Irish Arancini, Air Guitar Memorial, and the "Supermoon"

Today marked a first. Not a culinary first, per se, but a musical first. Jen voluntarily requested to listen to some early Ozzy Osborne. Even she was moved by the 29th anniversary of Randy Rhoads's death. I was more than happy to oblige.



I was also more than happy to play air guitar to some of my favorite Randy Rhoads solos. Jen thought that because I could go dweedly-dweedly-dweeeeeeeeee along to the solos that I should be able to also play them on an actual guitar. It took me a bit of time to convince her that this was not the case.

She still doesn't seem to understand how this works.



I was excited tonight to have a beer that was not disappointing. The past week or so has been filled with Irish beers that I don't really care for. Even before that there was that German pilsner that I didn't enjoy that much. So I was thrilled to pour myself an Irish Red from Thomas Hooker Brewing Company.

Unfortunately it was a little disappointing. It had a little bit of a vinegar taste to it (which seems to be intentional). I'm a huge fan of every other Hooker beer I've had (the limited edition Munich in particular) but I guess they can't all be gems. I much preferred the Irish Red from Saranac that we had last year.



I had an unusual idea to make a sort of croquette (similar to what I included with last night's salad) for dinner this evening.



I took the leftover batter from the fritters last night and stuffed them with a chunk of corned beef, braised cabbage, and Irish cheddar.



After that I fried them and finished them off in the oven, serving them over the remaining Guinness-braised cabbage. Essentially this is corned beef and cabbage wrapped in colcannon. I call it: Irish arancini.



For dessert we enjoyed another flavor of yogurt form White Cow Dairy. They don't include any nutritional information on their packaging which is fine because it's better that we don't know that this tiny amount of yogurt contains more fat and calories than an equivalent sized portion of pure lard.



After dinner I took this rather lackluster picture of the moon. Tonight was a "supermoon" (a term I'm pretty sure they just made up) meaning that it was the brightest and closest to the Earth the moon has been in eighteen years! That was disappointing because I thought it was going to have something to do with that scene in Superman IV where Superman flies that solar-powered baddie up to the moon and buries him in moon dust so he can't do any more harm.

I tried using the camera way beyond my normal wheelhouse of using whatever automatic setting I can find. I was adjusting all kinds of aperture and ISO setting. I even changed the f-stop! As you can see it was well worth it for this microscopic picture of the Earth's natural satellite.

Look out, Leibovitz, there's a new sheriff in town.