What food item would you miss the most if it were removed from your diet and recipes?
Submitted by scorpion1116.
That's easy - cheese. Many of the dinners I make have at least a little bit of cheese in them, and so it would greatly impact my cooking if I had to stop using it!
This week so far, we've had pasta bake, a delicious vegetable soup that's blended and has sharp cheddar melted in, and tonight is leftover soup with baked potatoes (cheddar on top). Tomorrow's meal won't have cheese: hot dogs/turkey sausage and cole slaw. :)
Film & TV writers are on strike, which means everything except reality TV could halt production. Do you support the strike? Are any of your favorite shows in jeopardy?
To follow up on my post from yesterday, here's a great resource that The Futon Critic put up today:
What's the greatest video game console on the market? Do you own it or is it on your wish list?
We are stuck on the last generation consoles still. We've got (currently hooked up) the Game Cube and Playstation 2. I guess we are a little more on top of things with our handhelds - Nintendo DS for each of us, and E still uses our Gameboys for some of his games.
I'd like a Playstation 3, and a Wii. The Xbox just doesn't have the games I want to play on it, in most cases, so that's not a huge draw. The PS3 will be even more enticing for me when the next Rachet and Clank comes out next month (yay!), and I think Sucker Punch (Sly Cooper) and Naughty Dog (Jak and Daxter) are coming out with PS3 games. E will probably want it for upcoming Final Fantasy releases (FFXIII, I think). The Wii has so many fun games, but probably Zelda: Twilight Princess is the biggest draw. :)
Where do you get recommendations for new books to read?
My favorite resource is actually looking at what other authors write for other publishing houses that I like. I've been reading books by Bethany House Publishing since I was 8 years old, when my mom first bought me a Mandie book. She read Janette Oke (tagged books), the first few books of multiple series, and then when I got old enough, I bought the rest of the books to those series and read more from the library. So now, it's easy to recognize the spines of other Bethany books on the library shelf. They have expanded their number of authors all the time, and so that makes for a larger selection too!
As far as my novels go, I don't tend to read what other people are reading, so it's not as easy to just skim through sidebars here at Vox. So things like going to the bookstore and browsing the aisles is a good way for me to learn of new authors that I may not have heard of yet. This is true in the crafting/knitting area, and the Christian fiction (tagged books). I did used to troll the romance aisles, but I just can't find anybody I love as much as my favorite Romance author, Jude Deveraux (tagged books), so I stopped trying.
When I'm trying to see what new knitting books I want to read, I like to go to a site that sell knitting books and see what is the most popular, like Knit Picks' bestseller list. Then I search for those on the library site to see which ones we actually have. General crafting books or cookbooks (other book loves of mine), I'm more likely to go browse the library shelves until I find something interesting and somewhat current.
I organize my reading here on Vox, and then in the last year or so, I've enjoyed working on author pages on Wikipedia (my wikipedia profile has some links) to keep up the book lists and info about the authors I'm enjoying the most. I tagged all of my books here on Vox with the series name and the author name so it's easier for me to see them when I'm looking to remember what books I've read from which author or whatever.
I'm interested to see if anybody in my neighborhood answered this qotd, it was definitely interesting to me!
What are your top 10 most-played songs currently?
I have last.fm hooked into iTunes, and so it does a really nice job of summarizing for me. Here's the 3-month rolling most popular track list.
Some of these are new in the last few months and some are old. Interestingly enough, none of them are a particularly high count, and so I must be doing a good job of varying my music listening moreso than in the past!
And then this is my top overall tracks since I've been tracking on last.fm (and a good reason to use an embed!)
:) Fun with music is always fun. I'm looking forward to grabbing a few more tracks from iTunes before I go on a trip for this weekend, because it's always nice to have a few new things for a long drive!
What kind of camera(s) do you own?
I am on my second digital camera, after upgrading from my original.
My first was a Kodak Easy Share DX3600. I got it in 2002, and took a LOT of pictures with it. I loved the freedom of a digital camera and being able to just take as many pictures as I wanted. It was during the time when I was sickest, too, so I did a lot of self-portraits to keep track of myself and how I was doing, and that's a really good way for me to look back.
Then last year, I upgraded to one with better quality and zoom. I now own a Canon PowerShot S2IS. It takes such nice pictures, and I can zoom and do nice macro shots, too. It is really nice for holding in my hand too, I was worried about getting one that was too small that I'd drop it, and this is perfect. I can also set up different options - I don't understand them all yet, but one that I do regularly is turn the flash down a little for taking pictures of my knitting that I don't want to overexpose.
While I can't take it just ANYWHERE because it's a little bigger, I still do a lot of picture taking. I'd like to do more non-event based photography (event-based: family get togethers, knitting projects). Actually going out and looking for things to take pictures of or just taking them when I feel inspired. That just requires more leaving the house! :)
And then, my other camera that I use frequently is the one on my phone. Its pretty good quality, for a cell phone (or it was a year ago when I got it ;) ) I love the chance to moblog with photos so easily and have them turn out so people can actually see what I'm taking a picture of (my previous cellphone just wasn't great quality!)
Those are my cameras! This was a fun QotD! :)
What was your favorite TV season finale this year?
Submitted by Kristine.
Funny thing is, when I suggested this question, I still didn't know what my answer would be. I'm sitting here typing and I still am not sure how to pick! :D
I went into the Season Finales with no spoilers. I've been spoiler free for most of the season, in fact. When it's close to the finales, I don't even open my "TV" folder in my feedreader because I don't want to be spoiled. With the east coast/west coast thing, I don't look at my Vox neighborhood even when it's the night of a finale or some big reveal on one of my shows.
I think I'll have to go with Heroes as my favorite. It really brought a lot of the characters storylines together, and even though it opened a lot of questions (like who will still be alive when we start next year, my fingers are crossed!) And actually the episodes leading up to it were so strong that it really had me even more excited for it, which really made me in a very anticipatory state!
Second highest point of the finales? Lost. OMG, wow. I'm still reeling. I think that if I didn't have to wait 9 months to see it again, I'd be quite a bit more enthused, though.
Other great ones: Bones, love the last scene. The Office, yaypamandjim. Numb3rs was shocking.
My least favorite of the finales goes to Grey's Anatomy. I just was underwhelmed. I didn't like how they ended it. It makes me not quite as excited for next season, truthfully, although I am enthused about Private Practice, the spinoff.
]]>When you go out to eat, how do you pick where to go?
Submitted by Kristine.
This is always a tough one. E and I tend to go out once or twice a week, and so we sometimes have a harder time picking than others. I was trying to think of somewhere to eat when I submitted the question idea :D
Unless I'm craving something... then it's easy ;) Like the other day, I wanted a goldfinger sundae so bad I could taste the bananas. That made it very clear that I had to go to Boppin' Bo's.
Other times, it's based on other things we want to do while we are out - if we are headed to the big library, eating downtown makes sense. If we are headed to grocery shop, there's fast food near Safeway.
Sometimes, it's related to an event. I'm very much for tradition, and so if I realize I went somewhere on a specific day the previous year, I just might want to go there again just for the sake of keeping the same patterns :)
Our favorite standby is always Red Robin - we go there a couple times a month probably. It's right in front of the mall (and we live behind the mall), so it's convenient. Olive Garden is equally close, but it tends to be harder to get in. E always is suggesting Mexican food (Azteca is on the same corner) but I'm just not a big fan very often. Old Spaghetti Factory is a little further, but worth the drive every time.
We've also been trying to expand our horizons and go to some new places. Just recently, we found a second Thai restaurant downtown Vancouver that was really good (Thai Orchid is our normal one, the new one we tried is Tiger's Garden). And in the last year, we've ventured to downtown Portland after finding that not only P.F.Changs is down in the Pearl district, but Macaroni Grill is down by Pioneer Place (before, we'd been going to Tualatin to our favorite outdoor mall for either of those).
Another way to expand our horizons has been to read the weekend section of the newspaper, where they spotlight restaurants. We've seen some interesting stuff this way, and look forward to trying some of these, although we haven't been to many yet. I've also browsed through CHOWHOUND's boards for the pacific NW on occasion, which gives some interesting ideas and reasons.
And I've been writing this post off and on all day, and I think I could write a book about my food dining behaviors, truly. So I'll cut it off here before I get carried away!!!
What's one family recipe that you wish you knew how to cook?
That's an easy one. I wish I knew how to make pasties. This is one that has eluded me so far. I've learned a ton of other family recipes and even created some that are family favs. But pasties is a traditional one that we've had since I was little, growing up in Michigan. It's definitely a Michigan thing, but also an English thing. We make ours with ground beef, potatoes, and onions. My mom used to put rutabagas in them, but we all tried to pick them out, so she stopped. :)
My brother and Sarah make them, I think I should be able to figure it out, but it's just one of those things that is more time consuming that I have had time to try doing on my own!
But yummmmmm, I sure love them and would love to have one right now!
What's your musical horoscope? (Put your player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)
Inspired by Stephanie.