End of weekend, time to rest.

Whoo. The Mad Weekend of Cooking is over (not all week cooking, just all weekend.) I managed to foist enough leftovers on people to not make the fridge ridiculously full, and a couple of things even got all eaten at dinner. Twenty people, fourteen Things To Eat.

First, it was a fun party. About the maximum number that you can fit in the apartment and have most people have somewhere reasonable to sit. Second, the food all turned out pretty well. Even the bagna cauda, which was overcooked somehow so that the garlic was a little more crunchy than spreadable, was still tasty. Third, I think I'm an adrenaline junkie. :) There's something exhilarating about having too much work to do, and a deadline, and getting it done in time. Working at Looking Glass was like that a lot of the time, finishing an assassin game is like that, getting married was quite a lot calmer.

Fourth, I have all these random muscles that are sore now. Like the hold-things-very-very-tightly-between-thumb-and-forefingers muscles, which I admit, I do not often exercise. But getting the feeder plate out of the mandoline seems to require it. (I'm ambivalent about the mandoline. On the one hand, it was very good at turning cucumbers into thin even cucumber slice, and the like. On the other hand, I haven't used it without cutting myself yet, and I'm sure that I'm going to injure myself badly taking it apart one of these days, as the method seems to require pulling on the feeder plate very hard.)

Fifth, I got to show off lots of bowls! (Alas, the knives from the wedding silverware were deemed Treacherous, as they kept leaping off of people's laps onto the floor. I admit I hadn't been thinking of that when picking the pattern). The very first book I learned to read was called "Ann Likes Red". It was about a little girl going shopping, and her mother keeps suggesting other colors. ("A green dress, Ann?" "No! A red dress! Ann likes red! Red red red!") I had that feeling when I was at King Richard's Faire in one of the pottery (too small and temporary for "stores", too large for "booths", I'm not sure what to call the shopping-places...). "A pitcher with a cover, Laura?" "No! A bowl! Laura likes bowls! Bowls bowls bowls!"

(no subject)

Most recently finished book: Court of the Midnight King. Sort of a Mists of Avalon take on Richard III. I bought it in London, and now realize that it's not even distributed in the US, presumably because Americans don't know who Richard III was.

I quite liked it. The writing is good, the love plots aren't inordinately sappy, but are instead moderately understated. I liked the frame story, too - I didn't start out liking it ("Why is there a frame story? What the heck is it doing?") but it grew on me. The frame serves to underscore/foreshadow the oncoming doom, and to point out more clearly the differences between this version of the story and the Shakespeare version (as well as the "real" Richard). There was a nice bit of philosophy about the secuctive allure of a proper villain, and the "magic system" was interesting.

Probably not in my top ten books ever, but one of the best books this month.