Gap Swimsuits

Loving the blocks of colors in the swimsuits in the Gap’s Spring/Summer 2009 line.

New Slippers

I bought new slippers this week, and I can’t tell you how happy they make me. I always had Ugg boots as slippers growing up, and while in high school and in university, but I gave them away when I moved to the US. I’m not sure why. Probably because they didn’t fit when I packed everything up. When I went to buy them, I shuddered a little at the price, and then embarked on an effort to find something that looked like them, but wasn’t so pricey. I don’t think such a thing exists – everything I found that was cheaper looked less well made and less sturdy.

Ugg Slippers: The Source of Much Foot Happiness

I ended up buying my ugg slippers from Campmor. Another thing I love: the speed with which Campmor ships. I’ve ordered a few things from them now (they’re always very cheap), and whatever I order is generally on my doorstep within a couple of days. Fortuitously, my new slipper arrived just as the temperature in Boston plunged (again). My old slippers weren’t so different from what I have now, but they’d become too loose on my feet – so they were constantly coming of – and the sheepskin lining was beginning to remove itself from the shoe. The new slippers are much better. Combined with my fingerless possum gloves, they keep me toasty warm when I’m working at home.

Rachel and I made a reasonably spectacular pumpkin pie recently. I have the Cook’s Illustrated recipe book out of the library, and we used the recipe from that. Generally speaking, I’m not a huge fan of Cook’s Illustrated; I find their recipes a little bit fussy, and this one was no exception. It was, however, good. The reason that it is good is that you basically make a custard filling (complete with heavy cream) that just happens to have pumpkin in it. We used pumpkin from a can (which is a curious American phenomena), and the recipe has you bring it to a sputtering boil to remove the taste of the tin. I have no idea if this really works or not, but it’s Cook’s Illustrated’s claim.

Aside: this is the other thing that irritates me about Cook’s Illustrated. It’s often pseudo-scientific. They rely completely on tasters, which I guess is better than nothing, but I’ve no idea if/how chemicals from the tin are leaching into the pumpkin (I really hope they’re not, though – I actually suspected that the “canned” taste comes from preservatives, rather than from the can), and if/how heating the pumpkin purée would fix that, and Cook’s Illustrated never tells you. It’s not like they uncover any new science in the quest for better recipes. Sometimes they regurgitate stuff that’s already known, and sometimes they speculate, but they never do uncover new science. They just make it sound scientific.

Pumpkin from a can bothers me a bit, probably because I didn’t grow up with it. However, I’m the first to admit that it makes baking pumpkin pie a million times easier. In any case, for all it’s fussiness, and despite the use of canned pumpkin, the recipe makes great pie – easily the best pumpkin pie I’ve ever made. And since I missed out on pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving – I completely neglected to make sure we’d have some at my Thankgiving dinner – it was nice to finally have some in the house. In fact, it was so nice that:

• I ate a slice before I went to bed;
• Uncharacteristically woke up at 3 am in the morning, thought a lot about pumpkin pie, and eventually snuck out to the kitchen and ate a sliver;
• Ate pumpkin pie for breakfast;
• Worked from home and ate pumpkin for lunch;
• And then declared that I really had to leave the rest of the pie for Rachel. And I did.