as we may blog

We finished our taxes online but had to mail some supplementary forms, so we fed the googly-eyed mailbox before lunch.

We walked over to Park Slope and had a giant sandwich at Bierkraft. Foreground: Defiant Porter, pulled from a cask.

On the way home, we stopped at Park Delicatessen for some Valentine’s Day flowers, then had a very nice piece of salmon for dinner.

I don’t remember how the decade started, but what a happy way to end it:

Last night, despondent about our seemingly limited choices for property ownership, we pulled up the Craigslist site for Maine and started looking for Maine farms and Portland houses for sale. We spent maybe an hour clicking on anything that looked good and learned a lot. A good rule of thumb: if the realty company has the word “moose” in its name, the house you’re looking at is too far away. It was a good hour of escapist thinking; we traded in the trash on the sidewalk for empty two car garages and laughed a lot about how all our stuff would look great in “that corner” of a 2000 sq. ft. farmhouse. It was therapeutic on some level.

I was back at work this morning and put on my headphones to listen to the new Avett Brothers album. I’d heard it a couple of times in the office and liked what I had heard but I hadn’t been listening closely. The very first song began:

Load the car and write the note
Grab your bag and grab your coat
Tell the ones that need to know
We are headed north.

One foot in and one foot back
But it don’t pay to live like that
So I cut the ties and I jumped the track
For never to return.

Headed north! It don’t pay to live like [this]! With visions of 50 acre farmhouses and easy access to lobster fresh in my head from last night, I concluded immediately that this was a sign! I stopped and listened closely, eager to make even the most tenuous connections between the song’s lyrics and our thoughts of setting up residence in Maine. The music swelled at the chorus:

Oh Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in!

*sigh*

Good song though.

There’s a tomato blight occurring throughout the northeast which has made a noticeable dent in the variety and abundance of tomatoes available at the farmers’ market and in our CSA share. In spite of the blight, there are still a lot of tomatoes to be had, what with it being hard to keep a good tomato down in late August. So we picked up a bunch of your garden variety red tomatoes (plus some fancy heirlooms too good for salsa) at the market on Saturday and made Mattbot’s Famous Salsa, a tried and true recipe that involves Googling “best salsa recipe” for 15 minutes before arbitrarily picking one.

This particular recipe employed Burger King’s patented flame broiling method. I stuck all the veggies above plus a jalepeno and anaheim pepper, plus two huge cloves of garlic—under the broiler for about 10 minutes. When they had cooled a bit, I squeezed some of the water from the tomatoes and tossed all of the roasted veggies into the food processor with a big handful of chopped cilantro and a 3:1 ratio of cumin to salt (to taste, natch). I hit pulse a few times and… picante! I paired the chips and salsa with a Lagunitas IPA, which lately has been my go-to beer.

Maggie writes:

THIS is currently outside of our apartment, making one helluva racket. I don’t think I’ve actually seen or heard the word “cesspool” in serious context since David Macaulay’s Castle.