Cabbage!

Here's the results of the fabulous braised cabbage recipe in The New Best Recipe.

I've also now made the bruschetta bread and the basic pound cake with mixed results. Overall the recipe for bruschetta has produced tasty food, but past-prime and incorrect ingredients have hurt perfection. The pound cake was also quite good, but a bit more cakey and flour-ey than I personally like. I suspect this was due to a failure in execution, as mixing the egg-part with the butter-and-sugar part has to be done with great precision, and I botched it because I couldn't pour precisely enough with the bowl I was using. I actually saw the butter-and-sugar deflate because the egg sat on it too long before being mixed in thoroughly. I also probably need more practice folding in the flour, which is the last ingredient added.

Armor!

After failing to dissect the last remaining rawhide chew toy to distribute to Loki and Louie with both a hack saw (too slow) and tin snips (too little torque) I finally resorted to a Dremel with a metal cutting disk. After reading The Omnivore's Dilemma I wasn't planning on buying any more industrially produced meat products, anyway, but the smell produced by this operation combined with my disbelief that any organic substance could be so strong has sealed the rawhide's fate.

Ew.

However, this makes it very clear why various types of armor worn throughout history were made of boiled leather. The chew toy I just cut apart would have handily deflected both a razor-sharp katana or a 30 lb. two-handed broadsword wielded by subject-matter experts. It's also ridiculously light for it's strength, certainly better than most metals and somewhere equivalent to polycarbonate.