Breville Breville

Welcome, gustatory reader, as this week has been all about food and drink. I don't know about you, but I feel like I've been eating solidly since about Dec 22nd, and it's beginning to take its toll. As Helen likes to say, the diet starts Monday; she just never specifies which Monday…

The first culinary delight we foisted upon ourselves this week was quesadillas. Helen bought me a quesadilla maker for Christmas, so we enjoyed this traditional Mexican delicacy this week.

The dictionary says that a quesadilla is a tortilla filled with cheese. I think the US has taken this definition and run with it: what passes for a quesadilla here is akin to what in the UK we'd consider to be a cheese toastie, with any number of additional fillings encouraged. The quesadilla maker resembles a circular version of the infamous Breville sandwich toaster which anyone who was a student in the 80s or 90s will know well (I say know well, because you'll know it well as the easiest and quickest way to give yourself third degree burns). This is yet another example of the Americans taking something simple and making it sound a lot more complex than it is.

The second food experience this week is to do with my favourite coffee shop, Verve Coffee Roasters here in Palo Alto. Now you know that Omicron is hitting hard when Verve are unable to open at their usual 7am because their staff are ill, and instead have to open at 8. The impact of this is that my usual morning coffee, which I get pretty soon after they open, has to be either postponed or skipped altogether. As an entitled tech worker of the highest calibre this is basically untenable. Anyway, the good news is, they managed to open at 7am on Friday, so I was able to pick up this:

Finally, we did it: we went to Pizza My Heart. This looks like a quite greasy, cheap-and-cheerful pizza joint, somewhat out of place in too-cool-for-school Palo Alto. The appearance of the place, combined with the punny name, have made us reticent to visit, but we've pretty much been through every eatery in Palo Alto at this point so when I suggested pizza for what became Friday's takeout, we decided to try it. Helen did a wonderful job of ordering, but there may have been an error of scale as the pizza we ended up with was approximately the size of a football field:

I'm almost disappointed to say that it was a pretty good pizza, and it turns out that Pizza My Heart is a local chain, having originated over in Santa Cruz. I said I wanted something with chillies on it, so Helen ordered me a pizza with chillies, then added an extra order of chillies, so you could say I had a few too many chillies. Anyway, I survived, and I'm now prepared for all kinds of chemical warfare.

And with that, dear reader, I leave you. Apparently the diet starts Monday… or maybe the Monday after that.