Catch Up In The Rye

The last week has been fraught with challenge, intrigue, injury, and too many meals eaten out. That being said we are finally quasi-settled in our new apartment and have left the sticky-dust filled air of Manhattan for a land filled with far more yuppies, chirping crickets, and the smell of the occasional skunk. Despite the latter it is often better smelling.

With a million things to tie up, change, abandon, and adopt, our main tie to the farm share has been in picking it up, putting it in the fridge, and wishing we had time to do anything with it.



Last week I picked up: Sweet corn, lettuce, beans, celery, carrots, Swiss chard, arugula, garlic, hot wax peppers, tomato, and apples.

None of the above would be used by week's end.

We did, however, eat out at the Holy Trinity of Washington Heights restaurants, Coogan's, Plum Pomidor, and Dallas BBQ., for our last three nights in the old apartment.

This lead us into the new apartment and new city where we quickly found the first of our new trinity, Water Moon, who have clearly let their domain name registration lapse.

While quite tasty, we became a little too familiar with Water Moon, eating there several days and nights in a row as we waited for conEd to be gracious enough to show up and turn on the gas so we could cook.

Of course we also had two meals delivered by Pizza Pasta & Things on the nights we couldn't even bear to go out to dinner in between assembling Ikea furniture and hanging curtain rods. Check out their website! The guy in the commercial that looks like Einstein actually delivered our food the first night. True story!



This lead us to the next week which brough: Spinach, broccoli, lettuce, dill, beans, carrots, kale, red onions, chiles, potato, McIntoch apples, and bosc pears.



With the magic combination of gas and vegetables you may be wondering why this shrimp and scallop scampi is the first meal we cooked in out new kitchen. Well, the missing ingredient of not-going-to-Ikea-or-Home-Depot-every-night-after-work was missing. Thus we could only throw some frozen shrimp and scallops into a pan, continuing to neglect the vegetables in the fridge.



But last night was going to be the night! I was able to use the arugula and greens to make a salad! Imagine that! It wasn't brought to us by a delivery driver! It didn't require dispensing a tip! Heck, it wasn't even deep fried!



I was even able to roast all these wonderful root vegetables from the farm: garlic, onions, celery, carrots, and potatoes.



We even roasted a chicken along with the vegetables! The smell of delicious roasting filled the air! Our new apartment, equipped with windows on all sides, didn't even heat up to 95 degrees as was custom in our old apartment.

Things were looking good. Until . . .



. . . TRAGEDY!

That's right, I broke our teapot. It was given to us by Jen's host family in Paris on our honeymoon. It is now broken. How did it break? Well, I filled it with tea and hot water (as one will do when making tea) then I picked it up and the handle just clean snapped off. Oh, and did I mention that when this happened the sharp broken handle bit sliced my thumb open like a lightsaber through a tauntaun? Unfortunately this particular teapot handle was not made of plasma and did not have the cauterizing properties of said Jedi weapon. This quickly made our new kitchen and bathroom resemble the scene of a grisly murder!

After I realized that this cut was not about to stop bleeding on its own we got in the car and started driving in hopes of finding an emergency room. Funny thing about Westchester: 90% of the hospitals are either psychiatric, for substance abuse, or both. After holding my hand above my head while Jen drove for nearly twenty minutes I began calling people I knew in the area to see if they knew where a proper emergency room was. After about 40 minutes we found one and there I had the most pleasant emergency room experience of my life.



At the hospital they quickly stitched me up and put this weird contraption on me that looks like a little metal doggy humping my thumb.

My last emergency room experience consisted of me waiting four hours in a waiting room while presumably dying of an intestinal virus, eventually getting seen, lying down in a drafty hallway for seventeen hours, then leaving after the doctor's had fixed me or, more likely, the virus had just worked its way out of my system.

My White Plains experience was about 30 minutes total. I was seen right away and while the nurse took my vital signs she recommended I watch a hilarious episode of Frasier where Niles cuts himself.



"You have to YouTube it," she said. "I watch it whenever I need a good laugh."



So, after a long day of refining my nine-finger typing skills for work, I made the best one-handed dinner I could with the ingredients on hand. This happened to be some frozen pierogies with some sauteed spinach from the farm. That was pretty much the best I could do.

With our annual Canadian Thanksgiving/Housewarming party on Sunday I am not quite sure how I am going to work that in my current situation. Most likely this means that Jen will do the bulk of the cooking and I will shout orders at her from a chair that I've rolled into the kitchen.

We'll see if she gives thanks for that.