Had a double Thanksgiving this weekend – Thursday at P’s parent’s house, and on Saturday, I cooked at my mom’s house. P’s mom, as a former housekeeper, did the complete Martha Stewart deal, including a perfectly rosted turkey, mushroom sausage stuffing with brown gravy, mashed potatoes, yams, pumpkin pie — you get the picture. On Saturday, I pulled off my godmother’s baked ham recipe that my mom was given, and a big tray of lasagna. Good eats for at least a few more days.
I didn’t buy anything on Black Friday, but instead we had to swap our Time Warner cable box. This was the second Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 that broke on us. Web reviews had mentioned that the DVR had quite a return rate — had heat problems, hard drive problems and an underpowered CPU. I asked if they had anything else, and they upgraded us to an 8300. Hopefully this one will be better. It doesn’t have the heat problems, and it does change channels faster. Also, it has keyword search of the listings, which is fantastic for finding things.
The box came up with several new channels, including the ImaginAsian channel, which seems to go head-to-head with the AZN (nee International) channel, and the chinese channels were not scrambled. However, the free In-Demand channels didn’t work. We’re up to 1014 channels!
Another interesting Chinese cooking show on Discovery Living: Kylie Kwong, a chef who is a 5th generation Australian Chinese. She looks like a thirty-something version of my aunt from Trinidad, and her accent is just as thick. Usually, I’m pretty good at figuring out Commonwealth English, but at some points I had to turn on the closed captioning to figure out what she was saying – definately a sheila. But the food was quite nice — if we ever make it to Sydney, we’ll have to check out her restaurant.