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We are considering some changes to our living room, to make it more library-like. Today I rearranged the existing furniture as an experiment. The idea is that we would replace the one bookcase you see on the left with an entire wall of built-in bookcases with an embedded writing desk, and replace the old dilapidated sofa with a new small sofa or large loveseat.

Sometimes you just gotta live a little and deep-fry your dinner. And make hush puppies with the leftover breading ingredients.

I attended a presentation this evening on some modernization being planned for the roads through West Newton Square. The most surprising finding they presented is that reducing the number of through travel lanes from 2 to 1 throughout would have little to no impact on traffic, leaving a ton of extra room for bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and more parking. But for me, the most highly anticipated change is fixing the intersection pictured here. I’m including a Google Maps screenshot of the current conditions for your reference (FB folks, click through for whichever did not get shown with my post).

We had a bit of a whiskey tasting on Sunday.

The bottle in the middle is not whiskey but Malort, courtesy of Steve. It is quite an acquired taste — bitter like strong dandelion greens —  but I kinda liked it so he left me the bottle.

I cooked 9 pounds of beef brisket — using Kenji Lopez-Alt’s hybrid sous vide / grill-smoking method — for my birthday this year.

I think this is the highest number of unopened packages of cheese I’ve ever had in my possession.

These purple long beans actually keep their color as you cook them. Very exciting after the disappointment of purple string beans.

I think tonight’s potato-leek soup is going to be a strange color.

Now that I know how easy it is to make real grenadine, I’m never buying the fake commercial stuff again. But that doesn’t stop me from reusing their bottles.

One of the pleasures of cooking this time of year is stepping out into the garden to retrieve some fresh herbs. Except for this year, when my herb garden is withered by drought and I am reduced to dried herbs like it’s the middle of the winter.