my parents made this spicy and sweet cinnamon tea about a week ago that i tried reproducing this afternoon. the ingredients are simple: boiled water, brown sugar, a crushed piece of ginger, and a piece of cinnamon - in this case chinese cinnamon, which is just the bark of the chinese cassia (i bought a bag yesterday in chinatown for less than a $1). at first i used half a cup of sugar, but it didn't taste sweet enough so i added another half cup. it still wasn't the same and i probably need to add more sugar and/or cinnamon. the ginger is only for show and i couldn't taste it at all. afterwards the house smelled like cinnamon for the rest of the day.

spent most of today trying to catch up on a backlog of movies and shows overfilling my hard drives. i finally got caught up to speed on all the episodes of HBO's in treatment. each episode is less than 30 minutes and it's pretty much a real-time psychiatry session. it's the kind of show that i'd find boring, but i was drawn in right from the first episode and after i watched 5 (meeting all the patients, one for every day of the week) i was hooked.

breakfast is the easiest meal to make. certain food are just breakfast food, things like cereal or scrambled eggs or french toast. dinner is more complicated and the choices infinite. no wonder i eat more for breakfast (actually in my case, lunch) than i do for dinner these days. today was no different: french toast + chicken sausages + cinnamon tea + smoothie or breakfast/lunch, but just a microwave hamburger with a glass of coffee milk for dinner.