Archive for December, 2005
- Best restaurant meal (pizza) : pizzeria bianco. probably our most anticipated restaurant experience in recent memory, we’d been waiting to visit this pizza mecca for about a year and a half. this place has been written up by many of the most regarded food writers in the country, and is widely believed to be home to the best pizza in the country, if not the world. the best pizza in the world, in phoenix? yup. Simply put, the best pizza we’ve ever had. To use Peter Reinhart’s words “perfect, i mean perfect, pizzas”. I’m still in awe.
- best dish that i can’t stop eating despite the pain that it causes: the dry stir fried chicken with chili’s at zoe’s in cambridge. i don’t know how they make this, but this chicken cooked with about 7,000 chili peppers, both dried and fresh, is crazy addictive. your mouth burns and your eyes water, but you can’t stop eating it. just watch out for those dried peppers. they’ll knock you on your ass.
- best evidence that i’ve gotten old (#1): i became a total NPR geek this year. i would hardly call myself a news junkie, but i found myself listening to it almost exclusively when in the car. informative, entertaining, …ah i might as well just move to the burbs and start spending all of my weekends at home depot.
- best evidence that i’ve gotten old (#2): we moved to the burbs and bought a house and i spend all of my weekends at home depot. ok, so it’s only 2 miles from our old place, but it feels like the burbs with all of the friendly neighbors and small-townness of it all. i seem to be working on about one life-changing event per year, so we’ll see what 2006 brings.
- best evidence that i still act like i’m 8: the many hairstyles of 2005. i’m not ready to look old quite yet.
- best article ever written about the BBQ at formaggio: spring is in the air.
- best addition to workday entertainment: streaming radio via BBC6, WXPN, and KCRW. they kept me entertained, up on all the latest bands that the kids are listening to, and i get to brush up on my british accent. also, a late addition to the list is my favorite new music source, pandora. you’ll be hearing a lot about this in the coming year, i guarantee.
- best meal (non-pizza): the Chef’s Whim at Craigie Street Bistrot with Gordon and Karen as our sort of good-bye dinner with them before they move to London. A pretty much perfect night with some amazing food and great company. it’s pretty much my idea of a perfect neighborhood restaurant. I wish there were more like it.
- best book: The Know It All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. a smart, incredibly funny account of a guy trying to read the entire encyclopedia brittanica cover to cover.
- best way to get drunk in nantucket for $5: the tasting tour at cisco brewers, makers of some very tasty beer and spirits. their $5 tasting tour is the best deal on the island. for $5, you get to sample 5 different beers, 3 different vodkas, their gin, and their rum. oh, and they’ll keep giving you samples of whatever you want if you’re nice to them. a nice way to spend an afternoon.
- best use of random plants growing in our yard: somehow, giant pumpkin vine planted themselves in our front yard. this is apparently the first time they’ve ever been there, and most likely came from either the compost in our backyard or from our pumpkin that got attacked by a band of squirrels last year. luckily, we know that these flowers are not only edible, but incredibly tasty when deep fried. if they come back nest year, we may have to do some covert missions to retrieve them again.
- best new tv show (drama): prison break.
- best new tv show (comedy): how i met your mother.
- best song: fix you by coldplay. every year there’s a song that i can listen to over and over and over. this was that song. even though it will forever be known in our house as “kirstin cohen’s song”
- best DIY fix-it project (tie): diagnosing, ordering the parts, and finally my fixing my car’s climate control system without breaking anything in the process. the world-famous medicine cabinet.
- sorry for the late posting. i’ve been busy doing nothing on my week off. doing nothing seems to take up a lot of time.
- santa was very good to me this year. i am a proud owner of a lovely sirius satellite radio. i’m coming with you howard!
- i also got a big scary circular saw. let’s hope i keep all of my fingers attached to my body.
- i am now a walking advertisement for formaggio.
- we finally rented our old apartment! goodbye rent+mortgage!
- pandora. this thing is just unbelieveable. it’s a free streaming music service where you create stations by entering songs or artists that you like. it figures out what makes that song or artist unique and then gives you other songs and artists with similar traits. it’s crazy how it figures out exactly what you like, even if it’s sometimes embarrassing. you can train it by telling it whether you like or dislike songs that come up, and it gets better and better at giving you the tunes that you like. give it a try. just plug in a song that you like and watch it work its magic. it’s a relatively new service, so the free service it still ad-free. we’ll see how long it stays that way.
- more house photos are up! feel free to fill in the empty spaces with furniture.
- i took my mom to baja last week. she seemed a little overwhelmed, but i htink she liked it. she’ll never get my dad to go there though.
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