I Recall Central Park in Fall

A perfect day.

Colors from Nature

My hair grows really fast. I credit this feature to my dad’s side of the family: the Orlandos all have thick and lush heads of hair that tend to go rather prematurely grey.

I haven’t seen more than an inch of my own natural hair color since I was 13. I’ve colored my hair for years, sometimes myself, but more often I have sought out wonderful stylists with artistic vision who could bring out the very best of my head suit.

Since moving here, I’ve visited one salon and it was an OK experience but at a high cost. And unlike at my beloved Salon Visio in Hood River, I WASN’T offered a delicious and soothing cup of tea, I WASN’T treated to a world-class head and neck massage, and my stylist WASN’T paying attention when I described to her what I wanted.

Now, New York is a mecca for world-class salons and stylists. The tricky business is that they are also some of the priciest salons and stylists. While I don’t mind paying good money for great hair, my hair grows just a little too quickly to pay top dollar for a touch up every 4-6 weeks.

With my mousy, ashy blond roots starting to show I decided to save a few bucks and touch up my color at home. This can be a risky endeavor, so I conducted lots of research. Drugstore color can be really damaging to the hair and also not provide the results one is hoping for. The worst-case scenario would be to color at home and then still have to go to the salon to pay for a color correction.

After reading through tons of reviews on my favorite beauty product review web site, Makeup Alley, I decided to try Naturcolor. Naturcolor is a low peroxide dye (only 3% so it can’t really lighten the hair) formulated from herbal extracts that is really gentle on the hair, the body, and the environment. It’s made in Italy and is only carried in health food stores – I found it at the Whole Foods in SoHo.

After calling the 800 customer service number and consulting about my desired effect, I decided to mix two colors in order to get a rich, dimensional auburn color. You can see in the picture above that is exactly what I got! And my hair is seriously silky, shiny, and soft. Naturcolor is THE best at-home color I have tried.

I’ll have fun finding and trying another salon next month. In the meantime, I’ve found a great way to stretch my style budget.

The Real Joy of Cooking

I just love to cook. Partly because following a recipe is so much fun - measuring and chopping and mixing feels a lot like playing with my food. I also enjoy cooking because I love to eat, and nothing tastes as delicious as a meal made at home with fresh ingredients. Lastly, I relish the act of cooking because the process always makes me think of so many wonderful people in my life.

For example, tonight I cooked a cauliflower curry recipe from my Moosewood cookbook. Since becoming a vegetarian, the Moosewood has been my go-to source for delicious and nutritious vegetarian recipes. My particular copy of the cookbook came to me from the library of my dear Aunt Jan. She must have enjoyed the book as well because it is dog-eared and has notes on some of the pages. It is special to me to have something that she liked so much.

The Moosewood cookbook is a compendium of recipes from the famous Moosewood vegetarian restaurant in Ithaca, New York. My friend Chesua is from Ithaca, and my stepfather Steve is from a city nearby.

The last time I cooked a new recipe entirely from scratch, it was an attempt to reproduce a truly mind-blowing macaroni and cheese dish that my friend Jen made for a party at her house. Jen likes to cook, too, and we all love it when we get invited to Jen's house for dinner. My mac and cheese tasted good, but not as good as Jen's. She's got the knack.

The pots and pans that I used tonight to fry the onions and simmer the curry were wedding gifts from my uncle Dave and his family. Both Dave and his wife Michele are such amazing cooks that the word "cook" doesn't really apply. They are Chefs - artists of the kitchen who are gifted with a flair for flavor and can concoct exotic dishes without recipes.

As I moved through the step-by-step instructions of my recipe, I remembered the advice of my grandmother to "clean as you go." A tidy kitchen makes the reward at the end of the process - relaxing and tasting the fruits of your labor - that much more enjoyable.

As the heady aroma of curry filled the house, I thought about my high school friend Carrie. Carrie now lives in India with her husband, and just had her first baby boy. Carrie eats a lot of curry and vegetarian dishes these days, but would kill for some fresh avocados like the one I had for lunch earlier in the day.

In the end, my Cauliflower Curry turned out beautifully. I served it over rice and lentils and topped it with raisins. Rich and I both found it to be delicious...spicy and sweet with the perfect amount of heat. It was, as with many of the dishes that I have tried from Moosewood, one of the most successful recipes I've ever followed.

My love of cooking isn't just about the steps on the page, learning what flavors work together, or even the tasty end result. The best part is having people I love along for the ride in my mind as I twirl through the kitchen stirring this pot and chopping that veggie. It's a dinner party and everyone's invited!

Shoutout: Stone Park Cafe

Today was a cold and rainy day in Brooklyn - the perfect day to sleep late and go out for brunch. At the end of our street is a cute spot called Stone Park Cafe, and I've been wanting check it out since we first moved here. Since they are only open for brunch on Saturdays and Sundays at 10 AM (they are open for lunch and dinner during the week beginning at 2:30), it took us this long to get a slow enough start out the door to make brunch make sense. Seriously, we've been wondering why everyone sleeps so late in Brooklyn! If I don't have breakfast by 9 AM, then you don't want to know me.

Anyway, we finally made it there today and MAN...it was totally worth the wait. I had the sourdough french toast with fresh berry compote and Vermont maple syrup. Rich had the eggs benedict. It was, without a doubt, one of the top 3 breakfasts in my life. The service was attentive, the food was outstanding, and the coffee was rich and piping hot.

Hey Stone Park Cafe...HOLLA and thanks for the brunch!

True, true.

Spotted on Union St. in Brooklyn.

But What Rhymes With Ektorp?

Today's post is dedicated to my new friend, IKEA. Thanks to IKEA in Redhook, Brooklyn, we are no longer resigned to sitting on the floor. Having sold our big sofa prior to moving here, Rich and I found ourselves seat-less in our new apartment. Which was fun for the first 3 days, but quickly became a major pain in the butt. Literally.

Hearing all kinds of stories about how long it takes to have furniture delivered in New York, I was prepared to continue sitting on the *hard*wood floor for at least 6 more weeks. I spent hours upon hours (hey, I'm unemployed...why not?) conducting tireless internet research on sofas, dimensions, and delivery options. At long last, I narrowed our sofa search down to these handsome specimens: Pottery Barn's Charleston, Crate & Barrel's Lounge, and IKEA's Ektorp (which looks similar to the Charleston and costs about half as much).

It took a while to make the decision, what with the debates about quality vs. cost. In the end, the deciding factor was size. It turns out that the doorways in our old brownstone apartment are too narrow for Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel's modern furniture dimensions. By process of elimination, the Ektorp won.

After taking the FREE shuttle to IKEA (departing every half hour from 9th St and 4th Ave!) I blew through the showroom and copied down the requisite Aisle and Bin numbers for my purchases. In the Self Serve Warehouse, I found a strapping young lad to help me load the Ektorp sofa, Ektorp ottoman, and a tall Billy bookcase onto my cart. After paying for my purchases, which in total came out to be less than the price of either of the other sofas, I steered my laden cart to IKEA's Home Delivery service area. And there I learned that for a marginal flat fee, all of my new purchases could be delivered bright and early in the morning the next day.

Sure enough, the next morning at 9:30 two delivery men showed up and carried all of the furniture up the 3 flights of stairs to our apartment! AWESOME!

I love you IKEA, for your efficiency, fair pricing, sleek design, clean cafeteria, and strong employees. Our sofa and ottoman are super comfortable and attractive additions to our apartment. I'm so happy I could write an Ode to IKEA, but what rhymes with Ektorp?

Tuesday at the Met

Today I went to the famous Metropolitan Museum of Art (aka The Met) with friends Bruna and Beth (above). Both Bruna and Beth's boyfriends are friends of Rich's from the Naval Academy. Since we are all recent transplants to NYC, we thought it would be fun to explore a little culture and spend some time in the company of women.

The Met is a wonderful art museum located on the upper east side of Manhattan, adjacent to Central Park. It houses a wonderful smattering of art from a range of time periods and geographic regions. The admission fee is on a sliding scale, so you can pay whatever donation you can afford. A nice way to help make art and culture accessible for all, no?

Together, Bruna, Beth and I took in a variety of artsy artifacts including ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, African canoe carvings, Medieval unicorn tapestries and early American Tiffany stained glass masterpieces. Also, there was the complete series of photographs from Robert Frank's "The Americans" as well as a special traveling exhibition of Vermeer's "The Milkmaid."

After having the incredible good fortune to spend the earlier part of this year in Italy's Uffizi, Accademia, and Vactican museums as well as France's Pompidou, Picasso museum, Musee d'Orsay and Versailles landmarks, you would think that I would have had my fill. Hardly! The more I see, the more I love and the more I learn about the history of the artistic urge. The desire to create seems - to me - to be as base as the desire to eat, to love, to wage war, and to reproduce. I am always humbled in the presence of so much beauty and inspiration...the lasting representations of the human spirit.

The only disappointment was that the famous Costume galleries were temporarily closed. I guess I'll be going back, because I can't miss that! Now, who's coming with me?

E-Scow Racing on Tom's River, NJ

Yesterday afternoon Rich and I had the great pleasure of joining a friend for some afternoon sailboat racing on Tom's River in New Jersey. It has been many years since I did sailboat racing of any kind...the last time I did it I was about 12 years old and was sailing on 12-foot boat. This was also the first time Rich and I sailed together.

We were on an E-Scow (28 ft), about which Wikipedia has this to say:

The E-Scow is the younger sister of the A-Scow. Its rigging is similar, as well, and their hull shapes are almost identical, just 10 feet shorter. The boat is competitively sailed in Minnesota and Wisconsin and recently in many more states around the country, including Michigan, New York, New Jersey, South Carolina and Colorado.

The E-Scow that we sailed belongs to our friend John, who as a Skipper was patient and accommodating of our rusty skills. The day couldn't have been more gorgeous with sunshine and late summer warm weather. I hung in there for almost 3 races, but ended up leaving the boat after getting a little beat up and bashed around. E-Scow racing is TOUGH! You will be bruised and sore the next day - both Rich and I are are nursing various bruises and open wounds.

Injuries aside, it was so fun being on the water and going fast with a big sail and a great Skipper.