Hang on tight, please — this post is going veer and swerve violently around three pillars of pleasure for me: linguistics, google, and cheese.
First, the cheese:
Sarah’s mom gave her a book of recipes compiled by alumnae of her Catholic high school founded by an order of French nuns a couple of years ago (the giving, not the founding). Up until now, we haven’t done much with it except make fun of its name (I’ll spare you). But after our Strawberry Shortcake success on the weekend, I started thinking that we’ve become rather famous (at least in circles around the water cooler) for our dessert prowess. It might be good to branch out. So I started perusing the book and I found a winner pretty quickly.
Bleu Cheese Crisps
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 4-oz. package crumbled bleu cheese, softened
1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts (pecans are so hard to find here)
1 baguette sliced
Mix butter and bleu cheese until blended. Stir in pecans and set aside. Place baguette slices in a single layer on baking sheets. Bake at 350°F for 3 to 5 minutes. Turn slices and spread evenly with bleu cheese mixture. Bake 5 minutes. Serve immediately. Yields 32 appetizers.
We’re thinking about editing the recipe; we’ll update this post if it works well. These are really good and easy, but we’re interesting in giving them a boost of red or black pepper (or paprika maybe) and seeing how that goes.
Which brings us to the linguistics:
This stuff is fairly similar to Obatzda, which is a typical Biergarten treat. You’d expect more flavory things in an Obatzda like onions and garlic, but the general concept here was by-and-largely the same, if a bit more refined, owing to the touch of Fronce. Anyhoo, I was thinking about Obatzda, the word. Not so much what it means (someone explained that to me years ago), but what its non-Bavarianized equivalent would be. Based on what I hear people at the office say when they’re excited (mostly negatively…is that telling?), I surmised that the ‘O’ represented a high-German “an” and that the ‘batzd’ was a past-participle with a silent ‘-ge-’ past-participle marker that Bavarians (at least here in the Oberpfalz often just don’t need to use). Lo and behold, that wikipedia link above confirms the suspicion. How I found that out is the third pillar of this post.
What’s the sound of me dorkin’ out on the computer? “Goosh!”
Man, that’s fun to say. It’s short for the Google Shell (think bash, ksh, csh, tcsh if you ever had a unix account at your university or place of employment). For the keyboard-loving information junkies, just point your browser at http://goosh.org and go to town - start off with an ‘h’ command to show you what’s available. The best part? In my opinion, it’s the “addengine” command, which puts the goosh toolbar in your Firefox browser’s list of searchboxes. From there, you have the power of all those commands right in the search box. Here’s how I used it and was so tickled that I started this post: “wiki Obatzda” and “in regenblogsblog.com shortcake”. I love the keyboard.
A colleague visiting from the U.S. brought us two twelve-packs — one each of Dr Pepper and Mug Root Beer. How cool is that? I’m having a cold Dr Pepper right now. It’s the first one in I don’t know how long. And it’s not even a fountain drink from one of the local Subway restaurants (you can get Barq’s there, but the mix is usually off). Given that we even dilute fruit juice with fizzy water to make Schorles, a full-strength cold Dr Pepper is knocking my socks off. 
