To me, Tex Mex is the "Mexican" food at Chili's.

I made the drive down to her place last weekend (it's an hour and a half away) for our date

Good date, I'm assuming.

OMG the uni parfait. Who knew it was possible to cram so much WRONG into one dish?

I love that Batali has this huge "how lucky am I to be doing this" vibe and still has the chutzpah to try something so singularly wrong like a wrong thing that is wrong.

Oh, sarameg, so true. It's like referring to "East Coast" cuisine. I am still trying to train the phrase "Tex-Mex" out of Bob.

What?!?!? You mean people in the Southwest don't put jalapenos in every blessed thing they can get their hands on?

I remember at Thanksgiving there were all these "Southwestern" recipes and I was like, huh, they throw the same spice on each dish there. That's sorta weird.

I never knew there was a chef named that! We're not exactly culinary folk around here.

Wow, Wolfram! It seems like yesterday you just had the last one!

Though I guess it was a while back now. It all kinda blurs.

Which isn't Seattle proper--I have no idea how close or far it is, but everyone talks of it like Seattle. I wrote down the address of the other place but am way too tired to find it now. On the morrow.

It's across the lake from Seattle. Mercer Island is in the middle of the lake.

The Bellevue store appears to be in or around Bell Square. You know, the one from Say Anything.

Lee, we might make it over there, if you're feeling a need to hit a Lush.

Did somebody sit next to you at the mall there, Plei? Of course. Why wouldn't they?

Hmm. Looks like they've got one in Seattle proper.

3131 E. Madison Street

Seattle, WA

Dangerous.

In my extremely regional cuisine, pickled jalepeños are a garnish, not an ingredient. Like...pickles. Or a sprig of parsely. And unpickled ones are rarely the pepper of choice. When there's Hatch chile to be had, jalepeños are a waste.

Adding to the growing compendium of Kuiper belt objects, astronomers have spotted two new moons orbiting Pluto. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope from May of last year show two tiny dots revolving around the same center of gravity as the ninth planet and its largest moon, Charon. Reporting the finding today in Nature, the researchers speculate that the tiny companions formed in the same cataclysmic collision that produced Charon.

"We used Hubble's exceptional resolution to peer close to Pluto and pick out two small moons that had eluded detection for more than 75 years," says Hal Weaver, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and the discovery team leader. "That was somewhat surprising because ground-based observers had been trying for more than a decade to find new satellites around Pluto," adds astronomer Max Mutchler of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the first to see the moons in Hubble's images.

[link]

The moons have not been named yet. We should go on all the Firefly boards and start a petition to name one of them 'ita.'

I POSTED THOSE YESTERDAY. Sheesh. Skimmers.

The full press release is here: [link]