The fourth Krispy Kreme Challenge, NC State's growing tradition, was yesterday. Bell Tower to Krispy Kreme, eat a dozen donuts, then run back (four miles) in an hour. The prize? A green t-shirt and money raised for the NC Children's Hospital.

My Sunday reading habit is to work through the N&O in print and Washington Post and New York Times. Between Twitter, email newsletters and RSS feeds from the later two publications, I'll easily open about 20 browser tabs.

• "We're servants of our overload [1]" N&O ideas columnist J. Pedar Zane writes about the decline of capital 'R' Reading:

  Start with books. Recent surveys show that fewer than half of all Americans read at least one work of fiction for pleasure each year. The decline is especially pronounced among teenagers. Many factors have contributed to the trend, but the rise of the Internet is clearly a chief culprit.

  ...

  My guess is that the average American reads more words in a week than our ancestors read in a month. It's just that we're not reading books.

  Steve Jobs says the number is around 40 percent. But where is that figure coming from?

• Half of Japan's top ten bestsellers started off as cellphone novels.
• The New York Times on the NFL's "air it out" 2007 season:

  This was the year of the pass, when 3 yards and a cloud of dust gave way to the three-step drop. In one game of their undefeated season, the Patriots, who until this season featured a balanced offense, ran only twice in the first half. Seven quarterbacks threw for more than 4,000 yards this season, more than ever before, and two of them — New England's Tom Brady and Green Bay's Brett Favre — take their teams into Sunday’s conference championship games as favorites.

  Bill Walsh's legacy, perhaps? Remember when the 49ers lined up with Joe Montana [2] under center and had Jerry Rice, John Taylor, Roger Craig, Tom Rathman and Brent Jones and they could all catch passes?

• The Senate is considering legislation that would force the FDA to require special labeling for cloned food. Short of that, consumer groups want allowance for labeling food as "clone-free." Interestingly, the Washington Post article says the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture has to help get cloned food to market.

1. Disclosure
2. Though Joe Cool is dear to the hearts of every 49ers fan, I liked Steve Young better, possibly because I remember more of watching Young play than Montana.

Quick dinner this evening.

• Bratwursts cooked in a skillet
• Sauteed onions
• Stone ground mustard
• pickle relish
• Terrapin Rye Squared Imperial Pale Ale

All tasty. Not a bad meal to watch For A Few Dollars More with.

The beer is very fully flavored, but not overpowering. The brats did better with onion, mustard and relish than with Amy's Chili, though the chili wasn't a bad option.

"... Not too much. Mostly plants."

So begins Michael Pollan's article, "Unhappy Meals."

I don't believe I've read a better piece about the importance of food as communion, not merely as fuel composed of isolated nutrients.

Dinner/Raleigh f/4 @ 1/60 sec

Robin has the pager this week and that means that dinner is by and large my responsibility around "beep beep beep."

Looking at Vegetarian Times last week, I saw something tasty on the cover I took an idea from.

The ideal was going to be sliced hard boiled eggs over spring mix, topped with sauteed onions and red peppers on toasted focaccia. Unfortunately, the store didn't have focaccia, so I ended up with a larger multigrain bakery loaf. When I got home, no onions. Luckily, we had some shitake mushrooms, so those went into the skillet with the peppers, olive oil and sherry.

My idea was to have two or three eggs per sandwich, however, once the eggs were sliced, only one per sandwich made sense.

Tasty, but if I do it again, I'll probably have thinner bread and a little more sauce to augment the eggs. Maybe some cheese to encourage to stay on the sandwich as well.

Pod/Clifford f/3.5 @ 1/400 sec

I haven't had any substantial updates on activity in the last little while, largely since Robin and I have both been busy doing. Christmas shopping lead into our Christmas trip, which lead into the prep and hanging of my photo show. Oh, and I was on pager this past week.

Robin bought Ramen today. It seemed appropriate.

I fell victim for POM Wonderful's pomegranate marketing. Giant bins at Whole Foods and Lowe's. Fold out instructions of how to open pomegranates. Tartness.

So, after spending 10 minutes opening our second pomegranate, I can add pomegranates with whipped cream to the list of tasty concoctions.

What else have we come up with? Pomegranates on/in/with:

• salad
• granola and yogurt
• ice cream

There is one week left to this year's CSA subscription and we're starting to discuss what we want to do for next year.

One of my primary goals is to cook more with some of the more unfamiliar items we've been getting. Unfamiliar in the sense that I haven't cooked with it, not "WTF is this?" We didn't do anything with butternut squash, for instance.

Pretty decent weekend. The first in a while where I wasn't either injured or on-the-run somewhere or other. And that was nice.

Friday

Taking full advantage of some free evenings, I managed to get to dinner at Royal India with Tom, Bethany and ambermae. Quite delicious and far too long since I'd been to Indian. ambermae had an eggplant based dish that looked good. Tom and Bethany both had magic vegetarian platters of rice, five mini entrees and a sort of potato dumpling. I ended up having what was essentially tandoori red snapper, followed by mango ice cream. Very, very good.