Ever since reading Bourdain, I've been interested in French cuisine. Unfortunately, Minneapolis is not known for such fare. Sure, I've heard of Vincent - A Restaurant. I'm sure it's great, and I'll try it some day. But I want the weird stuff. I want to eat offal and fat and glands and livers and blood and pancreas. Tonight, I found 112 Eatery, downtown, and will be eating there tomorrow night. It is by no means a French restaurant, featuring at least as many classic Italian dishes as French, and so I have no delusions that it'll be like a Manhattan haute joint. But at least it doesn't seem so bistro. In preparation for tomorrow's meal, I've worked up this glossary of dishes and ingredients from 112's menu.

Crostini - An Italian appetizer of toasted bread or crackers with olive oil and a variety of toppings

Escarole - A type of endive, a leafy vegetable

Farro - A relative of traditional wheat, consumed in Italian cuisine as a whole grain, typically in soup

Foie Gras - The liver of a duck or goose that has been fattened by forced overfeeding

Gougère - A light pastry with cheese [in America, a cheese puff]

Harrisa - A Tunisian hot sauce made from peppers and garlic

Lardon - A piece of bacon taken from the rendered back-fat of a pig

Mascarpone - A triple-cream cheese

Mortadella - Pork sausage, made with at least 15% small pork fat cubes

Porcini - Boletus edulis, a highly-regarded edible mushroom, an Italian egg-drop broth soup

Stringozzi - A thick, shoelace-like pasta

Sugo - An Italian pasta sauce, tradionally prepared with meat

Sweet breads - A dish made from the thymus gland or pancreas of a lamb or calf less than one year old

Tagliatelle - A pasta similar to fettuccine, but wider

Thanks, as usual, to Wikipedia, as well as practicallyedible.com.

When you live in an apartment building, surrounded by neighbors above, below, behind, and across the hall, and you work strange hours, you do what you can to keep the building quiet and peaceful. I have an example. When I came home at eleven tonight after my shift to find that my brand new air conditioner had apparently blown the fuse to the circuit that all of my lights are on, I tried not to trip over and threaten more than seven or eight objects as I stumbled through the darkened and cluttered apartment, looking for the flashlight. When I reconnected the circuit in the basement and heard my malfunctioning fan scream piercingly its return to life from those two floors below, I made a reasonable effort to cover the distance quickly to shut it off. When I was finally able to wash the bus-bacteria from my hands and knocked the soap dispenser into the bathtub, where it shattered, I limited myself to only two or three minutes erupting curses at my miserable life and that darkest of days on which I was born.

Remember, always try to be a quiet and respectful neighbor.

Here's something you may enjoy. Thanks to my sister for the heads up.

Look out, it's more preposition humor. I stole this one from joe-ks.com, via Ben Yagoda's book, If You Catch an Adjective, Kill It:

Sent to prison as a first-time offender, an English student was told by a longtime inmate that if he made amorous advances to the warden's wife, she would get him released quickly. "But I can't do that," he protested. "It's wrong to end a sentence with a proposition."

Okay, let's make it a double; this one is also noted in Yagoda's book. Winston Churchill, having been corrected after violating the sentence-ending preposition rule, supposedly replied with: "That is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put."