Congratulations Kim & Ryan!

Wishing you every happiness!

Quick Eats: Orzo Salad with Zucchini & Feta

As part of my attempt to branch out and cook new recipes, I pulled this one from Real Simple magazine. It's a great, fresh, crisp cool salad, perfect for summer!

8 oz orzo
3 tsp olive oil
3 tsp white wine vinegar
.5 tsp cayenne pepper
salt, pepper to taste
3-4 sm zucchini, cut into crescents
8 oz feta cheese
.25 cup fresh, chopped dill

First, cook the orzo pasta until tender, drain, and then rinse with cool water.

Mix pepper, seasonings, oil and vinegar, and zucchini to marinate. Stir occasionally to mix the seasonings well with the zucchini.

Combine orzo, feta, dill, and zucchini in seasonings.

AND, Done! Enjoy!

(Original recipe here)

Food Review: Delicias Mexicanas

I am apparently expanding the reach of my restaurants. Having recently begun working in Harlem, I decided it was time to sample the delights of Spanish Harlem. A quick troll of blog reviews and Yelp told me to try Delicias Mexicanas.

Walking over from my office, I realized when I crossed Lexington that I went from Harlem to Spanish Harlem. Delicias Mexicanas is located just south of the 116th stop on the 6 train, with a clean, pleasant seating area decorated with tans with plastic plants. Their menu is extensive, from the standard burrito and taco to huaraches, birria, and flautas. I sampled the al pastor taco, which is strongly flavored with pineapple, and the carne enchilada. These are served with chopped fresh cilantro and onion on small corn tortillas. They make excellent fresh guacamole that holds true to the flavor of the avocado, and red (very spicy) and green (milder but not mild) salsa. On the whole, Delicias Mexicanas is very good, although I remain partial to my neighborhood taquerias.

Also recommended: eat-in restauarant, rather than getting takeaway. All the savory juices make your taco shell soggy by the time you finally get to devour it.



Delicias Mexicanas
3rd Avenue between 115th and 116th
Manhattan, NY

Quick Fix Eats: Pitza

E and I had a last-minute dinner conundrum, as all of our travels and graduation commitments have kept us from shopping for food. Our fridge had a sad rotten cucumber, three takeout containers from Vietnamese food last week, some pomegranate juice, pasta sauce and condiments. Not exactly the makings of a delicious meal.

So we rallied our strength and biked down to Three Guys. A few fresh veggies and some pita bread later, we had pitzas.

We took the pita bread, warmed the oven to 350 degrees, and then laid the pitas out on a tray. Spooning a bit of tomato sauce, basil and garlic onto the pitas, we then added some chopped tomatoes, peppers, and mushrooms before laying some fresh mozzarella on top. Add some black olives as a final topping, and bake for 15-20 minutes, until the mozzarella begins to bubble and brown.

Delicious.

If I were to make this again, I'd use less sauce and avoid the chopped tomatoes: they made the center of the pitza a little soggy. Otherwise, survey says: this is a great and quick YUM.

Restaurant Review: El Compadre

This week's restaurant review is a special one: El Compadre, in Los Angeles. El Compadre has two locations on Sunset Blvd in LA, one in Echo Park and one in Hollywood. The food is delicious although a bit gringo Mexican (read: cheese is on everything, and you get endless chips and fiery salsa), but the decor and the flaming margaritas make up for it.

I'd recommend the Vagabundo or the El Compadre, although everything I've ever had there is delicious. Make reservations, and you'll probably still have to wait any night of the week after 6pm. Inside, the atmosphere is dark and the decor like a redone Spanish villa. You'll fall in love, even before the mariachis start to sing or a woman comes in off the street to sell you individual roses at your seat.

Review: Cherry Blossom Festival at Brooklyn Botanical Gardens

E and I went to check out the Cherry Blossom Festival at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens . We biked up to Eastern Parkway and chained our bikes to the fence, and we could see a crowd of people around the entryway. There was no line, and we paid our $10 student admission to get in. We made our way across the main lawn and down to the event tent: it was already packed by noon when we got there, with people everywhere chowing down on $14 bento boxes and $6 Kirins, spilling out across the lawn under the cherry trees. Unfortunately the cherry trees had blossomed a week prior, so the ground was littered with sweetly fermenting blossoms but few remained in the trees.

The gardens were beautiful, and we enjoyed trekking across the manicured lawns, through the atriums with bonsai trees and desert plants, and outdoors under the shade of the fragrant trees but the crowds were a pain. There were gorgeous plants of all kinds, including a Harrington plum tree! One building also housed diverse, spectacular, and gravity-defying ikebana displays. Delicate little paths may be visually pleasing, but don't allow enough traffic during such a busy day (especially not one with strollers, walkers, and all kinds of slow-walkers).

The most interesting part of the day, for me, was the dress-up component. Quite a few visitors to the festival dressed up in kimonos or other "Japanese" gear, interpreted to include plaid school-girl outfits, goth, and pimped-out quinceaneara/prom dance/kimono dresses, replete with bustles, wigs, parasols, sandals, high heels, amazing costume jewelry. It seems the Cherry Blossom Festival serves as an occasion to dust off all the crazy stuff in the back of your closet and wear it once a year.

Overall review:
Pros: pretty flowers! being outside after the winter
Cons: overpriced food, crowds of (mostly) tourists

Other photos from visitors via Flickr group here.

All I Need to Know I learned during my MA: Reflections on Graduation

Other than New Year's, this is the time of taking stock: spring cleaning, graduation, next steps, anticipation of summer, what comes next! I am now two years out from LA, the Getty, and am now a "seasoned" New Yorker (what kind of season?), a Master of things according to NYU...now what? The things I learned during my master's study aren't what I expected to learn, but they are valuable lessons nonetheless.


First: I learned that life is not fair. It just isn't. Bad things happen to good people and usually not one-at-a-time, but simultaneously, in shitstorm fashion. But if you can get over this, and stop expecting life to be something it's not, there is so much beauty and joy still to be had. I learned to let go of things over which I have no control.

Second, things will never go the way you planned - and maybe that's a good thing (if you can let go of perfectionist tendencies). I planned on being somewhere entirely different at 28, but had I ended up there I wouldn't have had quite the amazing joyride I stumbled into. In my ruthlessly careful planning, I never anticipated or accounted for the world's generous, spontaneous bounty: travels across the world, jobs I applied to on a lark that changed my life, meeting friends in the strangest and best friends, and the miracles of technology that have enabled those friendships to flourish.

Three, you are your own worst enemy and best advocate. You have to believe in yourself, or you are already defeated. I have been blessed with people who, like mirrors, reflect my light back to me when I cannot see it myself. I have been fortunate enough to have friends who share their light with me when I foolishly allow my own to go out, friends who fly across the country to hold my hand in a moment of lonely trouble, friends who forgive my missteps and celebrate my surefooted-ness when it happens. But it is most important that I believe in myself.

Fourth - I should not ever doubt the spring. Having come from LA, I was unprepared for the seasons. But this taught me something important about how we grow. We are oftentimes removed from the cycles of natural decay and renewal. I learned not to doubt the spring, that she comes inevitably if I am but patient enough. And I learned to look for her signs in the frigid-seeming gaze of winter, to search within myself for the bulb bursting to bloom. We need times of dormancy and times of tenacious spurting growth, but we need them both. Upon seeing spring again, I cherished her more fully, every bud, every startling shot of green, the raucous chatter of birds reemerging outside my window, the caress of spring on my bare arms...I had failed to appreciate nature's beauty and bounty. I learned to love the thing for what it is, to rejoice in the moment, to appreciate the stages of the process and witness my own sometimes painful but always necessary growing.

Finally, despite its seeming obviousness, I learned that everything has another story. In anthropology (and much of the humanities), that is what we look for. I learned to appreciate turning issues over, to see them from new perspectives, to look for the stories that have been left out, and to see things in their entirety: with their full nuance, diversity, and complexity, rather than to gloss with easy assignations of binaries or "good" versus "bad." There is always another story, another perspective, another way of seeing things. Thus things become not good or bad, but meritorious on their own terms.

Film Review: L'heure d'été/Summer Hours

This French film examines possessions and legacies, and what happens when someone passes. The family matriarch, now in her 70s, has an impressive collection of art and decorative furniture in a beautiful country house outside of Paris. Her three children, now coupled adults, have their own commitments and are unable to visit her often. When she does pass, the children differ over how to deal with her estate, which she has left to them in equal thirds. The eldest son wants to keep his mother's legacy intact, and because he remains in the area imagines that the family will continue to revolve around the house. The other two children don't live in France anymore - they live in China and the US, and for them it becomes impractical to own a home in the Parisian countryside. The children struggle to appropriately allocate their mother's estate, and ponder what to keep and what to allow to pass.

For me, the film spoke about the life that animates the things we own - and that things become valuable because of the sentimental value we affix to them. It also showed the way spaces become invested with meaning. A scene at the end of the film is particularly poignant, as one of the granddaughters throws a party at her grandmother's house the weekend before the house transfers to its new owner. As she walks with her boyfriend through the nearby fields, she reminsces over how her grandmother taught her how to pick berries there. She remembers her grandmother telling her, "Someday you will teach your daughter to pick berries here." Now that future is lost.

This film is a thoughtful, yet realistic look at grief and legacies and how we move on in life. It is an interesting film at this point in my life, with endings and new beginnings and trying to make sense of it all...