Flavors 518

Am I going to go ahead and talk about the Walled Lake Big Boy ? Yes, yes I am. So I am in Michigan on a professional development trip. I took the train from Albany to Toledo on Friday night. Who takes the train from Albany to Toledo on a Friday night, you ask? Many people who are from Detroit originally and live out east, but are going to weddings and funerals. It felt we were all kindred spirits. There is something vaguely comforting about overhearing that a bunch of people are from the place you are from and don't live there anymore, but have to go back because of various important relationships. Also, there is something weird about the overnight train in terms of a bunch of strangers who don't know each other at all falling asleep in close proximity. You all feel like you are getting through some long journey together. There is a strong element of trust involved. Will the guy who is yelling at the all the people in his phone in colorful language do anything to me if I fall ...

So this picture above was taken in January 2009 about two weeks before my grandmother died. It is better than the one that was taken one minute before, but it is totally not in focus. The nurse was far from a good photographer. What a tragedy it is when photographs of moments in your life that will never be repeated are all blurry! We have a great one on our honeymoon that has this same problem. Very tragic. Anyways, so we visited her in Kalamazoo, MI at a nursing home. I was living in NYC working at the Morgan at the time. My grandmother was very concerned as to whether it was a paid job or just an unpaid internship. I was very concerned about getting her pecan pie recipe. She said "Everyone knows how to make that", and wouldn't give it to me but kept asking me how much I got paid. I never got the recipe, and then I married someone who is allergic to nuts. So no pecan pie for me. But this morning I was buying an espresso at the coffee shop in town ( because K cups ...

So I talked to my sister on the phone for a long time this weekend, and it turns out the people who live in my late grandparents' house think it is haunted. Of course I don't believe this really, and it isn't supposedly haunted by my grandparents, but instead my great grandparents who also lived there. I never met them, but I did research them quite a bit when I worked at Ellis Island (apparently they visited France a lot). Anyways, apparently the people who live there now smell smoke and hear big band music at random times when no one else is home (whatever). It caused my sister and I to start talking about all our grandparents' funerals we have been to. The first one, my dad's dad was when I was in college, when we were all barely starting to feel like grown-ups at all (I realize there are plenty of people who never get to know any of their grandparents for any significant amount of time, and I feel fortunate to have known the four of them during the years I was ...

When I was a kid I felt overwhelmed by Thanksgiving. It just always seemed like so much food that we'd end up feeling sick at the end of it. When I was in college and learning about people starving all over the world, a holiday just devoted to eating seemed a bit like flaunting our wealth in the faces of the less fortunate of the world. Like many things in life, sometimes it takes being able to do something out of free will instead of obligation for you to appreciate it. I did enjoy the green bean casserole:  (A Midwestern classic: can of green beans, can of cream of mushroom soup mixed together , french fried onions on top, put in the oven for a while.) This blog shows someone attempting the kind of holiday meal I remember as a kid here and here . This post has some great retro Thanksgiving photos (like the one I featured above).  In the past few years I've had different ideas about how to approach it. Our first Thanksgiving we did actually make an enormous am...

We seem to be having a food storage problem at our house. The thing about a CSA share is that you can end up with more food than you can possibly eat every week. Because of this I've made about 6 weeks worth of delicious soups for lunches. I've also filled up all the airtight containers we have. Getting your food straight from the farm also cuts down on the number of plastic shopping bags around the house. This is probably overall a good thing, but I have noticed that there are certain uses in which plastic shopping bags are useful - putting your scraps in them around the kitchen as you cook and putting your lunch in one on the drive to work so it doesn't leak on the car seat. Of course you could use a reusable lunch bag, but then you have to put that through the washing machine so is it really so much better for the environment? I mean I guess so, but I just think if you are using plastic bags for multiple uses they can't really be that horrible, right?  I always feel...

I visited Michigan over Labor Day weekend. There is something about places you've lived, and especially the place you are originally from, where it is reassuring when things don't change and very slightly sad or shocking when they do. It is as if that place existed only for your experience. It is as if every place you've been should remain the same forever like a museum of your life. And the fine folks at Pasquale's Restaurant seem happy to oblige. I went with my lovely friend I met in London and her husband. Her husband always went there for his birthday as a child. They went there for their first date. My mother used to go there every Saturday night as a child, and then after cruising down Woodward Ave as a teenager. It is crazy how one restaurant can be a part of so many different moments in so many of my friends' and family members' lives. About a year ago we rented out a banquet room there on the occasion of my grandmother's funeral. There was a ...

When I first started cooking I was friends with a woman who did not have very much of an interest in food. She was very skinny, and in the NYC style suppressed her appetite with huge amounts of coffee and cigarettes. I mentioned that I was going home to make dinner one day, and she made a comment like "How oppressive! What is this, 1950?" While planning a wedding, I can't help but think about what it means to be a "wife" in these modern times. All the imagery of a traditional wedding creates a story very different to what our marriage will actually be like. We're grown ups and have been for quite some time. We both have graduate degrees. We both have jobs. In fact, he mostly taught me how to cook. Yes, things are different now than they were in 1950, but my friend's reactionary viewpoint doesn't do anyone any good. The thing about spending all day Sunday cooking something is that you get to eat the leftovers for lunch at work all week. The thing a...