Tillamook sent me a wheel of their [100th anniversary cheddar](http://store.tillamookcheese.com/100th-Anniversary-Wheel-limited-edition-P153.aspx), which I cannot stop referring to as “100-year-old cheese.” This is not entirely accurate: it’s aged for three years.

This is really good stuff. It the only Tillamook cheese I’ve tried that has a crumbly cheddar texture, with amino acid crystals like in Parmesan. The only reason I hesitate to recommend it is that Laurie pointed out that it is very similar to [Cougar Gold](http://www.wsu.edu/creamery/), another local cheese which costs less. That said, if you see the 100-year-old cheese, which has limited retail availability, and are in the mood for an impulse buy, grab one. You won’t be disappointed, and it comes in a cute wooden crate which can be reused to hold toys.

Iris is old enough now to have chores, so I assigned her to be in charge of setting the table. This is my least-favorite job, because it has to be done right when I’m in the middle of making dinner, so I was delighted to outsource it.

Not that Iris likes it any better. She was proud to be able to do it herself the first one-and-a-half times and now sees it for what it is: a chore. So in the spirit of disgruntled workers everywhere, she elected to follow the letter of the law (“set the plates, forks, napkins, and glasses”) in a defiant, in-your-face style.

The result, you’ll agree, is fabulous:

I went to Uwajimaya today and didn’t notice until I got home what was attached to my bottle of Lion & Globe peanut oil:

This is so cool. I’m about to make use of it, because I need some napa cabbage for dinner and all they had at Uwajimaya was giant sumo wrestler cabbage.

A Thai restaurant near me has opened a sidewalk window selling individual skewers of chicken satay for $1 and red curry chicken for $3.

This was an offer I could not refuse. So I ponied up $3 and got a surprisingly large serving of rice, red curry, a few pieces of chicken…and, oh, *about a pound of canned bamboo shoots.*

Does anybody out there just love canned bamboo shoots? I didn’t think so. Would this dish have felt like it was worth $3 if they’d just left out the bamboo shoots? Yep.

I’ve gotten into kind of a breakfast rut lately: toast, english muffins, pancakes, sausage, bacon, fruit. Not all at the same time. So today I decided to make scones.

Rarely have I met a scone I liked. The very worst are the Mostly Muffins scones they sell on Amtrak, which manage to be both dense and dry on the inside and sticky and greasy on the outside. I guess you don’t need me to go through the taxonomy of bad scones. My point is just don’t get a scone on Amtrak.

Anyway, I was inspired by a recent savory scone at Oddfellows. It was something like bacon and scallion. I found some ground pork in the freezer and grated some extra-sharp Tillamook cheddar. I cooked up the pork and salted and peppered it and declared it sausage. (Did you know I have the power to declare anything sausage by executive order? Seriously, the Supreme Court said it was okay.)

Otherwise, I followed the Cook’s Illustrated cream scone recipe from Baking Illustrated, omitting the currants and adding the sausage and cheese to the dough in the food processor. The scones were great–light and cheesy. Iris approved. “Wow, I didn’t know these would be so good,” she said.

She has learned to be wary of my experiments. Last night I said I was going to make baked eggs. I checked the eggs after ten minutes or so and they were underdone. I let them go another ten minutes and the yolks got bullet-hard. I threw them out and we all had scrambled eggs for dinner.