A week ago Sunday, there was an article in the NYT Sunday Styles (my favorite section - the world may be going to hell, but looking great and knowing what's cool while it's happening is far more important) about slow blogging, which is the idea that blogs are no longer where people go for up-to-the minute information, and the latest gossip about their friends. They're Twittering or Facebooking that.

When I was a kid, my mom would bring home chestnuts, and we'd roast and peel and eat them. We usually stabbed them with a skewer, or when we got more manually dexterous, we would cut a slice into the top of each chestnut, rub them with oil, and then roast. They were hard to peel, and it was especially hard sometimes to get off the fuzzy, bitter-tasting inner skin. But that was part of the fun.

Back in the bad old days - the mid-1960s when I was a kid, when we were far less politically correct - the polite name for African-Americans was Negroes, and all of our parents smoked - it was considered pretty funny to imitate some Asians' inability to say the English "R" sound, and call the Chinese-American dish fried rice "flied lice".
That's what I made for supper last night:

Chicken Fried Rice

2 eggs
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. oil
2 - 4 TBLS more oil
1 carrot, diced
2 -3 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed or put through a press
2 TBLS peeled & grated fresh ginger

I got this enormous bunch of kale in my CSA box, and have been wracking my brains trying to think what to do with it. Last year I tested recipes for a book by Anne Bramley of Eat Feed, a food podcasting web site. The book's called Eat Feed Autumn Winter.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email with some stencils attached, so you could carve an Obama for president pumpkin - and there's a web site with pictures, too. I liked the Howard Rheingold, smart mob, flavor of all these people, including me, getting an email with a pumpkin pattern, and carving similar pumpkins, so I made one - even though other years I have always made jack-o-lantern, smiley face pumpkins.

I cooked a big dinner at the house on Sunday, and since then have been trying to utilize all the leftovers, plus feed a few extra teenagers that have been hanging around the house. Sunday I roasted six chickens. Monday evening I picked over the carcasses, boiled them in two big pots, and ended up with almost 5 quarts of thick (as in so protein-rich it jelled overnight) broth, and made potato cakes from some of the leftover mashed potatoes.

On Wednesday evenings I teach a class, and I am always looking for something good and easy to eat when I get home. I have a couple of standards - toad in the hole egg (egg fried in a round hole cut into a piece of bread, and you must fry the round piece on the side) or a whole box of baby lima beans - must be Birds Eye, in the foil wrapper - boil, drained, and tossed with butter, salt and a little nutmeg - it is OK to eat these right out of the pot you cook them in.

We're in Cincinnati for a librarians' conference. My mom was from Cincinnati; my uncle, her "little" brother, now 83, still lives there. My uncle took us to a place he says my mom liked, because it smelled so wonderfully of garlic. I had home made spinach fettucine, with marinara & 2 big meatballs. The noodles were on the thick side, chewy, and just a little watery - the sauce, called the house spicy marinara, had big hunks of garlic and was appropriately tomato-y.

Anna and Josh's Lewis got born on Friday the 10th at about 8:30 at night. Anna phoned the news to us at work that her water broke Thursday morning, then I spent the weekend wondering what was up. It was as I suspected during my weekend of fretting, though - us work colleagues were just a little low on the list of people to get notified of Lewis' arrival - Anna emailed at 12:40 a.m. Monday. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is after all, how it should be.