Every band I listened to today started with a B.

Last night's apple tarte tatin was a wild success! The pie crust was a bit too salty (I overcompensated for unsalted butter) but I didn't salt the apples and it actually worked out great. It was time-consuming, but a fun little late-night post-dinner project. Also DELICIOUS. Did I mention delicious? Definitely going into the regular rotation of recipes. I ate the last of it for breakfast.

Today I did little, again. My mom and I visited the Air Force Base to go to the commissary, the BX, and Class Six, the liquor store. Everything is so cheap on base! I forget these things. We got lots of booze (restocking the liquor cabinet, wheee), and LOTS of food, and we ate sushi in the car on the way back home! The commissary has a little sushi stand that sells pretty good stuff. I LOVE sushi. I miss it so much when I'm in Ohio.

After getting tons and tons of food (and marveling at the cheapness of beans... seriously, why do we eat anything else? oh yeah... in co-ops we don't.) we went back home, where we bought... more food! Because commissary produce is substandard, apparently. And then we went home, and I put all the groceries away, and everyone had lives except for me. Miles went off to band practice, and then a performance. Tory went to work. Mom went off to a hotel for her annual birthday getaway, and Dad was commuting from L.A. I was ALONE. So I unpacked some more (the boxes I shipped myself arrived), and now my room is clean of small piles of socks.

Tonight's dinner: with our food stores restocked, you'd think dinner would be something elaborate and amazing, right? No. Dinner instead was whatever I could cook that didn't a) require advance preparation, b) require thawing frozen meat in an hour, or c) use up ingredients earmarked for other dishes. So... cauliflower soup!

The soup was actually incredibly tasty. It really didn't have any ingredients but onion, olive oil, cauliflower, and chicken stock, but I jazzed it up a little at serving time by adding a lot of fresh-ground pepper and a swirl of argan oil. Argan oil is this weird fair trade oil sold from Morocco (I think) that is made from certain nuts, which, since they have an incredibly difficult fibrous outer fruit, are only processed after they have passed through the digestive system of a goat. That's right. We eat goat-poop-nut oil. And it is DIVINE. It's also super expensive, but since the rest of the soup ingredients were so cheap, I felt fine drizzling a little on. Unfortunately, it loses a lot of its unique nutty flavor when heated, so you can't sauté with it or anything, but it was perfect drizzled on the soup.

The guy from Mattei's didn't call. It's not a big deal, I wasn't exactly waiting by the phone. I would like a job, though. I really would like something to do. I hope people call me sooner rather than later.

Tomorrow's tasks: setting up doctors' appointments, looking through the course catalog and application deadlines for 4th quarter at UCSB, and babysitting in the evening. Whee!