Happy Friday! How are you spending your weekend?

Well, I’m spending mine mourning my youth.  On Monday, I turn 29, which means a year from Monday, I’ll be 30.  See how that works?  So this weekend, I’m going to escape the city and go home to New Jersey to see my family.  I hate my birthday, but my mother (who is hilarious) has a way of pulling me from my crankiness with stories of what a brat I was at my 5th birthday.  Apparently (I don’t remember past last year, let alone back to when I was 5), I thought I pinned the tail on the donkey, but my mother was being a gracious host and gave the prize to my “boyfriend” at the time, Cory instead.  Well, no one had explained what being “gracious” meant, so instead I threw a temper tantrum yelling, “That’s not fair!” and stormed away from my party.  Yeah…  I was just a treasure of a kid.  Hearing about how terrible you were before, though, somehow makes you feel better about who you turned out to be.  Not that the standards of comparison are high, but who cares!

Actually, there’s one little glimmer of sunshine to start off this weekend (holy cheez its, I’m basically asking for a personal rain cloud to follow me around), the Culinary Technology blog that I was hired to write for will actually be up and running by the end of the day!!!  It’s been a long journey – I got this blog up and running in about a week and the blog that I’m actually being paid to work on has taken 2 months!  It’s only partially my fault, I swear!  So before heading to bed tonight, please check out Cooking Issues – the blog dedicated to the food & tech adventures of Dave Arnold and Nils Norén.  Naming the blog took about a month alone.  Every other name that we tried was either taken or inappropriate.  Cooking Issues is simple and sums us up: we like to tackle issues in cooking & our work crew has a lot of issues in general.

However, if you are around this weekend, please go checkout my friend Nick Suarez at the Park Slope Pork-Off.  Nick has become addicted to these cook-off competitions and has placed Top 3 at the majority of the ones he’s entered.  He has a whole formula on winning – it’s gotta be mostly deliciousness + easy to serve in one bite + gimmicky name.  And who doesn’t love a gimmicky name???  At the Bacon challenge, his dish was called: “Kevin Bacon’s Last Meal” and he wore a t-shirt with the six-degrees-star’s face on it.  And the NYTimes will be there covering the cookoff phenomenon for next week’s Dining section.  So please go laugh in the face of Swine Flu and Vote for Pedro  Nick!