Jon Lasser

Two more quart jars of brandied cherries are in the fridge. This time, it's Skeena cherries not Vans, and they're delicious, even if the kitchen makes me a bit sympathetic for Lady Macbeth. Sadly, I don't think I can justify more fridge room for spiced brandied cherries, and I suspect that Laura's patience with cherry season is wearing a bit thin.

I made a batch of tomato sauce, too, as Alvarez Farms had good-looking plum tomatoes. I'm usually too lazy to do it, but I decided not to worry about peeling or seeding the tomatoes. It manages to taste wonderful anyway, and I'm freezing half of it for later.

Dinner was salmon roasted in butter with basil, and sugar snap peas sauteed with butter and olive oil. Simple, but tasty.

For brunch today, Laura and I went to Smith. I didn't mind the decor (lots of animals on the wall, and lots of fairly terrible paintings) except that it was trying to be ironic, and I'm not much for aesthetic irony. Unfortunately, the food was very good so I'm likely to find myself back there occasionally.

On the subject of irony, it occurred to me that there was a difference between literary and aesthetic irony, and that I liked the former much more than the latter. This may be why I think Mad Men is overrated.

Hopefully this week at work will be less stressful than last week, during which one major customer had a series of blowups that should now be resolved. I had to stay late at work on Tuesday instead of leaving early to volunteer, as I usually do on Tuesdays, and had a number of twelve-hour days. Oof.

Cooking plans for the week include steak salad, something involving a whole chicken to be served alongside sauteed zucchini, pasta with the aforementioned tomato sauce, and pepperoni pizza. We've been making pizza pretty much every week since I discovered that even I could make decent pizza dough almost instantaneously in the food processor (thank you Mark Bittman!), and that one batch of dough is two pizzas, as is one batch of sauce.

I'm going to need to make some chicken stock this week, to get the chicken backs and necks out of the freezer. I'm concerned as to whether we have enough containers for freezing stock, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.