It's about our bassist and my fake all-pie restaurant. Called Pie Hole.

Love it.

t serves up a a steaming plate up of puppy-in-chard, with a side of greens

Just because I have not been offensive enough, lately.

If it's at all like spinach, I'd try it. I love spinach.

Chard is much more flavorful than spinach, but they're similar enough to be fairly good subs for one another in recipes.

Chris Rose's letter made me cry.

It made me pretty misty. So my cousin wants me to get her a press pass so her mom can get some stuff. She actually is a writer, so it's not a craxy idea, I'm not sure if I can pull it off though.

I have a problem with sharp and/or sour salad greens. Salad greens need to be inoffensive, and not totally overwhelm whatever else might be in the salad.

Also, I think it is funny and strange that in England, they call arugula "rocket". WTF?

Will this day ever END? I have two heirloom tomatoes ($1.20/lb!) desperately waiting to leap onto my kitchen knife and then into my belly. This cannot happen at work!

Next week? Baked Alsation ala alrugara.

Puppy!

I may not be a puppy, but I'm damn cute all the same.

Furry puppy for JZ

Beets frightened me for most of my life; pickled, roasted or plain, they just looked weird and wrong and I avoided them like mad except in the form of borscht with lots of sour cream. I can't remember when I actually attempted to eat one, except that it was fairly recently, but it turns out that I like them very much indeed, and could have been loving them up for the past three decades if I hadn't been so weird about it. Yet another sorry chapter in my wasted youth (and what a waste of a wasted youth, really, to be wasting it on things like not eating beets).

Our favoritest restaurant, which closed a few years ago so they could put up a fugly office building in its place, offered a pickle plate as an appetizer. And while it was eternally delicious, one of the things on the plate was a sliced beet. I've never cottoned to beets because I remember them being that sort of canned-cranberry-sauce sort of soggy-slipperiness. So, I typically left them alone.

One night, the co-owner of the restaurant, and the person that did the pickling to begin with, was our server. She came by to pick up my dispatched-except-for-the-beet plate and had this look of horror on her face.

"You didn't eat the beet?" "Well, I never liked beets as a kid."

She stood there for a second, then said, "Well, my husband won't eat them either. But I love them. And we're still married."

I tried a pickled beet the next time we were there. Delightful. But I've realized that it's very much an adult vegetable that denotes you as a grown-up. Few kids would eat pickled beets without duress.

Another puppy for JZ.