Because of the two vegetarians, I decided to use asian vegetables and flavors in pulling together most of the meal.  I can’t stand vegetarian menus that sacrifice flavor in the hope of simulating meat.  There’s a restaurant near my house that boasts of their ability to do this, but I think most of it turns out poorly and I’d take an ethnic restaurant that uses veggies or tofu instead of animal proteins any day.

The menu in brief, with more details below:

• Course 1: Kale and Lime Soup
• Course 2: Asian Stuffed Cremini Mushroom and Sauteed Portabello
• Course 3: Vegetable or Salmon Stir Fry
• Course 4: HomeMade Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream with Fresh Chocolate Chip Cookie

Course One: I wanted a simple, vegetarian soup that I could make without much effort.  I thought about a mushroom soup, which I have some experience with, but decided that later courses would already have too many mushrooms, and this wasn’t Iron Chef.  Instead, I opted for a Kale and Lime Soup from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, garnished with a slice of lime.  It generally got positive reviews, though my guests thought it could have used some more kick.  Unfortunately, I left out the jalepeno from the recipe which may have solved this some.

Course Two: Mushrooms make great appetizers and cook quick, but most stuffed mushroom recipes use cheese and italian flavors, which didn’t fit in will with the rest of the menu.  I modified this recipe for Asian Stuffed Mushrooms from Eupicurian instead, using medium-sized White Mushrooms replacing the peppers (which I didn’t have) with carrots and changing around the ratios for the other ingredients which seem more like guidelines than rules.  I popped them in the oven when I served the soup and served each guest one mushroom garnished with two slices of sauteed portabello.

Course Three: For the entree, I made a stir fry, starting by heating the aromatics (garlic and ginger) in oil, then stirring in the slower cooking ingredients (onions, broccoli, zuchini), some leafy vegetables (bok choi, scallions), adding some liquid (a stir fry sauce I found at the grocery store), and cooking for a few more minutes.  It would have gone great with a side of rice, but a friend brought Pasta Salad so I didn’t think we needed more starch.  For the carnivores in the room, I quickly sauteed a piece of salmon in a separate pan to toss on the stir fry.

Course Four: By far my strongest course was the dessert, shown below.  Before anyone came over, I made homemade Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream and chocolate chip cookies, which combined took about 10 minutes of work.  I put the ice cream in the freezer to harden and served each in a cup with a cookie, a sprig of mint from my herb garden, and slice of cake courtesy of my guests.

Home Made Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

My ice cream maker has quickly become my favorite kitchen appliance.  Making ice cream is fast, easy, and tastes orders of magnitude better than anything in a store.  Plus, the ingredients tend to keep for a few weeks, so I can leave them in the fridge/pantry without worrying about them going bad.

remind me of this guy…

“I could get into trouble for telling you this, but…”

“Delete this email immediately.”

“I really shouldn’t put this in writing.”

“Don’t tell So-and-So.” Or, “Don’t send this to So-and-So.”

“She/He/They will never find out.”

“We’re going to do this differently than normal.”

“I don’t think I am supposed to know this, but…”

“I don’t want to discuss this in e-mail. Please give me a call.”

“Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.”

“Is this actually legal?”

#2 is naive - there’s no such thing as “deleting” an e-mail anymore unless you’re a sysadmin, and even then it’s a chore.  I imagine lawyers searching on #4 finding a lot of birthday party invites.  The real kicker for me is #10 - if you have to ask if something is legal, it’s probably not ethical, and almost always a bad idea.

Via Evil HR Lady.

Arranging to deliver the ransom for the Ukranian ship captured by Somali pirates, and to receive the ship and hostage crew in return is a delicate matter without a legal framework to reduce the counterparty risk (sort of like a drug buy):

More from market-design guru Al Roth’s new blog.

Please help! I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!

I wonder if they have a “best-of” like Craigslist.

“Actually, this will be a surprise because a lot of people in America would, as a knee-jerk reaction, would rank the New York Philharmonic at the top,” Inverne says. “Or, indeed, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which has fantastic technical standards. But Chicago beat a further six orchestras, which were in our top 20, from America.

…

“Chicago famously has this incredible brass sound,” Inverne says. “And it just pins you to the back of your seat. And the way that that brass sound shoots out, exemplifies a lot about the orchestra, which is a sense of adventure in music-making.”

Thus far, no firings have been made or even suggested, but the casino’s members have agreed to beef up oversight measures by replacing the position of casino pit boss with a 15-person pit coordinating committee.

You began by saying that it is an exciting time to be an economist. I agree—not because economics is about to be replaced by psychology, but because of the big questions we are now struggling to answer. What are the fundamental causes of poverty? Are there solutions? How do ideas, habits and information spread across social networks? What makes innovation happen? Can governments help? Can anything improve the awful record of economic forecasting? How do economic clusters develop? What kills them off? How does competition work in the face of fallible consumers?

Behavioural economics is already making the running on the subject of consumer decision-making, but in other areas it has little to offer. That is no surprise, because there is so much more to economics than a theory of individual decisions.

Read the debate over behavioral economics that spawned this conclusion from Tim Harford.

It also contains an interesting sub-discussion on the literature around pay performance schemes which may be of interest to some of the management or info-econ wonks out there.