We set a date. While I’ve made no secret of our Seattle plans and I make sure that my Internet stuff is under a different name than my work stuff, I’m choosing not to publish the actual date here. If you’ve been paying attention and/or know me in real life, suffice to say that the date is right on target with our initial plans. Some people get married and have kids at our age, we prefer to move to a new city with a lower crime rate and better coffee.

I don’t have a job lined up yet, but I am applying for at least two positions per day with the hope that one of them works out. Statistically, I mean. It will probably work out. Plus when I say “at least two,” you should take into consideration that I have a mildly obsessive personality when it comes to being employed, so that number – at least for the past three days, which is when I made this decision – is more like five or six.

I have to find some time today to apply for something, although perhaps I should have allowed myself some time for that in addition to cooking dinner for Christy’s birthday (belated, but when else were we supposed to fit it in?). I don’t normally cook for vegetarians, and while this dinner won’t be completely meat-free (bacon on the side, also braised chicken as an option because the rest of us NEED FLESH NOM NOM NOM), I don’t think she’ll leave hungry. Also I’m making her some sangria, so even if she doesn’t eat everything she wants, she can at least get drunk and in my experience, drunk means you bitch less about the food.

Not that Christy would bitch about the food. She ate meat at my house for months after she effectively became a vegetarian just because I cooked it, because we come from the kind of backgrounds where you clean your plate and accept what’s been offered to you politely. But this is her birthday thing so of course I’ll cook mostly things she can eat, and I’m not even putting stock in stuff because that is how much I love her.

So how do you make stuff that’s vegetarian and still tastes good, still satisfies? Don’t give me that shit about how vegetarian food is just as good as meat. It’s not. Not really. You can think you’ve trained your body to enjoy it just as much, but I’ve seen many a vegetarian fall. They don’t call bacon “the gateway meat” for nothing.

Well, for me, and I realize this doesn’t satisfy the vegans but I’m not inviting any vegans to eat at my house because they’re fucking lunatics, the answers are: starches, cheese, roasting, and dessert. I know you’re supposed to say “mushrooms,” but this is not a mushroom household. I won’t say that I’d rather eat shit than eat mushrooms, but that’s only because to me, mushrooms taste so much like shit that it’s basically like eating the same thing. I know you think I just haven’t had them prepared the right way, but trust me. I know my tastes. Mushrooms taste like garbage. Mushrooms taste like rot. I can taste a mushroom the second it enters my mouth, because it’s not just the taste, it’s the smell of dying, decaying matter that fills my sinuses and makes me want to barf. So yeah, no mushrooms. Instead, here’s what Christy’s getting for her birthday dinner:

* English cheddar with cranberries, bread, and almonds
* Corn, scallion, and zucchini cakes with feta, yogurt, and avocado and roasted corn-tomato salsa
* Green beans with shallot and orange en vinaigrette
* Roasted potatoes with garlic dill gremolata
* Lemon and fennel-braised chicken thighs (not for Christy, obviously)
* Carrot cake oatmeal cookies with cream cheese frosting (per Christy’s request, but also nobody can decorate a cake as prettily as she can so I’m glad she didn’t ask for one)
* White sangria with pluots, nectarines, pears, and apples

Most of the prep for the above is done. The bread is made, the corn cake veg is resting, the tomatoes are slow roasting (4 hours), the gremolata is done, the onions and fennel have been sliced, and the fruit has been sitting in a sugar/triple sec mixture since last night. I’m mostly stuck with washing a bunch of pots and cleaning the house, which isn’t hard but it’s summer so there’s cat hair everywhere. And that’s probably not vegetarian.