We can’t seem to give up the coconut + five spice combination, despite 2 previous efforts. The biscotti got little exposure because, well, as we discovered, only people who actually eat biscotti buy biscotti. Compared to cookies, biscotti is a hard sell. So we turned the combo into a mini macaroon. I have to say, when they are around, I can’t stop popping them in my mouth. I was never a macaroon eater, but these are addictive. They sell well at the Flea, but we had a bit of a tough time with shelf life so we are hesitant to sell them online. So what’s next? A drop cookie…this time with white chocolate. Pretty good so far and I think we are going to put them into a special Father’s Day box. Stay tuned…

I was the first to wake up this morning despite the fact that I was the last to go to sleep. It’s amazing how well I can function on so little sleep (relatively speaking, of course). I’m not used to being the first up in our house so I thoroughly enjoyed the quiet living room, watching the sun stream in.

I often wonder how long we’ll live in this apartment. It’s been 3 years and while the first year was nothing short of a nightmare (and those who know us, know what I mean), the last two years have been most pleasant and I’ve even grown to love this place. It’s a new building in Brooklyn so it has no character or architectural interest what-so-ever, unlike every other place that I’ve lived, but we’re making it our own. Is it weird that I have no interest in owning a house? Aside from a backyard (that’s what my parent’s house is for), and perhaps an extra room so that guests don’t have to camp out in the living room, I’m perfectly content in an apartment building. We’re lucky that we don’t hear neighbors and we have enough space for now. I’ve seen quite a few friends leave Brooklyn the last 2 years, and I’m sure I’ll see a few more go, but we’re holding on to our life here. Besides, I’m not sure where we would even go.

I’m hearing rustling in the other rooms. We’ve got a busy day ahead, prepping for the Flea tomorrow, plus we have a few birthday cake orders going out. By the way, I think I’ve decided that I can become quite good at decorating cakes so as soon as I have some free time (ha!), I’m going to try my hand at flowers and piping icing. Fun!

The humidity hasn’t hit yet but it’s downright warm today. Despite the copious amounts of sunscreen I slather on the girls everyday, they’re turning tan and Claudine even has funny little tan lines on her feet from her sandals. We met up with some friends in front of the Brooklyn Museum this morning to watch the choreographed fountains, but after 2 short thrilling minutes of shooting water works, the damn thing broke and stopped working. Instead, the kids frolicked on the grass while I tried coaxing Claudine onto the grass but she was not happy. I’m guessing she has some sensory issues because she doesn’t like walking on grass or sand, but seriously….how are we going to get by summer if she’s having these issues? Lunches on days like this are usually containers of fruit, cold cuts, sliced veggies and whatever else we might have in the fridge, laid out on a spread. Like me, Mia doesn’t have an appetite these days. Hard to believe how skinny she is getting – both the girls were such big, chubby babies. Now that she has lost all of her baby fat, she is looking so mature.

The thing about buying food at Costco is that whatever you buy, you end up with a lot of it. Not such a big deal if you live in a house with a pantry or a basement for storage, but a very big deal if you live in a city apartment. We’ve been lucky enough to be able to store the massive 3-packs of ketchup and the like in our deep kitchen cabinets, but with more perishable items, like blueberries, you need to be creative. So it’s been blueberry smoothies, pancakes, and this morning, muffins. For some reason all the blueberries sank to the bottom of the muffin pans making them come out like little blueberry upside down cakes. Not so bad if you can pry them out of the muffin tin. At least Claudine, who refuses blueberries normally, ate them. Cautiously, of course.

For a brief hour, the skies looked like this yesterday afternoon. The winds picked up and battered our little potted violets on the balcony, and the gathering clouds created a moody, dramatic backdrop to all the activity, turning the apartment quite dark. As quickly as it came, it passed. In fact, it didn’t really rain much at all and the sun came out again soon after. I love summer storms like this.

When Mark was working as a Pastry Chef, holidays and weekends meant nothing since he was always working. In fact, getting 2 days off in a row was so rare that we never did short weekend trips or 2 day getaways. As you can guess, long weekends have taken on a whole new meaning for us and we happily drove out of Brooklyn and finally felt like any other American enjoying the long weekend. Part of our holiday was spent with swissmiss and her family who were gracious enough to host us (and there’s the pie on her site! ha!). We went to the beach, dutifully grilled meat for our dinner, and sat outdoors under a shaded umbrella for a spectacular summer lunch spread the next day.

This weekend was all about food. We came home Sunday evening for an extended family dinner at a small Korean restaurant in Flushing where we had barbeque cooked on stone plates and the best cold buckwheat noodles (Neng Myun) I’ve ever had. It’s officially summer when you eat that dish.

We ended the holiday weekend back in Flushing with a Chinese wedding banquet held for my good friend James and his new wife Rachel. A multi-course meal where the food kept coming even though we were mighty full midway after the 5th course. Mia ate like a champ and I was thrilled that Claudine liked the lobster soup. It was a spectacular weekend overall and this morning I’m having a bit of trouble switching gears and focusing on work. At least I have banquet leftovers to look forward to!

I have been waiting for rhubarb for a long time. For whatever reason the season seems to have started much later than usual this year and I did see a sign for rhubarb at the Union Square Greenmarket a few weeks ago, but I was told that they had sold out. My apologies were offered to Mia, who seems to like rhubarb just as much as I do and I promised her a pie as soon as I could find some. I finally did track down rhubarb at Provisions, a market in Fort Greene, and with Mia’s help, (she had her own setup with a toy rolling pin and some dough scraps), assembled the pie for a dinner at Tina’s (aka Swissmiss) house over the weekend. Rhubarb is one of my all-time favorite foods, going all the way back to my childhood when I would actually eat it raw from my grandmother’s garden. When I use it I never combine it with anything else – to me that just dilutes the flavor. I’m very happy that Mia likes it too. Claudine, however, true to form, rejected her first taste of rhubarb and only wanted the ice cream. I really hope that her pickiness lessens as she gets older as I just can’t imagine anyone growing up without rhubarb.

Rhubarb Pie (makes 1 10-inch pie)

Pie dough for a 10-inch two crust pie (I used the Flaky Cream Cheese Pie Crust from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Pie and Pastry Bible)
6 cups rhubarb, washed and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
3/4 cup sugar
4 teaspoons cornstarch

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Roll half of the pie dough to 1/8-inch thickness. Press into the bottom of the pie pan. Mix together the remaining ingredients and pour into the pie. Roll the remaining dough and lay on top. Crimp the edges to seal, and make five small cuts in the top with a small knife. Bake for 1 hour, until the crust is golden. Cool completely before slicing.

Pastry chefs always seem to get stuck with more extra work than others in a typical restaurant kitchen. Someone in the dining room was served the wrong entree? Give them free desserts. Need something extra for a VIP banquet for 300 people tonight? Have the pastry department whip up several hundred petit fours. It takes superb organizational skills and excellent improvisational skills to be a pastry chef which is probably the main reason they are able to handle such things. Here is maybe the most common example: the chef approaches the pastry chef and says, “I have 3 cases of something that’s going bad – use them up.” That’s an easy one, just make some ice cream.

I always like to think that anything can be made into an ice cream, so whatever extra ingredients you have on hand can be used to whip something up. Since I’ve been making many marshmallows lately, especially for the FiFis last Tuesday, I’ve had lots of extra egg yolks lying around, plus some lemongrass, heavy cream, and even some toasted coconut from something I can’t remember. That sounded like a winning combination, one that I may have even tried before, so I made it using my basic recipe. It had a very smooth, warm tropical flavor and the lemongrass gives it that extra something that you can’t quite put your finger on. If you have an ice cream maker and want to try it, just use your favorite vanilla recipe and substitute plenty of fresh lemongrass and toasted unsweetened coconut for the vanilla. Strain it out and proceed as usual. I have a feeling I’ll be making lots of ice cream this summer.

We are mighty happy to see cherries at the markets and stores, and while they are still a bit steep, you can always find everything cheaper in Chinatown. We polished them off in one sitting and they were firm and sweet. By the way, a cherry pitter is a handy gadget to have around if you’re feeding cherries to small kids.

Aren’t these papers pretty? I went to New York Central Art Supply in the East Village this morning to pick up more paper for our sampler gift boxes and I admit I got a little carried away. I LOVE paper and I haven’t been to this store in well over 7 or 8 years. Along with our usual Tibetan sunflower paper, I also picked up a nice gray paper and this delicate white rice paper to play around with. We’ve been getting quite a few wedding favor inquiries so I wanted to experiment with packaging.

Unlike the East Village, New York Central has hardly changed since the years I used to frequent it way back when I was an art student at the Cooper Union a few blocks away. It was nice to be back after so many years and still feel like it was familiar. The surrounding neighborhood, however, is hardly like it was when I lived on St. Marks during college…or even just 8 years ago when I lived on 12th street (crap, I’m freaking old). I don’t come to this neighborhood very often so I forgot about the new stuff like that curved glass monstrosity that’s sitting on the former parking lot of the old Carl Fischer building that we used to cut across every day. It’s hard not to think of old memories whenever I pass by that old Cooper building. I look up at the 5th floor windows and think about how we threw eggs from that window, aiming at the then Cooper Chicken awning across the street (I know, TERRIBLE, but we were 18). It was a weird time to be in art school – the country was in recession and war in the early 90s – and I lost my interest in art. What I do remember about those years was that I grew up and actually lived life. I’m not saying that I had a sheltered childhood, but I spent so many years in high school focused so intently on drawing, painting and sewing, that by the time I got to Cooper, it really wasn’t all that interesting to me anymore.

Walking around in the drizzle today, I recall the morning I walked home from a friend’s apartment 2 months into my freshman year. It was my first time staying up all night with friends since I moved out of my parent’s house and it all felt terribly grown up. The group was mostly older, in their junior year, and we talked about art and life and looked at paintings in this smoke filled studio. When I left it was already at the cusp of dawn. The streets were eerily quiet and empty and I walked home alone down Lafayette towards Chinatown totally and completely happy.

You may guess by now that I am a complete nostalgic sap. When I moved to the West Coast after the Cooper years, I met my match in nostalgic sappiness through a classmate in music class. We later shared a house with 2 other people in Portland (Mark being one of them) and one of our favorite things to do was stay up late till the wee hours of the night, talking and reminiscing about New York. We didn’t know each other then, but we lived parallel lives (me at Cooper, him at the Jazz Program at the New School) and we both left the same year to come to Olympia to study music. We would lounge on the couch and stare at a NYC subway map that he had taped up on the wall and talked like old folks about food and restaurants, beloved streets and neighborhoods, and characters and experiences that we shared in common. Good times.

I’m actually better about letting go of the past since I’ve had kids. It’s not hard to do when you have so many things to look forward to, but when you live in the town you grew up in, it’s hard not to run into shadows of your former life.