Blogging Outside

Alas, the food at brunch was so hastily devoured that even the camera with the fastest digital shutter could not have captured it.

If you are ever in the Washington, DC area, the Tabard Inn is an impressive place to take either a date who likes delicious food or a stodgy gentleman who likes his atmosphere dripping with eau de wooden library and leather chairs.

This is a photo of the adorable reception desk, as The Tabard is actually an old-style publick house.

It has been alluded to in many books, though I imagine it's not quite as literary as the original Tabard! I'm told that the guest rooms are equally charming, but I have not seen them myself.

Then the food: we ordered the house special doughnuts for the table. Fresh, warm doughnuts with thick-whipped vanilla cream...covered in sugar...really, they were quite like the little beignets I had yesterday, sans lemon. The thing about these doughnuts is the freshness...if you didn't know that they were fried in the kitchen just moments before, you'd swear they floated down from heaven and happened to land on your plate. On Top Chef Las Vegas, Wolfgang Puck criticized a contestant's doughnut for being heavy, throwing it at the cameraman (or in that general direction). If he could have mustered up the cajones to throw a Tabard Inn doughnut, it would just fly away and keep on going. They are THAT GOOD.

Then I had the eggs Benedict with house-made Tasso ham. It came with potatoes and onions. Everyone else had the omelette, which I think had asparagus and goat cheese. Jim asked for Tobasco, as he is technically on shore leave from France and I'm pretty sure it's hard to get hot sauce in a restaurant there, even if you know how to ask for it. Anyway, I put some on my potatoes, even though they already had plenty of other flavors from the onions and whatever herbs they'd cooked them with.

This other photo is of the pool at Jim's condo complex. After brunch, we went to hang out there, enjoying the unexpected sunshine. Also unexpected: the sheer number of babies we saw. Blair said that babies were the hippest new pool accessory, putting Jim's neon pool noodles to shame. This is, of course, patently untrue. Pool noodles are AWESOME.

I'm hoping to get a good GoodReads widget onto this blog so you can see what I'm reading (and maybe suggest more?). I just finished Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is actually kind of about geekery. I didn't realize that until after I started reading it! I recommend it, but if you haven't read Watchmen or The Lord of the Rings, I suggest you get those out of the way first. A viewing of Star Wars and some basic Star Trek may also be in order, just so you don't feel totally left out of everything.

And that's that! Go outside and play...autumn will be here soon enough!