Hawleyblog

A Movie-Filled Weekend With the 'Phews

Matt and Mike visited with us last weekend, and we saw some terrific movies at the IFC Center.

On Saturday morning, M&M, Tony, and I saw A Monster in Paris 3D, which was part of the New York International Children's Film Festival. I can't find information on a U.S. release date for the movie, which had had its U.S. premiere at the festival the night before. But I've got to imagine it will get a wide release here because a mostly new voice cast, including Sean Lennon, Bob Balaban, and Catherine O'Hara, was brought in for the English-language version. Here's the trailer.

We all thought A Monster in Paris was wonderful. It was very funny at times and beautifully animated, and it had some great songs and action-oriented scenes too.

That night, we caught the Oscar-nominated animated short films, like the 'phews and I did last year. Tony, Mike, and Matt all agreed that Oscar voters had made the right choice; their favorite was The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. I enjoyed it too but preferred Pixar's La Luna, which I found to be delightful in concept and execution.

Matt liked The Hybrid Union more than the rest of us. Tony enjoyed Wild LIfe almost as much as TFFBOMML. And Matt and I enjoyed Nullarbor—which, like THU, was a "highly commended" film and not an Academy Award nominee—more than Mike and Tony. Matt and I agreed with Mike that it was pretty predictable, but its cleverness won the two of us over.

I teased the guys that when we got home from the movies, they had to eat a piece of chicken before going to sleep. The previous night for dinner, we had fried up 3 pounds of homemade chicken fingers. (I had gotten a little carried away in the meat section of Whole Foods Friday morning.) We ate them with purchased duck sauce and roasted red pepper tapenade—like we did on New Year's Eve—and ketchup. We also made mashed potatoes and sunchokes (which M&M had never tried before, mixed in with potatoes or otherwise), roasted carrots in blood orange juice and ginger (very similar to the carrots we made the last time they visited), and a mixed lettuce and sorrel salad with Meyer lemon dressing. Matt once again liked the dressing so much that he drank the last of it from the serving cup.

For lunch on Saturday, we went to Gobo. The 'phews enjoyed their green tea noodles with a meatless Bolognese-style sauce. Tony had a hearty winter soup with coconut rice. I got one of my usuals, the Butternut Squash Risotto. Matt took a photo of his lunch. Just like his uncle.

That evening, before we went to see the short films, we ate at Kin Shop. M&M ate rather adventurously, as far as spiciness goes. They started with the Steamed Pork Meatball Soup and shared the Northern Thai Style Curry Noodle with brisket for their entree. Tony began with the Stir Fry of Aquatic Vegetables and, as he's often inclined to do, got duck for his main course. I had the Bibb Salad—with Brussels sprouts, pumpkin seeds, lady apples, and Szechuan peppercorn vinaigrette—to start and then the Curry Noodle. The brisket was super tender, and the curry was delish. I had been thinking about getting a fish dish—because one of my foodie goals for Mike and Matt is to get them to eat fish other than the usual kid stuff like fish sticks—and I would have gotten the Braised Skate if the sides that came with it had been more appealing.

On our walk back from the movies, three different people commented on the Frost Valley sweatshirt Matt was wearing.

The guys told me about the songs they made up that would be on a Christmas album about Rudy, including "I Saw Molly Kissing Rudy Paws" and "It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Rudy." Ha!

After Tracey and David arrived on Sunday, we all went to Bistro de la Gare for brunch. I ordered a rasher of bacon just because I was curious to see how much I would get and because I wanted to say "rasher of bacon." I got three slices.

To end this post, here's a photo of the Gerber guys looking at their phones on the couch while Rudy cuddles up to David.

Valentine's Day and Presidents' Day

On the Saturday before Valentine's Day, I visited Matt, Mike, Dad, and Granny at the Gerbers'. Tracey and David had gone away for a few days to Puerto Rico, and Dad and Granny were hanging out with the guys. It was a pretty low-key day.

M&M and I played some video games. I petted on Molly.

The guys left to go ice skating at Rockefeller Center with their youth group from the temple late that afternoon.

Dad, Gran, and I had dinner at Smith Brothers—which sometimes, erroneously, calls itself Smith Brother's on its signage and website—in Ridgewood. It was OK. The food and atmosphere, like the bad punctuation, reminded me of South Jersey. :-)

And so did these people: Gran ...

... and Dad.

***

Tony and I had our Valentine's Day dinner, on the Sunday before, at Commerce. For our entrees, we both got the Red Snapper with Eggplant and Bok Choi in a Thai-Inspired Broth. "Sooo good," I raved on Facebook. "I drank all of the broth." That sauce was actually a little too salty for me, but it was loaded with flavor.

Here's my boy posing thoughtfully. And handsomely.

***

I took the 13th and 14th off so I could go to the 136th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. I wrote a lengthy post about it over at Queer New York.

Before the second night's judging, Lou and I grabbed a quick dinner at Pizza Suprema. It was much better than the average slice joint. Quite good.

Here's a photo I took from our not-so-great-but-good-enough seats during the Best in Show judging.

***

The following Sunday, I made Hamburger Soup, from homemade vegetable broth and tomato puree, ground beef, Bintje potatoes, sweet potatoes, and multicolored carrots from the farmers market.

***

The next afternoon, on Presidents' Day, I met the Schultieses at FAO Schwarz. At Christmas, I had told Abbe and Zane that I would take them to the toy store to make their own Muppet Whatnots. Bob told me earlier in the day that Zane had woken up singing about making a Muppet. :-)

The kids selected the characteristics for their Muppets by placing stickers on a sheet.

Then we had some time to kill while the Muppets were created. Bob posed with a sample Muppet:

And with a pound of Reese's Cups:

That works out to 100 calories per $1.

I posed with a candy bar I'd never heard of but that nonetheless summed me up perfectly. And it looks like that gal in the orange jacket agrees.

After the Muppets were made, we headed downtown to have Hamburger Soup with Tony, who'd had a busy day for work or else he would have joined us at FAO Schwarz.

While I heated up the soup and the adults had some wine, the kids went up to the nephew cage to play with their Muppets. Zane had immediately named his Mr. Bob. Later, Abbe chose Princess Maya as her Muppet's name.

We adults had salad for a starter, with a bell-pepper-and-onion dressing I made. And on the side with the soup, we had Mary's Gone Crackers crackers, which Bob and the kids liked much more than I had thought they would, because they're very seedy and nutty. (The crackers, not the people. :-) I figured Jen would like them.) And Abbe had two helpings of the soup. Winna!

The boys.

And the girls.

For dessert, I had whipped up some chocolate chip cookies, just like the ones I had made with the nephews during the Muppets-based weekend they spent with us.

Jen told me on Friday, when Tony and I went over for a pizza night, that the kids had been playing with their Muppets constantly all week, which they'd had off from school.

That was a fun night too, with Tim and Lauren, Mike and Gina, Mil, and a surprise appearance by the kids' piano teacher, Louis, and his artist partner, Michael.

I'll end the post with a Muppet that Zane had made for Tony and me and a thank-you card the kids made while they were upstairs, with materials Tony had left up there for them.

UPDATE on Feb. 29: Here's a photo of another terrific card I got that I had meant to put in the post, from Tony for Valentine's Day:

Two Plays and an Exhibit

Two weeks ago Sunday, Tony and I went to see Anything Goes with Dan, Paul, and Dan's momma, Josephine. First, we got lunch at Ceci, an Italian restaurant where Tony and I had eaten once, in between the media event and the party for the season 3 finale of RuPaul's Drag Race.

We all enjoyed our food. It hadn't been that long since breakfast, so I didn't eat a lot. I got the Rigatoni Pollo Ceci, which was in a pink vodka sauce and featured sundried tomatoes in addition to the chicken.

I had ordered the tickets for us, and when I went to the will call window to pick them up, I thought it was strange that there was a line for refunds. As we realized not long after, thanks to signage in the lobby, that was because Sutton Foster, who won the Tony for best actress in a musical, was off that day. "The role of Reno Sweeney will be played by Tari Kelly. Noooo!" I wrote on my Facebook wall. My biggest theater-fan friend, Andy, commented: "You can exchange for another date. Sutton is above the title. Go to the box office." But we weren't not going to go, because of the trip involved for D&P, who had picked up Dan's mother in South Plainfield on the way in from Trenton. And I was really excited to see the show anyway, even though I was very disappointed not to be seeing the Tony Award–winning actress for the first time. (I never caught her in Shrek, The Drowsy Chaperone, or Thoroughly Modern Millie.)

It didn't take long at all for Kelly to win us over; we all thought she was terrific. And Paul, who had caught the show once before, with Dan, when Foster wasn't taking the day off, said he found Kelly to be better in some ways. For instance, he said, he thinks Foster tends to overenunciate when singing.

I'd still like to see Foster sometime. Maybe I'll take Dad to see the show.

***

Last month, Tony, Joyce, and I caught Other Desert Cities, starring Stockard Channing, Rachel Griffiths, Stacy Keach, Judith Light, and Justin Kirk. The production was great, and the actors were outstanding, to a man/woman. I left the theater feeling like I needed to think some more about the play. Overnight, I realized that I wasn't buying into the script.

THERE ARE SOME SPOILERS HERE BUT NOT THE BIGGEST POTENTIAL SPOILER OF ALL: The plot concerns an author, Brooke, visiting her über-Republican parents, Polly and Lyman, for the holidays. Her second book is about to be published, and she wants her family, including her younger brother, Trip, to have a chance to read it beforehand because of its controversial nature.

The book isn't a novel, as Brooke had originally claimed; it's a memoir focusing on the eldest sibling in the family, Henry, who committed suicide after perhaps being complicit in the death of a man killed by a bomb planted by a left-wing group he belonged to. Polly and Lyman are horrified by the book. They want Brooke to wait until after they're dead to publish it. And toward the end of the play, they reveal a huge secret that provides a reason deeper than their own embarrassment for why she shouldn't publish the book. That secret is so big that I would never have been able to forgive my parents for keeping it from me until I was in my early 40s/late 30s, as Brooke and Trip are. But the play makes it clear that that wasn't the case for those two characters. It was especially difficult for me to accept that Brooke was able to move on from this revelation because she had had a breakdown a few years earlier and was perpetually struggling with depression, largely because of what had happened to Henry.

Light plays Polly's alcoholic sister, Silda, who secretly helped Brooke write the book while hiding her own Henry-related secret from her.

The play did a great job of having you go back and forth about how much you liked/disliked the various family members. But that big reveal blew everything that came before it out of the water and made the nuances of character seem like a waste of time.

*** 

A week ago Saturday, Tony and I caught Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, at the Brooklyn Museum. (The exhibit closed yesterday.) It was powerful enough to move me to buy the companion book.

The most-moving image for Tony was Interim Couple (1164) by Bill Jacobson. I enjoyed the levity of Poets (Clothed), Poets (Naked) by Wynn Chamberlain and was haunted by Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph of gay archhomophobe Roy Cohn.

A Muppets-Based Weekend With the 'Phews

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.

A Food and Drinks Post With a Couple of New Obsessions, a First Attempt at Gluten-Free Cookies, and Some Catching Up, Part II

In November, I bought some crosnes at the Union Square Greenmarket from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm. As you can see in the photo, they look like grubs. They taste slightly nutty after being lightly sauteed in oil.

***

Tony has made ribs a few more times in the slow cooker, including once when we had Lou over for dinner after New Year's, using this recipe from About.com Southern Food, with a couple of tweaks. He also made them once in the oven using this Alton Brown recipe, but we didn't like them as much.

And he made a wonderful lamb tagine that we ate on Dec. 10, along with one of the three delicious wines DC Mark and Mike sent us. (We didn't wait until Christmas to open the box. Or the bottles.)

He's also been doing some juicing. Here's a purty and tasty pineapple and cranberry layered concoction he made me last month:

***

On Dec. 17, Jack treated Hanif, Mark, David, and me to dinner at Dirt Candy. He had also invited Tony, who politely declined the offer because he didn't think DC would be able to accommodate his dietary needs. Even though it's a vegetarian restaurant, the menu includes a lot of dairy and bread-like substances. Like the Jalapeño Hush Puppies with Maple Butter that we devoured as a pre-dinner snack. And the waffle that came with my cauliflower-centric entree. I enjoyed everything very much, but my favorite course was—shocker!—the dessert: Ice Cream Nanaimo Bar, made of sweet peas, mint, and chocolate. 

Mark and Hanif:

Jack and David:

David had also gotten the cauliflower entree. All of the appetizers and entrees were built around one ingredient; carrot (which we shared along with the hush puppies), corn, celery, and Swiss chard were some of the others.

***

And speaking of Swiss chard, my favorite salad green I found at the Greenmarket this fall was micro Swiss chard. The Two Guys From Woodbridge had it one day not long before Christmas, but I haven't seen it since.

***

On the first Friday of this month, I went to Bob and Jen's for a chicken and eggplant parmigiana dinner. Kelly, who was Jen's maid of honor at B&J's wedding, was visiting from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Here's what the four of us looked like back then, on July 19, 1996, in my photo of a photo from B&J's wedding album:

And here are Kelly, Jen, and Judy in the present time, posing for me during dessert:

Willy and Emily and Vita and Steve were also there from B&J's building. It was a great night.

A Food and Drinks Post With a Couple of New Obsessions, a First Attempt at Gluten-Free Cookies, and Some Catching Up, Part I

It's been a while since my last all-food-and-drinks post, so I've got some catching up to do. But first, my two new food obsessions:

I've been buying kaffir limes at my new health food store, Integral Yoga Natural Foods, and using them in salad dressing. If I put some sliced apple and radish in the salad, I've got sweet, tart, and bitter all in one bite. Outstanding.

My second obsession is dried pineapple. I bought some of it maybe three weeks ago from the Organic Avenue near where I work, and I really enjoyed it. But it was very expensive and packaged in plastic. Lately, I've been buying it in bulk at IYNF. It's more reasonably priced, I can carry it off in one of the bigger reusable cloth produce bags that Dad and Jean got me for Christmas, and I'm almost certain it's organic. (I think that's what the sign at the store said.)

And my first attempt at gluten-free cookies:

At my request, Tony gave me the BabyCakes Covers the Classics baking book for Christmas. I have yet to visit the well-known vegan and mostly gluten-free bakery on the Lower East Side, but I've heard nothing but raves about it. (And I'll get there eventually.) And when I checked out this book at the Barnes & Noble near work, it looked like a winner. It's got recipes for things like waffles, breakfast buns, and all-time-favorite cookies, like chocolate chips and Snickerdoodles, all made without gluten or dairy ingredients.*

And donuts! How could I not mention the donuts? In a cover blurb, Mark Bittman says BC's donuts are "the best I've had in twenty years." I don't think it will be too long before I try out one of the donut recipes. But I'll have to buy donut pans first. Because these are baked donuts.

Two weekends ago, I asked Tony to select a cookie out of the book for me to take a stab at, and he chose Lace Cookies, which was the least-complicated cookie recipe in BCTC that didn't contain oat flour. (Tony is unable to eat oats even though some people with celiac disease can.) The majority of the recipes in the book contain arrowroot and xanthan gum, and BabyCakes proprietor Erin McKenna highly recommends using refined coconut oil as the butter substitute in most of her recipes, though canola oil is named as an alternate. And unsweetened apple sauce shows up a lot too, in combination with the oil. IYNF had only unrefined coconut oil, which would have made the cookies taste strongly of coconut, so I ended up buying the refined stuff and the arrowroot at Whole Foods.

I liked the cookies, but Tony was a bigger fan. Which was better than the reverse would have been. :-) I took some to the Game Party, and they were well received there too.

Here's the bowl of dry ingredients:

Here's the dough:

And here's the finished product:

***

The brunch photos in my previous post reminded me of the very good brunch I had at Malaparte back in October.

Mashed potatoes and eggs! At another, more recent brunch there, I got a classic Spagetti alla Carbonara.

At the end of October, Paula and Mark P. joined us for dinner at Commerce.

The waiter took photos of the four of us with my iPhone, but they all turned out somewhat blurry. And I looked possessed in every single one of them.

Commerce was our old favorite place. Bistro de la Gare is our new favorite. The owner/chef is very friendly and comes out of the kitchen to check on her customers. We like that. And because they use rice flour as a sauce thickener and use butter in only those items on the menu in which it's specifically mentioned in the description, it's a great place for Tony to eat. (And as I mentioned in one of my 86 or so Christmas/New Year's posts, we had said we'd treat the Gerbers to dinner there. And we did that. On Friday. But that's a story for the pending blog post about my nephews' visit this past weekend.)

We took Bob for dinner at BDLG back in early November because he visited and helped us with some technology-related apartment issues.

As usual, he wouldn't smile for the camera. Because he sucks that way. :-)

On a visit later that month, just the two of us, there were some handsome cyclamens outside the door, planted with cabbages and ivy.

*As author Erin McKenna explains in a note about the complete gluten-free-ness of the recipes in the book, BabyCakes sells some products made with spelt** flour, but she worked hard to create spelt-free versions of Wonder Buns and other bakery favorites for her GF readers. Thanks, Erin!

**Spelt is a wheat variant that some people with gluten senstitivies can eat without digestive difficulty.

Christmas 2011 and New Year's 2011–2012, Part IV

Dan and Paul drove up on that Saturday afternoon with their sweet ol' woofer Claire.

I made fried chicken strips for dinner, along with a couple of my staple sides from the fall and winter: spicy butternut squash and roasted cauliflower with garlic. I dipped the chicken strips in beaten eggs with Cajun seasoning and salt blended in and then dredged them in gluten-free King Arthur flour that Tracey had given me at Christmas. After frying the chicken in a mix of canola and olive oils in my big cast-iron skillet, I seasoned it with more of the Cajun spice mix and salt, and we served it with purchased duck and red pepper sauces.

I fried up more chicken for our guests, and Tony and D&P helped set up for the party. I knew Eugene was bringing frozen latkes that his cousin had made and that we'd heat up in the oven. That was one of the reasons I had decided to try making fried chicken: I figured we'd have a little fried-food, Hanukkah-ish theme going on.

We had a good crowd, in addition to D&P and Eugene: Hal and Stacy, Hanif (but not Mark because he was still in North Dakota), Jack and his friend David, Bri, Rich and Vince, John and Keiko, and Lou. Most everyone was looking at the TV in these photos because it was getting close to midnight.

The next morning, D&P and I got breakfast at Cafe Minerva, a cute little place on W. 4th Street I've walked past innumerable times and had been meaning to try. My Uova al Pomodora was awesome. D&P know the drill by now: to pose with their plates. :-)

A little while later, Tony and I ate at presumably-gluten-free-friendlier Le Pain Quotidien with Vince and Rich. Even though LPQ has claimed to be able to accommodate GF orders, Tony has always been somewhat skeptical—because pain is in its frickin' name and gluteny bread is everywhere. We noticed that the menu now acknowledges, in exact wording I can't recall, that the restaurant can't guarantee a GF experience. And Tony prefers a restaurant that admits to such a possibility rather than pretending to be completely safe when it knows it's not. He got the fruit bowl. I got oatmeal and a chia seed muffin. What a great way to start off the new year: two brunches. Woot! :-)

That night, I took a photo of the large building to our west that had the cutest Christmas tree perched on a northernmost terrace. It's cuter in the embiggened version you'll get if you click on it.

Christmas 2011 and New Year's 2011–2012, Part III

Granny had gotten out the Tangoes set of tangrams that I had bought for Pop many years ago.

Tony and I and Matt and Mike tried to solve a few of them.

And because I realize there were no people in the photos from the last post:

Mike (in green) and Matt unwrapping a present

Dad and Jean checking out the wine Tony and I gave them

Rob excited to see that he's unwrapped a telescope

Tony and M&M at the Green Olive. We all went there for breakfast on Monday morning. So it was an official Souf Jersey visit.

The next weekend, we had two parties for New Year's. Because we had invited people fairly late, we decided to have guests over on both the 30th and the 31st, in case they'd already made plans for New Year's Eve.

John R. and his girlfriend Keiko stayed with us Thursday night. We went to dinner at Slice.

The next evening, before our first party, we had the Schultieses over for dinner. Tony made stir-fried chicken for Bob, Abbe, and me and stir-fried shrimp for Zane, Jen, and himself. I made a salad for a starter. And for dessert, flourless peanut butter cookies that I'll definitely make again. I made Tony three of them without chocolate chips and the rest with chips for those of us who can eat chocolate that may contain traces of dairy product.

Zane and Jen. Behind them, you can see part of the row of dwarf Alberta spruces we had a landscape designer plant behind the greenhouse so that we could have some lit-up (but otherwise unadorned) Christmas trees. That's all we've asked Amber to do for now, but this spring, with her guidance, we're going to start growing some more plants and get some furniture out on the deck so we can really enjoy the space in warmer weather.

Abbe and me

And my dinner

Mark M. and José and Andy were our only party guests later that night after John and Keiko took the train to hang out with John's friend John G. in Jersey. It turned out that most of our friends were still available to come to our party the next night, Saturday night. I fell down on the picture-taking front, so I don't have any new photos of MJ&A from that Friday night. We had lots of fun, chatting mostly about the theater and other forms of pop culture.

Christmas 2011 and New Year's 2011–2012, Part II

On Christmas Eve, Tony and I drove down in our rental car with the Rudester. We had the borsch for lunch at Granny's. She didn't like it.

That evening, we had the usual Christmas Eve cold cuts and sides, including Jean's wonderful green Jell-O salad that, like so many things I mention on here, I would have sworn I'd written about before but doesn't turn up in a search. Dad and Jean had bought kosher salami for David but no mustard. He ragged on them all night because he couldn't put mustard on his sandwich. On Christmas day, Dad went to Acme—who knew it would be open?—and bought some Gulden's spicy brown. Before David and the rest of the Gerbers came over to Granny's for lunch—Dad had brought the leftover sandwich makings to Granny's too—I doctored the label of the mustard.

That's Souf Jersey–speak, bitches!

Rudy seemed underwhelmed by the squirrels-in-a-tree-trunk toy I got him.

Since then, he's played with the squirrels a bit. And I've gotten him to pull the squirrels out of the trunk to retrieve a biscuit at the bottom. And after we got home, Tony had fun posing the squirrels on and around our snoozing boy.

We started opening presents at Dad and Jean's before dinner and finished up, with the Gerbers handing out their gifts, after dinner. Tony got me a Smokey the Bear like I had when I was a wee lad. Actually, I think I had two back then because I wore the first one out, if I remember correctly.

He had said I was either going to love one gift he'd gotten me or I was going to chuck it aside, and he meant this one. I loved me some Smokey. It was such a sweet idea. He also gave me a book of amazing portraits of monkeys and apes.

Everyone enjoyed looking through it.

Jean and Dad had the cutest little tree on the table between the front door and the sofa.

Tony and I gave Granny an organic-flowers-of the-month-club dealie. Her first bouquet arrived a couple of days before we did.

I had hoped to make pop-up cards for everyone in the family, but I didn't get them done. I made a rudimentary one with a pop-up fork for the Gerbers that I thought turned out pretty well.

It reads: "Have dinner on us at the restaurant of your choice. But not Per Se, because that would be taking advantage of us and our generous offer. And no wine pairings for Mike and Matt. Remember how badly that ended last time. And as always, for G-d's sake, DON'T GET THE LOBSTER!" (The last line is a standard joke of mine.)

I had invisioned the Gerbers picking out a nice place (but not Per Se kind of nice), putting the bill on their credit card, and letting me know how much it was, so I could pay them back by check. Tracey and David insisted that we should all go eat somewhere together. So we're taking the four of them to Bistro de la Gare, our new favorite neighborhood restaurant, later this month during the next 'phews visit.

Christmas 2011 and New Year's 2011–2012, Part I

A week ago Thursday, I made my soup to take to South Jersey for Christmas, as I am wont to do. Tony is big on making stock from scratch, so I started the soup with a stock made from roasted beef bones, carrots, and onions.

I'd bought the bones at Tony's favorite butcher shop in the Village. Ottomanelli is probably better known, but he prefers Florence. It's a charming little shop with a kitty cat and a sawdust-covered floor.

The soup was Ukrainian-Style Borscht, which I based on this recipe. And I'd based the stock recipe on this one. But I used allspice from the first recipe in the stock. And I used stew meat I got from the farmers market rather than meaty ribs to provide the chunks of beef. (I'd bought the beets and the beef on a whim at the farmers market, figuring I'd make borscht, before I looked at any recipes.) And I roasted the beets before skinning and chopping them and adding them to the soup. Tony said the soup was really good but wasn't very Ukrainian. And they would call it borsch, without the t.

The next day, I took the train to Franklin Lakes to bake with the nephews because, for Tony's sake, I can't really use regular flour in our kitchen. And because it would be fun to bake with the 'phews.

I wanted to make the Chocolate-Orange Sweet Rolls again that the boys had helped me make five Christmases ago. They tasted great, but they didn't puff up as much as I would have liked. The recipe says to heat a mixture of milk, butter, and orange juice to 120 degrees. Then you combine eggs, sugar, orange peel, and salt before adding the hot-milk mixture to that stuff, followed by yeast and flour. Something told me I should reheat the milk to 120 after I'd mixed the eggs and their friends together, but I didn't. I think that's why the dough didn't double in size like it was supposed to. It just wasn't warm enough to make the yeast really happy. So, like I said, the flavor of the buns was good but the texture wasn't what I wanted.

The 'phews made Chocolate Chip Biscotti with a little bit of help from me. They were delicious.

I stayed for dinner. Tracey made brisket in her slow cooker, and I made Bill's Browned Brussels Sprouts with BSs Tracey got for me. She really likes them now, and so do David and Mike. Matt still doesn't, and that's OK.

Mike and Matt lit candles for the fourth night of Hanukkah.

And Latke Larry sang his song about latkes when I squeezed his foot.

 

The train station at RIdgewood was all purty that night.