Fun with Yeast

I spent most of the weekend cleaning and preparing to have a bunch of friends over on Sunday night. I made two pizzas: one bacon, onion and tomato sauce and one shrimp, bacon and pesto. The dough rose beautifully, unlike my recent batches of roll dough. We also had a salad with spinach, lettuce, strawberries, walnuts, grapes and the Honey Asian Citrus dressing. I made brownies, too.

It was great to do some cooking again, because it's something I really enjoy. As usual, my enjoyment of a particular activity is inversely proportional to the time I spend on it, perhaps with the exception of blogging.

The important thing is that I had a really good time with my friends. We played Pictionary, which I probably hadn't played in 15 years or so. I think it was even more fun than I'd remembered. It was also great to have HS over, who turned out to be an excellent cooking companion.

Monday night, my parents and I watched Paradise Now. That was a very interesting, but sad, film about two Palestinian suicide bombers. It seemed to fit well with what I could remember having learned in Dr. Miller's historical terrorism course at Duke. I had trouble with the subtitles, because the bottom half of the last line always got chopped off. There is probably some way to move them around or move the image on the screen, but I wasn't able to figure it out in the length of time that one can fool with such things before the rest of the audience starts to become restless.

Tonight we celebrated Mother's Day. In the Triangle, Mother's Day always coincides with graduation at at least two of the local universities. At ACME Food & Beverage Co., they decided to make up for this by offering free dessert for mothers tonight instead. So, I took my parents out to eat, which was a nice mid-week treat. I don't have any pictures of the food, since it's too dark for my new phone, but take a look at this enormous portion of food that I got for lunch today at the Refectory.