The cooking itself when smoothly for the most part. Half of this is just chopping vegetables, which I need more practice with, but don’t actually mind a whole lot. Chopping fresh herbs in particular is nice because they exude all their lovely scents. And chopping onions did clear out my sinuses…

But yeah, lots of fun all around. And super healthy! I think we’ve been eating better recently, which is great.

Note: Photos are mostly by the lovely Stacey, who could safely hold my camera because he was not covered in lemon juice all night.

On a mostly unrelated note, on Tuesday I picked up Kaki King’s new album, Junior. I actually went out to the Leominster Newbie’s to get it because I was in Ayer anyway. I hadn’t been out there in a long time and it was gloriously nostalgic buying a CD there on the release date. I listened to it on the way home and quickly discovered that, like every Kaki King album, it doesn’t do well on car speakers. There’s way too much road/other ambient noise to hear all the subtleties, so today I played it twice through over my good stereo speakers in the kitchen while I cooked.

First, it does well with repeated listens. I was kind of ambivalent the first time through, but by the third I was rewinding to songs I really liked and singing along to some of it. That itself is worth mentioning… there are a lot of lyrics. She sings on all but two or three of the tracks, which surprised me. Reading some reviews online, I found a lot of complaints about her voice. I don’t think that’s entirely fair. True, she doesn’t have a flawless or necessarily well-trained voice. But I think it suits the songs. The vocals are echoey and distant, wavering and melancholy. They’re actually great. I feel like her voice is more of another instrument than vocals on top of the music. It adds texture and color. So whatever complaints people have about her technique, I think they’re missing the big picture here.

There isn’t much to be said about the guitar that hasn’t been said a hundred times over. The girl can play a goddamn guitar like nobody’s business. I do miss the tapping and complex acoustic stuff, but she introduces electric solos here that are equally awesome. And the instrumentals are still unbelievably beautiful. Kaki King’s music makes everything glow.

Now that I’ve written way too much and drank a bunch of wine, I think I’ll peace out. Hope all is well with the… three people who read this? Right.