hut

I asked Austin for a food topic I could write about tonight. With gusto, he immediately suggested,"SAUSAGE!" Thanks, babe. We did have our new favorite sausage dish tonight, Rigatoni with (Italian) sausage and Parmesan. I'm not sure if I'm crazy about rigatoni? It's tough to cook just right, without it ending up too toothy or too mushy. But it's an easy carbonara-type recipe where you stir eggs and cream in at the end and it comes together as a creamy sauce. Mushrooms, onions, garlic, can't go wrong there. Loads of beautiful roasted squash for a side dish, from the farmer's market, including butterfinger zucchini, which is the same shape and texture as regular zucchini but super rich sunflower yellow. Just gorgeous.

The good news is, our new camera came. And it is great looking, and I already took one very cute picture of Emily. The bad news is, I did not take any pictures of our cooking adventures tonight. I forgot.

I was going to try to pull something thoughtful out tonight, but James McAvoy is on The Daily Show and boy, am I distracted. Are Austin and I going to see Wanted, and not even be embarrassed about it? Yes. We are.

Our dogs must have had a long exhausting day, out there in those storms. Our house looks like some kind of canine Chernobyl. Limp, muddy corpses littered every few feet, both the living four-legged kind and the shredded, emptied stuffy kinds. Most of the time we keep the dog toys closed up in a box with a lid. If we leave it open, Mischa will continually play with a single toy for sixty seconds, discard it and dive back into the box for the next. You can't take a full step without an objecting squeaker under your heel. But she's seemed extra bored lately, and the joy with which she responds to every re-opening of the toy box is always worth it.

No more cooking plans til this weekend. Fridge crammed with leftovers, and fun plans tomorrow, about which I will hopefully brief you tomorrow night.

**You get a bag of chocolate chip cookies if you can correctly i.d. the origin and significance of tonight's blog title. Goodnight, y'all.**