Crab cakes

The only magazine I get that is not school related (and I guess technically those are "journals") these days is Cooking Light.  I look forward to it every month because it means a bunch of new recipes to try.  April's issue came on Saturday and I promised myself to make something out of it today.  There are a ton of good recipes in this issue, so I don't know that I'm going to be able to get through all of the ones I want to try.  For example, there is a whole spread on handmade pasta by Lydia Bastianich and every single recipe in there looks delicious.  And there is another section on Indian cooking with lots of yummy looking curry recipes.  But what definitely caught my eye was the cover recipe: crab cakes.  Made them for dinner tonight and they definitely get two thumbs up.

1/4 c chopped red onion
2 T chopped parsley
3 T mayo
2 t dijon mustard
3/4 t old bay
1/2 t worcestershire sauce
2 egg whites, lightly beaten
1 pound lump crab meat
1 1/2 c panko
1 T olive oil

combine first 7 ingredients in bowl, gently fold in crab meat.  stir in 3/4 c panko.  cover and chill 30 mins.  divide mixture into 8 equal portions (about 1/2 c each) shape into patty.  place remaining panko in dish and dredge cake in panko.  heat oil in skillet, cook 7 minutes on each side. 

You can tell it's getting to be that point in the semester

Because it's 3am and 5 of my grad school friends are online right now.

MGM Foxwoods opening in May

MGM partnered with the Mashentucket Pequots (the tribe that owns Foxwoods) to open a new hotel/casino right next door.  It's opening May 18th.  Doubtful there will be a new poker room...I have a feeling this is going to be more along the lines of the Venetian/Palazzo in Vegas.  But still, exciting.

I hope this doesn't make traffic on Rt. 2 completely unbearable.

Edited to add:
Just read on the FARGO mailing list that the new Mohegan Sun poker room is scheduled to open 8/29.  Woo-hoo!  I've never been to Mohegan Sun before (why would I go somewhere without poker?), but it is actually slightly closer to my parents' house than Foxwoods and supposedly nicer (though what my relatives' basis for a casino being nicer is, I don't know).

Week in Recap...lots of beer.

M: Played at the Monday game...there was beer.
T: went out after work to Red and Black and saw some bands... they had a great beer selection...Allagash and Chimay Red.
W: saw the Bank Job (it was good) and then went to Wonderland for beer (I drank Hefeweizen)...showed up an hour before last call.
R*: After teaching went to Wonderland for bridge night (Anne and this newbie played against one of her friends and his brother and we won!) and beer (more Hefeweizen, Billy's Sierra Nevada that he didn't like, and Anchor Steam).  Was there from 6-almost closing time.  Btw, I have never really eaten at Wonderland before last night...they have really good food for a bar w/o a real kitchen.
F: GVPT happy hour at Looking Glass Lounge and then Alison's bday party (I hear there will be cake and more beer).

Might even be more beer on Saturday after Pops' game.

While it may surprise you, this is not indicative of a normal week for me... no, really....

Also, I need to give a shout out somewhere to Matt O'Malley..friend from college who just friended me on facebook and apparently has a blog.  He is about as Boston Irish as you can get (see picture on his blog) so I figure this shout out is relevant to beer (ha!).  Matt and I did student government stuff together...and now like 99.9% of my GW friends he is doing stuff in politics. 

*R is how GW used to abbreviate Thursday so as not to conflict with T for Tuesday but only have to use one letter in the student schedule.  It stuck and I have always used R to abbreviate Thursday since about 1996.

Please fix my car soon!

My car should finally be fixed this week.  :) Here is one of the many pictures that the insurance people shared with me.  :(

Dinner Party Recap

Appetizers:
crab dip with crackers
homemade hummus with pita

Main course:
BBQ meatloaf
garlic mashed potatoes
roasted asparagus with balsamic and parmesan
mushrooms and caramelized onions

Dessert:
Guinness chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting

Beverages:
We ended up drinking 4 bottles of wine (2 chards, 1 pinot grigio, 1 verdejo), several bottles of beer, and 3/4 of a bottle of blueberry vodka.

I made everything from scratch...and I had made everything before except the cake.  The cake turned out really good though - it was chocolate-y, but not too sweet, and dense and moist thanks to the beer.  I bet it would be good to substitute a belgian raspberry lambic or something in place of the Guinness.  I also learned I should not try to frost a cake drunk...messy.

I've also decided that 6 people is about the max you can have at a dinner party before it becomes work.  It really only took me a few hours to throw everything together food-wise, but cooking for more would have required some better oven management on my part.

It's nice having some seating in my kitchen in the form of a bench (thanks, Mom) because when Anne and Billy arrived at 7 I was still mixing up the cake batter and they could sit in my kitchen and talk to me.

After stuffing ourselves silly, we played a round of BS - a game where you make stuff up and then have people bet on whether you are telling the truth or not, and a rowdy game of Scattergories... where I think I made Keenan choke when I wrote down "muff" for things you keep hidden that start with the letter "m".  Ha ha.

Anyways, thanks to everyone for coming over.  Hope you had a good time.  My kitchen is almost back to normal after two loads of dishes...

Best sentence I've read today

One of my favorite blogs regularly posts the best sentence of the day.  When I first started reading that blog, I wanted to copycat, but decided that most things I read in a day are really not that interesting (especially recently when I've been stuck reading a ton of midterms written by my students).

But I just read a great sentence on Poker Grump's blog that is without a doubt the best sentence of the day:

It frequently occurs in my life that people say things to me for
which I can think of no reply that is simultaneously meaningful, civil,
and honest.

Yes, I frequently have that problem too.  Few things that come out of my mouth are all three.  Not generally very meaningful, hardly ever civil, but generally pretty honest.

The makings of a good dinner party

Grocery bill: $105.98
Liquor store bill: $197.34

To be fair, I had a lot of food stuff already and my liquor cabinet/wine rack was sadly depleted...but still.

Blueberry Beer

Went out to Wonderland with Anne last night and we ended up having some of their daily special - 8% ABV blueberry beer called Wild Blue.  It was REALLY good.  I checked the bottle to see where it was brewed/bottled and low and behold it was made in Baldwinsville, NY.  That's about 15 minutes away from the small town in the middle of nowhere where I grew up.  It too is a small town in the middle of nowhere, though there is an Anheuser-Busch plant there and I guess that is actually where Wild Blue is brewed...in their craft brew section.  Regardless, it was really excellent, and I don't usually like fruit-inspired beers. 

In the map below I've marked Baldwinsville and Manlius (the town I grew up in). Zoom out to see it better.

View Larger Map

The Grand Pushed Back

So mark your calendars for 4/11 because that's when it's opening in DC.  Patience is a virtue.  *Sigh.*

Last week in poker

Went up to AC with Travis after my class ended on Wednesday.  Came back on Friday early evening $800 richer.  First night there we played at Harrah's (where we were staying).  The room there is nice and I really like their chips.  However, the floor people mostly had no clue, and the action was kinda dead.  After about an hour I was up $150...then I ran my KK into AA when I really should have folded and proceeded to play some of the worst poker I have played in about a year.  Fortunately I only ended up $300 stuck.

The next day we headed over to Borgata.  I did a quick double up after I won a $300 side pot with T high and everyone at my crazy table wanted to pay me after that.  Cashed out (now even for the trip) when my sister and her boyfriend found me in the room and we went to go get some dinner.  (Note: the 24 hour place at the Borgata, The Metropolitan, has really good food!).  Played some roulette and ended up pushing there... came back to the poker room and was seated at seriously the tightest 1/2 table I have ever been seated at in my entire life.  The floor wouldn't give me a seat change and I started to get really bored.  I was up about $10 at that table and I decided to cash out and go play some table games since I felt that in my current state I might get really stupid and lose a lot more than $100 at the poker table.

Took my $100 in green chips left over from roulette and decided to go play blackjack...except I couldn't find a seat at a lower limit table.  Finally I decided to go put my money on a Texas Holdem Bonus table.  Really in order to make any money at that game you have to hit the bonus, so blackjack probably would have been smarter, but....  My $100 lasted me a pretty long time and I was hanging tough.  Finally I hit the bonus with AhJh which pays 20 to 1.  I cashed out $75 ahead and went back to the poker room.

The table I got seated at this time was awesome...  lots of drunk guys wearing rolexes who would raise pf and just give you there money if you hit anything.  After about 4-5 hours I was sitting on just over a grand and then the table broke.  I decided I'd take my money and run rather than trying to be seated at a new table at 5:30am, especially when I needed to drive home the next day.  Went back to the room, rented a movie, went to sleep...and somehow managed to leave AC  $800 ahead for the trip.

Then Friday night I shipped more than was necessary at pink.  I know how to play that game good and I even do it on occasion.  I just can't find the discipline to play O8 and especially Tahoe as tight as I should.  I never have any problem making/holding onto my money during the Stud8 round.  I was also running bad, which didn't help.  I left very early for me (2:30am) and went home. 

Saturday Pops was running a rebuy tourney for charity and then a cash game afterwards.  I didn't even come close to winning in the tourney, but only put in $120 to that...and it was for a good cause.  Got into the cash game and the next thing you know it's 12:30am and I'm cashing out over $1100.

Hopefully I can make some money on Monday too.  Next week is Spring break and I think I'm gonna head up to Foxwoods on Tuesday night.  May go up to AC instead, but I'm definitely going to be playing some poker.

Follow up to small favors...

So, I have more readers of my blog than I thought.  ;)  I've already gotten a few IM's from people and all of them have said something along the lines of: "I'm trying not to laugh, but this really seems like only something that you could manage." 

Ha ha, feel free to laugh.  I am (now that I am home and not standing on the side of the road).  I am a klutz and yeah, if you've known me long enough, you know that I have stupid luck when it comes to this kind of stuff...like the time I missed that test in college due to my concussion...and then the prof committed suicide.  YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP! 

Only in Katie-land.

Thank goodness for small favors

So I got into a car accident today...with a bus.  Fortunately, I am not hurt and there was no one on the bus except for the driver.  No damage to the bus.  On the other hand my car had to be towed from the scene as it was not drivable.  The whole front end is no longer existent, all kinds of stuff was leaking out of my engine onto the road, my steering wheel wouldn't move, car wouldn't start...  I guess it's pretty obvious that a Beetle loses a battle with a bus.

Literally two days ago, I got my headlight fixed.  I got a repair order awhile back and have to get the paperwork into the MVA by Wednesday or else my registration will be suspended (yes, I procrastinated).  At the time of the accident, I was actually on my way to the state police barracks in College Park to get them to sign off on my repair order, so I could take it over to the MVA. 

Since the bus is county property we had to call the police and I got my first ticket for any moving violation *ever* (boo).  I wouldn't have gotten the ticket if it wasn't an accident with a damned bus because we wouldn't have had to call the cops, but there is a silver lining, I suppose....

So my entire front end is smashed...including the just repaired headlight.  Guess it's a good thing we had to call the police and that the officer was in a good mood because he signed off on my repair order after I gave him my sob story even though the headlight was in a million pieces.  I guess he figured even if I was lying, I was gonna have to get it fixed now anyways.  He even apologized when he wrote me the citation, and noted that he had to do it because the accident involved a county vehicle.   

Finally - ATLARGE recap

I just don't have the inclination to write a long day by day breakdown of ATLARGE events, so instead here's a list of highlights.

13.  There's always something fun about looking out across a poker room and seeing 10 people you're friends with spread across the room.

12. Getting to see my sister, who I don't see all that often, considering we live 2.5 hours apart.

11. Me and Ricky almost peeing our pants from laughing so hard after the guy paying out Keenan got really confused as to who "Sandy McWhinerson" and "Kiki the Vag" were and why Sandy McWhinerson was trying to fill out his paperwork under a different name. 

10. Keenan on tilt storming out to play a slot machine to cool down and then telling said slot machine to eat a dick.

9.  Eating breakfast Friday morning at a literal bar with Keenan and Billy, and then playing the TOC tourney on multiple vodka redbulls.

8.  Deciding it was definitely a sign to leave my table Friday night after I had more than doubled and then in immediate succession: 1) some guy walked by and said: "wow that chick has a lot of chips." 2) the dealer did not deal me in on the button while I was seated for some inexplicable reason. 3) the fire alarm went off.  I took my chips and went up to the room, even though I liked my table.

7.  Running "real good" in the NLHE tourney...  First hand in the big blind my two pair is no good...  then bust out when my QQ ran into TT...T on the flop.  Guess I'd rather run bad in the tourneys than in cash though...and overall I can't complain about the way I was running at the cash tables (only one really stupid suckout).

6.  Being on uber-massive-monkey tilt during the Stud8 tourney where I literally saw 2 playable hands in 6 levels...and both bricked while other people caught real good.  And Drunkey McLucksack was seated at my table and annoying the ever-loving shit out of me.

5.  Alternating between getting phone numbers and having guys think I was being a bitch.  Being a girl playing poker is always interesting.

4.  And speaking of that, having the "pleasure" of meeting the guy who has got to be the biggest douchebag I have ever played poker with (and that is saying a lot).

3.  Running like crazy people through WaWa (twice) with Keenan and Billy trying to figure out what kind of crap junk food we wanted to buy.  In case you care, there are two votes against the pretzels.

2.  Having Keenan inform me that I was going to be his mommy while we were in AC.

1.  Actually leaving AC in the black...woohoo!  (and remembering some fundamentals of poker along the way)

What the...?

So I'm sitting here writing a paper and I have the TV on.  All of a sudden, a commercial for theladders.com grabbed my attention.  Their tag line is: "100k jobs for 100k people."

100k people????

I guess this kind of elitist ego-stroking attracts their target audience, which is a good thing from a marketing perspective.  However, the attitude, which seems to be pervasive in American culture, that people's worth to society is based on how much money they make drives me up a wall.  I know lots of people who feel this way and for the life of me I cannot understand it.

The argument typically goes something like: "The free market determines salaries.  People will get paid in accordance with how much they are worth on the market.  If society really values the work someone does, they will get paid more."

So does our society really value ambulance-chasing lawyers, airline pilots, and plastic surgeons over teachers, civil servants, and other important, but lesser paying jobs?  Perhaps so, but really societal values don't have all that much to do with it, in my opinion.  Jobs that pay more pay more because they require specialized skills.  There are fewer people able to do those jobs due to the specialized training they require.  Additionally, a lot of high paying jobs demand abnormal schedules, additional workload, or being on call and an increase in salary is one way to make sure that people stay in those jobs.

Anyways, that's my rant of the day.  The amount of money you make has little to do with how awesome of a person you are, or how valuable you are to society.  /rant.

*And yes, my opinions on this probably have to do with the fact that I am the daughter of two people who do things that I consider socially valuable that do not make a lot of money, relatively speaking...and that I want to do the same thing "when I grow up."

I know lots of useless shit

From a trivia website I visit that sends out daily trivia questions:

TQOTD Rank March: #11 of 42,789

That's right, I'm 11th out of 42,789 people.  I've gotten every question for March right so far, but I haven't been fast enough in responding to get first place.

Today's Truism

It is quite surreal to walk into someone else's apartment and see furniture, sheets, and random odds and ends that you picked out and bought for yourself.

Overheard in the gradlab

*I'm putting together my lesson plans for discussion today...Gerg and Shanthi are discussing getting people together for karaoke.

Greg: Remington's in Laurel can be fun if you get a bunch of people together.

me: Especially when those people are drunken, nerdy, overworked polisci students.  Let me know when you guys go; I love karaoke.

Shanthi: You surprise me, Katie, you don't seem like you would be the karaoke type.

me: I'm an undercover freak.

Greg: I believe you.

Overheard in GVPT 170 lecture

Dr McIntosh: How many of you have ever watched Congressional debates on CSPAN?

*About 5 students in a lecture hall of 500 raise their hand.  I am the only TA out of 5 that does.  Melissa looks at me and laughs.

Dr. McIntosh: Well apparently we have some nerds in this class.

Dinner with Dad

My dad is consulting on a project that has him down in DC about once/month.  Our schedules haven't matched up recently, but we finally worked it out Tuesday night and he took me out to District Chophouse which was conveniently located across the street from his hotel and was actually in the building he was doing work in.

I've never been to the District Chophouse, but I've heard good things from many people and, as I discovered by looking at their website, they brew their own beer - which I knew both me and dad would like.  As it turns out they have a $2.50/beer happy hour too, which was a pleasant surprise.

We both got the nut brown ale which was really good.  I love eating out with my dad because we can order food that other people might not like -- he ordered the mussels as an appetizer and they were REALLY good (they were in some kind of spicy marinara sauce).  He got the NY Strip and I got a filet on top of portabella mushrooms topped with gorgonzola cheese and a side of sharp cheddar mashed potatoes.  Sadly I couldn't finish all my food, but it was really good.

It was really nice catching up with my dad and hearing about the work he is doing these days.  Plus, when isn't it nice to be treated to dinner and have your dad throw random compliments your way?

Two thumbs up for District Chophouse.

ATLARGE

Home from ATLARGE...stories to follow.  Somehow I managed to make money even after dropping $360 in tournament buy-ins.  Huzzah!