Winter comfort dinner and Portland exploration

This meal was consumed two months ago, but it was so awesome I saved it so I could share it with the world. It's actually all from Veganomicon (basically), except the "cooking greens," which were just braised in some tomato sauce, water, and a bit of olive oil. Made some corn bread, chickpea cutlets (dipped in breadcrumbs and baked), bastardized fast red wine sauce, and FUCKING AMAZING baked beans. Seriously, I'd never made homemade baked beans before, and now I understand. I have converted. They're ridiculously easy to make, too. Overall, this was definitely a four star dinner. Would have been five if I had not been lazy and made a better sauce.

I haven't posted in the past week because my friend Emily was visiting from Ann Arbor. We did many, many awesome things, one of which was visit Portland Sunday night. More pictures and blurbs will come later, but I wanted to touch on one significant element of our Portland visit: Powell's. I'd never been there before, and now I understand why it has so much hype surrounding it. It is the ultimate destination for a bibliophile: it's like the biggest bookstore you can imagine, like maybe double the average B&N, but the vast majority of the books it contains are USED! It was heaven. We were there for quite some time. I bought five books I'm really excited about - first I am reading The Undercover Economist. So far, so great. Kind of like Freakanomics but with more content and makes you feel smarter. It's like an interesting textbook.