This person scanned in all his mom’s recipe cards. That’s pretty cool. What is also cool is that he has pictures from Otakon of a couple Katamari cosplayers. Food and Katamari, what could be better? Nothing, that’s what. (Link brought to my attention by BoingBoing.)
On Thursday night, the family got together for a birthday celebration for Dad and Ryan. We had a potluck dinner- Mom and Dad made the entree, Jon and Ryan brought the starch and the vegetable, and I brought the dessert. Our theme was Italian, so the entree was eggplant parmesan, the starch was focaccia, the vegetable was a caprese salad, and the dessert was tiramisu. Top to bottom, this meal was excellent. I think it’s better than we would have had out.
I made the following pasta sauce last night. I had bought an eggplant the week before to make an Indian dish. Come last night, that eggplant was getting pretty old and I wasn’t in the mood for Indian. So I chopped it up and added it to a simple tomato sauce. It was good. Meaty- in fact I thought about calling it a sugo finto (mock meat sauce). I’ll be eating it for the next couple of days.
After dinner, I went over to Jon and Ryan’s to exchange the last of my tiramisu for the last of their focaccia (which I ate for breakfast this morning). Ian was visiting, which was cool. Ian is one of Jon’s friends from high school (in North Carolina- SO LONG AGO). Ryan made us all Mexican spiced hot chocolate which her parents had sent her from Zingerman’s, a truly awesome gourmet shop in Michigan. I talked about Katamari (of course, since I have no life outside it) and… cutting my fingernails. We ran out of conversation at one point and I offered some truly awful filler.
Warning! We Love Katamari SPOILERS! Kind of!
OMG, We Love Katamari. It’s pretty awesome. The controls are more sluggish than the first game, which sucks. You have to be pretty adept with the dash move in a few of the levels. The stages are many and varied. They’re all much shorter than they were in Katamari Damacy. The longest stage is seventeen minutes. Most are under six minutes, and there are a bunch of “do this as fast as you can” levels which should only take you a minute or two (well, ideally they’d take you under a minute, but I haven’t done that yet). There are levels under the sea, up in the clouds, in endless gardens, in an increasingly flammable campground, in snow, in darkness, and in space. The “make the moon”-esque level is incredibly awesome. There are tons of places to go and some really cool things to pick up. The world really IS full of things. Like Stonehenge. And the Taj Mahal. And someplace that looks kind of like Cloud City on Bespin. Hardest levels are the cowbear one and the “picking up only 50 objects, make as big a Katamari as possible” one. The fire ones are kind of hard, too. I kept going out, or people kept pushing me into the water. And the underwater one is kind of annoying because of the whole “you don’t fall as fast in water” thing. My new favorite cousin is Huey. He’s frikkin’ adorable. Especially when you put the hair streamers on him.