296 Melrose Street

The 3rd of July

2009-07-03T22:38:00.008-04:00

We celebrated the 3rd of July today. I took my bike to Towner's on University Avenue. I had not been there in many years, and I recalled that the last time, I was told that the bike was not up to their standards. Fine. I will get new inner tubes, install my Hello Kitty bell, and ride it to work in summer.
I weeded the garden for five hours (time flies), including hacking away at the overgrown rhododendron, Rose of Sharon, lilac, forsythia, and wisteria. Even the tarragon and oregano Sara gave me in 2007 had spread dramatically. The tarragon is over three feet tall. I need to learn to make some things with tarragon, other than Poulet a l'Estragon. I was fresh out of poulet.

After a long bath and four Ibuprofen I set about to making a seasonal dinner: butter lettuce with feta and strawberries. Fresh pea soup with tarragon, mint and Greek yogurt. Corn fritters. Fresh figs.

At the market on Thursday, where I met Alayna and complained about the number of people smoking while they shopped, I bought three eggplant, a head of broccoli, a butter lettuce, a flat of figs, strawberries and blueberries. A farmer from Penn Yann was selling fresh peas for $3 a bag. He harvests them and then "The Mennonites" have a machine that removes them from the pods. I have shelled peas and it takes forever, so I am glad the Mennonites have this technology.

The soup: boil the peas. for about 5 minutes with the ribs of a head of Butter lettuce. Chop finely a large Vidalia onion and microwave it in some olive oil until it is very soft, about 3-4 minutes. While it is cooking, add to the peas some chopped fresh mint and tarragon. Salt, pepper.

Puree the peas/lettuce and onions with some skim milk and then put it through a food mill to make it smooth. Serve with yogurt and mint.

Corn fritters were one of my mother's favorite comfort foods. Drain a small can of corn. Make a basic pancake mix with flour, wheat germ, baking soda, baking powder, eggs and buttermilk. Salt, pepper. Mix in the corn and fry like pancakes. A trip back to the Fifties.

Happy Fourth.

Recipe for Margaret

2009-01-19T22:46:00.005-05:00

Here you go.

Peach cranberry rhubarb crisp. Can be made in any dorm kitchen.

Put a nice layer of fruit on the bottom of a lightly buttered pan. It can be apples. Maybe 4-5 cups of fruit total. I used peaches because I had a lot of frozen peaches in the freezer. Then I added some frozen cranberries, maybe 1 cup. Sometimes I use apples and frozen raspberries or blueberries.

Mix a cup of oatmeal, 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons softened butter. If you use apples you might want to add some nutmeg and cinnamon.

Put it on top of fruit. Bake at 350 degrees until the fruit is soft, maybe 30 minutes.

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream. Should be accompanied by strong coffee.

That's all.

The Other Sixties

2008-11-06T22:30:00.040-05:00

When I think of "The Sixties" there's a clear divide in my mind into two diffferent worlds, and I don't know what event or series of events tipped from the old era to the new. I have images in living color - the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, hippies, Hendrix, the summer of peace and love, Woodstock, Monterey, the 1968 Chicago DNC, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King. But before that it was black and white.

Looking back, the Sixties started in the Fifties, although we didn't know it. I was born in 1951. Rosa Parks sat in the bus in 1954, and the Montgomery bus boycott was a full year, from 1954-55.

I can't say I remember it. I should, though. My earliest memory of a newspaper headline is President Eisenhower's heart attack, which, I just learned from a web site, took place in September of 1955. I was sitting on the kitchen floor of our house on 41 Corlies Avenue in Poughkeepsie, and I apparently read it aloud- something like "Ike Comes Home" and this startled my mother. "Who said that?" she demanded, and then looked down at the floor where I sat. "Did you read that?" she asked. I probably replied, smugly, in the affirmative. Why wouldn't I be smug. it was two months before my fourth birthday, and my sister Eileen liked coming home from 2nd grade and passing on the lore of Dick, Jane and Sally.

That Ike headline is the first text I can remember understanding. But I don't remember Rosa Parks or the boycott that followed. I need to check the New York Daily News archives to see if it was even covered. It must have been. After all, the divide in the Sixties was clear - good vs. evil, the non-racist North - that was us- vs the cross-burning bad guys in the South (that was them). (Okay, it was before the race riots in places like Rochester, a city in western NY I never thought I'd ever even visit, let alone live in.)

I do remember Little Rock. It was 1957, and I was 6 years old and starting 2nd grade with Mrs. Wardell, a mean old woman who yelled at us and called us "hooligans." The word itself scared me, and school as a source of conflict was something I could relate to. I noticed Little Rock, and my mother talked about it. I may have even read about it in the Daily News. So the desegregation at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas registered with me. These were kids who wanted to go to school. This was pretty confusing to a neurotic 6-year-old. As I said, I was afraid of school. Our teachers yelled at us and even hit us occasionally. My first grade teacher, Miss Cook, had screamed at me for "reading ahead" in Dick, Jane and Sally. Listening to the kids who didn't have older sisters to teach them read aloud was torture. The road ahead to high school looked long and unpleasant (and it was).

But being tormented for being too good at reading, not good enough in math and not rich or popular enough was small potatoes compared to life for black schoolkids under after Brown vs the Board of Education. They were the unwitting footsoldiers who fought the war of desegregation. In 1957, the governor of Arkansas got the state's National Guard to keep the school segregated. President Eisenhower sent in the military to federalize the National Guard.

This is the picture that scared me the most. I imagined what those white people were yelling, and I thought the Negro girl (that was contemporary terminology) had a great dress. I didn't understand the sunglasses, which were worn only by movie stars at the time.

I don't remember when I first saw this 1964 painting by Norman Rockwell which is titled "The Problem We All Live With."

Not only high schools were forcibly integrated. Other people wanted to go to college. James Meredith had to be escorted to campus ("Ole Miss") by US marshals. (I wonder what the they are thinking here.) My mother read James Meredith's story to us from the Readers' Digest over lunch (my brother and I came home every day for sandwiches and Campbell's Soup). She was obsessed with the segregataionists, and I did not understand the history of her outrage until I was much older.

George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, a symbol in the North of the quintessential evil Southerner, did not want educational institutions integrated, as you can see. In 1963, he personally blocked the door the University of Alabama to keep out black students. This became known as the "Stand at the Schoolhouse Door," where Wallace attempted to put into practice his "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" policy from his 1963 inaugural address. He was displaced by Federal marshals.

Education was not the only thing the civil rights activist fought for. Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first play by a black woman on Broadway. It was about education, career opportunities and equal access to real estate.

It was one of my mother's favorite movies. How could it miss? The elegant and well-spoken Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier try to get their kids out of the city into a nice Chicago suburban house, only to be unwelcomed by the white neighbors. So it was equal access to education, freedom to live where you wanted to raise your family, and ... the right to VOTE.

I was 10 or 11, and the Freedom Riders' bravery made me feel like a coward. I knew I would never have the courage to facce the evil Southern whites. The Freedom Riders risked their lives to help people register to vote. The people whose names tended to get in the paper were the whites who died. Viola Liuzzo was a mother of five from Detroit who went to Alabama to volunteer in the Civil Rights movement after the March on Selma.

Since I was terrified of all dogs, let alone German shepherds, these images gave me constant nightmares. I'd been raised with my sister's grandmother's horror stories of being chased by Christian boys in Bialystok with their dogs.

Then there were the fire hoses. The water pressure was strong enough to break bones. The hoses and the dogs were used to attack peaceful protesters.

I felt a connection to this domestic civil war because there was strong support in the Jewish community for black voters' rights. Jewish slavery was not something that happened thousands of years ago in faraway Egypt. We could relate, thanks to the 1961 Eichmann trial, which brought Jewish massacre, slavery and martyrdom to our black and white television every night. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were Jews from NY. James Chaney was from the south.

It would be more than forty years before an arrest was made. Two of the mothers of the three, who were 20, 21 and 24 when they were murdered, were alive to see the trial. Dr. Carolyn Goodman, whose husband (Andrew's father) died in 1969, died in 2007.

Edgar Ray Killen is serving a 60 year sentence. The photo above is James Chaney's mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, and his younger brother at his funeral.

The civil rights battle was fought on all fronts. The South seemed like Nazi Germany, where gays, Socialists, Communists, Jews and other minority groups lost civil rights. The American Negro had been emancipated in 1863, but a hundred years later, could not get a cup of coffee at a Woolworth's lunch counter, or drink from a white water fountain.

No place was spared in the battle, not even the church. It was in the sanctuary of the 16th Street Baptist Church that Addie May Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley died in the 1963 bombing. This was two months before the murder of President Kennedy and my 12th birthday. I was exactly the same age as the youngest, Denise McNair (top photo).

I don't think about this era every day. When Barack Obama talked about the 106-year-old voter and what she had witnessed in her lifetime, he rattled off a list of indignities and injustices. When he said "bridge in Selma, dogs, firehoses" I was shocked at the black and white images that I recalled, and, well, here they are. So the Civil War is over, as Tom Friendman wrote the other day, and it appears now that yes, we can. After january 20, 2009, two little black girls are going to be running around the White House chasing their new puppy.

山口百恵～「jambalaya」赤面物デビュー当時

2008-06-13T15:47:00.003-04:00

The boys came back from NM and TX with a new appreciation of Hank Williams. This is a result of John's first surfing in eight days.

Williamson, NY's first winery

2008-05-17T22:16:00.007-04:00

Jon Young's parents had the soft opening of their winery today. I'd planned to go to the market and see Margaret this morning, because she is leaving for Europe, but the unsuccessful hunt for Phil's three missing cell phones derailed me. The weather didn't inspire me to leave the house either. It rained, it drizzled, the sun came out, the rain came back.

I did find an ancient Nokia that Phil pretended to use to summon a horse and carriage. Then I found a twenty-year-old 35-mm camera with four shots taken of 27. I gave it to Jordan to use up at the dedication of Pepsy Kettavong's Nathaniel Rochester sculpture. It was dedicated at 2 pm today in a drizzle that was punctuated by more sun and purple clouds.

John and I overcame our weather-induced lassitude to drive with Phil and Jordan out to Williamson. The Young Sommer Winery produces apple and other fruit wines. We particularly liked the Cherrytram and the Senchu apple wine.

It was a great day to be in an apple orchard and vineyard. Some old bikers stopped by. One of them had an astonishing accoutrement that you don't normally associate with motorcycles (see video below).

All in all, we predict great success for the new YS winery venture.

Garbo Blogs

2008-01-27T20:37:00.000-05:00

It's been so long since I've written here that the title might be "Rip Van Winkle blogs." It was so long agp that you had to load the photos to PhotoBucket or some other wretched photo site, and then keep them there...oh, never mind. Blogspot now does you a favor and allows you to upload them directly from the files. ("Where have you been?" I can hear some readers mutter. That's a good question.)

The occasion of this posting is the convergence of Sara's birthday and the Shafrir family's return last night from Israel (via Japan, for Shai). I was thinking of some of the things I would have made for Sara for a birthday dinner and I remembered a carrot soup we had at Le Pain Quotidien in Brussels three and a half years ago. We liked that it was not totally pureed, but there were still discernable pieces of carrots and onion in it. I had the same soup with John about a year ago at Le P.Q. on First Avenue in New York. It was, unsurprisingly, quite similar. I made a very large quantity and dropped some off at the Shafrir's as they slept off their jet lag. Ivry, who is two and a half, was pleased to hear it had been made by the Jackie half of what he calls "JeckieJohn."

(Ivry had the monkey call his father in Japan)

2 lbs carrots, cut up in 1" pieces
1 medium potato, " "
1 large onion, chopped
1 cup celery, " "
2 t. olive oil
vegetable bouillon
skim milk
1 tsp cumin

Put the carrots and potato in a pot and cover with water. Add some cubes of vegetable bouillon. Bring to a boil and then cover. Lower the fire so they boil but don't boil over, and check to see if they need more water.

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and cook the onion and celery until they are translucent. Then add a cup of boiling water and a bouillon cube. Cook over medium fire, adding water if necessary, covered, until the onion and celery are soft enough to be put in soup.

When the carrots and potato are soft, remove from the fire, and mash them in the water until there are no large pieces. At this point, puree about half of the carrot/potato mixture in a blender with milk until the you can pour it. If you don't have a blender, you will have to mash for a while longer. It's good upper-body exercise. Add the cumin. (At this point, I would normally add some ginger and Tabasco sauce, but since it was going to be consumed by a child, I left it out. ) Add milk, put in the onion and celery and heat. Salt, pepper, more milk if it is too thick.

For the second Moose Murders rehearsal tonight, I made a hummus I would have served for Sara's birthday but not to Israelis since that would be like my making pizza for a Neapolitan.

1 can garbanzo beans (keep a few out for garnish)
1 can cannelini beans
1 clove garlic
1/2 cup tahini
lemon juice
salt, pepper
zahtar
olive oil

Put everything but the zahtar in the food processor except the salt, pepper and zahtar. Puree until smooth. Add a little water if if is too think but you don't want to keep adding lemon juice. Don't worry about amounts. Just tast it until it is right. Garnish with zahtar, garbanzo beans, a teaspoon of olive oil.

The white beans mix well with the garbanzos since they puree better.

That's all for today.

Green Christmas

2006-12-25T13:39:00.000-05:00

The squirrels are confused, the Canada geese are flying in all different directions, the forsythia are budding and even John is starting to think there is something to this global warming thing.

Elaborate plans to get up at 6 AM did not materialize. And we're on the way to the next thing. But here are two photos. First, the pinwheel butter cookies from the Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts. Cut the sugar to 2/3 cup and substitute light cream cheese for most of the butter. Or half of it. If you have not been to the Moosewood, you should go. Sara Robbins who is a great cook and who I have known for 40 years is one of the founders.

Paul did like his Country Western Singing Buck.

We had to leave before dessert since Ewa is leaving for Ukraine on Wednesday and has to finish packing, so Anne thoughtfully gave the two of us who were not driving eggnog to go. Check out John's new Zorro tie from the Adams.

John got six ties this Christmas: a paper tie from Josanne and a Fornasetti, two from the Adams and two from the Storms. He may have more than 200. But who's counting.

The day ended with a viewing of Elf at the Storms. Emily and Napoleon P. Oodle both enjoyed it although they'd seen it already.

December is always full of surprises

2006-12-24T22:59:00.001-05:00

It was a busy month. We've been waiting for April to visit for about 20 years and on December 8 it finally happened. She was surprised to find Rochester green, reasonably entertaining and easy to get around.

Sara posed with her boxwood & lady apple wreath as Santa rode by on a fake sleigh.

Nikita was surprised to see Charlie again at Joe's after their meeting at City Hall earlier in the week, and a scary new trio moved into 296 Melrose Street. Diana and Jordan had latkes and made Christmas cookies.

Sara looks worried. Santa Emily Walker isn't talking.

Phil is trying to prove a point, it seems.

Julia and Margaret cheerfully froze at the Crescent Beach, but they made some new friends.

Back at the ranch, it was tree chaos.

Our first Christmas Eve at home in 30 years. And to all a good night.

Joe's new friend

2006-12-03T16:00:00.000-05:00

Frosty the Snowman visited Java Joe's this morning, along with a lot of other people. One Margaret displayed beautiful quilts, the other Margaret made four new colorful friends.

That previous day...

2006-11-26T12:11:00.000-05:00

I made Jordan a banane flambee, which he greatly enjoyed. Simplest possible dessert. Heat a small amount of butter in a heavy skillet. Don't brown the butter. Slice a banana in half lengthwise, and cook it a minutes or to on the not-flat side. Flip carefully, and then go look for some rum. When the banana is almost cooked. carefully pour in a small amount of rum (a tablespoon should do) and ignite it with a long match. It may flame up to the ceiling. Be careful. Best done with all the lights out for dramatic effect. Slip onto plate and serve. In this case, since it was 2 days post-Thanksgiving, there was spray whipped cream for garnish.

Charlie's 50th Birthday

2006-11-26T12:01:00.000-05:00

Charlie's 50th Birthday cake. Plastic chocolate is harder to make than it looks. But no one really complained. The Reaves family portrait appears here; Charlie and I had a nice ride home with the top down of the convertible, let the record show, on November 26, 2006.

this is a test of the emergency blog system...

2006-07-08T16:24:00.000-04:00

this is only a test

"How to" of the day

2006-06-11T17:03:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia can be time-consuming, but WikiHow is scary. Anyone can post anything. About a week ago, while I was avoiding some loathsome task, I idly clicked on an innocent-looking link in Google which invited me to personalize my Google homepage. I liked that idea. I kept some of their suggestions, and ditched most of them, like sports. (Although I now have the World Cup results at the ready.) It was handy to have New York Times headlines, Rochester weather, Doonesbury, the BBC, and so on. I also liked "Word of the Day" and the "How-to" feature of the day. Although I've had "How to" on my homepage for about a week, I hadn't looked at it. Today there were three links. The first two were "how to survive being lost in the woods for three days" (unlikely that I will ever need this advice)and how to leave someone for good (not going to touch that one). The third one caught my eye: how to make yogurt. This was something that I hadn't done in a number of decades.

This was a slow Sunday morning. John has been in New York since Thursday morning for his 35th reunion (Columbia University, 1971, B.A. in English). I kept myself pretty busy. Saturday morning started with a variety of household activities, followed by a couple of hours at the Market, mostly spent at Java Joe's. Janet Irwin came this morning. The subject of James ("the Godfather of Soul") Brown came up, because I was trying to convince her to come to the show of Eastman Theatre at 8 PM.

She had seen him in Boston, many years ago. I hadn't, but we began to talk about other Sixties music icons we'd seen in concert. A discussion of Woodstock (1969) ensued, during which Janet asked me how far Woodstock was from Poughkeepsie. I said that the Woodstock festival had not actually taken place in Woodstock, but rather in White Lake, New York. "Oh" Janet said "I know that, because it was on my mother's cousin's farm." I couldn't believe that I've known Janet for decades and just found out that she's the second cousin of the most accidentally famous New York farmers, Max Yasgur. (It had never before occurred to me that Max Yasgur was Jewish.)

Around 5:30, I met Birthday Girl Margaret Spevak and her husband Jeff , the Storms, and some other people at the bar at 2Vine. On our way to the Eastman Theatre, we stopped at Java's on Gibbs Street to have some coffee and to hear a Hungarian jazz group, Djabe. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see them perform very much, because they were so late setting up. I suspect that their fingers were frozen; it was about 55°F, damp and sort of windy. Not very June-like weather.

James Brown is 73 years old. His energy level was inconsistent, but at that age, most people don't even have an energy level. He sparkled, and his hair glistened. I'm not going to say any more about the concert, because you should just read Frank De Blase's Jazz Festival blog in City Newspaper. (See "Never saw it comin'.") It's more than a good piece of writing; you'll be on the edge of your chair as Frank describes his close call during the show. Not that you didn't already know that journalism is a dangerous field.

So I stayed up past my bedtime, drinking wine, talking incessantly, listening to music, and drinking more coffee back at Java's. We never did run into Margaret or Jeff Spevak later, and I hope that the rest of her birthday was as good as the earlier part. I suspect that it was. The Storms walked me to my car which was parked by Spot Coffee. On the way, we stopped in to see the tired proprietors of a beautiful new stringed instrument store on East Avenue. The store was so great it made me wish I were a musician. It's called Bernunzio's and it actually has a creative and well-designed urban window display. This is something you don't see the United States very much, outside of large East Coast and West Coast cities.

Too much audio and visual stimulation. So I got up later than I expected, and rushed around trying to get a few things done before picking John up at the airport around noon. The afternoon was sort of a blur, but I do remember going back several times to the WikiHow thing on making yogurt. I thought it would be worth seeing if I could re-create the Greek yogurt that we get from the incredibly annoying 19th Ward Food Buying Club. We actually had a yogurt maker at one time in the distant past; it may have been a wedding present, and it may have gone to the Salvation Army sometime in the late 70s. It was just plain ugly. I knew what to use, though. Years ago, Janet gave us a gift of a plate warmer. It's basically a giant heating pad that folds into numerous baffles; the whole thing is covered with a screaming golden yellow acetate pillowcase of sorts, and you layer the plates in the folds. This is not a dumb thing to own in a climate like this. In the dead of winter, it's pointless to put hot food onto dishes just off the shelf; it will be cold before you get it to the table.

I followed the WikiHow instructions, and realized that I'd read them elsewhere. I pulled out the Goldbeck's vegetarian cookbook, published in 1983, and I think the instructions are identical. Not that the WikiHow author credits the Goldbecks, of course. I think this must be the WikiWay. Of course, recipes can't be copyrighted. So here we have the stages of my first batch of yogurt that I've made in at least 2 1/2 decades. You can go to WikiHow and read all the boring instructions. This photo demonstrates my home-engineered yogurt incubator.

The only thermometer I could find was on an old refrigerator magnet that I bought in Kansas City, Missouri about 10 years ago. I laid it on top of the plastic wrap. The catch was that it only went up to 120°F, and I think the heat exceeded that. No matter. It's a nice refrigerator magnet.

The whole thing was covered up with one of my favorite linen dish towels which we bought some time in the 90s at the National Trust gift shop at Stonehenge. Someday I am going to photograph my linen dishtowel collection. (Consider yourself warned.)

I wish I could remember what time I started the process. We went to see Blazing Saddles at the Dryden tonight, and by the time we got home, the yogurt seemed ready. Tomorrow, when it is cooled, all will be revealed.

True confession: I never actually had seen a Mel Brooks movie before, and neither had John. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it, and it was pretty interesting. I can see why my father and my sister were Mel Brooks fans. Blazing Saddles isn't a bad update on Marx Brothers anarchy, and it's very 1974. I was glad that Jim Healy had urged us to see it.

Sopa de Ajo

2006-05-09T18:34:00.000-04:00

I had sopa de ajo only once, in Cuzco, Peru, in March, 1999. Haven't a clue why I've never made it. I came home tonight after having saved $200 + by not buying a printer for photos. We went to Rowe Photo, intending to support a local business, but quickly realized it would be one more machine to maintain. Enough. I'll do what Jordan suggested and get prints via email. So, having chickened out of buying a printer, I decided to make something simple but different, like garlic soup.

The reason I have no photos of Peru is that BJ's Wholesale Club destroyed several rolls in processing. The remaining ones weren't very good. The young woman behind the counter apologized and said cheerfully "We'll, let's hope they weren't your once-in-a-lifetime trip to Venice." "No" I said, teeth gritted, "my once-in-a-lifetime trip to Peru." Almost more wounding than the loss of the photos was her insinuation that I might never make that trip again. Seven years ago, I still thought of myself as a young person, not a middle-aged woman who might not, in fact, hike Macchu Picchu the next time around, if there was a next time. It's absurd that I sometimes remember that tattoo'ed counter clerk in her red smock when I'm travelling, and the thought crosses my mind that I just might not make it back to Innsbruck or Budapest in this lifetime. There are a lot of places I haven't been.

I flew from Lima to Cuzco on Aero Peruana, I think. They went out of business shortly thereafter. It was quite a process. Curt, who teaches at UR but for whom the Maryknoll Mission in Lima is home, took me to the airport to lead me through the Kafkaesque twists and turns of departure taxes and "inspections." It was pre-September 11, 2001, and there was more screening when flying internally in Peru than flying internationally from the US. When I was in the final line, a little old Peruvian lady (grandmother type in flowered shirtwaist dress) asked me if I would carry on this little extra suitcase for her. I regretted, but no, senora. She went to the redheaded young British man behind me. "Hey, do you speak Spanish? She's asking me something" he said. I laughed and said "You won't believe this. She's actually asking you to take this extra suitcase on board for her." He was amused. "Can you please tell her 'Not bloody likely, Madam' for me?" Sure, I said, and explained, en espanol, that one should never take on board equipaje that belonged to others. Though I hadn't needed to translate for her; she got the drift. She scowled and moved down the line. Curt later told me that she certainly found a sucker to take the bag on, probably for good compensation.

I ran into the redheaded British guy the next evening walking aound the Plaza de las Armas. He was in Lima for three months, living alone in an apartment and working twelve hours a day working on securing some multinational conglomerate's computer systems. Guzman had been in jail for years, but foreign investment was still coming in slowly and unsteadily. I was impressed that he'd come up to Cuzco and Macchu Picchu on his own, instead of hanging out drinking the weekend away at the Hard Rock Cafe in Miraflores.

The next day I went to Macchu Picchu by train. I was suffering badly from the headache caused by soroche, altitude sickness. I was dragged onto the train at 6 am, feeling as though an iron band was being tightened about my forehead. A French woman looked at me, slumped in the seat, handed me a large square lozenge and said "Vite, mettez cela sous la langue." I did as ordered, and realized, as I put it under my tongue, that I wouldn't have cared at that moment if it had been cyanide. It wasn't, though. It was glucose, and ten minutes later, the headache was gone and I felt like Popeye after a fresh can of spinach. It was a scary train ride, but I was glad to be on the train and not on the 20-minute helicopter from Cuzco.

This is not a good place if you have a fear of heights. I spent the day with a British family. The parents were my age, and the 22-year-old son was taking a term off from Cambridge to do an internship in Sao Paolo. They'd just come from Bolivia and were traveling around Peru for a week. They came in handy at several points when I didn't want to look at the thousand or so foot drop. I closed my eyes and let them lead me over some of what they cheerfully called "the more harrowing bits."

We were having such a good time we very nearly missed the train back, and that would have been a problem. That evening, we had sopa de ajo at a restaurant, where we snickered at two Japanese girls who were taking turns videotaping each other eating dinner. It's probably on their blog somewhere.

This is my best memory of the sopa de ajo. It was a damp autumn evening, and the soup was great.

1 head (yes) garlic
1 T olive oil
wine or vegetable bouillon
canned crushed tomatoes
fresh sage
fresh thyme
salt, pepper, chipotle pepper sauce
one egg per person

Heat the oil in a deep saute pan and put in the chopped garlic. Cook until soft but not brown. Add maybe two or four cups of liquid (wine or water) and cover. Cook covered, low fire, until the garlic is very soft. Add the tomatoes, herbs, salt, pepper. Forget it for a half hour, simmering. Blend, or use a hand-held blender stick (in Italy they are called mini-pimer)until the garlic is pretty invisible. Or if you are lucky enough to have a chinoise, even better. A food mill would work but is too messy to clean.

Taste the soup. You may need a pinch of sugar, or more chipotle pepper sauce. It should be thinner than canned tomato soup.

To serve: five minutes before showtime, carefully drop from a cup in each of the four corners of the pan (if a round pan can have corners), one egg for each serving. Simmer until the white is fully poached and the yolk is heated and beginning to set, but not hard. Scoop the egg out with the same utensil you'd use for poached eggs and surround it with the soup. Garnish with olive-oil brushed toasted croutons and sprigs of fresh thyme. I served it with grilled asparagus and carrots. Et voila.
Bonus: when I took off the purple rubber bands from the asparagus John bought at the market, they said "Product of Peru." What are the odds?

Java Joe's Next Generation and the rest of Sunday

2006-05-08T20:45:00.000-04:00

Sunday, May 7 was Java Joe's official grand opening. A gospel group, Voices of Clouds, performed. Here's Joe's father, with John disappearing into the cafe to get some coffee.

It was a perfect spring day, although a little cool for plant buying. So we arrived at 9, because Joe

asked us to get there early. The mayor wasn't coming until 9:30. That was fine, since it gave us time to watch the band set up and to hang out.

Mayor Duffy had already been to two events by the time he showed at Joe's at 9:30 and he was remarkably energetic. He stayed for quite a while before he had to go to his next gig. Hard work on a Sunday morning. Here he is with Charlie Reaves, Dana Miller, Joe and Maria.

And of course he schmoozed with Joe's father.

JudieLynn McAvinney came by with her two new dogs and they were well-photographed. Josanne and Charlie look as though they are ready to adopt.

Jordan had a crepe with Nutella and fruit.
Margaret was hard at work, first on juice, then as barista (this is a good skill to have before going off to college, Margaret).

John had a few cups of coffee and then went shopping for a birthday present for Lucinda.

I thought she'd be horrified despite her love of poodles. But she loved it. The new pet is named Chanelope (rhymes with Penelope) and will last forever, according to the woman John bought it from. This is one of the many advantages of a dog topiary over a real dog.

We finally dragged ourselves away and went to The Gables to meet the new resident director. After that, we visited Sara in her new home, a Victorian house on Rowley Street with great light and high ceilings. Then we went to Highland Park before is it contaminated by the annual Lilac Festival booths and crowds. The magnolias were almost over. I'd never noticed the yellow one before. Some of the pink ones were enormous.

The lilacs are worth the visit. There are 1200 or so of them. Here is John, hiding in a giant pale purple bush.

It was a close-to-perfect Sunday. At 7 we went to the Dryden to see A Night at the Opera which I hadn't seen in decades.
Subversive, anarchistic. No wonder they had revival success in the late Sixties.

El jardin, 5 de mayo

2006-05-05T18:45:00.000-04:00

Phil dropped by this morning to pick up his motorcycle and I photographed him with the forsythia.

He had to do some maintenance but was soon on his way to campus.

Since I was out and about with the camera I thought I'd take some photos of the garden. We closed on the house on May 12, 1991 so in a week it will be the 15th anniversary of our owning 296 Melrose Street.

The rhododendron is an annoying pale pink-beige but before the flowers open the color is saturated and satisfying.

The kwanzan cherry is next to a variegated olive. Pi the cat and Honey the dog are buried under it.

I like the grape hyacinths better than the real ones which are too aggressive and large. The forget-me-nots last pretty well in the shade.

To the right of the front door there is a terrific white lilac. It is just behind a deep purple one that's not quite in bloom.

The line-up between our house and the driveway: white dogwood,lilac, flowering quince. Marilyn's cherry tree is to the right.

Wisteria

2006-05-05T18:04:00.000-04:00

The first time I was conscious of the wisteria plant was the spring of 1971. I was living in Nice, and on the other side of the Route de Fabron there was a winding dirt road leading to a farmhouse. It was lined with an ancient stone wall, covered with wisteria. Behind it were mimosa trees that hung over the wisteria and the road.

I planted one in 1981 in front of our first house on Rosedale Street in Rochester and it bloomed madly the first year. It still blooms. We sold the house in 1983 when we planned to move to Japan to teach English. Which we didn't do. We moved to Aldine Street in the Nineteenth Ward instead, and planted a redbud tree and a wisteria. The redbud is magnificent. The wisteria never bloomed, and I was told my first one had been beginner's luck.

We moved to Melrose Street in 1991 but it was not until 2003 that I asked Adair to buy a wisteria. I'd decided if this one didn't flower I'd dig it up and forget it. The first year it had three flowers. Last year it was respectable. This is the wisteria against Marilyn and Cy's garage, with one of their lilacs in the background.

chick pea soup

2006-05-02T20:29:00.000-04:00

It sounded odd. I make every other kind of bean soup, but never chick pea. I had just come across a cache of dried garbanzos. A massive amount of hummus? too much, and too short a refrigerator life, once prepared. So I googled "chick pea masala" and came up with some soups. But that's not what I made. All I did was soak chick peas overnight, changing water several times. Boiled the chick peas in fresh water until soft. This took about an hour. Added a couple of chopped carrots, onions, celery, and two mashed cloves of garlic. Cooked until vegetables were soft. Added 4 cubes vegetable bouillon, salt, pepper, a teaspoon of cumin. When it was done I pureed about half in the blender and added it back to the pot. (You can see there are still whole chick peas.) Finally, stir in the juice of half a lemon.

This cooks.com recipe is probably better but more ambitious. I'll make it sometime. But will probably use cubed cooked sweet potato in place of the acorn squash...easier.

Sponge cake

2006-04-14T22:59:00.000-04:00

I never considered making a sponge cake. It seemed like a lot of work to go through for not much bang. However, when I was growing up, it seemed like sponge cake (and its next-of-kind angel food and jelly roll) were the burden of all Jewish women. You baked a sponge cake for any occasion. Jelly rolls, infinitely more harrowing to assemble, were for serious illness, or post-funeral.

I couldn't put my hands on my mother's recipe, and my Passover cookbook had some ridiculous ground walnut cake instead of sponge cake. That's like leaving the mac and cheese out of The Joy of Cooking. Who needs books? I googled, and this one sounded right.
Sponge cake
and it was fine.

The hard part was that I'd bought matzo meal instead of matzo cake meal. I pulverized it in the Cuisinart until it looked fine enough. Here's the batter:

I also was short on lemon juice so I added some Caravella orangecello originale. I would have used limoncello, but I was out of that too. Against my better judgment I substituted 1 cup of Splenda for one of the two cups of sugar. We'll see tomorrow if that makes a difference in taste.

The recipe does not tell you that after you beat the egg yolks, and before you beat the egg whites, you have to wash the beaters. I've known since I could crawl that egg whites won't beat properly if there's a drop of fat in them (or so I was told), but I wonder if the average about.com reader is aware of this. Just one of the many dangers of getting recipes off the web. You also have to cool it by turning it upside down IMMEDIATELY. Within a minute of removing it from the oven, it will sink like a souffle in a cold draft if it's not upside down. My mother always used a soda bottle. I used what was handy, a Beaujolais-Villages.

It takes forever to cool, and then you have to saw it out of the aluminum tube pan with a thin knife. My mother had at least two of these tube pans, and there is one still in her apartment, which I will take home. You never know who will need a battered tube cake pan.

Tomorrow I will make one to ship to my niece in California. She has a thing for sponge cake, apparently, and my mother used to send her one every year.

Hot chocolate

2006-04-10T22:27:00.000-04:00

The first time I had European hot chocolate was in 1996, at Wedel in Warsaw with Ewa and John. This was a place Ewa went to when she was a student at the University of Warsaw. The room was pink, white and sort of run down. I went back there a year ago, in March of 2005, and it was pretty gentrified. The chocolate was the same, thick and dark, even though the place is now owned by some multinational conglomerate and not the Wedel family. It's at ul. Szpitalna 8, and is in my top fifty (as yet unwritten) list of things to do in Warsaw.

So in 1997 I went to Spain and a student told me to go to the Chocolateria San Gines. There are probably better places to go for chocolate than this because it's in Frommer's and Fodor's and god knows what else. There can be a line around the block. The chocolate is served with churros, long, greasy, repellent doughnuts which are dipped in the chocolate. Add a cigarette to the mix and it's all pretty hazardous to your health.

So this hot chocolate is pretty easy to make.

for about 4 servings:
2 cups skim milk or soy milk
1 heaping teaspoon cornstarch
sugar to taste
chocolate chips
1 Tablespoon cocoa
1/2 tsp vanilla
chocolate liqueur

Dissolve the cornstarch in a little water and add to the milk. Whisk until it begins to thicken. Add sugar, a teaspoon at a time. Add some chocolate chips, or semi-sweet baking chocolate. Whisk until dissolved. When it is thickened, add chocolate, vanilla, liqueur to taste. You can add Cointreau or Kahlua, too. Not too much.

I made this for Jordan on Saturday. We came here after the Market and we went over the recipe pretty thoroughly. He had this chocolate for the first time in February, 2005 in Siena, and I forgot to ask Donna for the name of the shop where we had ciocolatte calda and panforte. However, I googled "caffe Siena panforte" and it came up: Nannini. This photo is of Jordan (wearing Federico's leather jacket) and he really liked this hot chocolate.

Chocolate pudding

2006-04-10T21:24:00.000-04:00

So. I bought a 3 pound bag of chocolate chips at BJ's Wholesale Club, and it will take several years to use it up. I think the original thought was to create Italian hot chocolate which is thickened with corn starch and served in small cups. However, Phil was lobbying for Chocolate Chip Pie. It's one of the most revolting recipes I've ever read. I offered the Hot Chocolate. Phil rejected it because he said you can't have a slice of hot chocolate. I downgraded to Chocolate Pudding. Sara, who made the mistake of being out of the room at a time (okay, so this isn't a democracy) feels cheated. Phil liked the CP idea so much that I said what the hell. (This is NOT going down well with Sara.)

To make chocolate pudding, mix about 1/2 cup sugar with 3 Tablespoons cornstarch. Add a cup of skim milk and whisk well until there are no lumps. Begin to heat over low fire. Add another 2 cups of milk or soymilk, about 4 big tablespoons of Hershey's cocoa (dark is good), and whisk well. It will thicken. Don't let it alone and answer the phone, and don't get impatient and turn the fire up. Check it to see if it needs sugar, but first add a small pinch of salt, and maybe 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla, or Kahlua. if you think it needs to be thicker (it should more than coat a spoon) whish 1/4 cup milk with one very well-beaten egg, or better yet, 1/4 cup eggbeaters. Whisk in slowly over an even lower fire, or off the fire, so you don't get the pudding equivalent of egg drop soup. Curdled egg is not good in pudding.
Pour in cups and chill 20-30 minutes. Serve with sour cream or low-fat vanilla ice cream.