Saturday, October 13, 2001
just now finished putting the bowling alley wax on my kitchen floor. whew! no fun! so i'm rewarding myself with a few squares of el rey mijao chocolate. . .i still slightly prefer the bucare, but the mijao is a delicious variety as well.
yesterday i got too ambitious, and decided to try to reproduce a dish i had at lupa, a special of hand-made whole-wheat orechiette with glazed chanterelles. i find all the food at lupa a tad too salty, and this was no exception, but it was still a marvel. on the way out i caught one of the staff, who said a very similar recipe could be found in a cookbook by deborah madison. she's long been one of my favorite chefs, and i own just about all her books, so i had the recipe.
thus i fought my way downtown in the afternoon to buy chanterelles. there's a famous store on the lower-east side that specialized in mushrooms, but i thought it might be easier just to get to dean & deluca, even though i loathe the place. the prices for the fresh chanterelles and baby porcini were truly shocking, and they didn't have much of a selection of orechiette. thus i ended up buying some of their fresh pappardelle, which was truly a mistake. it was just shockingly terrible -- too thin, too little egg -- and ruined the whole dish. thus i re-learned my lesson: you can't take short cuts with ingredients! i should have stuck with the artisanal dried pasta.
this furthered my resolve to begin making my own pasta, which as a flour product, might fall slightly into our bread category! i'm signing up for pizza and pasta-making classes pronto, my friends! naturally i just missed the pasta class. . . .
but there is a little recipe for the little ear-shaped pasta here.
posted by fortune | 1:12 PM | top | link to this | | email this: |
Thursday, October 11, 2001
and a big hello back to mary beth of orientation! love your textile and quilt work...
the workmen finished replastering and painting my house. after spending some time down on my hands and knees waxing my antique hard wood floors with butcher's white diamond bowling alley wax, i was really looking forward to some yoga. and, since it's cooler, maybe getting the kitchen back to where i could bake some cookies (i still owe you paula; i haven't forgotten!).
three weeks away from yoga is a long time! i started out slow with a beginner's class at yoga people. however, my office has been relocated to the woolworth building, and i should start back to work next week or the week after at the latest. so i wanted to use the time remaining to me well. thus i went to take two afternoon classes at jivamukti.
tuesday i went to the 1 pm class taught by the awesome nancy la nasa. she always gives a fun class. yesterday i had lunch with my husband, whose gone back to work, uptown and nearly went to the uptown jivamukti. but at the last minute i hopped the n & r subway -- excuse me, for the next 3 years it's going to be the q & w until the city repairs the tunnels that once ran under the world trade center -- and went back down to astor place.
jivamukti's afternoon classes are not crowded, considering the large spaces. the jivamukti studios are all quite large, although not of the same awe-inspiring size of the iyengar institute. the 4 pm wednesday class was completely new to me, an open class taught by rhana. she's a small chick with a tiny voice but her classes kick butt. tough.
what's great about going to jivamukti is that you get to see many talented yogis and yoginis, which is very inspiring. i really felt encouraged to devote myself to more practice after seeing so much truly beautiful yoga in the room. i am still somewhat wary of the injury rate i hear about there -- but if i can focus on practicing without vanity and admit my current limitations, then i think i'll be ok. i did sign up for the rodney yee workshop while i was there.
it's peculiar how easy it has seemed to adjust to this new world. the armed troops and the personnel carrier at the foot of the brooklyn bridge no longer cause me surprise when i see them. i can look out the window at night at the downtown manhattan skyline without wanting to cry. am i numb or hard-hearted? if i eat grimaldi's pizza or buy a new rug at abc, am i spending money in a city that really needs it now or just distracting myself? when i go to vote today in the mayoral run-off, am i participating in rebuilding new york or pretending -- as the candidates seem to be doing -- that the world trade center was an isolated incident?
how clearly i recall those early mayoral debates, when the candidates tangled over how to spend the revenues from the sale of the city-owned world trade center to a private developer. the developer has already hired an architect; he is already drawing up blueprints. . .
posted by fortune | 7:03 AM | top | link to this | | email this: |