Yo, Sandy, What's for Dinner?

Much to my surprise, I discovered last night that I have been wearing a belt this week.

This has been a week of major eating. LK comforted with her food - shepherd's pie, pulled pork, burritos - and last night she, Peg and I squeezed into the car for dinner at Sandy's. (And really squeezed in for the ride home.)

Sandy was debuting a Low Country Boil. I had not heard of this before, but in the future I will make sure to find a seat at any table that is serving it.

If you haven't had the pleasure of this dish before, my description probably will not make it sound anywhere near as delicious as it is. It amounts to a clambake in a pot. Sandy flavored the water with a couple of traditional mouth-kicker seasonings - each of which seemed to have pepper, pepper and a little more pepper as its key ingredient. Into that boiling water, she added potatoes, corn on the cob, andouille sausage (in case there wasn't already enough pepper in the boil), shrimp and mussells.

Being Sandy, she prepared enough food to feed everyone if several dozen friends dropped by unexpectedly. She was so worried that the five of us might not be satisfied eating the equivalent of three or four meals that she even had Dave grill a couple of steaks and asparagus. My favorite part of the feast came at the end when she said there was no dessert, as if any of us could have handled it. (Not even a wafer-thin mint.)

Other than eating, this has been a typical dog days of summer week. One day we drove to the outlet mall where a record was set as I managed to spend more on my stuff than LK did for herself.  But how can you pass up $29 sneakers? Anyhow, neither of us bought all that much. I think we spent more buying fancy dips and sauces at the food store.

We read a lot this week. LK finished "The Help" and is engrossed right now in "Word War Z", and I have just downloaded that last one onto my Kindle, ready for some low-brow stuff after finishing the very interesting "A Visit from the Goon Squad", which won the Pulitzer this year. (Obviously, reading quality writing has not taught me how to avoid run-on sentences.) But before the zombie book,  I want to tackle "Blood, Bones & Butter", a chef's autobiography that Sandy is reading.

Enthused by the novel, LK wanted to see the movie version of "The Help", and she and Sandy and I went to see it Thursday. It's a movie about minorities, which in this particular case also applied to men in the audience. LK had told me the movie is about how badly black maids were treated, and I was quite surprised that they could make a movie about Dominique Strauss-Kahn so quickly. Turns out it is actually about black maids in the south during the early 1960s. It was OK but I think others liked it a bit more than I did. Probably my favorite part was watching Bryce Dallas Howard channelling Michelle Bachman in one of the key roles.

Speaking of movies, LK and I made a short one (2 minutes) this week as well. More on that later on, though.

Other than that, I didn't do any work this week. Didn't exercise, didn't write a blog, didn't answer some e-mails that just beg to be answered. Oh, I did start playing Words with Friends on my iPod. Sandy is addicted to this game, which is as close to Scrabble as you can get without violating the copyright (or whatever it is that board games have). And now I am approaching the addiction, too, as she and I seem to constantly be taking turns in the last couple of days.

And that, for this week at least, is pretty much what I did on my summer vacation.