Valentines

Another Valentine's Day has passed, not without dinner, flowers from Craig, and an untimely and uninvited head cold for me. The thing is, over half of our office staff has contracted this thick ugly virus, and half of said half chose to come into the office anyway, bringing along said germs. That said, I fell victim to it. I've been so incredibly and happily healthy for so long now that my body didn't remember the sensation of helplessness and weak limbs and head. Therefore, I stayed burrowed in the couch Thursday and Friday of last week. Now I won't lie: being away from work is nice, every chance one has to have time away. However, circumstances that found me away from work included a mountain of crumpled Kleenex on the floor, infested water and juice glasses piling in the sink, an unmade bed (rare occurrence for me) and a steady stream of mindless daytime talk television with a few movies thrown in, all totaling to time away from work not being that great after all. Thursday, Valentine's Day itself, I wrapped up in layers of clothing and headed to Blockbuster for a stack of flicks. The second my foot hit the pavement outside I became a shivering mess, freezing cold and aching from head to toe. I battled to Blockbuster anyway, because exercise is regular for me now, even if it's a simple walk to the movie store at 96th. I spent half an hour wandering the movie aisles, sniffling into a clutched ball of Kleenex with blurred eyesight. Sounds delightful. Nothing struck my fancy plus, Craig had our movie card so I instead purchased Gone Baby Gone, the Affleck-directed/other Affleck-starred film about a Boston child abduction. Then I wandered into the Gristedes beneath Blockbuster and below ground level. I've never been in there before - in fact, my only Gristedes experience ever thus far in New York was once I think at a Lexington location and I didn't walk away mesmerized. Before I go on, let me clarify the grocery store experience here in New York, for those less aware of the challenges New Yorkers face when selecting a preferred grocer. We have options, as I've mentioned before. I have a Key Food located at 92nd and 2nd which typically suits my needs* (*see later note on this). I've also mentioned C-Town around the corner on 1st Ave. Other groceries available include Food Emporium, Gristedes, the option of Fresh Direct (ordering groceries online and having them delivered at your very own convenience, which translates to me as someone being paid less money than they should to grab any green pepper, any tomato, any bouquet of asparagus, any apple, any anything produce-related, bruised, unbruised, who cares, they're not paid enough to, right?? therefore I opt out of that resource...), a Whole Foods Market rumored to be located somewhere in NYC, a Trader Joe's also rumored to be located in Manhattan, and finally, for those raking in the funds to be able to afford it on a regular basis, D'Agostino's, or simply D'Ag's. I'm just jealous, truthfully - I'd shop at D'Ag's in a heartbeat of there were one closer to us than 84th and Lex. I can barely drag myself home from 86th and Lex each day, much less two armloads of groceries once a week from 84th and Lex! To sum it up, New Yorkers are definitely faced with an array of stores at which to purchase their sustenance needs, but the stores range in quality. So, back at Gristedes at 96th Street, I was faced, in my thick fog, with a lot more decisions than with which I'm faced at my Key Food. Instead of 5 flavors of Progresso canned soups, I stood facing 55 different flavors - a whole wall of Progresso soups on shelves, ranging in percentages of reduced amounts of fat. The juice opportunities were endless, the Kleenex boxes choices ranging from regular sandpaper varieties to scented lotion-filled slips of heaven under the Kleenex logo (the latter, of course, is what I chose!) While I didn't have the lucid experience I'd liked to have had at our neighborhood Gristedes, enjoying the simple pleasures of their meat and deli section (this Gristedes must cover real estate of at least half a city block! It's huge!) I did note to go back sometime for a prolonged visit.*Meanwhile, Thursday night Craig and I did go through with our reservations across the street at Zebu Grill. I felt hazy but happy to be with Craig for our 8th Valentine's Day. Zebu served a 3-course meal, the finale which for me consisted of white chocolate cake and a small scoop of delicious ice cream doused in a shot of espresso - Craig chose guava cheesecake, which he loved - and we came home and went to bed early! Friday was still sore and uncomfortable for me. By Saturday, I suppose I had somewhat regained earthly awares, so Craig and I headed across the Park on the bus to meet up with Alison and Scott. We had two drinks on the West Side traveling north, then jumped in a cab and headed to Dinosaur BBQ near Columbia University. We were there by like 6-something but the wait was 2 hours. They weren't cushioning it, either! It was every bit of a 2-hour wait! We had a couple of beers at the bar and ate appetizers to tide us over. After a fun dinner with them, we headed back down to lower Manhattan to do some pub-crawling. I know it wasn't the best medicine for my recovery, but we had a fantastic time with Alison and Scott. They're a lot of fun. We're glad they're around!*Today has been too speedy. I hurried to Key Food to fetch some items for a pork tenderloin with mushroom ragout in the slow cooker, which I threw together and got started in time for it to cook 8 hours. I mentioned my love of slicing mushrooms...after preparing the ragout, I felt fairly mushroom-cutted out! The ragout is supposed to be served overtop slices of the tenderloin ontop of egg noodles, but I don't really think there is any nutritional value whatsoever in an egg noodle, so I'm making roasted garlic mashed potatoes and asparagus as sides, instead. This marks my first time roasting a head of garlic - I just popped it in the oven and can't wait to begin to smell the fragrance of it. Following the preparation of that, Craig and I ordered unhealthy burritos for delivery for lunch, and then I headed back to Key Food, armed this time with an actual grocery list for the week. I spent time constructing a fine list in between other odds and ends today: ingredients for a vegetable lasagna one night, ingredients for a lightened version of Penne a la Vodka for one night, and finally, ingredients for an intriguing Asian Chicken Noodle Soup for another night, which will provide KB with yet another challenge she's yet not faced: cooking with chicken on the bone. Once, long long ago in the recesses of the KB-cooking chronicles, possibly pre-blogging, I did slow cook a whole chicken. I can't recall how we ate that chicken but that was once so long ago and now, in our refrigerator lurk two chicken breasts, with skin and bone (the recipe instructs there to be no skin, which yields me skinning it!) and these breasts will be dunked into the seasoned soup broth with carrots, celery and onion and lots of other Asian-flavored pleasures and will simmer for an hour, then to be removed from the broth, the meat to be stripped from the bone and placed back in the soup. It doesn't seem too daunting, now, does it? I can't believe moms everywhere, mine and Craig's included, ever had the time or the discipline to master these things. I barely have the time now, and there are not yet kids running circles around me. I will have to make a note sometime to ask both of our moms about their cooking-learning experiences. Anyway, so my problems with Key Food and the inconsistencies that lie within its crowded walls include the following, as of this morning: 1. no Bok Choy. Why? WHY? You always carry Bok Choy, Key Food. Why not today, the one day KB most needs it for her Asian Chicken Noodle Soup?? 2. People milling about lazily only in the sections I need most to be. Okay, that's a consistent occurrence, Key Food. 3. Why does your produce suck on Sundays?? Don't you realize a giant fraction of your clientele arrives Sundays to shop for the week and yet your red peppers were all faded to pink in color, your green peppers were squatty and less-than-green, your asparagus selection looked like it had all been hit by a bus and your white onions were growing unidentifiable tumors? These things could probably be cured for me if I were to take Craig's weekly advice and go to C-Town, instead. If I were to explain this to a Midwesterner, one from Indiana, to be specific, I'd say the following: Key Food is to Kroger as C-Town is to Marsh. Take that for what it's worth - I always preferred Marsh, myself.*I know I've blogged at length but I've been away for a while and it's good to be back, feeling so much better than 3 short days ago. The apartment is indeed beginning to swell with a roasted garlic scent. One thing I've saved for the end is that I'm embarking on a new journey, one that's been meaning to begin for quite some time but which has had little funding to support its cause. That is, I am planning to buy a camera. As a much younger girl I did take photography classes and I wasn't the worst photographer you've met. Well, actually, better than behind the lens, I was a pretty fair darkroom artist. Now, as a near 31-year old (woe is me), I don't anticipate finding enough money lying around to generate an amateur darkroom, but we are in the age of digital photography, and plus, my background's Graphic Design, so why am I not being more deliberate in my photos, creating works of art? Why am I not manipulating f-stop settings and creating blurred backgrounds and jumping on the computer to better enhance my photos? Why is that picture of my gorgeous flowers from my wonderful boyfriend not more interesting?? Well then, I've determined it's because I don't own a current, exciting and manually-operative camera. And so the hunt begins. The amount of money I save coupled with the option of requesting Best Buy gift cards for my 31st birthday will determine just how much I plan to invest in this. I just hope it yields ripe fruit.*