#i would still consider myself jewish because we do do a “friday night dinner” and its a major part of my culture esp relating to my mother-

[boabel]

sorry sending you multiple asks but! i also was just thinking about jewish district traditions, i know you've talked about it before and wondered if you had any more Thoughts!!

aa sorry again for answering late, my inbox is very full 😭

ofc i do! i mentioned in your other asks that they still do shabbat every friday, even if they don't know why.

i also think they would celebrate some form of hanukkah and maybe even christmas as well, since i believe multiple different religions impacted district culture.

thank u sm for asking, and srry for not having more hcs 😔

[sarakuper]

New York, New York

Stop #28, Sept 28-Oct 6

We arrived in Connecticut to meet my dad and Denise, his parter, who graciously offered to keep our truck and trailer on her property while we spent time in NYC. My dad gave us a ride into the upper east side of Manhattan to stay with my mom for the night. She came downstairs with my childhood dog, Rocky, so we could introduce him to Jaxon and get them comfortable with one another. While walking them together up and down the block Mikey and Laura arrived and the 5 of us had dinner together. It been so long since we were all together for something as casual as dinner. It was so nice to all be together! Mikey and Laura slept in Inwood (upper Manhattan) that night at my Aunt Frema’s while me Sean and Jaxon got comfortable at my moms place.

Sunday morning we slept in, ate breakfast together, then my dad picked me Sean and Jaxon up to head to my Bubby’s in Queens for the first night of Rosh Hashana. Aunt Frema was preparing chicken soup and side dishes while also panicking about the caterers who had yet to arrive with the food they ordered for our meal. We helped set the table and get organized, meanwhile everyone else started to arrive. Denise and her son, Mikolo, Michael and Laura, and then Aunt Alane, Uncle Lew, and my cousins Aaron and Jack (who are like brothers to me). We were a total of 14 in my Bubby’s apartment and she couldn’t have been happier to have everyone there, although we missed Shelly who flying back to the states from Israel. By 6:30pm the food had finally arrived only 6 hours later than they originally called for. 

Rosh Hashana was always one of my favorite Jewish holidays growing up. It celebrates the new year and we get to dip apples and challah in honey to represent a sweet year ahead. Not to mention, the main food is always delish! To our surprise, even though we catered this year, everything still tasted home made. There were FOUR types of kuggel, which is not surprising considering this is a Kuper gathering. But seriously, four!? My dad made the classic potato kuggel in addition to the cauliflower, broccoli, and noodle kuggels. There was also chicken soup with matzo balls, chopped liver (which sounds totally gross but is SOO delish), brisket, chicken cutlets, and way more dishes that I couldn’t begin to name. 

I haven’t been with my family for this holiday since I moved to Colorado, and quite honestly it was so great to be together again for a happy occasion. We drank lots of wine, yelled conversationally across the table, and ate until we were stuffed. We could have had a second seating with the amount of food that was left, but again, this is typical for our family. We have major portion control issues! 

As the night came to a close Bubby handed out goodie bags to all the “kids”. She usually bakes for everyone, but with her current health and age she decided it was time to buy the cookies to give out. Everyone left one at a time leaving me, Sean, Jaxon, and Aunt Frema; we all slept at Bubby’s. 

On Monday morning I woke up to join my Bubby and Frema relaxing on the couch. My Bubby has the most comfortable couch in the world and I take a shloof (aka nap) on it almost every time I’m here. So, as per usual, I made myself comfortable with them. 

An hour or so later my Dad arrived to go to shul (aka synagogue) at Young Israel, my Bubby’s local soul. After he gets back we  have a “lighter” Rosh Hashana lunch with the many leftovers from the previous night, but before we that Aunt Frema and I went for a long walk in the neighborhood with Jaxon. My dad got back and we had a late lunch that ended around 4pm. We were so full, and I couldn’t believe that Sean and I were going over to Lew and Alane’s for yet anther Rosh Hashana meal with Alane’s side of the family. We were having ANOTHER massive meal only 2 hours later. I found Sean laying down on the couch in the room we slept in and he stared at me as he said “I… can’t… do this… again” referring to the large amounts of food we’ve eaten in the last 20 hours. Well, we did!

By the time we got to Alane’s, also on the upper east side, Sean and I decided to go very slow. Eventually we were able to eat another full meal of chicken soup with matzah balls, brisket, and lots of side dishes leaving our bellies stuffed once again. Most of the Jewish holidays are like a marathon of eating, and Sean certainly got to experience it first hand. 

We slept in the next morning, still totally full, and hung out with my 13 year old cousins Aaron and Jack who actually look 16. We brought over pizza and then walked to the park to play basketball. I love these boys so much, they are like my brothers! They are also my favorite people to hang out with when I come to NYC. 

Our dinner plans with friends got canceled, and so Sean and I decided to have a night downtown to ourselves. Sean also wanted to stop by Soho Ink, a tattoo shop not far from Chinatown where we planned to eat dinner, and at the last minute decided to get the tattoo right then and there! He has lots of gaps between his current tattoos that he “needs to fill” and so this time he got an axe. It turns out the artist who was available to tattoo him was a finalist on the most recent season of Ink Master, a TV show.

After the tat Sean and I walked through Little Italy and Chinatown to get our “must eat while in NYC” soup dumplings. Usually we eat at Joe Shanghai for soup dumplings, but we wanted to try something new. We headed to Tiny Shanghai and ordered 2 rounds of soup dumplings, cold sesame noodles, scallion pancake with sliced beef, and chicken broccoli with white rice. Overall the food was delish but way less authentic than Joe’s. Since we were in the neighborhood we went to some of my old stomping grounds like Whiskey Tavern and Ryan’s daughter. At both places, to my surprise, someone who worked there when I still lived here still remembered me and welcomed us with free drinks and a good time. It was a fun date night for me and Sean! I kind of got the feeling Sean would like to live here for a little bit, maybe just a year or two. I would never do that again! But, I really do enjoy visiting. 

Wednesday morning was a lazy morning until my mom got out of work early to spend the rest of the day with me, Sean, and Jaxon. We walked around the upper east side en route to a nearby park, but it was so hot walking on the streets we decided to sit in the shade at an outdoor table for coffee and ice cream. The rest of the late afternoon was spent prepping my favorite dish that my mom makes, fried pork cutlets with sweet cabbage and potatoes. Sam came over to join us for dinner before heading out to meet her friends. Theres nothing like a home cooked meal from my mamma <3

Thursday was meant to be spent hiking with Sam somewhere upstate but because of the cold rain we decided to skip it. Instead Sean and I met her downtown and went straight to Joe Shanhai’s for a soup dumpling lunch! Yes, soup dumplings again… we could never eat too many of those. We ordered 5 rounds between 3 of us for a total of 40 dumplings. Sean only had about 8 and the rest were split between Sam and I…. yeah…  :) We continued to walk around downtown heading to the lower west side and got ice-cream at a Japanese style ice-cream spot called Tayaki on the way. Sean and I had a war of throwing shredded coconut at each other. 

^^ This is what the entrance to Joe Shanghai’s looks like ^^

We walked to a place in the west village called Uncommon which had coffee, drinks, and snacks but offered endless games! I immediately thought how much the Elser’s would love it here! We paid for an “all day” pass which was $10 each or $5 if you have a student ID which Sam does. Sitting for almost 2 hours we played Ticket to Ride and Phase 10. Eventually Sam had to leave to head to class and Sean and I went uptown to take care of the puppers at my moms place. Almost immediately we all went back downtown to Uncommon to spend the rest of the night gaming. This time Tomo, Sam’s partner, met us and we started a new game of Phase 10, which really is so similar to Kaluche. For the first time in what feels like forever I won!!!! :) AND I whooped everyones butt. FINALLY! It was killing Sean, which gave me so much joy. He was trying so hard to get everyone to come after me so I would win, but Sam has been reading my posts and while she didn’t help me win, she definitely wasn’t going out of her way to try to make me lose. What a friend! 

Friday morning I had brunch catching up with my friend Sarah, whose getting married just before Thanksgiving! In the evening Sean and I went to Hoboken to go to visit my life long bestie Toni and her husband of 1 year, Ross. They have a lovely apartment and welcomed us with a beautiful Shabbat dinner. After dinner me and Tone spent the rest of the night watching youtube tutorials of how to do the shuffle (dance moves) and were sad by the realization that we don’t have the same dance skills we once did. Ross and Sean were watching sports but were totally amused by our efforts to nail these dance moves. Sweaty and tired, we did not reach our goal, but we did laugh our butts off. After saying goodbye and being sent off with a bunch of goodies we headed back to my mom’s apartment for a short night of sleep; we were waking up at 4:30AM to go on a fishing trip with my pop and two cousins.

4:40AM quickly came and me and Sean got ready for a long morning on a boat. We walked to my cousins place only 15 blocks south where my dad picked us all out to head to Sheepshead Bay. We fished from 7-12pm and had such a blast! After I took a quick nap on the boat I woke up with enough energy to fish and caught 5! At one point I caught 2 at once, and in total only 2 of them were keepers. Sean caught more than 10 fish, 1 being blowfish which was so fun to see!!! My dad and cousins caught a few too, and the ones we kept were filleted on the boat and packaged to take back for my aunt and uncle to cook for dinner. On our way back to the city we stopped for lunch at Roll and Rooster, an old school place thats been around for a long time! On the drive back in me and my cousins all fell asleep in the back seat, and of course Sean snapped a picture. 

The rest of the day was spent napping before one final dinner out with my dad and Denise. Being exhausted from the long day we didn’t stay out long and went to bed shortly after. Both Rocky and Jaxon put us to bed that night. I think they had the best time together! And Jaxon certainly loves his grandma Annette (my mom) because maaaaan did she give him a lot of food and treats!

Sunday morning my dad gave us a ride back to Denise’s house in CT where we packed up our stuff, prepared the trailer, and hit the road to head back to Colorado for Taylor and Ej’s wedding! It will take us 4 days to get back to Colorado, but we couldn’t be more excited to celebrate the love and marriage of two of our best friends!!!! 

Thanks for reading fam, love you all! 

[ja9doeswhole30]

Before-Whole30 Baseline

One of the reasons I kept putting off committing to a firm eating plan like Whole30 is that I consider myself a pretty healthy eater. I’ve always anticipated that forcing myself to be 100% compliant with a strict plan would send me into a deprivation mentality, and that being a ~90% whole-food eater with a little wiggle room for other stuff wasn’t the worst thing in the world. 

Nonetheless, here we are. I’ve bought into the idea of a 30-day reset of eating only the “right” foods. As my start date approaches, I wanted to focus on the ways in which I’ve been eating well and can build on during Whole30. 

I cook at home. A lot. Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved to cook. Eating is awesome, so why wouldn’t someone want to participate in the creation of the food and make it exactly to spec?! My early attempts as a teen mostly consisted of eggs, pancakes, certain traditional Jewish holiday foods, and cookies. I also messed around with salads, sandwiches, smoothies, etc. (more ��food assemblage” than actual “cooking,” if we’re being technical). Then during college I graduated to vegetable stir-fries and sauteed pasta dishes, and I made a lot of marinated chicken breast on my Foreman grill. When the hubs and I moved in together we started incorporated baked salmon once a week along with the grilled chicken, turkey sausage, and turkey meatloaf that became our staples. 

Still, I didn’t realize just how much we ate out in NYC until we moved to the suburbs. Pre-kids, we’d pick something up from the pizza place one night during the week, and perhaps another weeknight we’d meet friends or coworkers for dinner and drinks. And the weekends inevitably involved eating out in some fashion or another. These days I cook dinner every weeknight pretty religiously, and that way weekend restaurant visits and take-out meals really are a special treat for everyone. 

I’m also kind of grumpy and cheap when it comes to grocery store shortcut foods - no cooked rotisserie chickens or other prepared foods from the deli counter for us. That said, I understand that this is often an optimal alternative to true take-out food for people who are too busy to cook. But it’s not like I’m relying on them and need to cut them out now, which is good. 

Finally, I’ve almost always packed and brought my own lunch. Occasionally I’ll treat myself to some sushi (since no one else in my family likes it) as a special Friday lunch, but otherwise I eat a homemade salad or leftovers from the night before. 

Hence, I’m intimidated by the menu requirements of the Whole30, and the prospect of making sure my meals are compliant while also satisfying for my family of picky eaters, but it’s not like this is my first rodeo in the kitchen. 

When I do eat outside food, I don’t go overboard. The sushi aside, when eating in a restaurant I usually pick something sensible like a salad with lean protein. If I indulge in a sandwich, I make sure to stop when I’m full (usually eating around half & saving the other half for the next day). In my youth I was a total glutton whose brain used the “oh, we’re eating out!” signal as an excuse to stuff myself, since it was a “treat”. 

I guess it’s also worth mentioning here that when we eat out, it’s pretty strictly Greek diner, Italian, Thai, or Chinese - i.e. somewhere I can eek out a decent meal (even if it means ordering steamed veggies and tofu with brown rice while everyone else has saucy deliciousness). The only time we even consider a typical “fast food” joint is on road trips, and even there you can always get a salad. 

Obviously, I’m not perfect. My willpower is shit when it comes to a nice diner bread basket or a steaming tray of garlic knots. But, in contrast to my youth, I’m able to have half a slice of challah, or one garlic knot, and stop there. This doesn’t really help with Whole30 since all that stuff is off-limits, but if I used to eat a lot of something, and trained myself to eat just a little, by extension eating none of it isn’t such a big stretch. 

I don’t eat after dinner (anymore). Because I have small children, we eat dinner around 6:30, finish by 7:00, and have them in bed by 8:00. A few months ago, I found myself picking at randomness in the kitchen during the evening cleanup. I realized that I was rushing through dinner, too distracted facilitating everyone else’s eating to slow down and feel myself to satiety. Thus, a few hours later I was either still hungry, or just antsy and unsatisfied enough to pick at nonsense. For the last several weeks, though, I’ve been more strict about dinner being the time to eat the good foods that’ll keep me full until the morning. (I say those exact words to my kids every single night; may as well take my own advice, right?)

I only booze occasionally. Last January I basically gave up drinking alcohol. Every once in a while I’ll have a glass of wine or a beer at a party, but between the negative effect on my triglycerides, the extra calories I don’t need, and the fact that I have small children who wake up me at the asscrack of dawn even if I have a headache, these occasions have been fewer and farther between. The logic also falls somewhere along the lines of “what’s the point of having just one drink?”  The other night I drank (a whole beer!) for the first time in over 2 months, and while it was delicious the buzz kept me up too late and I spent all of yesterday feeling sluggish and exhausted. Not worth it. So I know I can go 30 days without booze, no problem. 

I exercise almost every day. I know there’s a lot of speculation about whether exercise is actually good for weight loss - you burn a lot of calories but that just makes you hungrier, or you pat yourself on the back and take more liberties with crappy food choices, blah blah blah. All I know is that I got into the habit of working out every morning and I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I gave that up. My usual routine is 20-30 minutes on my elliptical, plus some strength exercises from a 30-day challenge chosen by my sister-in-law and her friends. It might be psychosomatic but I’m convinced the endorphins help me manage stress and have energy throughout the day. Plus, knowing I have to get up early to get the workout in before the kids get up is usually enough motivation to get into bed at a decent hour at night. 

The Whole30 book warns that adjusting to the program may affect athletic performance, so I’m going to proceed with caution the first few days. It so happens that we’re almost at the end of a thigh challenge, so the first day of Whole30 I’ll need to do 40 leg swings, 45 side leg lifts, and 45 side lunges (per leg). The next day it’s 50 side lunges, 55 plie squats, and 45 inner thigh pulses. So maybe I’ll skip the elliptical one of those days, or do it as a quick 10-15 minute warmup instead of a full cardio session. Regardless, according to the book exercising means you need to eat an extra (small) meal, and for my money that’s enough reason in and of itself to keep exercising. 

So there you have it. Stay tuned for my next post in which I bitch about all the reasons Whole30 is going to be insanely hard. D:

[laraimaustria]

Check your Spam Folder: The Thrilling Conclusion of the Bus Tickets to Paris Saga

Have you ever realized that the solution to your problem was right there all along? Or in this case, in the spam folder of my email? Following a hunch that we just had to ask if there were any tickets in Courtney’s name, we called the bus line one more time before giving up and just buying an new ticket to Paris for Courtney. Lo and behold, they had her ticket, and I felt my blood pressure drop back down into the normal range. This was the one problem that was giving me the most stress, the problem that had actually shaken my confidence in my own ability to be a functional adult pretty badly, and the solution had been so simple! They emailed me the right tickets, both for me and Courtney. I had one final moment of panic when I wasn’t getting the email, but it got put in my spam folder. Flash forward to this morning, when on a whim I decided to check my spam folder again to see just what was in there. And there, nestled between emails about male enhancement pills and fake orphans asking for my money, were the original emails with all the tickets that had been sent weeks ago when I first booked the tickets. They had been right there, all the time, and pretty much all the phone calls and emails we had made were totally unnecessary. I’m pretty mad at myself, because checking your spam folder is a logical thing that a functional adult should probably think of before panicking and trying to buy every ticket on the market. I didn’t do that, so we spent two weeks worrying about how we were going to get onto this flipping bus. Long story short, ALWAYS CHECK YOUR SPAM FOLDER. 

This week Courtney and I started our volunteering with a mom and her 3 year old girl who will be going to an English speaking school. The mom wants her to get as much exposure to English as possible, so she contacted our institute looking for native English speakers to essentially babysit her daughter and speak to her in English. Courtney and I thought this sounded like fun, so we signed up. On Monday we met with them for a first time and were unexpectedly treated to pizza! Fun fact about pizza in Europe, in pizzerias here the usual thing to do is order a personal pizza for yourself, the American practice of ordering one large pizza to share with everyone doesn’t seem to be common here. However, the “personal” pizzas are about the size of an American small or even medium pizza in some cases. I’m talking like eight slices of pizza all to yourself. I guess it makes for good leftovers though. The rule here also seems to be that you can put pretty much everything on pizza. I had a not so unusual combination of spinach, ham, and garlic, but Courtney got a pizza with chili con carne and corn on top, which surprisingly wasn’t terrible. Corn on pizza is a thing here, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Also tuna, which I definitely think I’ll skip. On Wednesday we took the girl to the park and played for awhile, and then Saturday morning we took her again. Afterwards the mom cooked a big lunch for us, which was very nice! The little girl is adorable and even though we can’t understand most of what she says because she tries to talk to us in German, it’s still fun to play with her. 

Our tour for our history class this week was to the Imperial Treasury, where they keep all of the old official crowns, jewels, and important relics of the old monarchies. It was pretty mind-blowing to see things that are literally 1000 years old and haven’t completely fallen apart. It’s apparent that the church had influence over literally everything, considering all of the symbols had some religious significance. Fun fact: Apparently the trend in the middle ages was to take any piece of wood or scrap of cloth and claim it was part of Jesus’s actual cross, or the tablecloth of the last supper, or something else that Jesus touched. It’s funny to think about some bishop in the Middle Ages getting conned into buying a random piece of wood that everyone genuinely believed was part of the cross. My favorites were definitely “John the Baptist’s Tooth” and “Piece from Jesus’s Loincloth”.  The weather’s turned colder and rainy, definitely time for fall, but Friday was pretty nice so we went to Mariahilferstrasse, a popular shopping district. They have a lot of the same stores you would see in popular American shopping areas like H&M, Lush, Forever 21, etc. So it felt kind of like being at home. I actually found a good warm scarf for only 5 euros! It was fun to go shopping, even if it was just to look at all the stores and get outside for the afternoon.  Saturday was colder and overcast, so I finally convinced Courtney and Justine to come with me to the Sigmund Freud museum. As a psychology major who thinks Freud is an important (but admittedly pretty hilarious) figure of psychology, I was really excited to see the place where modern psychological treatment was born. We got English audio guides that described everything that was in the museum, but to be honest I feel like they could have done a lot more. The only room with the original furnishings is the waiting room of Freud’s former practice, which was still pretty cool since this is where the first psychological society’s meetings were held. They also had some of Freud’s actual possessions which was pretty cool for me. The rest of the rooms didn’t have much in them, just a lot of old pictures and books, which I found interesting because some of them were first editions of Freud’s publications. I just think that they could have given more background information of Freud, what he did, and why what he did was so revolutionary and important in the development of psychology as a legitimate field of study. For me it was fine since I’ve already studied and learned about Freud, but for the average non-psych major I think I would have left still not really knowing a lot about Freud. Also “the couch” wasn’t there, but they explained that Freud took the original couch with him to London when they had to flee the Nazi’s. That was the most interesting part of the museum, learning about how the Freud’s were forced to leave because they were Jewish, and that the Nazi’s hated Freud’s ideas and burned his works. I’m glad I went and saw it, but it definitely lacked in terms of information. Saturday night we made another dinner together, and managed to impress ourselves again! We made broccoli cheddar soup and garlic butter crescent rolls, and both turned out pretty good! It was the perfect dinner for a cold rainy night.  Next weekend we go on our excursion to Prague, which I’m sure will be amazing and a totally new and different experience. Honestly I feel like after solving our ticket problem I can do anything. At least my stress levels have dropped significantly. I am sure they’ll get right back up there next week when I have to take my placement test for the German course at University of Vienna. There’s an oral portion of the test and I can say probably five things about myself in German. It’ll be interesting, to say the least. 

[londonlanded]

Weeks 7 & 8

Alright so the longer I am here, the longer I am starting to realize that this is going to be a bi-weekly digest at best, sorry my life isn't interesting enough to document on the daily but hopefully it's worth the wait (and hopefully more stuff happens to me to make it worth chronicling!). 

Monday was marked by another walk around my area, though I headed east along the Thames this time, and stumbled upon the Hammersmith bridge, which I had heard rumours about but hadn't actually seen myself. 

Tuesday, came home and decorated my room to the point that it's actually liveable, half since it was about time it started to feel like home, half because I had just had an infuriating shift at work and needed something to go well that day. Here's the thing about my job that I can actually, legally disclose without compromising the welfare or confidentiality of the people I work for and with; how my day goes is largely dependent on who I am working with. This is the reality for any job, I know, but it's all the more relevant when you are someone who largely depends on being cognitively stimulated to at least a small degree. My job involves a lot of repetitive tasks, the bulk of it isn't necessarily challenging though it is tiring and relatively demanding. You're remotely interacting with literally hundreds of people per day, some are a little less thrilled to speak to you than others, some want to tell you the stories of their lives. The day-to-day job is almost never the same, and it varies just as greatly based on my company as it does based on the phone calls. On days when I feel like I'm doing the job of two people, I am somewhat less friendly than usual.

Dave was the recipient of my angst on Tuesday night, and as a result, sent this to the hotel. 

A very confused concierge, used to receiving guest-related and not staff-related queries, cautiously came into the communications office and dropped them off, but only after having read the delivery notice for the flowers since the recipient was initially written as "Maple Face." Not a bad start to my Wednesday. 

Finished it with dinner outside my building, I am happy on the pavement so long as there's a decent sky above me. It's not living on Park Lane, certainly, but at the moment, I am more than happy with a partially obstructed view of the sunset, and Red Planet Pizza as company.

Friday before work, I hunted down a birthday present for my Englishman, hopping between tailors in Mayfair and trying to find something I could afford wound up being impossible, so I found myself on Carnaby street.

After successfully hunting down the requisite obnoxious yet high quality pair of socks he was looking for, I meandered among the throngs of tourists that I have only recently stopped identifying with myself. It's not that there isn't anything more to discover, that would be insane to think, but it's mostly that I feel like I have my bearings now, and that I honestly feel at home. Spent Saturday in Wycombe with Dave to celebrate his birthday, and spent Sunday helping a friend move out of his flat. Quiet weekend, the first I had off in a while, and it was wholly appreciated.

Monday was spent doing a bit of life admin, but things got interesting again on Tuesday when I went to meet a Swedish friend to go get our very first ever official English breakfasts. 

I decided to go for the grilled tomatoes, British bacon, sausage, egg and black pudding, while Bea went for the baked beans, bacon, sausage and toast combination. Salty and satisfying, I could hear my arteries crying but for that moment, I didn't really care.

Bea and I decided to explore the area after our meal, and before we knew it, we were at the foot of Westminster Abbey, accidentally trying to enter through the exit. 

We walked on, over the Thames on the Westminster bridge, and right under the London Eye. 

We parted ways so that Bea could continue her day off at the Tate Modern, and so I could make it to work on time, but my walk took me through Trafalgar Square where I got to listen to an incredible violinist alongside a hundred or so other spectators. 

Walked past the Canadian embassy and made it to work 45 minutes early in spite of my morning of adventures. It would have all been perfect had I not somehow sprained my ankle while walking... someone told me it was a bad idea to walk 8 miles inToms.....I didn't listen the last 30 times why should I listen now!!! Still, it's been a bit demoralizing being unable to really get around these past few days, but there's nothing a little ice and ibuprofen can't fix right?...

Wednesday I managed to have another instance of public transport sociability. I offered directions to an American couple and wound up learning that the gentleman was a pediatric orthopaedic surgeon who spends a lot of time at sickkids. I told him I had spent quite a bit of time there too, though not as a patient of course. He told me they were from Boston, his wife was a social worker and told me I should consider social work instead of law, and she invited me to her practice in Boston if I ever found myself here. The gentleman handed me his card and did the same. It was only when I looked at it that I realized I had just traded giving directions for a tour of Harvard Medical School. Oh, the people you meet.

Thursday, Spent my afternoon at a guitar shop contemplating a little pre-birthday impulse buy (I was talked out of it, thank you dad). While I didn’t wind up buying anything, I did hook up to an amp and enjoy myself thoroughly for the hour and a bit I was there. I wonder how many times I can go back before they tell me I need to buy something...

Still, the day really picked up at sundown, as my Four Seasons affiliation was about to pay off once again. Every department was given a pair of tickets to Kinky Boots, and my supervisor, Paris, decided to take me since we both had a day off! Nothing better for a sprained ankle than being forced to sit still for an hour, right? Though my friend Coline and I got stuck on the tube for about an hour on the way to Embankment Station, we still had time to grab a bite without having to speed-hobble to the theatre. Coline and I knew nothing about the show at all before it started, but thankfully the show has more blunt statements than it does subtleties. 

We were met with Drag Queens and drama, tales of self-acceptance and songs that made you laugh and, at a few moments, made some of us cry. While I’m no professional reviewer, I’d recommend this show to anyone with a soul, who wants to laugh until they snort a little while feeling like their perspective on people might be slightly more open than it was when they walked through the Adelphi Theatre’s doors. 

Friday, back to work, nothing like a 6:30AM start time after going to bed less than 4 hours prior (whoops). Still, working with Paris is always a pleasure, and the day was a literal zoo. Apparently one of my colleagues ran some statistics, we received 3000 phone calls over two days. It’s August, high season for hotels, but it’s still so hard to believe that one room staffed with three people (at most) can handle that much attention in a 48 hour period. 

Saturday, working again, thankfully this time I was alone for a few hours but didn’t cause any hotel-wide problems like I did that first time.... After work, headed out to Hyde Park to meet up with some of my coworkers for a picnic, and was pleasantly surprised with the way our rainy day went. 

My Guyanese coworker Glen had been back to Ghana since we saw him last, and brought raw coconuts, plantains, and black beans from home. He made us bean fritters and fried plantains, jungle juice (ginger, lime juice, African chilli, cayenne and some other spices I’ve forgotten), and brought some raw coconut for us to snack on. 

Our Portuguese coworker (Isabel, the long-time operator who is queen of the office, night shift, and everything in between), made fish cakes, some salad concoction with everything under the sun in it (mussels, eggs, corn, potatoes, parsley etc.), chorizo from Portugal and some other fried stuff that I can’t name but ate anyway. She would hold her ground against any Jewish grandmother I’ve come across if there were a competition for who could stuff their grandchild with food the fastest, I was literally having food thrown at me. 

Still, the highlight of the day came after we had finished eating. Isabel guided us to the small patch of trees in the southwest corner of the park where, for whatever reason, someone once set their pet cockatiel free. Instead of losing track of their pet, the cockatiels somehow bred and stuck around, and what resulted is a thriving community of bright-green, ex-domestic relatives of parrots that hang around in Hyde Park and eat seeds out of your hands, off your head, off anything you place food on that’s high enough for them to feel safe enough to land. Exhibit A, my new soulmate:

Sunday, 6:30 start with my favourite night operator, Bertrand from France. He’s quiet and has the kind of humour that catches you by surprise sometimes. On the other hand, he’s the same guy whose stomach grumbled loudly all morning today, and the first time it happened he looked at me with a deadpan expression and said, “oh, inside fart,” just as I was reaching to pick up the phone. Not sure whether it was his comedic timing or the concept itself, but he had me in stitches and therefore unable to do my job. Thankfully, most people have better things to do than call the Four Seasons at 7:15AM. 

Today was a reflective sort of day though. I bailed on my afternoon plans because of my sprained ankle, and wound up sitting in a cafe with my journal, my head as full as its pages. Perhaps its pathetic fallacy, the weather was grey and the rain was spitting and I was about to descend into a funk. 

But then, I stopped and thought about everything for a second. I thought beyond the moment I was living in, and about the fact that I was able to reflect on it at all. I am lucky enough to be in a position where I can actually want things to be different than they are. I want my schedule to work so I can travel, I want to go to law school, I want to do a job that I love. I have desires that go beyond feeding myself and my family, I have people who know I am far away and still take care of me. I can afford the coffees I sometimes allow to go cold on the table, too engrossed in the ideas flowing from my ballpoint pen onto well-loved pages bearing the stains of many mugs that cooled before this latest victim of my narrowly focused attention. I know I did a bit of my own legwork to get to this position, but beyond my own limited contributions, I know I have more people to thank than I have the eloquence to properly do so. 

I looked back out at the rain and smiled, packed my bag and my journal, pulled on my jacket and left my dishes where they were. I walked outside, pulled my hood off my head, and smiled into the mist.  

e

[oselatra]

Grow the dough

How a Wall Street hotshot chased a childhood memory to a pizza career.

Anthony Valinoti, owner of DeLuca's Pizzeria at 407 Park Ave. in Hot Springs, thrives on the kind of volatility involved in making pizza, as he says, "the hard way." DeLuca's has no freezer. It has no microwave and it has no stand mixer — all standard equipment for reducing a restaurant's margin of error and streamlining a production process. It has no dedicated room in which to "grow the dough" (Valinoti's words), and therefore no consistent way to sequester the fermenting mounds from the litany of things that can affect dough rise — humidity, the temperature outdoors, whether the yeast is feeling feisty that particular afternoon. "If you treat it with a lot of respect, it can turn out well," Valinoti told me. "I'm not a chef. I don't consider myself a chef. But, a chef takes something that's pretty much dead and reanimates it. Chefs are reanimators. This is what they do." Valinoti is a storyteller and a gesturer. He cupped an imaginary globe of yeasty life in the air with hands covered in smudges of nonimaginary pizza dough, dusting my laptop and the table beneath it with fine flour at each firm conclusion. "When you put water, salt, flour and yeast in a bowl, it comes to life. And the idea behind what I've learned over the last three years is, 'How do you harness that life?' "

As a kid, Valinoti would visit Di Fara Pizza in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood on Brooklyn's Avenue J, watching the revered Dom De Marco hunched over the counter, forming discs by hand and snipping basil over the finished pies with a pair of kitchen scissors. "He's been doing what I guess we all try to emulate at some point," Valinoti said. "Nobody really understood what it was. It was just really that good." Later, he'd search for that De Marco slice as an adult, in cities like Miami, Las Vegas, Los Angeles — all places where you'd imagine it's easy to hunt down a good pizzeria. "You can," Valinoti conceded. "It's just not what I was used to. There was always something different about New York pizza. I think this is changing now. Better chefs are opening up pizza shops and pizzerias. Nancy Sil [Silverton] comes to mind, with [Pizzeria] Mozza in California. There's no better bread baker than Nancy Silverton. Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery in New York has his own pizza shop now. And you realize these people are doing some amazing things with dough, and you realize that this is nothing more than a loaf of bread, basically, flattened out."

If you didn't know better, you'd take Valinoti's mental list of the country's baking masters as a badge of lifelong culinary study, and you'd be dead wrong. In his best Henry Hill — only a few shades away from his own natural speaking voice — Valinoti described his childhood aspirations. "I don't know that there was anything else I wanted to do rather than work on Wall Street. I love the line in 'Goodfellas' where he says, 'Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a gangster.' For me, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to work on Wall Street." Valinoti's father was a truck driver and then a cop, and his grandfather Pat (DeLuca, for whom DeLuca's is named) was a printmaker. The young Valinoti, though, was drawn to less blue-collar pursuits. "There was something prestigious about banking, especially in New York," he said. "And that's what I gravitated towards." After an interview in which his would-be boss asked him a single question, "Do you like to eat and drink?" Valinoti got a job as a money broker and worked the stock market for 13 years, moving money around from 7 a.m. until the markets closed at 5 p.m., then schmoozing with clients in restaurants and bars at night. "I'm very lucky in that if I lock into something, I can get to be pretty good at it. You know, it may take me a minute, but my attention span is that of a gnat, so you've got to lock me in, and you've got to lock me into a project that is way above my head. That makes me keep going. That makes me keep looking for answers."

Eventually, he didn't feel like looking for answers anymore, at least not the kind the stock markets were giving. "I knew I couldn't do it any more. My last job was in Two World Trade Center, the 55th floor. That was before all that catastrophe, and those terrible, terrible days in New York. ... I found myself not being myself. I was very short. And it's very hard to walk away from a job where they're paying you that much money."

He dropped everything "with no rhyme or reason," he told me, and headed to a place whose wonders he'd only become enchanted with a year earlier: Las Vegas. "Got tired of that once my parents passed away," he said dryly. "My parents passed away within two days of each other, and I just grew disenchanted with everything. My sister always likes to say, 'It was their happy ending; it just wasn't our happy ending.' It was just the way it was. It just happened. And I just wanted something different in my life."

He drifted to Europe for a few months, then back to Vegas, where a man he met remarked, "If it wasn't for my ex-wife, I'd live in Hot Springs, Arkansas." Valinoti booked a flight into Little Rock the following morning, rented a car and drove to Hot Springs. "It's funny; I always tell people that I know this, but I saw a sign for Centerfold. And I'm like, 'How bad could this place be?' So I drove around," he said. "I went to Maxine's. I was sitting on the porch at the Arlington having a drink, and I felt at complete peace. When I saw the buildings and I saw the architecture, it reminded me of New York and Chicago, and it exists in this absolutely magnificent National Park. You're not gonna find that everywhere. This is much different than other places in the South. I've traveled all over. I've been literally all over this planet. There was something very, very calm and very, very serene here. I didn't know anyone. It was just a hunch."

The hunch was a solid one. Valinoti needed catharsis, and the north section of Bathhouse Row needed pie. So, fueled by a memory of Di Fara and some grief that needed working through, Valinoti made a move. He built a plan to open a pizzeria, and went to Naples, Italy, to learn how. "I was heartbroken. And I needed to take that pain in my heart and put it into something. I needed something that was cathartic for me, right? And I needed something that was physical, the physicality of making dough. We made all the dough by hand, and that's how I learned. I never used a machine and I still don't."

He wasn't happy with the pizza at first (and, arguably, isn't completely satisfied with it three years later), and pulled back from the fanfare of a grand opening. "I was tellin' people — excuse my French — this was shit. 'But if you'll just give me a minute, I'll figure it out. One way or another, I'm either gonna figure it out or I'm gonna walk away from it because I can't figure it out.' "

And, just as he did on Wall Street when a stock wasn't doing well, Valinoti adjusted. "I would come in, and I would make these catastrophic errors, I felt, but I wouldn't make that same catastrophic error again," he said. He moved boxes of dough from room to room. He recruited help from chefs. He employed people who knew what they were doing — most of whom have bucked typical restaurant turnover rates and stuck around at DeLuca's. "This place should not be open. Let's be honest," he said. "I probably should've quit a thousand times, but I said to myself, 'You haven't given people the best that you have yet.' "

If the half-Italian sausage, half-Calabrase pie I made it home with was not Valinoti's best, I'm not sure what tinkering might make it so, and I wouldn't dare offer advice. Even after a drive from Hot Springs to Little Rock — no doubt a far cry from the way a Di Fara or a DeLuca's pie was meant to be eaten — the crust was toothsome, chewy like a Vino's pizza crust, but crispy like a ZAZA's pie. It was New York-floppy, but covered heftily enough in fresh shredded and whole milk mozzarellas not to fall apart. The Calabrase, which the menu describes as "Creminelli Brothers Spicy Gourmet Pepperoni," was salty and briny enough to have stood on its own on one of DeLuca's antipasto platters, and the other half was dotted with irregular crisps of Italian sausage from J.V. Farms in neighboring Bismarck (Hot Spring County), conservatively spiced with fennel seed.

As it was constructed, the kitchen walls vibrated with music. Valinoti doesn't like to talk much when he works. He claims the playlist typically includes Lou Reed and The Allman Brothers, but on the afternoon I visited, it was Blondie's "Denis" that shook the cutout of The Rolling Stones tongue and lips and the adjacent calendar flipped to the lovely Jezabelle Jax, one of Spa City's burlesque artists.

The rest of the DeLuca's menu is a marriage of Italian staples and Arkansas-grown goods: salads made with Arkansas Natural's Spring Mix and an option to add chopped, smoked beef from McClard's as a pizza topping ("In New York, there's this attitude that we know everything about food," Valinoti said, "but we don't know anything about barbecue.") Like a great barbecue place, though, DeLuca's makes a day's worth of dough and when it's gone, it's gone. There's a pizza named after Don Gooch, the head honcho at Spa City's Arvest Bank, one of the pizzeria's early patrons. There's cannoli, gelato and enough espresso to keep the whole affair running a brief but vigorous three and a half days a week: 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday and noon to 8 p.m. Sunday. Valinoti sticks close to the premises and shies away from daily suggestions that he add a food truck or collaborate on a farm-to-table catered dinner. "When I leave here at night, I'm exhausted. I'm mentally exhausted. I can truthfully say I've given you everything I have, and that's all I wanna do."

Grow the dough