Produce

You're probably getting bored with garden updates, but hopefully this one will be more exciting: we have produce! Please enjoy these pictures of the veritable vegetable bounty in our front yard. (10 points and public recognition to anyone who can name everything in order!)

The only bad news is that our zucchini squash have contracted some kind of mildewy fungus, as you can see from the very last picture. But scientific studies have shown that you can treat the leaves and stems with a milk solution to kill the fungus. So we're doing that, and hopefully it'll work!

Skype!

Sometimes, I skype with my cousin Jacob. Tonight, I got to skype with lots of other people too - my mom, Aunt Brenda and Uncle Bill, and cousins Sandi and Ethan. But as usual, Jacob was the center of attention. Here's what it looked like:

That's Jacob on the left, Aunt Brenda in the middle, and my mom on the right. Hi everyone!

Picnic!

Last Sunday (July 12) Maggie, Panda, and I headed down to the Charles River for a special treat: a picnic and the Sunday New York Times (highlight: crossword). For the first time, we picnicked in high style, using a special picnic backpack that I originally gave my parents for their 20th wedding anniversary. It has everything you could need on a picnic, as you can see.

We had cheese and bread, chickpea salad, ice-cold lemonade (thanks to the special insulated wine "bucket" on the side), and other goodies. Hooray for summer picnics! (And thanks, mom, for the picnic backpack!)

Garden Update

Our garden has exploded with color and produce! Here I offer two sets of photos - the first group of four was taken June 19th, and the rest are from July 5th.

In case you're wondering, the updated list of herbs/veggies includes:

Lettuce (green and red leaf)

Red Beans

Peas

Peppers (red and yellow)

Tomatoes (beefsteak, cherry, and other)

Broccoli

Zucchini squash

Burpless Cucumbers

Melon

Raspberries

Strawberries (very small, but surviving!)

Basil (Thai and other)

Purple Sage

Dill

Mint (two kinds)

Rosemary

Lemon Balm

Curly Parsely

Sunflowers

Creeping Thyme

And a bunch of flowers, as you can see. We've already enjoyed a few salads of home-grown lettuce, and Joey made a delicious basil-lime granita for dinner last night with some of the basil from out front. So exciting!

Good Eats in New Haven

I've been in New Haven since Monday, kicking off my dissertation research with painstaking archival work in Yale's Gilmore Music Library. I won't bore you with details, but it's equal parts fascinating, mind-numbing, incredibly useful and completely pointless. Apparently this is what I have to look forward to throughout my career - tenure, here I come!

On to the reason for this post: like my dad, I have acquired the habit of enjoying food a great deal more when I'm away from home. (No offense meant to Maggie's or my own cooking ability, since clearly we are awesome in this regard. It has more to do with a willingness to try new places, see old friends, and meet new ones. And it helps that this research trip is Harvard-funded, so I'm more inclined to actually spend money on food.) My jaunt to New Haven has proved no exception.

Soon after my arrival, James and I hit up an excellent Chinese establishment right across from his apartment (Royal Palace Restaurant - yelp reviews here). For $6.95 we had soup, General Tso's chicken (James very spicy, me not at all), and fried rice. Awesome deal. In the evening, we patronized a well-known New Haven establishment, The Educated Burgher. (This is Yale's version of Bartley's in Harvard Square.)

There, I enjoyed a 1/3 lb. bacon cheeseburger with curly fries and a chocolate banana milkshake. Sure, I'll regret it in 20-40 years, but until then, it's all good.

Yesterday I had a small breakfast of Frosted Flakes (I never get sweet cereals at home!) and a lunch of a ham-and-gruyere croissant and a sandwich composed of Boar's Head (TM) roast beef, horseradish, and cheddar on a kaiser roll with a Snapple lemon iced-tea. But the main event was dinner.

Apparently the place to get pizza in New Haven is Pepe's, located in the city's own miniature Little Italy. James and I met there Will, Judy, Lindsay, and Kristen Oakes, family friends from way back who live 30 minutes from New Haven. Sure, we had to wait almost an hour and a half to be seated, and sure, then we had to contend with the world's slowest/most negligent waiter, but then! The pizza was excellent. We got an original with mozzarella (the original original comes without cheese!) and a pepper, sausage, and mushroom with mozzarella. Amazingly, Pepe's only serves pizza. That's right - no pasta, no subs, nothing. Don't believe me? Check out the menu:

My junk-food culinary overload continues tonight with all-you-can-eat sushi at an event James and his colleagues have been planning for at least a week. I'll let you know how it goes!

Weekend in the Berkshires, Part 2

I can barely describe the many layers of thoughtfulness, style, and significance that permeated the wedding of Meredith and Andres at Mass MOCA. Suffice it to say, there were many. We enjoyed the Klezmer band that played traditional music throughout cocktail hour, the ceremony, and the first part of dinner before switching to covers suitable for dancing. We relished the "Pfoho fizz," a special cocktail whose origins have something to do with the Harvard dorm (Pforzheimer) where Meredith and Andres lived for three years. We oohed and aahed over the ketubah, commissioned from an artistic uncle whose use of color and whose layout created a document unlike any we'd seen before. And we were impressed by the skillful, respectful combination of various Jewish and Chinese traditions during the service, which took place among the museum's exhibitions, saving us the $15 entrance fee (of course, there was much, much more to see). As evidence of the service's hybridity, the chuppah (supplied by the groom's Taiwanese parents) had been hand-embroidered with Chinese characters. Beautiful.

The wedding was also fun - the band was great, the food was delicious, and it was nice to experience a purely social event with many of my classmates. When we finally left the party, Maggie and I walked (!!!) through the rain back to our host's house, giving us time to digest and rehash all our favorite moments.

The next morning, we were up fairly early and had breakfast at a new restaurant on Main Street before getting coffee at Brewhaha Cafe. Eventually we walked over to the hotel where the wedding party had stayed, said goodbye, congratulations, and thank you to Meredith, collected Matt and Madeleine (Frank had gone back to Boston with Tom the night before) and drove back to Ben's house.

We said goodbye to Ben, his roommate Annie snapped this photo, and we took off - in the wrong direction! But on purpose, as we wanted to walk around Williams College, located in Williamstown, 10 minutes west of North Adams. Williams was beautiful - and with property values in Western Massachusetts actually reasonable, I'd be more than happy to get a job there.

Finally, we arrived back in Boston around 3:15 in the afternoon, just in time to show our apartment to a prospective subletter for next year. And with that, our weekend getaway came to an end!

Weekend in the Berkshires, Part I

Yesterday afternoon, Maggie and I joined our friends Matt, Madeleine, and Frank for a road trip to the Berkshires, a heavily-forested, "mountainous" region in the northwest corner of Massachusetts where every town is quaint, artsy, and peaceful. Our ultimate destination was North Adams, where we would attend the wedding of my classmate Meredith and her fiance Andres.

View Larger Map

On the way, we took a slight detour to stop at the Montague Book Mill, a used book store in a converted (you guessed it) mill. Their slogan is, "Books you don't need in a place you can't find," and boy were they right - we had to take a detour on top of our detour to get there. But it was worth it, both for the books and for the excellent cafe where we had lunch.

Back on the road, we actually drove right through North Adams and up Mt. Greylock, the highest peak in MA (3,491 ft.). We parked just below the summit and hiked up the last half-mile or so, pausing at the top to enjoy the amazing view.

On the way down the mountain, we learned how to use second gear (it slows you down!) and, once back in North Adams, Maggie and I were dropped off at our lodging for the night. True to our pre-Paris frugal nature and our preference for "authentic" accomodations, we avoided staying at the hotels recommended by Meredith in favor of couchsurfing with Ben Lamb. Ben drove us around North Adams, giving us a local's perspective, and we saw the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, a bunch of old factories converted into artists' residences and studios, Main Street and its charming cafes, and part of Williams' campus (in Williamstown, 10 minutes away).

Eventually we returned to Ben's humble abode, where Ben regaled us with stories of his summer spent counting sockeye salmon in the Alaskan wild. Wild, indeed. Then, it was time to get gussied up for Meredith's wedding! And so we headed to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art . . .

(To be continued)