WARREN CONNECTICUT – How about this: a long weekend! In Warren. I hacked around a bit with my Leica M9 and 18 mm Super Elmar lens. Great combination. Here’s some salad on the hoof:
Veggie Garden
GOSHEN CONNECTICUT – We visited some friends, Henry and Celia McGee, in Goshen for lunch – Goshen is the site of a country county fair in August – we’ll be back. Taken with my Fuji X Pro-1 and a Fuji 35mm lens.
LunchSalade Nicoise
In this day last year: Moonrise over Manhattan. I probably won’t see this juxtaposition again. Ever.
WARREN CONNECTICUT – A weekend with friends and family. Maria is in Europe but our children and Kimball and Patrizia Chen joined us for the weekend. We just had a Big Green Egg delivered – known as the “Harley of outdoor cooking” so I’m experimenting with ribs, steaks, pork shoulder, pizza, you name it. This is deep water – I’ve got a fair amount of work to do on it.
Here’s John Novogrod listening to Alexander at dinner with us. Taken with my Leica M9 and Noctilux lens.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – I’m going to ramble a bit today. Maria (wife), Francesca (daughter) and my sister in law are all off for the week in Mexico at a spa having quality female bonding time (and celebrating Francesca’s graduation last week). This means that Basil (the Norwich Terrier) and I are home alone. Do we have miserable litle lonely guy meals, gnawing on pizza crusts and drinking a designer beer? Do we impose ourselves on our friends, offering entertaining conversation in exchange for protein and alcohol? Not on your life.
When I’m on my own I cook. It’s a chance to experiment. A chance to order out for a pizza without shame if I cook up a disaster. Since last Friday (when the women in my life left) I’ve done 7 variants on a hamburger, sous viding them to medium rare and finishing at high temperature. Various blends. When to salt. And so on. Today I looked around for ideas and found that I had a copy of the “Blackberry Farm Cookbook”. I’m a lucky guy – we have a lot of friends in publishing who send me cookbooks. When this one arrived I thought “Ugh – not another farm to table picture book.” I had forgotten that Blackberry Farm is currently the premier foodie destination in the country. Anyway I cooked a braised rabbit, and roasted hen of the woods mushrooms and corn pudding. A college classmate, Ted Elliott, has settled north of San Francisco and has made a career at wine – I opened a bottle of his TR Elliott Queste Pinot Noir (2008). The wine was better than the food. The rabbit was delicious but had a slightly dry mouthfeel (isn’t rabbit always like this?). The corn pudding was fabulous but the liquid proportions and cooking time were wrong for my stone ground corn meal – if I hand’t made adjustment it would have been corn chowder. As I said . .
A neighbor in Connecticut gave me a bunch of rhubarb – a golden opportunity to make rhubarb sorbet. Anyway, here’s dinner, taken with my relatively new Puji X-Pro 1 and a 50mm Fuji lens.
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Back home. A longish day at the office but after five days on the road I thought that we deserved a home-cooked meal so I stopped at Fairway where I found a nice piece of swordfish, decent tomatoes, and miraculously very nice basil and fresh peas. I combined these items and the usual stuff from the larder, and a good pinot grigio, into dinner at home for two. Taken with my Sony Nex-7 and 24mm Leica Summilux lens (and a stepladder). Dinner for two
On this day last year: cigarette butt. A walkabout with a wide lens.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – A busy day of shopping, cooking and otherwise preparing for an onslaught of relatives for Alexander and Laura’s wedding this coming weekend. It’s good to have some food hanging around just in case people are hungry at odd hours. So I roasted a coupe of chickens, made two kinds of swiss chard, did some beets and feta cheese and eggplant parmesan, and made a variety of pasta sauces. Here’s a sample, captured with my Panasonic GH2
Chicken Eggplant Swiss Chard
NEW YORK NEW YORK – Our friends Varya Gornostaeva and her husband, Sergei Parkhomenko, were in town from Moscow so we had a small dinner party for them in our kitchen. Varya has terrific English and Sergei very good French (as does Maria) so we had enough languages in common to communicate well. This is Sergei captured with my Leica M9 – this is less annoying than it looks because it was at the end of the meal and still mid-afternoon in Moscow.
Dinner in the kitchen
On this day one year ago: A passport photo for Maria. This very clearly demonstrates that I really could make a living at photography, doing passport photos.
