So I was tired and slept through fixing or supervising the
fixing of dinner, which meant that Erik got to burn the
salmon and Carol got to burn the side dish. The fish was
deeply colored Alaska sockeye, supposedly fresh, and it was
in fact pretty tasty despite being done twice as long as
they'd have liked and probably three times as long as I'd
have preferred. They covered it completely in flat parsley
leaves, which might have improved it. The texture was of
packing material. One good thing was that the skin had
been charred, so the scales had burned off, so it was
pretty edible. There was no butter on the table to
remedy the dry fibrousness.

I'd suggested doing the cabbage that Carol planned to
offer on the side in bacon fat, but that was too unhealthy,
so she cooked the slaw in olive oil and fried a couple
slices of bacon separately, tossing that lovely grease, and
crumbling the fatless result into bacon bits to toss through
the cabbage, which she allowed to get pretty black. It was,
well, almost yummy but could have been so much better with
just a little attention.

Erik put together a green salad. With blue cheese. I took
one myopic bite. Why is there blue cheese?

Dessert was pretty good, though, what there was of it:

Ben & Jerry's Urban Bourbon ice cream - burnt caramel
ice cream, almond slivers, dark chocolate chips, and
Bourbon (flavored) caramel swirl. The ice cream itself
is pretty good, rich and mouth-coating, but way sweeter
and less intense than Toscanini's, which popularized
the flavor some decades ago. Almonds were more shardlike
than I'd like, and the chocolate chunks bigger and more
abundant, this being a good thing. The swirl had little
or no Bourbony taste but was an oversweet vanilla
caramelly intrusion. All in all plain burnt caramel ice
cream would have been better.

Haagen Dazs strawberry - I detest this brand, The Mattus
family started it, concocting a tongue-in-cheek name that
had nada to do with any Scandinavian or other for that
matter language. It was a decent product, and they got
wealthy, selling out to one conglomerate that got swallowed
by another, and then another. Somewhere along the line the
Mattuses lent their support to a startup called Frusen
Gladje, which was sued by Haagen Dazs's parent, and even
though the suit was totally without merit, the upstart
went under in due course. Contributing to the demise was
the consuming public, which thought that Frusen Gladje
sounded like a fake name compared to the obvious
authenticity of now-entrenched Haagen-Dazs - of course,
the truth was as it often is the exact opposite of what
consumerdom thought, but what the hey, nobody apparently
has gotten rich betting on the intelligence of the public.
Anyhow, this ice cream is reasonably rich and creamy and
has a pleasant frozen-strawberry flavor; in fact it's
much like what you used to get as supermarket house brand
decades ago. Kind of good, but the company has blood on
its hands.

==
Langnese creamy country honey - according to the label,
Europe's #1 brand - nice textuer, grainy but with a fine
grain; I guess with a substantial amount of wax, which
made dissolving it difficult.

Driscoll's strawberries (product of USA) - these were
prettty good looking, good rich color. Not much aroma and
less taste. Even the big blushing beauties had a hard white
core and didn't have much appeal. Cooking fruit, you might
say; all I can add is that I hope the US farmers get their
act together before the season is over.

Naturipe blueberries (product of Georgia) - a mix of sizes,
more smaller ones, some unripe. Okay flavor, not as good as
some of the Mexican and Peruvian Driscoll's ones we've had
in the winter, but certainly better than the strangely fibrous
Mexican ones that Driscoll foisted off on us twice this year
so far.

American blueberries (product of USA) - a mixture of smallish
very sour berries and medium-to-large sweetish but tasteless
ones. These were inferior to most we've had, which made the
"patriotic berry" nonsense on the box particularly irritating.

==
One very weird thing. I took the train to Boston, and
after Kingston I decided to hit the restroom before
Providence. I left my stuff sort of in a hurry, and
when I returned in about 4 minutes, a girl was looking
closely at my computer, which had been unplugged. I squinted
at her, wondering if she was someone I knew, but she didn't
offer an explanation or greet me or anything. No damage
seems to have been done - just creepy is all.
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