Life in the key of E flat minor

I was going to go to New York for a weekend – the weekend of January 29-31  – this weekend. I had gotten sick and ended up not going anywhere for New Year’s, so I thought I’d treat myself later. I found a great deal, $116.88 a night, in Midtown, a neighborhood I usually stay in. It was going to be an estimated $275.24 for the two nights with taxes and fees. In my free time, I plan travel trips, whether or not I take them. It’s a great exercise for me to research new and old places to go as well as estimate the prices for big trips. I was on goggle flights, playing around with dates and locations, and saw a ticket for $81 to Chicago for the weekend I was planning to go to New York. Now, the ticket was on Spirit Air, an airline I have never taken. I took a step back and thought about whether or not I should rethink my plans. The Amtrak deal If I had completely committed to go to New York, I could have purchased a round trip saver ticket on Amtrak for $78. With advanced pl...

This is one of my favorite Italian dishes. I am a sucker for complex salty flavors: the slightly floral pickling of capers, the vinegary brine of green olives and the hidden fatty sharp and "fishy" taste of anchovies. There are times when I crave salt and this dish does it for me.    Apocryphally described as a tomato sauce that was served in a brothel since it was based on the ingredients in their larders, this "in the style of a prostitute" sauce is a tangy, briny creation of the mid-20th century. The salty and fragrant ingredients are typical of Southern Italian cuisine: tomatoes, olive oil, anchovies, olives, capers and garlic. Wikipedia has a less salacious origin story . More like Buffalo wings, puttanesca came about when hungry people sitting at a popular Italian night spot complained of needing to eat and the restaurant owner not having enough ingredients. "Make any kind of garbage ( puttanata )," they retorted and the owner mixed his remain...

Before I embarked on my 2014-2015 trip to the UK, my brother, who was moving the family to the West Coast for his new job, invited my parents and myself to come celebrate Christmas 2015 in California. We all agreed and I left the farewell party with my bags to fly off to London. Since the family was going to travel for next Christmas, I started to plan for it as soon as we made the decision. I love Christmas and I love wrapping gifts. I have rolls and rolls of wrapping paper that I have collected through the years and I have ribbons, gift tags, bows and trappings to present the gifts in a decorative manner. I get excited to find wrapping paper, ribbon and bows for sale after Christmas in patterns that I think look classic. I don't always buy new paper each time since a have about four viable rolls of paper, but when I see something that screams me, I do get it. Two different Christmases, some of the same snowflake paper However traveling for the holiday wreaks havoc with w...

With this cold snap this last week in Philadelphia (the low was 12F on Monday into Tuesday), I wanted some good old fashioned stick-to-your-ribs comfort food. So I started searching the web for more information about shepherd’s pie. Hachis Parmentier Primarily known early on as cottage pie, this dish was the vehicle for using leftover meat, encasing the meat in mashed potatoes. Now shepherd’s pie is a combination of beef or lamb and sturdy vegetables topped with a mashed potato crust.  Serving suggestion I didn’t know there were so many different relatives to the cottage pie, like the Cumberland pie, the vegetarian and vegan friendly Shepherdess pie and the French Canadian pâté chinois . Even the French dabble in this dish with the hachis Parmentier , described as a dish made with mashed potato, combined with browned meat and sauce lyonnaise.   Well, I had overdosed on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown on New Year’s day and I had rewatched the "Lyon" episode, so t...

I spent New Year’s Eve 2014 into New Year’s Day 2015 in Scotland: the land of Hogmanay and Auld Lang Syng . In particular, I was in Edinburgh, which hosts one of the world's most famous New Year celebrations. Thought the official celebration is a major street party along Princes Street which cost over £20 to enter, I was with friends on Calton Hill waiting for the cannon at Edinburgh Castle to be fired at the stroke of midnight and the large fireworks display. Yes, there was much drinking and celebrating. It was a pleasant surprise that while watching the fireworks over the castle, there were supplemental fireworks over us. One fun note is that the clock faces of Waverly Station in Edinburgh, which were directly in view from Calton Hill, run two minutes early to help passengers catch their trains on time. All baked and ready to be eaten The next day, I was told that Scottish tradition is to have steak pie. This sounded like a great idea after a late night on the town being...