TRAVELBLOG POST #7 - BRKEXPAT

BRKEXPAT
                                    

You can take Salem out of the country, but
you can't take the country out of Salem

If you are around my age and can remember a time before cigarette ads were banned on television, you now have an annoying ear worm.  You're welcome.  Can you believe that all those physicians were feeling Lucky?  P.S., there's no Surgeon General's Warning on this ad.  It's old, like me.

Today is a Sea Day.  No stops at any ports of call, just rest and relaxation aboard this floating hotel.  Times like this, my mind starts to wander off into strange territory.  Today I wandered into Brooklyn, city of my birth.

751 Daniel Street, North Woodmere

I have been a true-blue suburbanite most of my life.  Besides the eleven years I lived with my grandparents and brother in our high ranch in the Five Towns, I have spent all the years of my married life but one in the 'burbs.  I like the 'burbs.  I like having a backyard with a kumquat tree and splashy hibiscus.  I like having property and a patio and a pool.  I love expansive lawns and green green St. Augustine grass and a peaceful view of water and trees.  I like suburban schools and Boy Scout troops and martial arts schools and synagogues. The 'burbs are the best place to raise a child.

Central Florida has towns and cities and suburbs and country.  Real country, with no visible neighbors and very few paved roads.  Working farms with citrus trees, cattle, or corn as far as the eye can see.  Neat brick ranch homes, large airy barns, and a mailbox barely within driving distance.  Or no farm, but a family who prizes peace and privacy above all else, doesn't mind driving an hour each way to do their food shopping, and are okay with the kids being driven two hours each way to attend their district public schools.  Huge pieces of property peppered with mobile homes in a questionable state of repair.  What they all have in common is a complete absence of a town center, or even a neighborhood.  There are a lot of people who love that isolation, prefer raising their kids away from the bad influences of overcrowding and negative opportunities and are up to the task of quality homeschooling.

915 East 7th Street, Brooklyn (Midwood)

When I was a very young child, living in Brooklyn, "country" had a whole different meaning.  My grandparents had a summer house in the country, and that was probably pretty accurate, as it was located upstate (defined as anything north of the Bronx) in Monroe.  Each home had quite a lot of property around it, and I used to help my Pop mow the lawn.  Never mind my lawn mower was constructed of plastic, I was helping.  We had a patio and a pear tree that we could see from the kitchen window over the sink.  That was before the Dark Times - Joyce and Mike were still together and home in Brooklyn taking care of my little brother - and my relationship with my grandmother was special and precious.  Once I got a little older, all hell broke loose and my brother and I went to live with my grandparents, and the definition of "country" was extended to include anywhere on Long Island, as long as you pretended not to know that Brooklyn and Queens were on Long Island.  "The Island" was just that part of Long Island covered by Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

3521 Kings Highway, Brooklyn (Flatlands)

Okay, I could possibly see Suffolk County being called "the country" - the Long Island Expressway barely crossed the county line back then (although Vanderbilt Motor Parkway had once stretched from Queens to the western shore of Lake Ronkonkoma), and there were a hell of a lot of potato farms all the way out to Riverhead and the Forks - but by the late fifties my Aunt Ceil, Uncle Louie, and cousin Cary had only moved as far as Bellmore, on the south shore of Nassau County, and my grandmother insisted that was country.  Never mind that it was a normal suburban street with sidewalks and neat front lawns and a school bus stop on the corner.  My grandmother often said that Aunt Ceil lived in the country, but it was still better than the house she had wanted to buy out in the anarchist wilds of Islip.  The family was uniformly scandalized by that flight of fancy, and someone managed to talk her out of it.  Probably her bossy sister, my grandmother, who never lived any further out on the Island than the Five Towns, in the most southwestern corner of Nassau County, tucked tightly up against Far Rockaway and Rosedale in neighboring New York City.  Mom (my grandmother) was definitely a city girl, so when Rob and I were buying our first house, in Ronkonkoma, she asked if the garage was attached, and I replied, "of course it is, Mom ... and we even have indoor plumbing." She was not amused.

2177 Cedar Avenue, Ronkonkoma

I realized, at least within the last few years, that I am more like my grandmother than I usually like to admit.  I could never live in the country, or even in the more isolated sections of suburbia.  Of course, there is absolutely no part of Long Island that could be considered country anymore, but I'm not really talking about Long Island.  The country in Florida is entirely real, and at least in my own head, I have given it some thought.  Idle thought - the Keys, the Panhandle, one of the habitable islands in the middle of Lake Toho.  I said the 'burbs are the best place to raise a child, and they are, but I am way past that point in my orbit.  But if I allow myself to go beyond idle thought, what I feel is a frisson of fear.  I need to be able to see my neighbors, even if I don't know their names.

Sadly, no relation.  Nathan was actually the first name of the founder.

I really think it is the Brooklyn in my blood.  I was born in Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, and that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the essential me (if you really care about that, which you certainly may not.)

Although we moved out of Brooklyn when I was nine years old, I never really left.  For one thing, my Pop owned businesses in Brooklyn; first, Vijax Coal and Oil up in Greenpoint, and then as a partner in Plaza Home Improvement.  As a very young man, he started out driving Mac trucks for Vijax, his father's business, and as he used to tell me, he "knew Brooklyn like the back of his hand."  I loved when he would pass on his knowledge and all his backroad travels. Yes, even Brooklyn has backroads.  While I was living in Howard Beach, in Queens, I was so close to the county line, I could spit into Brooklyn.  I attended Long Island University at their Brooklyn campus, right across from Junior's Restaurant, on two different occasions - graduate school and paralegal school.

The old Brooklyn Paramount is now part of the Long Island University - Brooklyn Campus

While I was working at Robert Hall Clothes on Metropolitan Avenue in the Maspeth/Middle Village area, I would go out of my way to find creative backroads home, which almost always landed me somewhere in Brooklyn.  (Fellow New York City peeps - ever take the Interboro (Jackie Robinson Parkway)?  On purpose? It was like driving through the City of the Dead, which made it so interesting.)  When I was dependent on mass transit, and especially while I was attending LIU, I would purposely take convoluted routes so I could experience new lines and stations in Brooklyn.  I loved that borough like nobody's business.

Where I fell in love ... with lobster.  I was five years old.

So, over 15 years ago, when I first needed to pick an online handle for the old Orlando Sentinel message board, the name that immediately popped up in my mind was "brkexpat" - Brooklyn Ex-Patriate.  Never mind that I had been living in various Long Island communities since 1962, my connection to Brooklyn is that powerful, as well as eternal, because just last year I found  a bunch of my father's family, my Osher relatives, and a number of them still live in Brooklyn. 

I'm essentially a city girl, and it's best that I realized it and accepted it before I bought a home out in the boonies.  Because ...

You can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but ...

Chick-a-Boom-Boom-Boom Chicken

I opened the third door and there she was

And she whispered so sexy, hello-ooh

I tried to do the same

And impress her with my style

But why I said this

I'll never know

Chick-a-boom-chick-a-boom

(Mmmmm-aaaah)

Don't ya jes' love it

Chick-a-boom-chick-a-boom

(Mmmmm-aaaah)

Don't you jes' love it

Chick-a-boom-chick-a-boom

(Mmmmm-aaaah)

Don't ya jes' love it

Chick-a-boom-chick-a-boom-boom-boom

Good grief, that pose is soooo me!  Hand on my hip, the severe look on my face, the attitude in my body language.  Incipient lawyer, indeed.  Maybe a med mal case as that's my client, the future doctor Elliot Morris.

I am starting a new series of blog posts tentatively called Six Degrees of Separation and Consanguinity, dealing with the lost and found status of family members.  It is a topic that has been on my mind and in my heart for a number of years.  I'll probably start publishing the posts once the Travelblog series is completed.  From paradise to family dysfunction - don't tell me I never take you folks to interesting places!

When I was planning to make the stir-fry earlier this week, I picked up both pork and chicken breasts to use as the protein.  Having changed my mind in the time it took us to drive from Publix to our house, I figured that when the time came, I'd know exactly what to do with those two lovely chicken breasts.  Well, the time came and this is what I did.  This is delicious, just slightly spicy, and the right balance of chicken to sauce.  My boys don't seem to care if I serve any side dishes with the entrees, but I was thinking these ingredients might pair well with couscous.

Best of all, this is a dish that works well for a mid-week dinner.  And if the kids don't like the very slight bite from the hot giardiniera,  I'm guessing the recipe would work well with the milder version.

Chick-a-Boom-Boom-Boom Chicken

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons bacon fat

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 large sweet onion, sliced

About 1 pound of boneless and skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-size pieces

2 tablespoons Wondra flour

1 cup white wine

1 - 16 oz. bottle of hot giardiniera, drained (I use Mezzetta brand California Hot Mix)

1/4 cup whole, pitted Kalamata olives, drained and cut in half lengthwise

1 - 14.5 oz. can fire-roasted diced tomatoes, undrained

4 tablespoons half-and-half

Seasoning:

Kosher salt

Ground black pepper

Granulated garlic

Whole dried oregano

Emeril's Essence

Heat the bacon fat and the butter in a large frying pan over high heat.  Add the sliced onion and season well with the salt, pepper, garlic, oregano, and Essence.   Cook the onion, stirring fairly frequently, until it starts to brown.

Place the chicken in a ziploc bag.  Add the flour.  Shake the bag so that all of the chicken is lightly dusted with flour.  Add the chicken, with any remaining flour in the bag, into the pan with the onions.

Brown the chicken on all sides. Add the white wine and bring to a boil.  Cover the pan and reduce the heat to low.  Cook the chicken for about 20 minutes, stirring once or twice.  Remove the cover and stir in the tomatoes.  Raise the heat to medium, and cook just until the sauce begins to thicken.

Add the giardiniera and the olives and cook for another 10 minutes, adding a bit of white wine if necessary to keep it from drying out.  Lower the heat all the way down and begin adding the half-and-half one tablespoon at a time. Stir well after each addition.  Once you add the dairy, do not allow the sauce to bubble.

Happy Hanukkah!

Fry, Fry My Darling - Corn Fritters

Die die die my darling

Don't utter a single word

Die die die my darling

Just shut your pretty eyes

I'll be seeing you again

I'll be seeing you in hell

Sheesh, what awful lyrics!  Forget that, and instead concentrate on these wonderful corn fritters.

This is still Hanukkah week, and I am frying some tasty tidbits in more of that miracle canola oil.  These will be coming with us when we head over to the Wheelers for some Hanukkah Hoopla (that's the invitation, folks).

I found this recipe about 35 years ago, in a Hadassah cookbook I'd purchased from a neighbor who lived across the hall from me in Howard Beach.  Her studio apartment was even smaller than mine, which was pretty amazing.  So are the fritters.

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

2 cups Bisquick

black pepper, to taste

2 teaspoons sugar

2 - 11 oz. cans Green Giant corn niblets, well-drained

In a small mixing bowl, beat the eggs with a fork.  Add the milk, set aside.  In a large mixing bowl, mix the Bisquick with the pepper and sugar.  Stir in the egg-milk mixture.

Add the corn niblets.  Use a wooden spoon for the mixing, and don't worry if it looks like the batter is insufficient to coat the corn.  It works, trust me.  Set the fritter batter aside to rest up to 20 minutes.

In a wok, heat 2 inches of oil to 350 degrees.  Stir the batter again, and then using a small scooper that has been coated with cooking spray, gently drop the fritter batter into the hot oil, about 8 to 10 fritters at a time.  Turn them occasionally and fry until the fritters are golden brown and the interior batter is cooked all the way through.  With a slotted spoon, remove the fritters to drain on paper towels.  Repeat with the remaining batter.  This makes approximately 3 dozen fritters.

The best way to eat these is with maple syrup.  Break  one open and drizzle a few drops of maple syrup over each half, then eat and enjoy.  And you will enjoy.

These are great served as an appetizer or as a side dish.  Let's face it, they are great, no matter what.

TRAVELBLOG POST #6 - AT SEA: RIDDLE ME THIS

When we are at home, we live in a 90 year old house with solid wood floors that slope precipitously, a very updated 2014 kitchen, and a tin roof. I loved that house the minute I stepped into it, 15 or so years ago, when we were looking to buy property for professional offices, and I love it even more now that we have converted most of it into a residence.  It is quaint and it is quirky, and I suppose those two words describe me as well, so the house and I are well suited to each other.

See how the floor tilts?

The bedrooms are on the top floor, in what used to be an enormous attic. That conversion was done long before we bought the house, including ruining the original wooden floors beyond repair, so we had to ceramic-tile the entire second floor. The ginormous master bedroom, with it's low sloping ceiling reminds me of a deep, cozy cave.  It's a wonderful place to sleep.  There is plenty of room for a king-sized bed, and we were all set to replace our 40-year old queen, but had to abandon that idea when we realized rather quickly that those 1925 doorways would never accommodate a king-sized mattress's passage.

You can see that nothing is even; certainly not the floor.

The tin roof is relatively new.  In 2004, when Florida was hit with the deadly hurricane trifecta of Charlie, Frances, and Jeanne, our Kissimmee house took some serious damage.  Not as bad as our neighbor, who had a tree pierce the first story roof of his building, but bad enough.  I remember walking into what was then my office on the first floor of our building, looking up and remarking to Rob's secretary Maria, "I don't remember having a skylight over there."

Everything was a mess.  Hundred year old trees all along the surrounding streets had been uprooted.  Above-ground electrical wires were down, along with the poles that had supported them.  An old house located in back of the courthouse was completely leveled, while others were so severely damaged as to be uninhabitable.  Downtown Kissimmee was trashed, which turned out to be a good thing in the long run, but certainly didn't seem so at the time.  FEMA-blue tarps overtook the majority of roofs in our neighborhood.

In time, our insurance company paid for the roof to be replaced, and the neighborhood returned to a mostly pre-hurricane normal, except for my neighbor, an antisocial personality in full bloom, who had been hoping he would be permitted to tear down his damaged property so he could sell that land without an ugly, badly-maintained cinderblock wart there to detract from the true value of the location.  I wish he had been successful as well, but that's water under the bridge, or through the roof, so to speak.

That is my office building behind the sign.  Two historical 

hotels previously sat on that site.

But this is about my tin roof.  This morning, while sitting in bed in our stateroom, enjoying the gentle rocking of the ship (yes, of course I am wearing my wristbands), I could hear the patter of raindrops above me. Very soothing, as it reminded me of that same sound around and above me from our tin roof at home.  Until I remembered that our stateroom is on Deck 5 of a 14 deck cruise ship.  So riddle me this - where were the raindrops coming from?  And why did they stop at the same time it stopped raining outside?

When we completed the move to Kissimmee earlier this year, my world closed in on itself.  On a daily, workday basis, I travel a lot less and enjoy it more.  I live close to my office - I could walk to work if I wanted to - and even closer to the courthouses.  I can walk to Lake Toho, with it's beautiful lakefront park, and stop at Susan's Courtside Cafe on my way back for a nice lunch and an even nicer cup of coffee.

Or I could walk from home in the other direction and pick up pizza from Al's (a Kissimmee institution) or chips from the 7-11 where I also gas up my car, once a month or so.  I don't have a backyard - I have a cobblestone parking lot, much better.  The lawn care dude doesn't need to use a mower on our teeny bit of grassy knoll, because ten minutes with a weed whacker works just fine.  It's a short ride to the Race-Trac for frozen yogurt and do-it-yourself toppings, and my very favorite chip mix from Utz. The Starbucks is nearby, as is a Walmart grocery, and every fast food restaurant known to man.  While I don't eat a great deal of fast food anymore, there is nothing like Long John Silver's to alleviate a deep-fried food craving.

Nearby on Broadway Avenue is an eclectic selection of restaurants and nightspots.  In my office complex right off Broadway is Savion's Place. Awesome food, even Emeril agrees. And then there is Nadia's with her wonderful Mediterranean food, including really good falafel and salad with big hunks of feta, and Broadway Pizza with calzones the size of your head. The Kissimmee Police Department is one minute away, the fire department is two.

Part of the City Centre complex.  Three Sister's Speakeasy
and Savion's Place.  

For the most part, the location is incredible.  Except for the motorcycle gangs, nightly arising from the extreme south end of Clyde Street, and the absence of decent sushi.  I have no idea where the motorcycles come from, but their harmless, noisy parade reminds me of that early scene from the Rocky Horror Show, just before Brad and Janet's tire blew out, forcing them to walk back toward the light coming from the Frankenstein house.  Our dogs are quite diligent about chasing them away.  The motorcyclists, not Brad and Janet.  Yappie dogs, gotta love them.

The back of my office building.  I know, I still can't believe it.

For sushi, we still head back to Hunter's Creek to Mikado, but the distance makes it less likely we're eating sushi.  Same reason my fake nails keep breaking off.

I love this.  The lake, of course, is Lake Tohopekaliga.  Big Toho.

This ship has sushi.  Not the fake-but-fun sushi rolls that used to be served on the  Carnival Ecstasy, along with that Japanese mayonnaise I'm so crazy about, but real Mikado-quality sushi with gorgeous fresh fish (how they managed that on the sixth day of a cruise I haven't figured out, unless we picked up something besides souvenirs in Curaçao.)

We know this because we decided to have lunch there today.  The place is called Bonsai Sushi, and it is right across from the Fahrenheit 555 steakhouse.  Today is a sea day, and very much a food-focussed day, with another English Tea at 3:00 PM and a cruise elegant dinner.  Sushi for lunch fit in with the general theme.  There is an upcharge, but it is relatively minor and oh-so-worth it.  Their menu is a lot more limited than Mikado, which has a menu that needs a Table of Contents.

See what I mean?  No cognitive overload here.  I can definitely handle this. So we ordered the "Ship for 2", and I discovered something I had suspected for a long time. Miso soup sucks.  Rob and Cory order it all the time, but it has never appealed to me.  Anytime I've seen Morimoto use miso paste on Iron Chef, dozens of times, it always looks like something that only Andrew Zimmern should be eating. But, since it came with the lunch, I decided to try it.  One discrete, delicate sniff, and very small, tentative sip.  Oh, feh, or as Nero Wolfe would say, Pfui.  Oh, and double feh - I found tofu in the soup.  I don't necessarily dislike tofu, but the problem is that tofu is only worth eating when it is paired with other flavorful elements of the dish.  Tofu is a flavor-cipher that ends up tasting like the other ingredients in the recipe (unless you are crazy enough to try Korean stinky tofu, another Andrew Zimmern favorite.  Come to think of it, I don't think even he likes it.)  Unfortunately, this tofu had no choice but to taste exactly like the less-than-palatable-to-me miso soup, so let me just put that whole thing on the "No Need to Try Again Shelf" along with blue cheese and truffles.

Robert enjoyed the miso soup tremendously, so I don't want you to think my lack of enthusiasm had anything to do with the quality of food at Bonsai.  Everything was delicious.  Lunch came with a side salad which was just what I was craving, and the California roll (which was all I was able to eat) was full of real crabmeat and buttery avocado.  So very yummy, even without my Japanese mayonnaise.

We already have plans to return for lunch on the next sea day.  Which is not tomorrow - tomorrow we dock at Grand Turk, and I booked a tour of Historical Homes and Museums.

Edamame, yes.  Miso, no.

Tonight though, was our second cruise elegant evening, so I put on eyeliner and high heels and we had a lovely dinner, after watching a terrific live show.  Let me remind you, disco is not dead, and these performers proved it.  For dinner I ordered escargot and the chateaubriand.  Not bad at all, but I would have liked more béarnaise sauce.  I did not order the Baked Alaska for dessert because I never do and neither should you.  When it is Baked Alaska night on a Carnival ship, order the warm melting chocolate cake for dessert.  You will thank me.

Time to Make the Sufganiyot - Easy Donuts, Part I

Hanukkah is in full swing right now.  It started at sundown on Tuesday, December 16, and will end at sundown on December 24, just in time for Christmas Eve.  Last year Hanukkah was so early it fell on Thanksgiving weekend, and we called that holiday season "Thanksgivukkah", and that would have been the perfect holiday for a Turducken.  Too bad I didn't think of it in time, but as you know, when it comes to me and Turducken, I am always a day late and a dollar short.

Hannukkah is the polar opposite of Tisha B'Av, which commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem, and the expulsion of the Jews from the Land of Israel. It is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, and it is a fast day.  If we're going to be sad, we may as well have a headache.  Hanukkah is a happy, snappy holiday, commemorating the rededication of the Second Temple.  It is most definitely not a fasting holiday.  It is a major eating holiday. Heartwarming foods filled with love and cholesterol.  It's all about the oil, like a lot of things in the Middle East, so with the symbolism worthy of Sigmund Freud, we eat foods that have been fried in oil.

If you're Ashkenazic like me, that means potato latkes - grated potato combined with onion, egg, and flour or matzo meal, formed into patties, and fried in oil, till GBD (according to Alton Brown, that's Golden Brown and Delicious).  If you're Sephardic, you are a fan of this gentleman:

Or as they are called in Hebrew, sufganiyot.  The fried kind, of course. Traditionally jelly doughnuts, but no one is seriously going to turn down an original glazed Krispy Kreme.

Now in addition to fried goodies, it is also something of a tradition to eat dairy during Hanukkah in commemoration of the Jewish heroine, Judith. Cheesecake, cheese blintzes, cheese latkes, that sort of thing.  If you can fry your cheese dish, so much the better!  Sour cream is also an important part of the cheese experience.  Breakstone sour cream, for instance.  Hanukkah cheese heads are crazy about this guy:

Twins!

(Of course the actor who played both Fred the Baker and Sam Breakstone at around the same time, back in the eighties, was Jewish.  I bet Hanukkah was his favorite holiday.)

I almost always make potato latkes around Hanukkah, and that's still my plan, but I wanted to try something totally new.  Time to make the sufganyiot, folks.

This recipe has been around a long time.  I first saw these biscuit doughnuts being prepared by Paula Deen years ago.  When I went looking for the recipe today, I came across a couple of glazing options that were even easier than the  doughnut, which is pretty darn easy.

2 tubes of Pillsbury's Grand Biscuits, Buttermilk
Canola oil for frying
1 tub prepared frosting (I used Pillsbury vanilla.  It was already colored a bright Hanukkah blue)
1/2 capful almond extract

Lay out the biscuits on aluminum foil or wax paper.  Cut out the center with a cookie cutter or a bottle cap.  Save the centers to make donut holes.

Preheat about a half-inch of oil to 350 degrees.  I used my electric fry pan, but you can do this on the stovetop.  Carefully place the cut biscuits into the hot oil.  Do not overcrowd the pan, because these are going to puff up.  When the first side is done, carefully turn each donut over.  I used Korean chopsticks to do this.  You can use tongs, two forks, even a spatula.

Remove the donuts to a wire rack set over foil and then paper towels.  Then add the almond extract to the frosting and stir well.  Microwave the frosting for 30 second, stir well, and pour into a bowl that is wide enough in which to dip the donuts.  Dip the tops, return to the rack, and sprinkle on any toppings like sprinkles, nuts, coconut, etc.  Let the icing set.

 

I brought these in for our Children's Legal Services Holiday Party.

Party animals, every last one of them.