You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July, 2008.
Last night, Anuj and I stopped by Good Housekeeping’s 3rd Annual Green House, the first LEED-certified private residence in Manhattan. The house happens to be located just up the block from us, on 122nd street in Harlem. It was a festive affair – organic wine, passed appetizers, and a large number of publishing industry professionals wearing Good Housekeeping-branded flip flops to protect the newly finished, responsibly harvested wood floors. There were even a few celebs (Russell Simmons, Maurice Dubois – much more handsome in person).
I’ve got a mystery to solve. Since the spring, we’ve had the symphonic croaking of frogs in our front yard. The master bedroom overlooks the front yard, so Anuj and I (and any friends staying in the bedroom directly above us) fall asleep to these sounds. Now, I’m not sure how Anuj feels about the croaking, but I think there’s something sort of sweet about being sung to sleep. It’s also a nightly reminder that this isn’t just our yard, here. Some other creatures are doing a little homesteading of their own.
The mystery is, what kind of frogs are they? An early visitor who hails from Virginia suggested they were tree frogs, but a little poking around on wikipedia and the Western New York Herpetological Society website revealed that tree frogs are typically found in the southeast. Places like…Virginia. Okay, so according to the Herpetological Society, our lovely state includes 13 types of frogs and toads – and check it out: enature.com even includes audio files of their calls! Not sure I can upload them here, but let’s see if I can’t deduce which ones are providing our lullabies.
A few weeks after my Dad installed the interior window, we slave driving-children had him back to help with our next big undertaking: the trim. As I’ve mentioned, this house was built in the 70’s, and when we bought it in January, it was still bearing many of those less-than-inspired architectural and design features like ugly trim around all the doors and along the floor in most of the rooms.
See it here (with the ugly linen cabinet thing Anuj tore down to make room for the interior window):
The doors of our house aren’t real wood – they’re not even particleboard – they’re just horrible. We knew we couldn’t replace them (at least not yet…), so we decided we’d just paint them and replace the trim around them.
Back to our local lumberyard we went for wood that would be our trim. I knew I wanted a more ‘country’ look, but I wasn’t sure it would jive with our 70’s home – but my Dad assured me it would be great. And so we skipped over the fancy moldings you find in the city or newer homes (saddle, quarter-round, t-mold, shoe) and settled on a historic Colonial standard: 1×6 pine for the baseboards and 1×4 for the door trim. Nothing else. Plain, simple, timeless.
Last Saturday Anuj and I decided to take our first swim in our town’s tiny, reputedly crystal-clean lake: Queechy Lake. To get to the beach requires some searching. Since January, we’ve driven on the lake road a dozen times and could not figure out where the beach was. You have to find the barely marked sign, pull your car over to the side of the road (having other cars there helps), walk through some wild flower bushes and follow a grass path through the woods.
Once you arrive – a small bit of heaven awaits.
We haven’t worked our way out to the floating dock yet.
Along with the horrible linen-closet-cabinet thing outside the upstairs bathroom, there was something else in the house Anuj and I knew had to go. This:
I know, there’s a lot of things wrong with this picture. But draw your attention to the wallpaper. How could anyone look at this for longer than five minutes and not run screaming into the wilderness? Let me show you from another perspective just to be sure we’re in agreement:
We had some friends up for the 4th of July, and as promised, hit a few local shops for the freshest produce, cheeses and meats we could find. We didn’t make the Lenox farmer’s market because it opened at 3:00pm when we wanted to start cooking (plus we had an early afternoon hike scheduled), but we did hit Guido’s, a market I like to think of as the Berkshires’ Citarella in New York. Kind of expensive, lots of fresh – but not always local – produce. From what I hear, the Guido’s butcher is local. So we got some great stuff and pulled together a feast of corn & tomato salsa, spice rubbed grilled steak, french potato salad, and some grilled zucchini we were too stuffed to eat. After dinner, we hit the Chatham fair to watch the fireworks, and guiltily got a few fried doughs. At the New England fairs I visited as a kid, I remember maple syrup on my fried dough, but alas, Chatham only had powdered sugar and cinnamon. Not that it slowed me down.
Earlier in the day we went on a hike on a trail maganed by the Columbia Land Conservancy, a local organization whose mission is to protect Columbia County’s farmlands and forests. After the hike, we hit Old Chatham Sheepherding Company for some cheese to nibble on before dinner. The farm was closed, but the “store” was open.
It’s self-serve, so you pay by the honor system. Take your cheese, leave your dough. We miscalculated how much we’d need. The block of Camembert was gone in about fifteen minutes.
Saturday morning we decided to make the dessert we were supposed to make the night before: plum and berry crisp. The recipe called for blueberries and blackberries, but we couldn’t find any local – so we used strawberries instead. I cooked up the crisp and served with vanilla ice cream for our breakfast. Yum. Our friends left that afternoon after picking up some more Old Chatham Sheepherding cheese for their train ride home.
We then headed over to Hinsdale, Mass for another feast. This time, it was huge, sweet Berkshire beef meatballs, salad, and a cucumber-dill-yogurt dish. Kind of like raita. We rolled home and then spent Sunday working off the food. I weeded, Anuj vacuumed – a perfect ending to the long weekend.
