mostly pics because I'm mostly lame

I still don't have much besides photos for show & tell. So here goes...

The other day was Tami's birthday, so I made her a gluten-free chocolate nut cake and even busted out the fancy spoons (from the 1920's at the latest; I think my grandmother got them for her wedding):



Amanda brought me the bestest ever little salt and pepper shakers. They perfectly match my dishes:



When I was researching wheat-free cooking I realized that wheat might actually be behind a lot of life-long problems I've had, so I'm experimenting with gluten-free food for at least a month. Baking has been fun:

German plum cake and blueberry-fig-walnut muffins

Gluten-free bread (delicious)

Banana-walnut muffins

I finally got my butt in gear and made some robot-themed baby items for Casey's brand new nephew Matteo. I have been promising Casey for months that I'd do this!

Here's my friend Steph's sweet little girl Gwen wearing a stripey dress I made for her:





And finally, here's a sweater I recently made for myself--just in time for San Francisco's one month of warm weather.

gettin' german wit' it

I am going to another wine tasting dinner tomorrow, and this time I signed up to make the dessert. I said I'd bring German apple cake, and then this afternoon I got all nostalgic for German plum cake, so I made one of those too. It will be interesting to lug these to the East Bay on BART tomorrow night at rush hour, along with an overnight bag and a bottle of wine.



Did I mention that a couple of months ago we were tasting Portuguese reds, and I ended up volunteering to cook a dish called açorda de camarão for 10 people? In someone else's kitchen, and not having cooked said dish in well over a decade? Luckily it didn't suck.

There is no real point to this post other than maybe to make y'all jealous and/or hungry.

reruns--volume II (original title: taking care of business)

(Here's another golden oldie from the India archives, circa July 2007.)

Setting up business in a foreign country/culture means you have to recalibrate what you think of as normal. The last couple of weeks I have been learning a lot about the recruiting and hiring process here, and it's been...interesting.

For example, it is considered perfectly normal and acceptable to arrive to meetings, including job interviews, 15 or 20 or even more minutes late, without apology and typically without a call to alert you of the delay. This seems to be a combination of cultural attitudes and the realities of living in a megacity with unpredictable traffic, transportation, and weather.

Now, back in San Francisco, if a job applicant shows up 20 minutes late for an interview, that person had better have a spectacular excuse involving, oh I dunno, a herd of rabid boar loose in the BART tunnel and an exploding clown on Market street, including photographic and preferably video evidence to back it up. AND a note from a doctor. And the person had better have called me to tell me he or she would be late. Only then would a 20-minute delay not warrant summary dismissal as a potential hire, because, dude, it's a job interview. If you can't make it in time to that, why should I believe you can do anything at all on time? But here in India...not so much.

Another thing that fascinates me is the kind of information that is included on resumes. You almost always are told the person's date of birth and marital status, and often you are helpfully provided with the applicant's passport and/or driver's license number. My favorite, though, is that people usually list a few of their hobbies. Cricket is often mentioned (the sport, I mean; I have not seen any resumes from entomology enthusiasts so far), and, oddly, table tennis (not that I would ever turn down a good game of table tennis, but I'm just sayin'--who the hell is that into ping pong that they can't even refrain from mentioning it on their resume?). The very, very best is when people put things like "Vivek enjoys the movies and listening to soft music," or "Ritu likes to read and watch TV."* You are trying to impress someone into hiring you for a director-level position AND THE BEST HOBBY YOU CAN COME UP WITH IS WATCHING TV??" I give up.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent, and also I can't remember any of their actual names at the moment.