Blogiversary

 Gobsmacked at how pillowy soft the gnocchi are at Mr. Joe's.

At about this time each year I do a blogiversary post where I recap my favorite restaurants, as well as favorite dishes, recipes, and various other highlights of the year. I'm not going to do that this year, because 1) I barely wrote any posts last year, and 2) I have a baby now, and who has time for that shit!

I used to wonder who the people were that were so lazy or bereft of time that they bought pre-cut fruit from the grocery store. Now I know. People with children! Who has time to cut fruit? Slice cheese? Eat a hot meal? Cook? Brush your teeth twice a day? Shower more than two or three times a week? Not me!

I have not cooked a single meal - not one! - since my daughter was born back in September. I've diced a couple of onions while my partner was cooking, but that is it.

Hello, Is It Me You're Looking For?

Oh, Hi! I'm not dead. Just busy...and tired. When I'm not at work, a doctor's visit, prenatal classes, interviewing daycares and pediatricians, or sitting down with financial advisors, I'm taking a nap (because pregnant women don't sleep at night, and they won't for the next three years).

I also don't get out to eat much anymore (and probably won't for the next three years) due to the fact that I'm taking naps, can't eat large restaurant portions in one sitting, and my dining radius has been drastically reduced since walking more than ten blocks in the summer heat is a challenge.

But I have eaten out a few times, and even occasionally remembered to take phone pictures.

Above is Baltimore's famous Berger Cookie from a weekend getaway a while back. It's a lot of  fudgy chocolate icing on a small, soft, cake-like cookie.

Nomad Pizza slid into Horizon's old location, and is cranking out some great pizza and salads.

Austin Quick Trip

I flew out to Austin, Texas, for a couple of days last week for a little getaway. My main mission was to take it easy and eat tacos.

With multiple locations in Austin, Dallas, and Houson in store fronts and food carts, Torchy's Tacos came highly recommended. The fried avocado taco with either a flour or corn tortilla (I chose corn) was good, but did not live up to the hype. The crunch of the fried batter surrounding the avocado obscured the fresh avocado taste, and I was disappointed in what appeared to be bagged shredded cheese. A decent taco for sure, just nothing to get worked up over.

Izzoz Tacos (no picture) from a trailer just down the street (Austin is flooded with food trailer parks) was much better than Torchy's.

Lick Ice Creams is worth the hype! Inventive flavors, like beet-mint and blackberry-lemon-basil, churned from organic milk and local ingredients put Lick on par with Philly's Capogiro. The scoop of salted caramel and scoop of goat cheese-honey-thyme was fabulous.

One-Eyed Cats and Other (Good) Excuses

Posts on this blog went from infrequent at the beginning of the year to just plain absent these past weeks. I have a good excuse. In fact, many good excuses. Mostly, 2012 has been a doozy, and I'm afraid it's going to continue in that fashion.

The entire month of January was spent taking my cat back and forth from my vet and the Veterinarian Hospital University of Pennsylvania to confirm that my cat had an iris melanoma (she did), and try to determine if cancer had spread to the rest of her body (it appears not!).

After many weeks and vet visits, her left eye was removed. She spent four days recovering on hardcore kitty cat morphine. For those four days when she was completely out of it, she was sequestered in my bathroom for her own safety. I camped out in the bathroom with her 24-hours a day to make sure she was eating and drinking, and to keep her company. I'd do just about anything for my sweet kitty, even sleep with my head next to a toilet.

I'm happy to report that kitty recovered very well. Also, animals are amazingly unselfconscious creatures, and really don't give a hoot if they only have one eye. It's back to normal kitty activities around here, like, napping!

About the same time I started sleeping in the bathroom with my cat, I caught a cold (not from the bathroom, but from my partner). It was the worst cold I can remember having in quite some time. I was sick for three weeks. I then had a four or five day reprieve, and promptly caught another cold. I cried in frustration. From the start of one cold to finish of the next, I was sick for more than a month. That was how I spent February.