Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

Tom made a beautiful dinner  Look at this dinner! Color me lucky :-)

I was at a Thai restaurant last night with Tom and Scott, looking over the signature cocktail menu. I didn't see one that really was calling my name. And, of course, I would never order my go-to bourbon drinks in a Thai restaurant. It's too much cognitive dissonance for even me. So I vaguely waved my hand and asked for a vodka tonic.  Half a screenshot of the cocktail menu at Laut Thai. And then I halted mid-sentence.  "Do you have Fever Tree?" I asked in a panicked voice because I was, in fact, slightly panicked.  I would certainly never drink tonic that came out of a bar gun. Tonic from a gun always has that bitter taste of under-bar tube slime and the bubble quotient is extremely variable. Also I don't like tonic from a previously opened plastic bottle. It doesn't fizz properly. No thank you sir. I like Fever Tree tonic from a single use glass bottle.  Anyway, the Thai restaurant did not have Fever Tree and so I changed my order to a more Thai-forward cockt...

It's really pretty :-)   I may have just realized I am a repository for the plants of people no longer with us, between my grandma's cactuses and Tom's mom's partner's brother's jade plants . My grandma also had a whole bunch of dumb canes.  spoiler alert: dumb cane usually don't look this nice. They have a penchant to grow one big leaf on a long stem. We were over at Jamie and Scott's in Brooklyn on Saturday night and Jamie had a dumb cane in a cute pot on the coffee table. I said, "is that a dumb cane?" and she looked at me like I had insulted her plant. It's not a great name, tbh so I get it. Luckily I have the Picture This plant identifier app on my phone (that I got for my fern life list ) and was shown to be correct: Jamie's plant did in fact identify as a dumb cane. I handed her my phone and she was suitably impressed because yeah. It was impressive.  But it was a trip down memory lane for me. My grandma, my mom's mom, had do...

 My hydroponic game is for sure leveling up.  Some of the harvest

  I've created a brand new ancient tradition - the bonsai jade plant Look, when Tom's Mom's partner's brother passed away probably 20 years ago, I got his large and luscious jade plant. I did not make off with it during the funeral luncheon at the house, in case you were wondering. I was properly gifted the plant when no one else wanted it. Anyway, with these jade plants, it's a cycle of life scenario. The big bits die but of course you can pick off the tops and replant them and then they grow into new little plants. Lots of new little plants. The thing is, throwing out a perfectly alive new little plant, in this house, is as reprehensible as like, idk, swimming in jeans. Even if you have 400 new little plants. For the record, not all new little jade plants are showpieces. Some of them are downright unattractive because they get tall and floppy.  Enter my amazing new hobby! the bonsai jade!  If I twist all these plants all around each other they will (crossing finge...

 On this penultimate NaBloPoMo - I have nearly succeeded in posting a post a day for one full month on this National Blog Post Month, yeah, my inspiration is waning. So I was planning on just posting this picture of some of my money plants:  Some of my money plants At one point I had probably 20 gorgeous money plants. The deal is that the money plants have baby money plants and then I feel bad about squashing them so I wind up with a Dugger family of money plants.  It was just too damn many money plants so I gave a bunch away. I felt very charitable when I did so since my mother saw money plants not half this nice for sale at Giant for $9 each.  Right?! Just another reason why my house is actually a farm. Anyway, this was going to be the entire post, but then, when I was looking for a great picture of the money plants, I ran across this photo in the photo library: Tom with a knife and his brother. It is a photo of Tom wielding a knife. Shirtless. With his brother in ...

The fancy beans 🫘 It’s a worthy unboxing that goes on when I get  these beans from Rancho Gordo. Look at these splendors of the vine! Your average bulk kidney just withers in shame in comparison!  Sadly they all sort turn a basic shade of beige in the Instant Pot so if you’re playing the long game, don’t bother. But while they exist on my shelves, I feel like a cottagecore influencer, hashtag fo shizzy.  

  Purslane in the Aerogarden When I first got the Aerogarden, I'd weigh the crops I harvested for amortization purposes. For example: Amortization Schedule. Look, of course it should have been a spreadsheet and the micro green reference prices of course should be footnoted but I'm busy and that's just how it is. Then I started growing Purslane instead of random lettuces and you can't even buy purslane in the store most of the time, making it, you know, priceless. So I stopped keeping track. It was getting onerous anyway. Purslane is " a tasty weed that is loaded with nutrients ." And right?! It is tasty. Also, as I know from prior harvests, (see above) I can and have harvested 100 grams for one full serving size. I am practically a farmer. I said to Tom maybe we should write off our house as an agricultural zone. Tom wasn't into it. He reminded me my eighth grade math teacher went to jail for declaring his house was a church and not paying any taxes for lo...

Who doesn't love a chia seeds? I'm a lifelong fan. You might call me an evangelist even. When my niece was 13, I gave her a Bob Ross Chia pet head for Christmas. She could not have been more thrilled.  I'm pretty certain she was thrilled at least.  Mostly. Bob Ross Chia Pet Head Chia seeds are also an essential ingredient in my extremely complicated morning smoothie recipe. I measure them out and dump them in the blender along with flax seeds, hemp hearts, hemp powder, psyllium, steamed kale, blue berries and a running list of other items I'm experimenting with and/or are about to go bad in the fridge. It's amazing how you can chuck very questionable fruits or vegetables into the blender and never know they weren't top notch after a thorough decimation. As I told someone the other day, I can never go back to the office. My morning routine has become far too complex and time-consuming to take the show on the road. Anyway, the other day, I spilled I'm going to...

 Probably the day after Thanksgiving and four days before the end of NaBloPoMo is as good a day as I'll ever get to relate my personal solve for acid reflux.  Devising my own solution was pretty much my only option since I seem to be one of those people who can't take PPIs (like Zantac, etc). They make me feel horrible . You'd think that more doctors would advise patients about waves of just feeling miserable as a possible side effect, since, at least in my experience, it was pretty nasty and I only connected the dots back to the PPI because I was randomly on drugs.com looking into something. Anyway, here's what worked for me. It took maybe 4-6 weeks, but I no longer have acid reflux. It's been maybe five months now of feeling symptom free. This is something since acid reflux runs in my family and I had it pretty bad.  Occasionally, I've felt the start of acid reflux again, but when it does, I snap into action and redouble doing all my things (ie Steps 1-5 below...

  Dried Split Peas in an attractive little pile Yesterday I was halfway through a shower when all of a sudden, there was something digging into my heel. I lifted up my foot and picked off one (1) dried split pea. Later on, I told Tom about the split pea. I wondered where it had come from. The whole incident had a very mysterious vibe.  Tom immediately responded, "Do you think it fell out of your hair?" WTF.

Most critically, I went down to the Fountain Pen Hospital and bought three different kinds of fountain pen ink. Here's one of them. What a nifty bottle, right? Fountain Pen Ink I bought at the Fountain Pen Hospital Given how much the fountain pen store guy helped me work through my ink indecision angst, I'm not even going to worry that I saw this ink for $5 less on Amazon OR that the same exact day I was in the store, the Fountain Pen Hospital was running an online 20% off special I found out about later. These guys at the Fountain Pen Hospital are fountain pen Nerds with a capital N. When you can capture their attention with wild hand gestures and your outside voice, they are also happy to wait on you. The guy I ensnared told me not to buy the Mont Blanc ink. He gave me this advice for some reason I half couldn't hear and half couldn't understand. The Mont Blanc ink was $10 more, so some shekel saved there. The guy also told me to avoid the very alluri...

We had dinner with Bruce and Bernardo last night at Candle79 on the Upper East. I wish the Candle79 interior looked a little less like your uncle's favorite Italian Japanese fusion place circa 1993. The food is as consistent as the decor, however, which is why we continue to go back. (Note: Tom disagrees. He says he "likes the decor." Especially the upstairs.) After we bonded over fountain pens, Bernardo started telling this story about how one time he tried to learn to play the violin. It was not an altogether successful attempt. He wondered if the problem was his violin, so he went into one of the fancy violin stores up by Lincoln Center and had his violin restrung. credit: Brobst Violin Store The proprietor of this violin store happened to have been some kind of violin virtuoso in his younger days. The Virtuoso was there when Bernardo went to pick up the violin. Bernardo decided to ask him for advice. He explained his problems to the Virtuoso and then paused ...

Tom and I boarded the airplane and sat down in our seats.  We were bound for Oregon to spend 4th of July with Helen and Matt at Darcey and Kent's house in Eugene. I fastened the seatbelt and stowed my crap under the seat. At some point, it became evident that the young woman seated on my right was singing softly. Some kind of Christian uptempo number. Then she started talking to herself, mostly narrating the entire process of downloading the United App, remembering her frequent flyer number and signing up for inflight wifi.  The quiet talking and occasional musical interlude continued the entire flight. Later on, when we mentioned this to Kent, he said, “She’s probably from Eugene.” Speaking of the travel portion of our vacation, I’d be remiss if I failed to mention how I had been pulled aside by a TSA agent at the security checkpoint. It was because of a ziplock full of lentils. The agent hoisted the lentils into the light and peered at them intently. Then he turned ...

I have laryngitis. The upshot is that Tom gets to chat with himself during dinner. Tom: "I hated peas growing up. But they were canned peas. Very weird texture. Also not a good color." Tom: "And the name. PEAS. What kid is going to eat PEAS?" Tom: "They'd have more luck if they called peas something else. Something like ... Green Balls. I'd call them Green Balls." Me: (WTF look) Tom: "Ok maybe Green Balls is not the best name. How about Green Goblins? or Sargent Squishies. It would be better if they were crunchy because Crunchy is great in a name. Except Captain Crunch is already taken." Tom: "I'm going to single-handedly rebrand peas. I'd like to see them in the cereal aisle. Although if peas were in the cereal aisle, they'll probably wind up coated in high fructose corn syrup." Tom: "What are peas, by the way? A legume? A bean? I need to look this up." photocredit: https://summerharvest...

Photo credit: http://sewingtheseedsofchange.blogspot.com/2011/03/ It's Thanksgiving week. I quit work on Wednesday, so Wednesday is like the new Friday. Which is why I was all confused this morning when I inspected my bean sprouts. I usually start the sprouting on Monday morning so by Friday, the sprouts are very sprouty. Salad-ready. But this morning, the bean sprouts were totally small. I said to Tom, "Something is wrong with my bean sprouts." There I was, all ready to harvest, staring at stringy and very tiny vegetation. It took me a good minute and a half to realize that although it feels like Friday, it is not Friday.

I bought these cotton reusable bags for vegetables and herbs instead of plastic. You wash your veggies and then toss them in the bag. When you use up the veggies, you put the cotton bag in the washing machine. Good as new. Except sometimes you might put the bag in the wash when it's not quite exactly empty. Tom: "Why is there cilantro inside my jeans?"

Candle 79 is a full-on vegan place. It was Matt’s first time in such an establishment. I felt very honored by his fortitude in the face of so much bean dip and radicchio. The Candle 79 waiter goes by with a platter of onion rings. The food in question. When he comes back around to our table, Matt asks him, “What were those things that look just like onion rings?” “Ummm. Onion rings?” says the waiter. It will be many years before anyone forgets this incident. 

I am now fully into making yogurt out of soy milk. There are three to five reasons for this which I will make up right now: Store-bought non-dairy yogurt is super pricey. I prefer to spend my money on Dona chai turmeric latte supplies that come in totes adorbs bottles that look like tinctures from the days of yore. I love stepping away from my desk for a moment to transform myself into some sort of herbalist shaman centrifuging a potion on the rotating glass plate inside the office microwave. Store-bought non-dairy yogurt has all these weird gums and gellans in it and comes in plastic one-use containers which I dislike for all the same reasons some people wear organic bamboo shmatas and eat tiny scraps torn from Mother Jones magazine. Fresh Direct sent me 4 quarts of soy milk that expire in two weeks. I over-ordered to stock up and then noticed the tragic flaw in this plan. As with all my endeavors, this dream of yogurt also required a lot of online research, mostly on Amaz...

It’s a thing, you know. These days, when you look up a recipe on the interwebs, you don’t just get a straight up recipe with just the facts ma’am tablespoons and cooking temperatures.  Now the recipe is like the climax after paragraphs about grandmothers and prairies. There is talk about heading out to a well-tended garden on rainy days. After sniffing the fragrance of a good simple life, the recipe author will gracefully kneel to clip perky stalks of nostalgic vegetables sprouted from the pink hearts of homemade whole grain bread baked with love in shiny retro appliances covered with artfully arranged Hello Kitty stickers. Also there are a lot of ads for Pottery Barn for Kids and photos that make you want to paint your kitchen butter yellow and make yourself an apron out of gingham. Rhubarb dessert I love moss-covered table decorations as much as the next gal, and so I became inspired. May I present to you my first, and probably last, Recipe Novella: I went ou...