A few weekends ago, Peter and I went down to DelMarVa for crabs. On our way back, we took the slow way through New Jersey. We needed to stop for dinner, so we picked a town at random–Lakewood–where we’d stop.
Downtown Lakewood, it turns out, is entirely Mexican–except for the Hasidic owners of Gelbstein’s Furniture. I finally got an inkling of what it might feel like, as a non-Mexican American, to have your town demographics shift in just a decade.
Last night at one of my freelance jobs, a woman I work with was musing on the current financial mess: “I figure, my family lived through the Depression. It wasn’t pretty–but they survived.”
Survival is key. But I worry that people today don’t have the same survival skills they did back in the 1930s. I mean, indoor plumbing was still pretty novel then. People still got blocks of ice delivered, in lieu of refrigerators.
We’ve gotten dangerously soft.
A while ago, we had a Code Red in the house: We ran out of butter.
Holy crap, I’m shivering with fear again right now.
No–it’s over. It was all just a bad dream. We solved that butter problem.
Our friend Katie had a significant birthday, which called for dinner. I haven’t been cooking much recently, at least not in a big way. It was very soothing to go through my cookbooks, make my lists, do all the mental tinkering, get the shopping done and get down to business.
First, though, the decks had to be cleared. Tragically, this meant the Spanish ham bone had to say good-bye. He’d been lingering in the freezer for more than a year, and much as I took satisfaction in having a little gauze-wrapped cloven hoof at eye level every time I went in to see if I had any more frozen bananas for smoothies…well, the time had come.
A little while back, I mentioned the blog New York Knife & Fork.
My suspicions about its overall uselessness were confirmed when she reviewed the joint right around the corner from my house, a Bosnian restaurant called Pasha.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think that a restaurant reviewer (especially a self-proclaimed one) should adhere to a certain code of ethics. Specifically, when confronted with a cuisine you know fuck-all about, you have a few options:
I’m still a little bitter over the loss of the French bakery on Broadway. But I can understand it. Astoria is not a French neighborhood. And for some reason, its residents seem impervious to the use of butter and sugar in the right proportions.
But a Craiglist ad suggests that the (I thought) successful Laziza, which rocks the house with Mid East pastries, is up for sale.
A few days ago I was enjoying my ad hoc lunch of fried egg, tomato chunks tossed around in hot butter and, in lieu of toast, big croutons fried up with some leftover pesto. I was reading the paper and not really paying a great deal of attention to what I was eating, except to occasionally pat myself on the back for essentially pulling a mighty fine lunch out of my ass (yummy as that sounds), and even think of putting it on a pretty plate.
But when I got near the end, the last four bites or so, I had to put down the paper and concentrate.
Without revealing salient details, I just want to mention an odd editorial debate that’s going on with one of the publishers I write for.
In a nutshell, the problem is whether a book should recommend songs (relevant to the destination) that have explicit lyrics.
Not that you were missing my Sisyphean Thai-dining adventures, probably.
I know I wasn’t–I’d totally forgotten about it in the whole server-move shenanigans, and it wasn’t till I went to write a new post that I realized it had been abandoned, like a 3-year-old accidentally left behind in the mall during the Christmas-shopping chaos.
So it’s back, safe and sound, and there’s a new post, even.
Oh, that is just the fucking coolest. I need more theme cakes in my life. (Scroll through the photostream to see more pics.)
The funny thing is, I was just at the Brooklyn Kitchen, for a pig-butchering demo (more on that in a bit), and I saw that very same pirate-ship cake mold. “Rad!” I thought. And then, “Agh–dangerously close to Williams-Sonoma.” And I turned away.