For a pot-luck doggie party, I made a fake chicken pot pie (had to be vegetarian due to at least one vegetarian being there). The Asian restaurants have fake meats you can buy, and I must say the pot pie with fake chicken was better than with real chicken.

Thrice, have attempted tempura and I am still not very good at it. They turn out good enough to want to eat, but bad enough to be ashamed to show other people.

Spaghetti is simple. It’s wonderful with freshly cooked spinach, mushrooms, and grated sharp cheddar cheese. It works well without meat, but I’ve also used sausage or snail meat. [The Mascot says: Snail meat in spaghetti? That's weird, man.]

This past Sunday, I baked three stuffed quail. It’s the first time I’ve stuffed and baked poultry. [The Mascot says: You finally experienced sticking your finger in an animal's anus. Congrats!] Quail tastes too similar to chicken to want to buy it again, but it was fine. I’m going to do fried quail today, because I accidentally left the other three quail out overnight. Call it defrosting.

You know how they say you end up becoming like your parents? Growing up, my dad liked sardines, and while I tolerated them as a kid, they always seemed kinda weird. But on Saturday? Bought 4 mini-cans of sardines and have already eaten 3 of them.

Falafel with plain yogurt is wonderful, but plain yogurt occupies a very small section in most supermarkets. If it’s there at all.

Today, I have to use up the bananas that were overripe from not finishing them before Thanksgiving weekend. Banana bread sounds just like the way to go.

Somewhat unusual/exotic foods left to use: red rice, frog legs, more snail meat, chicken feet, octopus, plum wine (this stuff is better than grape wines, I think).

Three games over the weekend before last. One to be semi-satisfied with, with two stinkbombs.

Game 1: The best of the lot. I managed to extract a disadvantageous position from a winning one, but my opponent then managed to give away his advantage (which I don’t think either of us realized that he had). Even on time, we eventually agreed on a draw in a Rook endgame.

Game 2: My hair-brained novelty on move 4 is a fraud, and my opponent sacrifices material for a crushing attack. To give you an idea how badly I played the opening, from moves 5 to 14, Fritz gave me ?’s or ??’s on 5 moves. Now, if that was the end of the story, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But I had multiple opportunities to halt his attack and convert on my material plus, which I failed to notice. That’s what made this loss so irritating.

Game 3: Got paired up with someone rated 600 points lower. Don’t know how most of you feel when that happens, but these games make me really nervous. Mainly because I know I should win, and even a draw would be devastating. Plus, there’s no benefit ratings-wise for a victory, so it’s a lose-lose situation. I have no problem with playing an occasional game like this; it reinforces that I need keep my head in the game regardless of the situation. (Being nervous about playing lower-rated players seems to have done wonders; I only have two losses to anyone below 1500: a 1400 and 1497.)

In this game, I run around headless for the first 2/3rds of the game, but I wasn’t too worried, expecting my inexperienced opponent to start making blatant mistakes. Which he does, eventually. (In reality, I had no clue how to play the position.) But he was pretty solid for a good chunk of the game.

Despite it all, I (unofficially) earned +8 rating points.

Does anyone else have that tome “Chess” by László Polgár? 95% of it is problems to find checkmate in 1, 2, or 3 moves. It’s wonderful to have so many problems, but here’s an example of something that annoys me about the format of a lot of them:

This is a White to mate in 3. In this position, like a lot of the problems, Black has a way to give check or even checkmate. So you know right off the top of the bat you have to give check every single move, but this is rarely like a usual game.

To me, it seems a bit artificial. Maybe it’s more important for training to be able to see the pattern? What do y’all think?