seems like old times.

Another good title for this post can be found in the tags for this post: Spanish Breakfast Nostalgia. Yet another good title would be Can You Believe We Have a Black President, Yo?

A bonus of not having any readership to speak of is that I may freely vent about "sensitive" topics without having to moderate 194 irate comments from people with whom I would never converse in real life (see Ruhlman's pro-Obama post).  Nor do I have to listen to people threaten to "delete my bookmark" or stop buying my books, etc. I can just issue a grand, pre-emptive "fuck off" to trolls and delete any comments I don't like. It's awesome!

Thus, a bit about my election experience: I think it's a strikingly "expat" experience to not have daily contact with one single person who wanted McCain to win this election. None, no one. I mean even in Democratic enclaves like Burlington, Vermont or Portland, Oregon, or hell, even south Texas (where Obama won up to 80% of the vote in some counties) you've still got 20% or so of the voting public behind McCain. You're bound to run into them somewhere. 

Here? I mean, sure, these guys are probably doing something inappropriately conservative somewhere in our fine city, but judging by the freshness of their website I don't guess there are too many of them for me to run into.

Anyway, commence obligatory uninformed blogger post-election perspective: unbelievable that there will be a black man in the White House, Afros on the White House lawn someday soon, some kind of non-Fleetwood Mac music playing in the Oval Office (don't get me wrong, I loves me some Lindsey and Stevie), etc cliche etc cliche. It's also refreshing to have voted for a candidate that didn't lose. 

But for realz: this changes if not everything, then a lot of things. Grammar be darned. Actually that's one of the things it changes: we now have a President who can comfortably and persuasively speak the English language. I thought this was an insightful post comparing Obama's language to Kennedy's. 

I'm not quite elated (but then I haven't yet listened to his acceptance speech), but I'm at least relieved, serene-ish, and a teeny tiny little bit proud of America, for the first time in many years. There, I said it.

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As for me? Thanks for asking...I'm OK, I give my mood a B minus. Had a terrrrrrible gig last night, my first terrible gig in a long time, maybe one of the worst ever. Scratch that: definitely one of the worst ever. Last night, due to some last minute changes during sound check (after which we did not re-check our sound, amazingly) I couldn't hear a single thing I was playing. And 50 minutes is a very, very long time to be onstage without making any confident contributions. But, as I said to several people last night, it can't always be magic.

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Today I am nursing two hungover mooperbirds, myself and That One who is sleeping upstairs at the moment while I make her some torrijas. This is a Spanish version of French toast that we made a few times back when we first started living together, out of a Food and Wine cookbook that is one of the first cookbooks I owned. 

The torrijas came out OK, and in fact probably just about as good as any pancake/French toast kind of thing you could possibly make without having any maple syrup in the house. The maple syrup replacement is really the most interesting part of this dish, and its uses extend into other tasty areas as well: we'd bought some really dry dried figs, kind of like rawhide dog chews, that we'd dismissed as inedible. But lo: after poaching them for an hour in torrijas syrup they rocked pretty hard and were an excellent thing to put on H-D vanilla ice cream as we watched Six Feet Under (back on TV here) last night. 

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figs poached in torrijas syrup.

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8-10 large dried figs, either left whole or chopped

1 1/2 cups ruby port

1 1/2 cups orange juice

the zest of one orange, cut in thin strips

1/2 cup black currants

3 tbsp raw sugar

Put everything in a saucepan, bring to a boil, and simmer on low heat for 45 minutes.  

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