One of the first vegetables any child plants, and one of the first to mature in the garden, is the lovely radish. So round, so brightly colored red on the outside and so intensely white on the inside. What’s not to like? The taste! I hate radishes. Always have. (more…)
And basil! These are in abundance right now. Salad.
Greens (from the market)
Lots of basil leaves
Sliced fresh strawberries
Sliced jicama (or other crunchy veggie)
Crumbled gorgonzola
Chopped honey glazed cashews (or other nut)
Extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar
Sea salt, fresh ground black pepper
Yum!
We’ve been gone for the past twelve days. The day before we left, we stuck seeds and a few little plants in the ground. Our dear neighbor watered faithfully while we were gone. The weather was warm. And Oh – My - God! Look what happened! (more…)
Wouldn’t you know, the day we’ve been waiting for… when the first strawberry in the big patch we made last year is finally ripe enough to eat, and we’re in New York City! My neighbor kindly sent us a picture of the new baby berry: (more…)
Anyone who regularly reads this blog knows that we love good coffee and will go to some effort to find it in any city we visit. Given that we visit Rochester often and had a fairly disappointing experience the last time, we decided to check out a cafe that had been recommended to us by the friend of a friend: Cole & Parks in Victor, NY, some 20 minutes southeast of Rochester. (more…)
I know, this is stretching it a bit, but I couldn’t help but think what an honor it was for Syracuse’s Dinosaur Bar-B-Que that, out of all the restaurants in New York City, Michelle Obama would take her daughters today to lunch at the Dinosaur in New York. I mean, when we think of New York dining, it’s more like Jean Georges for lunch or Otto for pizza and red wine, or Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop for a lime rickey and pastrami sandwich. (more…)
I’m going to spend a few days with my dear ol’ Mom and her equally dear ol’ boyfriend. They met a couple years ago, when he was about to turn 90, and they’ve been acting like teenagers ever since. I can’t wait to see them, but that doesn’t mean I have to like Yuban out of a can. So this morning I experimented with items to make my mornings as tasty as possible. (more…)
My wife and I are huge fans of going to cafes in any city we visit. But there are exceptions.
We were enjoying a sunny day off last Monday in Rochester and were heading out for breakfast at the popular Highland Diner, but had talked about trying to find locally roasted coffee. Purely by chance, I happened to notice the Boulder Cafe on Alexander St. as we drove by. It looked as though it was good-sized, and its sign and decor seemed to indicate a good product and atmosphere, so we decided to stop.
Whether or not you eat meat, do yourself a favor and visit Green Hills Market at 5933 South Salina Street in Syracuse. That’s just a few blocks south of Route 173 and so worth the trip. It’s local grocery shopping at its best, for at least these two reasons: (more…)
Hydrofracking threatens everything we value: our land, our food, our water, our air, our natural environment, our animals and birds, our home values, our communities. Seems unbelievable, which is why people just can’t seem to compute how close it is to destroying New York State.
The following post is not written by me. It’s too well written for that. It’s a complete copy of a post at Ithaca’s Food Web blog. Read it and weep. (more…)
Just recently I was relaxing and watching the boob tube, when I saw the new Domino’s Pizza ad. At first I wasn’t sure what was going on. As I recall, a fellow standing in a professional kitchen (possibly the CEO) was saying that customers had told the Domino’s management that their pizza wasn’t good. The language he quoted was pretty blunt. Wow. He went on to say that they had taken this to heart and changed their recipes (and possibly the ingredients?). Finally, he asked the viewer to please come in and try the new pizza. It was hard to believe that this was an ad, with simple candor. What a concept – no slick sales pitch, and even more amazing, an admission of error by a corporate boss. Unbelievable! And refreshing. Finally somebody who gets it. Now that I think about it, I wonder if it’s cheaper to make this type of ad than some dazzling, slick, completely phony production.
In the Internet age, with everyone blogging and commenting everywhere, and with news organizations publishing online countless times per day, it’s very hard for a huge business to hide. If your stuff sucks, people will find out very quickly, whether or not you admit it. As such, corporate heads can no longer count on preventing negative press from being seen, which they were able to do when distribution of news and information was very tightly controlled. But it’s still the rare CEO who seems to grasp this. I suppose that if upper management has been there a long time, and no longer is in touch with rapid changes that make up our modern reality, then you’ll still see the tired, outmoded ad techniques trickling down from their remote ivory tower. Fortunately, this seems to be changing.
We just got back from a couple days’ visit to New York City during which our nearly sole focus was to try new places to eat. Staying with family in SoHo, we found it delightfully easy to fall out of bed and into a restaurant, chocolate shop, specialty grocery store or patisserie.
Our first stop after a long trip with too little caffeine was a Vietnamese restaurant called Bún Soho. With family members, we ordered a couple of bún, a beef salad and duck confit, all really tasty. The coffee showed up slowly (we expect this with Vietnamese coffee) and in a startlingly large quantity, without the little Vietnamese coffee maker sitting on the top. It was very satisfying, but just not the knock-out coffee we get at New Century in Syracuse. I suspect it was not made in the traditional way. The service, too, was lacking. Seemed it was her first day on the job. All in all, though, the experience was quite nice, and I later experienced a longing for that cup of coffee that was not sated by the Italian coffee nearby.
Later in the evening, looking for a hot drink to balance out the bitterly cold weather, we wandered into Maribelle chocolate shop and cacao bar. Yes, it’s pricey, but so is most of New York. And yes, it is an experience worth having at least once in your life. We went to the charming cacao bar in the back and ordered one Aztec spicy chocolate and one dark chocolate. I judge all hot chocolate by the chocolate I drank in Bar Odeón in the north of Spain some thirty years ago. It must be thick, very dark, and so rich you have to eat it with a spoon. Maribelle provided exactly that. I’m just sorry we didn’t have time to do it again.
My garden progress:
