chocolate cake, a chocolate cake with nuts, some cranberry cake, and truffles. all in all, it was quite appetizing.
i was trying to figure out which one i would have liked to have eaten, but it was really hard not to try and sample a little of everything. and, what’s best was that after the shoot, they were gracious enough to give me samples of everything that was there. mmmmm.
food photography is pretty tricky. i thought that i had tried to learn from the last truffle shoot, but there were still a lot of things that i wish i had done better. oh well, maybe next time.
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i love meat. this is no secret and i cannot help it. i grew up in a meat-eating household. i don’t think that there was ever a day where we did not have some kind of meat. mystery meat is even good…sometimes. but one of the things that my parents have never really done is grilling. we’ve done some bbq’ing, but not much, and usually when we did grill, it was in the form of burgers.
so whenever i get the chance, i’ll grill up a storm. the biggest thing i’m into now are dry rubs. i don’t know what it is about them, but they can be rather tasty. i have to admit, though, that i’m not much of a fan of the cajun dry rub i’ve made. i’m not sure what it is about it, but the flavor doesn’t really do much for me.
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i don’t grill pork chops much, i’m much more of a red meat eater, but because [url=http://www.track15.com]dardy[/url] was coming over, i thought that i should give him a non-beef alternative. i think he is the only one of my friends left who is avoiding beef….but he still gave in and ate some anyway.
i have to say that the meat pictures don’t look very appetizing. i don’t know what it is about meat, but it’s hard to make it look good. i’ll have to do some research to find out what people do to make it look more tasty.
still, 2 tri-tips and 3 pork chops later, i have to say that the meal was pretty satisfying. mmmm.
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[url=http://jimmy.ocliw.com]jimmy[/url] gave jen some persimmons, but jen’s now away for a few weeks for work so there’s a big bag of them sitting in the fridge. i don’t know how long they last, but i suspect that they will go bad before she gets back. jen offered me some persimmons too, but i don’t like them so i don’t know what is going to happen to them.
i decided to make one of them useful and i decided to try out one of my lenses for macro work. it took pictures better than i had expected. the problem i see now is that macro photography is very detailed oriented and dust is a big, big problem.
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i believe there were 22 different truffles to be tried by everyone. 6 different flavors with up to four varieties of each flavor to sample. though truffles are small and bite-sized, they are truly decadent and each morsel was something to be savored. i was definitely feeling a little overwhelmed by the amount of chocolate that i had to consume last night. it was a good thing that i didn’t eat dinner beforehand because i don’t know if i would have been able to have had all of this truffle madness.
my friend had a truffle taste test last night and we all had to sample the various truffles out there. it turned out that there were 3 different brands of truffles and she wanted to see how their truffles matched up against the commercial competitors.
she’s also asked me if i would do some product photography so i had agreed to shoot a few sample shots of the truffles to see if they wanted to go with my style or not. i guess we’ll see how that works out. either way, it was nice to get a little tasting of truffles. mmmm.
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we all had to fill out these surveys to give some feedback on the truffles. during this time, i realized that i have a very commercial palette and a rather unsophisticated one, at that. i generally liked godiva more than the much more expensive and high class xox chocolates. oh well, i guess that’s why i don’t have truffles all the time.
but the way that people were describing the complex tastes in the truffles was simply amazing. they would describe the truffles as “typical commercial overprocessing, with a waxy shell.” me? i thought it was good chocolate. =P
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our host had a candle burning on an end table, so while i was waiting for people to arrive, i decided to take a quick picture and ended up liking it more than any of the pictures of the truffles i took. go figure. =P
wow, i can’t believe it is november already!
to celebrate daylight savings, i got into work extra, extra late today. actually, i had a pretty bad headache when i first woke up so i went back to bed thinking that i’d call in sick. but after another hour or so of sleep, i felt much better so i decided to go into work today.
i watched the grudge on friday night with a bunch of people. the movie was actually one of the better horror movies i’ve seen in a while. it’s interesting how whenever we as a mass of people go and watch horror movies, we collectively laugh uncomfortably after a scary moment. there’s some kind of relief knowing that it is just a movie and you are safe.
the movie had its creepy moments, but i was glad that the movie was particularly gory. i’m not much of a fan of gore. i thought the movie had better cheap scares than the ring and i also thought that it was more haunting than the ring. overall, i liked it. i had heard some people complain that the movie’s plot was not very cohesive, but i didn’t feel like that at all. my roommate was pretty affected after watching the movie and she apparently had some difficulty enterting the apartment upon returning from the theatre.
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saturday, [url=http://jimmy.ocliw.com]jimmy[/url], john, [url=http://www.phamily.org]paul[/url], greg, josh, mike, and i went to wilder ranch state park for some mountain biking. the weather was rather windy at first and i was cursing myself for not bringing a jacket, but once we started biking it got warm. i’m not sure if i’m just that out of shape or if the trails were that hard, but i was walking a lot of the inclines on this ride. it wasn’t as technical as the ride at soquel, but then again…that was hell. this ride was fun, the downhill runs were especially fun…especially because i didn’t bail on this trip. it was good to get out on the bike again. it’s been a while. we strapped on four bikes onto the rear-mounted bike rack to get our bikes there.
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a lot of us were huffing and puffing along on the trail, walking the bigger inclines.
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greg sort of blasted through the whole park.
at the top of the one of peaks, it looked like there was a fire that burned away at most of the vegetation there. it looked rather odd.
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it’s official. [url=http://www.mars.com]mars, inc.[/url] is out to kill me. sure, they call their GIANT 3 pound bag of chocolate mix heaven “fun sized”. uh huh. suuuure. fun size, eh? let me tell you something. snickers, m&m’s, and twix put together in a giant bag is just brilliant. let me make sure that that point was made adequately.
complete. genius.
i have this sweet tooth. it’s undeniable. i have a particular weakness for donuts, but my sweet tooth is not limited to just that. no, it has far greater aspirations. i was walking around safeway when i stumbled upon this display of halloween candy. usually i’m able to stay away from these types of impulse buys, but when i saw this combination of candy, all sense, reason, and logic had left my body and in its place was an uncontrollable need to acquire this bag of candy.
and so what first started off as a simple errand became this inner struggle between my increasingly unsuccessful attempts to maintain a healthy diet and splurging on the joy that is a twix bar. i walked away from the display. surely, if i could walk away, i wouldn’t be tempted to get the bag, right? i went to pick up the other things on my list and on my way to the cash register something happened. even today, a day after the purchase, i still don’t know what it was that had come over me. but i was drawn to the candy display and though i could hear myself thinking that this was not a good idea, i could not stop my hands from snatching up this bag of pure delight.
i casually went to the register and laid out my items for purchase. the bag of chocolate joy was beckoning me to fulfill its chocolate destiny. how could i possibly refuse? it would be criminal to not help it fulfill its destiny. and who i am to stand in the way of destiny?
so, an hour and 1/4th of a pound later, i started to feel rather guilty about how i’ve been having so much “fun.” i guess you can’t win them all, eh?