Homegrown Cuisine Survey

Super quick post to do a super quick survey of foreign and native Californian/US food-appreciators alike: I'm making a big dinner on Wednesday night at 20:30, which would be 11:30 in the morning for those of you in the Pacific Standard Time Zone. So answer before then!

What is good California food? What is good US food? I was thinking chili and cornbread, but I don't like chili, rice-stuffed avocados (found a good-looking recipe), guacamole with weird chips (weird because we're in Italy), split-pea soup, something with strawberries (thinking about Watsonville), something with artichokes (thinking about Castroville)....any of those sound like winners? I don't think I have time to make dessert as well, but if you have an easy suggestion, shoot.

So far I have four confirmed guests, but we could get up to nine or ten and I want to let our peculiar blend of fusion cuisine shine for these folks. Recipes are welcome if they've had success.

In other current events, I am done with my tests. I learned a lot of things and I'm still recovering. So far I'm really liking my new classes, especially history of urbanization. I think when I'm bored with being a brilliant linguistics researcher, I'm going to go into environmentally-friendly city planning. I'm also taking Spanish linguistics...get this, within a month, I'll be giving an oral exam in Spanish! Sometimes I'm my own worst enemy. And I'm taking applied linguistics; the prof likes bashing Noam Chomsky but I'm faithful to the number one linguistic revolutionary of the century. And in the meanwhile, I'm learning how to do a new kind of linguistics research using computer programs.

Tomorrow I start a mini-teaching project at a local high school: the topic? Renewable energy resources. Yay for the spread of knowledge!

And my other latest news is a collaboration with a certain professoressa Bragaglia, who is preparing a speech about food and cinema for Princeton in English with which I am helping her. In exchange, she, a member of Slow Food (http://www.slowfood.com/), is giving me cooking lessons.

Until next time...