Coasters

I have a thing about coasters.  Coasters must be used any time any one sets a drink on a table, be it glass or wood.  Most coasters I've purchased are ceramic.  Here's the thing:  I have cats.  Cats apparently have an innate drive to knock coasters off of tables.  They. Simply. Must.  That is why most of my coasters end up in at least two pieces.  I just purchased some rubber coasters, but they're not pretty.  I just came across these crocheted coasters at  throughtheloops.  What a great idea!  I'm going to make a set (right after I finish the sweater I'm knitting - which is holding at four inches of ribbing and knitting).

Chicken Tortilla Soup

This is the Pioneer Woman's Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe.  I made it last night.  I considered leaving out the tomato paste, but that would have been a bad idea.  It was SO good.  I did leave out the black beans because I didn't have any.  I don't think it hurt anything.

Review: The Windup Girl

Author: Paolo Bacigalupi
Narrator: Jonathan Davis
Duration: 19 hours, 32 minutes
Publisher: Brilliance Audio (May 2010)
Program Type: Audiobook

Emiko is the windup girl of the title.  She is an engineered being who has been left in Bangkok by the rich Japanese businessman who brought her there as his secretary and later found it cheaper to abandon her than to pay the fees for her to leave the country with him.  Her presence in Thailand is illegal, and she lives in danger of being mulched by the White Shirts who are the Environmental Ministry's military police.  She is forced to perform nightly at a seedy sex club by the club's owner, who bribes the White Shirts to ignore her presence.  She crosses paths with Anderson Lake, an American hoping to take advantage of Thailand's political unrest to further his company's goals.

The story is set in a dystopian near future in which the world oil economy has been replaced by an economy based on calories.  The author does not give a great deal of background as to how this "contraction" occurred, but simply presents it as a fact.  Genetic engineering is commonplace in both food and living creatures, including Emiko. 

The pacing of the story is fast, and the characters are well developed and multidimensional.  The narrator did an excellent job of voicing all of the characters.  I look forward to reading more by this author and to listening to more books by the narrator.

This will be on the menu soon

Crockpot Artichoke Pasta

We love dinner being ready in the crockpot when we get home from work.  We love pasta.  We love artichokes.  We love garlic.  And as an added bonus?  Cream!  Bring it.

Thank you, Stephanie, at A Year of Slow Cooking.

Milk Punch

I spend a lot of time at work with not much actual work to do.  I'm trying to remedy the situation by switching to part-time employment.  Back in the old days, if I was lucky enough to have a window office, which I usually wasn't, I would have passed such downtime staring out of the window.  Now we have the most wonderful internet, which enables me to spend my time being personally productive when I am unable to be professionally productive.  I've decided to use this blog to record my favorite Internet discoveries.

Here's something I'm definitely going to try.  Definitely wouldn't have found this staring out the window.
Smitten Kitchen's Milk Punch