After careful research, I settled on the Canon PowerShot SX100IS. So far, I could not be happier with my choice. Here are a few selections from the last couple of weeks:

Spoon concert. We were easily 100 feet from the stage.

A good 30 feet from the mixing board. You can read the set list in the high resolution shot.

Tortilla soup. I swear I’ll be blogging about this soon.

Baseball games.

I’ve had some of these for years and forever reason just didn’t get into them when I started them. Maura was making fun of me for having such a huge pile of these books, so I decided that I would just buckle down and get through the pile before I get any new books. So far, I have already finished On Beauty by Zadie Smith, which was definitely as navel-gazingly boring as I remembered when I started. However, apparently I put down All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy on exactly the page before it started to get interesting, so I’m enjoying going through that one right now.

This is a delicious, healthy, and incredibly easy (though you can fancy it up with little work) recipe that I adapted from a recipe in the local MSM rag several years ago and have cooked a handful of times. Their recipe called for couscous, but I started replacing it with quinoa to get pretty much the same consistency with a healthier grain. We made it for dinner on Sunday night because it makes a big recipe with delicious, cold leftovers that we took to the game for dinner on Monday night.

• 2 12oz. jars marinated artichoke hearts
• 4 cups cooked quinoa
• 1 cooked chicken, meat removed from bones; works great with a rotisserie chicken
• 2 green onions, chopped
• 1/2 cup minced Italian parsley
• 1/4 cup toasted pine nuts
• Cherry tomatoes
• Spinach or greens
• Salt and black pepper to taste

Drain the artichoke hearts, reserve the marinade. Chop the artichoke hearts.  Stir together all the ingredients in a great big bowl.

To make it especially fancy, don’t mix in the greens and cherry tomatoes. Put a layer of greens a plate, put a pile of the salad mixture on top of the greens, and garnish with cherry tomatoes.

On Friday and Saturday we went to the exhibition games between the Braves and the Indians at Turner Field, the first of the 83 games we have tickets for from our season tickets. The weather was cold and wet all weekend, but I enjoyed the games and it put to rest my worries that I would be sick of going to baseball games by the middle of April. It’s a lot of baseball, but going to a baseball game is a relatively low key event.

Anyway, this will probably put a damper in my brief attempt at posting here more often. However, I will have a lot to say about Braves baseball all season, and I’ve created a special new place to do so. Check out my new Braves blog here:

Section 435 dot com

And I will still be posting here, just not quite as frequently as you haven’t yet gotten used to when the Braves are in town.

This one of my favorite recipes I’ve cooked yet. Maura dropped the cliche about what kind of meat the rabbit tasted like, but I think it was much more flavorful. The chocolate, even though it was just an ounce, makes it a rich dish.

My first adventure was butchering a rabbit. The farmer’s market sells whole, farm-raised rabbits. My cookbooks have vague, at best, instructions on butchering a rabbit: two back legs, two front legs, two ribs, and two from the saddle. The leg were essentially the same as cutting the legs from a chicken; you just have to find the joints. The saddle pieces I cut from the spine and got two lovely, thin, boneless pieces. The ribs were the challenge. I used my kitchen shears to cut the ribs where the meet the spine.

In theory, you should be able to get your rabbit pre-butchered, but I wanted the experience.  After butchering, you marinate the pieces with red wine, onion and carrots for four hours. Then you brown the rabbit pieces, then vegetables.

The stew part comes from the reserved marinade, chicken stock, and brandy (woot!) It simmers for an hour before you add the chocolate. Although everything is drenched in red wine, and bears the purple color until you add the chocolate at the end, You can’t really taste it in the end. The change from wine-y purple to a deep, rich brown was almost instantaneous about a minute after adding the chocolate.

We paired the stew with one of our favorite sides from The New Spanish Table, Spinach with Pine Nuts. We haven’t had any pine nuts the last couple of times. It’s just as good with other nuts. We used sliced almonds. We’ve also decided that the four tablespoons of olive oil is too much, so this time I made it with two tablespoons, which is plenty to brown the raisins, garlic, and nuts, without making the final product overly oily.

To make things more interesting, we decided to use blueberry barbeque sauce, following the recipe in Not Your Mother’s Slow Cooker Cookbook.

There’s no way around it. This recipe calls for an ass-ton of blueberries. Two-and-a-half pounds. We bought a three pound bag of frozen blueberries for $13. With onion, brown sugar, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, et cetera, it yields about four cups of very blue sauce after (you guessed it) eight hours on low in the slow cooker. Doubtless, the most expensive barbeque sauce I’ve had.

Still, the barbeque sauce is quite delicious. It’s a little bit sweeter than a tomato-based sauce, very tangy, and really only slightly blueberry-y, beyond the color. Purists need not fret: the cookbook ladies report that it’s a traditional Southern recipe. I’ll take their word for it.

We made the sauce a day in advance, then just dumped the ribs in the crock in the morning (after scooping half out to save for serving on the side).

After cooking, the ribs were not blue at all. Nor were they infused with much blueberry-y flavor. As such, I’m going to suggest that if you’re interested in the blueberry sauce (which you should be), you don’t cook the ribs in the blueberry sauce. Use a regular, tomato-based (read: cheaper) sauce for that, and save the good stuff for the side.

I’m also going to suggest that, in the case of ribs, you go against the cookbook ladies advice on the quality of meat cuts. They say that the slow cooker lends itself best to the cheaper cuts of meat. Pork butt over loin chops, check. But when going for the ribs, you best splurge.

Not that our ribs were not fall-off-the-bone tender. They were. Delicious, yes. But this would have been a much better meal had we gone with the choicer cut of ribs.

It makes for a delicious meal, but when you’re cooking a pound of potatoes, a half pound of chorizo, and a whole onion in a 7-egg omelet, all cooked in a heavy, cast iron skillet, flipping the beast is a bit of a challenge.

I was anticipating the challenge while making my first tortilla this weekend. I’ve read that it takes a lot of practice to master the art of flipping the tortilla.  After the eggs had set enough, it was time for the first flip. I was nervous. The flip involves cover the skillet with a plate, flipping the tortilla onto the plate, and then carefully sliding the tortilla back into the skillet so that the upside is now down.

I managed the first flip without any damage, doing a little victory dance before sliding the tortilla back into the skillet. The second flip caused a minor crack, but the final flip onto the serving plate went off without a hitch.

It’s actually quite a simple dish, but nailing the flip was one of my proudest culinary achievements yet.

Now, it’s not a whole lot less true than it was last time I wrote about this years ago - my expertise in wine is minimal, particularly compared to my knowledge of beers. It’s a bit daunting buying wine, but I’ve decided that I shouldn’t feel bad about sampling wines based on the most interesting bottles. After all, what better way to learn what you like that by sampling a wide variety in an essentially random fashion. That’s essentially how I learned what I know about beers. And while it is perhaps not as dense a topic as vino culture, the methodology should work as well. (Not to mention be more fun than listening to recommendations from snooty oenophiles.)

So here is my most recent haul:

We had a couple glasses of the Mano a Mano tonight with our Spanish dinner. It was nice, sturdy without being overpowering. (Maura thinks my description needs to be more descriptive in terms of the flavor notes, but I’m terrible at that.)

I’m posting this picture mostly to remind me to start updating my Cork’d profile. (Let’s be drinking buddies!)

These will be salsa one day!

These will be… ummm… Italian-y goodness.

For now though, it’s all just dirt.