yesterday's food

Yesterday's get-together went well. Charles made his wonderful pizza in personal-sized portions that he then cut into four pieces to serve us, but he'd made three pizzas—roughly, cheese, pepperoni, and veggie—serving us a piece of each (I ended up with two slices of the final pizza, so no leftovers). Of course, with Tom there, Charles couldn't straightforwardly take us through the pizzas linearly: Tom hates vegetables (with some few exceptions), so he refused to touch the veggie pizza (the phrase veggie pizza sounds crass; I'll have to think of a better term), which came out last. So none of Tom's three slices of pizzas were veggie.

cheese pizza, out first

cut into unevenly sized portions for the burly men and the self-sacrificing normies

Not pictured: pepperoni pizza.

pizza with dried tomato, olives, and arugula (a.k.a. rucola/rocket)

Note the perfection of Charles's crust. This is probably about as good as a home cook can make a pizza crust without the benefit of a straight-up pizza oven.

I guess I forgot to get a pic of Tom's wife's dessert, a very nice chocolate "crinkle" (see here).

Charles's cake and my cookies.

I deepened the colors on all of these photos, but you wouldn't be wrong to think I took the baking of my cookies almost to an edge. I made two batches, one lighter-colored, one darker-colored. The difference in baking time between them might have been about 90 seconds. Interestingly, the darker batch was no crunchier, and the taste was about the same. Maybe the texture is due to the lack of gluten in the almond flour. What if I sprayed neutral oil on the cookies to fry them a bit while they baked...? Maybe not a good idea.

My cookies and Charles's cake: a reverse angle.

The cake was great! I took home two slices (they died last night), and Tom took home three slices meant for him and his family. While the whisky did come through with an alcoholic flavor, it wasn't surpassingly strong. And as a "gingerbread cake," it didn't taste like the cake he'd made in 2016, which had been very ginger-forward. (I ate all of that one, anyway—it was good despite being very different from the chocolate cakes I normally gravitate to.)

the freekeh salad (on display today, with arugula looking a bit wilted)

I'd been planning to fast all day today to make up for yesterday's carb explosion, but one look at the container of freekeh salad that I'd taken back with me convinced me that I needed to eat most or all of it today, before everything wilted. It still tastes fine if a bit tart from the lemony dressing. But acidic food is good for you, they say, in terms of its fat-burning properties. I'm not sure about freekeh as a go-to grain, however. Too chewy. I think I prefer barley or farro.

There was one tense moment yesterday during the gathering: I'd been waiting for months to see whether my buddy Tom would ever look at my blog to read (or at least glance at) the many, many posts I'd written about last year's heart-failure diagnosis and heart attack, and he of course hadn't because he's not much of a reader. It's a bit of a clash when your preferred way of communicating to friends and strangers is through a blog (does that sound autistic?), and your close friend is an English teacher who, ironically, hates to read and write and talks about how much he hates grammar (which is why Korean students have a stereotype of foreign instructors who have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to the technical aspects of English*). While it never got to the point that I was yelling at Tom, things did get a little tense. Charles reads my blog when he can and at least makes the effort to keep up with my current events; I thought I caught a moment where Tom was explaining himself, and Charles looked almost as if he were staring daggers across the table at Tom. Maybe. Maybe I was just over-reading into the situation. In the end, I can't make Tom do anything. If he cares, he'll make time and read the blog—just a five-minute scan is enough. It's not unreasonable to ask for that from a friend. He doesn't even need to read an entire post. If I've had a heart attack and am now blogging from the hospital, I'll doubtless note that in the very first paragraph or two. It doesn't take much effort to keep up.

Aside from that, it was a pleasant evening with all the usual banter and humor. Some of us again mentioned that we ought to do this sort of thing more often, but with everyone's schedules being so wildly different, I don't know how plausible that is.

Add another regret to the list.

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*In my teaching experience, I often found myself caught in the middle of this discussion. I'm a grammar stickler who became even more so when I began working at the tutoring center I'd renamed as "YB" on my blog. As a language teacher, though (mainly English, EFL English, and French), I know that a strictly grammatical approach to language learning will guarantee slow learning for most people. I learned French mainly via grammar charts, dictation, choral repetition, and rehearsed dialogues through high school, which resulted in a solid but overly "correct" French that didn't feel quite natural. Only when I went to France and interacted with the French on their naturalistic terms did my French start to smooth out, to the point where people would stop and ask me if I was French or joke that I could pass for a Frenchman.

Focusing on oral proficiency, at least in the early stages, is much better. The danger with oral proficiency, though, is that it leaves a student able to communicate practically but unable to rise above a certain sloppiness and imprecision due to the lack of a proper grammar foundation. Over 90% of my Korean students' English errors over the years had to do directly with grammar ("You looks like..." "How she know that?" etc.). So I always tried to slip in a caveat about how grammar is important. But for communicative purposes, it's more important to just get in there and practice what you know, paying attention to what your interlocutors say so you can expand your vocabulary, idiomatic, and grammatical knowledge, fleshing out your fluency in the target language, then maybe moving on to other languages.