THIS JUST IN: Bruce Springsteen is giving a free concert at an Obama rally in Virginia– swing state swing in my hometown-stomps of Charlottesville! Epic Awesomeness. TODAY. 2pm. And, luckily, it’s the 47% that will probably be free at 2pm on a weekday. If you’re down there GO for me. Now: we just need to get Bocephus and/or David Allen Coe on board and we’ve got Virginia’s delicate demographic balance covered. Which is why: WILLIE NELSON HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU.
image from here.
How brilliant is this: whenever my dear friend Kitty has a dinner party or an impromptu brunch or (in our case) a weekend-long carnivale of kitchen-and-wine goodness, she writes the occasion and the what-we-will-eat on a plain card, dates the back, and hangs it on a little hook for reference. Whenever the feast is over, she adds the card to the little stack of its brethren. Reference as a useful tool for the future, Good Meals as events of import worthy of record. As someone who loves list making and food making, ephemera saving, AND hanging-pot-open-shelving-situations, I think this might just be something I need to start doing.
You might remember from this post that Sweetheart and I have been searching for change, making T-charts, Venn Diagrams, and complicated lists to try and narrow down our next step, our great leap forward. Or at least sideways. Leaping Somewhere. The space between Country Mouse and City Mouse has been seeming a bit wider every day, City Mouse yearning for space, sweet and quiet, and a little piece of land to call her own, while Country Mouse is still needs City Mouse’s proximity to incredible chinese food and strange DJ light installations in abandoned waterfront warehouses put on by dear friends (seriously, anyone in Brooklyn tonight, go to Nuit Blanche’s Autumn Bowl event tonight in Greenpoint- admission free if you “Bring Your Own Beamer”— beamer=video projector). What are a couple of little ole mice to do? Well, we’re working on it, and in the great machinery of what sweeping change requires, we’re wrangling a lot of moving parts. One of those parts required taking a weekday sabbatical, acquiring a truck from the hasidic rent-a-car on Classon, and rattling upstate for an afternoon adventure to help Sweetheart’s Mama move out of her summers-of-love Woodstock digs. Stay tuned for more City/Country Mouse news, in the meantime, I’ve just got to say: THE LEAVES.
If you’re needing a little dose of wonder and beauty this morning, go here. With this incredible 360 degree panoramic view of the Sistine Chapel, you can zoom in and out on any panel, move around the room as if you were actually there (or as if you were actually flying up by the ceiling), and—in an INTERNET FIRST—the site’s built in heavenly music is totally awesome. The Vatican has really stepped up their web presence. While you may want to zoom in on the Drunkenness of Noah or (my personal fave) Judith slaying Holofernes, it’s also just pretty cool to check out the oft-ignored “Sistine Floor”.
New York is a pizza town. Allegiances run deep… One of Sweetheart’s high school friends once broke up with a girl because she ate her pizza with a fork. There’s the ancient Neapolitan battlegrounds (Lombardi’s, Grimaldi’s, Difara’s), Staten Island’s best-pizzas-you’ve-never-had (Denino’s, Goodfellas, Salvatore’s of Soho), the hipsters (Roberta’s, Paulie Gee’s, Speedy Romeo), the best sicilian/place to take a southerner on a date (L&B Spumoni Gardens), the local slice (Rays ad infinitum, in our neighborhood “Not Ray’s”)… With all of these rarified pies, harkening back to ancient traditions, earth vs. brick ovens, coal vs. wood burning, cheese vs. sauce, the consideration of pizzaiolo-as-master-craftsman, it would seem as though pizza might simply be one of those things beyond the scope of the humble home cook, off limits to one possessing nothing fancier than a standard electric coil oven and a pizza stone. To this, I say: fuhgeddaboudit.
This weekend at the Kitchen Garden Cooking School‘s Pizza Making Class we proved ourselves capable of transcending pizza barriers. Like most wonderful things, it was truly simple. The Dough: a riff on the fabulous No-Knead dough that turns out such incredible boules, the sauces: simple classic tomato, creamy funky caramelized onion, sweet pungent red pepper, the cheeses: burrata, gouda, gruyere, chevre, fontina, taleggio, parmesean, the toppings: tomatoes, basil, garlic infused oil, roasted garlic, caramelized onions, red onions, ginger, lemon, sumac, artichoke hearts, olives, and pine nuts.
We each floured, tossed, topped, peeled, baked, and devoured our own tiny, perfect pies, and it was revelatory. An ancient skill for the ages to add to the home cook arsenal: food grower, fermenter, jam maker, bread baker, pizzaiola, and the time-spent-with-good-friends factor that is absolutely necessary for successful kitchen endeavors.
ps. This was the second Kitchen Garden Cooking class my mama and our dear town mouse friends have taken, if you find yourself in gorgeous Upper Black Eddy, PA, I highly recommend the classes. Check out the blog here.
Such Life! I can’t wait to share the utter loveliness of the Jubilee Cooking Class we took this past weekend, the exceptional noshes and ever-full glasses of studied wine, the discourse and lending of dear books, the sharing and playing of new music…but in the meantime I’m scrambling to put up what remains of my little backyard garden. After all, this weekend we had our first frost.
It’s been a pretty big week for pizza (when is it not a big week for pizza?): we went to Grimaldi’s new location in an unspoken celebration of Ann Marie’s return to the East Coast, and today I’m leaving to meet my Mama to take a pizza making class as part of her ongoing JUBILEE celebration. We’ll stay with our town mouse friends, have much wine and lots of food, and generally make merry in the best of ways. On a related note, did you know that a standard baking stone is, like, $30? I’ve been under the illusion that they’re hundreds of dollars and that’s why I don’t have one. GET THEE TO A CHEF SUPPLY STORE! In love and pizza, have a wonderful weekend.
Grimaldi’s image from here.
THIS JUST IN: when magnetically charged particles from the Sun stream around the Earth’s magnetic fields they create radio frequencies that CAN BE HEARD BY THE NAKED EAR. It’s called the “Earth Chorus” and it’s happening right now. In the sky. People have been taping it for ages, but, like late Django, they’ve only just now gotten the technology to capture a clear recording of it. Here:
Amazing, right?
This Saturday, after knocking about the flea for a hot second and trying our hands at brunch, we decided we needed to get out. The city felt like it had a lid on it, and we needed to break away. We headed out to Rockaway, the world opening up for us, turning from grey and stifling still to open and cool the farther we got down Flatbush avenue. It was sweatshirt weather, jeans rolled up, swimsuits stuck into our bags as afterthoughts, hopeful necessities included by our road trip habit (swim every day, just in case). We headed to Fort Tilden, drove by the abandoned barracks and strange decaying outbuildings, and crested the dune to find the beach deserted, the sun slinking sideways, the wind whipping the sand low along in that autumn way that is at once beautiful and a little lonely. After a summer of sun, the water was warm, much warmer than the air, and we decided to go for it. Slipped our sandy feet through our skinny jeans, shimmied into our suits piecemeal, shucked our work shirts and infinite necklaces and went for the double-figure-8-high-five-run-in (if you’ve never done this it’s the best way to get into a chill ocean: start back to back, run half of a figure 8 back to your starting point, meet in the middle and high five, run the other half of the figure 8, meet, high five, and then sprint into the ocean). It was perfect. The air cool, the water warm, the wind blowing rainbow spray back from the ocean crests, the wheeling gulls, the JFK 747’s coming in every 10 minutes. 
Getting out, goosebumps and shivers, heartbeats and the golden sun. When we got back home, the sun had gone down, the temperature dropped to 40 degrees. Just like that, it was over. We had gotten the last possible swim of the season, the end of Indian Summer, the start of whiskey weather. But we still had the feeling of wind in our hair and salt on our skin. Perfection.
Yesterday’s cross-Brooklyn internet outage meant no post here, but it also meant I was free to go see a matinee of the new Wuthering Heights with Carrie at the Film Forum. A synopsis: It’s raining outside, and IT’S RAINING INSIDE MY HEART. But… it’s worth watching just for the stark beauty of the moors (which are now on my list of things I must see in person, after “northern lights”, “southern cross”, and “fjords” and ahead of “Tokyo”).
image from here.
Feather By Feather 