The Time of Ghosts, The Time of Roasts, The Time of Orange, Red & Gold

Though I have no idea how this happened, it's the second week of October.  Night time temperatures have dropped so low that we need to close the windows and shut off the fans.  This means it's time for cooking with wine.

As Vaquero's off for NO again tomorrow, for nearly two weeks, I'm making the farewell dinner tonight, the first beef of the season, slow cooked with small red potatoes and portabellos, and  caramelized yellow onions with carrots.  In lots of wine.  Then we'll go see Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Affair.

While concocting the dish and getting some of V's packing together (he's so busy with so much he hasn't got time to breathe! -- while having breakfast he was interviewed by a German paper) I'll continue listening to the audio version of John Burdett's (2005) Bangkok Tattoo, Knopf, which has been my workout and domestic tasks book since coming back from New Orleans.  Thai police detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, is one of the most interesting of detective characters and voices to arrive this decade.  His Thai perspective on sex work and women may also be one of the most egregious male fantasies of all time.  Burdett is not Thai, though his character is at least half so -- Sonchai's father is an American farang. What I may like best about these books though is how the Vietnam war still haunts so many Americans in southeast Asia. For the Asians though, they, being Buddhists, have forgiven us. Islam takes a rather different way in these matters. This particular Sonchai novel is about these things.