Abbiamo imparato a fare la pasta!

That’s right…we learned how to make pasta!

 

The Real Cool Cooking School

As an engagement gift, my siblings gave Todd and I gift certificates to the Bekins’ Real Cool Cooking School in Grand Haven.  Finally, last Tuesday, we went to learn how to make fresh pasta.  We chose this class because we figured it was something that we’d never attempt do on our own.

Chef Todd

Our instructor, Tom Reinhart, was trained at the Culinary Institue of America and did a great job of walking us rookies through the process.  There were about 8 people in the class and it was the perfect size to allow each of us to actively participate in the class.

Chef Tom teaching us the technique

Everything we learned was surprisingly simple.  After mixing up a batch of dough (eggs + flour + salt) we all got to work kneading and rolling out the dough with a pasta maker.  While we got the pasta nice and thin, Chef Tom started mixing up fillings for what would eventually be our raviolis.  We all worked together to create three types of ravioli – three cheese and spinach, chicken and garlic and sausage and cheese – creating tortellini, beggar’s purses and triangles of dough to wrap around the delicious fillings.  It was a long process, especially since we were learning as we went but really simple, I never knew make pasta from scratch would be so easy!  Plus, it was so fun to put effort into a meal and have it turn out so well.  We even added a pasta roller to our gift registry after we got home!

The Final Product - Così Delizioso!

The class was great fun and I’d definitely try another.  The school offers classes every Tuesday night and Saturdays too, teaching bread baking, how to make soups and sauces and souffles, world cuisine, cakes – pretty much anything you’d want to learn how to make.  Even though the Real Cool Cooking School has a cheesy name it’s well worth the visit.

Ready to Cook!

Thanks Matt, Em and Drew for the great gift, we loved it!

Todd’s 11 Rules for Technology in 2011

1. Your email address must have some relationship to your actual name, and the closer to your full name, the better.
2. If you don’t check your email at least once per day, we can’t be friends.
3. You don’t have to have a smart phone, but I can’t relate if you don’t want one.
4. It is time to get rid of Hotmail, AOL, and really any email provider that isn’t Gmail, Yahoo, or your business’s domain.  With email forwarding services, switching is much easier than you probably think.
5. You should have more than one charger for every digital device you own that runs on a rechargeable battery.
6. It is time that you own a portable device with a map function.
7. If you don’t consider yourself tech-savvy, your next computer should be a Mac.
8. You should have a Paypal account by now.
9. At only $5 per month, everyone ought to use Backblaze or a similar online backup service. Sometimes computers die or get stolen, and that’s a real bummer – you know what’s worse?  Having that happen and losing all of your files in the process.
10. The simplicity of services like Google Docs and Dropbox (both free!) mean that you shouldn’t bother emailing yourself files anymore.
11. You have to at least try the Kindle before claiming that you like “real” books too much to get one.

Abriendo Mentes Update

During our time in Playa Potrero we were able to take video and finally, months later we have finished work on the Abriendo Mentes – An Introduction video.  Watching the footage made me miss Potrero and the kids so much.  Todd and I are both hoping that a trip back is in the star but until this video will have to do.  We hope you enjoy it!

 

And don’t forget, since we’ve left Meradith and Drew have continued their work helping to educate the young minds of Potrero.  They’re down there making a difference and you can keep up with all of their amazing accomplishments at their website and blog.  Miss you guys!

 

 

Home (brew) for the holidays (Part II)

Update: Beer Number 1 (“Todd’s Christmas Tea”) is done and ready.  Here’s what some people are saying about the new brew:

“If I paid money for this in a store, I wouldn’t be upset.”

“This is GOOD.” (in a shocked voice)

The packaging needs a little work.

Cheers!

Keep your eyes on the goal

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. As a general rule, I believe if you want to start (or stop) doing something, you should just start (or stop) doing that thing.  You don’t need to “resolve” to do it, and you certainly shouldn’t wait until January to start (or stop) doing whatever it is you want to start (or stop) doing.

I do, however, believe in setting goals.  A few years ago during our annual Christmas Tea, we decided to share our goals for the coming year.  The following week, we memorialized our goals via email, and at some point later that year, we all did a “goal check up” (again via email), before repeating the process the following Christmas.  We did this because it seemed like a good idea.  Little did we know that writing down your goals, making them public, and being accountable to others for your goals are considered some of the best ways to ensure that they happen.  I’d also add that specific and quantifiable measurements make a big difference.

Hopefully you can see the difference between making New Year’s resolutions and setting clear, measurable goals.  If not, let me show you:

Resolution (bad): I’m going to get in shape in 2011.

Goal (good): I’m going to run the River Bank Run on May 7, 2011 (great day, by the way).

There’s no good way to track “getting in shape.”  Does it mean going to the gym 4 times per week?  Increasing your bench press?  Lowering your average pace per mile?  Additionally, there’s no way to figure out when you’ve gotten in shape, and therefore, even if you do manage to “get in shape” you won’t get the benefit that comes from knowing you achieved your goal.

On the other hand, committing to running a 15-mile race on a specific day gives you an obvious, measurable goal to work towards, with clear signposts along the way (such as being able to run 3 miles, 5 miles, 10 miles, etc.).  On your way to reaching that goal, you are very likely to “get in shape” (whatever that means), and, oh, by the way, it’s going to feel great when you finish the race and achieve your goal.

Now that you know how I feel, here are my 3 goals for 2011:

1. Run 365 miles.

After a 2-year hiatus, I’ve recently started running again a couple of times per week.  I’ve been exercising regularly since law school (thanks, Dad, for suggesting that going to the gym was a good thing to do when I was sick of studying), but my relationship with running has been very on again off again.  This year, I’m going to run an average of 1 mile per day (but not actually run 1 mile each day).  So far, I’m WAY ahead of pace, having run 3 miles in 2 days (547.5 miles per year pace for you non-math types).

2. Read 12 books.

This is year 3 of this goal.  In 2009 I finished about a week late.  In 2010 I had a lot more time on my hands and nearly tripled my goal, reading 33 books.  After getting a book from Kate for my birthday, and a Kindle from my parents for Christmas, I feel good that I can achieve this goal again.

3. Find a job/career path that I’m comfortable doing for the next few years.

I used to think that I was going to get out of school, go to work for one organization, stay there for 40 years, and then retire.  Well, that obviously didn’t happen.  So let’s try to simplify and find something that I want to do for at least a few years.

Happy New Year!

Home (brew) for the Holidays.

Kate and I were recently spent a weekend in Chicago, and while there, we toured the Half Acre Beery Company.  This kicked off a string of emails between myself and my 2 brothers about how we need to open our own brewery.  Mostly this consisted of me saying “We should start a brewery” and Joel and Scott responding with “Agreed” or “Duh” or “Why haven’t we done this already?”  Once we had established that it was in fact a brilliant idea, we mostly just bickered about what to name it.

The idea of starting a brewery is not new.   Ever since we gave up on the idea of starting ScrougeYou.com (an ahead of its time website where you could send coal to a person of your choosing at Christmas time), with the brilliant tagline (courtesy of Craig Neckers): “When instead of saying ‘Merry Christmas’ you want to say ‘You Suck,’” the Neckers brothers’ business plan du jour* has been starting a brewery.

*Every time I see “du jour” on a menu, I always think of this famous exchange from Dumb & Dumber:

Lloyd: What’s the soup du jour?
Waiter: It’s the soup of the day.
Lloyd: Mmm, that does sound good.

So after much debate about the name, 2 weeks ago I kicked off the initial phase of what Scott has dubbed “Silver Lake Brewing and Davenport Sales, LLP” (formerly known as the “Neckers Bros. Brewery”).

This isn’t the first time the Neckers brothers have gotten into home brewing.  I’m using a kit that Kim gave Joel a number of years ago, which he used throughout law school.  Scott’s tried his hand a few times, and in 2008, my then roommate Justin Mast and I made a batch of Russian Imperial Stout that Justin famously named “Fig Brewton” due to the fact that the beer tasted strikingly similar to the once popular snack food.

I picked up a kit from Sicilanos Market here in town, opting for a “Holiday Ale” and set off to brew.

Despite a few minor blips in the process (mostly related to the difficulty in trying to use a hose as a syphon while holding the ends in 2 different buckets that were about 3 feet apart), my return to home brewing was successful.  After 2 weeks of letting my Holiday Ale ferment, last week Kate and I bottled the Neckers Bros. Brewery, err, Silver Lake Brewing’s first batch.

In a week or so we’ll give the Holiday Ale a try, but in the meantime, Scott and I decided to give a 2nd batch a go yesterday, brewing an IPA together.  Now, if we could only get Joel to actually pitch in and help, maybe we could really be the Neckers Brothers Brewery.

(Special thanks to Kate’s sister Emily who gave me another beer kit (the soon-to-be-brewed Kate’s Kolsch) for Christmas.  Check out her new blog here.)

Goodbye, Grandpa Hendricks.

Two weeks ago my Mom’s Dad – Don Hendricks – passed away at the age of 91 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s.

Grandpa Hendricks was simply the kindest person I have ever known.  You can still see it alive and well today just by spending 5 minutes with any of his 3 children, who are now all in the running for kindest person on the planet.

Today I want to share with you 3 memories I have of my time with Grandpa Hendricks.

Memory #1

My brothers and I played tennis from the time we were little all the way through high school, and other than my parents, there wasn’t anyone who came close to attending to more of our matches than Grandpa Hendricks.  Dressed in his trademark khaki pants and golf hat, he watched quietly, and was always quick to congratulate on a match well-played – after a win, or a loss.  It didn’t matter to him, he was just so, so proud of us.  I don’t remember Grandma being at those matches very often, but I’m sure that’s because she was off shopping at Penny’s with Marge, finding something to spend 10 dollars on so that she could get a free mini-radio to give to one of us boys.  I never had the heart to tell Grandma that the items they gave away for “free” were unquestionably worth less than what she had to spend to get them.  Then again, I’m sure she wouldn’t have cared; she was too Dutch to think it was anything other than a great deal.

Memory #2

Grandpa Hendricks loved to play golf, and when I was in middle school, I took up the game for a brief while.  One Saturday morning the summer before my 8th grade year, I went golfing with Grandpa, and one of his friends – I’m guessing it was Arnie, since as far as I know, those two golfed together every day for at least 20 years.

While we’re playing, we get to a short par 3 that was about 160 yards long.  Grandpa and Arnie hit first, and then it’s my turn.  I take out an 8 iron, and hit the ball the right distance, but off to the side, away from the green.  While we were walking towards the pin, Grandpa asked me what club I’d used.  I told him it was an 8 iron – and he couldn’t believe it.  He’d used a 6 or 7, as had Arnie, and Grandpa couldn’t believe I could hit an 8 iron 160 yards.  Regardless of the fact that my shot missed the mark, to me, this was the ultimate accomplishment – in my mind, Grandpa was a golfer on the level of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicholas, and Chi Chi Rodriguez – whose name was on the golf clubs that lived in Grandpa and Grandma’s garage that I’ll always remember using along with Scott to imitate Chi Chi’s famous swash-buckling celebrations.

Memory #3

My final memory of Grandpa for today comes much later – sometime in the last few years, long after Alzheimer’s had taken away nearly all of Grandpa’s memory.  It was a holiday weekend in the summer, and being as such, we were at the Silver Lake cottage, and Joel and Scott and I had anchored the canoe not too far from the beach, and were attempting to hit plastic golf balls into it.  Grandpa and Grandma were out that day, and as he normally was at this stage in his life, Grandpa had been very quiet.  At some point he came over to see what we were doing, and at my Mom’s suggestion, he was given a golf club.  Now, for those of you who play golf, you know that the real golfers hold the club a specific way – not like a baseball bat, with one hand on top of the other, but in a very counter-intuitive way, with some of your fingers interlaced.  And sure enough, despite not knowing what holiday we were celebrating, or probably even the name of the lake he’d spent so many years on, when Grandpa picked up that golf club, his hands immediately went back to the familiar grip on the golf club, and after a couple of picture-perfect practice strokes, he started absolutely peppering balls at the canoe – far more successfully than Joel, Scott, or I.  That’s probably my last truly happy memory of Grandpa – as his Alzheimer’s only worsened from there.

Final Thoughts

As many of you know, I live year-round at the house on Silver Lake that Grandpa built so many years ago, and in closing, I just want it to be known that:

– I still sharpen my pencils with the ridiculously inconvenient pencil sharpener in the back closet;

– I still skip the traditional pizza cutter and use scissors instead

– I still call the yard that abuts the lake the “front” yard, despite it having no road access;

– I still call all of the couches at the cottage “davenports”; and,

– I still plan to play wiffleball every 4th of July, even though there are no more tomato plants to step on while fielding grounders up the 3rd baseline.

I’ll miss you Grandpa – you’re gone, but certainly not forgotten.

A Reflection on ArtPrize

Today is the last day of ArtPrize until next year’s competition.  Last year, Todd and I missed the  majority of the inaugural installment of ArtPrize because we were on our trip to Machu Picchu.  This year we were able to spend a good amount of time downtown during the competition, both for ArtPrize and other unrelated events.  The buzz around the social experiment (a term that I dislike for some reason) has been overwhelmingly positive.  As a bonafide participant in the ArtPrize 2010 experience, I have to say I completely agree.

Every time I’ve been downtown in the last two weeks the bustle has been amazing.  I have never seen so many people walking around in Grand Rapids, it’s felt like a different city, as busy as any day in Chicago.  It’s great to see people enjoying and, I think largely, getting to know their city.  It makes everything feel so alive.

Another thing is that literally everyone has been downtown.  From moms with strollers to groups of hipster kids to businessmen and buses full of senior citizens, people from every walk of life have been walking around to check out the art.  ArtPrize has become the most universally popular attraction in this town.

On top of that, everyone seems to have an opinion about what’s good and what’s bad.  What’s art and what’s not.  It’s a far more stimulating discussion than any I ever had in an art class when I was in school.

One of the things I think of when considering whether to stay in Grand Rapids or to move elsewhere for awhile is the energy of a city.  Of course a new place is always exciting and full of things to discover but there are some cities where people are outside all of the time.  It was that way when I lived in Buenos Aires and the life that was constantly happening on the streets was invigorating and I miss that.  But in these last two weeks of ArtPrize, Grand Rapids has felt that way – lively, exciting, buzzing, energetic.

I am so excited that Grand Rapids has been blessed with ArtPrize.  It has woken up the city, it has brought it alive.  I am so proud of our little town.

 

Silver Lining

I had the worst day at work today. Just really crummy. When Todd came home from work today, he arrived with this to make me feel better:

He is the best. I am so lucky.

We’re jammin, jammin…

Todd’s a pretty normal guy but he has one big quirk.  His big quirk is that he doesn’t like jam.  It has something to do with the texture and also his aversion to fruit (his biggest quirk).  He even claims he can’t stand the smell of jam and leaves the room when I’m putting jam on my toast.

Despite his utter dislike of jam, yesterday afternoon he helped me make homemade blueberry lavender jam.  It must be love!

I’d never made jam before but saw this recipe on a friend of a friend’s blog.  How could I resist?

picking out the stems

blueberries ready to make into jam

todd zesting the lemon

such beautiful colors

mashing those berries

blueberries, sugar, lavender, lemon

jam, jarred

finished product

(From Surprised by Joy)

Blueberry Lavender Jam
Adapted from Vanilla Garlic

3 lbs of blueberries (48 oz.)
1 lb of sugar (16 oz.)
3 T. dried lavender
Juice and zest of one large lemon, preferably organic
1/4 teaspoon of butter (this prevents foaming)

Day Before Jamming: Measure out your sugar using a kitchen scale and place in a large bowl. Measure the dried lavender into the center of a square of cheesecloth and tie up tightly in a sachet. Bury this sachet in the sugar and cover well, letting it sit preferably for 24 hours. This helps infuse the lavender essence into the sugar, which lends to a beautiful, full flavor in the jam.

Day Of Jamming: Wash the blueberries and toss them into a stainless steel or copper pot, or a enamel lined dutch oven (not an aluminum pot as this will leach). Mash the berries with a wooden spoon or a potato masher. Add the rest of the ingredients, including the lavender sachet, and stir. Let macerate for about 10 minutes. Place a small plate in the freezer, as this will be used for testing later.

Turn heat to medium-high. The mixture will bubble and froth vigorously. Skim the foam off the top with a slotted spoon, if necessary (the butter should help prevent foaming; I found stirring mine well kept it from foaming too much.) The boil will subside to larger bubbles, but still bubble vigorously. Be sure to stir frequently, to keep the jam from sticking to the bottom.

After about 20 minutes, begin testing the jam by placing a small amount on the cold plate. Allow 30 seconds to pass and then run your finger through it to see what the cooled consistency will be. Boil for a few minutes longer if desired for a thicker jam. (Because of the high amount of pectin, the jam sets up pretty well, so turn off the heat when it still seems just a little too liquidy.)

Remove the lavender sachet and discard, then ladle the jam into hot, sterilized canning jars* and seal leaving 1/4 inch of head space. Wipe the rims of the jars clean before applying the lids. Screw on the rings to finger-tight. Work quickly. Process in a water bath for about 10 minutes to ensure a good seal. (A large stock pot is perfect for this.)

Let the jars sit out on a towel overnight, and then store in a cool, dry place.

The only difference in how we made it was that we didn’t actually properly can it.  Instead, we just froze the jam we’re not using right away in sterilized canning jars so that we’ll have blueberry lavender jam available to us all winter long.  I tried it on my toast this morning and it turned out great – a really lovely combination.

“We’re jammin.  To think that jammin was a thing of the past, we’re jamming, jammin and I hope this jam is gonna last.” – B. Marley