Kitchen Progress Report

April 25, 2014 – Kitchen Progress Report

We’ve reached the end of Week 1 of the Kitchen Saga and we already have a new floor.  For those of you who were wondering if Elliott and I were doing all the work ourselves, the answer is “no.”  Elliott and I do whatever we possibly can, as well as some things that we really shouldn’t be doing.  Fortunately, Elliott found a competent and reliable contractor to do most of the labor.  He and Roger make a great team. 

Although we’re making progress, we were quite disappointed to learn that there’s going to be a delay in the delivery of our cabinets, which impacts the schedule for the rest of the project.  Since we’ve adjusted well to semi-subterranean cooking and dining, it won’t be a major hardship.  I can manage pretty well with a toaster oven and microwave, but we’ve also used this disruption as an excuse to eat out a little more often than we normally do.

Our friend Joel’s recent departure for Turkey, where he will resume his Medtrek (a walk around the entire perimeter of the Mediterranean Sea), inspired us to make a return visit to Zaytinya, a fabulous Turkish/Greek/Middle Eastern restaurant in DC. Since there were five of us (Marshall, plus friends Millicent and Andy), we were able to sample nearly a dozen different mezze.  All were delicious and beautifully presented.  The ones that I remember are grilled octopus, fried squid, shrimp in lemon-dill sauce, spanakopita, stuffed grape leaves, zucchini patties, okra with chickpeas, and lamb kebabs.  I washed all of this down with a glass of red wine from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.   

Needless to say, there was plenty to eat, but we couldn’t resist ordering dessert, too.  Fortunately, desserts were offered in mezze portions, which saved me from having to choose just one.  These are the two I ordered:

On the left, you see a mouth-watering mixture of muscat-soaked apricots, vanilla Greek yogurt cream, apricot sorbet and a sprinkling of pistachios.  On the right is the incredible Chocolate Rose – rose ice cream, chocolate custard, and spiced raspberry purée.  By the way, if you plan to eat at Zaytinya, it is imperative to make a reservation, as it is one of the most popular restaurants in DC. 

Our lunchtime dining-out adventures have been closer to home and much more modest. 

However, we were very pleased with a local pizza shop that Matt introduced us to today.  The aptly named Extreme Pizza on Maple Avenue in Vienna, Virginia, is a simple take-out place that’s hard to find but worth seeking out.  You can choose from a wide array of superb toppings, and they even offer a tasty gluten-free crust.  

More later – it’s time for my daily trip to Home Depot. 

No More Kitchen

April 21, 2014 – No More Kitchen

The day we’ve been anticipating with such mixed emotions has finally arrived.  In honor of the occasion, I presented Elliott with an early birthday present.  You can see him modeling his personalized hard hat in the photo below.  

In the kitchen at 9:30 a.m.

We have set up our temporary kitchen headquarters downstairs in the rec room.  As I was setting aside non-essential items this past week and packing them up in boxes for the duration of the project, it struck me how much “extra” stuff I have when I really need so little to get by.  Is it perhaps time to simplify our lifestyle?  Would we feel younger and more carefree with fewer possessions and less clutter?  I’ll have to ponder that over the next 3-4 weeks. 

Before the demolition began, I had one last cooking session over the weekend.  Our downstairs refrigerator and freezer now contain enough prepared food to last for several days.  On Sunday, Elliott, Marshall and I went to Baltimore to join family for a lavish Easter lunch.  For our first course, Marie-Claude had prepared a classic French chicken liver pate to go along with the homemade baguettes.  My contribution to the menu was one of my favorite spring vegetable sautés (a mixture of asparagus, fennel, garlic, shallots, arugula, and feta cheese).  It was a pleasure cooking it in Marie-Claude’s beautifully equipped kitchen.  Elliott’s great-granddaughters made colorful holiday decorations for the dining room and gave each of the guests a handmade chocolate lollipop.  It was a very festive afternoon. 

In Marie-Claude's kitchen

Marie-Claude's delicious and beautiful pate.

Marie-Claude's egg-shaped cake covered with white chocolate ganache.

 I’m signing off for the day now so I can go get some rest.  We made a late afternoon trip to Home Depot to purchase floor tile, cement board and related supplies.  I got my exercise hauling bags of grout and something called thin set adhesive.  Elliott’s been working hard all day, supervising the demolition.  As you can see that there’s really nothing left in the kitchen. 

In the kitchen at 4:30 p.m.

Kitchen Countdown: D-Day minus 4

April 17, 2014 – Kitchen Countdown: D-Day minus 4

D-Day (Demolition Day) is fast approaching.  Only four more days until the kitchen cabinets are wrenched from the walls, the floor is torn up, and the island is hauled downstairs, where it will be repurposed as a worktable in my studio.  The packing is about 95% completed.   

Elliott is still making lists non-stop – items to purchase, deliveries to schedule, etc.  Although I was hoping he would turn over these responsibilities to the contractor, he continues to micro-manage the project.  This has necessitated daily visits to Home Depot, where I am becoming much too well acquainted with the plumbing aisle.  

 During today’s shopping spree at Home Depot, Elliott was like a kid in a toy store, especially when he got to the lumber section.  In the photo above, he is selecting a piece of wood called a ledger board.  Please don’t ask me why it has that name, or what he intends to use it for.  He was just thrilled to be handling the wood.  Elliott never uses cologne, but if he did, his scent of choice would be Eau de Sawdust. 

Spring Fling

April 14, 2014 – Spring Fling

We’ve been taking advantage of the delightful spring weather to get out and have some fun.  I kicked off the past weekend with my friend Michelle, an AHS ESOL teacher who was celebrating the start of the week-long spring break.  We had dinner in Fairfax City at Sisters Living Room Café (a wonderful new Thai restaurant), followed by a spirited performance of Carmen at George Mason’s Center for the Arts.  Amazingly, I had no trouble staying awake until midnight. 

Saturday was a day to enjoy being out of doors.  In addition to working in the garden (I finally got those pansies into pots), I went for a ride in my friend Cheri’s convertible.  Then we took a long afternoon walk through a neighborhood park, where we came upon a colony of frogs who had set up a playground in a swampy area.  Frogs of all sizes and ages entertained us with their antics for several minutes.  An extra bonus on Saturday was a quick visit from Elisa.  She and her friend Lauren stopped by for a quick visit on their way to a bridal shower.   

  

Sunday was Hair Day.  Elliott, Marshall and I took in a matinee performance of the 1968 musical at the Keegan Theater (near Dupont Circle) in DC.  I wanted to get into the spirit of the era by dressing in appropriate clothing.  However, I scoured my closet in vain for bellbottoms, tie-dye shirts, and love beads.  We all enjoyed the show (so much familiar music!) but instead of making me feel young again, it actually made me feel older, part of an earlier generation.  The young actors did a wonderful job capturing the feeling of the time.  But for them, it could only be history, whereas I lived through it.  

Right before the show began

 Then it was just a short stroll over to 17^th Street for a dinner of Turkish mezze (fried sheep’s milk cheese, beet and orange salad, zucchini pancakes, grilled squid, chicken skewers, lamb chops for Elliott, creamy rice pudding) at Agora before heading home under the luminescent full moon.  

Some of the mezze at Agora

 

 Monday morning brought gray skies and a brisk breeze that liberated clouds of tiny blossoms from the cherry trees.  Petals of pink and white enjoyed a brief moment of magical dancing before they traveled earthward.  Once settled on the ground, they transformed mundane lawns, curbsides and parking lots with their random beauty.

Back at home, I’m happy to report that we’ve packed up over 50 percent of the kitchen.  Elliott has worked out a detailed schedule of the work for the project.  I hope our contractor is grateful!  Speaking of the kitchen, I’d better get in there right now and start cooking.  Passover begins in a few hours and I’m bringing a sauté of asparagus, shallots, garlic and arugula to my friend Eleanor’s house as my contribution for the Seder dinner.  Fortunately, the pared down kitchen hasn’t kept me from trying some new recipes.  Since eggs seem to be such an important part of the holiday food tradition for both Passover and Easter, I tried a tasty new version of egg salad.  This one has no mayonnaise, just plenty of Mediterranean flavors – chopped hard-cooked eggs with olive oil, za’atar, lemon juice, green olives, red onion, pine nuts, and cilantro – and it made for an absolutely delicious lunch today. 

A Salute to Spring

April 11, 2014 – A Salute to Spring

Elliott has been busy, as usual, developing his expertise in kitchen remodeling.  He has spent hours online investigating the installation of heat registers and the extension of water lines.  He has also enlisted my help with measuring, marking, photographing the kitchen floor.  I hope our contractor will appreciate all of his hard work.  In the photo below, you can see Elliott taking a well-deserved break from his labors.  He’s sitting outside in the spring sunshine, sipping Green Glory juice, a blend of apple cider, pineapple, celery and wheatgrass.  It’s available at Wegman’s.  

Meanwhile, I’ve been on Blossom Patrol at the Tidal Basin.  Last Tuesday, I went into DC to take my annual walk under the pink froth of cherry blossoms.  I even dressed appropriately, in a pink sweatshirt (and pink socks, too).  

The blossoms were about 50% open on Tuesday.

And I have some big news to share regarding the kitchen project.  We now have an official starting date from our contractor.  Demolition will begin on April 21, which gives me plenty of time to sort through the cabinets, get rid of unwanted items, and box up those things we’ll keep.  Discovering forgotten items hiding in the back of cabinets makes me a bit nostalgic.  Objects can bring back such memories.  A little gadget for making gyoza, my mother’s old fondue pot, and Elliott’s mother’s egg scale all remind me of earlier times.  Even those peeling, aging cabinets, which I’m eager to replace, served me well for a long, long time.  I’ll definitely miss the butcher block island, the scene of many cooking adventures and center of daily life.  It wasn’t all that many years ago that I’d sit around the island with Elisa, gobbling up homemade guacamole when she returned from work.  The island was where I watched the kids gobbling up milk and cookies when they got home from school.  And of course, until very recently, it was Elliott’s command headquarters, where he’d sit with his coffee mug, hunched over the newspaper, for a couple of hours each morning. 

I guess we’ll be eating out a bit more often while the kitchen is under construction, and that’s one aspect of the project I’m looking forward to.  It will be a challenge, however, to find restaurants that serve food that is not only delicious but healthy as well.  Before I took my mother out for lunch today, I did some research online.  It’s pretty grim when you check the nutritional content.  Even seemingly healthy items are loaded with excess calories and sodium.  I finally chose Baja Fresh where I was able to satisfy my desire for a tasty lunch without sacrificing my health.  And as you can see, Katie enjoyed her Baja chicken taco.  

Creeping weight gain over the past 12 months or so has forced me to re-evaluate some of my cherished beliefs about my diet.  I think I will have to abandon the theory that calories consumed in restaurants don’t count.  The same goes for calories consumed while standing up.  I’m even going to jettison my long-held conviction that the consumption of “positive” foods cancels out the calories of “negative” foods.  An example of this would be eating an apple so that I could safely eat an ice cream cone later.  Midway through my seventh decade, I have to accept the reality that my eating system no longer works as it did previously. 

In the interests of reducing my calorie intake without suffering from dessert deprivation, I’ve come up with a recipe for coconut-lime chia pudding.  Honestly, it’s not as bad as it sounds although the specks of chia seeds look a bit weird.  I’ll spare you the photo, but let me know if you want the recipe. 

An Academic Dilemma

April 6, 2014 – An Academic Dilemma: Physics or Dance?

Somehow, I managed to get through twenty-plus years of education without ever taking physics.  While I suffered through high school biology (the dreaded frog dissection) and chemistry (sheer torture), physics, thankfully, wasn’t a graduation requirement.   I remained steadfastly in the humanities/social sciences camp throughout my undergraduate and graduate career.  The science requirement at University of Wisconsin was a minor inconvenience that I satisfied by taking a series of televised zoology lectures and writing a paper about the breeding behavior of penguins.  Another choice would have been a class called Physics for Poets.

In the past few decades, I’ve hardly given much thought to the subject of physics.  And as far as I can tell, my lack of knowledge hasn’t negatively impacted my life.  However, now that Marshall, who used to work for SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) is living nearby, Elliott and I have listened to his occasional attempts to explain the basics of particle physics.  It seems interesting, but so abstract that my eyes usually glaze over after the first 30 minutes of his mini-lectures.  

You can't actually see particles.  I really don't understand this but it's pretty.

The H in the center is the Higgs particle that physicists were looking for.

Just when I’d given up hope of ever appreciating all the excitement about the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle, a movie came to the rescue.  Particle Fever, a feature-length documentary, opened at our local cinema.  With a quirky cast of characters (both theoretical and experimental physicists), a picturesque alpine setting (CERN’s location), mindboggling machinery and dazzling, colorful graphics, the film helped me make some sense of modern physics.  I don’t claim a full understanding of the subject, of course, but my interest has been piqued.  In fact, I’m now considering enrolling in an introductory physics class at George Mason.  This creates a dilemma, however.  I’ve already registered for Dance Appreciation.  I don’t want to take two courses in the summer.  So the question is – should I take physics or dance? 

I thought the dance appreciation course might be a nice break from the reading-intensive history class I’m currently taking.  The Israeli-Arab Conflict in the Middle East has required a lot of fairly dense reading.  I don’t regret taking the class, however.  Coupled with extra reading (fiction and non-fiction), plays and films, it has given me a much deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances of the Middle East conflict.  I can’t say that it has left me feeling any sense of optimism about the resolution of the conflict, though.

Elliott would love to attend classes at GMU with me, but it would be too demanding physically for him.  He wouldn’t be comfortable sitting in a hard plastic chair for a class that lasts over two and a half hours.  But he has been enjoying our latest Great Courses lecture series, Religion in the Axial Age, which we will probably wrap up later today.  Over the course of twenty-four lectures, we’ve learned about Zoroaster, the Hindu Vedas, the Buddha and Buddhism, Jainism, Confucius, and Daoism, all of which developed and flourished during the period from 800 to 200 BCE. 

I’m not sure which lecture series we’ll watch next.  There are so many tempting choices in the catalog:  history, religion, philosophy – or maybe introductory physics?  Whatever we decide, I’m sure Elliott and I will continue to enjoy sharing the experience of expanding our minds.  His passion for learning is one of the things I love most about him.   

The PBS News Hour with Elliott Thompson

April 3, 2014 – The PBS News Hour with Elliott Thompson

Sweet treats for my sweetie

 While we’re waiting for bids to come in, Elliott’s kitchen activities are on hold and he’s had to find new ways to occupy his time.  With more spring-like weather – finally – he’s been getting out and going on neighborhood errand runs with me.  A couple of days ago, I took him to the bank where he received not just one, but three lollipops!  The highlight of our week, however, was yesterday’s visit to the studios of PBS in Arlington.  Thanks to our friend Bill, we were able to get an insider’s look at the production of the PBS News Hour.  This amazing experience gave us a real appreciation for how complicated and finely choreographed the production of a news program is.  Over seventy people are involved with the program, and despite being very busy, everyone we met welcomed us warmly and explained their role.  We spent over an hour watching from the control room while Judy Woodruff was at the anchor desk.  Afterwards, she very graciously greeted us and posed for some photos.  We finished the evening with a wonderful dinner at Carlyle, just around the corner from the PBS building in Shirlington.  

in the control room for the PBS News Hour

with Bill Barber and Judy Woodruff

Enjoying a pre-dinner stroll in Shirlington

A sweet finish at Carlyle