fun dinner

We invited Corey and F over for dinner. Dee made lasagna; I helped. And we had salad and garlic bread. The food was good, and now we have strategic lasagna reserves.

We showed them the "new" place, learned dirt about the sordid underbelly of the crossword industry, got a heads-up to check out this Sunday's (I think it was) NYT crossword -- it's a new record for fewest total entries in a 15x15. (I don't know why I'm being coy about F's name since you can read it in the New York Times tomorrow, but I can't remember if I'm mimicking Corey's zephyr habit pointlessly or for a reason.)

We played Boggle and got our butts whupped (Corey had one beautiful 44-point round), and Ricochet and Deanna unshockingly won, and DDR and Para Para to for pedagogical purposes.

Informercial of the evening: read at one page per second!
http://www.learningstrategies.com/PhotoReading/Home.html

Weird fact of the evening: Realtor® is a registered trademark, coined in 1916.

miso soup I

First attempt at miso soup.

Absolute entry-level miso soup would have been water, miso, and these instant dashi granules. I also added, oh, a spoonful of wakame.

Each half-inch matchstick of wakame reconstitutes into a sheet of seaweed at least one inch by two, so my little cup of soup turned into a morass of seaweed all clinging to itself. Eating this Sargasso was mechanically non-trivial. But it tasted good, and there was enough broth to wet each spoonful of seaweed.

Next trial: more tasty bits.