Opened the freezer today while looking for a thermometer.  Guess it has been neglected a bit!  I don’t go to the grocery store and really only use the fridge for drinks every once in a while.  A different lifestyle than suburban-Shawn.
The Ziegfeld theatre has been showing old Bond movies the past two weeks.  I went to “Dr No” and “From Russia With Love” last weekend.  It was the first time I’ve been to the Ziegfeld, and it was great.  It’s a huge old-style theatre.  Maroon felt-covered walls and gold painted wood.  Happy!
I’ve decided to not keep around old bottles of wine any more.  Ideally, I’d like to keep about a case worth of mixed wine for special occasions.  I currently have 4 bottles of special-occasion wine that I’d actually drink.  The others are of “questionable provenance”and I don’t want to risk trying to drink them.  The problem is that any wine refrigerator of this size isn’t really made for long term storage.  At the size that I’m looking for, they are also extremely shabby.  They don’t seem to make a high quality wine refrigerator for under 30 or so bottles.  I used to have a 35 bottle refrigerator, but that was too big for the NYC apartment.  I’ve thought about it, and I think that is the trend I want to follow.  I think the idea of the storing a special-occasion wine is a suburban idea.  Special bottles, like these, take time to get a hold of.  And space isn’t that expensive, so it makes sense to stock up.  In NYC, on the other hand, space is at a premium and coincidentally, I can buy any wine I’d want just a few blocks from here.  If I wanted a Lafite or a d’Yquem Sauternes, Morrel has it.  At the moment, they even have an Unico.  (I carried 2 Unico’s from Spain when I visited a few years ago)  Now the only problem is, what do I do with the current store of special-occasion bottles? I was thinking of just drinking them over the next couple weeks.  (I just reclaimed them from Trevor R’s wine fridge after storing them there for quite a while)  I don’t know if I can convince myself to drink almost $2K worth of wine in such a short amount of time! I’ll be trying to convince myself over the next couple of days.  What are the alternatives?

It sounds familiar, but I didn’t remember.  Shannon and Ryan have their birthdays within a week of each other.  They both turned 30 this year, and they organized a party down in Houston.  I took a week and visited Houston.
First day was her actual birthday, so we did what she wanted.  She’s a big nerd, we visited Lucy since the exhibit happened to be in Houston.  Apparently the fact that the exhibit is touring the world is pretty controversial.  The Smithsonian isn’t accepting it out of protest, but Houston’ll take it!  We also saw the DaVinci exhibit which was also kinda neat.
I also wanted to get a culinary taste of Houston, because I don’t really remember trying to do that before.  All the places we went to were excellent.  Ryan and Shannon have good taste!  Ryan is a true foodie.  The places I remember were Breakfast Klub (Get the Wings and Waffle!), Strip House, Tortas El Angel (Best tortas this side of the border), and to top if off…. Feast.  Here is one person’s experience. Ever since seeing that Bourdain-London episode, where he had random neglected pig parts, I’ve been wanting to give this stuff a try.  As it turns out, Ryan bought a couple books from the St. John chef and had heard that a former collegue of the chef opened upshop in Houston.  My mom and Ryan got the Ox Tongue fritters and I had the pig cheek.  I liked the fritters more, but the cheek was along the lines of mexican barbacoa.  It went well with the cabbage, and it was definitely an experience!
The actual birthday bash was a great time.  They had enough food to feed everyone about five times over!  The main attractions were the 2-60qt. stock pots on burners continuously churning out crawfish/corn/potatoes.  The crawfish were driven over from Louisiana and were still very alive.  They were cleaned, salted and dropped in the seasoned boil. The 40-50 people there didn’t even make it through half of the crawfish! I have to say, my favorite part was the corn-on-the-cob, cooked in this spicy crawfish seasoning.  Then Ryan made gumbo on a 3rd turkey-fryer burner, which he was working on for a few days.  Real fish stock and a chocolate colored roux. THEN, just in case you didn’t like any of that Lousiana-style stuff, they bought enough barbecue, crudités, cheeses for everyone two or three times over.  They also had a beer keg, wine, sodas, etc.   Good times!

This should be titled “Nanoon does NYC, 2008″ but I had a clash with culture that I wanted to write about.
Shannon came to town briefly, so we had to squeeze a lot into a little.  We finally got her to Hell’s Kitchen, but she’s avoiding uncooked fish and alcohol <hint> so she couldn’t have the tuna tostadas!  There was still enough for her to eat and she was happy.
I also finally went to Les Halles.  I honestly wasn’t expecting much.  I never got the impression Anthony Bourdain became a TV Personality based on his cooking.  I always thought it was about his writing.  That being said, it is a successful NYC restaurant in a neighborhood with some decent competition.   They have the usual French staples, but it seemed that steak was their specialty since they had many different cuts.  I got a hangar steak with Bearnaise.  We also got an order or escargot as well as pork confit.  Ryan is Mr Confit, so we had to get that.  The escargot was amazing.  I’ve had escargot, but never really thought anything special.  This was something special.  The hangar steak was perfectly cooked and was so tender it reminded me of my first taste of Kobe beef (that was actually cooked properly)  The rest was fine (onion soup, wine, bread) but the escargot and steak is what really was special. Happy!
Shannon has been a Patrick Stewart fan ever since Star Trek and apparently Ryan is a big fan of Shakespeare.  The opening night of Patrick Stewart as MacBeth was last night, so how could we not be there?!  I’ve always made it a point of avoiding Shakespeare.  I decided a while ago that because my mind is visually based that this was inherently incompatible with literature that is artistic with the delivery, as opposed to using plain language and instead being artistic with the mental visual they produce.  Same reason why I don’t get poetry.  However, I like to test my pre-conceptions periodically and I like to see performers perform so I thought it’d be a shot.  While I didn’t have a revelation (I still don’t see what people see in Shakespeare) I do think it is in the realm of Shawn-possibility now. I’m starting to think many people are probably like me but just approach Shakespeare and classic literature differently.  I think I’ve always approached literature like a movie or a modern narrative and expected to create visual mental images from the delivery.  After this week, I’m thinking this approach is wrong.  Before I went, Ryan gave me the basic plot line, which was a great help.  I think I would have appreciated it even more if I read the Wikipedia entry beforehand.  During the show, they could have been speaking French for all I understood.  But I could tell when the plot lines were happening because of the “preparation”.  Afterwards, I read the Wikipedia entry, and every plot point reminded me of the specific scene, so there are memory association “anchoring”.  I can see that repeated reading/watching/studying would create familiarity of the work, and might even create enjoyment!   Definitely a different approach one might use for Harry Potter!