those were the days…

Seeing as I am turning a tad older today…. umm yip, I dug this up.

To The Kids Born  1930 – 1979 who SURVIVED the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s!!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick- up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter and bacon. We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar. And, we weren’t overweight…   WHY?

Because we were always outside playing…

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on..

No one was able to reach us all day.  And, we were OKAY.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride them down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.  After running into the bushes a few times,we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Play stations, Nintendo’s and X-boxes.  There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no surround-sound or CD’s, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet and no chat rooms.

WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.  We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team.  Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever.

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?

AND makes me totally glad and proud I was born in the generation I was.  Well that and I don’t really have a choice! HAHA

a simple soup for a simple gal

Mighty Mushroom Soup

10 oz box button mushrooms roughly chopped

1 medium onion diced

2 cloves garlic minced

2 tbsp fresh thyme

1 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp butter

3 cups veggie stock

1/2 cup milk or cream (cream will make for a heavier richer soup) milk will be a little lighter

Heat the olive oil and butter in a large pot, add the onions and saute until golden brown about 15 mins, add mushrooms, garlic and thyme.  Saute until the mushrooms are golden brown, add stock and simmer 15 mins.  Puree, adjust seasonings and serve.

diners

I’m obsessed with Diners.  I can’t help not be, they are just so far from anything you will ever find in N.Z.   I try steer us into one at every opportunity I get, fortunately now that we are constantly on Rte 4 and Rte 17 there’s plenty of pit stopping to and fro upstate.

By far my favorite is The Coach House Diner, it’s the creme de la creme of diner experience, mainly because of the existence of its famous salad bar.  Oh the salad bar with its 80’s inspired salads.  There are always mounds of shredded carrot & raisin salad, Waldorf salad, egg salad, mixed bean salad, white bean salad, coleslaw, beetroot, chickpeas, slabs of feta, grape leaves… I mean I could be here all day naming the array they have on display, GOD BLESS YOU COACH HOUSE!

And have I mentioned value??? Well yes siree bob VALUE to the max…. my meat fest extravaganza consisted of flank steak which comes with two sides.  I picked baked potato with gravy and steamed broccoli (which should be noted never arrived and I wouldn’t of eaten it anyway, it was purely just for show) AND it also comes with the aforementioned salad bar,  total $15.50.  In Mr Weiss’s corner he ordered veggie lasagna (a whopping portion smothered in cheese, which almost gave him a coronary just looking at it) and his dinner too came with salad bar, total $10.95.  Now that’s bang for your buck.

Coach House Diner we will see you again!

what the hell is this thing?

Thank god this horrifying creature is on the other side of the screen, otherwise cover your ears Mr Weiss she’s gonna blow!

just to put this into perspective this creature as about 4 inches wide…  that’s like a small bird!!

betty crocker

Not all mothers are Betty bleedin Crocker, now are they, and mine certainly wasn’t.  Perhaps if the Bible had recipes us kids might have fared better.  But it doesn’t and that’s a crying shame… note to all Bible publishers, perhaps incorporating “Jesus Junket and other Religious Recipes”, into the good book might have an audience, no?  Anyway, it was an endless menu of mostly inedible, indistinguishable “food type substances” that graced our plates nightly.

What I do remember from the dinners where pretty horrifying, every possible thing boiled to oblivion, scones like rock cakes that could take out a fairly decent sized pane of glass.  White bread, white rice, tinned fruit, jelly, jelly and more flippin jelly, I still to this day do not eat jelly (jell-o),  dry old chops, all kids horror, the ever lurking presence of silverbeet.  Risoles, which despite this glowing description, certainly didn’t end up this way in our household, they were usually flavorless charred lumps of greasy meat, made with the cheapest ground beef imaginable.  “Bread” we used as soccer balls,  from the alarming amount of yeast used and resulted in loaves so impossibly hard to cut, let alone eat without cracking every tooth in your head and concave birthday cakes that housed massive pools of icing and were completely impossible to cut.

Oh the joy of cooking, where I get it from can certainly not be attributed from these scenarios, but by far my favorite mother use of the oven was when she used it to “dry” our school uniforms.  We didn’t have a dryer growing up and only a wringer washing machine that was so deadly I was completely petrified of it and had massive panic attacks when it was my turn to help with the laundry.  The fear that it would entrap one, or both, of my hands through the rollers, as it was prone to happen when wringing the clothes dry, leaving me with mangled useless limbs  With only one uniform, come Monday morning it had to be dry, which was fine in summer, but when winter rolled around, it and along with our other normal clothes were headed, on baking sheets,  for the oven, patiently waiting their turns.  Inevitably of course I was the only kid in school that sported brown scorch marked, singed clothes.

So the memory scent that I associate with childhood, isn’t one of freshly baked warm cookies waiting to be gulped down with a cold glass of milk, it’s the steaming unmistakable smell of wet wool eventually burning. Don’t try this at home, but in keeping with the wool theme, try this instead…

Roast Leg of Lamb

2 1/2 lb boneless leg of lamb butterflied (get the butcher to this for you, or just hack around the bone)

3 cloves garlic strangled through a garlic press or us these

2 tbsp each of chopped parsley and rosemary

1/4 cup olive oil, 1 tsp ground cumin, 1 tsp both salt and pepper

Make this into a paste and smear over lamb, bung into a ziplock bag and leave to marinate in refrigerator a few hours, or overnight if your really into cooking in advance.

take out our meaty friend, roll and tie it in intervals, doesn’t need to be neat just to keep the meat all together and so it will cook evenly.  Next prep some veggies…. typically I used what was left, screaming for attention and rattling around in the fridge… you use what you have, or what you like but cut everything roughly the same size carrots, pearl onions or onion wedges, celery root, parsnips, potatoes, all make a fine companions.

Toss veggies in some olive oil, salt and pepper and place with meat on a baking sheet.  Like so.

Roast 375 for about 45= 50 mins, turning once halfway through, until veggies are nicely browned and lamb will be medium/rare.

Like this.  I suppose you’d better make something “green” to go with it…. peas? beans? some other vegetable that’s “good for you”, I made my “go to green”,  sauteed broccoli rabe with garlic.  Which after blanching the broccoli is finished off exactly how it sounds.

Serves 4, or 2 with leftovers for a lamb sammy the next day!!

yes…. bread again.

a weekend’s worth of food

Okay hands up how many of us did not leave the house this weekend? WHAT!!! just me was the wimpy-cheese-standing-alone type who couldn’t face 15F weather outside. Whilst I was in lock down this weekend my challenge was to feed Mr Weiss and myself with ingredients left forgotten on the shelves.

What’s a girl to do when it’s cold outside…. EAT goddam it EAT! Get the spanx out retirement it’s worth every mouth full. HAHA.

Friday night dinner, I have been hoarding this recipe for awhile now waiting to strike and since I was too lazy to make an entire dinner I got Mr Weiss to stop off at our favorite Indian takeout joint on Houston to supplement my contribution.

Shrimp in Chili Mustard Sauce (adapted from here)

1 lb medium shrimp peeled and deveined

1 medium onion finely diced

2 cloves garlic finely chopped

2 red chilies sliced

1 tbsp mustard oil

1 tbsp yellow mustard seeds

1 tsp tumeric

1 tsp coriander

juice of 1 lemon

1/4 cup water

In a large skillet gently heat the mustard oil and add the seeds, garlic and onion.  Saute 2-3 mins until seeds start to pop and onions turn translucent.  Add the spices, lemon juice, chili and shrimp, cook 3 mins.  Add the water and turn shrimp until they are pink and opaque, about another 3 minutes.

YUM! Mr Weiss brought us chana masala, and spinach saag and some vegetable pakora’s all for a whopping $5 bucks. Dinner is done.

and we scarfed up every last morsel… this dish will be a repeater for sure.

I’m a simple gal at heart, so one of my favorite breakfast’s is egg and soldiers…. and a cappuccino of course.

3 minute boiled egg… perfect everytime.

again there’s no waste in this household….

Mr Weiss also had the smarts to pick us up a Boboli premade pizza crust… scoff all you want but these things are great.  I made us our simple standard pie of olives, capers, red sauce, slash of pesto (when it’s around) parmesan, spices (crushed red pepper flakes, garlic chips, dried basil and oregano) and mozzarella.

there are 2 plates there, I swear I didn’t pig the entire pie!

Mr Weiss is known for whipping up a wicked waffle and a perfect pancake.  He treated me to wild maine blueberry (I had some frozen from summer) pancakes for Sunday breakfast.  I know, I know I’m a spoilt be-actch.

His go to recipe comes from the Joy of Cooking, but he’s a bit like me in the respect that there is always something extra thrown in for good measure.  He halved the original recipe which makes 4 perfect sized pancakes each.

oh joyous Sunday morning how you treated me so well.

iceland pt 3

Some randomness shot around the countryside…

aren’t they gorgeous?

iceland pt 2

The Golden Circle,  this is a driving tour that consists of stopping in three main places… Pingvellir, where the Icelandic Government first convened, it is the symbolic heart of this nation. It also sits directly on top of the continental rift which continues to separate about 8mm per year.  The entire plain is riven with small crevices from all the geothermal stretching.

walking along the continental rift.

Geysir.  A geothermal area full of hot springs, it was discovered and named in 1294.

Gulfoss.  Iceland’s most iconic waterfall.

iceland pt 1

The main reason why Mr Weiss and I found ourselves in Iceland after our QM2 voyage was well we had to find a way back to NYC and it just so happens Iceland Air is running some very cheap tickets in and out of Iceland.  We paid $365.00 pp to fly Heathrow-Reykjavik-JFK, a pretty great price right.  So we thought we’d have a quick 4 day mosey around the place to see what the what is there.  What the what is right, Iceland is an utterly amazing, crazy, weird, disorientating, expensive, eye popping spectacular place.  Needless to say we loved it and will at some stage love to revisit, maybe in summer when the light is available for more than a few measly hours a day.

We stayed at the Blue Lagoon on our first night, which was totally awesome and a great deal.  135E per night, in a super lux room, full breakfast included, your own private lagoon area plus general admission for two into the Blue Lagoon.  We loved it so much we went back for a few hours before getting our flight back to NYC,  I also carted back a suitcase full of BL beauty products.

This giant geothermal pool is the ultimate natural spa, with lunar black lava rock as a backdrop it is truly a spectacular setting.  The blue/green algae present in the water is said to have numerous benefits for the skin.

the idea is that you float about in this hot aqua blue colored milky water, slather yourself in silica mud, which leaves your skin as smooth as a baby’s botty.  There are also steam rooms, saunas, water massage, relaxation rooms, a cafe and numerous nooks and crannies for you to just retreat into.

After we could tear ourselves away from this relaxation and somewhat prunier we headed into Reykjavik to settle as a base for 2 nights.  First night we stayed at Hotel Bjork (well I had to with this famous moniker).  Which was okay, nothing special, a great deal though, we got the CBS (cheap bastard special) of 47E for the night and again, as it seems with everywhere in Iceland, breakfast is included and its not some stingy dry old pastries and whatnot, it is a full spread.  Fruit, cheeses, different cured meats and fish, different types of breads, boiled eggs, cereal,  skyr (obsessed with this stuff), here it’s Siggi’s brand yogurt which is EXPENSIVE, there it’s mad cheap. Yup you can tell the Icelandic people take their breakfast’s seriously.

Second night we rented an apartment from Apartment K and this was AWESOME, I would totally recommend doing this, we got the last available one which was a huge two bedroom, living room, big ass t.v, kitchen, flash bathroom, wifi etc for 99E for the night.  I wish we could have stayed longer.

great coffee…. which is hardly surprising with the amount of light they are restricted to in winter time, you need all the help you can get to get out of bed and greet this when its still pitch black outside.

We only spent a couple of hours each day in Reykjavik as Mr Weiss and I were more interested in seeing as much of the crazy countryside than walking around the city streets and we weren’t really looking to go shopping, merchandise is pretty expensive in Iceland as everything is made there.

We had a great cheap dinner at Icelandic Fish & Chips, situated right across from the harbor,  fresh fish battered with spelt and barley flours, so it’s light and crisp,  served with a variety of dipping sauces.  Be warned though you can get totally fleeced eating out in Iceland, the fancier restaurants charge $55US and up for a main course and it is unfortunately not worth the money.  We rented a car for the 5 days we were there and did some day trips outside Reykjavik.  Tomorrow stay tuned for the very spectacular Golden Circle Tour, it’s a real show stopper along with the “Jewish John Wayne” that’s right Mr Weiss goes Icelandic Horseback riding.

a quiet weekend

Yes it was and thank god too.

Last weekend, we arrived back from Iceland late on Friday night,  then legged it upstate the following day, went snowboarding and being not as well rested as I should have been I totally wiped out off the lift (yes embarrassing!!), twisted my ankle, which resulted in the limp of shame down the mountain.  Then it was back to the house, I got sick with a cold, back to NYC, had to work, still recovering sniffling and hobbling and limped on through to the weekend. PHEW.

Saturday had a quiet stroll, well quiet maybe not, slow yes, through Chinatown with some fuel along the way…

steamed veggie dumplings and kimchee, delicious.  Dumping House on Essex street.  $5 bucks. Then on Grand Street there was this nugget….

a street side booth with this elaborate contraption making tiny cream filled cream cakes.  8 for $2 bucks or 25 for $5 bucks.  I couldn’t walk by this one.

Piping hot with a runny cream center.  YUM!  You’ll find me lurking around this corner again.

Went and saw “Up in the Air”, the new Jason Reitman movie, pretty great, watched a smidge of the SAG awards, for fashion only, what is with Drew Barrymore’s do these days?  I love her, but the bird’s nest has got to go.

Sunday was spent trawling through my Iceland pictures to upload for you dudes and figuring out my TAXES without loosing too much hair from pulling it out in frustration.  I’m wearing a cap today! HAHA.