Land of the Wine Beverages!

So the Sherbs and I bit off more than we could chew with a Mark Bittman recipe involving roasted vegetables and yogurt - possibly because A) our broiler sucks and B) we don't have a broiler-safe casserole dish even if it didn't.

Also: it takes freaking forever to char tomatoes. Should I just put them over an open flame or what?

To counterbalance our not-quite success with the roasted eggplant, peppers, and yogurt, we made sangria - and stumbled upon a not too bad recipe. I don't think we'd use Weinstock kosher red wine again (it is so tannic), but a mix of red wine and cranberry wine, with chunks of granny smith apples, was tart and refreshing and did not taste as if we were trying to make Bartles & Jaymes (speaking of which - now that we have Mike's Hard Lemonade and such, does anyone drink Bartles & Jaymes anymore?).

We had a goodly amount of the sangria watching the Joan Collins film Land of the Pharoahs, which is sort of a telling of how the Pyramid of Giza was built, if you can allow for glaring failures in plausibility such as Joan Collins playing a deceptive and murderous Cypriot. There are some supporting characters who are interesting, but they take up only about a half hour of the hundred-minute plot, about as much time is taken for long pans across Egypt watching extras pretend to haul or build things.