But what do I *really* want for my birthday? Some time with a real designer and an architect to tell me what to really do with this place so I wouldn’t waste any money doing it. When it comes to home design, you either have time or money and it looks like I’m stuck with time, honey.

But what do I really really really want for my birthday? Five seconds of complete freedom with the time and space conundrum. That’s all.

The dehumifier that could short out the circuit.

March is said to come in like a lion. What the saying refers to is the changeable weather as winter loosens its grip on the land and green shoots begin to appear in spite of continued frosts, rain, and wind. This year, March has started with some instantly spring weather but it knocked me over in another way. My beautiful paint job scarcely had a chance to dry when I came home late one night and found the floor of the bedroom wet. All wet. At first I thought the 100-year-old windows had leaked since it had been raining.

It wasn’t the windows. One side of the bed, the side farthest from the windows, was soaking wet. I panicked and thought my shower had leaked. It wasn’t that either. While I was putting down towels to soak it up, I overhead my neighbor in the hallway fending off an angry landlord for the apartment on the floor below. Their water heater had leaked. Since my bedroom is sunken, about three feet below their kitchen, the water had gathered in the space and while at the same time dripping into the apartment below, it had found its way beneath the drywall into my bedroom. Are you frickin’ kidding me?

As I write this, there are two huge fans and an industrial-sized dehumidifier that I have taken to calling the Monstrosity in my bedroom. I spent Thursday afternoon having a confrontation with the He-Neighbor and moving books and bookshelves that less than two weeks ago I had moved back into the bedroom and thought that was the end of it. I have spent the nights since sleeping on the sofa with white noise of the two fans and the dehumidifier churning away in the bedroom. They’re generating so much energy that it was 73 degrees in the apartment today. It’s in the 40’s outside and I have drafty windows. Do the math.

Thanks to poor communication by the carpet cleaning company, I missed the guy today to pick the crap up and will have to deal with it until Monday afternoon when hopefully that part of the nightmare will end. And then I can deal with the other part of the nightmare in getting someone to pay for this.

I think I should get an award for continuing to honor my shifts at work around this chaos. I would have been entirely justified in calling out just because of my severe fatigue. If I were 5 inches shorter, it would be easy to sleep on the couch but it just wouldn’t be that easy, would it?

In other news, we’ve bid farewell to our Cute Italian fellow. There goes my model for Marco. Good thing Argentines have a similar word choice and cadence with English.

RECIPE SOURCE:

Mascarpone Cheese – Vera’s Recipe (Baking Obsession) for Homemade Mascarpone Cheese.
Savoiardi/ Ladyfinger Biscuits – Recipe from Cordon Bleu At Home
Tiramisu – Carminantonio’s Tiramisu from The Washington Post, July 11 2007

Well, this was so time-consuming that if it hadn’t been for the big snowstorm mid-month, I never would have gotten it done. It also marked the first Daring Bakers challenge that I have had to repeat a part of the process. I don’t love tiramisu and prefer gelato as dessert rather than this rich tourist favorite, but this version has an great cream filling that benefited from some small changes I made to the requirements.

The first part I made were the savoiardi on a night off midweek. I attempted to make them using my pastry bag but it was a disaster and the resulting cookies looked like tortured tree branches. I knew they were fated to be lost in the cream, though, so I wasn’t worried, but their complete ugliness prompted me to attempt to make the recipe again the next week. This time, I used a cut off plastic bag instead of the pastry bag and the results were much more even. Recipe-wise, if I ever make them again, I’ll top them with granulated sugar rather than the confectioner’s called for in the recipe. I doubt I’ll make them again, though. Biscotti are so way funner and taste better.

I have never in my life made cheese. It belongs to that family of foods that defy rhyme or reason why someone would want to make it at home when others do it so much better. But, fathfully, I followed the recipe, I even purchased cheesecloth. I have no idea what went wrong. I thought I had done it right, but the resulting product was just a step away from the original creaminess of the heavy cream itself and a far cry from the mascarpone you buy in the store. Due to the price of whipping cream, I didn’t repeat this recipe, since I was also running out of time to get all the pieces done.

On the day of the forcasted (and as yet unseen Snowicaine), I made the zabaglione and the pastry cream as well as finished the tiramisu. I have made zabaglione before but this time it didn’t turn out quite right. I used coffee instead of marsala since I don’t have marsala in the house and I intended to take this thing to work and not keep it at home. I don’t own a bain marie and usually use a glass bowl over water in a saucepan for melting chocolate. I used the glass bowl setup this time as well and proceeded according to the recipe. After 40 minutes of stirring and no change in the stiffness of the cream, I got desperate and moved it to a smaller saucepan that I set inside the larger one. Glass is a poor heat conductor and less so when you’re counting on it to cook the food in the bowl and not just heat it. A stainless steel bowl has been added to my shopping list for next month.

The pastry cream cooked up like a dream, though and I’ve continued my streak of good luck with custards. I used orange zest both in the pastry cream and the zabaglione instead of lemon zest for a nice twist. Oranges are so in this time of year.

For assembling the final tiramisu, I used a loaf pan for ease of transport to work. The homemade savoiardi just fit a row across end to end at the top to make up for the empty space. I’m glad i remade them so I had cookies that were approximately the same size. Once the three layers were done, the loaf pan was filled all the way to the top. I topped it with chocolate curls rather than powder. I always hate the powder on top of tiramisus and wasn’t going to do the same thing with my own. I have an entire box of chocolate odds and ends and this was as good a time as any to use them.

There is one thing I must vent about. The required 2 cups of espresso is far, far too much. It could be my savoiardi were smaller than average, but given the recipe we were given, I doubt they were that much smaller. Unless I misread or misunderstood the 2 cups to mean 2 demitasse cups of espresso rather than the 500ml I made, it’s a huge, wasteful amount. Not even half a cup of it was used. And i had put Grand Marnier in it instead of rum. What a waste. I feel awful. As I write this, it’s sitting on my stove sadly blinking at me. I hate, hate waste and I hate how I didn’t listen to my common sense on this one.

As far as the finished product is concerned, as of this writing, I have yet to taste it but if the leftovers of the cream were any signal, it’s a good version of the dessert.

Addendum 2.28.2010: I’ve tried the tiramisu. It’s less coffeesque than I’d hoped. Maybe that’s from my using instant espresso powder to make the coffee rather than brewing it. Also, it’s a bit too sweet for me. If I made it again, I’d notch the sugar down. The cream doesn’t keep its form and just sliding down so the layers look like a mudslide in slow motion. I’ll stick with my old recipe if I ever make it again.

The bathroom needs to be finished Monday. I can’t believe how happy I am with the paint color.

Yesterday, the Garces group opened the Garces Trading Company on the outskirts of the gayborhood. Today, I went. It’s smaller than I thought it would be with a cafe with waiter service in the middle and the food purchase areas around the perimeter in a sort of racetrack around the eating area. Cheeses and charcuterie are next to each other with bread over in the corner. The serve-it-yourself oil and vinegar section is facing it in the little alleyway. Croutons and crackers are beneath and sweet spreads and marmelades are at one end and savory canned goods on the other. Pastries and the coffee bar are in the back with a single bar table in which to sit. There’s a refrigerated section for canned and bottled drinks. The other side of the area is a temperature controlled section devoted to the new wine shop. It’s owned and operated by the PCLB but the wines are actually stored right, the employee knows how to help you, and there are a good deal of wines not seen anywhere else in the state of Pennsylvania. It’s all-European with the Italian section being the largest. Beyond, in a corner is the cashier for the wine and alcohol.

The place is lovely with a bit of the rustic feel of Amada. Employees are neatly uniformed and a few were very helpful (I try to be realistic about service, we are in Philadelphia after all). The cheese section has nothing DiBruno’s wouldn’t but it’s well-curated and they’re generous with the samples. The charcuterie is geared towards the Iberians and I bought my beloved sobrasada not found anywhere else in the this city (to my knowledge). There’s a small yet immaculate collection of olives. It is not self-serve, thankfully, something that has always bothered me about the olive bar at DiBruno’s. While it has fewer varieties than the Italian shop across town, the varieties are hand-picked. I got some arbequinas, not always available unlike their French and Italian relations. Since I have bread at home right now, I didn’t take a look at that section but many other people were and I can only imagine it’s as perfect as the bread served at the restaurants in the group.

There are some interesting oils, once again a carefully curated collection with even one California one in there for balance. It’s self-serve, though. Patrons fill their own bottles which are then sealed at the cashier. This could be a disaster in the making, especially with liquid gold like white truffle oil. Hopefully, the cheese and charcuterie section will always be heavily staffed to avoid catastrophes from happening. I wonder if children should be banned at the door.

Among the preserves from France and Italy is a small collection of Garces’ own cheese accompaniments including roasted garlic dulce de leche, truffled lavender honey, sangria honey, and the cherry fig preserve I bought. They’re a steal at $5 a piece. The savory canned section has piquillo peppers and real navajas. I bought a tin of conchas and can hardly wait to eat them when I’m done writing this. Condiments other than vinegars and oils were few.

The pastry section has great deals on the little cookies like financiers, macarons, and madeleines. The chocolate ones were calling my name with a perfect sugar crust, but they will only sell them in dozens. Knowing I’d eat them all if I got the dozen, I didn’t.

Overall, the place has great food but the layout is a bit tight and it’s smaller than I thought it would be. I was there are the end of an ordinary work day on Ash Wednesday so it was steadily busy but not exploding with people. I can’t imagine the chaos that would ensue on a Saturday when larger crowds descend on anything of Garces in this town. It also seemed to be fairly dark in there. I don’t know if it was on purpose mood lighting, but I didn’t know there were signs with the menu above our heads until I had been there about half an hour. There also seemed to be a lot of employees, a lot. And with the space being as limited as it is, it made for a tight squeeze. Though there’s a coffee bar with a full barista, I couldn’t imagine wanting to hang out there. All food purchases must be made at the one cashier by the coffee bar. Forget about relaxing reading your paper whilst being jostled by those waiting to pay and those looking at the dessert case.

The wine boutique has some real gems, though, and given Pennsylvania’s ridiculous liquor laws, it’s the first of its kind. There is knowledgeable, genial help in there and that, my friends, is priceless. Also, there are great deals. You don’t have to pay even $20 to get a good bottle. Plenty has been selected at the more everyday end of the scale. You have to pay separately than the food, but then that’s the world we live in. The cafe looks nice and you might actually have more breathing room sitting in there eating and drinking while people do their grocery shopping on the perimeters.

I can’t help thinking they need more space for all they’re trying to do. I wonder what they could have done with a space like DiBruno’s Chestnut Street location, but it is what it is. The food’s of great quality, there are Iberian specialties not found anywhere else in this city of Italians, and we can buy wine now from people who actually drink it.

Thanks, Jose.

The tony park the day after the storm.

I thought we as a species had evolved past being crippled by less than catastrophic weather events (this being a normal-for-the-season event). I was wrong. I have seen less juiced up frenzy after an earthquake.

But personality-wise he’s different. Whereas the old one was a party boy whose ease with strangers provided a foil for his shy but decent best friend, this one wears such a hard outer shell that if he weren’t famous or wealthy, he wouldn’t have anyone around him at all. I have to be at my crispiest to write him at all, like on a day after a long shift.

It’s funny how things come back, though.

Who knew? Crippling snowstorms would fall on the city on Saturdays in the same winter. Shocking. In a near reiteration of the last storm before Christmas, this one dumped 18″ on the city. Most businesses were closed in the neighborhood with the exception of places frequented by locals. The gyms were open, two coffee shops, and the cheese store. Starbucks, the one chain in the neighborhood, was closed.

I made paella and nearly imagined myself in Valencia. I also got a huge amount of work done except for any reading or writing.

My new chair whose delivery caused so much worry.

This is a great time of the year to make all kinds of home purchases since things are on sale. unfortunately, last year was punctuated by a death in the family, a stressful real estate deal, and general exhaustion. I felt I couldn’t spend any more money (just the act of buying anything at all costs tens of thousands of dollars, not counting the down payment). Also, I was so mentally exhausted, I couldn’t make any rational decisions about more things, especially things that would be costly. Anything involving work on a home is costly.

This year, though, I’m ready to do something and I can finally make rational decisions. My first move was to get rid of the oversized, out of fashion lounge chair I had. I saw this Delia chair on Room and Board’s end of year sale it was the exact same chair I had loved since the previous spring, in just the fabric I wanted. I bought it. After a lot of rescheduling thanks to my insane work realities, I finally got it delivered and had my other chair picked up by a local charity. It looks amazing with my throw pillow I got years ago at the old Matthew Izzo (that place is a local business but I hate everything they stock these days).

The painter comes tomorrow for an estimate of just the bedroom and bathroom. If I like her work, I’ll have her do the rest of the apartment. Slowly things get done and when a lot of money and big changes are on the hook, slowly is probably best. I’m one of those people who has a clear idea of what I want and I cannot and will not accept anything but that. That’s why it takes me so long to arrive at a decision. Hey, I hate it, too. But I can’t make excuses or apologies for being hard to please.

Next up:

• Get my spices organized
• Fix the files
• Change the bedroom closet doors
• Hang the Montmarte picture in the bedroom

The best thing about this challenge was the side-challenge of the graham cracker recipe. They blow the store-bought ones out of the water. The second-best thing about this challenge was the relative ease of the recipe. After a grueling month of parties and ridiculous cooking feats, it was comforting to have a relatively simple bar cookie recipe. And it was no-bake! I don’t think I have ever crammed that much butter into so small a space, but it was fun and I did it on a weeknight.

I made the graham cracker pastry one day of the long New Year’s weekend and then rolled it out and baked the crisps on another day of it during such a bitterly cold day that I didn’t feel I was wasting the day by staying inside. The original recipe given was gluten-free but since I will probably never use those flours again and I hate to waste food, I used all wheat flour. The original is always the best. I also used something else from my pantry and instead of buying mildly flavored clover honey, I used some expensive Italian forest honey. It isn’t mildly flavored, but it was between that and my cherished jar of chestnut honey. It wasn’t a close battle. During the baking of the crackers, I discovered that a) I sucketh mightily in measuring dough, b) can’t cut in a straight line to save my life, c) my oven heats unevenly and c) none of that mattered. The crisps were delicious. Three days after making them and becoming afraid I’d eat and distribute too many to make the bars themselves, I forced myself to pulverise some of them to smithereens.

The bars themselves got made on a day off work after spending another long day at my favorite coffee bar in the history of humanity. This recipe had a lot of ingredients and a little of them like a few tablespoons of heavy cream, pudding mix, almonds, an egg, chocolate powder, a couple of different sugars, and a huge, disgusting amount of butter. The bars were done in an hour and I chilled them well before cutting them with a sharp paring knife. I allowed myself to eat and photograph one of them before packing up the rest for work. I got 36 out of the pan. I’ve never gotten so many bars out of a pan that small but I couldn’t imagine making them any bigger.

As far as tastes are concerned, I adored the graham cracker recipe and I will be making those again though next time I may not bother cutting them at all and just baking two full sheets and rolling a pizza cutter through them a few minutes into the process. Measuring is for people who scrapbook. Seriously. They were amazing, though and I may get a straight rolling pin just for the purpose (I have the tapered kind since I usually make tarts). The use of good honey didn’t go to waste.

As far as the bars themselves are concerned, they were kind of fun to make but used a lot of dishes. The washing up was a bore, what with the bain marie, the mixer, a saucepan, and several spatulas getting used and that’s not counting what I needed to use to chop chocolate and almonds. They also had a lot of ingredients, including somewhat weird things I may never use again. Like the organic pudding mix I got at Whole Foods that will now rot in my pantry since my brain will hurt too much when trying to figure out how much to decrease the milk to make the box as stated. The heavy cream will also languish in my fridge. I may be able to use it in a soup or if in doubt, freeze it. The bars were too sweet for my tastes but the people at work *loved* them. Someone said the one she had eaten was the best thing she had eaten in her life.

Now back to the big project at hand…

Note: Picture quality is very poor since I’m still learning my way around this phone. I can’t be bothered with the big camera except for big things anymore.

Ms. Zielinski, the fashion stylist, said her best friend, a man, told her once: “ ‘You are confident, have good credit, own your own business, travel around the world and are self-sufficient. What man is going to want you?’ He laughed, but I found that pretty depressing.”

So now being smart is a detriment? What’s wrong with people? Overall, this has become a society that rewards mediocrity, where exceptionalism is treated as some kind of a handicap and real handicaps as some kind of Get Out of Jail Free card. Give me a freakin’ break.

Be smarter. Work harder. What happened to men here? Is it so accepted that they’ll be overgrown children all their lives that so many have taken the path of least resistance? It’s in evidence all over this town, and you can tell just by how people dress. There’s the girl who’s put herself through the wringer to dress well and look good and there’s the fat slob next to her with a backwards baseball cap and some sports logo monstrosity. Excuse me while I go vomit.

Grow a pair already, gentlemen. There’s nothing wrong with being successful. There are too many dudes and not enough Men.

I also start pottery classes Sunday. And as a friend at work said today, “So if you die you can be buried in a potter’s field?” I have nothing more to say. It’s the three dog nights days of the winter.