What should I bake next?

[sarea]

This weekend I'm going to participate in "Dinner with 12 Strangers," which is a UCLA alumni program where a Bruin alumni in a local city hosts a dinner and other local Bruins sign up to attend. It's my first one, and the first time this host has done it as well. I don't know how it's normally done, but she's allowing everyone to bring a guest (probably because she's married and her husband will be there), which I kind of feel is contrary to the intent of this thing. I mean, it's supposed to be dinner with 12 strangers, not 24 of them, one of whom is your spouse. Plus, it's supposed to be for UCLA alumni, which half the people probably won't be. I mean, I love the idea of 12 (I guess it would be 13) people sitting around, having one thing in common (where they went to school), and getting to know each other. Or if you're hosting, you alone have the privilege of also having your significant other there. Now I have to hope that I am not the only person not bringing someone, and have an awkward singleton situation a la Bridget Jones/Carrie Bradshaw.

The good news is that originally I was put in the group to bring beverages, while the other group was supposed to bring desserts or side dishes. Me and another woman asked if anyone wanted to switch, and luckily two people spoke up who were like, "Ohmygod I can't cook, switch with me!" So now I get to bring a dessert or side dish. Right now I'm leaning toward dessert, but I haven't decided what to make. I should probably go with something I've made before that will at least be edible and look nice (like the cheesecake or designer apple pie), but I'm also selfish and like to try new things to entertain myself, so I'm kind of leaning toward doing something new (if it's a disaster, I can always run to Bakery Nouveau and get their chocolate cake to bring... and maybe take credit for it... just kidding!). I'd like it to be something more fancy than cookies or a sheet cake. Anyone have any ideas? :D

Had a lovely time with adelagia, slitherhither, and lyndsiefenele on Saturday. Despite the freezing cold and snow, we walked around Greenlake! 3 times! And we helped B. unpack and put away all her boxes from moving! Then we caught a goose and killed it (humanely) to roast for our homemade 7-course dinner!

OK fine, I sort of made all that up. What we did was play board games and eat at two restaurants and one hot chocolate bar. SO SUE US. For lunch we went to Jhanjay, a vegetarian Thai restaurant. I usually need meat of some kind, but curry is the one type of food in which vegetables alone hit the spot for me, because there are already so many other flavors going on. Also, Ta. tried to summit a mountain (of mushrooms) and got 3/4ths of the way there before she had to call in the EVAC team (aka, me and Ti.). Afterward we went to Chocolati for hot chocolate. We all got varying sizes of the Europa, which is twice the amount of chocolate as in their regular house version, and ohmyGOD it was basically like drinking melted chocolate. In fact, it was lukewarm because they can only heat it up so much otherwise the chocolate burns and it's no good. But since I like my drinks as hot as possible, I think next time (and yes, there will be a next time), I'm just going to get the house version. For dinner we tried Satay, a new restaurant that serves "Malaysian street food." I thought it was a little disappointing, to be honest. The food was definitely okay, but when I think of street food, I think cheap and messy. Instead it was served in real plates/bowls, the portions were kind of small, my laksa was not hot or spicy enough, and the prices were a bit high. It was like... fancy street food. I'd rather eat off a paper plate and have more food. It wasn't like the place was super posh!

So... the Oscars poll was a bust. Sorry guys, I messed it up. Basically only 4 of us completed the whole thing. >< This is primarily because I had missed a bunch of categories the first time around, so the people who took it early either didn't see that they needed to go back to fill out the others, or didn't feel like it, so most of the entries were incomplete. Oh wells, maybe next year I won't be so lame. I can always hope, right? I must give myself a personal kudos though, because in my neverending competition with jade_okelani, I fared OK this year! I got only 1 fewer correct answer than her, and if I hadn't been lazy and lame and gone to change one of my answers like I'd been planning to, we would have tied!

No big surprises whatsoever. I guess the biggest surprise, for me, was Tom Hooper's win over David Fincher for best director. Otherwise everything pretty much fell as I was expecting it to. I'm glad the supporting categories went the way they did, I'm glad The King's Speech won out over The Social Network. I didn't much care about anything else. I hope one of these days Christian Bale gets a best actor Oscar, he deserves it.

I'm kind of bummed that Winter's Bone didn't win anything, but considering the categories it was nominated in, there wasn't really much of a chance for it to. Still, if you get a chance, watch it. It's very good.