Eat, drink, and sleep, look up at the stars

I don't know if today was productive in the traditional sense, but I hung two pictures on my walls this afternoon. Neither of them is quite where I wanted (one is about six inches too high, which is going to annoy me every time I look at it until either I yank the nail out and commit to gratuitous holes in the plaster or accept it as just one of those things), but they are both part of my room now. The poster for The Big Broadcast of October 30th, 1938 is taking up some of the dead air next to the stupid closet and my watercolor housemate Richard de Menocal is on the wall beside my bed. I will get the rest of my art from Lexington this weekend and set about figuring out where it belongs.

Afterward I walked over to rushthatspeaks' and we finally iced the parsnip cake. There was a preface of frantic kitchen searching before I remembered the metal bowl for the stand mixer was almost certainly somewhere in ratatosk's kitchen, having conveyed the electric blue whipped cream there for his party in February, so we creamed the butter and beat in the crème fraîche and started to beat in the confectioner's sugar with me in Rush's kitchen lab coat to ward off flying dairy, holding a wooden bowl underneath the beater of the stand mixer and turning it periodically so as to combine all ingredients smoothly or at least not ludicrously unevenly; this worked until the confectioner's sugar, which made enough attempts at high-velocity escape (i.e., more than one) that we gave over and used a spatula on it. That worked fine. Rush's spatula is an omnicompetent instrument. Slightly to our surprise, it turned out that lemon extract in this recipe is not an efficient substitute for lemon juice: we needed to add sufficient extra that we had to beat in more confectioner's sugar than bargained for and the resultant texture of the icing, while admittedly preferable to the kind that runs off the sides of the cake, resembled Play-Doh by the time we were sticking it to the sides of the cake. I would have zested a lemon in if we had one, but neither of us had thought of buying one in advance. It tasted great, though, and I hope faerieboots enjoyed it.

And then derspatchel and I went for dinner at Magoun's Saloon, which has the delightful property of being less than ten minutes' walk from where I live now, and split the jerk chicken and curry goat off their April Wednesday menu. The conch fritters were superfluous, but tasty. The rum punch I ordered was doing its best to be a one-person scorpion bowl, only without the being on fire bit. (I looked at it and said, "I just want to set this on fire." Maybe that's why they didn't give us a candle.) Dessert turned out to be coconut milk ice cream sandwiches from the Stop & Shop on Route 28, which I consider completely reasonable. We only walked twenty minutes to it and back.

The Sachal Studios Orchestra's version of "Take Five" is actually as good as everyone says it is.