chickenfeet

Last night: Shrimp risotto. A simple risotto flavoured with white wine and saffron with a a couple of handfuls of shelled, raw medium shrimp and the zest of a lemon stirred in a few minutes before the end.

Tonight: Lamb shanks. This started life as a Jamie Oliver recipe but I'm not sure it really is anymore. Take six lamb shanks and brown in olive oil. Remove from pan and add two onions, six carrots and half a head of celery all diced and six crushed cloves of garlic. Cook until starting to caramelize. Deglaze witth a slug of balsamic vinegar and several glugs of white wine. Add six anchovies, a 28oz can of diced tomatoes and herbs of choice (fresh thyme today). Replace lamb shanks and simmer until the meat is falling off the bone. Adjust seasoning.

Yesterday we did our first serious looking for a new condo. We saw four places at various points along the lake but clearly one pays a lot for a lake view in a newer building and those buildings seem to be spending a lot on showy extras we don't really need like flashy lobbies. The one place we saw and like was in the Merchandise Lofts. This is a former Simpson's/Sears warehouse which has been really nicely converted. The whole place has a cool vibe and the unit we saw had lots of space and made good use of it. The building has a real gym which I would actually probably use. It's also the first condo building I've been in in ages where the average resident seemed to be younger than me! I think the search is going to refocus on lofts and give up on the lake.

My aging Denon DVD player, excellent in its day, pretty much died of old age. It was refusing to play most disks which was getting very tedious. I toyed with the idea of replacing it with a Blu-Ray player but to be honest there isn't much content I care about in Blu-Ray yet and I think the prices are still too high so I bought a $100 LG DVD player as a stop-gap. I love it! Sound and picture quality from DVD are excellent. It happily reads all my MP3 disks and plays many kinds of .avi files. What is really, really cool is that it has a USB port so I can play stuff off a Flash drive. I just watched the first half of Gloucester vs Wasps from yesterday's EDF Cup games downloaded as a torrent earlier today. The first three things I've tried on it are the last couple of scenes from Peter Grimes on DVD from the Met, the Gloucester/Waps game and now Billy Bragg and Dick Gaughan singing The Red Flag. I guess that pretty much sums me up!