More Food for Plottie

The Great Plotnik has been observing an alarming drop in the amount of comments from his vast readership. It can mean only two things: 1) Too much baseball and 2) not enough food.

Sorry! My bad! Oi!

Here are the old war horses: Sour Slaw, Lentils and Cardamom, Arugula/Cilantro/Parsley Tabboule, strawberries and a new dish: Surprise Peppers. The surprise is that The Great Plotnik bought the red peppers at two stands at the Farmer's Market, then mixed them together, forgetting which ones are sweet and which are scaldlingly hot. It's a surprise, all right.

And let's not forget the bottle of Black Cat -- despite yesterday's sage vinter notes about wine tasting and barrel sampling, Plot and Duck always come back to their $5 cabernet from Trader Joe's. When they were cruising wineries in the Sierras, fellow tasters would ask, pondering deeply as they swirled their sangioveses: "Do you taste cherry? I taste cherry. Do you get oak? Blackberry? Licorice?"

The Great Plotnik is usually unable to taste anything other than "red wine with battery acid" or "red wine without battery acid." And most of the time, he was secretly thinking to himself: "Does this $20 bottle taste four times better than Black Cat? Two times better? Better at all?" Usually, the answer was no.

Steve's Happy Birthday eclairs were pretty good, though the box of cookies from Dianda's lasted longest.