Have not been posting much lately because have been having too much fun with rachelmanija, who is apparently one of my Sekrit Twins. She is also evil because she will actually encourage me to talk about food for hours and hours. In fact, we had one very long conversation solely about tropical fruit (I have discovered that "mangosteen" is the correct English name for one of the best fruits ever), one on assorted Jewish and Chinese food holiday traditions, and an ongoing one about food we like. If it were up to me, I could probably talk about food for forever.

So. Yesterday we headed up to SF to meet up with literaticat and browsed Borderlands (aka the sci-fi/fantasy/horror bookstore with the hairless cat). They had a centaur teddy bear, which I wanted but was too expensive, a magazine titled Cthulu Sex, which looked incredibly disturbing, and no copy of Tamora Pierce's The Will of the Empress, which made me very sad. However, I did learn that Tamora Pierce will be signing at Burlingame on Wed., so hopefully I will get it there!

Book loot report to come. rachelmanija is very evil and keeps loading me up with things.

There was also a little Cthulu plushie in the window that I really wanted but wasn't on sale! Sadness. I seem to be attempting to amass a monstrous plushie collection, since I currently have the Beast (the killer rabbit from Monty Python) and now want to acquire a Cthulu, a Godzilla plushie, a stuffed Bun-Bun from Sluggy and a centaur bear. Hrm.

Then we went to the pirate store on the street, which is really cool and has a wall of crooked, wavy shelves with drawers of things like "Beard," "Rat Tail,s" and etc. I very much wanted a big floppy pirate hat with a swishy feather.

And then... Ethiopian! (although now every time I go there I will be reminded that actoplasm has said that the flatbread looks like the skin of the hairless cat. Wah.) I had kitfo! Kitfo is extremely good! It's raw beef, very, very briefly sauteed so that only bits and pieces of it are browned, and then mixed with warm butter and assorted herbs and/or spices. It is so good. It's just soft and buttery and feels like it will melt in your mouth, and I stuffed myself. The mushroom/tomato bit and chicken and hard-boiled egg in some sauce were also really good, but the kitfo was wonderful. Must go have more sometime.

Then it was off to Yaoi-con, where we first went to one hotel (where the con was officially at) and then had to hike across a parking lot to another (where the registration was, for some odd reason), got extremely baffled in the registration line and saw various people in ninja headbands and wings (usually separately, though it wouldn't surprise me if there were a winged ninja floating about somewhere), and finally met up with telophase. I got prints. Haha!

And, apparently there is a convention for the Church of God and some football people going on at the same time, in the same two hotels as Yaoi-con, which I find very funny. I wonder if the Yaoi-con people are secretly slashing the football players.

I actually didn't see much of the con at all, seeing as how there was pretty much nothing going on. But! Me and telophase and rachelmanija hightailed our way out of there (after a bit of confusion with the parking lot lady, who had also previously made faces at me while I tried to find parking) and made our way to a Chinese seafood restaurant.

I had much food. There was roasted squab (I think squab is pigeon?), which had been quartered, with thin, brown, perfectly crispy skin, and lovely juicy, fat meat that was very difficult to get off the bones without resorting to ripping into the thing with one's teeth like a cannibal, which I did. I love dark meat on birds. It was so tasty and rich and duck-like, but even juicier and cripier. And some Chinese veggies, which I ate most of, a pound of fish (mang fish? not sure what it is in English), steamed with soy sauce, oil, ginger and scallions, which was also very good (I loved Chinese style steamed fish), and I was extremely nice and gave the cheeks to telophase and rachelmanija, since neither of them had had fish cheek before (it's the best part of the fish, I swear! unless maybe it's the jaw on bigger fish, but that's a different story).

And then, sesame mwaji things for dessert! Mwaji (manju in Japanese) are these little balls made of glutinous rice so that they're very chewy and soft. These were hot from wherever and however they were cooked, with black sesame paste inside of them, and some sugar/peanut flour mixture on top. And the heat was wonderful, because it meant they were the exact right degree of chewiness and softness, and the black sesame paste was wonderful. So we ended up getting seconds. I think the waiter thought we were strange for getting more of them. I have no idea why, they were really, incredibly good.

Then, drinks back at the con hotel with another of Rachel's friends (I got myself a virgin pina colada, which prompted the waiter to card the whole table, for some reason). And now, to bed. More fooding today. My tummy is so happy right now.