Darice de Cuba

Being December and being on vacation after working almost a full year without vacation I’m in the mood of being a bit extravagant. It started with making a reservation to dine at Le Cirque this Tuesday as an early Christmas celebration. This will be my first high scale dinning experience.

With work we went to Brasserie Plinius for our Christmas dinner. We got a selection menu..We got four starters dish a fish tartare, pata negra ham with cheese(or parmaham, not sure), European sea bass with a light sauce and a piece of guinea fowl with mashed potatoes.

For the main dish I choose rib-eye steak with fries and the dessert was fresh pistachio ice cream. And after dessert cheese and bread. And of course there was champagne, white and red wine. I must say I can be a difficult eater but that comes due to my kidney diseases which affects how food tastes. For one I absolutely cannot stand salmon. I am not a pig meat fan either. So that night was a constant discovery of new tastes, like the ham and the guinea fowl. But I must say I really enjoyed the fine dinning. The portions where small, tasteful and not fatty or heavy at all.

My mom is spending the holidays with me while my sisters is traveling around Thailand. So I have a willing someone to go try out all kind of dinning places with me and to try out food I cook to see if they are good enough.

I recently bought Delicious food guide special edition. With the best places to eat out and do your food shopping in a few Dutch cities including The Hague. Yesterday we went out last minute to dine out. Just walking round the city checking out menus of if they had a place as on Saturday night everything is full. And by pure causality we ended up at Pastis a small French bistro. It is situated in a small side street, when I saw the name I remembered it from the Delicious Guide. So we went in, they had a spot at the bar which we didn’t mind. Soon afterward we where offered a table as there was cancellation of reservation.

French Food

I always wanted to try Coquilles St. Jacques which they have as starter. So feeling adventurous I ordered it. But it wasn’t my thing, not so much the taste but the texture of it, I’m gonna sound crazy but the way it felt in my mouth wasn’t nice. Luckily my mom did like it an ate them. I tried a bite of her scallops, not that bad, I think I could come to like them.

For the main dish I went with Mussels and Fries. I have eaten mussels before but as the Coquilles St. Jacques where a disappointment(due to my own taste) I was afraid the mussels might be too. But they where very tasteful, steamed with green onions, garlic and parsley. Fresh cut fries and fresh made mayonnaise, the mayonnaise had a hint of vinegar which made it delicious. And for dessert I had crème brûlée which tasted like heaven. All in all a night of very fine dinning. Excellent service, nice atmosphere and good food.

I’m also realizing the more I eat good food like this the pickier I become on where to eat out. I’m starting to care more about the food experience then the price. Not that I will be spending extravagant much on eating out but I will be much pickier and be more careful where I chose to eat.

But as long as it is vacation time I will enjoy fine food, I’m even hoping to go to a seafood restaurant soon, It Rains Fishes a French seafood restaurant. One of the few places you can get a good fresh lobster so far I know.

And the ironic of it all is that my left under wisdom teeth is coming through, so I’m in constant pain or discomfort. My appointment with the surgeon isn’t until January 14. So meanwhile I have to bare the pain each time I finish eating and take some painkillers. I asked my aunt to fedex me some Oragel which they don’t sell here. Hopefully she will and it will be of some relief.

I love reading, love books and everything about it. I have a bookcase full of books, full of books with pristine pages with no pen, pencil marks or pages with earmarks. In my school years I never made annotations or highlights in schoolbooks, I wrote all important passages down in my notebook and would then study from the notebook.

And now with web books I use post-its on pages I need to return to or I simple flip through the book till I find what I’m looking for. I always thought how easy it would be to just take a pencil a make notes for easier reference, but I just can’t make myself “damage” the book. I never really stood still about it, until today.

Today I got a new book I ordered, Everything you know about CSS is wrong. It was recently published so I want to write a review on the book. While reading the preface I already saw a sentence I wanted to take in my review and that started a stream of thought and this weblog post. I don’t want to have to take a Moleskine with the book and write down each note worthy content of the book. So I’m now debating for the first time to start making annotations in the book itself.

The book is not extremely expensive, it’s for educational purposes, considering the topic the book will be outdated in some time and will have no value whatsoever in a few years. So I think I’ll go ahead, sharpen a pencil and make tidy and readable annotations of interesting content. And while I will be taking this step the one thing I won’t do is earmark pages because that just ruins the books format. Instead I’ll just use post-its for pages I have to go back to while using the book in practice, e.g. during website development.

I did a search on Flickr to see others their books full of annotations but I didn’t find anything cool enough like Oprah’s own copies, full of colorful post-its and highlighted passages. If my copy of Everything you know about CSS is wrong turns to something I will post a photo, to mark my first book with annotations.