Exhibit 1.4.10

Wok



I need you to know that I now own a wok.

It's like my best friend.

I call it Wok-uin Phoenix.

My fridge is full of leftover noodle and rice dishes.

Sometimes I season the wok just for fun.

I say the word patina a lot.

I don't blog.

I keep hoping lightning will hit a tree so I can carve a wok paddle out of it.

When I'm watching baseball and here the word "walk" I get up and make stirfry.

I nod at Asians.

I judge people based on the amount of fish sauce they have.

I think about whether or not fish have woks.

I'm already thinking about buying a better wok.

I'd name this one River Phoenix.

I couldn't do that to my wok.

Exhibit 11.1

Heather and I made more chocolate chip cookies.

(I know you're thinking that we live in some magical, cookie-filled paradise. You're mostly right).

Really we just had some standard chocolate chips lingering about and decided to give the old Tollhouse recipe a go to see if it could stand up to our adventures in Cookie-of-Record-approved deliciousness.

Um, no.

They weren't bad exactly. The first one even tasted great if only because their mediocrity made us think of how good cookies could be, sort of like how watching any other third baseman makes a person think of George Brett (no? just me?). Perhaps for the first few bites we were even able to fool ourselves into thinking the flat, sparsely chocolated discs were those other cookies.

In the end, tasteless crumbs stuck to the tears running past our mouths as we shouted recriminations.

Or maybe I'm just misremembering.

Exhibit 10.24

As the next step of this blog's continued devolution from hard hitting literary and political analysis to masochistic sports blog to smiley-faced cooking blog, this post is about cookies.

The Times occasionally takes it upon itself to decide what the best recipe for _______ is and recently they've turned their gaze to chocolate chip cookies. Their quest is detailed here which I'm redundantly linking to despite the fact it has inevitably been emailed to you by your grandmother. The recipe--a chronicle of cacao ratios and refrigeration times--is here.

Not wanting to miss the most recent cookie zeitgeist like we missed the Cakester fad, Heather and I already took a stab at these and I'm here to tell you they are nothing short of incredible.


In the oven they seemed threateningly puffy, the sort of lonely, doughy cookies that you see at a school potluck, but by the time they were done they'd settled into the perfect ratio of crispy outside and chewy inside.


Plus, look at that presentation. I wasn't sure about the step calling for a brown table cloth, but the Times really came through.

Stay tuned as this blog continues to decline in coming weeks until it's nothing but artwork done by Australian children:


Crikey!