The cover of the current Gourmet is Tiki - my son thought the crab & pork spring rolls looked like turds, but wanted the chicken satay.

I read over the Gourmet recipes and they sounded good, but in the end the recipes I had always used for satay and peanut sauce from The Best of Vietnamese and Thai Cooking sounded easier.



And easy was good because as it turned out, I marinated the chicken, and made rice for fried rice, so that it could chill - I used the pineapple ginger fried rice from Gourmet, but added some bacon - and then went off to an outdoor music fest and came back and hour and a half and 6 missed cell phones calls late. And of course the fest was a mesh of seeing people I knew from 20 years ago, who knew each other in ways I had never predicted - my town is 2 degrees of separation, not six.

But when I got home, I broiled the satays and made the fried rice, and peanut sauce, and John & Jake came to eat, and almost all was devoured. So all good, except I sort of dozed off reading a book instead of going back over to the east side to see a really good band, Honor Among Thieves, in a bar at 10 pm ...