Because I can't stop talking about FOOD!

Weekend roundup of edibles:

• Mole con almendras For dinner Friday, Monshu and I decided to try out the new Mexican place in Little Saigon. For North Side Mexican, it was surprisingly good. (If you know Chicago, you know that's damning with faint praise.) The chips were fresh, not too oily or salty, and my mole was rich, dark, earthy--almost like eating something dropped in a mud bath. Tell the truth, it was a little overwhelming. Next time, I think I'll go for the tinga.
• Oxtail Strudel Owlet couldn't stop talking about this. She said she'd been meaning to try oxtail for a while, but she couldn't find anyone else willing to join her. Not even her fiancé? Nope. I was stunned. "He's Texan and it's beef. What exactly is the problem? It's not like you're asking him to eat testicles!" It was damn tasty: basically two puff-pastry pockets of shredded beef in a flavourful sauce--which was, of course, hotter than magma when they arrived. (Later, looking at Meinl's dessert case, I was dismayed to see they had rechristened the Rehrücken "deerback cake". The German name comes from the fact that it resembles a saddle of venison in shape; the English "translation" simply makes no sense.)
• Kazandibi I was the one who spied these quivering in a tray at Turkish Bakery, I asked the waitress about them, but, ironically, I was the only one in our party not to order one. They were something between a custard and a blancmange, containing egg white but no yolks, and tasting like a lighter form of flan. Owlet was willing to maim in order to defend hers from depredations.
• Droste Apparently, the local Jewel overordered cocoa for the holidays, because Abu `Ata'allah picked up ten boxes of Droste for 50¢ a piece. 50¢! I made some remark about how I would've bought ten at that price, too, so he gave me one to take home. What a mentsh!

Browser grousing

So today is the day we all move to IE--or so I discovered ten minutes ago.

As is usual whenever we migrate software here, this means lost functionality. My bookmarks won't import ("This is very interesting! It worked fine for everyone else.") and the handy LEO German Dictionary plug-in is gone. (I installed it in Netscape in mere seconds by dragging and dropping; for IE, I first had to download several files and unzip them, only to have the installer fail for completely opaque reasons.)

To make matters even worse, this is all ultimately my fault. Last month, I started seeing messages on one of my most frequently-visited (work) sites that they were discontinuing support for Netscape 4.X in mid-January. I brought this to the attention of my supervisor, in the hopes that IT would finally upgrade our browsers. (Why didn't I quietly upgrade it myself? Because local IT has the most insanely restrictive privilege settings of any place I know of. I'm lucky they let me change the desktop wallpaper!) I was hoping for Netscape 6.X or--even better--Mozilla, but they decided to go to IE (and IE5.5 at that). GRRRR!!!!