Sated

It's Restaurant Week this week. Restaurant Week is an annual event sponsored by a local radio station and benefitting a local food pantry. $6 from each meal sold goes to the food pantry. Lest you think that's not a ton of money, keep in mind that some of the posher places book around 500 covers a night. That's over $20,000. From one restaurant. And there are alot of restaurants on the list.

The draw is that you get a three-course meal for $30. Last night we went to a lesser-known Italian place. Not a spaghetti house. This is big time food. The three course were an appetizer and a salad followed by two choices for an entree. Sunday we'll be going to a very hipper-than-thou place where you get an appetizer, entree and dessert.

Last night's menu:

Roast Quail with side of gnocchi in a very light gorgonzola cream sauce. The gnocchi were sublime.
Caesar salad with a great, garlicky dressing that had obviously seen the addition of a few real anchovies.
A choice of halibut or, what I went for, duck breast in a green peppercorn-vodka sauce and two petit grilled lamb chops served with a bit of garlicky pasta and some steamed spinach.

I'm still full.

And I've started the River stole from the new Rowan.

There is quite the hullabaloo about the new Rowan magazine. I can see that there are very few, if any, really fabulously timeless pieces in the new mag. But I've found several patterns that interest me and, while the mag may not be up to Rowan's usual standards, I'll say that I was far more disappointed in the new Vogue Knitting. My opinion is that the utterly lousy photography goes a long way to making the Rowan magazine less than it should be.

Knitters want to see the garment they are supposed to knit. The picture of the River stole shows me a good view of the skirt the model is wearing but pretty much jack about the actual knitted item. Fortunately, I know that Sharon Miller generally writes gorgeous patterns so I'm willing to make a leap of faith. But, for goodness sakes, if I'm going to be knitting a sweater, can I see the model standing up rather than lounging in bed? Apparently, Rowan thinks that we should knit all of their items on faith rather than using something as trite and declasse as a decent photograph to determine if a garment would suit us.

Yes, there are some godawful items available for your knitting heresy. But, I'm not so much disappointed in the knitables as I am in the decision to substitute decent graphical representation of said knitables in favor of an ad for the Society for Creative Anachronism. Nothing against Pennsic, but I don't want to knit it.