Tapastry

Here are a few shots from our delicious Spanish appetizer feast the other day!

Cherry tomatoes stuffed with crab salad and olive tapenade

Fresh tuna salad with capers

The hit of the night was sliced baguette topped with melted manchego cheese and carmelized onions.

Tips for a great white sangria:  2 bottles pinot grigio, quarter cup brandy, quarter cup orange or apple liquor, tons of fresh fruit, half cup simple syrup, and refrigerate overnight.

Our next event:  French appetizers

Foodie

Getting together this weekend with some friends to have a tapas party. Food. All kinds of little foods. Lots of little tiny foods with big flavors. So, I get to eat a lot of little food.

A lot of food. The chorizo. The olives. The shrimp. The scallops. Grilled asparagus wrapped in Serrano ham. And did I mention the sangria?

I wonder sometimes why food excites me so much? I am heading out to Wegman’s on my lunch hour to shop for the tapas dishes I will be preparing and I am excited beyond belief. The produce aisle. The seafood. The bread.

So tomorrow afternoon, the girls will be preparing all sorts of foodstuff while the guys will be downstairs, practicing for their first surf music gig in a year.  I wonder how that will go….cooking Spanish-inspired food while listening to Dick Dale-inspired music?

Food…I even wrote a poem about it a while ago. Here is the abbreviated version:

Comfort Food

What does it mean when
Coffee is more comforting
than an embrace,
And wine more than words?

On a cold winter’s night
Mashed potatoes
Osso buco
That’s all I need.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity. ~Voltaire

Frogger

If I can make my 40-minute commute to work each morning unscathed, I consider myself lucky. Driving in New Jersey is hazardous to your health. It causes rapid heart beat and palpitations. It causes stroke-like symptoms of numbness and brain fog.

Yesterday morning I was almost T-boned.

I didn’t even have time to blast my horn. I literally had only seconds to swerve into the lane of oncoming traffic to avoid his front end from slamming into my passenger side. I was saved only by the fact there was no oncoming traffic in those few seconds. I was shaken and flabbergasted! Especially when I looked in my rear view mirror after returning to my own lane, and the guy was steadily making his turn, not batting an eye. No hesitation or braking. Just going where he wanted to go. There was a stop sign right in front of his face but of course it wasn’t meant for him.

Driving in New Jersey you always have to be on the defensive. You have to know there are people out there driving who should not be driving. There are people without car insurance. There are people without driver’s licenses. There are people who have failed driving tests. But they just keep on truckin’.

Inconsideration. Inconsideration and a real-time game of Frogger. That’s what you get when driving in the great Garden State.

Automobiles are not ferocious.... it is man who is to be feared. ~Robbins B. Stoeckel

Devil's Food

Last week I embarked on a “clean eating” plan. Eat no processed food. Eat from the earth. If man created it, do not eat it. In theory, it was a good idea, and great for my health. And I was able to do it for three days, until someone at work shoved a chocolate covered donut down my throat.

Okay, so she didn’t shove it down my throat. But she did pick up the Entenmanns’s box from the food table I had managed to avoid all day, carry it to my desk during the three o’clock danger hour, and hold the box of glossy-chocolate sugary-smelling orbs in front of my face. That’s equivalent to holding a gun to my head and making me eat it. That’s even worse than the devilish serpent offering me fruit from the forbidden tree - because at least eating from the tree of forbidden fruit would have been “eating clean”.

There’s food everywhere. How do you escape it? I just now found out Entenmann’s is even in my spellchecker. I had it spelled wrong. How do brand names of processed food products end up in Microsoft’s spellchecker? Food is everywhere. You cannot escape it.

So I have decided to still eat clean - at least 75% of the time. That is practical. That is doable. At least I think it is.

High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Supersquash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us? ~Annita Manning

So Long

Goodbye Michael. Goodbye Walter. Goodbye Farah.

Goodbye Jon. Goodbye Kate. Goodbye plus-eight.

Goodbye Guiding Light. Goodbye Dirty Sexy Money. Goodbye Lipstick Jungle.

Goodbye Circuit City. Goodbye Pontiac. Goodbye Starbucks on every corner.

Goodbye two-salary households. Goodbye savings account. Goodbye George Bush.

Goodbye property tax rebates. Goodbye Homestead rebates. Goodbye Jon Corzine.

Goodbye 2009.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. ~Hal Borland