constant craving.

NOTE: these last few posts contain no artfulness whatsoever, I'm generally just bumbling about, trying to attain some kind of "purification through microtasting." Plus I thought I'd take a couple of pictures with this new camera. Artfulness will have to be retrofitted.

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I have some terribly good news in that the cable TV picture now fits on the TV screen, and the DVD picture is no longer mint-green and magenta only. In other words: the home theater system is up and running. That'll be $1600, please! Now all we need is a movie to watch.

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I keep feeling like I should be taking better advantage of the perfectly sunny 33°C weather outside (and not doing things like watching movies), but that's because I keep forgetting that it's sunny like this every day. So there's no hurry, the sun'll be there, though the temperature's supposed to drop to 27°C by the end of next week. Brrr!

Actually, the pool water is freezing, if that's any consolation to those of you wintering in less sunny climes. I didn't find that out until I jumped in today...it's usually substantially more balmy.

I said Balmy.

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One of the disorienting things about visiting the Phoenix outpost is that it takes a few days to get re-acclimated to American-style abundance. Here's half a pantry:





































Part of it comes down to nothing more than available space: this is one of the refrigerators here, and it's itself twice the size of our cumulative refrigeration space at home. And there's another refrigerator of equal size in the laundry room here.

Some of this storage area is devoted to toddler food, which we won't be test-driving much of on this trip (though we may cast a morbidly curious raised eyebrow at its nutritional content at some juncture).

The rest of it, however, is fair game for this tooth of mine. Many of the edibles are either officially "bite-sized" or individually portioned for convenient snacking, and this allows for equally convenient curiosity nibbles. I've tasted teaspoon-sized portions of, oh...about 30 different snack foods since I've been here, most of which don't deserve our attention really, but a couple of recent noteworthy subjects include:






















The first actually tasty rice crisp product I've ever put in my mouth. There's none of that vaguely chalky and insipid texture that many "healthy" rice snacks have, it'd be a lovely vehicle for some kind of equal and opposite cheesy product.

And another rather delicious healthy product is Ben & Jerry's frozen yogurt variation:






















You'd never mistake it for ice cream, but it provides a satisfying dessert moment on its own terms.

Something completely unsatisfying and verging on disturbing was Gianna's Artisan Baking Company's Coconut Macaroons with Chocolate:

















Um: eeewwww. They smell like coconut, but how to describe their taste....imagine if you could isolate the nasty sulfur-y taste of cheap dried fruit and somehow imbue a dry, grainy biscuit with that flavor and then drizzle tasteless plastic chocolate over top of it. And then charge 6 dollars for 12 of them. NOT a coconut macaroon, people.

ETA: This is a coconut fucking macaroon:

















Made by Bakker Bollebof and sold at the Dirk, they're very much like the macaroons I grew up with, moist and fantastic, if the tiniest bit oversweetened. I can only eat one of them per day, whereas I used to be able to go through a whole tin of macaroons in my youth. And the price is probably 1.20 euro for 320 grams' worth (almost a pound by my careless estimate).

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