Thanksgiving-by-the-Sea

Being a food enthusiast, you'd think that Thanksgiving would be a huge holiday for me...but it's not so much. I don't like turkey...and when people suggest that I substitute duck, I don't see the point when I can eat that any day of the week. Likewise with a vegetarian Thanksgiving.

So instead I saw Thanksgiving this year as an opportunity to escape to Seaside, Florida for five days with the Soul Twin. I was just coming home from NCTE and thought there probably wouldn't be a better way to relax than sitting on a beach in Florida. Observe:

This was Sundog Books, one of the best indie bookstores I've been to. The classics section seemed to be in no discernible order ...but then a saleswoman approached me and asked if I needed help. I told her I was looking for Persuasion. It took her all of a nanosecond to find a copy and hand it over to me (with a smile). Incredibly nice people and a great selection.

So this was bought as a joke. It's Francis Ford Coppola's mini Sofia line and, why yes, that's a straw you see there on the side. Like an alcoholic Capri Sun. The taste? Well, it's what you would expect. But when you're sipping while shopping through an open air market, who cares?

Okay, so maybe oysters aren't your thing...but what if they were slurped while taking in the view below...

Can you think of a better way to enjoy the fruits of the ocean?!?! An entire bottle of wine was consumed while taking in this incredible view.


A feast on our balcony. What else do you need other than bread and cheese? Oh, and wine.

Yes, this was on the balcony. Check out the pool below. Word up.

And for your viewing pleasure, one of the most un-PC things I've seen to date. Cowboys and Indians?! Really?! I didn't know anyone still encouraged this sort of play...

An unbelievable trip. In addition to the photographic joy above, we also:

• ate many many loaves of bread from Wild Olives - one of the best baguettes I have tried ever.


• rented bikes from Butterfly Bike and Kayak, and we rode more than six miles everyday (well, yeah, after all that bread, cheese, and wine!).


• drank coffee every morning at Amavida; I'm not a pastry person but Amavida had some of the best morning pastries I have ever indulged in.

It being a vacation and all, lots of books were read. Soul Twin read Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and moved on to Anna Godbersen's Splendor (courtesy of me...I swear, I'll push that series on anyone showing even the slightest sign of weakness!). I read a galley of Wicked Girls by Stephanie Hemphill (Salem witch trials in verse, tentatively scheduled for a June 2010 release), Educating Peter: How Anyone Can Become an (Almost) Instant Wine Expert by Lettie Teague, and Let It Snow by John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle.

Eat, drink, and celebrate at the beach!

Note: All photos taken with my cell phone camera. For that, I am deeply sorry.

Going to Denver anytime soon?

I've been meaning to do this since ALA Midwinter Conference but I just kept putting it off...

While I was in Denver in January for the conference, I found myself with some unexpected free time on Tuesday.  Most of my colleagues had started home by that point and all my meetings were finished.  So all you book people will know where I headed: Tattered Cover book store , of course!  It was every bit as lovely as I had expected - dark wood, lots of hushed intellectual conversation, nice people, plush seating.  After a couple of hours of perusal, I purchased a few books: Real Food Fast by Nigel Slater, Cooking from the Heart of Spain: Food of La Mancha by Janet Mendel, Gallop! by Rufus Butler Seder, and Judy Moody Gets Famous by Megan McDonald.  I'm guessing you can tell which were for me and which were presents for Kiddo.

As I left the store and walked down Wynkoop Street, I saw this symbol on a sign with an arrow pointing down the alleyway: 

Wines off Wynkoop.

I thought to myself, "Why not?"  So I diverted myself down the alley and entered the wine store.  It had a similar feel to Tattered Cover: dark wood, cozy, bright.  I asked the friendly guy behind the counter about their local wine section: "What would you recommend in a red and a white?"  He recommended the Trail Ridge 2006 Gewurztraminer, explaining that he personally didn't go for Gewurztraminer, typically, but the Trail Ridge was milder and more food-friendly than other versions.  

Upon drinking it when I got home, I found his assessment to be spot-on.  It still had that typical crisp sweetness, but it wasn't cloying or over-the-top.  The Colorado version wasn't nearly as showy, which is a compliment.

The red he recommended was the Verso 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon.  Again, like the Gewurztraminer, I felt like this was the wallflower version of a true Cabernet: it was jammy and dark, but not as much as you would expect from a typical Cab.  And this is again a compliment: in an age of so much in-your-faceness, I found this Cabernet's shyness refreshing.

And as if I wasn't already having a fantastic day, I finished that night eating dinner alone at Osteria Marco.  If you find yourself in downtown Denver this is the place to go.  I loved the way that you enter through a modern lobby but, once you take the stairs down, you enter this dark-wooded, cozy atmosphere.  The service was attentive without being hovering, and the food was outstanding.  I finally (!) was able to try burrata (which I had heard so much about from Art & Aioli): Osteria Marco makes their own in-house version, along with all their charcuterie, and it was delectable.  

Here is one thing that happens when you eat alone: you end up sitting in weird nooks and crannies of restaurants.  I should know: I love eating at a restaurant alone so this happens to me quite a bit.  In this case, I ended up sitting near the guy who makes the paninis so I was able to watch him man the presses.  And I learned a ton.  For one thing, he had the heat much lower than I have mine at home because those sandwiches were there for a long time.  He also pressed them down...and down some more...to make them super-thin.  I don't worry that much about mine - I usually throw some weight on top of them and then walk away.  I know now that I shouldn't be so flip about them in the future.  Well, the guy noticed I was watching him intently and I think he told the manager because he eventually came over and chatted it up with me.  I learned about the restaurant and that the manager was planning on opening his own restaurant someday.  And I also got a good laugh when I told the manager I was in Denver for the ALA conference and, showing no restraint, he exclaimed, "But you're under 40!  And thin!"  To be fair, he was apologetic for his outburst - I didn't take it personally - you have to be able to laugh at your profession, right?

Overall, it was such a beautiful, phenomenal day in Denver.  It's been difficult to look back at that time with fond memories, as it makes me miss Kate and Kathy so tremendously, but Denver really was one of my favorite conference experiences to date.  With a special thanks to Kate and Kathy (of course), Patricia, Brenda Bowen , Jenny, my friends at Random House, and Kathy Nuzum.  

Eat, drink, and look forward to the opportunity to visit Denver again.

Airline Food, Red-Wine Soaked Fried Bread, and Homegrown Stimulus

Once again, I find myself having to apologize for the dearth of blog posting lately. You see, I have a glittering, sparkling day-to-day life that often prevents me from writing as much as I like - I'm terribly busy and important doing any number of fabulous things.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

And as is customary when I've been absent awhile, everyone else has still been blogging. I have found all kinds of fantastic treasures in my Bloglines and email inbox:

• The List Universe has put together the Top 10 Most Overrated Novels. I'm down with Emma being on that list, especially when compared with Austen's other work. The listmakers got the right one; if they had stuck Sense and Sensibility on there I would have had some choice words for them. However...the Lord of the Rings trilogy?! They're out of their minds...or they're just as bad as those trolls that come along and say useless things with the sole purpose of pissing people off.


• I heard from Ellen at Avec Sucre...who heard from Clotilde...about this complaint letter sent to Sir Richard Branson regarding the food on a Virgin flight from Mumbai to London. Funny, funny stuff, my friends. Read it and weep.
  


• ALA has posted the phone calls made to the authors and illustrators for the Youth Media Awards at ALA Midwinter. Fun stuff! My favorites were Laurie Halse Anderson saying over and over, "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness!" and when hearing that she would be invited to be on the Today show Beth Krommes said, "I watch that show every morning!" For the record, I found Neil Gaiman's swearing hilarious!
  


• In yet another intersection of food and children's literature, Readers' Books in Sonoma has a fantastic display idea: "homegrown stimulus package." In addition to having child-friendly books like Tillie Lays an Egg and Extraordinary Chickens on display, they also have locally grown eggs and will soon have local produce and preserves. Talk about exemplifying the idea of community! Thanks to my daily Shelf Awareness email for that tidbit.
  


• I can't believe I'm admitting this but...I found a version of milk chocolate that I actually like. Café-Tasse has been my chocolate of choice for awhile (with Dagoba, Vosges, and Scharffenberger making cameo appearances). My favorite Café-Tasse bar has been the Noir-Café (dark chocolate with coffee); however, I unintentionally grabbed the Lait-Café last time I was at the store. Well, you heard it from me first: it's Really Good. Incredibly creamy, equally rich. And it doesn't taste all jacked up on sugar. Granted, I'm not converted - I'll still go for the Noir. But I will thoroughly enjoy the Lait while it lasts. (And this all reminds me of an article in the NY Times a year ago today about milk chocolate making a comeback. I scoffed a year ago but now...)
  


• I'm a geek and here's why: I get the email updates about Spain...On the Road Again. I've been watching the show casually and enjoying it. It would be so wonderful to make some of the food that they eat but I feel that part of the reason it looks and sounds so good is because it is local to Spain. I'm just not going to get the same freshness of produce and seafood here...because, you know, I'm in NYC in February. Nevertheless, I might have to try this recipe. To quote Mario: "Fried bread soaked in wine...dangerous." Indeed. Here's it is:

TORRIJAS

Serves 6

* 3 cups olive oil
* 2 cups dry Spanish wine
* 3 large eggs
* Eighteen half–inch–thick slices crusty Spanish bread (or substitute a baguette)
* 1/4 cup sugar, mixed with 1/4 cup ground cinnamon

* Mosto (recipe for Mosto follows below)

Heat the olive oil in a large heavy pot over medium-high heat until it reaches 365 degrees Farenheit. Meanwhile, pour the wine into a large shallow bowl, add the bread, and let soak for 8 minutes. In another shallow bowl, beat the eggs until well mixed. Working in batches, remove the bread from the wine, draining well, add to the eggs, and let soak for 2 minutes; drain well, add to the hot oil, and cook for until golden brown, about 1 minute per side. Drain on paper towels, then sprinkle with the cinnamon sugar, drizzle with mosto, and serve to friends.

Mosto: Boil 3 cups of dry red wine with 1 cup of sugar, a cinnamon stick, and a splash of fresh apple cider until it is reduced by three-quarters (it will be thick and syrupy). Allow it to cool, then store it in a clean wine bottle. Use whenever you need a sweet, grapey punch, in everything from a salad dressing to an ice cream topping.

• I have only very recently discovered the blog of my two new friends, Cindy and Lynn. They reviewed Dear Julia and I loved what they had to say. I hadn't made the parallel between Zemser and Joan Bauer but I think Cindy is right on.

Eat, drink, and beware of that food on Virgin...or any airline really.

"French Milk" caused my OCD to kick in!

This is as good a time as any to confess that I am often overcome with a bit of OCD. Which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise since, you know, aren’t we all afflicted with a touch of OCD from time to time? So here’s the story of my latest bout with OCD:

I was recently introduced to the blog Oops…Wrong Cookie, which has some nice reviews of books I haven’t heard of. I always appreciate reviews of more obscure (at least obscure to me) titles – it helps me keep my street cred as a “children’s materials specialist” and I just enjoy being in-the-know about such things.

So one of the bloggers, Laura, reviewed a darling book called French Milk by Lucy Knisley, published by Epigraph Publishing (unfamiliar to me) in 2000. I’m a total Francophile so I was completely intrigued – am I the only one who had never heard of this book before? I first looked in the Queens library catalog: no go. Hmmm… So I went to Baker & Taylor and BWI: “permanently out of stock”. Which of course is just one stop away from Outofprintsville. Damn. So I went to Amazon (guilty as charged) to see if I could pick up a copy from the Marketplace: denied there too. Hmmm… So I thought perhaps Brooklyn PL or NYPL had heard of this book and purchased it: that was a dead end too. Has this book dropped off the face of the earth?!

This is where the OCD kicks in. Now I am obsessed with finding this book. Obsessed. And this has occupied my mind for a week. I haven’t been to eBay yet so that’s my next stop. After that, I think I might have to trek into Manhattan and hunt it down at the indie bookstores; they most likely won’t have it in stock but they’re more likely to hunt it down for me than my local B&N*.

Anyhoo, the hunt is on for French Milk. I will find it. Just watch me.

*This is one of those things they don’t tell you about Queens – there isn’t a worse place to live if you want an indie bookstore. Truly. I have yet to find one at all. And even if I do find it, I will no doubt be forced to take the subway and a bus or two there. And I could be all noble and make that trek, but it most likely ain’t happening. It’s easier for me to go to Books of Wonder or McNally Robinson in Manhattan than someplace in Queens. Which brings us full circle as to the likely reason there aren’t any indies in Queens…

Short Round-up

Oy. I've been so behind in my blogging. I don't have time at work - and I think it might against company policy, maybe? - and I'm too busy with, you know, life when I'm at home. Better late than never, n'est-ce pas?

• I recently read a fantastic quote from John Constant of Elliott Bay Book Company – unfortunately, it completely escapes me where I read it (perhaps my daily Shelf Awareness email?). Everyone, meaning non-librarian types, asks me for the name of my favorite book. And I could never ever name just one. Well, Mr. Constant phrases it in such a way that I feel he understands me:
  
  "Does anyone over the age of 16 even have a favorite book? Claiming a favorite is only indicative of the fact that you haven't read enough: Out of the thousands of books that I've read, with the enormous palette of ideas and emotions they've represented, how could I choose only, say, five? Why not ask for a favorite orgasm, or laugh, or grain of sand?"
  


• These are about the coolest tribute to Halloween ever! Cannibal pumpkins, puking pumpkins, and the most disturbing – pumpkin giving birth. Check it out and get in the mood! Thanks to Your Neighborhood Librarian for the link.

• Thought the midnight book parties were a thing of the past once Harry graduated from Hogwarts? Not so. Powell’s Books in Portland is throwing a midnight party for Stephen Colbert’s new book I Am America (And So Can You!). The party is in a bar across the street from Powell’s and they’re decorating in red, white, and blue. Not to mention shooting “Truthiness” Tequila. See, NYC isn’t the only place with really, really cool stuff. Again, if you can handle that rain, move to Portland now. While you can still afford to do so.

I know, I know. This is a short post. Coming up? The NYT Dining section tomorrow, a photo of some local succulent mini-pears from New York, and a review of A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban (Hint: I loved it).