I’ve been listening to Scritti Politti’s White Bread Black Beer, and have really been enjoying it. It’s nice, mellow music to have on in the back ground, and it’s completely possible to work while it’s playing. It’s the first time I’ve (knowingly) listened to Scritti Politti, and I’m glad to have found them. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting – something harder, I guess – but once I put it on it was a pleasant surprise. I’m planning to explore them a little more – I have Cupid & Psyche 85 on my request list at the library. It’s significantly older than White Bread Black Beer – I’ll be interested to see if it’s at all dated.

I have to admit to feeling a little ambivalent about this movie. It’s a British movie (this isn’t why I feel ambivalent about it, though), and not a great deal happens in it. And, at least if you’re me, the lead character grates on you in the beginning, although she does grow on you as the movie progresses. Perhaps this is the point? In any case, I felt much better about the movie at the end than I did in the middle of it.

Once you get past the missing apostrophe in the title of this book, it has a lot going for it. It covers a lot, is beautifully laid out, with plenty of photos letting you know what you’re making, and the recipes (or, at least the one’s I’ve tried) work beautifully. This book helped me make my first unsupervised roast chicken (which was delicious and moist), and opened my eyes to the oven-baked risotto. I’ll never stand for hours over a stove stirring a risotto again!

This book is incredibly good. As well as being a compelling story (it follows the life of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan), it is incredibly well written. I read it over a weekend; I didn’t get anything else done – I simply couldn’t put this book down!

Full of cliché (although not at the end), but I enjoyed it anyway.

That said, if the guy said “Cool” one more time in the movie, I might have attacked the screen in an effort to strangle him.

I learned lots about fonts and type face while watching Helvetica, but I couldn’t help feeling that there wasn’t really enough material for a full-length documentary. Perhaps a 30 minute film would have surficed?

Friends gave me Hungry Planet for my birthday nearly two months ago, and I’ve finally had a chance to sit down and read it. It’s a fantastic book, quite like anything else I’ve ever read: part coffee table book, part recipe book, part commentary on the differences (and similarities) that exist between the developed and the developing world.

The basic idea of the book is this: Photographer Peter Menzel and his partner Faith D’Alusio travel to a variety of countries, all over the world, and document what people eat. Each family they visit is photographed sitting with a week’s worth of food, and the family is interviewed; the reader gets a sense of how food fits into the family’s life and culture.

I’m not sure I’ll make any recipes in the book, but the family photos alone are eye-opening. It’s sobering to compare the weekly food consumed by a family in a first world country with that of a family living in a refugee camp.

This evening, I settled in with Season 2 of The (American) Office. I’ve seen all of the British version, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but it took me a while to warm to the American version. The first few episodes follow the British series very closely, and it was painful to watch. Then, the American version branched out in it’s own direction, and it got considerably better. It’s very different from the British series, but funny in it’s own way.

A series of short stories set in Brazil, all with an element of the supernatural.

This account of one family’s attempt to eat locally has changed the way I buy and cook food.