Doctor Who: The Mutants

This one is long and mediocre. It's your standard cartoonish bad guy, occupiers oppressing the indigenous people of Solos, etc. The twist here is that the indigenous people mutate as part of their species' natural life cycle and they don't know it.

Skip this one. I remembered it being bad and that's why the Whoathon had such a long break. I kept putting off watching it.

THE RUNDOWN

Doctor: Third
Companions: Jo Grant
Episode: #63, "The Mutants," six parts
Adversary: the Overlords and the Marshall

Classic Lines: scientist: "Earth is fighting for its survival. The side effects are of no importance." the Doctor: "Genocide as a side effect! You ought to write a paper on that, professor."

Tuck This Away to Impress Your Friends: The Doctor goes to Solos on a mission from the Time Lords.
Next Up: "The Time Monster"

Two T's Mini Golf

Dave and I went to Two T's for mini golf recently. I haven't played for years, and I was hoping this local place would be fun. We played the outdoor course, but there's a glow in the dark indoor course of 18 holes, too.

It was so much fun! The course was great. There were fun obstacles (including the obligatory windmill) and a neat cave. For one of the holes, you had to hit your ball into the water and let it be carried along to the second part of the hole. Cool.

The winner gets a free water ice. If you live in the Lehigh Valley, check it out.

Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge

Last weekend Dave and I visited Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey.

We walked the trails near the visitor center, and then we walked the trails and checked out the bird blinds in the wildlife observation area. Well, the trails near the visitor center were peaceful and we saw some cool birds.

great blue heron

The wildlife observation area was a bust. It was crowded and the wildlife were nowhere to be found. I'm glad we went, but it's probably not worth the drive there to go back.

Mom's chocolate cake

No, it's not MY mom's chocolate cake. This recipe is from Food & Wine. It's supposed to be one of the 40 best recipes in their history. Um, no.

This cake was bad. I didn't finish it. Let me repeat that- I didn't finish a piece of chocolate cake.

What else needs to be said?

New York cheese pizza

Dave surprised me one day with the book The Elements of Pizza, by Ken Forkish. It's full of pizza-making techniques and a variety of dough and pizza recipes. I've made pizza with store-bought dough, but I've never made a pizza completely from scratch. For my first one, I decided to go with something simple: a single dough ball for a New York cheese pizza. I used 00 flour and baked it on a pizza stone, but I couldn't get my oven past 525 degrees and I don't have a pizza peel or an instant read thermometer (to check the temperature of the water and the dough for proper yeast encouragement).

YUM!

Most of the dough recipes yield three balls of dough and take more than a day, but this one you can start in the morning and have pizza for dinner. You have to give the yeast time to work so most of the time that this recipe takes is waiting for the yeast to do its thing. It's actually quite quick if you just count the time you're actively doing something.

SO GOOD!

Kneading the dough was kind of fun and easier than I expected. When it was time to stretch it and shape it into a pizza, it did look more like a pizza than an amoeba...but it had a slight accident going into the oven so the shape changed a bit then. Haha.

DELICIOUS!

Okay, so how did it taste? HOLY CRAP. It was so good. So, so good. The dough was amazing, and this was the "quick" dough in the book, not one of the doughs the author considers the "better" doughs (that take longer). It wasn't just the dough- the pizza was delicious. Dave said it was better than the pizza from our usual pizza place.

It's time to get a pizza peel. I'll be making my own pizza more often.

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra

Last night we went to see the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at the Williams Center for the Arts in Easton. 

Dave really liked the Danish String Quartet so I figured I'd press my luck and see if he liked this. The performance was great! They started with something modern, then pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii joined them for some Chopin. After intermission, they played some Tchaikovsky. 

Tsujii was outstanding. Remarkable. So was the orchestra. I'm a big fan of Chopin, so it was great to see his work performed in person. It was a good time.