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Oh, Canadia

Gil and I decided to spend our long holiday weekend in Toronto because evidently there aren’t enough great restaurants or tall buildings in New York for our taste. Also, the exchange rate is basically 1:1, there’s no language barrier, and I’ve never been north of the border, so why not visit friends and family and experience a little fine dining in the process?

We only wandered around a little bit (darn these flats!) this afternoon, but that turned out to be plenty of time to experience a national treasure:

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Carolina in my mind

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Flexibility is the key to a happy marriage. Gil doesn’t complain about picking me up at the train station when I work late, and I don’t complain when he snores like a congested bulldog at night. Also, I suck it up when he changes our dinner plans on the fly by proposing to pick up BBQ from Bourbon BBQ, the new temple of smoked meats in Hawthorne, NJ.

Right. Like I’d ever turn that down.

Tonight, we ordered pulled pork and sausage along with beans and potato salad on the side, but was that good enough for me? Oh, no. Not when I can come up with some way to make things a little more difficult for myself.

I felt like Carolina pulled pork sandwiches, so I threw together a quick vinegar sauce (though I used only one teaspoon of salt instead of the full TWO TABLESPOONS –which must be a typo — called for in the recipe) and tossed it with with an even quicker slaw made of thinly sliced fennel and napa cabbage, sprinkled with brown mustard seeds. I was a little worried that the fennel wouldn’t be so good in […]

Beef, it’s what’s for dinner

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Simple dinner last night, but it really hit the spot. I spread both sides of a fresh baguette with roasted red pepper and sun-dried tomato aioli, topped it with thinly sliced steak left over from Sunday’s kitchen adventure, and loaded it with arugula.

A good sandwich is hard to beat, even when it doesn’t rise to the level of bacon sarnie.

Lagniappe: August 26, 2007

More non-food links for those of you hungerin’ for something different!

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Betsey beans!

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I’m always up for something new, especially when it comes to food — cooking or just eating it. So when Gil told me about a new gourmet food store that recently opened one town over, I could hardly contain my excitement and rushed there the very next day to see what it was about. Well! Zeytinia exceeded my expectations by a mile and we’ve already paid them three visits in one week. Their olive bar is a thing of beauty and sampling the varieties of honey could keep me busy for a year, easily. But where they really shine, IMHO, is in the produce section. The freshness of the fruits and vegetables alone would beat our local grocery, but they also have a variety I haven’t seen in this area.

As I was deciding between fava beans and cranberry beans (neither of which I’d cooked before), Gil made my decision for me: “Hey, those cranberry beans look like they were designed by Betsey Johnson!” (Reason 1, 375 why I adore this man so.) I only bought a small sampling just in case they turned out to be nothing special. I needn’t have worried, […]

Paris en miniature

Via The Agitator, I found a great Photoshop tutorial that lets you fake the tilt-shift miniaturization look without an expensive lens for your camera. I played around with a couple of my Paris pictures from last October’s visit and got some pretty cool results.

Mini Musée d’Orsay on top, with the original image below:

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And, of course, it wouldn’t be a trip to Paris without a visit to the Eiffel tower:

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Fun! I’ll try to get a few decent shots in Toronto next weekend with this technique in mind.

They call me Nickeless Nickelby

Sometime in the past 15 years I developed an allergy to nickel so severe my dermatologist was alarmed by my recent reaction to a patch test. One month later, a red square lingers on the oh, so delicate skin on my back. The doctor assures me it will fade in time, but since I can’t see it, who cares? Oh yeah, that would be my husband, who points it out regularly.

Anyway, now that I have confirmation that wearing any of my old earrings (and a favorite watch, siiiigh) is out of the question, I decided to turn my lemons into lemonade and convert the earrings into pendants! I know I’m hardly the first person to think of this, but I am proud that it occurred to me at 6:15am as I was getting ready for work. So now I have a cute little pendant that’ll be great with that deco trend Lucky promises will be So. Big. This. Fall. And now that the pliers are out, who knows? I may not need to buy necklaces again for at least another year. That’s four whole shopping seasons!

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Not to be outdone by […]

Happy birthday, Deb!

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Alas, I have no pictures of the birthday girl; instead, you get a picture of the beautiful amaryllis she gave me on one of our visits. (As Gil correctly points out, any pictures I did have would pale in comparison to Paul‘s, anyway.)

Have a wonderful day, Deb!

Making the most of what we have

The idea of throwing out food is anathema to those of us who grew up in families that maybe didn’t have so much money. My aunts can squeeze a nickel till it bleeds, my dad would rather cut off his left hand than let anything wither in his garden, and my grandma always saved her cooking oil (and bacon grease, natch) because of the starving kids in China. The plight of malnourished Indian children weighed more heavily on my other grandma’s conscience, so she recycled the bread crusts I demanded cut from my sandwiches into her bread pudding. My family was green before green was cool, or something.

So when I noticed a bunch of arugula wilting in the crisper drawer, a container of ricotta’s expiration date fast approaching, and a big hunk of pancetta taunting me from it’s perch, I knew something had to be done. After eating tomatoes every single day for almost a week, a sauce wasn’t at the top of my list, so I threw together an arugula and nectarine salad topped with spicy caramelized pancetta. And yes, in case you were wondering, caramelized pancetta is just as good as you imagined.

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Lazin’ on a Sunny Afternoon

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Or … a little less you cook, a little more you relax!

One of Gil’s good friends visited over the weekend, so we bummed around, showed him the sights, consumed massive amounts of pizza, and watched a bunch of entertaining superhero movies. We really know how to show a person a good time.

To stretch our legs and enjoy the gorgeous weather (75 degrees, sunny, and breezy), we visited Ringwood Manor for a couple of hours Saturday. While Gil and Aaron strolled the grounds and caught up, I took my new camera for a test drive. Click on the photo above to check out my Flickr set. Gil wrote more extensively about the visit (as is his wont) and took some incredible photos.