The "I'm Back!" Photo Essay

Olive bread: buttered, salted, and topped with Gruyere. I love ACME bakery. And I love people who bring me ACME bread (hint, hint). And thank you to N and E for the gorgeous flowers.

Now that that beautiful photo is out of the way: if you're reading this Lucky Register finally straightened things out. It's nice to only pay about $15 a year for a domain name, but I guess five days of down time after paying my renewal fee is the price I pay for being cheap. There's no reason for the down time, but how are you going to argue with a company that's not reachable by e-mail or the phone, and that charges you pennies a week for service?

Anyway, I'm back, and I've been eating all this while (shocking, I know). No long reports; let's just mentally binge on a slew of food photos to help catch everyone up.

Sunday Brunch. A few friends were visiting from San Jose for a wedding in LA, so we had them over for a last minute brunch before they had to start driving home. Biscuits and gravy (one of my favorite breakfasts), nutmeg-spiced pancakes, warm syrup, bacon, sausages, scrambled eggs, and a fall fruit salad with cantaloupe, pineapple, grapes, and kiwis drizzled with lime juice.

Lion's head: we had a little dinner potluck and made Taiwanese style Lion's Heads. The other dish is leftover mei cai ko rou.

Japanese cheesecake (only $5 at 99 Ranch!) was an easy, relatively light dessert that was great with some muscato-style wine. I'm keeping an eye out for a springform pan on clearance. Next project: fluffy rosewater flavored cheesecake.

BBQ chicken and broccoli. I marinated chicken thighs in some mustardy South Carolinian sauce that was gifted to me by a wonderful person, then sauteed some broccoli in garlic. Delicious, and simple!

Toasted olive bread drowned in sausage gravy. It makes me happy when leftovers love each other.

Cumin crusted lamb. I found this small rack of lamb for $4.50 at 99 Ranch, so we had lamb for no special reason. I mixed together two teaspoons of ground cumin, two tablespoons of finely chopped onions (mush, really), two cloves of crushed garlic, a teaspoon of ground black pepper and a teaspoon of salt. I mixed those with a tablespoon of olive oil and smeared it on the lamb. That sat in the fridge all day, then at room temperature for about an hour and a half to warm up. I seared all sides over medium high on a cast iron, then finished in a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes .The result was medium rare, delicious lamb.