For the benefit of 2 of my favorite foodies, I thought it might be nice if I posted about the Valentine's Day dinner that Mrs. Bali Hai and I put together last Tuesday:

The missus made a Cuban pork roast with mango sauce in our shiny new crockpot. We got the recipe out of a fabulous cookbook called, ¡Cuba Cocina!, given to me as a gift by my most favoritist foodie bud-ette in the whole wide world. In addition to the roast, she whipped up an incredible batch of frijoles negros with white rice.

My mission, which I decided to accept, was to use my top-sekrit training to produce a chocolate-pudding souffle. Inexplicably, my souffle-fu was weak, and my offering came out only partially cooked through, so we wound up with a dessert that was part souffle, and part mousse. Still delish though.

As an apertif, I uncorked a bottle of Renwood 2004 Zinfandel Amador Ice, an incredibly delicious Eiswein that had us both drooling uncontrollably after the first glass.

Thank God Valentine's Day only comes once a year!

Posted by MrBaliHai at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well, instead of packing for a trip to the Bay Area next Monday, it looks as if I'm going to be stuck out here on the Frozen Tundra for a few weeks, and possibly even longer. My trip was cancelled yesterday, due to lack of student participation in the class I was supposed to be teaching.

And as if that weren't disappointing enough, my trip to L.A. next month may also be in jeopardy due to the threatened strike by Northwest Airlines pilots and flight attendants.

In addition, my trip to Barcelona is still up in the air and Munich is also a question mark, so I may wind up being a homebody well into this summer!

Bummer.

However, there is one spot of good news: I managed to get my company sabbatical approved mere days before our glorious new interim CEO announced the suspension of the entire program until December, so if worse comes to worse and everything winds up getting cancelled, I'm gonna take a 3-week roadtrip around the Midwest to do some serious flea marketing and drinking at various tiki establishments in the Milwaukee and Chicago area.

Stay tuned.

Posted by MrBaliHai at 8:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)