Hey, ho, KellyGO

The Modern's Kina

2013-03-31T12:58:00.003-04:00

The last time Mike and I were in New York it was sort of for my birthday but also to see The Clock at MoMA, possibly my favorite museum on the planet. The line had a four-hour wait, but I managed to make friends with the girl in front of us. I held her place while she went to buy a book, and she held our place while we had lunch. By the time we got back in line, we only had five more minutes to wait.

At lunch, I had a truly fantastic cocktail in MoMA's high end bar, The Modern. I was thrilled to find that the recipe had been printed online, and though the ingredients are a little hard to find, it's worth the search.

The Modern's Kina

Ingredients

1 1/2 ounces gin
1 1/2 ounces Dolin Blanc Vermouth
1 1/2 ounces Cocchi Americano
Dash fino sherry
Garnish: Lemon twist

Fill a mixing glass with ice. Add gin, vermouth, Cocchi Americano, and sherry. Stir until well chilled. Strain into a cocktail glass, garnish with lemon twist, and serve.

New cocktail Wednesdays: British Bulldog

2013-02-27T18:57:00.001-05:00

I've gone about a year or two straying from my first love, bourbon, to my new BFF, the martini. I make the best martini ever, really. I'll share my recipe at some point.

But my repertoire has narrowed significantly, so I decided to institute New Cocktail Wednesdays. This week's experiment is the British Bulldog, a riff on the "most expensive cocktail ever" recently in the news, which sells for $12,916 per cocktail.

From Eatocracy:

Winston (approximated)

2 ounces 1858 Croizet Cognac Cuvée Léonie ($156,760 per bottle, at least when last found at auction; Churchill and Eisenhower allegedly drank this Cognac while planning D-Day, hence the cocktail’s name)

2/3 ounce Grand Marnier Quintessence ($800 a bottle)

2/3 ounce Chartreuse V.E.P. Yellow ($150 or so)

1 dash Angostura bitters

Stir with ice, serve to billionaire.
Cost per cocktail: $12,916.
The bargain version I’m going to christen the British Bulldog (with apologies to Mr. Heffernan, whom I’m sure is actually one heck of a bartender):

2 ounces VSOP Cognac, your choice ($40, give or take)

2/3 ounce Grand Marnier ($35)

1/3 ounce green Chartreuse (much easier to find than the yellow, stronger, not as sweet and about $60)

1 dash Angostura bitters

Stir with ice in regular ol’ cocktail shaker with a chopstick, serve to anyone who looks thirsty.
Cost per cocktail: $4.80.
You know what? It ain’t half bad, though a little on the sweet side. Plus, you can have 2,690 British Bulldogs for the price of a single Winston. That’s what I call value.

I agree, it's too sweet for my tastes, but it's not horrible. I substituted Armagnac for the Cognac, but otherwise it was the same. Mike may have liked it better than I, but he still switched to Negronis after the British Bulldog.

Letters to Santa

2012-12-24T23:45:00.001-05:00

We're all looking forward to tomorrow. Thea may still be awake, and Liam will no doubt be up before dawn.

The kids made dinner

2012-12-13T18:37:00.001-05:00

I've been trying to get Thea and Liam into making dinner once a week. Tonight the kids made a super easy chicken parmigiana (sort of) that turned out well. This was Liam's first time making dinner, he wanted me to be sure to note, though Thea has made lasagna before and is getting pretty good at chopping. Here's what they did (with supervision):

Step 1: Bake some chicken tenders (10-15 minutes at 425 degrees).

Step 2: While the chicken is baking, warm up tomato sauce on the stove-top and add spices. (We added onion powder, thyme, oregano, basil, salt, and sugar.)

Step 3: Take the chicken out and put it in a casserole dish. (Liam did this part and arranged the chicken as if her were a professional, one layer down and then the next layer overlapping on top just a little in a perfect pattern.) Put some tomato sauce on the chicken, then put a bunch of shredded cheese on top.

Step 4: Put it back in the oven and bake until the cheese is brown and bubbly. An important lesson in baking: ignore the time for the most part and open the oven door only when your food smells done. Pull it out of the oven only when it looks done.

That's it! The kids were proud of the results and thrilled that it was my turn to set the table.

Action shot of eating!

I forgot to take a picture before dinner was served, but as you can see, it looks pretty good!

Lulabelle is jealous of the kids' big box

2012-12-05T22:25:00.001-05:00

The dishwasher died (maybe) right before Thanksgiving, and it's taken forever to get a replacement. I finally had a new one installed yesterday, but it still didn't work. The installer said it may have been a bad breaker, though replacing the faulty one still didn't provide power to the dishwasher. So Mike fiddled around with some wires and, voila, working dishwasher! Though we may not have needed a new dishwasher after all, the kids are having fun with the box it came in.

That Mike is quite handy. Since moving in a few months ago, he's installed two overhead lights and a garbage disposal, fixed the dishwasher (twice), and solved the leaky roof problem.

UPDATE: How could I forget, he also refinished all the floors on the first floor and repainted the den and living room, including the living room ceiling!

First-world threats

2012-12-04T20:46:00.001-05:00

My neighbor Saira, Mike, and I are coming down hard on all five of our kids. "If you don't finish your homework and clean the living room," we yell, "no soufflés for any of you!" O_o

Puma and I are worn out

2012-11-30T22:36:00.001-05:00

I fell asleep pretty much right after dinner. There's much I could say -- that Thea made dinner or that, despite my efforts not to give my son a name so popular he'll be one of dozens of Liams in his life, his name is #1 for baby boys this year -- but instead I plan to be awake only long enough to close out the month of posting without having to back date the last post.

Aaaaand scene.

The kids made swans out of their Chipotle leftovers

2012-11-29T18:17:00.000-05:00

So classy. No one does that any more. In fact, how did they know of it?

Nerd fight!!

2012-11-28T21:45:00.000-05:00

I found this drawing on the chalkboard by Thea. Cute!

Hank hiding after Sunday dinner

2012-11-27T20:04:00.000-05:00

The kids aren't allowed in the grownups' room. Is that why Hank was here?

Sunrise at work

2012-11-26T22:21:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, I was in a pretty crummy mood today. The Monday after a five-day break is tough. But there were more bright spots than dark. Tonight, Mike and I went to our new favorite neighborhood bar, Old Line, and got free homemade lemoncello from the bartender and free cheese from the owner/chef, and spent the evening chatting with a local who invited us to his party on Saturday.

And though it's hard to be at work at the ungodly hour of 6:30am again, the upside is that I get to see the sunrise. I know that this may be the only time in my life that I consistently have access to such sights, and I'd be a fool not to savor it.

The Sunday dinner when Chris's and my uteruses exploded

2012-11-25T19:32:00.001-05:00

Omg, babies holding babies. All the parents sing, "Sunrise, sunset."

Also: the Thanksgiving Cocktail = yum.

A boy and his dog

2012-11-24T15:11:00.000-05:00

Liam wants to hug Tina, but she keeps trying to lick him. Gross, Tina! I know what you snack on!

Thanksgiving dinner

2012-11-23T14:59:00.000-05:00

We may have had to eat off of paper plates this year, but dinner was still great. Here are a couple of the highlights:

Mike made a lovely turkey with stuffing inside that he then took out and cooked with even more stuffing so that we'd get all the flavor from the turkey but none of the salmonella. We also had mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts, as we do every year.

We also had two desserts, a sweet potato pie from the recipe I shared earlier, and

Mike's mom's famous "Lady Finger Pudding," which she made every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Mike says he, his brother, and his mom would each get one piece, and then his dad would eat the rest. It's pretty delicious, I have to admit. I'll have to remember to post the recipe.

To soothe our stomachs after dinner, Mike and I had grappa out of paper dixie cups. Cheers!

Thanksgiving cocktail

2012-11-22T12:35:00.000-05:00

This holiday is about indulgence, beauty, and acknowledging how lucky you are. In that spirit, here's what I'm drinking:

Thanksgiving Cocktail

One ounce Bombay Sapphire gin
One ounce Grand Marnier
One ounce cranberry liqueur (homemade, which I started about a month ago)

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Thanksgiving eve, stop harshing my mellow

2012-11-21T21:50:00.000-05:00

So, today my dishwasher died, right before Thanksgiving! Full of fetid water and dirty dishes! I can't have the new one delivered until next Friday. Then Mike's car (my old caddy) overheated on the way home from the store when he went out for a few last-minute things. Even worse, it appears his computer died today. I don't know if I can get the kids' baby pictures off it. We've also broken a flashlight, mug, and fan today. Lastly, Omar broke Liam's overhead light -- "It was an accident!!" and also the third time in a year --and there was shattered glass in Liam's bed at the end of the night.

Still, I have much to be thankful for. Thea reminds me that we have an oven and electricity, and the man who sold me the new dishwasher lost his wife a couple months ago, leaving him the single parent of two small children. My kids are happy and healthy, the kids' dad and I have an amicable relationship, and my boyfriend is a stone cold fox. All in all, my life is pretty awesome.

I saw the figure 5 in gold

2012-11-20T09:51:00.000-05:00

Today is the day before our five-day weekend starts. We're all pretty excited.

My neighbor, who usually takes them to school in the morning, is out of town helping her sister-in-law who just had a baby, so I had to come home to drive them to school after Mike got them ready. It was nice to have a chance to see them, since I'm usually gone long before either of them wake up. Liam said it was like opposite week, where we go to school and work for two days and then get five days off.

So I got another cup of coffee, and then the kids and I started chanting "Five! Five! Five! Five!" and dancing around the kitchen, high-fiving each other. We shouted things like "Five fingers! Five toes! Five pets! Five family members! Five rooms on each level of the house! WOOO!!!"

I love Thanksgiving. Best time of the year.

Homework at Plato's diner

2012-11-19T18:01:00.001-05:00

I usually hire my neighbor Al to do my lawn, as does pretty much everyone on our block. Today he is cleaning the yard with a leaf blower, which is really loud right outside our window, so the kids and I went to our favorite local diner to do homework and have some food. Liam usually orders the French toast, and Thea gets the caesar salad. We've been coming here for years. I love this place

Liam turn 7 years old today!

2012-11-18T22:18:00.000-05:00

Liam is now in first grade and doing great. He reads above his grade level, and is proficient in every other area. No complaints on the school front at all. His teacher says she wishes she had a class full of Liams. Right now, his favorite things to do are play tag with the neighbors and the dogs, make up stories with his action figures, and play wii games for an insane amount of time. It's weird how good he is at them, and if he plays with me, he'll sometimes take my control from me to get me past a level that I'm stuck on.

For this year's celebratory dinner, Liam asked Mike to make his famous butter cheese pizza. (Instead of pizza sauce, Mike uses butter, and it has tons of cheese on it.) It was a really lovely time.

Every year the kids are measured against the door frame. This year Liam is just a little shorter than Thea was at the beginning of this year, and he's two years younger. The boy is definitely tall for his age!

For his birthday cake, Liam asked for zebra icebox cake. It consists of fresh whipped cream and chocolate cookies. I made two icebox cakes, one with the traditional cookies and one with oreos. They were a big hit.

Since it's Sunday and we have Sunday dinner every week, which the kids look forward to as much as we do, a number of friends came over, including baby Aoife. Still adorable!

Date night

2012-11-17T23:41:00.000-05:00

We're standing in front if one of my favorite restaurants in DC, Montmartre. The kids' dad has them for a couple of hours three evenings a week, one of which is Saturday. Although we can't stay out too late, we try to take advantage of the time together.

Isn't Mike handsome? Rowr.

Dancing after dinner

2012-11-16T22:30:00.000-05:00

Mike flings the children around after dinner and worries the dog. Liam can't wait for it to be his turn.

The Love Boat, Halloween 2012

2012-11-15T18:30:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago, Mike and I went to a Halloween party where the theme was "Love Boat." I had no idea how to dress like a Love Boat, but I did some research and found that my favorite TV show as a kid, Charlie's Angels, had a two-episode cross-over show. Mike and I went as Kelly and Bosley. Though our costumes probably weren't the best ever, I thought we were better than the people who just went as "Random '70s Guy" or a random '70s TV character, even though the character was never on the Love Boat.

God, I'm such a dork.

Key part of my costume: tons of blush

Key part of Mike's costume: a phone

Key part of both of our costumes: the right attitude

Back-dating like crazy

2012-11-14T08:52:00.000-05:00

For years now, I've participated in National Blog Posting Month and have attempted, mostly successfully, to post to my blog every day for the month of November. Some months are easier than others. This year, I'm back-dating posts like mad. So, note to self, when I look back at the posts this month, remember that the pictures and posts don't always match up. I can't use my blog as a way to say precisely what was happening on any given day, as I've done in the past.

That is all.

Kissing is gross!

2012-11-13T12:41:00.000-05:00

The other day the kids and I were watching Mirror, Mirror. Overall, it was entirely enjoyable. Very pretty, the characters were cool, and the princess saves herself, the prince, and the kingdom, too, which is a great change from the usual princess stories.

The kids really liked it, except for the one kissing scene. It kind of builds up, so by the time the princess and prince actually kiss, you've been waiting for it to happen for a couple minutes.

When they finally kissed, the kids both started to shriek and writhe as if in physical pain. I shielded their eyes for them and let them know when it was over, and tried not to laugh too much while I did it.

Ewww, mushy!!!

Excuse my French

2012-11-12T09:08:00.000-05:00

The other day I was driving around with the kids in traffic. People were driving particularly badly, or maybe it's just that I was in a particularly bad mood, and I was swearing more than I should have been. After every curse, I muttered "Excuse my French." After a couple of times, Liam asked me what that meant, and I explained that it's just something people say, pretending that curse words are French and that you don't understand what they mean, I guess. After the next time someone cut me off and made me slam on the brakes, Thea said, "Mommy, you speak French so well! How long did you say you studied it?"

Funny girl. Very sophisticated!