Flavors 518

We used to take the Amtrak or drive to Poughkeepsie to take the Metro-North to visit NYC. In more recent times though, we've discovered the charm of driving. Insane Manhattan traffic you say? Take the BQE. Expensive parking you say? My mother-in-law spotted a place in Brooklyn that costs $7 a day. And there are benefits too - flexibility of timing, being able to buy stuff there and cart it back (no one wants to crush their pretty Paper Source loot or One Girl whoopie pies in a backpack), and in the case of my job being able to move artwork around. The Taconic State Parkway is also beautiful and incredibly civilized to drive on. You feel a bit like Don Draper dropping Sally off at boarding school. You can imagine all the old timey road trips taken on that very strip of asphalt. I drove down for work a little while ago, fought through traffic in the Bronx, got to a spot near Hudson on the Taconic and experienced the most beautiful view. It was all fresh air, arm-stretching space, ...

I've been out dogsitting quite a bit lately in North Adams on the weekends. I've been watching these dogs for almost four years, which seems crazy. This has meant marathons of David Tutera and Bridezillas and the sort (last night was the last episode of Bridezillas ever, how is that even possible? End of an era!). It has also caused me to feel incredibly nostalgic for my old job. What is nostalgia really? How are you nostalgic for things you chose to leave behind? Are you nostalgic for parts of yourself you seem to have lost, or some rosier version of life that never really existed? An important ingredient for nostalgia to exist is time - enough time gone by to forget negative aspects of things. One thing I know is that the more ambitious you are, the more difficult it is to feel grateful for what you have, so there's that. Anyways, so I've been meeting my husband at The Towne Tavern in Averill Park because it is a good halfway point. We've been exploring differe...

 The week before last week, we went to the Magnetic Fields show at Club Helsinki in Hudson. I hadn't really been to Hudson before outside of an Amtrak car, and I'd always heard great things about it. You can just get tickets to see the music, but it is way classier to get a table and eat dinner while you watch the show. Also, the menu is great . It is Southern inspired and makes use of local, seasonal ingredients. I got their first and ordered a glass of Pinor Noir which was very tasty, and some of the fried okra with a Cajun remoulade to start. I happen to love okra done right, and this dish had a nice corn meal crust which wasn't greasy at all. I took in the surroundings, like what I imagine the Copacabana to have been like in some far off past decade. Scott showed up and we got some of the delicious beers from nearby Chatham Brewing . For dinner, I got the Helsinki burger, which was really juicy and "topped with applewood smoked bacon,  roasted portobel...

 The crack staff at the Capital Region Dining Blog are big fans of The Hungry Fish , Chef Sarah Fish's locavore diner.   So we were pleased to see that they were moving to a slightly more convenient location (for us) in Troy.   We were able to visit this weekend, and can happily report that it's as good as ever.   The new room retains its offbeat charm, although the store portion is a little smaller.    The food remains both terrific and a good value.  I had the breakfast BLT: Very good homemade bread, high-quality bacon, fresh tomato, farm fresh egg -- how can you go wrong?   The home fries were very good too, with crisp exteriors. I'm not, in all candor, a big fan of the homemade ketchup -- it's better than most, but I'm more or less part of the foodie backlash that sees it as better in theory than in practice.  That quibble aside, it's a perfect brunch sandwich.  Ms. Garlic had the Croque Madame: ...

My friend at work was telling me about the baby animals at Hancock Shaker Village . She also said the cafe was amazing, so I really wanted to go. I loved seeing the baby animals in past years at Indian Ladder Farms , but my husband was not as impressed (though he may deny it now - in his defense it was a cold and rainy day that I wanted him to stand around and listen to me say "look how cute the little baby ducks are!!"). So it was good my friend Elizabeth agreed to go with me. Here is the part where I say to you "Look how cute the animals are!!" Here is the Round Stone Barn that holds the animals:  Then we went to the Village Harvest Cafe. My friend really recommended it, and they grow their own vegetables so it sounded like a great choice. Here is the menu . I had the "Open Faced Roast Beef on Grilled Farmers Bread with Shaker Mushroom Sauce, and Crispy Shallots", and lots of hazelnut coffee that I really enjoyed. The mushroom sauce was ...

We spent the weekend in NYC, and I hung around until yesterday to get to see the Pioneer Woman at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. We had a fun filled weekend which included Rangers/Islanders at Madison Square Garden, Colicchio & Sons , a pub George Washington frequented , Brooklyn Flea , and then I went to Alice's Tea Cup with my friend (more specific run downs of these activities may follow). I guess what I really just wanted to say though is how happy I was to come back to Albany at the end of it. New York City made me feel after a weekend just like I had felt after 4 and a half years - that it was dirty, expensive, and crowded. A few weeks on the radio I heard Kristi talking about what she liked most about the Capital Region . She was trying to defend the photo of Sheridan Avenue on Jeopardy where the associated question was "What is city plight?". But instead of coming up with ways we could help people in that neighborhood, all she could come up wit...

I previously mentioned that I am auditing a class at the art conservation lab. Last week we took a field trip to the Empire State Plaza Art collection. I had never been down there before. Another blogger discussed the collection here . The conservator told us about all the awful things that have happened to these paintings, including vandalism in the 1980s. You can read an article about that event here . A man took a serrated steak knife to eight different paintings, sawed at them, pulled the canvas forward, and wrote on them in magic marker. It was at three a.m., the plaza police were off somewhere, and the only reason the man got caught was that he turned himself in the next morning. There were other incidences over the years with these paintings - kids lodging spitballs on them with straws from the nearby McDonald's, coffee spills, soy sauce packets sprayed on the Jackson Pollock , a Jazzercise instructor using a painting as the jumping off point for her exercise, kids climb...

I always look forward to President's Day because that means I usually get the Monday off after my birthday . This year, however, I am auditing a class at the conservation lab , so I ended up going into work anyway (it is a floating holiday for us). It is a fun class because I get to hear about all kinds of art related gossip, like how the people at the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge put paintings where the pastry chef ended up burning them with his setting the cherries jubilee on fire. The conservators told them not to put the paintings near any food, so they put them above the boiling water of the coffee station, and five years later had to pay to get them fixed all over again. Also, The Clark's Bourgereau is getting conserved and every time we go it is a little different looking as the yellowed varnish gets removed gradually. Anyways, this class is making me tired as two days a week I get home at about 10:00 at night so I took today off. We had originally sampled some fo...

Sometimes my boss and I sit around and try to come up with ways to make more money. Yesterday we thought Etsy was a good idea. Today we started talking about all these parties you can have where you sell things. I never knew about half of these. Pampered Chef Tastefully Simple Even Dove Chocolates There are custom handbags .  ( Made nearby in Troy) And the idea that started them all: Tupperware . The only one that actually seems like a good idea to me is Avon , because that is actually not a party and just a catalog. Still, there is something a little wrong about "Hi, I'm your friend - buy some eyeliner?!" Anyone have any thoughts on these? Does anyone actually make money or is it all a way for these companies to infiltrate your social circles and make your friends guilted into buying things from you? 

Today I went to a pizza making class at King Arthur Flour that my parents signed me up for as a Christmas gift. They are located in Norwich, VT. I had a great time driving out there with all of the beautiful scenery populated with ski resorts and small cheese farms. I got there early and checked out the store. Browsing the store was a great time for me, as I am sure it would be for anyone who is really interested in baking. They also sell supplies online, and you can order a catalogue . They had pretty much any kind of flour you can think of, probably 10 different kinds of vanilla extract, endless decorating supplies, bread cookbooks, and much, much more. They also sold some local Vermont products. I bought some Grafton cheddar cheese , Vermont Smoke and Cure bacon , and some tart pans. Then I went to their cafe. I got a spinach and feta croissant and a coffee. The croissant was very flaky, very fresh, and totally amazing. The Baking Education Center was really professional and...

Now I am a big fan of the Cook's Illustrated Pizza Margherita recipe, as discussed here . But I recently tried Mark Bittman's pizza dough recipe from the New York Times Essential Cookbook, and that is very good too. I like the idea of mixing half wheat flour and half white flour in a lot of bread recipes because I feel you get some of the health benefits of the wheat flour, and some of the texture benefits of the white. I think it is a good mix, so I've been doing this in my pizza dough too. I went to Wild Oats Market in Williamstown, MA ( as discussed here ) earlier in the week and got some Maplebrook mozzarella and no joke - the best pepperoni I have ever had in my life. It is from Vermont Smoke and Cure and oh my goodness was this good. I cannot wait to try all of their other products like summer sausage, ham, bacon, and sausages. So delicious it was unreal. The same day I bought these products earlier in the week I had one mishap after another - through bad plannin...

As a Christmas gift I signed my husband up for a pasta making class at Different Drummer's Kitchen in Stuyvesant Plaza. The instructor was from MezzeNotte in Guilderland. We sampled some food from this restaurant at the Albany Wine & Dine for the Arts and really enjoyed what we tried. He said they made some risotto, ricotta gnocchi, and a couple kinds of long fresh pasta. He said it was all hands-on and that the staff was very helpful. He said that in the class he learned the having a Kitchen-Aid mixer with a pasta attachment is the easiest method of making fresh pasta at home. He said that the hand crank ones really need two people - one person to feed in the pasta to the machine, and another to crank it (sometimes a third person is also needed to keep the device steady on the counter). Check out some of his photos - it all looks delicious! Apparently it was not difficult to learn.

This week I am dogsitting in North Adams, MA. ( Last time I was dogsitting I took myself out to breakfast at the Blue Benn in VT. )  I love the Berkshires, and it is not just because three different museums out here have employed me, compared to none in Albany. I love the Berkshires for a lot of the same reasons I love the Napa Valley . Sure it is very rural, and you often feel like you are in the middle of nowhere, but it is still relatively culturally sophisticated. James Taylor lives here. What is often ranked as the number one liberal arts school in the country is here . Emily Dickinson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Herman Melville are all from western Massachusetts. The scenery is incredibly beautiful, and yet the one movie playing in town is likely the same artsy movie you saw at the Spectrum last week. Our friends who live in Seattle and Boston talk about how they want to go to MassMoca . People who hear about me having an hour commute always feel really bad for me, but it is ver...

This year I decided to take on a part-time job during the weekends throughout the holidays to make some extra cash (because weddings , no matter how much you try not to spend a lot of money and make everything yourself are freakin' expensive). Back when I was an unpaid intern at the American Museum of Natural History , the archivist told me as I was taking on tons of debt to basically hope to be like her one day, that it would be a long while until I made a lot of money. Of course, it is also really satisfying work, and I knew what I was getting into. One main reason that I went to graduate school was so that I didn't have to be a waitress anymore . So when I came up with the idea of working weekends during the holidays, I really didn't want to go back to that. So I showed up at a craft store, let's call it Mary Jo's Crafts, which is next to Emperor's Wine and Spirits . To their credit they hired me, since most places like that see that you have a Master...

I took yesterday off of work months in advance to attend an author signing and cooking demonstration by Amanda Hesser for the Food52 cookbook. We woke up super early, drove to Poughkeepsie, took the Metro-North, took a cab from Grand Central, and made it to Sur La Table on 57th street just in time - just in time, that is, for their staff to tell us it was postponed because the store hasn't finished installing their kitchen yet. So unfortunate. What a let down! So we just killed some time hanging around Columbus Circle and then met our friend at Prune Restaurant for lunch at 1st and 1st. Scott had the sweetbreads with capers and bacon. I had the burger on an English muffin with Cabot cheddar cheese, and our friend had the skate with a lemon caper sauce. Hers also came with a potato slaw with some sesame sort of dressing with it. It was all amazing. A side view of the burger: We also had desserts: churros and a poached pear with brandy and creme fraiche. ...

I have the above postcard hanging up next to my desk at work. It makes me think about regional foods. Do they mean anything in terms of the sense of identity people have relating to a specific place? What does it say about places if they don't really have their own regionally specific foods? I've lived in three places - Detroit, NYC, and Albany - and when I think about the foods that might be associated with those places I wonder what it means. The funny thing about regional foods is if you grow up in that place you assume everyone in the world knows about those things. It becomes a bonding thing or a short hand for relating to someone who is also from there (like sports teams). If you grew up in Michigan, you couldn't possibly know that if you went to Florida and ordered Mackinac Island fudge ice cream they would look at you like you were crazy. As featured above pasties are big in MI. I saw something similar when I was in Scotland, so I wonder if it was Scottish im...