Sasasnippets Pink: Things Making Me Happy of Late

I wrote this yesterday, planning to post today before I heard about the earthquake in Japan. Not feeling so happy anymore – in fact, feeling pretty worried as I haven’t yet heard from my obaachan (grandmother), aunts and uncles. Please think good thoughts for them.

Update: Have heard from most of them and they are ok, thanks so much for all your kind comments, tweets, emails and DMs.

Spring, are you teasing, or is it really you?

It’s been such a long time since I could go outside without wearing the down coat I talked about in my last snippets that I bit the bullet when I saw the sun shining for two consecutive hours and went out in a trenchcoat. I didn’t freeze to death you guys, next stop, strawberries!

F is for feminist

I’ve never questioned whether or not I’m a feminist; I think working toward a world where women feel safe from violence and are paid equally for equal work benefits (nearly) all of us. There were lots of interesting articles floating about the web for International Women’s Day and I particularly enjoyed this one from The Observer.

On another note, I think I may have nearly exhausted my local library’s supply of English books – I take them out in piles of fifteen. The kind librarian asked me if there’s anything I’d like her to order and naturally I drew a blank just at that moment – video shop syndrome, you know – any suggestions?

More eating my vegetables

Wasting food gives me the major guilts but my second bout of stomach flu meant the contents of my vegetable crisper didn’t see the light of day until yesterday. Deb’s take on Julia Child’s spinach gratin did an admirable job of using things up as well as an impromptu crepe dinner (make crepes, fry mushrooms and wilt spinach, lay atop the crepe and crumble leftover sausage over, sprinkle with cheese, roll and heat until cheese melts if you’re inclined to try it at home).

I also revisited this roast fennel recipe from the archives (archives! I feel so seasoned!) and remembered again why I rhapsodised about it last time.

Future Fun

Looking forward to a visit to Milan this weekend and a month later, a flying visit to Berlin. I feel very spoilt though it’s all on a rather miniscule budget – I’m afraid no reviews of Michelin starred restaurants will be forthcoming so I hope you like pictures of pizza and sausages, it’ll be my first trip with my very own camera.

Just because…

I love dancing, I loved these pictures of people dancing around the world and because I love cute illustrations Irena’s hand-illustrated food blog makes me happy.

Also, Twig and Thistle is a beautiful design blog with free downloads, the latest being St. Patrick’s Day Coasters (you know you want to) and where I got that cute “apple of my eye” sticker in the photo up there – I stuck them on all the fruit for Valentine’s day.

Self-promotion

Tasteless to bring it up perhaps (but I will anyway, heh) but I was rather thrilled to be interviewed by Radio Active, the Wellington radio station about Sasasunakku (MP3 here) and living in Austria as well as on Kiwiology, a site all about Kiwi blogs.

Google Recipe View

This probably only concerns the food bloggers among you but Google recently rolled out some changes to the way you can search for recipes; you can click on recipe view in the sidebar the way you can for say, images. This is useful for searchers but to be featured in the results you need to recode all your recipes. I haven’t done this and don’t plan to until someone develops a plug-in that makes the process easier than pulling teeth but if you want to, you can read more about it on Google’s webmaster pages.

What’s good in your world dearhearts?