Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Kat Tales of the City: Part I.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day in New York. I can’t say that I’ve ever been to the parade, but I can claim one St. Patty’s Day belly up at an Irish bar with my pals from college, The Pig N Whistle on 47th Street. I have, however, spent a lot of nights walking these streets and avenues tottering my way to the bat cave on 19th Street I rented. Tonight, after dinner with Vanessa at Shima Sushi on Second Avenue, I got to witness to the revelers tottering their way from bar to bar. To be sober in New York on March 17th is a whole different experience.

Insert any year here, location Manhattan. Drinking and making merry on these evenings that call for it, like tonight for instance, Halloween, or New Year’s Eve, the faces are different, but the actions remain the same. Girls cry, (I passed three on my way home, one sobbing into a cell phone, another to a gay friend about his lover’s bad behavior, and an Asian twenty-something blubbering in her native tongue. I couldn’t translate what she was so upset about, but I could keenly surmise that Cosmopolitans were the catalyst). A kid on a skateboard stopped to vomit between two parked cars. The streetlights were out at 10th & 2nd Avenue, and traffic was beginning to pile up, the two cops walking the beat more concerned about a group of college boys drinking 40s wrapped in brown paper. My brother and I spent one New Year’s Eve drinking beers out of paper bags, but we had straws. We knew the score. A lengthy line had gathered at 11:30 PM outside the infamous McSorley’s where, if memory serves me correct, you have to drink or get out. Your selection: beer or whiskey. Non-alcoholic beverages are not to be found unless you count the tap water from the tiny bathrooms in the back. Even when I was a regular bar hopper, I refused to cue up, preferring a good local place with a well-stocked jukebox and a bartender who knew me. This trait follows me. For example, all week long, I’ve been anticipating the Trader Joe’s opening on 14th Street, and tonight, the line for purchases wrapped completely through the store right out the front doors, an employee holding a sign with a large green clover announcing “Line Ends Here”. Discouraged, I left. Clearly, waiting is not my forte.

As I trotted Lily around the block for our last evening’s pee-mail, I wondered why people were shivering outside of McSorley’s so late. And I think, it must because they haven’t yet found someone to make merry with tonight, that stranger who you hope will hold the answers. Although the odds are long, there is always that expectation of something more. We hear those fairy tales of one-night stands turning into the love of one’s life. I know these stories intimately having friends happily married who have met this way. So we wait in the cold, biting wind, at an hour when “nothing good can happen” my mother would say, with the hope that Some One Wonderful will fall in love with us over a pint of Guinness. And we’ll totter home, happily ever after.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Inherit the Snap


gingergoo
Originally uploaded by beautykat.
There are certain traits that you take for granted you will inherit through the sheer brilliance of DNA; a great golf swing, the ability to whistle, perfect pitch, the simplicity of baking a ginger snap. My mother is not only a great cook but also a fantastic baker. Nobody can top her piecrust. Her mother was a great cook and baker, even making the household bread every week. Now, on the paternal side, my Nana’s culinary contribution was her fish croquets, added annually to the bounty of Christmas Eve dinner. Apparently not a baker, I must get my genes from her.

I don’t know how I got this bee in my bonnet, but for the past few years, I’ve have been trying to break the ginger snap code. Randomly, this question will pop in my head, I could be on the Sepulveda Pass, I could be flying from Newark to LAX, but it will come upon me, what makes a ginger snap snap? And why is this feat so difficult for me to accomplish?

My ginger snaps don’t snap. I follow the recipe, but they come out gingerbready, which, don’t get me wrong, is great, but it’s not a snap. A snap is like a slap on the ass, but in a good way. That thwap sound that you know is going to melt in your mouth. The soccer hottie I’m involved with now (save your questions for the comment section), spent his years following college as a baker in Northampton, Massachusetts. I explained my situation to him over iChat one afternoon while I was blending ingredients for “Cranberry Nut Bread”, another Grandma Sue favorite. He suggested using only yolks, but informed me that his specialty was carrot cake, cheesecake and his ability to knead two loaves of bread at the same time. He wasn’t a cookie man. I consulted the expert. My mother’s suggestion was to lower temperature for longer cooking. This information extrapolated after I begged for her secret. Her reply: “I don’t know, mine have always snapped”. Well, bully for her.

The other evening, I was at Trader Joe’s where I found myself in the check out line debating with the cashier over a canister of ginger snaps or chocolate chocolate chip cookies. Glaring at the ginger snaps, I relinquished the tin to Rafael and decided that this would be the night to tackle the ginger snaps again.

I did not heed the advice of the soccer hottie, but instead decided on a few secrets of mine own, like using one teaspoon of baking soda instead of two, adding double the amount of ginger and substituting King Arthur with gluten free flour. Then I heeded Mom’s advice and lowered the temp from 375 to 350. I waited. The result is what you see here. A glob of ginger goo. Not even that tasty as sometimes goo will be. My experiment ended up in the trash, and I pulled out the never fail good old oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe, another one passed down through the family. At least it’s not fish croquettes.

Shameless Crushes...

find life experiences and swallow them whole.
travel.
meet many people.
go down some dead ends and explore dark alleys.
try everything.
exhaust yourself in the glorious pursuit of life.
-lawrence k. fish

Yoga For Peace

read much and often

Cleopatra: A Life
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Never Let Me Go
The Angel's game
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Bel-Ami
Dreaming in French: A Novel
The Post-Birthday World
A Passage to India
The Time Traveler's wife
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Catcher in the Rye
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Kite Runner
Eat, Pray, Love
Slaughterhouse-Five
Les Misérables
The Lovely Bones
1984
Memoirs of a Geisha


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