Category: Local

Childlike Wonder pt. 1

I’m not sure if it’s on purpose, coming from me- if I’m drawing a feeling of awe out of the air like a lightning rod or if there has been extra beauty latent in the world as of late and I’m drawn to it like a open-mouthed moth to a flame of awesomeness. Either way, I really feel like the past few weeks have been full of wonder. This is a hard thing to come by, so needless to say it’s been pretty great. Is it that we’re too tired usually to look around? Is it that the world is extra-lovely when it tilts its orbit to squeeze the last bit out of fall? I went to Dumbo to see the Creators Project and poke around and I simply could not get over how beautiful everything was. It was ever so marvelous a feeling.

Picnic!

Much traveling, so little time at home… sweetheart and I capitalize on this rare day in August where breezes kiss the skin. Impromptu picnic in Fort Greene Park. What a lovely afternoon…The amazing Opinel knife belongs to me (courtesy of Cassie’s divine Gravel & Gold), but alas, the Steinbeck belongs to Sweetheart. I’m shamelessly burning through George R.R. Martin’s Storm of Swords like wildfire. I’ve bought each book from Greenlight and they (mercifully) don’t make me feel like I should be reading something better.

It’s not over til the… ahem. until the Lady sings.

All it takes is a cool breeze and I got an itchin in my bones for fall. I am not alone.  Just as I was about to spend some time yearning for sweaters, I had the delicious fortune to stumble upon New York Magazine’s stunning roundup of get-em-while-it’s-hot-ephemeral-summer-eats. Oh baby, it ain’t over til it’s over. I see a trip to Randazzo’s in my near future… Yum Yum Yum: Zucchini thin pie from Franny’s , Blueberry (thick!) pie from Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Tomatoes (for Andrew) from whatevs farmers market you can muster, ‘wichcraft BLT (LOOK at it), Pearl Oyster Bar Po Boy, and Key Lime Frozen Yogurt from Culture… so much outer borough love!

All Courtesy of Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite

Petit Herbs Garden

Ahh, New York. Would that we could have an acre out back for straw bale tomatoes, climbing cucumbers and whatever other delectable treats we could imagine. It’s all we can do to put a few simple herbs out on the front stoop now that summer has officially arrived. I stopped by the Union Square farmers market this week and picked up the bare essentials: basils, rosemary, thyme, oregano, parsley. After a week of squalls today was the perfect day to plant them! Now, what should we have for dinner?

Wearing Fresh Flowers

I went home to Virginia last weekend for a dear friend’s wedding and to deliver my mother some Ramps and Sunchokes from the Union Square farmers market (I’ve been obsessed with this pairing for the past three weeks and can’t believe that there are still ramps available- I read this my first spring living in New York and have made the yearly appearance of ramps at the market a New-York-specific-ritual for myself… but I digress).

I was getting ready to go to this wedding with my mama in what, now that I try to put it into words for the first time, is not just a bathroom but a full on dressing room with a chaise lounge (I have not realized the import of this until this second- I have always just called it “Mama’s bathroom”… well it does have a tub). Getting ready and being in here is always awesome, since I was little snooping around in her stuff has always been the best.thing.ever- the only difference is that now, if I am very nice, she will actually let me wear some of her jewelry.

So, my father comes in and we’re just lounging around looking at old photographs and talking about hair-stuff and he hands me a tiny parcel with this inside:

Immediately the stories come out- first thing you need to know: we are from Williamsburg, Virginia, as in Colonial Williamsburg. So, when my father was a small boy he and his two brothers went down to the CW silversmith and picked out this brooch for my grandmother for Mother’s Day. My grandmother is an amazing lady, a horticulturist and philanthropist, a mover and a shaker, and the grandest possessor of hats, scarves, and jewels I have ever had the good fortune to meet. She, at some point, loses this brooch and secretly goes and replaces it without telling her sons. Then FIFTEEN years later she finds it again out in the garden by the woodpile (because, of course, she’s the kind of lady to wear fancy jewelry out by the woodpile). By this time, my parents are married and now Gramma has two brooches- so she gives the replacement pin to my mother. By this time in the conversation, my mother has pulled hers out. Apparently, they don’t make them anymore, but Daddy has found one somewhere (perhaps out by the woodpile) and thinks that since Gramma and Mama both have them, Nan should too. How divinely amazing!!

As you can see, I filled my tiny vase-pin with water, went right out and cut a peony from the garden, and went along to the nuptials feeling fine, like a classic Virginia lady (albeit in an Abigail Lorick dress), and most importantly- very loved.

Here are some modern options (if you don’t have a southern woodpile that keeps birthing brooches on the world):

Brass boutinier pins from calliopevintage
This is made from the handle of a knife from an old silver pattern from thefashionedge
Glass pin from the Opulent Poppy


Foxy, Mopsy, and Cottontail

I love this from Aled Lewis. Usually I feel like the bunny, but sometimes I feel like the fox. Today is one of those days. Watch out, Spring Saturday Night!

 

ps. bought a satchel of newcomer Momofuku Milk compost cookies from the flea for Njoki’s birthday, fulfilling my duty/destiny to see and be seen wearing funny shoes/glasses (baby/dog optional).

The Matrix

Yunhee Kim for The New York Times. Food stylist, Maggie Ruggiero; prop stylist, Deborah Williams.

THE VEGETABLE SOUP MATRIX: You choose the green bean and the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. Take the red lentil, you stay in Wonderland, and get shown what the rabbit’s eating down deep in its hole. This divine little article explores the recipe-less free-wheeling cousins of bisque. Just like I like alphabetizing my condiments and labeling my leotards, the idea of pushing a vast category of wild foodstuffs into Four Simple designations (CREAMY, EARTHY, HEARTY, BROTHY) is like a Punnet Square of sustainable eating on the cheap. We’d better get (pepper) cracking if we’re going to make any of these delicious bottom-of-the-barrell greenmarket scrapers before we’re back to rhubarb and tomatoes. I will gladly celebrate the end of butternut squash, kill the kale, and im-peach the beet, all with toasted baguettes and crème fraîche.

Rainy Day Nest: Recipe

Alpine Accordion Band Recipe Card

Ahh, it’s been one of those weekends. This week justified doing absolutely nothing* all day Saturday and then deciding, oh hell, let’s do absolutely nothing again today. Well… no matter how busy my week was, if I’m not going to go see (what looks like the most amazing) Norman Rockwell photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum or Snape/Shine at BAM or all the myriad things one should do on a rainy day off in Brooklyn. I always feel at least the need to fluff around my apartment and feather it a little bit. Enter: my favorite recipe- which I have never named and is simply: Almond Cake. It is SO ridiculously easy, but ends up quite special and sophisticated.

I like this recipe so much (and make it so frequently) that instead of living with the rest of the recipes, I transcribed it onto the back of the awesome Alpine Accordion Band postcard I got in the Hague and it lives on the fridge, edges curling with repeated Kirschings, in easy in-case-of-reference reach:

Almond Cake (for company or solitude celebrations)**

1 cup  almonds, raw
1 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. almond extract
3 eggs
1 stick butter (softened, cut up)
1 tsp. Kirsch (if you have)
1/3 cup flour
1/4 tsp. baking powder
powdered sugar (in truth, optional… but just you wait!)

– Oven to 350 degrees please.

– Place almonds, sugar, salt and almond extract in food processor, pulverize.

– Add eggs, butter, kirsch and blend thoroughly.

– Add flour and baking powder, mix until just blended.

– butter/oil/pam/crisco/lard/whatever and flour pan (standard cake pan, torte pan, whatever)

– Scrape batter into prepared pan, smooth.

(at this point Sweetheart comes in dripping wet in the middle of it– heading from teaching a children’s music class in Chelsea on his way to Bed-Stuy to lead a rock band of eight year olds– bearing champagne and bacon. le swoon.)

– enlist sweetheart’s help to lick spatula and everything with even a smidge of almond mixture on it clean (optional, encouraged…if you are afraid of raw eggs, then… I am very sorry for you. Egg nog, Southsides, Hollandaise, all other -aises, and sweet batters are some of the best treats around).

– Put un-cake in oven for 30-45 minutes until it turns golden brown and becomes cake.

– Let cool completely, then run a fine knife around the edge and invert on a plate. There is a surprisingly good little drawing of how to do this on my recipe card:

NOW- you are effectively done. BUT- if you’d like to take it a step further, then the easiest and most lovely thing to do next is to decorate it with a powdered sugar relief. Again, if you like making cheap things look expensive (like I do) and easy things look impressive (me too) then this is the kind of next level thing you’ll love.

Cut whatever you’d like out of plain paper– if you are artistically inclined you can get totally crazy, but simple shapes work just as well***– I chose a rainstorm-brings-spring-blooms thing because it’s so wet and nasty out today, but it must be paving the way for crocuses and daffodils like.any.second. Place your cutouts on your lovely almond cake:

Then dust a light sprinkling of powdered sugar over the cutouts using a fine sieve or flour sifter if you’re super fancy:

Then carefully take off the paper cutouts (I used tweezers for this one because the flower stems were as bendy as real flower stems and I didn’t want to color inside the lines by accident).

Et voilà:

This is the perfect way  to make “a rainy day where you could have gone to see Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts but decided to nap” into “a triumph of home and sweetness, and now let’s have people over to eat it for dessert”.

* Saturday I actually spent in the thrall of a Colum McCann book… I loved his newest and “supported my local bookstore” by buying this one and recommend devoting a Saturday to it wholeheartedly. Lovely and bittersweet and occasionally staggeringly beautiful. Slivovitz and words that taste like wheat and sky.

**The recipe calls for a large food processor, but until Sweetheart’s mama gave us a “Robot Culinaire” for Christmas/Hannukah/New Years, I made it just fine on multiple occasions without (chop the almonds fine fine fine and melt and stir the butter, instead of cubing it- no prob).

*** Other cakes we’ve made in the past month include:

Heart Cake for Valentine's Day
"Bubb's Cake" in honor of "The Wire" season IV Finale

If you make one Please send in a picture (we’ll keep adding on!).