In Which I Try a New Kind of Meat

I don't have a heckuva lot to say about yesterday, and I haven't been to the Radio Shack yet to facilitate the posting of pictures, so this will be a short one!

We had a long but productive rehearsal. The show goes up on Friday, so we have a lot to do, but everyone's working hard and rocking it out!

I realized at lunch that I had like ¾ of the ingredients for anything I might want to make – but not all of the ingredients for anything. So I box mac 'n' cheesed it, and I'll make a quick grocery run on my lunch break today.

And for dinner, none of us wanted to feed ourselves but neither did we really communicate, so Meridith and Tess ended up at the Brewery and Stephanie and I wandered around until we found the BBQ Shack, where we ate...

...caribou sandwiches! This guy (Bob – he's lived all over Alaska, including on the Aleutian islands, and used to give tours in Skagway before he settled here and opened the restaurant) has all kind of wild meat on his menu, actually – caribou, elk, salmon, buffalo – and he says that as the season gets going he starts having a wild meat buffet, which sounds tremendously exciting. Meanwhile, the caribou had been sort of pounded into these smooth rectangular patties and put on just a regular sandwich with bbq sauce and lettuce and stuff, and it was delicious! Very savory. Stephanie and I had been on the hunt for hot dogs, and weirdly enough this sort of hit the same spot, although it was tastier/less processed.

And that's about it! Hung around the house in the evening, chatted with Michael, who's been teaching himself finger picking through the winter, who used to frequent a bar in New Orleans where all the musicians came after 2 am and jammed together, who started directing the show up here in 1984 and did so for four summers before he quit to run his Mexican restaurant in Baltimore, and then who came back up here in 1998 and stayed! What a cool cat.

And now – to rehearsal!

Haha I forgot about this picture from Juneau.

Kitchen Reflections

I love it here, and the weather is great - lots of warm summer days (actually, I could stand a few more and a few hotter - it's no California, but it's 8 million times better than New York), interspersed with surprise mountain storms. I just went for a run in the rain! That's two days in a row of going for a run, although they're only 10-15 minute runs of probably less than a mile, because those hills are DESTROYERS OF LIFE, plus the altitude. And I just got a letter from Katie, and the shows are going great, and my coworkers are delightful, and I'm living in a nice house with a large and functional kitchen (I made sour cream coffee cake last night - new recipe - yummy!) (the 9,500 ft. baking conditions aren't even that difficult to work around, either - extra flour, an extra egg, underestimate the sugar, turn up the oven 15 degrees, and you're solid :p), and now I have a nice cup of tea to take with me into my bath in my claw foot tub! I miss my ice cream maker, though, and I miss sitting outside in the sun on my sidewalk in Queens wearing a floppy straw hat and having a homemade milkshake in a teacup. You know, miscellaneous moments and habits are what make a place home, maybe. Actually, about the only two things I miss about Irvine are driving with friends to the beach (not even the beach part as much as the driving with friends toward the beach part!) and sitting outside on the enormous sidewalk in the sun wearing my floppy straw hat and having neighbors lean down from their balconies and offer me tacos. So I guess I just like food and sun. I can get that here! Vestiges of homesickness, gone!

I still miss the ice cream maker, though.

Here's the new Millay poem I just memorized:

"The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn't a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn't a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not be knowing,
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Sometimes I think Millay knows everything about me!

Actually, that poem reminds me of another one of hers that I love:

"Not in this chamber only at my birth--

When the long hours of that mysterious night

Were over, and the morning was in sight--

I cried, but in strange places, steppe and firth

I have not seen, through alien grief and mirth;

And never shall one room contain me quite

Who in so many rooms first saw the light,

Child of all mothers, native of the earth.

So is no warmth for me at any fire

To-day, when the world's fire has burned so low;

I kneel, spending my breath in vain desire,

At that cold hearth which one time roared so strong,

And straighten back in weariness, and long

To gather up my little gods and go."

Home everywhere - but nowhere so much home that I'm not missing somewhere else.

And I kind of love it.

Anyway, I guess this was a pretty miscellaneous post, and after a substantial hiatus. It's not as if I haven't been doing actual things out here for the last few months - sushi in Colorado Springs, a familial visit including the tram up to Pikes Peak, karoake at the bar, the '20s-themed birthday party of a coworker, a latke-vodka party last week, the super rad farmers' market in Woodland Park, time in the sun on the porch with Hazel my wonderful stage manager and housemate, free Zumba classes 2-3x/week, picking up shifts at the coffee shop across the street (I started out as a regular - like, she knows my order and gives me discounts and I hang around - and all of a sudden today I was employed!), Impi bars with peanut butter chips, brownies, Italian chocolate-almond torte, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, coffee chocolate chip cookies, tons of great science fiction/romance/classic reading, and I just started watching Girl Code on Youtube (I'm degenerating with this list here! But seriously, one episode in, and Girl Code already rocks. I still have some Psych to get through, too!). And it's not as if there's not tons more stuff I want to do here, that I probably won't even have time for - the mine tour, more time in Manitou Springs, shopping with a couple coworkers, the museum at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, hiking....

But I'm not going to try to cover all of that.*

Instead, I'll leave you with one more poem. She's still on the travel theme here, but not too melancholy - just saucy!

"How shall I know, unless I go
  To Cairo and Cathay,
Whether or not this blessed spot
  Is blest in every way?

Now it may be, the flower for me
  Is this beneath my nose;
How shall I tell, unless I smell
  The Carthaginian rose?

The fabric of my faithful love
  No power shall dim or ravel
Whilst I stay here,–but oh, my dear
  If I should ever travel!"

*Praeterition = my third favorite literary device! Partly because of its fun name, and partly because sometimes it's like winking at a person (although sometimes it's like stepping up in their face to challenge them and then stepping back passively as if you've been friends all along, which is also sort of my style, unfortunately).

I Probably Don't Want to Read This Book

but I LOVE the cover!

If only, possibly, because I'm so sick of photo covers.

Anyway, here I am in LA, hanging out with Ethel and Ruthy and Alexia, soon to see Meredith and the good ol' OC, San Diego for a wedding... oh, you know all this!

Also I'm reading 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. Science fiction, but not up my usual alley. Very long. I'm almost 200 pages in and I'm finally starting to get into it. We'll see how it goes! Also I'm memorizing 1492 (I think I posted it in my Chanuka post!), publicizing CSJO and J-West, I wrote two songs (except they're sort of the same song) on the plane and can't wait to sit down at a piano and get the stuff behind the lyrics and rough melody, scribbling a bit more flesh-out into the opening third of the book I started writing 8 years ago (I know I can finish a novel, I've done it before... but, you know, can I? and will it be good? It isn't, yet), seeing Zero Dark Thirty tonight (ack. But I know it will be good for me), MEXICAN FOOD.

I love California!

Emancipation and Pasta

So last night was great. Katie and Faye and I grabbed soul food at Manna's on 134th and Malcolm X, which I'd been craving for some time. Mac and cheese, collard greens, truly amazing candied yams (and I do not like my yams candied), mashed potatoes, bread pudding, plantains. Yum!

Then we went and saw the Emancipation Proclamation Exhibition at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. It was really good. The exhibition was pretty simple, in a small room, and it pretty much consisted of the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, a later draft on vellum, on the other side of the room a typewritten first draft of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 100-year anniversary Emancipation Proclamation speech (with his edits on it in turquoise ink!), and some explanatory panels. But the panels were thorough and detailed, a good brief refresher on the events surrounding emancipation and then a quick journey through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and post-Civil Rights challenges for blacks and others who still face systemic oppression (p.s. I love that museums will come right out and say things that are true, without equivocating or doing that thing the media does where they include viewpoints that are wrong in order to be balanced). And seeing the Emancipation Proclamation, written in Lincoln's hand, with bits copy-pasted in from a previous speech published in the newspaper, with caret-ed in edits, was just amazing, as was seeing the bits of MLK's draft and editing process. It only took half an hour to view the whole exhibit, but it was moving, educational, and totally rewarding.

In other news, round challah drizzled with honey, for a sweet and round new year!

Can anybody tell me what exactly would make a year round,

and why that is desirable?

I made it into French toast today, and that was great, although I think I actually still prefer my French toast from sourdough; it makes the flavor more interesting and vibrant.

Also I made salted caramel ice cream with salted caramel praline, and threw in leftover frozen bits of homemade cinnamon pecan roll, and it's delicious although too salty because when I halved the recipe I forgot to halve the salt. But I would make it again, with the correct amount of salt, and I can already tell it's an amazing recipe! (Recipe can be found here, btw. David Lebovitz is so great.)

Leftover giant upside-down cinnamon pecan roll.

These are a big pain,

even if you're in the habit of making bread,

but SO DELICIOUS.

Also, about a month ago I made pasta for the first time! I had like 18 egg yolks leftover from all the macarons for my tea party, and the pasta dough alone used up 7 of them. What a hilarious, pain-in-the-ass, kind of fun, ultimately delicious process!

You really do make a well of flour 

and throw the eggs and other ingredients in it,

and then...

Stir it up with your fingers! 

For a really long time. 

Until it turns into... 

This! And you incorporate the rest of the flour with a pastry cutter!

Eventually you get a ball of pasta dough! 

It is very important to pose prettily

as you grate parmesan for the alfredo sauce. 

It is also very important to wear your

original French chef hat

from New Orleans. 

After the dough chills in the fridge,

you roll it out AS THIN AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN,

which is difficult and not really that thin,

and then pizza cut it into

fettucine heaven! 

Success! 

Lots of cheese and more egg yolks for the sauce! 

Scrumptious homemade pasta,

and I am ten egg yolks down!

I also made tapioca pudding (which I thought I liked, but blech, I need to toss it), green tea shortbread cookies, and ice cream with the remaining yolks. A good food month!

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!

Yesterday

was super fun!

It was Alex's second day off in a row, after almost a month of nonstop work. So we made a day of it!

First, we went ice skating in Bryant Park!


This was fun. It was not even too cold, and by the time we'd been skating for half an hour, I had taken off my gloves, scarf, and hat, and unbuttoned the top of my coat! It took a little while to find my skating legs, but then I got pretty good. Today my hip flexers and the tops of my quads are so sore!

Anyway, once we stopped ice skating, after about an hour, I was suddenly so hungry I could barely function. So Alex took charge, and found us a little Cuban restaurant on 45th and 5th - and it was a total find! Alex ordered empanadas, which were only ok - Mama's in Sunnyside is much better - but I had a pork sandwich with sweet plantains and green salsa and onions, and it was just the perfect combination of flavors. And I don't even really like pork!


Escape to Cuba!

After eating, we thought we would continue subway stopping the 6 for a while. So we wandered over toward the 51st St. stop, drifting at one point into a very very fancy hotel-type building, all lit.


Eventually, we got on the subway, and emerged several stops later at 86th St., as we had last left off at 77th. The area around 86th and Lex is not particularly interesting, as far as I can tell, but there is a cute bakery we did not enter.


There are also pretty lights, and a good looking restaurant that was closed.



We had walked east a couple blocks at this point, and started heading north toward the 96th St. stop, and come 90th St., we happened upon Ruppert Park. I am interested in parks, so we wandered through!


One tree looked like it was conducting!


Once we had crossed through the park to what I guess was 91st St., we found that for a block it was a pedestrian-only street, which is great.


We also passed the Tasti D-Lite that Alex and Meredith and I stopped at a year and a half ago when we were walking down from the top of the park looking desperately for frozen yogurt!


Also, we found the super sexual pill.


We eventually achieved 96th St., and took the train one stop up to 103rd, which housed a lovely mural.


We also stopped at the East Harlem Cafe, which was cozy and lovely and delightful despite their bad hot chocolate. I would go back for the coffee and the atmosphere!


Across the street were some truly great murals.


We reached 110th St. and turned left, heading toward the 2/3 stop at Malcolm X Blvd at the top of the park; we had some business on the Upper West Side, which shall remain unelucidated because it involved buying a present for somebody! On the way, we walked along the Harlem Meer, which is beautiful in the evening.



After our business on the Upper West Side, we headed down to Finnerty's at 13th and 2nd - the only 49ers bar in the city, as far as we can tell! It was great to walk into a sea of red, to feel at home among California expats for the '9ers-Steelers game - especially because the game was so so great and satisfying and exciting and fun!

We were among friends.


Anyway, there are more pictures from yesterday, and I'll post the full album on facebook, possibly as part of a winter album. (Although first I should make sure I've put up all the fall pictures I want to!) Tomorrow I'm having a latke party, so I'll have to keep y'all updated!

P.S. Usually when I go to create a new post on blogger, it gives me the options of viewing what I'm doing in html or in, I don't know, regular, where it actually has buttons to do what I want to do and format how I want to format. But today it is only showing the html option! This is a pain, because I don't know all the html codes for centering text, changing font size, etc. Does anybody know what the deal is or how to fix?