Oysters

Last night I went out for dinner with a team visiting my office from Korea to a local seafood place. On the menu: oysters, crab legs, a little bit of fish, and some bread.

Normally oysters are something I eat in my mom's stuffing at Thanksgiving or Christmas. I don't dislike them, but I've always found them kind of gross.

Last night I eschewed that and had quite a few (for me) oysters. And in retrospect, they weren't half-bad.

As I get older, I find my palate changing, accepting things I would not have eaten before. I love bananas. Black pudding in the UK was good. The Beautiful Competition even turned me on to fois gras, which I admit is really damn good. I feel like there's a new world of culinary delights out there yet to be discovered as I open my mind and taste buds more and more.

Still not going to eat any raw oysters on the half-shell though.

Chicken Coop For The Soul

So one of the things that Elizabeth and I found in London was a thriving locally-sourced food scene. Locally-sourced foods are great for many reasons: fewer preservatives, healthier, you know what's in them and how they were grown, and it bolsters the local economy rather than massive corporate farms that are good for no one except investors. We decided to become very serious about looking into the possibility of entering the scene as more than just consumers, and although we still don't know what that will look like we decided to try to start 'easy' with a few chickens for eggs.

So we now have five hens, a chicken coop and 9 eggs after two days. A small portion of our yard is taken up with the chicken run, but apart from a long weekend of hard work and a lot of Internet research on the part of the Beautiful Competition most of the intensive labor is done.

I'll post more about this as things develop but 'going local' has always been a priority of ours, and this is the first step to becoming that change we want to see.

Buffalo Sauce

I go through strange food cravings. Not the kind of craving that a pregnant lady has, 'I have to have this right now or a small nation will suffer!' or the kind of craving you might have after work, 'gee, Mexican food sounds great tonight.' My cravings are much more constant and low-grade, but consuming in that it may be the only kind of good that sounds good to me.

When I was in London, twice I had tomato cravings. Both of them lasted six weeks. I ate fresh tomatoes, tomato sauce on Italian food, roasted tomatoes, tomato soup, tomato paste. If it can be made from a tomato, I probably put it in my cakehole. The Beautiful Competition was extremely tolerant of these cravings despite their nonsensical nature.

I've gone through others, but much less pronounced. Red meat. White sauce. Different kinds of cheeses. But these haven't lasted nearly as long.

Since I've come back to America, I've craved Buffalo sauce.

That's not entirely true. I didn't crave it the moment I landed. In some small town in Oregon, while the Beautiful Competition and I were driving back from Oklahoma, we ended up in a Denny's at 11 at night (the only thing open) and the Buffalo Fingers sounded good, so I ordered some. The waitress brought extra Buffalo sauce on the side, in which I dipped my fingers (the food, not my attached fingers.)

And.. bam.

Ever since then, I'm craving Buffalo sauce. This is definitely the 'strange craving' category. I've imagined a world - this world - where I could buy a 50 gallon drum of Buffalo sauce, the kind you'd only find in a school cafeteria or a fallout shelter. And take it home. And just start drinking it. Despite the fact that I'm well aware that this would be a Very Bad Idea.

I'm typing this up in an airport on the way out of town for a business trip. I just had some Buffalo wings. They were nothing more to me than a Buffalo sauce delivery system. There was a nice paste of sauce on the bottom of the plate when I was done. I wondered whether I could just suck it up through a straw and drink it. (In case you're wondering, propriety won out and I didn't attempt it. To my fellow Sea-Tac travellers: you're welcome.)

I cannot explain this craving. But right now, if I could eat Buffalo sauce for three meals a day, I probably would.

Om nom nom.

Link Roundup

I hate doing this, but I've got so many cool links stacking up that I am going to put them all into one post without much commentary. If it sounds interesting to you, check it out.

• Via Lifehacker, the 7 Habits of Highly Successful Freelancers. Work on your craft every day: I cannot stress this enough.
  
• Via Lifehacker, Keep Windows XP Running for the Long Haul. I appreciate simple tips like this to keep my machine in working order.
  
• At The Long Tail, Why I Gave Up On Second Life. SL was, until earlier this summer, the flavor de jour of social media and New Marketing. But perhaps the Emperor has no clothes? One of my favorite thinkers about the online space, Chris Anderson, weighs in.
  
• Via Lifehacker, Eight Foods You Should Eat Every Day. I'm trying to be more healthy - shouldn't you?
  
• Via BoingBoing, Is It Fucked Up? If So, What to Do. BB was posting a lot of flowcharts last week, this one was the funniest.
  
• On Simonsays (a blog run by a coworker at Edelman), Public Relations and Public Relationships. An excellent discussion of how PR should be engaging bloggers - in Simon's own words, "about how the PR industry is missing the point about the social web and going forward how PR can engage with the online environment properly."
  
• On Web Strategy by Jeremiah, the The 3 Spheres of Web Strategy and the Skills Required. Oddly enough, I seem to be inside that middle sweet spot. Perhaps that's more rare than I think it is.
  
• Via BoingBoing, Opus Being Censored. What is this, the Reagan 80s?
  
• On the Slog, a Greek restaurant recommendation I'll be trying the next time I'm in Greenlake. Always on the lookout for good Greek.
  

That's all folks. Until the next time my Starred Items pile up in my Google Reader.