In Which I Am Better at Baking Than the Whole Internet

Because I made macarons today and got them right on the first try!

Every single baking blog I read claimed to have taken 3-10 tries to get them right. So I am better at baking than the internet! Or at least better at following directions.

Anyway, here is how it went down!

On Sunday I went to the apartment sale of a friend of Faye's, with Faye and Katie, to help them acquire stuff for their new apartment (of course, it is currently in my apartment, because Faye currently has no apartment and Katie is subletting a loft bed in Manhattan). Also at this apartment sale were things that F&K didn't need but I DID! These include two pastry bags and accompanying tips (actually, I can't figure out how to get the tips to go on and stay on and do their job, but fortunately for macarons you only need a basic round exit so I didn't have to attach anything successfully) and also a kitchen scale! The kitchen scale is very small and won't reset to zero with anything heavier than a pound on it, so it's not efficient and it's hard to read the display and I'd like to replace it with a better one when I can afford it, but it's good enough to measure ingredients for macarons for now! Also I spent $9 on an oven thermometer and $5.50 on a pound of blanched almonds at the Mediterranean grocery in Astoria (also I picked up a big container of black sesame seeds for $2, for macarons and ice cream and anything else delicious I can think of!). It turns out one recipe of macarons only uses a quarter pound of almonds, so it will be semi-sort of-affordable too keep myself in almonds. I also splurged on two colors of powdered food coloring at the cake supply store at Queens and 45th: emerald green and cherry pink. These will be good for when I make mint macarons and rose macarons. I also want black food coloring for black sesame macarons and blue food coloring for I don't know what kind yet of macarons and red and brown food colorings for chocolate macarons and gold food coloring for champagne macarons and ginger macarons and all the other macarons because gold is exciting.

So after I returned from those errands today, I got down to work! I was prepared to try two or three times today before giving up. So as not to waste ingredients on potential disaster macarons, I made only a half recipe - one cookie sheet of macaron halves - what should have been 18 macaron halves but was actually 17 because I spaced them poorly.

Anyway, I did everything that the recipe I picked and Stella at BraveTart said to do. I weighed my ingredients. I whipped the egg whites with sugar for almost ten full minutes (actually, I only did about 2 and a half minutes instead of 3 for each speed, because I had read that another baker found that it helped her macarons not to have hollow shells, but it still came to almost 9 minutes total). I did the macaronage without tentativeness, deflating my whites but counting my strokes and paying close attention so I didn't overmix and turn it runny. At this point I was not positive I had done it right - at one point I piped out a test macaron and it didn't spread quite the way I thought it should, so I piped the excess batter back into the bowl and continued folding for about 10 or 12 more strokes. In the end, both the one slightly undermixed and the 16 (I guess) correctly mixed macarons came out fine. I piped the rest of the macarons onto the parchment paper. I don't do circles beautifully, but they came out ok. I let the macarons sit for an hour in case I had overmixed (it's not strictly necessary but it doesn't hurt). I checked the temperature of my oven (5-10 degrees hot, as I suspected from the first). I put the baking sheet on another baking sheet to even out heat along the bottom. And then I put them in the oven and proceeded to sit and watch them bake for the full 19 (and then another 4) minutes, because I am nerdy and was both curious about the process and also wanted to see exactly what would go wrong and when if something did go wrong.

Here is what they looked like right at the beginning:

Here they are about three or four minutes later totally growing frilly feet just like they are supposed to!:

I cannot tell you how exciting it was when I saw that first foot.

Here is the first crack (not supposed to happen, in a perfect macaron):

I cannot tell you how concerned I was about the whole batch when I saw that first crack.

Fortunately, only four of the seventeen cracked, and only one little crack apiece (I have seen pictures of macaron disasters where every macaron has collapsed with 6 cracks!). I think some of it had to do with the poor job I did tearing and straightening out the parchment paper and then putting the pan in the oven, so a few of the cookies weren't sitting flat on the pan.

Here is the picture that just revealed to me what I didn't notice after 23 minutes of staring at eye level at my oven, which is that the oven door is totally disgusting:

Ew.

Anyway, I checked them at 19 minutes, when they're supposed to be done, and ruined a macaron (two macarons, I thought at the time, but one fixed itself when returned to the oven!) in the process - basically you're supposed to try to take a macaron off of the parchment paper, and if the top comes off in your hand they're not done yet. I did this with two, and one I totally destroyed but the other I put the top right back on and it fused back with its bottom! Anyway, then I stuck them in the oven for what was going to be two minutes but I got nervous and confused and they weren't browning or anything so I figured I had a few more minutes before I overcooked them (they are not supposed to brown at all) so that turned into four minutes (with me still sitting there staring at them the whole time, haha) and then I checked another one and it was done and I took them out! Here they are out of the oven, with beautiful smooth domes and magnificent feet!:

Success!

While they were cooling, I mixed up some Italian meringue buttercream, because I am fancy. This involves cooking egg whites and sugar over a double boiler until they are about 150 degrees (good thing I have a CANDY THERMOMETER now, eh?!? :D), then beating them in a bowl until they are cool (ugh, this takes forever, and also glass bowls, like I have, retain heat, so the buttercream never got as cool as it was supposed to so after I beat in the butter it still wasn't thick so I had to pop it in the fridge for a bit) and beating in room temperature chunks of butter and a little vanilla and salt. Basically, it tastes like straight up butter with some sweetness. Hilarious but also delicious. And then I flavored one section with Tasmanian leatherwood honey, which Tom (Jamie's ex) gave me like two years ago and which I like but which has a very strong and distinctive taste so I go through it very slowly, and food colored it "sunset orange" with a mix of plain ol' cheap liquid food colorings; and then I flavored one section with rosewater and colored it "dusty rose," and set aside some plain vanilla for later.

Here are the rockin' results!:

You can't really see the pink of the buttercream in the other one I took a photo of, so here instead is a picture of just the buttercream:

Anyway, they are delicious too - crispy on entry, full of chewy cookie, bright Earl Gray taste (actually a little too much bergamot in this variety of Earl Gray for me, so I won't make this flavor again for myself, but Beauty Queen Amanda loved it and I think everyone else will too), creamy sweet buttercream with just a gentle flavor.

Basically, I am the rock star of the kitchen! Next up: mint chocolate macarons. I think. My mind could change between now and Thursday (tomorrow I go teach in Jersey. Although I have time to bake before I go, so I might do that too). Maybe I'll make some for Faye's birthday tea party too! Although I think I am already booked to make green tea cake and ginger ice cream and maybe scones. So we'll see ;)

Oh, and btdubs, here is a quick pic of those cinnamon rolls I mentioned in the last post:

The Macaron Investment

The question is, of course, whether to buy the kitchen scale, piping bags and tip, buckets of blanched almonds, and powdered food coloring (because bright colors improve all food!) necessary for learning to make macarons.

And I do mean "learning to make" as opposed to just making, because based on all reports - even the down-to-earth non-magical-thinking one I've decided to subscribe to - macarons are complicated and finicky.

But, you know, now that Grease is done, I have the time and the inclination. I've gotten better and better in the kitchen over the last couple years, and I'm careful and good at following a recipe.

And then there's the part where I'm completely obsessed with the idea of making them.

I mean, come on! They are so pretty! And delicious, which I didn't expect out of them before I tried them. I'm so picky about dessert, and they really look like they would taste like sweet cardboard, despite how pretty they are. But it turns out they are delicious! (Based on the two I've ever eaten - a rose flavored one and, I think, chocolate chestnut, or something like that.) And they are filled with buttercream, after all. And I've never done French or Swiss or German buttercream before, so that would be totally exciting! I love the crispness and then the chewiness and then the softness, and all the flavor without too much sweetness.

And all the flavors I could try! I have rosewater - I made rose ice cream the other day - and I could make caramel ones, and chocolate, and chocolate mint, and bourbon pecan... as with ice cream, the possibilities are endless! Plus it would actually complement my ice cream habit really well, as many ice cream recipes use 5 or 6 egg yolks, and I have trouble figuring out to do with all the whites. The answer, of course, is make macarons, which call for lots of egg whites!

But a good kitchen scale - I read good things about the OXO brand - that holds up to ten pounds, which I would probably want because my bowls are glass rather than stainless steel, so a couple pounds already is $30-50; powdered food coloring is about $2 per 1/2 oz of color; piping bags are about $4 apiece; and almonds (which would be my biggest ongoing cost rather than single startup investment) are like $6 for 8 oz! Yikes! None of that is egregious, of course, but it's more than I want to spend, especially since my entire discretionary budget has been going to train tickets to get to work, and also I really want to see Once and Newsies on Broadway (which at least is tax-deductible for me!).

I wish it were my birthday already! Oh well. I will either decide to do it or not. And I will be sure to let you know if I do, and blog about all of my macaron triumphs and travails!

In the meantime, yesterday I made giant upside-down cinnamon pecan rolls, and they are sweet and delicious. Not an everyday treat - they need a double rise, which I'm used to now from regular bread making, and also you have to roll the dough out into an 18"x24" rectangle (the size of my entire counter!) and brush it with butter and sugar and cinnamon and roll it up and cut it into pieces, which is not terribly difficult but kind of a pain - and they're gigantic (so you need a lot of people around to eat them) and too sweet for me to eat all the time - I prefer richness to sweetness - but they are pretty darn good. Faye and Alyssa and Katie and Alex and I wolfed them down after a dinner of spinach salad, vegetables with hummus, and roasted asparagus last night, while watching season 2 of Sherlock. Great night!

Food (Spring 2012)

Here is the promised second food post!

But of course without pictures to guide me, I now have to rack my brain about what I've actually cooked in the last month or so.

For one thing, I made Carla a cake for her birthday (the six-layer chocolate fudge cake Aunt Carolyn always made for my birthday!). That particular cake is a pretty epic undertaking; the frosting alone is a several hour project. Most of that time is waiting for it to cool, but you do have to boil the cream and sugar in the microwave for ten minutes without it boiling over and ruining everything (I did not succeed at this - although I did the first time I made this  cake last year for Alex's birthday, so, confusing). And the recipe specifically says microwave - but I think that's just because Aunt C is a master of adapting recipes for the microwave so you don't have to stand over the stove for ages. Which I really appreciate, but next time I'll probably just make this icing on the stove, because it is less work than cleaning boiled icing off of every surface of the microwave.

We also had a seder here, for which Alex and Jamie and I (with the gradually accumulating help of many guests) cooked a legit feast! 60 deviled eggs, roasted asparagus, charoses (we thought it was a lot but it disappeared it seconds!), matzo ball soup (courtesy of Hannah), scalloped potatoes, a veritable mountain of salmon cakes (who knew 2 pounds of salmon could make 50 salmon cakes? we've been eating them for two weeks!) with horseradish sauce, 80 macaroons (well, I wanted to use up the coconut! but now we still have a few macaroons sitting in the Madeline lunchbox. probably should have frozen them), fresh mint ice cream (sooooooo good and I never make it because a large enough amount of fresh mint to make the ice cream is prohibitively expensive. I wish I could keep plants, because then I could grow mint and have it all the time!) and cinnamon ice cream (made from steeping cinnamon sticks! of which I got a whole container cheap at Foodtown not too long ago). Everyone had a great time reading from shared haggadas, reclining on our couches (actually the only way we can fit 15 people sitting and eating in our apartment), and feasting!

I also made avocado ice cream a month or so ago. This received very mixed reviews. I myself have mixed feelings about it. I think it would be better with a little less lemon juice - but Jamie thinks it needs more! Carla, Bobby, and Hannah loved it - but everyone else took one bite, made a funny face, and sent it back. It's just a very subjective one, I guess!

But there are so many weird ice creams I want to make! Creme fresh ice cream - egg nog ice cream - goat cheese ice cream - lavender honey ice cream (actually I just bought the ingredients for this yesterday - lavender is available at the Union Square farmers' market!) - olive oil ice cream - parsley ice cream - basil pine nut ice cream - coconut saffron ice cream - earl grey ice cream - polenta ice cream - buttermint ice cream (you can buy concentrated butter flavor!) - black pepper ice cream - ricotta ice cream! Plus of course more regular flavors, like butterscotch pecan, espresso, peanut butter, and rum raisin. Plus I really want to get ahold of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home, which is a great looking ice cream cookbook that my library doesn't carry. She uses a little cream cheese and a couple other techniques for thickening the ice cream and making it smooth, custardy, and scoopable, instead of making an egg custard base. Not that I've ever had problems with egg bases - whether the eggs are cooked or not (and yes, I'm very careful about salmonella; if I'm using raw eggs, I buy local farmer's market eggs from safely raised chickens, and wash the shells with soap before cracking) - but I'm intrigued to try her technique. She has a recipe for "the darkest chocolate ice cream in the world," which I want to try even though I have been disappointed by every chocolate ice cream recipe ever.

Anyway, enough ice cream (BUT CAN THERE EVER BE ENOUGH?!?!?). I was sick for a week, and then voiceless, and then busy, so I basically hadn't cooked in two weeks (peanut butter sandwiches! whole wheat pasta with cheese! grilled cheese! box mac and cheese! leftover potatoes and salmon cakes! lots of cereal!)... until yesterday! Yesterday Jamie and I went shopping and I got back on my game! We made hazelnut butter (I brought home a bunch of hazelnuts from my visit to Google with Alex's brother's friend Aaron, who works there and was here on a business trip. Google lets you eat all you want AND bring home all you want in a box, and has four cafes and unlimited hazelnuts for snacking! I still think Google is a little creepy, but eating lunch there was a cool experience!), chocolate hazelnut butter (way better than Nutella), maple butter (it turns out that if you heat maple syrup to 233 degrees F, cool it to 40, heat it to 60, take it off the heat, let it sit, then stir vigorously, it turns into maple butter! Chemistry is weird. Also hard, because no one had remembered to make ice in the last week, so we had about 15 star of David ice cubes [smaller than rectangle ice cubes], which made an insufficient ice bath for cooling to almost freezing. We eventually packed the pot with random stuff out of the freezer, then for the last few degrees stuck it itself in the freezer! Next time, I'll have ice.), pulla (Finnish sweet coffee-time bread. Flavored with cardamom. Jamie and Hannah like it ok; I think it's a little weird. Tossed the recipe), and crepes (sweet ones from Jamie's memory of Alf's recipe, not the plain ones from the blintz recipe. Taste pretty much the same, so next time I would make the plain ones because they don't have half a cup of sugar and also I have an easier time getting them out of the pan). I love to cook!

And today... I made cheese! I have only made a little so far, from two cups of milk, but it only took about ten minutes so I will totally make more (this time I'll try stirring in a little cream, maybe, and using lemon or buttermilk instead of vinegar to coagulate, because despite one blogger's taste test determining vinegar to be the least obtrusive,  I can still taste it a little). This is so exciting! I put milk on the stove for five minutes and then a few minutes of curdling and draining later, I have real cheese! I've read mixed things about whether you can make more cheese with the whey (it's possible that it's only possible with rennet-curdled cheese and not acid-curdled cheese, in which case I want to try with rennet, except I don't know where to buy it or what it costs), but everyone seems to agree that the whey can be used for many things and is full of nutrients, so I'll keep it on hand and do a little research this afternoon.

Also this afternoon, I will make the cheese into blintzes! It seems to be about the right consistency - along the lines of ricotta or farmer cheese - so why not? I also want to make these. You know, even when I get through all the recipes I have printed out in binders, photocopied in folders, and copy pasted or typed up in files on my computer, I still have over a hundred recipes bookmarked to try also! THE EXPERIMENT IS NEVERENDING. Which is both intimidating and great.

Anyway, here are the links regarding cheese, if you're curious:

http://www.thekitchn.com/recipe-diy-rico-23326
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/02/how-to-make-fresh-ricotta-fast-easy-homemade-cheese-the-food-lab-recipe.html
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Ricotta-Cheese

I'll keep you updated on the blintz, lavender-honey ice cream, and hopefully soon halvah situation! (Have I mentioned that I want to try my hand at halvah? Because it is delicious, and I do.) Happy cooking!

I don't remember what this was, but it looks chocolate.

Food (Winter 2012)

This is a post about food. It will probably be extensive, to make up for all the posts I haven't posted about food in the last three months! Here goes. (Let me pull up my folder of pictures for reference.)

Oh jeez, some of these are old (haha, January seems so long ago!).

For one thing, when I was home, I made pecan tassies, because I had been wanting to for ages, but didn't have the right pan, but didn't want the right pan because what do I need with a one-use pan? Anyway, they came out fun:

They are adorable, and would be popular among my friends in New York, but really they're not good enough to be worth the pain in the ass of shaping all those tiny individual pie shells. Next time I will just make pecan pie!

Shortly after I got back, I made peanut butter truffles, aka buckeyes:

Also individual and time consuming, but not as irritatingly tedious as the tassies. A little too sweet (how to get the right consistency in the center using less powdered sugar? maybe processed peanut butter instead of natural? because the natural is so wet and sticky, it really needed the sugar to smooth it out into a good filling) but still totally addictive. These warrant making again and playing with the recipe.

Next I made rumballs! I totally did not love these at all, but every single other person who tried them raved nonstop (even the people who are used to my baking and therefore have acquired some discrimination), so I'm keeping the recipe. They'll be great party favors/thank-you or birthday gifts/spoil-coworkers dessert. And they're attractive!

In a brief digression from baking, I am still making excellent use of the fondue pot. Usually, this involves Faye, Emily, and sometimes others coming over with ingredients, which is a great way to get me to bring this darling out of the cupboard for a new fondue recipe.

Here is the beautiful feta walnut fondue we tried in February:

It was thoroughly enjoyed by all!

The first one I ever made (which was a pretty straightfoward cheddar, I think) is still my favorite, though. I guess at heart I'm a basic-flavors kinda woman!

I also threw a chocolate fondue party a few weeks ago to welcome Faye's friend Katie to town, and it was a smashing success! All 10 or so of us couldn't finish the (double recipe) of chocolate fondue with fruit, pound cake, and (just to try it) avocado. (Avocado in chocolate, it turns out, really just tastes like avocado and chocolate. No blending or complementing - but not terrible.)

I also brought back from California a souffle dish, which allowed me to make the souffle recipe I'd had sitting around for some time!

 How pretty is this prep picture?

I love the stiff egg whites

and the creamy yellow yolks.

Folding away!

I am always afraid that things that are supposed to puff in the oven,

won't. 

But they always do!

I also made mushroom piroshkes one day when Alex was out rehearsing Rainbow Fish.

The batter for the dough looked so cool before I mixed it!

It was another of those have-to-make-a-bunch-of-individually-put-together-things recipes...

But they came out so beautiful - and so delicious - that it was totally worth it!

I would make them again. They are basically stuffed with mushrooms, cream cheese, and not a whole lot else that I can remember!

Anyway, back to baking! (I can never stay away from dessert for long.) I made these (I think they're firecracker fudge) cookies with peppermint icing a couple months ago. I think next time I would leave off the powdered sugar on the outside, which is a little too sweet. There's something a little funny or that I don't totally love about these cookies in general, but I'm not sure what it is - and I did keep eating them! Also, they're beautiful.

Here also are some pastries I made. They tasted fine. Like pastries. Tossed the recipe.

I also tried a whole wheat chocolate chip cookie recipe that everybody on the internet swears by. It was pretty interesting - a whole different thing from white flour chocolate chip cookies - with a more complicated taste and a more hearty feel. Jamie loved them, but Alex and I only thought they were ok. I don't remember if I kept the recipe (if I did, it's because Jamie pressured me!).

I also made some kind of layered thing with caramel (homemade - I'll get to that soon!), which I don't remember being any better than any of the other layered things I make, and which I think I tossed the recipe for.

But speaking of caramel (it is soon already!), I have been a little obsessed with ice cream sauces recently. The first time I tried to make caramel, it seized all around my whisk as soon as I poured in the cream. I was flipping out a little - I may have shouted at Alex to help me while also shoving him out of my way - but after some vain reconstruction efforts, I decompressed for ten minutes and then tried again, with much better results. In the two or three days after that, I made many sauces!

Clockwise from top left:

creamy caramel sauce (the one that went wrong the first time);

butterscotch sauce;

salted butter caramel;

classic hot fudge (PERFECT).

They were all delicious. I liked the plain caramel the best; Jamie loved the salted butter caramel; and butterscotch has a permanent place in Alex's heart. I also made a pecan praline sauce (with whiskey) that was delicious, a lean chocolate sauce that was fine but no competitor for the classic hot fudge, and several batches of vanilla ice cream to eat it all with! I still have a bunch of sauce recipes to try, too: dulce de leche; semisweet hot fudge; marshmallow hot fudge; marshmallow sauce; mocha sauce; and white chocolate sauce. Let's get on it!

And here ends the pictures I've taken of food recently, because after the sauces happened, Alex went on tour and I let him take the camera, since he would be doing more interesting things than I would. I do miss it for food pics, though! I'll draw this post to a close, though, since it's so long, and start another post on more recent cooking projects ASAP!

IT HAS BEEN SO LONG SINCE I POSTED

But now here I am again! Hooray.

Here are the brief updates:

Hannah is subletting from us and she is great! She took Carla and me to see Vintage Trouble, her friend's band, on Tuesday night, and they were totally awesome blues-funk-soul sexiness. They usually play in LA, I think, and if you live in LA or they are ever in your area, you should go see them! They have an album out next week, I believe.

Carla and Alex and I also saw Of Montreal play at Webster Hall last week. It was the second time I'd seen them and they were also totally awesome! Their new album is very dissimilar to their old albums but equally wonderful - less bouncy and whimsical, more trippy - but their show either way has the same blend nutty intensity, attractive androgyny, and performance art.

They had two openers. The second opener, a duo from Sweden (I think) was super boring. But the first opener, a guy named Kishi Bashi, was - wait for it - totally awesome. He plays violin, sings, chants, and beatboxes, and it's all fed into pedals so it can be looped. When he's live, you can watch him build these complex layers of music until it grows beyond anything you expect. We bought his (first!) album after the show!

I love this song.

Hm, what else is up? Poor Alex is sick and has been for a couple days, but (cross fingers) no one else has gotten it, and hopefully he'll be feeling better tomorrow!

Y'all probably mostly know that I'm working at a cool theatre in New Jersey called Porch Light Productions; if you don't, well, now you do!

Faye turned me on to Avatar recently, and I watched all three (COMPLETELY AMAZING) seasons in about three weeks. I highly recommend it to all. Each episode is only about 23 minutes, so it's a quick watch, and the world, politics, and character development are so great. Zuko/Katara forever! I'm also excited that Mad Men is back on, although I haven't watched any of the new episodes yet.

I'm currently reading Banner of the Damned by Sherwood Smith, which (like most of her books) is in the same world as the Inda quartet, although 400 years later (and another 400 years before A Stranger to Command and Crown Duel). If you aren't reading her, you should! If you want something fun, quick, and classic, start with Crown Duel; if you want total fantasy immersion in a completely original, pro-feminist semi-medieval world and story, go with Inda. They are all worth your time. The only equally exciting book I've read this year is Middlemarch.

And that's all for now, although expect a followup post very soon about exciting things I've been cooking! Plus, we're hosting a seder tomorrow and expecting 12-15 people; it should be really fun, and I'll keep you updated after on how it went :)

P.S. I got a Pinterest account! I haven't done that much with it yet, but what I have done is pretty nerdy and (I happen to think) very fun. Here's the link: http://pinterest.com/shoshaname/ And on that note, if you know any fantasy worlds with really cool maps, send them to me, because as you can see, I'm collecting!

Many Things All In One Week!

We made Christmas last week; Carla came over and I made her eggnog french toast.

I soaked the bread in the giant eggnog pot

and fried it into delicious!

Then she and Alex and I opened the giant mound of presents that had appeared over the course of the previous week and a half.

giant mound of presents

Lots of exciting present-unwrapping happened, which you can see on the facebook album I will upload very soon!

After that, we made enchiladas from no recipe!

mixture of enchilada sauce and oil for frying corn tortillas:

messy but worth it

yay friends cooking!

I wore the pretty sweater Alex's parents got me, and also the bows from the presents.

It was also a night of Chanuka, so we made some Chanuka.

The candles got attached in a neat way!

Here is a closeup:

After that was some movie watching and general merriment.

Here are some other things I did this last week!

Alex and I went grocery shopping one day (for what? you will find out momentarily!). Filene's Basement was having an unlikely sale.

Actually, that might be the day that Alex accompanied me on a shopping trip! That was Dec. 26th, for the sales. The stores were not too crowded, and the sales were pretty good. I got two tops at Banana Republic for $21 each marked down from $50 each; a pair of cute grey wool flats half off from I store I hadn't heard of before and don't remember, on 5th Avenue maybe around 20th; and a cute plaid flannel button-down half off from Old Navy. It was a lot of shopping, but we got Dos Toros in the middle, so that was ok.

Anyway, groceries also happened this week, because here is why:

Ben and Tara got us an electric fondue pot for the holidays! Also two fondue cookbooks (along with a regular healthy cheap food delicious looking cookbook)! One of the fondue cookbooks is the Melting Pot cookbook! We had to make fondue right away! Well, the next day, anyway. We made a cheddar fondue from the Melting Pot cookbook, with beer and sour cream and cream cheese and green onions and I forget what else but it was totally great, and dipped cubes of break and steamed asparagus and broccoli, plus later apples. We've been using the leftover fondue as a sauce on all bland things, such as polenta.

In fact, we fondued again today, this time with meat!

We should have probably marinated the meat first, but we forgot. It was delicious anyway, once we figured out the timing of cooking it just enough so it was tender. We made two sauces: a cocktail sauce from a recipe in the cookbook, which was ok, and a mustard-horseradish-mayo sauce with a little bit of Worcestershire sauce, which was awesome.

Next up we should make a broth fondue for meat, and also batter some veggies to fry in oil, and also make a chocolate fondue! The problem with chocolate fondue is that most things that you put in it suck (mainly because I hate fruit), but maybe I could make some shortbread or pound cake, and maybe also use banana. Any other good ideas?

So here is another thing from Christmas that has long-term awesome implications:

This is a great book! It has lists of many things I didn't know about! Now, the museums and when they are free or dirt cheap I mainly knew about already, but there are other things to do (many of them in the summer, sadly) about which I did not already know. Also, there are pretty darn good looking cheap-and-delicious restaurant listings, although they do not go north of the park, which is a damn shame. There are probably other locations they're missing for restaurants, but I haven't looked through the whole book yet, so I can't tell you where. However, the listings are so cool that Alex and I agreed to do at least 25 things in the book over the course of the next year! This includes all things listed -restaurants, museums, parades, staying in hostels (not actually likely), etc. We have already done two.

One thing we did was on the last night of Chanuka. The book tells about the world's largest menorah, which dwells during Chanuka on 5th and 59th and which is lit each of the nights. We went! It was pouring rain, and it turned out (unsurprisingly, I guess), to be run by the Lubavitchers, who are hilarious, and also the mayor was there. I am no fan of the mayor, but it was pretty cool still to be so close to him, as I had never had that chance and he is an important personage. The mayor and one of the Chabad guys (who kept offering me menorahs and reminding me to light my candles that night - "all 8!") went up in the ConEd lift (I know it was ConEd because the Chabad guy whenever he wanted something to happen with the lift would cry, "Mr. ConEdison!") and lit the candles (which sat in lanterns for protections) after some very fast praying. The Chabad guy kept cracking jokes about the mayor coming out in the rain, plus also at one point turned it into a bad political statement about how NYC doesn't negotiate with terrorists and neither does Israel. It was a very weird and also fun experience.

This is the best picture I got.

For a moment when I looked at it, I thought that the sky was a

Really Cool Color.

But that turned to be my umbrella.

The sky is brown with clouds and city lights.

It matches the buildings, more or less.

That is the mayor and the Chabad guy up in the lift,

plus some assistants.

On that very 8th night, Amanda lit the candles for our own menorah, and was cute!

Speaking of Amanda, she totally had two tickets to see the Merce Cunningham show that was here for three days at the end of the month, which he had been working on when he died, I believe, at an armory-turned-theatre at maybe 67th and Park. So I went to the show with her!

Now, I am often not a Merce Cunningham fan; he explicitly is trying to strip dance of story and emotion so that we are just appreciating and engaged by the shapes and movements of the bodies. This often is a failure for me; I like story. I tend to think that the purpose of all art is to tell stories and/or engage us emotionally. But then sometimes I totally get into what he's doing, just because the ways that the human body can move is really amazing. Then there's the part where I have a major love-hate relationship with postmodernism, and he is all postmodern: there's the super-postmodern music, naturally, and the costumes that may or may not have anything to do with the performance; then in this show the dancers were on three separate stages that we could walk around (not very well, because it was crowded), and you really couldn't watch it all at once, so you got some and you missed some and it was pretty disjointed. But then, because it's not telling a story, it's ok if you miss some of it, right? That's how I felt at this show, anyway, which I really really enjoyed. I enjoyed the music, I was totally into the movements of the dancers, I didn't mind the feeling that I was missing something while watching something else, and also the costumes (unitards that mostly sort of looked like they sort of had city scapes on them, with an overall sort of blue and green color scheme) were great. It's very interesting to me to watch how Cunningham's stuff, while it still has a current feel, is actually old fashioned in some ways. It is completely rooted in ballet, for one thing; while you can see how he tweaks the vocabulary to expand its range, and you can see the classical modern techniques he uses (filling the negative space, for example), the steps are still essentially ballet steps: sissonnes, pirouettes, developpes, glissades, promenades, blah blah, all the stuff I know. Also, while the movements he uses for partner work is modern, the essence of the partner work is very traditional: The man supports the woman. Even when it's not a lift - when it's, for example, someone holding an arabesque and resting a hand on the partner's shoulder (so essentially involving very little actual strength for the person with the shoulder) - it was still the man supporting the woman. I actually think it's a bit of a shame for someone who broke out of the mold in so many ways to still be trapped in that old gender binary, but, you know, so it goes.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the show, which was a perfect length at 45 minutes. But I still liked the woman who smiled and looked like she was enjoying herself more than I liked everyone else (she was the only one! At a professional level! Dancers really really don't pay attention to their faces! I knew that as a student, but assumed that dancers in the professional world knew how to, like, smile! I was wrong!). And I still liked the partnering best when the two partners seemed to connect. So I may have enjoyed the plain movement, but the emotional aspect clearly draws me in significantly and immediately even then.

Here is another thing I did this week:

Hung out with Denver, a friend from school whom I hadn't talk to since before graduation! Denver is great. She and Carla and I got coffee at Mud, which is the shop in the East Village that sends out a bright orange truck around the Astor Place stop sometimes, which is where I get off when I go work at NYU.

After that, her family - they were visiting her sister in Yonkers for the holidays - treated us to dinner at a delicious pizza place, the name and exact location of which I forget. How delightful!

Next up: New Year's! Carla came over for that, too, and I made chocolate peanut butter pie. I accidentally put in too much cream cheese, so it is a little over-the-top rich, and I am not a fan of the fudge sauce even though I put in a whole extra ounce of unsweetened chocolate (it called for two), but it is highly enjoyable nonetheless, because after all what can be bad about a peanut butter cheesecake-like pie in a chocolate crust with fudge sauce?

The crust was actually made out of cocoa wafers that I made from another of Alice Medrich's recipes. T'hey were fine in the crust, but I like the chocolate mousse pie crust better so will use that in the future, especially as the cocoa wafers aren't that good for anything else. So far Alice is about 1 for 4 on the recipes I bothered to copy from her book. (The 1 is a delectable honey ice cream I have made a couple times in the last few years.) Oh, well.

New Year's was fun aside from the pie, too. Basically Carla and Alex and I watched Spirited Away (we were going to watch Stand By Me, which I was dead certain I owned but which is not to be found - maybe it's with my parents? - but when we couldn't find it we watched Spirited Away instead, which is not at all the same but which we had from Netflix) and listened to music and drank about a bottle of champagne each, and went outside to watch some illegal fireworks, and generally stayed up until Carla had to leave for Newark at 3:45 am to fly home.

Then yesterday Alex and I watched football all day, which was great. I especially enjoy that the 49ers kicker threw a touchdown pass.

Last! Today! Alex and I did some errands, and we also did 25 Things Number Two by stopping for late lunch at a little restaurant called Sullivan Street Bakery on 47th between 10th and 11th! It was mainly bread things. Alex got a giant breadstick with olives; I had a giant square bread thing with pecorino inside; and we shared a brioche bun with gruyere and prosciutto (sweet and savory! amazing!) and also a sweet pastry with vanilla cream. Yum!

That is all for now (and gee! it was plenty!). The full photo album will be on facebook I hope tomorrow; we'll see!