When Nutmeg Met Basil

3. If you see a pedestrian in your direct path, increase speed as you drive toward them.

2. Honk with enthusiasm. And then honk several times more for emphasis.

1. There are absolutely no other rules.

Not a bad light dinner for under $4. And it’s made with brown rice!

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Today’s word is tosta.  It means having a strong personal character and can be used as an adjective to describe a person.

Example: Ce l’ha fatta perche’ e` una persona tosta. She succeeded because she is tosta.

This is going to be an eclectic mix, as reflects my taste in music.  Also, the list is comprised not necessarily of songs that were released since I started my blog, but songs that I discovered or started listening to a lot since then.

Links go to Grooveshark, my favorite online music site.

10.  Acid Tongue by Jenny Lewis (Acid Tongue)

9.  Apple Candy by Ben Lee (Awake is the New Sleep)

8.  Rolling in the Deep by Adele (21): I found the video really thought-provoking.

7.  Hurt by Johnny Cash (American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around): Also check out this article about the unique video for the song.

6.  My Sweet Lord by George Harrison (All Things Must Pass)

5.  Dynamite by Taio Cruz (Rokstarr)

4.  Spettinata by Giuseppe Povia (I Bambini Fanno Ooh…La Storia Continua)

3. Galileo by The Indigo Girls (Retrospective)

2. The Way I Loved You by Taylor Swift (Fearless)

1. If I Didn’t Believe in You (The Last Five Years)

I tend to go through reading spurts.  Sometimes I chain-read novel after novel, and then I go months reading nothing.  I’m hoping I can come up with 10 I’ve read since starting my blog!  Here goes…in reverse chronological order:

[Note that all of the book links go to Goodreads.com, a site I just found that will be really useful to me, since it’s not easy for me to remember the names of the books I’ve read!  The site makes reading social and allows you to rate books, get recommendations, and keep track of what you’ve read.]

10.  The Attractor Factor by Joe Vitale: A new way of thinking about your career and building a business using “spiritual marketing.”

9. House of Spirits by Isabel Allende: This book is so engrossing…it makes my commute into Manhattan fly by.  It’s an epic story of an extended family through generations.

8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Just re-read it for the third or fourth time.  Always a keeper.  I had a new perspective on it now that I live in NYC.  And having lived a little more since I first read it in high school, there were so many things I didn’t understand the first time around that I got this time.  Love the way that Fitzgerald shows without telling and uses visual and sensory details to convey a feeling without ever naming it.

7: Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan: I read this book last fall.  It’s about four 20-something girls who graduated from a women’s college and are trying to find their way in the working world.  I thought the author’s observations about women’s colleges and liberal arts colleges were right on and I thought her use of the term “freshman year of life” (referring to your first year out of school) was quite clever.

6: The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald: This one was kind of creepy and depressing, but just as fascinating as #7.  Based on the historical reality of “home ec” babies raised in women’s colleges by home ec classes as a learning project in the 1950’s, the book chronicles the fictional life of one such baby, and the strange emotional scars he brought with him into his adolescence and adult life.

5: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron: This is a classic 12-week course that trains you to access your creativity 24/7 and engage in your chosen art, be it writing, painting, acting, singing, or floral arranging.  Really effective and fun.

4. Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen by Susan Gregg Gilmore: This was a cute tale of a Southern girl growing up and following her dreams, even as they took her far from her family and the comforts of life in her small town.  The mystery at the book’s core was conveniently resolved in a somewhat cheesy ending, but it had a good heart.

3. The Moonflower Vine by Jetta Carleton: This one was EXCELLENT.  A long-lost family novel that was out of print for a while, I found this via Chinaberry.  It reminds me of House of Spirits in the way that it focuses different chapters on different family members, its epic scope, and high emotional and romantic drama.  Total escapism.

2. The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom:  First, I have to say that I couldn’t remember the name of this novel or its auther, since I read it last fall, but I did remember its plot quite vividly.  So I googled “Irish girl raised as slave novel” and it was the first hit.  This book was an amazing mystery, a heartwarming love story, tragic historical fiction, and a coming-of-age tale all in one.  It scored on all counts.  The characters are real and the haunting opening image has stayed with me to this day…I won’t give it away, but it’s in a 2-page prelude to the novel.

1. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle will always be my number one… read it and see for yourself.

It’s my 100th post!!  I can’t believe it.  To celebrate, I am doing a series of 10 10 posts: ten posts, each one listing 10 things.

#1: 10 Things I’ve Learned Since Starting My Blog

#2: 10 Great Books I’ve Read Since Starting My Blog

#3: 10 Favorite Songs Since…you get it.

#4: 10 Favorite Food Memories

#5: 10 Favorite Place I’ve visited

#6: 10 Best Snapshots I’ve Taken

#7: 10 Favorite Restaurants

#8: 10 Favorite Movies

#9: 10 Favorite Blogs I’ve Found Recently

#10: 10 Things I’ll Do Differently…Starting Now

Here’s the first list: 10 Things I’ve Learned Since Starting My Blog.

10: The way things are is not an accurate prediction of the way things will be.

9: Always make your bed before you leave the house.  Not that I always do this, but at least I know I should.

8: Soup is the best meal to eat alone, especially if you add an egg before you microwave it and top it with Aglio & Pepperoncino before you eat it.

7: Always bring your camera everywhere!

6: If you plan to fail…you fail to plan.

5: The most valuable time is time you set aside just for yourself.

4: You can take the girl out of Connecticut…but you can’t take Connecticut out of the girl.

3: A lot of bartenders don’t know that they should shake a whiskey sour.  Activate the sour mix, guys…otherwise it just doesn’t taste right.

2: Even if you say or think that you don’t know what you really want, you do know.  And you’ve known for a long time.

1: Put everything in God’s hands.  Relax and have faith.

Actually, make that late afternoon, or around 6:30, after I got out of work in Midtown East.  Now that I live in the Bronx, my roaming patterns have changed a lot.  I used to get out of work and automatically get on the train to go home, not even seeing daylight before entering the station underground.  (On the other hand, on my way to work, as long as I had the time, I took the longer route so that I could get off at Bryant Park and walk the few blocks through the park and to the office, rather than re-emerge above ground directly into the building.  Although I know that must be really convenient in winter [Middlebury…if only you had tunnels…] in the summer, it made me feel kind of inhuman.)  My old commute was only about 25 minutes, while my new commute is about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the time of day.

Yesterday, I left work at 6, with 3 hours to kill until I went uptown to Morningside Heights to celebrate my friend Wang Yu’s 25th birthday.  No point in commuting home first…I had even packed my PJs and toothbrush and glasses so that I could crash at her apartment that night.

So, three hours in midtown…what to do?  Honestly, the most I have seen of it since I moved to the city is the midtown lunch rush, as swarms of suited men and women crowd around trays of kimchi, iceberg lettuce, roasted potatoes, and sesame chicken in local delis.

Well, I started off walking purposefully in the direction of Bryant Park.  I love Bryant Park, the way the trees look against the sleek glassy skyscrapers, the lawn filled with families, the gravel paths dotted with tables of friends and couples eating take-out together.  Way back in June, I went for drinks at The Porch at Bryant Park, which is so cute with its wicker chairs and strings of lights.  Yesterday, though, the main event was table tennis:

There was some pretty intense competition going on.

I took a seat to observe and suddenly felt the urge for a coke.  Can you see why?

Last weekend I left NYC to go visit my family in the “country”!  On the way home, we stopped at Golden Harvest, a farmstand in Valatie, NY, where my parents and I have been buying apples and apple cider donuts since I was a little girl.  I was thrilled to see that they had Ginger Gold apples, and as you can see in the photo above, I even had the opportunity to learn of their surprising provenance (they were an accidental cross!)  We picked up the “utility” apples, which are heavily discounted for cosmetic defects, but taste just as great as the pretty ones 😉

On Friday, I had written this whole post about these apples on my iPhone, but all of the text got deleted when my phone ran out of battery and I was really sad.  In trying to fix the situation, the post ended up getting posted empty…reflecting the lost text!  I had written an homage to the Ginger Gold apple, and it went something like this:

Nothing is more evocative of the end of summer and beginning of fall than Ginger Gold apples.  These apples, which begin to appear in supermarkets and farmers markets in mid-late August, are a “potential cross of Golden Delicious and Albumarle Pippin” (see above.)  To me, they are the perfect apple, the answer to all of my sweaty and sticky end-of-summer woes.  The first crunchy bite of a Ginger Gold apple promises sweet cool sunny afternoons at soccer games under the beneficent presence of cheerful red and orange leaves, and long breezy fall nights snuggled under a down comforter.  The apples always remind me of the New Canaan Farmers Market in CT, just a quick drive from my old house, where I first discovered them on a vivid, clear sunny Saturday a few years ago.  I’ve been devoted to this ephemeral apple ever since.  Eat one now…because they’ll be gone in a few weeks.

il ponte vecchio, florence

An Italian expression that means the best in its class or category.

Example:

Firenze e` la citta` d’arte per eccellenza.

Translation: Florence is the best city for art.

There are two wonderful things about entertaining an out-of-town guest.

1.  You get to have them do whatever you really want to do.  They’re not too busy or too tired or too far away to come out.  They are right there and READY TO GO.

2.  You get to unselfconsciously be a tourist wherever you go, taking fun photos and being really loud on the subway for no reason.

Oh…and there’s a third reason of course…if you really like the person and you haven’t seen them in a while–you have a FREAKING AWESOME TIME catching up with them!

As was the case when my friend Kelly visited over 4th of July weekend.  (Seems like a while ago?  When we all got Monday off?)

So, here’s what I suggest for a great weekend visitor itinerary.

1.  Chelsea Market.

So much food…and it looks so cool inside!  I didn’t buy anything, but I enjoyed exploring the different offerings.  I walked into an Italian import store, where a man mistook me for a Venetian.

Man: Di dove sei?  Sei Veneta?

Me: No, sono americana!

Man: Ma dai, sembri un’italiana.  Mi sembravi veneta!

Man’s wife (holding a tray of free chocolate samples): Non sembra mica Veneta!  Si vede che e` americana!  (Looks at me)  Scusa, eh, parli abbastanza bene, ma non sei italiana.

Me: Walking away, distracted by the ENORMOUS jar of nutella!

2.  This park, for sun-bathing:

3.  The High Line!  Including the new section:

(more to come soon…uploading photos takes soo long on my internet connection!)