Thursday, March 23, 2017

Three Beautiful Things 03/22/17:At Last:Taxes,Good Times at Old Line,Simple and Exquisitely Delicious

1. I've been itching to upload our tax documents to our tax preparer and make an appointment with him. When I was younger, I put taxes off and always filed for an extension. I was kind of a wreck about this. But now, in my old age, I am eager to get the taxes done, but this year there was a holdup on a couple of our tax documents. On Tuesday, I had everything. So, today I spent a couple of hours scanning and uploading and tracking down a document at the Maryland Comptroller's website and elsewhere online. I worked deliberately, trying to do everything right on my end, and I might have succeeded. I do know one thing: I have an appointment in early April with our tax guy to get things done.

2.  After the Deke got off work and before we came home for dinner, we stopped in at Old Line for a couple of beers. We have a good thing going with James, a server there, and we hadn't seen him for a while. It turned out he'd been away for about a week, traveling to South Carolina and Florida. A while back, I gave him our DVDs of all the seasons of The Wire and he's into season three now and it's got him hooked. We also had fun talking with the Firestone Walker rep who was going from table to table serving up samples of Firestone's new take on Velvet Merlin -- Nitro Merlin Milk Stout. If we'd ordered a glass, we would have been served a free cookie with our Velvet Merlin -- a good pairing, I'm sure, but the Deke was into her 7 Locks Red Lager and I wanted to follow up my Firestone Walker DBA with Calvert's Mortal Double IPA. As we left, we chatted with the retiree who checked us out when we bought a bottle of wine and learned taht he has had a varied and fascinating life between living in far upstate New York and Maryland.

3. I had one box of pasta left, one onion, and plenty of canned tomatoes and butter and I wanted to keep dinner simple, so, before picking up the Deke, I whipped up a batch of Marcella Hazan's pasta sauce and when we arrived home I boiled pasta and grated some parmesan cheese. We had a very good dinner.  I know I've posted the Marcella Hazan recipe about 1000 times, but if you haven't looked at it, forgot to look at it, or if this is the time you'd like to give it a look, just click here. It's exquisite and so very easy.

Before I go, ever eat Campbell's tomato soup with a pat of butter? If you liked it, then you have had a foretaste of the heavenly kingdom of Marcella Hazan's pasta sauce.

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