oyceter | (no subject)

Wow, I feel like it's been a while since I wrote up a food post.

Food highlights of last week include meeting up with

laurashapiro and other people not on LJ, watching Buffy S7 (alas, the beginning of the long slogging part). Everyone brought food, mostly lots and lots of cheese and bread (yay!). One person made a Moroccan pie with filo dough and butter and chicken and spices and OMG it was so good except I don't remember the name of it. But it was tasty! And I brought over heirlooms (I cannot believe there are still heirlooms at the market), bread, praline spread, and

jonquil's marvelous raspberry jam, which everyone agreed was quite divine.

At work, I discovered the joys of Hershey's Special Dark Truffles, which while not being fancy and Swiss are still very good. I also discovered that eating approximately five in a row makes me slightly sick to the stomach. On the other hand, this didn't prevent me from doing the exact same thing the next day. Truffles trump learning curve?

Today, I went to a little sushi/izakaya place with excellent sushi and izakaya food (

rachelmanija, I will take you there next time you are in the area! You will like it!), in which I had kabocha croquettes, yaki onigiri, assorted sushi, roasted gingko nuts still in cracked and salted shells (really good), kimchi tofu soup, and something called age mochi. It's basically agedashi tofu, except with sticky rice instead of the tofu, and it's hot and flavorful and sticky and chewy and so good! I was quite happy.

Unfortunately, I seem to be getting sick (again), so my nose isn't working so well. Otherwise, I would probably be raving about the food even more than I am now.

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It is! (Well, one of 'em, now. ^^) We started working on it partway through the run, so we've been going back and filling in earlier episodes as we continue doing new ones, but we've *almost* got all of the older material done. I just greenlit episode 6, and that and ep. 7 will fill in the hole. (It's up to 27 eps. so far, and the other one we're working on right now is 21.)

Anyway, let me see . . . I'm notoriously bad at summaries. *laughs* It's set in a fictional country called Saiunkoku, which went through a bad period of fighting for the throne and ended up with a fairly young emperor who shows no interest whatsoever in actually ruling. His advisors are in despair over the fate of the country with this foolish emperor in charge, so one of them basically ~~bribes~~ drafts the main character, Shuurei, to come to the palace and make him shape up--which, since women aren't given positions of authority, means bringing her in as a concubine.

Shuurei is from a noble family that's fallen on pretty hard times, and she's very intelligent; she teaches kids at the local temple and works odd jobs with the family retainer to keep food on the table, that kind of thing. And she *hates* being poor, so she accepts the advisors' offer. (Her seiyuu plays her as occasionally shrill in the first ep. or so, but thankfully the performance calms down quickly. O_o)

All of that's just the initial set-up. (*laughs* No one will ever claim I write short summaries. ^^) The story goes some really interesting places, and has some pretty awesome characters; it gets political, but the characters themselves are always the focus. It's also got supernatural elements, but they're incredibly downplayed. Whole storylines go by when I forget about them. ^^ It's based on a series of novels, and there's a lot left to happen (although I'm unspoiled past where we are in the work, so I don't know what that might be).

Oh, that sounds interesting! Hrm... may have to ahem this one, after I get through Ouran.

^_^ Yay! We're working hard on this one, so it's extra-cool when people I know check it out.

The work I (well, all three of us ^^) do for Shadow is a series of editing/smoothing passes on her translation, with very minimal changes. This is kinda interesting to me because I've started thinking more in terms of adaptation, which is definitely not what I'm doing here; it's fun comparing what I'm doing with what I'd do if I were making more significant changes. Even if it's only in my head, I like the exercise. [/tangent]