Garden - En Fin
Well, it seems like we have reached the last days of the garden. In the few weeks since their peak, the combination of cold weather and the lack of nutrients in the soil seems to have really gotten to our plants. There are still plenty of tomatoes hanging on to the withered stems, but it does not seem like the plants themselves will last much longer.
It’s as though the plants, in their enthusiasm to sprout more tomatoes, ended up sprouting more than the soil could actually handle. All good things must end, I suppose. We collected most of what was ripened and left on the vines, and will wait and see if there’s a chance that the others ripen at all. I know that we grew these tomatoes ourselves, but they were greatest tomatoes that I have ever eaten, especially the slicing tomatoes.
Our tomatoes brought us much joy this summer, some new visitors, and lessons to take into future gardens. Thank you for your service, we will hopefully see you again next summer.
Days of Being Sick
Both Elisa and I have been off and on again of some level being sick for the past few weeks. We haven’t had a ton of energy to cook, but when we have they have generally been some sort of soup-based meal. The battle lines in the Park-Trombetta War of Soup (2021 - ?) has been slowly shifting in my favor. I won a key battle when Elisa realized that she actually liked making soup, because who doesn’t? You just dump a bunch of stuff into a pot and not worry about it. It is simply the easiest, most forgiving, tastiest form of cooking.
One night, however, we ended up putting quite a bit more effort. It started out with Elisa wanting to make meatballs because it was raining outside, then I suggested that we make also make fresh pasta to go along with it, then I had the idea of what if we don’t make pasta but try making ravioli? Each successive idea added to more and more time and energy required, and we ended up spending nearly the whole night cooking.
Making ravioli, it turns out, is not all that different from making dumplings. In fact, the filling that Elisa made had included lamb and cumin and five spice, so it could have easily been substituted for dumpling filling. We didn’t have a rolling pasta cutter to cut out the raviolis, so we ended up pressing down on the edges with a fork, which was heavy on the wrists but got us to the desired shape.
After a few hours of filling and cutting and pressing, we had a mound of ravioli on our hands. I threw some into a pot to boil and ladled half with the tomato sauce that had been simmering for the past few hours, and the other half with some olive oil, pepper, and basil from our withering plant on the balcony. Devoured with some meatballs and bottle of Portugese white wine. Was it worth it? Yes. Would we do it again? Maybe once we buy a pasta cutter.
We rotate between being sick and staying inside, then feeling better and wanting to go out because we’ve been cooped up. On one of the latter occasions, we took advantage of one of the nicest mornings of the month to go on a mini bakery-hop. Patti Ann’s recently released a couple of new menu items (including a fried chicken pizza we have yet to try), and Elisa also fortunately discovered that they would indulge her in making an off-menu request for her favorite coffee drink, the coffee/lemonade mix. To me, it always just tastes like off-color lemonade.
With drink and bagel in hand, we walked over to Fort Greene, near my old apartment. We were headed over to bakery #2 - Thea, which had just opened a month ago. Either there was a massive pent-up demand for bakeries in the neighborhood, or the word of the place had spread very quickly, because there was a line coming out the door when we arrived. I snagged the last slice of pound cake and a bacon, egg, and cheese that cost a shocking $11. When I got handed the sandwich though, it weighed like a brick, and with the fat pieces of bacon and egg inside it could have probably fed two people.
On another one of our outdoors ventures, we went over to the new restaurant that just opened in our neighborhood called NinHao. It had been advertised as “coming soon” for nearly a year now, so it was exciting to see it actually up and running, especially since it billed itself as a Fujianese restaurant which is I haven’t really had much of at all in New York.
We got to the restaurant a few days after opening, having split a gummy from the new batch of edibles we acquired (advertised as ‘Deep Sleep’). I am still unclear whether or not it does anything to sharpen my taste, but it does definitely make me hungrier after a while. It was about a half hour wait, so we walked over to Weather Up to grab a drink, our first time actually getting inside to order drinks after several previous failed attempts (it was too crowded).
We sipped on our drinks and then walked back to NinHao, which had thinned out a little when we arrived. The decor was interesting - they had a giant fishtank behind the bar reminiscient of cheap Chinese restaurants in the suburbs. Otherwise the interior was like a semi-upscale club in the Lower East Side.
We got a bunch of stuff including the ‘husband and wife noodles’ (vinegary, cold, tasty), oyster pancakes, wontons, and cumin lamb chops (our favorite). I’m not sure how much of this was recognizably Fujianese outside of the oyster pancakes, especially given that their most popular menu item seemed definitively not from the region. We also got additional drinks, which were named after various Chinese provinces. I got a ‘Xinjiang’ (bourbon, sherry, cumin) and wondered whether anyone else found the idea of sipping on this a little uncomfortable. And it didn’t even taste very good.
