Monkling’s Blog

Apparently I have morphed into the Muffin Lady. Okay, so I lied in my title but hey, there’s not a song about a Muffin Lady.

I have this little cookbook called Main Dish Soups & Stews and Breads by Narda Butler and Barbara Beckman. (It’s been years and I’m still annoyed at myself for not having Narda sign it before she went off to Alaska.) On the very last page of this book is a recipe for Oatmeal Muffins. I modified the recipe slightly and they’ve become a huge hit over at my daughter’s dorm building.

Sunday afternoon, when Theresa’s friends stopped by, one said something about muffins. “Wait a second,” I told her and went into the kitchen. I made a batch of the muffins for breakfast that morning so I gave them the rest to take back with them to school.

I’ve said when the dog looks at me, he doesn’t see me. He sees a huge, walking bag of dog food. I’m afraid these college kids are going to start viewing me as a giant muffin.

Unfortunately, I can’t post a picture of the muffins because I didn’t think of taking a picture until after they were gone. On the other hand, after being forced to see those pastries yesterday, maybe I shouldn’t post 2 pictures of food within a single week.

I wasn’t quite sure if that Muffin Man thing was a nursery rhyme or a song. I Googled it and I think it may be both, but that’s not the fun thing I ended up finding. It’s this website with a dozen muffin movies. Some are silly, some are funny and I wish I could figure out how to use Flash so I could make my own movies. And how did they get their muffin tin so clean? I bet they never even actually used it to bake muffins!

NOTE: You can now see a photo of these muffins and I even posted the recipe.

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As promised, I have photos of the 2 types of St. Joseph’s pastry. Warning: Do not look at these pictures when you are hungry. It will only torture you.

The one on the left is the zeppole & the one on the right is sfingi. The pastry for both is just puff pastry. The main difference is that the zeppole has custard cream and the sfingi has cannoli cream. (I have no idea why the custard one is called “zeppole” because to me, that is not zeppole. Real zeppole is fried globs of dough covered with powdered sugar. You’ll have to wait until May to see photos of that.)Naturally, you can’t eat those without having coffee. Not that weak American kind. You want black coffee with these. Black coffee is not regular coffee without milk. It’s espresso.

I tried to make cappuccino, as you can see by my poor attempt at foamed milk. I guess Stephen is right - the only real way to foam it is to use steam. I cheated & used a little electric whip thingie.

I tried finding my recipe for puff pastry but it seems to have disappeared. I guess if anyone wants a recipe, they’ll just have to google it.

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Did I mention yet that I should be in Nashville right now? No, I am not over it yet.

I had done a little research before this trip. Tomorrow is St. Joseph’s feast day. It’s to Italians what St. Patrick’s day is to the Irish. I found an Italian pastry shop in Nashville called Savarino’s Cucina. The owners are from Brooklyn so I’m guessing they know how to do pastry right.

We planned on going there today for some St. Joseph’s pastry, even though it’s a day early. It’s only a few blocks away from the hotel. I guess that’s not going to happen.

After consultation, it has been decided that we will go to Savarino’s in April. And tomorrow there will be St. Joseph’s pastry in this house. Pictures of it will follow.

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Yes, I am writing 2 blog posts in one day. At least this one isn’t a whining one.

I was reminded that they show the Opry show live so I set the Tivo to record it.

For the next hour, I watched the bit of it that they aired live. I thought it would be depressing watching it when I’m supposed to be there right now but it was fun. I was a bit annoyed that they only aired an hour of it.

And the good news is we’re going to do a do-over and try this Nashville trip again in April.

Since the Grand Olde Opry is all about music, I decided to edit this post to add something. I found a way to record the voice mail Bruce left me. Click on the blue arrow.

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Subtitled - more whining about not being in Nashville.

This is what we did instead of being away right now:

We spent hours hacking at the frozen layer of sleet. I have a cut on my hand where my wedding ring dug into my finger. My right arm feels like it’s going to fall off. But we can now get the car out of the driveway and there is a path in front of our house.

I am going to try not to get too depressed about the fact that we’re supposed to be at the Grand Olde Opry tonight seeing Loretta Lynn & Lorrie Morgan. I didn’t even know Lorrie Morgan was going to be there until I looked just now. I shouldn’t have looked.

All right, that’s the last of my Nashville whining.

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Actually the truth is, I am too worn out to rant. Anyone reading this should count their blessings.

We headed out this morning at 6:45 a.m. for our 8:30 flight. The sleet & snow, which wasn’t supposed to start until 10 was already coming down. When we get to the airport, there’s a problem with printing out our boarding passes. This may be due to fact that the flight was changed from an afternoon, non-stop flight to a morning one with a change in St. Louis. After consulting with at least 3 airline workers, we are told we have to wait in the long, long, long line. So there we were for an hour when another airline worker comes along, tells us we should have gone to some window “down there” and that since it’s already 8, we can’t get on our flight. Alrighty, obviously we have no other option now but to wait in that line some more, get to the window, and find out what they can do for us.

When we arrive at the window, 1 1/2 hours later (yes, we were on that line for 2 1/2 hours) we’re told the 8:30 flight has been delayed and we can still get on it. We get the last 2 seats on the flight. Off we go to the gate with our carry on luggage. Only there’s another problem. There is no room in the overhead bins and Frank has his laptop. They tell us we have to check his tiny piece of luggage. Okay, fine. we do that and by 10:00 a.m. we are sitting on the plane.

Did I mention we ran out the door in the morning without coffee? Did I fail to say that we didn’t have time to grab anything to eat or drink at all in between? So there we are on the plane. At 11:30, making a dig at JetBlue and the people stuck on the planes for hours on Valentine’s Day, they tell us we can leave the plane and get something to eat or whatever. Relief! I can finally get some badly needed caffeine!

At noon, they tell us that we will have an answer at 1 p.m. on whether or not we’re going to take off while they wait to see if the sleet stops. At 1, the pilot says that time is moved up to 2. Five minutes later, someone who looks like a pilot comes out, takes a suitcase out of the overhead bin & leaves. Five minutes later they tell us the flight is canceled. Yeah, apparently he wanted to run out before the passengers could storm the cockpit in protest.

By the time we file off the plane & get down to baggage claim, it’s close to 1:30. We wait. And wait. No luggage. Some luggage comes out. Frank’s piece doesn’t. We go to the little baggage security office & they tell us all the baggage is off the planes. We walk through the entire baggage claim area, looking at every single piece sitting there. Twice. No luggage. We go back & tell them it’s not there. Meantime I am mumbling about how this is why we had carry-on, we shouldn’t even be dealing with this. Someone goes up to the gate where it’s still sitting. By 3:20 we finally have everything and are in a cab heading home.

Even more fun news - we can’t rebook our flight for tomorrow. All the flights are full. People weren’t even able to get a train out of NY tomorrow. So no weekend getaway.

The highlight of my day was when I missed a phone call from Bruce Goldish. No, it wasn’t that I missed his call. It was the voice mail he left for me. He was singing & playing the guitar. I wish I knew a way to get it from the phone to here.

And that ends my fun-filled airport story.

Footnote: I was able to record Bruce’s message. See the entry for March 17 titled “Grand Olde Opry”

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It’s sunny, 60 degrees and there are crocus out back. Yeah, there are leaves back there, too. I guess I didn’t do a good job raking them all up this past Fall. I’m not a perfect gardener. Deal with it.

By this time tomorrow, it’s supposed to be in the 30s and snowing. I guess that’s why these are actually called “Snow Crocus.” If it is going to snow & sleet like they’re predicting, it had better wait until we’re on the plane and already heading to Nashville. Of course that’ll mean Theresa will have to deal with the shoveling but hey, that’s life.

I am so ready for Spring to really be here.

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A whole lot of people are going to be disappointed to read the article I just saw on foxnews.com saying that you can’t travel back in time. I’m surprised it took the physicists this long to figure that one out. Obviously they’ve never tried to go back to where they grew up.

I grew up in Brooklyn on this little dead end street called Dahl Court. I have no idea what the origins of that street were. It was like some developer came walking down 58th Street and randomly said, “Gee why don’t we stick a street right here between 18th & 19th Avenue, just for the heck of it.”

We moved there the summer before my 5th birthday all the way from a 4 family apartment about 3 blocks away. If my math is right, it would have been 1962. In the Fall of 1976, we moved from there to Long Island.

A couple of years ago, I drove past Dahl Court. It didn’t look at all like I remembered. For one thing, the street was paved. In all the years I lived there, that street had never been paved. It was broken up into 3 sections: The middle section appeared to have been paved like a normal street at some point in the past. The sections on either side of them were cracked, pothole filled sections of what I think was cement. There was no through traffic on that block so we used to be able to play in the street but if we wanted to roller skate, you could only skate on the middle section because that was the only part that was smooth. You were taking your life in your hands if you wandered off onto one of the other sections.

That’s all the reminiscing for now but don’t worry. We’ll come back to this topic many more times here.

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I shouldn’t have been posting at 2 a.m. because now I’m going to edit this to death. First I’m going to start with the original post of some of my favorite restaurants:

My Favorite Restaurants

• Luigi’s (New Hyde Park, NY, 718-347-7136) Italian
  I just love this place; they make the best Italian food. We’ve been going there once a month for at least 8 years. My all time favorite is their Veal Margarita but I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anything there that I didn’t like.
• Zutto Restaurant (Great Neck, NY, 516-504-8605) Japanese
  We have Bishop Cisneros to thank for finding this place. We used to have a different favorite Japanese restaurant that we had gone to since our dating days but they closed. Then Steve told us about this one.
• Black Forest Brew Haus (Farmingdale, NY) German
  Good German food and they have their own mico-brewery on site.
• Cozymel’s (Westbury, NY) Mexican
  Yeah, it’s a chain but it’s still good.
• Hellenic Snackbar & Restaurant (East Marion, NY, 631-477-9577) Greek
  This place is a bit of a trip but it’s not far from the Long Island wineries and has great Greek food. I fell in love with Greek food back in high school when my friend, who was Greek, took us to a relative’s restaurant in the Village.

Now that I had to include Cozymel’s in my list, I’m thinking of chain restaurants in general. Some are ones I’d only go into if I had no other choice (Sizzlers & Red Lobster come to mind). Others I really like, for instance, I love Cracker Barrel.

So - chains: which ones do ya’ll like & which do you hate?

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Today’s random thoughts are about time, as in how much time does it take a person to get over something. What other factors throw in complications? For example, say your 16 year old son lies to you. (This is a completely fictitious example because I am trying to come up with an example that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my own life.) If your son lies to you once, you’ll question what he says to you next time but the amount of distrust you have will be directly dependent upon a lot of other factors. How serious was the lie? Does this happen all the time? What sort or relationship did you have with your son in the first place? Was there another person in your life who constantly lied to you? All those things will have a bearing on your initial reaction and how long it will take your son to regain your trust.

15 years ago, when I had the 2 miscarriages, I remember reading something that said the average time it took to get through the whole grieving process was 2 years. At the time, I thought that was an incredibly long time, but it gave me hope that I wouldn’t feel miserable forever. It turns out that it took a hell of a lot longer than that and I got to thinking - how can anyone put something like that into a time table? I also wondered whether or not I’d have felt it so much if it had happened earlier in the pregnancies or if it had happened only once. I wondered would those things have made it not as bad.

I also know some people deliberately hold onto things. They keep their anger and resentment and sorrow with them like an old, treasured friend. It’s what they’re familiar with & they forget how to let it go. Maybe there’s a part of the whole “getting over” stuff that is like dealing with any other psychological problem or pain - you have to know something’s there and you have to want to deal with it.

I guess the bottom line is there’s no such thing as a set time for getting over anything, eh?

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