TOD:
Nothing much. We've got the DVD for
Hairspray, but I haven't had time to watch the film yet, just the bonus stuff. And the RedBox DVD rental thingie at work has a monitor on top that keeps playing quickie previews to sell the movies they're renting, so I'm so sick and tired of the song "You Can't Stop the Beat" that I'm likely to throw up if I try to listen to the song voluntarily right now. I mean it plays over and over and over and over and over. Bleh.
(And poor Robert Wagner, reduced to playing Mr. George Wilson in the direct-to-video "A Dennis the Menace Christmas," another preview in the loop. Sad, sad, sad.)
BOOKS:
Finished Raymond Sokolov's
With The Grain, which is all about cooking with grains.
Margaret Visser's
The Way We Are (quickie essays about where social conventions come from) and Christine Ammer's
Fruitcakes and Couch Potatoes (words and phrases that sound like food, but really mean other things) are both nightstand books - something to read quickly while falling asleep.
Which brings me to Ken Hom's
Fragrant Harbour Taste: The New Chinese Cooking of Hong Kong. From the spelling, you can tell that the guy does a lot of work for the BBC. His measurements threw me until I looked stuff up. He kept referring to a "dessert spoon" as a measurement, distinct from a "teaspoon" or "tablespoon." I had no idea what he was talking about. It turns out that a teaspoon is equal to 5 ml. A tablespoon is three times that amount, 15 ml. Dessert spoon fills in the middle, at 10 ml, or equal to two teaspoons. Handy, what?
(The above measurements do not apply in Australia, where a tablespoon is equal to
four teaspoons, or 20 ml. And we Americans think Texans are size queens!
)
