Slacks for Ella Funt

The past two summers, we’ve gone to a few Cyclones games. They’re the minor league baseball team that plays at Coney Island. It’s a lot of fun to go out to Coney Island and watch baseball overlooking the ocean and the lights of the boardwalk. They have a couple of mascots and do a lot of goofy games with kids on the field between innings, as well as a race of people dressed as hot dogs. I always like mascot races. This year, the Cyclones are even good, leading their entire league. We had a big group with us this weekend and everyone had a great time cheering on the Cyclones.
Whenever we go, we get hot dogs at Nathan’s before the game. They’re much better than the hot dogs inside the stadium, and they come with sauerkraut or sauteed onions. Also, I have a fondness for their cheese fries, despite them being kind of mushy and the “cheese” not really resembling actual cheese. Of course, we don’t order 66 dogs like the hot dog eating champion. I wouldn’t want to have a “reversal of fortune.”
After the game, Alex wanted a snack, but the hot dog line at Nathan’s was really long. So he got in the seafood line and ended up with frog legs. We were all pretty grossed out because they looked just like frog legs, but they tasted pretty much like chicken.

In the summer, we like to make jars of pickled green beans. We’ve tried to make other kinds of pickles, including cucumbers, but the green beans always come out the best, so now we just do those. They’re pretty good after a few hours, but they get better after a few days in the fridge.

I’ve been reading a fair amount of food writing lately, primarily online. Sort of armchair cooking, I guess, since I haven’t been cooking anything very involved these days. I enjoy reading about people making extremely complicated dishes that I would never try at home. Cooking her way through the entirety of the Julia Child cookbook, Julie Powell definitely attempts a lot of dishes that I would never try. The cooking descriptions are fun and some of the food, the parts that don’t involve liver, marrow, gelee, or anything else icky, sounds pretty good.

But the book isn’t just a book of food writing, it’s a memoir. And I had no interest in hearing about her medical issues, her friends’ love lives, her sex life with her husband, etc., etc. She seems like a complete drama queen, someone whose problems are always sooo much worse than everyone elses. I was pretty tired of hearing about it all by the end of the book.

My company published The Zuni Cafe Cookbook a few years ago, and I had never really gotten around to making anything from it. Everything seemed too involved. And since our grocery store is small and not very well stocked with anything not Polish, it seemed like too much of a pain to get a long list of fancy ingredients.

Various people at the office had raved about the Roast Chicken and Bread Salad though, and I finally managed to give it a try. It was well worth it, and didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. I salted the chicken in the morning instead of a day or two in advance because a coworker said that days in advance wasn’t necessary. Then, about an hour and a half before we sat down to eat, I toasted the bread and then roasted the chicken while assembling the salad.

It was well worth it. The crusty chunks of bread are saturated with vinaigrette and chicken drippings, contrasting with the bitter arugala and sweet currants and pine nuts. And the roast chicken pieces were the best roast chicken I’d ever had.

The only real problem was that cooking the chicken on very high heat managed to set off our smoke detector over and over. Lucky for us, we have an extra-safe one that’s wired into the building and only has battery for backup, so we couldn’t even take out the battery to make it stop. We finally pointed the fan directly at the smoke detector for the rest of the cooking time. If I ever make this again, I’m definitely turning on all the fans and opening all the windows before I start.

I was a bad blogger over Christmas—too lazy to write anything at all. We went to Lubbock for Christmas. Since my grandparents had just moved to Lubbock, this Christmas there was more family around than has all been together in years. Two sets of aunts and uncles were in town, as well as my little cousin, who I hadn’t seen since she was a baby, five years ago. It was fun to all be together. We went to a Texas Tech basketball game, ate tamales on Christmas Eve (a Texas tradition), and had monkey bread and stocking stuffers on Christmas morning.

E had wanted to go to the windmill museum the last time we were in Lubbock, but this time we finally made it. Then we went go cart racing at the same place we went last year. It was a blast, even though the cars were more evenly matched this year and it was harder to pass people. We went seven times in a row, and were all sore the next day from flooring the gas pedal the whole time.

When we got back to New York, we got right to work getting ready for our New Year’s Eve Eve party. It’s fun to have a party on the non-traditional night. We cleaned our whole apartment and made lots of party snacks. As usual, the most popular were the pigs in blankets. I was so busy getting ready that I forgot to take any pictures. We weren’t sure how many people were going to show up, but by when everyone was there, our apartment was pretty much filled to capacity. We had a lot of fun.

The next day, we were tired and we had a lot of cleaning to do. Our poor Christmas tree was almost bald—I think there were more needles on the ground than on the tree. By the time we finished cleaning up, we were too tired to do anything more than lay on the couch and watch movies on New Year’s Eve. It was nice to be at home that night and not go to any parties.

Since we rested New Year’s Eve, we were all ready for a big day of watching football on New Year’s Day. I made Hoppin’ John with black eyed peas for luck and collard greens. Somehow, given that all of that was cooked with plenty of pork fat, I don’t think it was the healthiest of meals. Very tasty though!

In blog-related excitement, E bought me my very own URL for Christmas, so this blog will soon have a new home!

Luckily, we received this year’s fruit basket from one of my vendors in much better shape than last year’s. Last year, I forgot to tell him I had moved, so the fruit basket sat in its box for a couple months at E’s old place before we discovered it. Needless to say, it didn’t look so good. Which didn’t stop us from digging out the bottle of cheap champagne and washing off the mold. The basket is much more attractive when it doesn’t look like a science experiment.
We decorated our Christmas tree over the weekend. Somehow, even though I bought two more strands of lights for this year’s tree, we still ran out when we got to the top. Our tree will just have to be a little brighter at the bottom. I am quite pleased with it and we had a good time decorating it, drinking mulled cider and eggnog, and watching Bad Santa. I even finished the tree skirt this year that I started and left unfinished last year.

Every November, Nascar holds its Championship Week in New York to attract media and business attention, as well as distance itself from its southern roots. The good part is that part of Championship Week is the “Victory Lap”—when the top ten drivers drive a loop down the streets. They start in Times Square and go west on 42nd Street to Madison, which means they pass directly in front of my office building. It’s great—Nascar comes to me.

Unfortunately, this year wasn’t as good as last year and the year before. They used to spin their tires and rev their engines. Last year a couple of the drivers even waved at me. This year—nothing. They just drove by. Still fun, but I missed the smell of the tire smoke and roar of the engines.

Also, this year my driver wasn’t in the Chase, so I didn’t have anyone in particular to cheer for. However, if Ryan Newman doesn’t get it together and not continue to stink next year, he may not be my driver much longer.

For lunch, we went on another holiday lunch to Tao. We had a huge group, so we had booked their upstairs skybox. Lots of fun, we felt very vip up there. The food at Tao is good, but not spectacular, but it’s a fun, clubby looking place and going there always feels like a party. They have a 20-foot buddha statue with a goldfish pond beneath it, glamorous lighting, and sexy fortunes in their fortune cookies.

It’s the start of the holiday season, when all of my vendors from work take us out to lunch. It’s great fun, because I get to go to restaurants I wouldn’t get to go to otherwise. Today, we went to one of my favorites, Artisanal, a French bistro and fromagerie. Fromagerie, meaning focused on cheese. When you walk in, the first thing you notice is the dominant smell of cheese . . . stinky cheese. We had two different fondues, and gougeres, these delicious little cheese puffs that I must learn to make.

Today I also tried a new class at the gym, the ballet workout. When I was younger, I was various serious about ballet—I did it for ten years and finally quit because it was all I did and it was making me miserable. Also, I ended up with short legs. But I do miss the dancing part of it, not the snotty people or the long hours, but just the dancing. So I tried the class at the gym. It was fun and I was (a) shocked that I remembered all of the terminology, arm positions, etc. without even thinking about it, and (b) frustrated at how much better shape I was in when I was younger and doing ballet daily.