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Meghan and Dan: The Marrying: Part 5b (Reception: In Which We Are Regaled)

Toast time brought lots of...

Laughing.

Crying.

Smooching.

Nervous twitching...

And, you know: toasting.

Dan's brother David did a great job with his toast - it wasn't until we got the video that I saw how much his hands were shaking. He talked about how we all got drunk as shiznit when he visited New York last year, and how that made him realize how much fun we were. Heh. He also talked about Dan's dad, and it was very touching.

Katie and Biz gave a joint toast that was sweetness personified. Hugs abounding.

Then... feasting!

Proof that I ate:

Feasting... and carousing.

Interspersed with and followed by an excessive amount of dancing.

We played "Party in the USA" especially for probable future brother-in-law Willis.

Yay toasts!  Yay food!  Yay dancing!

(Don't worry; there's an excess of dancing pictures TK).

Mmmmmm... Fishy

Mom's Christmas cookbook reminded me of my favorite Christmas gift to shop for: Scotty's!

My wonderful stepdad loves spicy, stinky, bad-breath-inducing foods, and gets no support from the family on this.  He's stuck layering canned fish and peperoncinis onto his pizza as we all scarf it plain.  So I thought it would be fun to get him an assortment of hideous preserved fishies and hot peppers.  I trawled the aisles of Buon Italia and collected several varieties of anchovy, salt-packed capers, hot ground pepper, fancypants mixed peppercorns, anchovy paste, and a nice spicy artichoke spread.  YUM.  Well... to some.

To this Katie added some New Orleans spoils, smuggled to New Jersey on the plane: a can of Tony C's and several bottles of Paul Prudhomme's Magic Pepper Sauce, a delightfully spicy yet sweet, vinegary hot sauce impossible to find north of the Mason-Dixon.

Scott loved his box of goodies.  Less grateful is Mom, who now gets to deal with his anchovy breath, but in the end I think it's a win.

More Snow

More snow.  Yes.  It's all I'm writing about because it's all anyone can talk about.  

We got, I don't know, 8 more inches last night?  12?  65?  Who can tell anymore.  I just know that some cars are way more buried than others, and one guy came out and found this:

(That ice is six inches thick).

In our neck of the woods, things are much prettier.

Let's just keep it, just like this.

Assorted Mundane Photos

We had people over on Sunday, which means we had to clean up the apartment.  Revolutionary solution for our chronic messiness: guests.

It's been snowing off and on, mostly on, for the past few days.  Yesterday's flakes were large and fluffy and dissipated the moment they contacted earth (perfect snow); today's are wet and floppy and sticking like crazy (nightmare snow).  You could see the street when I woke up, but an hour later:

In a breakfast meeting on the 42nd floor, however - flakes fly upward.

We ate our bagels as newly minted snow globe residents, pretending not to notice.

New Favorite

I purchased The Essential New York Times Cookbook as a Christmas gift for my mom, before admitting it was actually a gift for myself, once I inevitably stole it - so I bought two. I don't even do that for Ina Garten; when I need her instructions for shrimp bisque from Barefoot at Home, my mother has to patiently read out the directions over the phone. I have to really want it for a double-buy.

It hasn't disappointed. Amanda Hesser, who sifted through the New York Times recipe archive and tested well over a thousand recipes for the four-pound tome, is one of my favorite - nay, my absolute favorite - food writer, and I've been spending the past few weeks just reading through it before bed. Hesser's had a fair amount of Internet backlash in the past, and for the life of me I don't know why. I think mainly it's because she's cute and skinny while eating like, potatoes au gratin at every meal, and because she achieved a fair amount of success in a hard-to-crack field at a young age. But she's talented! Without her, I wouldn't know about almond cake, and Dan probably wouldn't have married me, so phooey on the Internet. She can be a little bit of a snob, but whatever. So can I.

Anyway, it isn't a basic cookbook: no illustrations for how to correctly wash leeks, and no index of cooking times for every variety of bean (I guess I'm saying this is a book to pick up after spending some QT with How to Cook Everything, an essential).

In this sense, the book is tailor-made for me. Amanda even suggests using it "as a gateway to culinary adventure" and to "discover the joys of dishes you've never heard of"! Her preamble to Gilbert Le Coze's bouillabaise, which includes "sea robin" and "conger eel," goes thusly:

"Looking for a weekend challenge? Here you go!"

Oh, may I?!?! This woman is inside my head. Why make mere paella when I can do Catalan Vegetable Paella, or Hot Penne with Chilled Tomato Sauce and Charred Tuna, or El Dorado Petit's Fried Noodles with Garlic Mayonnaise? What ARE all these things???? Ina, what have you been holding back on?!

Basically, I'm very excited about my new toy, and my only complaints are that it includes way too many recipes for veal (do people still eat that? Yuck) and is too heavy to carry on the subway. Otherwise, I am thrilled.

Less thrilled is Carla, as this could mean less takeout and therefore: fewer bags.

Free Snooki

Two posts in a row about Jersey Shore?! Who am I; a tv-obsessed American with a semi-vested interest in its success?!

Anyway, last night, Snooki got arrested. Well, she got arrested months ago, but last night on tv she got arrested, and as we all know, that's the only time getting arrested counts.

As much as I love her, I was pretty happy that dear Snooks had to face actual consequences for funneling a beer in the back room/sneaking out of work to take shots at 11am. She knows just as well as Frank, the t-shirt shop proprietor for whom the housemates "work," that she's waaaaaaay too famous for him or any other mere citizen to wield authority over her.

Watching Nicole get blasted with an older couple at a boardwalk bar at the end of her two-hour shift, a couple likely tickled by the story they could now tell their Gen-Y children, was a bit like watching a dramatization of Lindsay Lohan: The Early Slide, and I found it uncomfortable. But you know whose authority she isn't too famous for? The cops. So when she started sliding across the beach with an open container, trainwrecking in a spectacular fashion in the midst of a large crowd Red-Sea-ing to get the best view, the Night's Watch of Seaside Heights were there and ready to pounce.

"You guys are no fun."

But also no fun? A Lohan-ed Nicole Polizzi. It's one thing for me to belly-laugh as Snooki sits in her mini-fridge because the new tanning lotion is burning her buns, but it's not so fun to watch her self-destruct on television. I don't think she's too far gone for a simple wake-up call to send her back to mere light debauchery. So, Seaside Heights po-po, I salute you. May Sammi and Ron be next.

Jersey Shore!

I've finally joined the rest of the American TV viewing comunity in the shared cultural experience that is Jersey Shore (not kidding: 8.6 million viewers and counting.  That's more than Grey's Anatomy).

New roommate Deena is SO JERSEY.  From the crunchy gel-waves to the facial piercing that looks like a zit to calling Sammi a Very Bad Word because Sammi laughed while she drunkenly tried to straddle The Sitch in his sleep.  The essence of the Garden State.

I'm no Sammi fan but I'm going to say she wasn't entirely in the wrong for getting pissed.

Ugh, this show makes me want to be a boy.  They just put on their fresh t-shirts and cook family dinner on Sundays.  No screaming.  No crying.  No pulling out each other's weaves.

TEAM SNOOKI!



Her omission from the "Best Actress in a Comedy" category at the Globes is an absolute crime.

Black Swan

I told Dan I wanted to see Black Swan, an adaptation of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Improbable. My sweet husband was so excited to see how a screenwriter could turn this explanation of universal chaos and our own efforts to seek narrative in a random world into a coherent plot.

He soon discovered my deception.

GOTCHA! IT'S ABOUT DANCING!

So, I rather liked the movie, in the way I liked the last horror movie I saw (something about a Ouija board at Ashley Pina's house in seventh grade). I had no idea that the ballerina movie would be harder to watch than the one where the guy cuts off his own arm.

But Natalie Portman was good! At the end, when she finally dances the part of Odile (scary face paint swan), I felt the difference in her character's form and passion. She flew across the stage with her scary red eyes and rippling gooseflesh and, in the words of Vincent Cassel's egomaniacal ballet director, "let herself go."

"HOW MANY TIMES CAN HE SAY THAT?" Dan bellowed.

(The guy said it a lot).

To this, I replied, "but I want to be perfect!"

(Also a running theme).

In the end, I would recommend the movie, because occasionally screaming into your date's arm as a pretty girl rips off her own skin is fun.

But my favorite dance movie is still - obviously - Center Stage, a delightfully stinky hunk of 90s fromage. Its dedication to realism is such that in the final big number, Katie turned to me (obviously, we saw it in the theater) and whispered, "this... this has to be a dream sequence, right?"

Whew!

Just got back from a whirlwind 9-day trip through Colorado. It was really, really, really fun but now that we're back I really, really need to go grocery shopping. So until then, a peek at our first stop:

Niece and nephew New Year's!