New Hack City

Since LabRat and I had such a great time last year, we decided to take another autumnal jaunt to New York this year. We again had a lot of fun, but for two problems, albeit rather large ones.

The first was weather. Last year, we were greeted each day by bright, sunny skies with cool breezes gently stirring the colorful foliage. Aaaaaaah. This year, a series of what the jolly local newscaster insisted on folksily calling Nor'easters dumped a bunch of rain on us, and it was colder than mid-October has any right to be. On top of that, the cold that I've been successfully fighting for a couple of weeks saw that I would be trapped in an enclosed bubble of germs (aka an airplane), and took the opportune to strike. I would spend the rest of the weekend hacking up my lungs with a nasty dry cough, which the aforementioned weather did little to soothe.

We were determined to triumph over these things and get out on the town, though. After we had landed, eaten, and taken a nap on Thursday, we went out for a few drinks with Grouchbutt. It's always great to catch up with him, and I wish we could have had more time to hang out. He had places to be, though, so LabRat and I walked up to the Ocean Grill for dinner. I noticed that they had a similar dessert to the one that put me in raptures last year, so it says a lot about the rest of the meal that I couldn't even save room for dessert at all. How was I to resist the lobster bisque? The sushi? The best piece of hamachi I've ever had? I couldn't, so dessert had to be sacrificed.

Friday, we went to Chinatown to meet LabRat's friend from Boston. She took us to a restaurant and chose all the food for us, since she was familiar with their specialties. I'm glad she did, because everything was great, and the grease of the duck skin did me a world of good. Afterwards, we walked down to the TKTS booth to see if we could get a deal on tickets for a show that evening, then took the subway to Fifth Avenue, so we could window shop. It was tough to pick something at the TKTS booth, but a play called Perfect Crime caught my eye, as I'm always a fan of mysteries. The fact that we were able to get front row seats for $30 a piece should have told us something. We got there, got seated, and I sucked down enough cough drops to keep me quiet for the duration of the performance. Once we were settled, we learned from the program that the lead actress in this play has been performing it since it opened in 1987, and has played in every single performance, save four. That's pretty incredible, but I have to wonder if the resulting spectacle was because she's done it so many times, the words have ceased to mean anything, or if she's been this frenetic for 22 years. I don't even know how to describe this woman. She had a million tics, blinking and cringing and gesturing all over the stage. Her voice was like a foghorn and WENT uuuuUPPPP? At the END of evERY seeeeeeeNNNTEEEENCE? It was inCREDIBLY oooooooDDDDDDDDD? She was hammier than the pork party we went to last month. Plus, she didn't have a lot to work with. The play itself is kind of stupid. If it had been tediously bad, we would have felt like we'd wasted our money. As it was, it was hilariously bad, so we wound up having a great time.

Saturday, we went to the Guggenheim, which we skipped last year because so much of it was closed. It was open this time, and after wending our way through the line, we worked our way up the rotunda. I'm glad we went, because it's such an iconic museum. That said, the entire rotunda was nothing but works by Kandinsky, and while I like some of his stuff, it was a bit like having a meal of nothing but potatoes. No matter how much you like potatoes, ten minutes in, and you're ready for something different. Later in the day, we headed over to the Museum of Natural History, because LabRat really wanted to see the show at the Hayden Planetarium. There was another long line there, and LabRat got into it with a lady who was trying to cut in line. I didn't realize it was happening until it was over, and I doubt I could have been much help, anyway. I often lack the gumption to take people to task for those sorts of things, so I love that he's able to do battle. After she was dispensed with, we got our tickets, and went up to the planetarium show, which rocked. I could have sat and watched it four more times if they'd have let me. Afterwards, we explored as much of the museum as we could until it closed, which wasn't much. I look forward to going back and seeing more of it, because it was really nifty.

That evening, we were supposed to meet David for dinner and drinks, but I had taken a turn for the worse, health-wise. We were able to drag ourselves out for dinner at the diner, but I couldn't summon the fortitude to go out after that. I felt a bit guilty that I had sent him all sorts of e-mails and Facebook messages all "We're coming to New York, and will be ready for all sorts of adventure!" only to turn around and say "Well, it was great to see you for half an hour. Catch you next year?"

After brunch on Sunday, we went to the Whitney museum, which was a far more rewarding experience than the Guggenheim, art-wise. They had a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit, along with works by other great American artists, like Warhol and Hopper. Unfortunately, a bunch of the floors were closed, which seems to be an epidemic in New York museums. After some downtime at the apartment where we were staying, we headed out to a steakhouse for dinner. It was a meal at which I'd generally want a nice glass of wine, but I was so desperate for cold-fighting substances of any kind, I ordered a glass of orange juice, instead. Then it was home to stretch out and watch The Next Iron Chef. I'm kind of pulling for that bitchy woman.

Monday, as it was the day we left, there naturally wasn't a cloud in the sky. Damn it! We woke up and had brunch at the Barking Dog, a little place that I really like. LabRat even gave me one of their mugs for Christmas last year, and I treasure it. I had a spinach/dill/poached egg/salmon roe/pancake concoction that may as well have been called Limecrete's Ideal Breakfast, so it was a nice way to wrap up the weekend, culinarily. We cleaned up the apartment and came back to St. Louis, where I have spent the past few days still battling the cough, which has now morphed into a head cold. That wasn't quite the souvenir I had in mind.

Internet Video Gem #4 - You Can't Stop the Beat

Human beings sure do love to do things in perfect synchronicity, don't we? Hell, we made it part of the Olympic games. There's just something inherently fascinating about a bunch of people doing the same thing at the same time. So how about a couple of fun examples; one adorable, one amazing.

You may be big, tough Marines, but you cannot defeat the power of the rhythm!



And while we in America can't be beat in our individualism, if you mix traditional Asian culture with more casual modern attitudes, and add a healthy dash of sports enthusiasm, that collective mind cannot be topped.



Incredible.

You Can Be A Winner at the Game of Life!

You: "Geez, Limecrete! Where have you been? You treat your blog like you're out looking for a new place to live and both jobs are inundated with work and your car broke down and you're working on an herb garden!"

Me: "Don't be ridiculous! Like I really have the space for an herb garden."

So, yeah. I'm getting slammed from all sides. LabRat and I are both fed up with our apartment building. We like the rent and we like the convenience of what's available in the neighborhood, but that's about it. Normally, if I were to complain about having to live in a building with thugs and thieves and whores, it'd just be slightly irritating people as seen through the lens of my well-documented love of exaggeration. Thing is, these people really ARE thugs and thieves and whores. Literally. Much as it'll be a fun story to tell the grandkids someday about the prostitute across the hall whose pimp keeps stealing my parking space, it's not a barrel of chuckles right now, so LabRat and I have hit the internet and the pavement looking for a new building. Oddly, my fear of change is as well-documented as my love of exaggeration, and yet, I'm more anxious about the minutiae of moving than about sharing a home with a boyfriend for the first time ever. I'd like to think that means it'll go really well.

Naturally, the moment we started the search, the restaurant decided to schedule me for back-to-back wedding receptions, and a flood of new projects burst into the lab. That had me plenty frazzled, so my car battery dying last Friday did not greatly improve my mood. Fortunately, I'm not dependent on my car to get to the lab, so I was able to ditch it at the repair shop without losing a lot of time. Even though it's fixed now, the onslaught of work has no end in sight (for which I suppose I should be grateful), and there are more apartments to look at, so I'm afraid the House of Lime might continue to collect a cobweb or two. I'll do my best to keep up with it, though I think the interwebs may be able to live without entries that are basically: Got up, went to work, worked, came home, ate, watched TV with LabRat, went to bed. However, if I save the world from mutant radishes, you'll be the first to know.

Cookie Party - Volume 4

Hey, you may not have heard, but we're in a recession. Put down that lobster thermidor, yuppie! Frugality is in fashion, which is fine with me; I've always been adept at saving a buck or two. Well, except in one area of life. I spend money freely when it comes to food. The happiness that I derive from the burst of salmon roe on my tongue or from the soft pink of a perfect, medium-rare steak makes them more than worth their hefty price tags. I rarely regret expensive food, unless it doesn't live up to expectations. If you're going to charge me ten bucks for a sandwich, it had better be a corker. All that aside, I wanted to see if America's newfound love of penny-pinching could be applied to my baking experiment. Is it possible to make a serviceable cookie without gourmet buttercreams and Chilean dark chocolate?

In order to test this out, I reached back into the past. Here's where you can help me out by making those wavy arm movements and "DOODELEE-OOP! DOODELEE-OOP!" sound effects that everyone uses to signify time travel. Fortunately, one of my friends is descended from a line of Rombauers, and keeps a print of every edition of The Joy of Cooking ever published. Fascinated, I paged through the older ones, and happened upon a recipe from the 1936 edition entitled "Plain Cookies. Very economical." If there's one thing people living through the Great Depression were looking for to lighten their spirits, it was a recipe like this. It's got the instant happiness that a dessert brings without the sorrow of an already-stretched budget reaching its breaking point. So, as a minor act of contrition for my gastronomical indulgences:

Great Depression Cookies
Brother, can you spare an inflation-adjusted dime?

Now, the whole point of these cookies is that they're extremely simple. No bells and whistles here. Do you have any idea how much bells and whistles cost? So, there's not much of story to spin about the cookies themselves. They're just a basic sugar cookie. I can say that they took an amazing amount of flour, to the point that I was worried the dough wouldn't coalesce, and would crumble into little, gravel-like balls.

Luckily, the butter was sufficient to pull it all back together as it warmed up, and I had no trouble rolling it all out. The only cookie cutters I have are letters of the alphabet. I noticed with some dismay that E was among the letters I'm missing. Crap. I managed to cobble one together with the F and the I, but only did it once. The stiffness that the flour gave the dough made the cutouts simple to lift and transfer onto cookie sheets, so there were no Lace Cookie disasters this time around. Of course, you don't have to roll Lace Cookie dough out a gazillion times.

Like I said, sugar cookies are basically the white bread of the cookie world, so what I was really interested in this time around is how cheaply they could be made. I went to a local store that keeps prices low by having customers bag their own groceries. Once there, I prowled the aisles, and wrote down the absolute lowest price offered on each of the ingredients I'd need. I'll admit right now that I didn't actually buy any of these items. If it's a waste of money to buy overpriced cookie ingredients, it's even more of a waste to buy cheap ingredients that I don't need because I've already got all of it sitting in my cabinets at home. The batch I made actually had some very nice vanilla in it - the discounted imitation vanilla is merely a hypothetical thrown in to see how inexpensive this recipe could be. Recording the prices was the easy part. The tough part was calculating the amount of ingredients I was using. It's all well and good to know that I'm using three tablespoons of milk, but that doesn't do me much good when the volume is given in gallons and liters. Fortunately, I've got something the Great Depression cooks didn't have: Internet conversion tables. Ready for some math, you nerds?

Sugar: $1.88 for 4 pounds - Using 1 cup for dough and 1 cup for topping = 24 cents.
Flour: $1.53 for 2 pounds - Using 3 cups = 61 cents.
Baking powder: $1.77 for 10 ounces - Using 1 teaspoon = 3 cents.
Egg: 87 cents for 8 eggs - Using 1 egg = 11 cents.
Milk: $1.77 for 1/2 gallon - Using 3 tablespoons = 4 cents.
Butter: $1.78 for 8 ounces - Using 4 tablespoons = 47 cents.
Vanilla: $3.17 for 2 fluid ounces - Using 1 teaspoon = 26 cents.

Even using the cheap, imitation stuff, there's no getting around vanilla as the most expensive ingredient. That said, since you're only using 1 teaspoon, the 3 cups of flour winds up being the most expensive component. Still, check out that list. If you had none of these things on your shelves, the grocery bill would come out to $12.77 before taxes. Not bad. And considering that most home kitchens have most, if not all of these things already on hand, the bill drops even lower. I didn't have to buy a single thing to turn these cookies out, so I expended only the amounts needed to make one batch, which comes out to about $1.76. That's $1.76 in 2009 dollars. I don't have the resources to correctly deflate this back to 1936 prices, but it must be pretty damn low. I managed to get 42 cookies out of this batch, which was more than enough to fashion LabRat's name, feed the Top Chef viewing party, and still have enough left over to satisfy the vultures at work. 42 cookies into $1.76 is just over 4 cents per cookie. Impressive! I've never seen a four-cent cookie, even at the shabbiest of bake sales. Hell, by this standard, the Girl Scouts are a veritable cookie Mafia.

Clearly, no-frills sugar cookies will likely elicit the least excitement of any recipe that gets made for the Cookie Party. They're tasty, but not much to write home about. Even so, when December rolls around, and I'm elbow-deep in holiday baking, I'll take a moment to look down at whatever intricate concoction I'm attempting to whip together and think to myself, "There's no fucking way I could ever get this for a nickel."

Some Enchanted Evening

There's no getting around it. Thirty-two is a boring age. It's not a landmark. It's not a milestone. Hell, it's even a boring number. No fun squares or primes or anything symbolic. On the plus side, my birthday did fall on a Friday this year, which is handy. I took the day off from work without having any grandiose plans to fill the time; getting to sleep late was reason enough.

I spent most of the day lazing around and playing computer games. I didn't even bother to shower until late afternoon. I had to get cleaned up for the one concrete thing I had planned for the day. LabRat had asked me where I'd like to go for my birthday dinner, and I responded with the name of our favorite sushi place, almost before he'd gotten the question out of his mouth.

It rained a little bit during the day, but by the time we went out to dinner, the weather had cleared up, and the evening was cool and breezy. That is to say...perfect. We headed over to the Central West End for dinner, which we enjoyed as always. The tang of unagi and the wonderful bursts of salmon roe were enough to make my evening, but we decided to stroll around the neighborhood afterwards. The weather had brought everyone out, so instead of fleeing to air-conditioned buildings, people relaxing at the end of the work week were taking it easy at all of the outdoor restaurants and cafes. The gourmet cupcake place was hopping. Street musicians set up on the corners. A lady twirling fire batons drew an amazed crowd. It was a wonderful, laid-back scene, almost straight out of a things-are-going-great movie montage.

The rest of the weekend went well, too. Saturday, LabRat and I went to the Chinese Farmers' Market. It was my first visit there, and since I'm an adventurous eater, seeing all the exotic meats and fish turned me into Augustus Gloop (although thankfully, there were no pipes to get sucked into). We picked up some scallion pancakes, as well as some barbecue pork buns from the dim sum place down the road. Later, once the food haze had worn off, we went out for dinner, then drinks at a gay bar, where we befriended a lonely guy who'd been ditched by his straight friends. He was nice, though I hope he didn't think we were trying to get him to come home with us.

Sunday, I had brunch with my dad and stepmother, then came home to attempt my most complicated cooking experiment to date. I recently subscribed to Cook's Illustrated, and in my first issue, the recipe that really grabbed me was for Spanish Tortilla. Far beyond the usual chop-mix-cook recipes I tend to favor, this involved far more peeling and prodding and careful flipping. Visually, it didn't come out as I'd hoped. The flipping went all right, but when I tried to tuck it back into the pan, some of the potatoes got bottom-heavy and separated. So it may have been closer to a potato hash than a Spanish tortilla, but at least it tasted good. Though it requires a lot of ingredients and a lot of prep time, I'm looking forward to attempting it again. If nothing else, I can try it when I turn thirty-three. That's just as boring an age.

Wednesday's Child is Full of Whoa

I don't want to bitch about my job. Most days, I like my job. And hey, in this economy, I can count myself lucky that I even have one. Well, two. The restaurant has been just as busy as ever; it seems that the one thing people aren't even attempting to cut back on is the breadth of their wedding receptions. The guest list at these things just gets bigger and bigger.

So, in addition to these gigantic parties at which I'm kept hopping for eight or nine hours at a stretch, there's my full-time job at the lab. Some personnel shifts have left me with seniority in my lab, so extra duties and special problems will fall on my shoulders. That was fine, until both my bosses went on vacation at the same time, and we had five priority projects to do, and nothing was working, and I was in charge of scheduling everyone's work for a week. I'm pretty competent under work pressure, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't come close to cracking. The pinnacle of work stress came when some important samples failed to work on the third attempt, and someone was going to have to stick around and work on them until they were done. That someone was me, and I spent the better part of fifteen hours at the lab. I was so far beyond the end of my rope, it was just a speckle of twine in the distance. As I wrapped up my work around midnight on Tuesday, I sent an e-mail to the bosses (who were to return the next day), confirming that I wasn't going to be coming in on Wednesday.

As fortune would have it, LabRat also worked a long day on Tuesday, and also didn't go in Wednesday, so it was a great opportunity for us to have a rare concurrent day off. We started it in my favorite way, which is sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. Actually, one of the ways I can tell I'm aging is that I don't sleep as late as I used to; time was when I simply wouldn't wake up unless woken by an outside influence like an alarm or an earthquake. Now, I find myself waking naturally, which is still a weird feeling. Still, I was exhausted from Tuesday, and slept until about noon.

By the time I was awake, showered, and dressed, it was time to start thinking about lunch. LabRat and I both enjoy Dewey's pizza, but they're usually so crowded, it's almost not worth going. We figured that at 2:00 on a Wednesday, we could probably squeeze in without much of a wait. "Without much of a wait" was understating it; there was only one table taken when we showed up. I know it wasn't the peak lunch rush, but daaaaaaamn. We had a leisurely lunch of salad and pizza, with no need to rush off anywhere or to give up the table. After lunch, we came home to find an early birthday present in the mail for me. Veruca sent me a T-shirt (in my beloved chocolate brown) that has this printed on the front:

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator

I will be wearing the shit out of this shirt.

We hung out at the apartment for a while, then headed to a late afternoon showing of Julie & Julia. Let's see... How to characterize the rest of the crowd? That the next youngest person in the theater used to party with Bess Truman? That it looked like Julius Caesar's class reunion? That the touring company of Cocoon was in town? That there were more wrinkles represented than a library full of Madeleine L'Engle? I think you may get the gist, except I should mention that there were more walkers than at a charity 5K. The movie itself was pretty good. Meryl Streep was amazing, of course. I like Amy Adams, but there was too much focus on her character at the expense of the Julia Child story. Plus, I've read the book that this movie is based on, and the woman Adams plays isn't as charming as she's portrayed, though they do at least allude to the fact that she's pretty narcissistic. Thumbs up overall, though.

After the movie, we headed home and passed some time before it was time to head over to Timiffany's for the weekly Top Chef Masters viewing party. I slipped into my new T-shirt, which got approving comments from all present, and as with many successful Top Chef viewing parties, we hardly paid any attention to the episode, in favor of talking and eating cheese and sipping wine. After the episode, LabRat dropped me at the Deluxe, where I met Chrisngnat and Lex Webb for the Three Bad Jacks show. More approving comments on the awesome new shirt, although it may have gotten some attention because the rest of the crowd was all decked out in their standard rockabilly black. Unfortunately, it was getting kind of late, and I couldn't stay for the whole show. As I started the walk home, I called LabRat to let him know that I should be home in about twenty minutes.

LabRat: "Um...how far have you walked?"
Limecrete: "I'm almost to Manchester."
LabRat: "How would you feel about getting a drive-through shake?"
Limecrete: "I would support it."
LabRat: "Wait in front of Monarch. I'm on my way."

What better way to cap a wonderful day off than chicken fingers and milkshakes? After such a stressful week, I desperately needed to recharge my battery, and though I don't know how long said recharge will last, I'm back to my normal self and raring to go. At least until next week when I officially age up.

Leather

No, I haven't picked up a new, kinky habit. Leather is the traditional three-year anniversary gift, and although it opens up all sorts of wonderfully naughty and tacky gift ideas, LabRat and I simply don't have room in our tiny apartments for assless chaps and other such accouterments. The closest we got to leather was the steak at Sidney Street Cafe, our restaurant of choice for a special dinner. I like menus that allow me to do some culinary branching out, so I included the confit of sweetbreads in our appetizer choices (veal thymus gland on grilled eggplant) and had the sushi-grade seared marlin for dinner. Both were terrific, and though LabRat's steak was somewhat disappointing, we enjoyed the meal overall. The wine we brought in probably contributed to that.

The three-year mark in our relationship actually feels a lot different than the two-year one, which surprises me. I'm about to have a birthday, and don't anticipate viewing the world differently at 32 than I have at 31. The third year of dating LabRat has brought all sorts of new experiences that the second year didn't. Juggling our families on special occasions (mostly my family, since they're in town) has become more of a delicate balancing act. He accompanied me to a college reunion, meeting friends I had from long before I came out. We've reached the phase that certain components of dinner plates get automatically passed to the other person. Disagreements are generally aired out and resolved in short order; not at all the stew-on-it-for-six-days-then-enter-low-grade-depression method I used to embrace.

There are hurdles, as there would be in any relationship, but I still consider myself fantastically lucky. LabRat is kind and witty. He's sexy and charming. He's never boring. If money gets tight, we can still find ways to have fun together. If I want an ice cream sundae at two in the morning, he'd more likely join me than raise an eyebrow at my expanding waistline. I can't even describe how much I'm looking forward with anticipation to year four.