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April 23, 2006

Gadget Mom

My parents love all things electronic. They're both tinkerers, and I grew up surrounded by the latest Apple or IBM version of the home PC, along with countless other generations of personal technology products. When my parents were young and broke, they scraped together enough money to buy one of the first reasonably-sized calculators. They had a microwave long before anyone else. I learned my multiplication tables by using a program Mom wrote in BASIC. In the mid nineties, they both had watches that could send and receive email. When Mom and Dad went on a trip recently, they took two humungous bags filled not just with clothes and books, but with various electronics they couldn't possible part with for a week: satellite radios, a mini-camcorder, a laptop, palm pilots, cell phones, digital cameras, and a portable printer.

Given these tendencies, I was not all that suprised when Mom said she was bringing a laptop and printer on our trip upstate this weekend. We were heading to a meeting and I knew she needed to print some reports. I was a little bit apprehensive when she said that she planned to use the printer without an outlet. I kept suggesting that she could borrow someone else's printer upstate or find an outlet somewhere to use. I didn't fully understand what she was planning until she pulled out the printer IN THE CAR, while I was driving, and contrived a rather elaborate mobile home office on the seat next to me. She had to hold the adapter in the cigarette lighter while printing from the laptop and feeding paper in. In order to prevent the paper from getting stuck on its way out of the printer (which printed rather well, considering the fact that we were going 70 miles an hour in a rainstorm), she had to carefully route printed sheets away from the edge of the car seat and to a pile of paper on the dashboard. Now, laptop use in the car is widespread these days, but printing from the laptop? This is somewhat of a feat. I think she may have put off the printing of these reports simply so she'd have an excuse to use her laptop, portable printer, and new little laptop mini-mouse in the car. Just, you know, to prove it could be done and possibly to justify the ownership of a portable printer in the first place. Impressive, no? I'm wondering if somehow they'll contrive to get a refrigerator and microwave in the car for the next trip. At least that way we could avoid the awful rest stop food.

Update: Mom has informed me that Dad has already installed a refrigerator in his car, so all we're missing is the microwave. Mom has a bit of an obsession with RVs, too, so this might be the next addition to the collection.

Posted by csageday at 12:58 PM | Comments (2)

April 18, 2006

Jeff and Amber Can Cook

If you love food and cooking, then please, for the love of all things culinary, go and visit Amber and Jeff's new blog: The Jeff Next Door. These people, unlike some other bloggers we know, actually know how to cook. They are Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home devotees -- it's their "base cookbook," so you know there is great cooking going on in that apartment. Amber has posted the recipe for her acclaimed gingerbread (omigoditssogood), and they have graciously posted one of their favorite recipes from Moosewood: Gingered Greens and Tofu. I expect great things from this blog. The secrets of the kitchen that can produce a guinness cake and homemade flan will finally be revealed!

Posted by csageday at 09:59 PM | Comments (1)

April 17, 2006

The Meringue Project

It's been whole days since I wrote a cooking post, so here's the meringue story. Encouraged by my whipped-cream success, I decided to make meringues for Francis' birthday party. Meringues with hand-whipped egg whites, no less. Yes, I realize that I'm somewhat of a holdout with my whisk and sore elbow, and an electric mixer can probably be bought for next to nothing at the corner deli. I just can't stand to buy another kitchen item at this point, when there's a gorgeous new pasta maker (a Christmas present -- thanks Jo!) that I haven't used yet, and I haven't gotten rid of my four non-whistling teapots (what do you do with those? I would feel terrible about giving them to Goodwill -- what if someone's house burns down? They're perfectly good otherwise. Anyone know a whistle mechanic?).

So I skimmed over the recipe and saved some eggs and eventually got around to separating them a couple of hours before the party. Then I whisked. And whisked. There is much more whisking involved than with cream. It's a slow process, and at the beginning it looks extremely unlikely that the bubbly clear goo will ever turn into anything fluffy and white. When your arm is about to start shaking, though, it starts to firm up, and if you keep going you eventually get those fabled "stiff peaks". Amazing.

Once I had the egg whites whipped, I checked to see what other ingredients I might need (I do not recommend this sequence of activities). The recipe called for "superfine" sugar. My sugar box says nothing about being superfine. It's just brand-name white sugar. I thought for a minute that "superfine" might just be an extra marketing thing, like "extra fancy." Not likely. I had confectioner's sugar, so I thought about using that, but the recipe that uses that in Joy is the "alternative" recipe, and it calls for half superfine sugar and half confectioner's. This being my virgin experience with meringues, I wasn't going for anything "alternative," so I carefully incorporated my sugar and vanilla and cream of tartar (or maybe that was there from the beginning) and hoped everything would be okay.

Next, I got out three cookie sheets and started making little mounds (these were going to be mini meringues) with a spoon. Not satisfied with their looks, I switched to squeezing the fluff out of a corner of a zip lock back. Then, still not satisfied that I was being creative enough, I dyed the rest of the batch purple (festive, no?).

It's been a week since this happened, so I'm not sure how I did this, but when it was time to put the meringues in, the oven was too hot. Joy talks about how "cooking" meringues really only involves drying them out sufficiently to make the outsides crunchy, so you cook them on really low heat. For some reason (probably because I didn't check the heat in the recipe until later and over-pre-heated it), I had the oven set for higher than it should be (can you sense impending doom?). I left the door open for a while to let it cool down, and then put the meringues in for their allotted 2 hours.

One hour into this experiment, I turned on the oven light and saw two sad things:

1. Non-superfine size sugar crystals were popping up like chicken pox on my meringues.

2. The meringues were all brown. No purple or white in sight.

In other words, they looking NOTHING like the bright white mounds of sugar my mother made when I was little. Not light, not white, and certainly not fluffy. The sugar must have caramelized a little in the heat. When we finally got them out of the oven, I broke about a third of them just trying to unstick them from the pan.

The best of the batch were still brought to the party, where brave (drunk) souls took cautious bites. I stuck to Derek's white bean dip (blend white beans and pesto sauce and, poof!, better party food than mine). Sigh.

Posted by csageday at 11:43 PM | Comments (1)

No Common Sense

Derek and I were driving from Brooklyn to Jersey on Saturday, and just as we pulled into the lane on the West Side Highway that leads to the Holland Tunnel, we noticed that a little triangle of cones indicated that it was blocked off. There were about five cars ahead of us, and to our right was a gas station. There was a convenient lane at the edge of the gas station (it was on a corner), which people seemed to be using, gingerly, to get into the Holland Tunnel entry road. I noticed one driver do this but Derek didn't. When we pulled up to the cones, I said, "Go ahead, you can use the gas station lane," so Derek did. Bad idea. A tall, mustachioed cop yelled "Whoa" and flagged us down like we were a car full of bomb-toting terrorists. I tried to counteract the talking-to by apologizing profusely:

Me: "I'm sorry -- it was my fault. I thought it was okay to use that lane. Is the tunnel closed?" [Okay, this is a tiny bit of a dumb blond routine and I'm trying to change the subject at the end there.]

Cop: [menacing look] "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

Me: "We're trying to get to the tunnel -- I really thought it was okay to go that way."

Cop: "There could be 300 bodies in the road!"

Me: [I'm completely, utterly dumbfounded. Did he say 300 BODIES? Is this REAL? Not only the power trip, but the total attempt at instilling fear in a New Yorker with some thinly-veiled reference to a terrorist attack? Oh, and if there were 300 bodies somewhere, wouldn't there be more than 10 traffic cones and a cop with a mustache, flagging people by at random and harassing others? My line of thinking didn't get this far until later, actually. At the time I tried to look confused, to indicate that he didn't have a frightened Fox News watcher on his hands, and also to indicate that I am completely taken aback by this line of reasoning. 300 bodies, sir? Where exactly are you going with this?]

Cop: "Did it ever occur to you that I might have this road closed for a REASON?"

Me: [Complete silence. Now I'm just trying not to let the problem-with-authority portion of me get too affected. I'm also fighting impulses to stand up for myself for fear of being indefinitely imprisoned for non-American behavior in this Patriot Act state.]

Cop: "There's just no fucking common sense in this country anymore!"

[pause for dramatic effect]

"Turn around."

Derek: [possibly sensing my inability to respond at this point] "Yes, sir."

Now, I've always had difficulty dealing with cops. I'm scared of them. I've met some wonderful cops who have helped me out when I needed it, but whenever cops do this type of authoritarian fear-mongering, it completely messes with my head. Also, did I mention that the people using the gas station and passing through it were all being flagged by while we were being interrogated by Officer No-Common-Sense Mustache?

I was a blubbering mess all the way through the tunnel. Derek was unfazed and actually happy about not getting a ticket (he doesn't seem to have a cop complex). Still, this is a little absurd, no?

Posted by csageday at 09:28 PM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2006

The Zoo

Derek is at war with the ants in our apartment. Slice open a mango, and they'll appear within the hour30 seconds to haul away any minute scrap you've left behind.

For some reason, they congregate near our hall table. It must be their entry point to the apartment. We've checked for food, we've set out new traps, and Derek has bleached every inch in the vicinity (he estimated killing 40 ants in the process), but they still gather there on the windowsill. I left a glass half-full of Emergen-C on a desk in the adjacent room overnight, and by the next morning there was an army of marching ants going to and from the glass. Down the wall, across the floor, and up to the desk -- a considerable distance for an ant.

Our mouse seems to have abandoned us (though a neighbor's cat visited us through the window the other day, which may explain this), and I still haven't seen a roach the size of my first one (I've seen small ones, but nothing that would make an audible, hideous crunch quite like the first one -- it was big). Maybe the ants have taken over to the point of forcing other animals out? They do have an advanced social structure and military mentality. I wouldn't put it past them.

Posted by csageday at 12:55 AM | Comments (0)

Nothing to blog about, so I'll just ramble...

I have been, inexplicably, in a rather good mood today. Aside from my customary morning crabbiness (crabbiness is an understatement; Derek is a saint), I have felt strangely conversational. I joined in pre-meeting office banter. I made a friend on the bus on the way home from the Coop. I found the sticker-price-making machine at the Coop "fun." Something must be wrong with me.

I'm thinking this abnormal behavior can be attributed to spring and the extra sun I've been getting. On Sunday and again yesterday evening I took long walks in the park/woods near my family's house in New Jersey with the family dog. (Derek and I also had a pleasant time pretending to be aristocratic suburbanites (my parents are out of town) -- Derek played the piano in the (large, spacious) living room, and I read an ancient book about the Havameyers and sipped sherry. Rather ridiculous, but quite satisfying.)

If the quiet and outdoor activity are responsible for today's mood, this bodes well for the summer, since I just joined the Adirondack Mountain Club. My brother and I went to an Adirondack fair in New Jersey last Sunday in search of information about building boathouses upstate (a family project for this summer), and I was lured into membership by the friendly ADK volunteers. They mentioned "instructional weekends" where you learn about kayaking or trail maintenance or overnight hiking. There's a New York City chapter which organizes local activities. They also have a "rustic camp" on the same lake that Sebago does (Lake Sebago). I'm a bit intimidated because my camping and serious hiking experience dates back to eighth grade, but I'm hoping this will help me get up to speed again.

In other news, I'm flattered that Francis posted the birthday card we made for him (a la Six Things).

Posted by csageday at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2006

Bouchon Bakery

I wasn’t planning on blowing $6.50 to get over the mid-afternoon caffeine- and sugar-low hump today but I read about Bouchon Bakery (on the third floor in the Time Warner Center) in New York Magazine this morning and, um, it was on the way to the bank. I waited in line with a well-dressed toddler in a Bugaboo and an older woman with excellent posture, a vintage outfit, and designer sunglasses. On display were brioche, muffins, madelines, tortes, and upscale sandwiches. Selections are presented to customers on silver platters by waitstaff dressed in identical green striped Thomas Pink shirts (okay, possibly not Thomas Pink). The carrot muffin is fantastic and so is the chai latte, but I found the set-up a little, hmmm, rich? I’m thinking this is where I would spend an occasional afternoon if I were drowning in cash and self-pity.

Posted by csageday at 04:36 PM | Comments (1)

April 05, 2006

Book Report

After a spell of reading work-related items on the train and the occasional New Yorker, I delved into two books: In Cold Blood, by the ambitious Capote (yes, I saw the movie and had to have the book), and Specimen Days, by Michael Cunningham (of The Hours fame). If you want to read either, skip the rest of this post -- I don't want to ruin them for you.

I started with Specimen Days, and made it through about 60 pages before I simply couldn't take the depressing story line anymore. If I kept reading, the inevitable outcome seemed to be that every character would die or live a life of desperate poverty and hard labor. Each minor advance for the slightly deranged and deformed main character (a twelve-year-old boy) was counteracted by some awful act of pathetic stupidity on the part of the same character, and I couldn't take the stress anymore.

I came up for air and turned the book over to look at the back cover for some clue about where things were headed, but it was blank. All it had was a giant picture of the inquisitive-looking author (odd, no? A bit self-aggrandizing? Does he have a policy about back covers? My mother always said not to read them anyway...). So I flipped ahead and noticed acceptable dialogue and the presence of three separate parts. This encouraged me to finish up, and I wasn't disappointed.

The three parts take place in the past (industrial-age New York), present (post-9/11 NY), and future (post-nuclear-fall-out-Disneyesque NY). Each part has similar characters, but the roles change. A woman, a man, a deformed child, and various forms of automation and violence appear in each, but in extremely different ways. Like The Hours, this book uses the same format as Mrs. Dalloway -- three distinct narratives on the same theme. It gives you plenty to think about -- I felt kind of satisfied at the end.

As for In Cold Blood, I'm blown away by the sheer effort Capote made to record so many small details. I have enough experience with journalism (not much, but enough) to know that it takes a shitload of careful work to get so many details and so much intimate information. Now I understand why it made such a good movie. This was hard work, and not only did Capote get the information, but he really knew what to do with it. I'm sure my reading was influenced by the movie, but the book is fantastic. Its strength lies in its faithfulness to journalistic integrity -- Capote manages to explore both sides of the story with equal intensity. Perry and Dick -- the men who murdered the Clutter family -- are fascinating characters with screws loose somewhere in their heads. The story is very well told -- you're kept in suspense as Capote changes from story line to story line in the beginning, he maintains the momentum until the end, and the prose is fantastic. I highly recommend it.

Posted by csageday at 12:05 AM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2006

Magnolias, Not Dogwoods

Apparently I learned nothing from the Macy's Flower Show last year or from decades of living in The Garden State, because I can't tell dogwoods from magnolias. Rose kindly informed me that the collection of photos I had so carefully named "Dogwood Bloom #1", etc. were not, in fact, dogwoods at all. They're magnolias. Magnolias? I guess we had a magnolia tree in the backyard, not a dogwood? Damn. And that was one of the few blooms I thought I could identify! Now I only know daffodils (although I was a bit shakey on that until recently), rhododendrons (I even know how to spell that), forsythia, and roses. That's it. This is pathetic. It's going to take a while for the magnolia knowledge to stick, too, since I've been calling those trees dogwoods for at least 15 years. The rest of the blooms I see fall into the "flower" category. This is another area of grown-up knowledge I somehow haven't quite acquired, along with filing my taxes and starching the linen (oh, and making meringues -- they didn't come out so well).

Posted by csageday at 02:03 PM | Comments (3)

April 02, 2006

Spring

This weekend, Park Slope was full of flowering dogwoods, forsythia, and Little Leaguers (Saturday was opening day). Miraculously, we got out of the apartment before noon each day.

We meant to do something active and impressive on Saturday -- we planned to walk the loop in Prospect Park -- but we ended up visiting La Bagel Delight and sitting down to breakfast at the first picnic table we found instead. Too full after that for a walk, we spread out on a blanket and dozed. Then, more in the mood for more food than exercise, we visited the farmer's market (picked up some wonderful bacon from Flying Pigs Farm) and the Coop.

Today, we managed to walk the loop but then ran into some friends and immediately counteracted any health benefits received from walking by eating at Cafe Steinhoff. Here are a few photos from the park:

Posted by csageday at 11:36 PM | Comments (2)