Passover Seder, Vietnamese Claypot Ginger Chicken, Flan-o Perfecto, & Birthday Bling?

Last night (Monday) was Erev Pesach (the evening on which Passover begins), and Dan and I made a lovely Passover Seder at the Elkhorn Inn:

We had handmade Shmurah Matzah (THE best matzah!) from Chabad of Morgantown, West Virginia, and that made it a VERY special Passover, indeed! This is the second year Rabbi Zalman & Hindy Gurevitz from Chabad Morgantown have sent us Shmurah Matzah, and it truly makes our Passover wonderful! We used the beautiful Seder plate given to us by our dear Irish friend, Megan; the pussy willows & forsythia were from the Elkhorn Inn garden; our hand-embroidered coasters were from our amazing honeymoon in the Central Highlands of Vietnam; my prayerbook was my Dad's mom's, and our Manischevitz wine was from the Kimball, WV WalMart!  I made the Charoses (a yummy mixture of apples, almonds, and wine), that is eaten on Matzah as part of the Seder service, and Dan got the horesradish, and other foods we needed for our Seder plate; the herbs came from our windowsill garden!

Make no mistake: I am NOT a Chef.  Dan is the Chef.  I can basically follow recipes, "potchkee", doctor and tweak them- but I truly impressed even myself Monday night!

For our Seder dinner I made Vietnamese Claypot Ginger Chicken from Mai Pham's wonderful  "Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table" cookbook, as it's a great Kosher recipe:

basically chicken, ginger, garlic, Thai chilis, scallions, & a bit of brown sugar; the claypot gives the dish a wonderful smokeyness, and it's wonderful served over rice; it turned out SO good, in fact, that we've put it on the Elkhorn Inn's menu!

You can see the Elkhorn Inn's new 2010 menu

here, on our Facebook "fan" page under "Notes".

We treated ourselves to Freemark Abbey 2006 Viognier, one of the "Wines of the World" that the puppies had bought Dan for "Dogfather's Day" on http://wine.com, and it was Superb with the spicy ginger chicken! This is Definitely a wine we'd love to buy more of...

We then REALLY treated ourselves to a desert of the great banana and guava wines we brought back from  Vino Del Grotto in St. Augustine, Florida- tropic summer in a bottle! Neither is too sweet, as fruit wines are wont to be; the Guava wine would be an excellent accompanyment to a spicy, tropical dinner, & the banana wine is Fabulously Banana-y! And we WILL be ordering at least a case of their wines as soon as we can!

After this fete of culinary extravagance, Suzie Homemaker Not then Totally Outdid Herself, and made a Vietnamese flan (also from Mai Pham's cookbook), which is creamier than the more dense Spanish version; it's more like a creme brulee than a flan- and it was Excellent! Flan is a Very tricky thing to do right, and as I was able to do it spot-on my very first time, this means that: a) Mai Pham's recipe is Really good, & b) I CAN (contrary to popular belief) Follow Directions! LOL

I pulled about 10 different flan recipes before I attempted Mai Pham's, & I learned something REALLY cool from the www.ElBoricua.com recipe for  Puerto Rican flan: Instead of trying to make the caramel sauce in a pot (with the resultant mess of hardened or burnt sugar), you put sugar and water in the bottom of each ramekin (they must be both oven and microwave safe) and then put them in the microwave for approx. 2 1/2 minutes (you must watch them VERY carefully!), and you make the caramel sauce in each little ramekin! Pull them from the mircrowave the Second they turn light brown, let them cool, & then pour in your custard mixture through a strainer. Then you bake them in a "Bain Marie" (a pan of water) and Voilla!: Flan-o Perfecto!  If I can do this, ANYONE can do this!

As loyal readers of this blog know, April Fools Day is my 51st birthday, but I'm not finding it Nearly as depressing as 50.  LOL (I didn't find 40 NEARLY as depressing as 38, either...) I am therefore not planning to do or buy myself anything extravagant- although I Did treat myself to a ProPlay golf club handle/glove set & a cool (pre-loved) Helen Welsh "pony" zebra handbag on eBay, and am Hoping Dan & I get a chance to have a celebratory sushi-saki fest @ Kimono in Princeton...) I Am, however, still hunting for an engagement ring to replace the one I lost doing laundry, and so was back this week on DiamondNexus, in the Continuing Saga of Elisse's Great Ring Hunt. I, at 50, have been truly suckered in by the "Journey Jewelry" ad campaigns, which tout a string or a circle of diamonds, each one representing a 'milestone' in one's life. Having passed more than a few milestones to date, I find that concept Extremely appealing, and when I found the "Emotions" pendants on DiamondNexus, I began to think that maybe I want one of those, too!

Once you get to 40 or 50 (or 60 or 70 or 80 or 90...) and you have a few milestones to commemorate, the idea of a Journey Pendant is Very appealing. Whether it's kids or pets or jobs, military service or marriages or divorces (LOL), countries traveled to, illnesses survived, or houses owned (or all of the above, LOL), at some point it hits you that you Have been on- and are still on- a "journey", that life is, essentially, a "journey", and that it would be Really Cool to celebrate it all (or at least a few of them) in diamonds! 

What is cool about DiamondNexus is that while a diamond Journey pendant with stones of any size would be obscenely expensive, (and my journey has been Livin' Large, so I want Big Rocks! LOL), theirs, beautifully & perfectly set in 14k white or yellow gold, are actually affordable! (And Boo-Boo wants a 3.2 carat one, to be sure!) And they have them with emerald, ruby, saphhire, & chocolate gems, too!

And as someone who's mom has fought- successfully, B"H- the fight against breast cancer, and who has/had many friends and loved ones affected by this horrid disease, I LOVE that DiamondNexus has a 7-stone rose-pink "Journey of Healing" pendant, and that $200 from the sale of each pendant and chain set goes towards funding the fight against breast cancer.

Click here to check them out!

I will close this post with a couple of photos that prove that it really Is, Actually and Truly, Spring, here in Landgraff, WV:

Thoughts On Spring... dieting, turning 50, & Luis M.

Our group of ATVing guests left the Inn this morning for home, happy w/their 2 days of riding, several armed with hand-made WV coal tchochkas for their wives :-) The daffodils & magnolia are in bloom, as are our 3 fruit trees, & Dan even set up my giant, new 7' tall inflatable birthday cake outside! I would like to be bubbling over with happiness- and should be, truly: happy guests, more bookings, gift shop sales, two great reviews on http://www.tripadvisor.com/ and http://www.bedandbreakfast.com/, and a gorgeous page on http://www.wanderingeducators.com/... But a young friend of ours is apparently dying & I'm broken-hearted.

Luis M., a FEMA co-worker and friend who is in his 40s, is in the hospital in Puerto Rico, apparently dying from prostate cancer. I say "apparently" because I cannot bear to say otherwise; I HAVE to hold out hope for an "extreme miracle", the "Hail Mary Pass" in the big football game of life, as it were.

Not having medical insurance, Luis kept working & put off going to the doctor until it was too late, and now his friends around the country are emailing each other news from our colleagues visiting him in the hospital in Puerto Rico telling us of his sickness during what seem to be the final days of his life. I have been posting "status updates" on my http://www.facebook.com/ page asking my 156 facebook friends to please send him their prayers, hope, love, good karma, healing wishes... because I don't know what else to do. I want to cry, but I can't even do that... But I also can't sleep. For Luis to needlessly die young from an illness that could have been successfully treated had he been able to afford to see a doctor, makes this all so incredibly tragic that I've been walking around pretty much in a haze now for days, & he hasn't left my thoughts for months.

Luis was (is? It is hideous to be talking about him in the past tense when his is alive!), bubbly, funny, smart, talented, good-looking, and full of life and laughter. He was, like me, a FEMA Community Relations Field Specialist and a Reports Tech. The picture I have in my head of him is all of us dancing and laughing one evening during a FEMA training @EMI in Maryland a few years ago... and how he howled and teased me mercilessly for slipping & falling on my way up to the stage to join the gang in singing "We Are Family"... When I heard how ill he was, I sent him an "Easy" button from Staples to cheer him up, hoping & praying that somehow he would get the life-saving treatment he needed...

But he didn't- or whatever he did get didn't work- and he was "sent home to die" several times, each time winding up back in the hospital, where he is again, apparently now being given nothing but pain medication to ease his suffering.

I am "muddling through" as they say, thanking G-d daily for the miracle of my life & going about the minutiae of day-to-day living- "putting a good face on it" as they say. From the emails I'm getting from my FEMA friends, they're apparently doing likewise... I'm striving to enjoy our guests & the antics of our 2 puppies, trying to focus on planning our summer garden & working on promotional writing projects for the Inn, and letting myself be distracted by Facebooking & Tweeting, and, of course, eBay- my "retail therapy" out here in the mountains... But my thoughts keep cycling back to death & dying, and the fears I have of both; & a lot of dwelling on the existence of G-d, & why humans have always needed to create religions, in great measure, I think, to convince ourselves that death is not The End & that there really Is "eternal life"... Yes, I need therapy! But not having a therapist out here In The Country (where every doctor's answer to almost everything is "take anti-depressant pills), I write; hence, this Blog...

Another issue factoring into my "mortality thoughts" is that my 50th birthday is coming up in a few days: 1 a.m. on April Fools Day. I always loved having that birthday as a child, first of all because no one could forget it, & second, because my mother always made it fun w/a gag gift of some sort. The party we are planning to celebrate it with friends isn't until July, so in theory I'll get to celebrate twice, which, again, should be making me happy: I'm alive & seem to be in good health, & I'm gonna be a half century old! :-P When I was turning 38 & depressed to be "pushing 40", (Oh, to be 38 again!), my mother told me it "was better than Not turning 40", which, of course, it was. This time she emailed me that "50 was good, 60 was good, 70 was good, & 80 was good" (she's 86); and so, please G-d, it shall be! But 50 happened so damn FAST!!! It truly feels like my 40th birthday party was about a year ago and I got out of the Army about 3 years ago... A lot of my friends are older than I, and think it's hilarious & ludicrous that I've gotten myself all worked up over turning 50, spring chicken that I am, but to me it feels so Odd to be- all of a sudden!- so damn Old... Yeah, "50 is the new 30", me & Madonna are both the same age as Barbie, etc., etc., but having not had kids I think I'm stuck in a kind of state of arrested development: I still feel- in my head at least- 19... No one's carded me of late (like they do my friend Cindy, the Ageless Beauty of NYC), but I don't think I look Too bad- just Fat. And so I have finally, really, started to diet- the first one I've had to do in decades. :-P

About 2 years ago my metabolism seemed to come to a grinding, screeching halt while I was working on a FEMA disaster operation in Kansas. I remember having to go to the Sallies to get new size 8 khaki slacks, after I'd "grown out of" all the size 4s and 6s that filled my suitcase. Having put on weight on FEMA ops before (the 3-meal-a-day-thing really packs the lbs. on me), only to have it come off w/in a few months of being home & "eating normally" (one meal & a lot of coffee, basically), I wasn't worried. But this time No dice. By the time we left on our honeymoon trip I was so fat I couldn't fit into any of the cute clothes I'd bought for it; I gained still more weight in Vietnam, to the point where I had 2 chins & had to have clothes Made for me there... And then last week I went to the doctor for a check-up & learned I'm almost 140 lbs., & nearly gagged. I am 4' 9 1/2" tall & should be 100 lbs. 110 is fine, even 114. But I have NO BUSINESS being Anywhere Near 140. Last year I tracked my food intake on www.Glamour.com, & discovered that I rarely go over 1000 calories/day- but that I was GAINING WEIGHT on 1000 calories/day! And so The Diet has begun: I'm on Day 4 & haven't cone over 650 calories/day- including my nightly 100 calorie 4 oz. glass of red wine! :-) I figure if I can keep this up for a month I should be back into my 4s & 6s before July4th... I found a sparkly little Bob Mackie spaghetti-strap mini number on eBay for a song- a veritable festival of sequins it is!- and assuming I can get it zipped & not look like a sausage in a casing, I intend to wear it- with suitably sparkly stilettos- on July 4th... I also have my Slendertone belt & a batch of new pads, & tonight I will start using that again. What I Should be doing, of course, is exercise, but I'm a sloth... & between mistressing the website & online gift shop, taking bookings, blogging, email, professional assignments, LinkedIn, eBay, facebook, & twitter, I'm almost literally chained to the computer! I'm Hoping once it warms up a bit more we'll be out there playing golf, ATVing, & gardening...

In looking for a way to 'treat myself' for my b'day (and focus on something really silly & thus distracting), I did a Lot of internet research & eBaying, & finally decided to get myself a few help-the-birthday-diet purchases: an order of my fave AminoGenesis anti-aging skin care products to both restock our Gift Shop & my vanity table, a pair of LG-XL (UGH!) ShapeFX Lytess leggings that promise to take off 2 inches if I wear them for 28 days straight, & a bottle of Ageless Fantasy, the perfume with clinical trials proving people think you're 8 years younger when you wear it. As expensive as it is (but I scored another eBay deal...), I want to test it; if it really Does work (I'll have to ask the check-out clerks in the Kimball WalMart how old they think I am...) I want to give samples of it to all my girlfriends in July! Does shopping ease depression? I don't know yet for certain, but I'm giving it the best shot I can...

Kibbutz Goldstein-Clark...

Can you sing the theme song to "Green Acres" in Hebrew?

The vegetable garden has grown quite a bit since Dan first built it in 2004, & I am ever threatening to put up a sign in Hebrew that states "Kibbutz Goldstein-Clark, Volunteers please go to the Office", in the hope that at least one confused Israeli tourist will stop in...

The "yard" next to the Inn was nothing more than a rock-hard field of coal-lumps, but the Old Aggie in me had visions of a vegetable garden out there, and I began trolling the Internet for the Companion Gardening info I vaguely remembered from John Bowne Agriculture HS. I really had No Clue about the amount of Heavy Labor creating a garden out of a coal field would entail, however, and had I had to do it myself, the lot would still be a field of rocks. To shut me up, essentially, Dan built us a garden there with railroad ties, filling it with several tons of Real Dirt & a lot of eye-rolling hope that something might actually grow... In the spring of 2004 we put in a bunch of strawberry plants, as well as tomatoes and peppers and everything else we could find at Wal-Mart, Lowe's, & Eller's Quick Stop, and I Miracle Gro'd the dickens out of it, and that first summer we were literally giddy from our "harvest"! We not only had tomatoes and peppers, but cantaloupes & cucumbers & potatoes & onions & herbs! I planted giant sunflowers, and they shot up to the sky and rewarded us with something truly lovely to look at from the front porch. I'd be out there weeding the tomatoes in my high-heeled clogs & cars would slow down and honk... What a novelty- a crazy woman gardening on Route 52! Our friends G & M gifted us with a DVD of Green Acre's first season, which was actually pretty much on the money; as a child my "party piece" was to sing the theme song of GA in my best Hungarian accent. (See? Life imitates Art...)

Our friend Kathleen, who has the Gillum House bed-and-breakfast in Shinnston, WV, brought us a dozen oregano plants, we set them in as a border, & they took off like wildfire. It got to the point where we were harvesting a Silly amount of oregano, and by the fall we had so much damn oregano that Dan was creating what would become some of the Inn's "signature" recipes: Oregano-Stuffed Roast Cornish Game Hen, Oregano-Stuffed Roast Turkey... His turkey recipe was indeed inspired: after brining, he stuffed it with whole branches of oregano & garlic & then roasted it, & it was truly Divine... I entered his turkey recipe in Park Seed's Recipe Contest, and he won first prize: a $50 gift certificate with which to buy more plants!

But in 2005 the Japanese Beetles arrived with a vengeance, and literally ate everything in sight. They spent all summer screwing on the roses before devouring all the flowers and leaves, and they demolished the vegetable garden. I was literally in tears, hunting on the Internet in vain for JB Killers and spraying everything with "organic" insecticides (hot pepper/tobacco/dish soap concoctions), as well as Sevin & any other poison I could find. Nothing worked. Our harvest was dismal.

2006 was a continuation of 2005, only worse. My mail-order climbing roses barely survived the Beetle Feeding Frenzy, and the sweet corn was stunted & grub-filled. In May of 2007, with the fruit trees in flower (the apple tree across from the Inn looked like a magnificent, giant white snowball), the roses in bud, & everything green and gorgeous, we had:a ludicrously late frost, 4 inches of snow, & a week of 10-degree weather. the tulips & daffodils went into "suspended animation" and were fine, but we lost roses, butterfly bushes, and eventually our little dogwood tree. I was in tears and close to despair; It seemed like The Garden was nothing more than a toilet down which we were throwing 100 dollar bills & false hope. In desperation I ordered a giant can of Milky Spore and got it down in mid-May, but I didn't have much hope as it's supposed to take several years to get the JBs under control.

But lo and behold,.we didn't see a Japanese Beetle all year!

I assumed it was the Milky Spore, until the fall, when I read some Bird Watcher posts on a WV Yahoo Groups chat room, and discovered that No One in southern WV had seen any JBs... & it occurred to Dan & I that the hated late spring frost may have killed the beetle grubs!

We will know this spring...

The bottom line is that this last summer we had THE best garden ever! I put Cozy Coats & Tomato Cages around our tomatoes and set them out early, and we were rewarded with a bumper crop of tomatoes all summer- 8 different kinds! (The best were the cherry tomatoes which were literally as sweet as candy). . We had hot peppers out the wazoo, eggplants, okra, baby field greens, enough basil to make 8 quarts of pesto, and sweet corn what-to-die-for...

A garden is about dreaming and planning, as well as hoping & praying & weeding & digging & spraying, and so the dismally cold & gray winter is spent pouring over brightly colored Burpee & Park Seed catalogs (and websites), dog-earring the pages of the things you dream about seeing flower in the spring and harvesting in the fall...

We've learned in the last 5 years that some things just will NOT grow here- I've given up on petunias, for example- but that others do amazingly well- oregano & basil, for two. Last year I planted basil all over our property, and we had a Pesto Processing Party, freezing 8 quarts of what I call the "essence of summer". The marigolds, impatiens, & vinca did splendidly, too...

Back to the catalogs & dreams of spring.. and as Eva would say: "Vould you like a Gin & Tonic, Dahlink?"