Rowan Tree and Red Thread

I've just had a cup of tea and two slices of a lovely Polish wheat-rye bread, toasted and buttered. Yum.

Omnivore's Hundred (as lifted from agrumer)

1) Create a new note and copy this list, including these instructions.
2) X all the items you've eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating. (Hah! As if.)
See http://www.verygoodtaste.co.uk/uncategorised/the-omnivores-hundred/ if you want to know more.

( The VGT Omnivore's Hundred )

It was lovely to meet fjm and chilperic this weekend, on their holiday visit to Cork. sammywol and I enjoyed a very pleasant meal and excellent conversation at Isaac's, one of Cork's better restaurants and a favourite of our before the kids cramped our eating out habit.

My mother was down from Dublin too, bringing swag for the kids and providing much welcomed babysitting for our meal out on Saturday night.

In all a good weekend marred only by the onset of a cold. I need more ginseng!

I ate for the first time in the Quay Co-Op today, a pleasant little cafe over a health food shop in Cork, which came highly recommended by work friends.

Now I won't blame them outright, as there are weird tummy bugs going round, but ever since lunch it's been a mighty storm south of the Corcoran esophagus.

Just sayin'.

We're away with the kids for a brief weekend break to Killarney, Co. Kerry. The weekend was conceived primarily to pad out Rowan's Lazytown Live! show, on tomorrow afternoon at the INEC, Killarney. Little did we think that our first meal out in this little Kerry tourist town was going to be so very, very pleasant.

We dined at Kobe, a small, well-hidden Japanese restaurant upstairs in a shopping arcade (remember those?) In the centre of town.

I spotted the sign and got all excited, pointed it out to Sam, who got more excited, and we made our way up the stairs to look at the menu.

There was very nearly a misstep, when Sam started looking at a pretty Thai restaurant across the thoroughfare from Kobe, but sense prevailed and we trooped into the tastefully decorated restaurant.

The staff were pleased to see us, as the place was empty. Admittedly it was only just after 6pm, but business is business and they set about charming us with nice tea recommendations and admiring our daughter's interest in noodles.

We did not have noodles. We had sushi.

A mixed plate of nigiri-zushi each and a plate of vegetarian sushi to share, to be precise, plus miso and some breadcrumbed tofu on skewers. This was accompanied by the lovely Chinese tea, "Remember the King" and a wonderfully fragrant glass of some plum wine.

Yum.

daftnewt will appreciate that Kobe had a tea menu about as long as the food menu.

I'm wondering now if we can get a babysitter in Cork who'd be willing to look after the kids, not while we sneak off to the movies or the pub, but pile into the car and drive to the next county for sushi.

I had a lovely brown walnut bread and rollmops for breakfast. This morning I feel like Erik, or Leif, or Gunnar, or ...

And now, the pillaging!

As pointed out today by sammywol and mizkit, we wandered out of the house as a family for about the first time in a week, decided on an impromptu lunch in Milanos, a pizza place and firm favourite with Rowan, and bumped into mizkit and her husband T during our wanderings. We diverted them from their own pizza and gelati lunch plans in Gino's, another Italian restaurant nearby, and we all went together to Milanos.

Yay! Socialising with adults, yummy pizza, naughty deserts, and Rowan drew me a UFO with the paper and crayons thoughtfully provided by the restaurant.

Given that on Saturday we had two friends from Dublin (inuitmonster and his good lady) who were in Cork for the weekend drop round, bringing yummy cakes from Heaven's Cake in the English Market, this weekend was a lovely change from recent events, and one filled with good conversation, good food and a happy lack of gastroenteritis.

Rumsfeld is out. The Dems are in. I had Peking duck for dinner. I'm getting into a new PBEM rpg. It's a pretty good day, so far.

Today sammywol and I had the great pleasure to meet mizkit and her husband T for lunch in Cork. We had been introduced to one another in LJ-land by nhw, who used his amazing con-going powers to identify the possible match. It turns out that we're living pretty close together as things go, so we arranged to meet in an Indian restaurant in town on one of the days when sammywol's teaching allows a sufficient break at lunchtime to get into town, sit down to eat and get back to college for more teaching. Luckily this also matched with T's schedule so we made a table for four.

While we'd exchanged comments on Livejournal and had swapped e-mails beforehand, I was just a little bit apprehensive, not knowing if we'd hit it off. I needn't have worried. mizkit and swain are lovely people with a healthy store of good stories just right for chat over plates of all-you-can-eat, spicy Indian food. Better yet they are not only of the SF fan tribe, but also belong to the Gamer tribe, and are thus practically cousins, fannishly speaking.

I was amused by the hardy Alaskan conditioning they obviously enjoyed. Both dressed for a pleasant Irish summer's day. In the middle of October during a cold spell. In the week when I've had to admit defeat and unearth my winter coat and nice fleece hat. I am shamed by their inner furnaces, clearly.

Nice to finally get to meet you, mizkit. Maybe we'll try Thai next?

It's been a quiet weekend at home with my family and I've taken the
opportunity to do a little baking. I've done a bog standard white loaf so we
had something for lunchtime sandwiches, and which may end up in lunches for
me at work during the week, and I tried a Welsh honey cake (tisen fel? Can't
remember the name in the book). This was a success, if perhaps a little dry
- though could be because I left it out to cool and promptly went to bed, so
it was out all night - and that was remedied by a bit of butter on't. For
this honey cake was more a tea cake sort of thing and benefitted from a
little something spread on top.

However even better than the eating was the scent of the cake cooking. All
through the house the smell of baking mixed with warm honey. I spent some
time just standing in the kitchen inhaling as it baked.

Yum!

I'm out on the street searching for a meat pie and chips. Not particularly
odd as pregnancy cravings go. She was adamant about the gravy though, and I
forsee trouble if this chipper proves wanting.

What awaits within?

We're up in Dublin for the Easter holidays (bless my third level institution for their week off for staff) and to visit mother, brother and sister in law. Taking advantage of my mother's offer of baby sitting we headed out to a friend's place to watch the new Doctor Who, eat pizza and catch up with a gang of friends we don't get to see all that often. Living in Cork really has us out of the loop of the circle of old college friends.

( Possible spoilers )

We then had dinner. sammywol and I had Thai, along with another of the group, while the rest had pizzas. Some of the pizzas were upgraded! I think this just meant that the mozzerella was proper buffalo-sourced, but maybe they were pizzas v2.0 in other ways. The thai stuff was delicious and I snarfed my pad thai up in no time. Despite this I managed to embarrass myself with the banoffi AND the baklava too. Or I would have embarrassed myself if I hadn't had those glands out when I was six.

Conversation was on the hysterical side of odd, and I remember an involved discussion that arrived at us taking the decision to start a new website after the model of Book Crossing. We, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, are going to launch Pants Crossing on the unsuspecting world. "I hope these pants give you as much pleasure as they gave me. I like to feel there's a little bit of me in every pair of pants I pass on."

I'm back home tonight after a marvelous dinner out with John Kovalic, James Wallis and Cat, James' girlfriend, in Cafe Paradiso, the best vegetarian restaurant in Ireland. It was, as might be expected, a splendid way to spend an evening. John is a truly generous and genuine guy, full of excitement at the adoption process he and his wife, Judith, are undertaking to bring Luisa, a little Russian orphan, into their family, and pleased as ever to be in Cork for Warpcon and three days of peculiarly Irish gaming madness. It was my first time meeting Cat and I was very taken with her humour and the obvious warmth James and she share. It's good to see James relaxed and happy in his skin.

And James... well I really enjoy that we ( and I) and James seem to be able to slip back into comfortable conversation, tale-telling and a real interest in our recent events, even if a year or two have passed since we last met. We don't overlap much in the rest of the time, but I'm always happy to have the chance to meet up and reconnect. Thanks Warpcon!