drinking and cooking: two great tastes

This weekend, among other things, I made Smitten Kitchen's black bean confetti salad. With a few changes - I only had one can of black beans so I used that and threw in a can of small white as well; I didn't have 4 bell peppers (only one red bell, getting sad and wrinkly) so I used some on-their-way-out green beans and frozen corn instead. (I also didn't have cayenne so I substituted hot pepper flakes. Cayenne would have been better, though, since I didn't bother grinding the pepper flakes and thus didn't get terrific heat distribution.) I also doubled the dressing called for but it still wasn't quite enough when finally plated (I tossed some of the bean salad with romaine.)

Never mind. It was a delicious adventure in food photography - I learned that the flash on my camera is not my friend:

(it makes food look yellow)
but that taking pictures without flash works fine:

(food looks more appetizing, or at least more real)
as long as you're still capable of holding your hand steady for long enough:

the dissolute cook
On the other hand, the blurriness of that photo means it's hard to tell quite how bad my hair looks, and you can't see that I'm all broken out from wearing sunscreen on saturday. (Honestly, why do I have to be allergic to sunscreen? Aren't there enough things wrong with me already?)

Picture taking + drinking: these hobbies were born to be together.

or not.
note rotten photo composition and prominent, nearly empty wine glass


Other weekend events:
Zoe had her first bath and was surprisingly good natured about it:

I'm vewy mad at ou

Dave and I hung out a lot:

(my hand was partially over the flash here which accounts for the dumbass lighting effects.)

I made the first batch of salsa of the year: I blitzed it too long in the food processor so the texture is more, uh, frothy than I love (also too early for local tomatoes) but man, it was good and I'm working on refining the order in which the ingredients need to go into the blender. (Garlic, jalapenos, olive oil and balsamic first, then onions and tomatoes and coriander, pulsed, then salt. Pulse again. That's how I should have done it, anyway.)

We went to the WBOS EarthFest, which was HEAVING with people - it was really hot and crowded but we eventually elbowed our way onto some grassy riverbank:

You can see in my haunted eyes that the crowd experience was traumatic. Also you can see some people passing by behind us.

And we checked out the Somerville memorial day parade, which I did not take any pictures of (but I really don't think I could have done the oddities justice anyway.) Man, those shriners went on forEVER (I swear to god, one of them was riding a converted lawn mower). The cars just kept getting smaller. They had shriner clowns, too. (One clown was on a chopper bike.) Shriners are fucked up, is all I can say. The somerville dog owners' association was a little disappointing (last year it was the highlight) - not many dogs, although there was one crazy springer spaniel mix that kept running circles around her owner, in typical springer style.(I think she'd been trained to do the running-in-circles trick but only a springer would keep it up nonstop for a 3 mile parade.)

Also, many many marching bands - mostly school kids or people loosely associated with the military - and all the tuba players were wilting with heat. Just like last year, we were across the street from the nun encampment. There were also nuns in the parade, I forget why.

We missed most of the politicians (okay by me) since we missed the first half hour.We let when eleven screaming fire trucks and abulances (I think there were more than 11, actually) came up the street to blow our ears out.

Inty and Dave took a nap together:



And that's my weekend round-up.