Posted in Eats, Travel, tagged berries, food, Le Pain Quotidien, Manhattan, New York City, oatmeal, organic oatmeal, Photographs, postaday2011, steel-cut oats on March 26, 2011| 3 Comments »
Yes, I DID go all the way to Le Pain Quotidien, a fabulous bakery in New York City, and ordered organic steel-cut oatmeal with fresh berries. I had pretty much threatened to do this a few weeks ago.
It was entirely worth skipping croissants and danishes to eat this masterpiece instead. Creamy and nutty, it made me realize that I need to figure out how to utilize milk in my version of steel-cut oats instead of simply water and/or orange juice.
Posted in Do One Thing, Home, Travel, tagged baking, challenge, Christmas, Do One Thing, holidays, husband, junk, kitchen, marriage, New Year's resolution, New York City, pantry, piano bench, postaday2011, Pylones, resolution, stacking wine bottles, storage, travel, vacation, wine, wine pyramid, wine racks, Wine Stack, wine storage on January 4, 2011| 1 Comment »
The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.
Day 2: I labored over whether I should include purchases in this challenge. As the sole board member, I voted “yes.”
When we were in New York City in early December, I saw this nifty little device in Pylones that allows you to stack up to 10 bottles of wine safely and efficiently. I realize that other people have wine racks on their countertops and walls and even on top of their kitchen cabinets, but proper wine storage demands protection from light and temperature variations. Thus, most of our everyday wine (“everyday wine” … we sound so sophisticated) is stored in the bottom of the pantry, far away from the stove and other sources of heat.
The bottles, however, tend to arrange themselves in a mishmash, no matter how carefully they’re initially placed. Any stacking at all requires something extremely heavy and unneeded to prevent rolling, and unstacked bottles rolling around on their sides waste a tremendous amount of vertical cabinet space.
Thus, when I saw the incredibly neat pyramid of wine bottles enabled by the Wine Stack, I pointed it out as just the thing we needed to fix the wine problem back home. My husband looked at it and declared that we would definitely figure something out when we got back.
I should have picked up the Wine Stack and carried it to the register, but what I didn’t realize at the time (yep, still learning after 15 years) was that his comment could be translated as follows: “I do not recognize this wine problem you describe; therefore, I shall forget this discussion in approximately 3 minutes.”
So, when I was trying to put the pantry in order last week after a round of holiday baking, I mentioned this solution we were going to figure out. The husband paused for a couple of seconds, and said, “I guess we should have bought one of those wine things while we were in New York.”
Sigh.
I ordered my Wine Stack on Sunday night, and I’m counting it as my second Do One Thing act of the year.
Day 3: I cleared off the piano bench, a hotspot for downstairs junk like books, magazines, gloves and scarves. Every house has a spot like this. Of course, now that I’ve swept it clean, I need to maintain a subresolution of keeping it clean.
Posted in Eats, Photographs, Travel, tagged breakfast, cooking, cowboy stew, cranberry compote, cranberry foam, destination dining, Doughnut Plant, doughnuts, eating out, EN, EN Japanese Brasserie, Facebook, food, Foreman Grill, hummus, husband, Jean Georges, Krispy Kreme, lasagna, Manhattan, New York City, oatmeal, quinoa, raisins, restaurant, sake, salad, sandwich, steel-cut oats, subway, sweet potato cake, tofu, travel, vacation, Valrhona chocolate, walnuts on December 14, 2010| 6 Comments »
From Jean Georges in Manhattan: Warm sweet potato cake with a cranberry compote and cranberry foam.
When the husband and I go on vacation, we tend to plan our itinerary around food. We’re not the only people who do this, but I get mixed reactions from a few folks, some of whom apparently expect to hear more about the shows we’ve seen in New York City (most recent count: 0) than our sake-tasting and evaluation of the freshly made tofu at EN Japanese Brasserie (evaluation: awesome).
Some people get it: After a recent photo documenting our pilgrimage to the Doughnut Plant, one Facebook friend noted, “You take the best doughnut vacations ever!” Indeed, we do.
So what’s with our vacation food obsession? Honestly, we eat like monks at home. We have old-fashioned oatmeal (or steel-cut oats, if there’s time) with walnuts and raisins for breakfast every day. I almost always have a fresh salad and quinoa or hummus for lunch, while the husband consistently has a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Dinner might be homemade lasagna or something easy, like a cheese sandwich pressed into submission on the Foreman Grill with a bowl of leftover Cowboy Stew. We rarely go out to eat. We’ve found that one of the consequences of cooking your own healthy, delicious food at home is that your average restaurant food doesn’t measure up anymore.
What does measure up, however, is your above-average restaurant food. And this is what turns our vacations into the pursuit of destination dining. So while I can’t be bothered with a 10-minute drive to Krispy Kreme for Hot Doughnuts Now (trust me when I tell you that growing up with a Krispy Kreme within easy driving distance makes their doughnuts way less of an attraction later), I am perfectly willing to make a 15-minute hike to the subway station, stand on a crowded car for five minutes, make a 10-minute hike to the Doughnut Plant and stand in a long line for a Valrhona chocolate doughnut. I deem the calories worthwhile.
And that’s how my photo albums end up filled with pictures of doughnuts, ice cream, cheeseburgers and steamed shrimp, while we forget to take pictures of ourselves. Sorry, Mom.
Posted in As Pictured Below, Christmas, Photographs, Travel, tagged Christmas, cold, December, decorations, iPhone, Manhattan, New York, photograph, Rockefeller Center, TiltShiftGen, TiltShiftGenerator, travel, vacation on December 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »
Freezing near the Rockefeller Center, I ungloved one hand long enough to get this shot, because I knew I just HAD to run it through the TiltShift Generator.
If I make any more trips to Manhattan in December, I’m getting a pair of those iPhone-friendly gloves.
Posted in Eats, Photographs, Travel, tagged Atlanta, bottle, Coke, cola-cola, high-fructose corn syrup, immigrants, imported Coke, imports, inmigration, Mexican Coke, sandwich, soda, Star Provisions, sugar on October 28, 2010| 3 Comments »
I recently got a peek at the Mexican Coca-Cola trend during a visit to Atlanta. While standing in line for a sandwich at Star Provisions, I overheard the guy ahead of me convincing his dining partner to try a bottle. Never one to let a culinary opportunity pass me by, I grabbed my own Mexican Coke out of the refrigerator case. The cashier congratulated me on my choice.
Fans of Mexican Coke claim that its use of sugar makes it superior to the U.S. version, which is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. I admit it was a delicious soda, but it also came in a glass bottle, which always seems to make beverages taste better, at least to me. I also don’t drink a lot of soda, so my taste buds may not be equipped to allow me to accurately proclaim the supremacy of one formula of Coke over another.
What I found odd, however, was sitting in Atlanta, the home of Coca-Cola, listening to folks waxing poetic on the superiority of Coke made in Mexico, a product that was originally imported into the United States to appeal to immigrants. It just seems weird, in light of the anti-immigration mood that has swept the country, for Americans to appropriate a product that exists here only because Coke was trying to appeal to immigrants. No immigrants = no Mexican Coke.
Posted in As Pictured Below, Photographs, Travel, tagged apps, Atlanta, bridge, Coca-Cola, Coke, iPhone, Mexican Coke, miniaturizing, photo effects, photograph, photography, TiltShift, toy train, train, train set on October 26, 2010| 1 Comment »
I had purchased the TiltShift Generator app last year after seeing some inspiring photographs on SevenDead, but I never seemed to find the right subject for its miniaturizing effects.
Finally, I saw this scene while crossing a bridge in Atlanta last week and had to stop. The app did just what I expected it to, making the scene look like an elaborate toy train set. Then I had a Mexican Coke. In Atlanta. Where they make regular Coke. But that’s another story for another post.
Posted in Eats, Photographs, Travel, tagged Atlanta, Ben & Jerry's, Big Wheel, biscuits, brother, childhood, cooking, cream cheese icing, dogs, exploration, family, farm, grandchildren, grandfather, grandmother, ice, ice cream, ice cream freezer, Irwin Street Market, Jake's Ice Cream, kitchen, Lowe Mill, Nutella, pie crust, potatoes, red velvet cake, strawberries, woods on October 21, 2010| 1 Comment »
When I was a child, a visit to my grandparents was a magical event. They had a farm with gardens, cows, tractors and sometimes even horses. My brother and I were transformed into free-range children, loosed to explore the edge of the woods, climb big hills of red clay and ride the Big Wheel up and down grassy slopes, dodging excited dogs and fallen tree branches along the way.
The food was also an adventure. I can’t think of my grandmother without picturing her in the kitchen, mixing biscuits by hand, cutting up potatoes or rolling out a pie crust.
One of the culinary experiences we looked forward to the most was homemade ice cream. My grandmother always kept one of those old-fashioned hand-crank wooden barrels on the back porch; once it was deemed hot enough outside, she would make a ton of ice (or get someone to pick up a couple of bags on the way back from town), gather the salt, make the ice cream base and prep the grandkids for hard labor.
Because if we wanted ice cream so badly, we were going to have to work for it, turning the crank until the mixture thickened so much that we our little arms just couldn’t turn it anymore and our grandfather had to come to our rescue and finish the job for us.
The ice cream always came out thick and delicious, not as firm as it would be after a couple of hours in the freezer, but good enough to eat without having to wait. And while we were good kids, waiting for ice cream after all that work was not on our list of things to do.
Fast forward to the late 1990s, when I my husband gifted me with an electric ice cream freezer. I was disappointed when my first batch emerged from the canister not merely soft, but soupy. When the second and third batches did the same thing, I packed the freezer away and gave up.
(Yes, you can buy hand-crank ice cream freezers, but they make way more ice cream than two people [these two people, anyway] can eat, and we don’t have any readily available child labor.)
I was on the verge of tossing the freezer a couple of years ago when I gave it one more chance and it redeemed itself with a recipe for strawberry ice cream from the Ben & Jerry’s recipe book. Alas, that’s the only ice cream recipe that emerges from the maker ready to eat.
I’m ready to give it another go, however, because the Red Velvet ice cream from Jake’s Ice Cream in Atlanta is everything I’ve tried to accomplish in homemade ice cream and more. It was like a fresh piece of cake, cream cheese icing and all, mashed up in a scoop of ice cream. Only it had all been frozen together at once, without the cake drying out or freezing into crunchy, unsatisfying bits.
We visited the Irwin Street Market location of Jake’s, a former warehouse housing several creative food vendors. The building’s got kind of a Lowe Mill feel, for any Huntsvillians reading, only on a smaller scale.
The husband had the Nutella flavor, which I don’t even SEE on the menu. Jake must spend his days dreaming up awesome new flavors. I want Jake’s job.
Anyway, I’m trying to decide whether to dump a measure of red velvet cake and cream cheese icing into my unpredictable (or, I guess, quite predictable) ice cream maker or just mash some cake and ice cream together toddler birthday party style. It’s a win either way, right?
Posted in Travel, tagged Atlanta, car, Chicago, coach, food, home, Huntsville, iTunes, jetsetter, playlists, road trip, singalong, travel on October 20, 2010| Leave a Comment »
I’m finally back home after eight days of running. We drove to Atlanta, drove back to Huntsville, then flew to Chicago and back. I actually woke up yesterday morning slightly puzzled as to what city I was in.
I sort of feel like a jetsetter, only I don’t think jetsetters fly coach. Or make special iTunes playlists and assign car occupants individual singalong duties.
Anyway, more to come on some delicious food in Atlanta and how awesome it is to reconnect with old friends.
Posted in Photographs, Travel, tagged alabama, bats, batyaking, canoe, caves, Guntersville Dam, iPhone, kayaking, Lake Guntersville, North Alabama, Sauta Cave, TiltShiftMaker, Toy Camera on July 6, 2010| 2 Comments »
We finally made it to Lake Guntersville to see the bats emerging from Sauta Cave at dusk last weekend. We missed the group “batyaking” trip due to the husband working overtime, but since we had been waiting for nearly a year to see these bats (they only do their massive-flight thing during the summer), we dutifully loaded our kayak onto the truck and headed to the Guntersville Dam, where we schlepped the boat down a rocky pathway to the water.
Immediately, I realized why the batyakers make their trip in a big group on a Friday night: We were the only kayakers in a huge gathering of power boats ending their Saturday boating (on a holiday weekend, no less) with a trip to the bat cave.
And how much do I love saying “bat cave”?
The power boaters were the most polite boaters I’ve ever encountered, however, so we really had no worries mingling among them. The trip from the launching point at the dam to the bat cave (heh) took about 15 minutes at full kayaking speed; we got there at about 7:50 p.m.
We didn’t see any bats until around 8:15, when we started noticing them swooping around the boats like little X-wing fighters. No pics, because it was nearly dark when they emerged and they moved so fast that I didn’t even know where to aim the camera.
After about 30 minutes of action, the bats seemed to be finished, or maybe it was so dark we just couldn’t see them anymore. We kayaked back to the launching point in the dark, which was kind of scary yet awesome, and reloaded the kayak.
This is definitely must-see entertainment for North Alabamians with a canoe, kayak or other boat.
Entirely Adequate 