Bulgur and Lentil Salad with Tarragon and Walnuts (Page 152)

• Date: Wednesday, December 13, 2006 -- 9:30pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: My Apartment
• Fellow Chefs: Glen, Matty, and Matt
• Dining Companions: Ana, Jessie, and Ronen
• Recipe Rating: B

I picked this recipe to go with dinner on Wednesday because I usually really like this sort of thing: a healthy-ish dish with lots of grains/legumes. This recipe wasn't anything special though. It was pretty good, and compared to the rest of the meal (which was definitely sub-par) this dish was probably the best, but there wasn't anything striking about it. I enjoyed my serving, but I didn't feel compelled to eat seconds. Matty and Glen, who did most of the work on this dish, both said that they liked it but felt that it wasn't worth the effort. Ana deemed it picnic-appropriate, but said she couldn't think of any other appropriate occasion for it.

My beautiful new computer has been behaving really badly -- it likes to shut itself off many times per day for no particular reason. I made an appointment at the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store in the Galleria this morning. The guy looked at my computer for a bit, deemed it broken, and told me that if I had purchased it in the store he would give me a new one but since I bought it online (from the Apple website) he couldn't. Why that makes sense, I have no idea. He told me to call the online store, which I did, and after an hour on the phone with a really nice tech support guy, he too deemed that my computer needed some serious repair. So I have to send my new baby away. Very sad. I felt very much like I was at the doctor's office -- they kept asking me all these detailed questions about what symptoms my computer was having, many of which I had no good answer too. The guy on the phone's best guess was that it is some temperature regulation problem, which actually makes a lot of sense considering the particular situations in which my computer decides to turn itself off. The only upside of my brand-new computer being broken is that it is still under warranty so I don't have to pay to get it fixed. That's something.