Oh Maine, kisses! We've been back for a good two and half weeks now and I still find myself thinking absently of what lobster roll I should get today. I was . . . a little obsessed this past trip, happily so, and we pretty much ate one a day, driving over an hour away to sample the wares of a lobster shack I'd read about on Chowhound or Food and Wine or profiled somewhere out there in the vast interweb. My favorite, hands down, was Red's Eats in Wiscasset. Unadorned, huge HUGE chunks of lobster, a buttered and toasted roll and a side of dipping butter? Mmm. I thought I'd be partial to the New York style of a slight mayonnaise-y lemon tang, but am now, flag in hand, squarely on the purist side. And don't speak of lettuce on the roll. Sacrilege. Also, the pies at Moody's diner are perhaps the finest I have eaten. Particularly the chocolate cream. DK and I took greedy forks to it in the car and polished off three-fourths before we could pause for air.
Wow, it's a good thing we ran five miles every day. Otherwise, we would have waddled back to Manhattan.
But it's good to be back. Work is work and is busy. It's also been a surreal time to be here. We live downtown, in the financial district and to pass by now defunct Lehman Brothers and AIG and camera crews on a daily basis is bizarre. It's horrifying what is happening and between the economy and the political race, I have to admit I haven't been writing because nearly all my free time seems to be devoted to reading every article by every type of commentator ever published. I go through days reading press that I know is going to be a salve to my worries: Maureen Dowd, The HuffPo, Gawker, various polls. And then I read hungrily the conservative pundits who are waffling in their GOP support: Christopher Buckley, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan . . . hell, Kathleen Parker. And I torture myself by reading the Nation and that really hateful WSJ.com writer – I can't recall her name, but I always wonder how one can be so young, yet so vituperative. The election cannot come soon enough. I have a problem and it's frankly exhausting.
DK is away this week on a totally absurd surreal business trip. I say absurd, because my business trips consist (usually) of spending days in a conference room, occasionally seeing the light of day for a good meal or two, and more work back in the hotel room. DK, on the other hand, is helping curate a show for a very fancy pants gallery in town and is staying at the Ritz in Paris for a week. Every night he tells me some totally outlandish story about who he met that day and I try to imagine how that is even possible that such a person exists in real life – and then I tell him an absolutely riveting story about the cat.
But being solo mio can be nice. For one, the cat thinks I am the bee's knees, aka the One Who Feeds Him. So he deigns to cuddle with me and be generally very solicitous of my attentions. I also got to make a lamb tagine (DK has a no-eyelashes policy, so I almost never cook red meat. Or the other white meat. Mammals, people, you get what I'm saying) for my parents when they came over on Friday night and have slurped up all the leftovers like a very happy carnivore. And I've gotten to work my way through the first season of Mad Men, which he somehow has already managed to watch sans moi. Love that Donald Draper. Like, it's a problem love.
Other that that, I am reduced
to bullet points to sum up things I have learned/done since last I wrote:
- NEVER AGAIN will I buy cod or other ocean-floor dwelling fish. I bought a lovely large fillet from Whole Foods last week and as I was prepping dinner, sort of absently pulled out a strange looking green/black thing. I think I thought it was a vein and put it aside without comment. But then as I continued to rinse and slice, I kept finding more of fiddle-fern esque curly-cues and grew . . . suspicious. "IS THIS A WORM?" I demanded of DK, holding it up to his face. He assured me it was a "fish scale." I looked at him, looked at the very clearly a worm thing and dubiously said, "Really? Ok . . . because, I mean, it looks . . ." And continued to work. But then I found the monster worm, hideous in it its worniness, slowly tugged it out of the fish flesh and brough my face close, inspecting. The horrifying certainty set in -- that, indeed, we were dealing with a parasite. I let out an embarrassingly loud screech and flung the hateful thing down on the cutting board. DK dutifully brought the half prepared fish back to Whole Foods with the excavated things in tow, and while we were refunded our $7.59, the fish monger explained that nearly all ocean-dwelling fish have parasites and that's why it's really important to cook those types of fish solidly through. Yeeeeesh. Salmon anyone?
- We went to Amherst last weekend to meet my cousin
and her partner's beautiful baby twin girls. The smell of those baby heads,
seriously? DK rocked one on his
chest for a solid hour and I kept talking to virtual strangers about my
strong desire to have a baby right now this minute oh my god look at my
husband with that baby it is killing me, snuffle snurfle slurp baby thigh. Ahem.
But now I have had a moment to regroup (away from the intoxicating
infant smell) and am back to being resignedly ok with waiting another
several months before we get on the baby land express. Ish.
- Um, want to hear a great story about the
cat? Hoo hoo, I kid. I can instead tell you about my failed
juice fast I tried today. I bought
all these crazy "super juices" last night and was all gung ho go
about ridding my body of toxins. So
this morning, I juiced, I went on a long run and did some pushups and sit
ups and drank some more juice and generally felt quite angelic. But then DK called me around 5:30 from
our dear dear friend Ester's flat in Paris and Ester got on the phone and
started telling me about macarons she made DK buy me and how they've been
drinking wine and eating cheese and having a typically typical Parisian
evening and talked me into opening up a bottle of wine right there on the
phone so I could virtually join the party.
So I did. And ate some
cheese. And then that leftover
tagine. Toxins be damned.
