More snow.

View from my office window

But hey, the city did get the whole cleanup thing together in much shorter order this time around.  So much so that all the Twitter and Facebook comments of my fellow denizens regarding Snowpocalypse 2011 skew in the “well, the sequel isn’t as great as the first one” direction.

Whatever.  Snow pretty!  Until it’s run over by lots and lots of trucks and toileted upon by lots and lots of dogs.  That’s my take.

The January socks are progressing well.  After a few initial moments of “counting is hard!” whining, I’ve gotten to the point where the next row of the chart makes logical sense, and I can kind of stop looking at it all the time.  Which is nice.  I may mod a bit in the leg portion, because knitting as many repeats as the pattern calls for looks like it will make a long mutant sock, and I don’t really cotton to the idea of it.  But I’m concerned that the pattern will then lose its nifty flow into the heel.  Sigh.  I guess I’ll just have to try it my way and see if I hate it.

Our little dinner party Monday night was a great success.  Mr. Boyfriend made a ricotta and acorn squash lasagna that was amazing, as well as a spinach salad with gorgonzola, figs, bacon, pecans, and onion dressed with a pomegranate vinaigrette.  I will preempt all snarky comments and requests by saying he is mine.  Not for sale.  Mine.  NO TOUCHIE!

And I made cake.  It turned out better than last time, and I think that had a lot to do with the butter.  Jam cake has a tendency to be dry, so I tried to combat that by mixing it up in the same fashion that I would mix up a pudding-based cake (like my favorite chocolate cake recipe from America’s Test Kitchen).  Instead of creaming the butter and sugar together to start, you whip up the eggs and the sugar to make a nice, puffy base into which you can fold the jam (or pudding, in the case of the chocolate cake).  After that, you mix in the butter one softened tablespoon at a time.  This keeps it from getting entirely liquefied, and makes for a much more tender crumb than a creamed-butter cake, which I think is vital when there’s a lot of liquid in the cake to start with.  After that’s done, you mix in the flour and remaining liquid (in this case, milk) in alternate even thirds.  I also added just a pinch of baking powder, which made for some pretty lofty cake.  My only real disappointment is that I rushed the frosting, so it didn’t get all ribbony and wonderful as I’d hoped it would but seized and was more like a glaze.  Oh well.  It was still damn tasty, and the cake wasn’t the consistency of sawdust, which was the big pratfall I was avoiding.  And PS, I love my mixer.  If you are a serious baker and you don’t have one, you are missing out.

NYC Winter Restaurant Week starts in just twelve short days, and I am looking forward to it with the sort of anticipation experienced by a six-year-old at Christmastime.  Some restaurants I have been curious about for ages are on the list this year, and for a $35 price tag, a fine three-course sampling of their best can be mine!  So far on the list of must-trys are Palm Too and TriBeCa Grill.  Perhaps if I come upon an unexpected windfall in the next week, I can add a few more.  Fingers crossed.

So that’s the story for today.  Hopefully I will have more interesting things to report once my neighborhood ceases to resemble Hoth.  Without the tauntauns, of course.

The post title comes from Series 4 of The IT Crowd.  If you haven’t yet, watch it.  Netflix Instant Watch.  DO IT.