Well, Hippo is back now, but we’ve had a hard time getting our blog legs back. I had meant to post up a weekly single mashup, involving me, myself and lots of Whole Foods sense-deadening paraphernalia (read: beer). Now that Hippo has something like 50,000 words to post about her China trip, this mashup will seem a little pathetic. Nevertheless…

While we decide whether we are willing to spend money on Flickr (no!), I’ll be doing this week’s mashup using the good ol’ search-wordpress-for-hours-for-some-kind-of-stupid-plugin-that-does-this-crap-well method. For the most part, the image descriptions are self-explanatory. The four major themes here were: blurry pictures because Hippo stole our camera, alcohol, beets, and a little dinner party I went to with friends involving death metal and mac and cheese.

[Show as slideshow]

This week’s mashup is engorged (though not nearly as much as we were) because Hippo is preparing to leave the country, we didn’t have time to blog about one of our go-to places, Chef Yu Yu, so we’re including it in our mashup. I’ll take this time now to note that Hippo will be carousing around China for a bagajillion weeks, leaving me high and dry here in Oaktown. Hopefully we’ll get at least photo updates from her as she eats all of China, but if not, I will be filling in solo with bachelor’s food – you know…beer, dumplings, and mac and cheese. It’s gonna be an exciting few weeks, folks.

This week we’ve included some home-grown fare, including Hippo’s delicate use of pickled vegetables, and her attempt to make up for my dining at Chez Panisse *alone* by making a beautiful raspberry, blackberry and beet salad. My Panisse experience drove me to become obsessed with heirloom tomatoes for an entire day. As a result, we present to you: “Tomatoes Frolicking on Blue Mat.” Limited edition prints available. Those tomatoes were, unfortunately or not, sliced thin with beets, edamame, “farmer’s cheese” (also had with some Acme baguette), and a dash of balsamic vinegar, sea salt and black pepper. With an entire week’s worth of pay down the organic, slow-food drain, we decided to stoop to some BBQ chicken wings and cheeseburgers with onion rings at none other than your local Denny’s.

From there, we rebounded rapidly to a number of treats: pomegranate frozen yogurt at Yogurt Harmony in Berkeley (froyo will surely be a blog post in its own right someday); and raspberry and peach tart with a Russian cheesecake from our favorite Hungarian bakery, Crixa.

On the drink front, I felt the need to throw in the Vietnamese iced coffee tea we had at Ao Sen, and the wine I sampled for no reason other than the fact that an older gentlemen completely CLEANED Trader Joe’s out of the bottle, except for one: *mine*!