Matt and Mike visited with us two weekends ago. One of the highlights was a second trip to Museum of the Moving Image, on that Saturday. M&M and I went this time specifically to catch Jim Henson's Fantastic World, which I had seen back in November 2009 in Doylestown. In that linked Hawleyblog post, I had mentioned that Miss Piggy and some other characters weren't in the traveling exhibit because of legal disputes. Well, they must have gotten at least some of them worked out because Miss Piggy, dressed in her wedding gown from The Muppets Take Manhattan, is now in the show.
On Friday evening, Tony and I treated all of the Gerbers to dinner at Bistro de la Gare, like we said we'd do for a Christmas present. We all enjoyed our meals a good deal. And Tracey, Tony, and I partook of the wine Tony and I have been most enjoying from BDLG's list: the 2006 Château Roc de Candale, a grand cru Bordeaux from the St-Emilion appellation. Fancy! *nose in the air* Not really. But it is very good. And when Tony and I go to BDLG on Tuesday night, which is half-price-bottle-of-wine night, it seems like a steal.
I have no good photos from the dinner. The one that I took using the flash on my iPhone camera has an annoying amount of brightness. And the ones I took without the flash look bad when enhanced in iPhoto.
On Saturday morning, the guys and I had breakfast at Cafe Minerva, where Dan and Paul and I ate on New Year's Day. Here's a photo of the cute dining area with the central coffee bar:
And here's a photo of my cute 'phews at the Queens Plaza subway stop, where we switched from the E to the R:
It had snowed a bit overnight but not enough to be too much of a pain in the ass. (And it snowed a little more on our way back to the subway after our museum visit.)
On the way out of the subway in Astoria, in the Steinway Street station, I snapped a photo of an ad for a Spanish-language TV show starring celebrity chef Aarón Sanchez, with a tooth blackened out by some wiseass. I knew Tony would get a kick out of the ad (and the fact that Sanchez has his own show on another network) because Sanchez and Alex Guarnaschelli are our favorite judges on Chopped. Sanchez comes across on Chopped as a guy who'd be too refined to have oodles of ink, so I was surprised to see the sleeve tattoos in the subway ad. And he's got them all over his torso, it turns out.
The guys really enjoyed the Jim Henson exhibit. And I enjoyed seeing it a second time.
Afterward, we played some arcade games:
Reflected in the Frogger screen in the photo of Matt is the marquee for the Tut's Fever Movie Palace, which was showing an episode of a Dick Tracy serial from 1941. We didn't catch that.
We had a surprisingly good macaroni and cheese for lunch at the museum.
M&M helped me cook dinner for the four of us. I had bought a sirloin from a stand at the Greenmarket that sells both beef and buffalo. I had thought I was getting beef, but as I discovered when I took it out of the freezer to thaw, it was buffalo. The guys had said on Friday that they would be up for trying it, so that's what we cooked. They liked it. And they also liked the oven fries and carrots roasted with minced ginger and orange juice that they helped prepare. And the next day, when Tracey was with us, Matt said, unprompted, that his favorite salad dressing is my kaffir lime dressing that I put on the salad that we ate before the buffalo. (Or, as Matt called it, the Gruffalo.)
For dessert, M&M and I had more of those mini pies from the Meredith's Bread stand at the Abingdon Square Greenmarket. I got the one shown below. Mike got pumpkin, and Matt got cherry.
After dinner, we watched Labyrinth, which was available via download on Netflix. I had asked whether they wanted to see that or The Dark Crystal, another of the movies that was discussed in the exhibit. I'm not sure now why it didn't occur to me at the time to ask them about seeing one of the older Muppet movies. I guess because M&M had just seen the new one. Which they very much liked. Tony and I haven't seen it. I'm sure we'll catch it when it's available on Netflix.
I hadn't seen Labyrinth either, but I remember loving The Dark Crystal, which was released when I was in 8th grade. I read the book too.
We all thought Labyrinth was a decent flick. The synth-heavy music made it seem dated to Tony and me. But the special effects were well done. And a young Jennifer Connelly did a fine job as the teenage girl who must navigate a labyrinth filled with unusual creatures to retrieve her half-brother from the Goblin King, who's played by David Bowie. Tony joked that the wardrobe people went with the clothes Bowie had on when he showed up. Ha! And I said the makeup people had to take a little off. Ha!
Here's a photo of Rudy snoozing on his bed with his nose near Mike's sneaker. M&M thought it was cute/funny that Rudy slept that way all night and didn't mind the sneaker smell:
The next morning, the guys and I had breakfast at Grounded. They got bagels, and I got oatmeal.
Then the guys helped me with my second attempt at gluten-free baking: We made Chips Ahoy! cookies from the BabyCakes Covers the Classics book. We couldn't follow the recipe to the letter, though, because it called for mostly oat flour, which, as I've noted before, my baby can't eat. Instead of 1 1/2 cups of oat flour and 1 cup of all-purpose gluten-free flour, I used 2 1/2 cups of the GF flour. This recipe also included ground flax meal, which I thought made the cookies seem downright healthy—even though I know they're still loaded with sugar.
Here are the guys working on the cookie dough:
And here's the finished product:
I thought these cookies were phenomenal. Tony liked them but said he preferred the Lace Cookies I made in my first attempt. I said, not in a bitter way, that that was so predictable: Because ours is a relationship of opposites, it figures that he would prefer the cookie I liked but didn't love to the cookie I could have eaten every single one of in a day, if it wouldn't have made me sick.
After Tracey arrived to pick up the guys, she, M&M, Tony, and I went first to Darling, a clothing store I thought she would enjoy checking out. I pass Darling every evening on the way home from work, and I've liked many of the things that I've seen in the big display window that has a concealed fan to playfully blow the clothing's fabric. Tracey thought the shop was cute but didn't see anything she had to buy.
Then we got lunch at Bee Desserts & Cafe. I had a grilled chicken sandwich with a side of yucca fries.
And then Tracey and the guys went home, after what had been a Muppets-based weekend in the city.
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