Wine Pairing

Sam's won a wine and food pairing party for 10 that was donated by her boss' husband who does it for a living. So Sam invited her colleagues and their spouses to it and it was held in a furnished vacant penthouse in Crystal City. The unit was pretty cool with a view of the potomac, and Jefferson Memorial, right off the metro.

The event itself was interesting. Andy, who ran it, actually does not like the word "pairing" as many wines will go well with many foods. First he explained what many of the wine adjectives mean in more laymen's terminology. Then we took six wines, one at a time, and tasted them in combination with different foods that would stimulate different tastes: sip, bite, sip. The results were interesting in some cases, obvious in others. For instance, lemon went well with one of them which I have already forgotten (which I guess defeats the point), sauvignon Blanc perhaps.

Of more interest was the company which was excellent. Sam's coworkers are all very cool, professional, funny. And their spouses as well. Talked about gardening, food, music and of course, apartment leasing. Hope to be able to do similar events again in the future.

Hamlet @ Folgers

I went to see my first Shakespearean play since coming to DC last night at Folger's Shakespeare Library. This venue is behind the Library of Congress kinda near the Capital South stop. I got to walk around the exterior and see both the facade sculptures and English Garden with its metal sculptures; alas was not able to see the libraru itself. The theatre here is an intimate 250 seats in size and elizabethan in style. Very comfortable with good acoustics, small enough that there really is not a bad seat in the house.

For this production, the set was very spare and white, a reminiscently Scandinavian style, appropriate to a play about Danish monarchy. The dress was business formal, cutting edge in fashion (fitted, European style) and seemed completely appropriate for the Royal figurals portrayed. There was also excellent use of light to illuminate sections of stage and provide contrast for scene changes. Also loved the use of film as the medium by which the cast watches the play-within-a-play scene.

The play itself was very well directed and acted. I thought the cast was strongly emotive, with Hamlet conveying a lot of raw anguish. The character playing Hamlet Sr (and also the lead actor of the play-within-a-play) deserves special mention as his voice was so perfectly... I don't know. He just sounded really good. Ophelia was a bit weak though I do not really have much to compare her too and I will say that Hamlet's anguished dialogue sometimes made it difficult to understand his speach.

Overall, I have not seen Hamlet in a long time and will be seeing it in Opera form next week but this was an excellent production. It seems to me that with Shakespeare, understanding the play before you see it makes you appreciate it more so knowing the story or watching it multiple times and perhaps in different interpretations just gives you more appreciation.

Summer Lentil Salad

This is an interpretation of something I saw in the whole foods in Winter Park, FL while in town for the weekend. Very hardy, filling summer salad (or anytime of the year I guess).

Salad
1 c cooked and cooled lentils (cooked 20min in 2 c vegetable broth)
1 bunch steamed and cooled al dente brocolli
4-5 roma tomatoes, roughly chopped
1 bell pepper roughly chopped
1 cucumber chopped
4-6 spring onions chopped

Dressing
1/8 c olive oil
1/8 c hemp oil
zest of 1/2 lemon
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/8 c cider vinegar
1/8 c red wine vinegar
1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 tbs chopped fresh basil
2 cloves garlic finely chopped

Mix all ingredients, mix dressing and pour over. Mix salad well and refrigerate. tastes best on day two.

American Buffalo @ Studio

Last wednesday was Spanish night so I headed over to the Studio Theatre so see if any rush tix were available. Sure enough I landed one for American Buffalo. This is a play by David Mamet about three small time crooks planning a job and interacting with each other. The draw in this play is really characterization as plots and themes are pretty minimal. The dialogue is fantastic complete with accents, slang, cursing, etc.

The story lays bear the paranoia, greed, and ultimately friendship and stretched bonds of loyalty of these characters in a very realistic, and gritty way.

Mom in Town

I could probably get a whole lot of posts out of my mom coming into town for a long weekend as we packed the weekend full of things to do, all deserving a mention. But I will summarize them all into a single quick Itinerary with links:

Thursday PM -

Pizzeria Paradiso - Had the special, a mushroom and sausage pie, along with a four cheeses with fresh arugala on top. Mom and Sam had a flight of Belgian beers while I had a Dulk Milk Stout.

Dolcezza - Bought coffee for the week and a Hazelnut and Pistachio gellato

Friday AM -

National Gallery of Art - West Building - On the round level is the Chester Dale collection, a gift of mostly early 20th century art from the generous benefactor, including a good video of the same.

Friday Afternoon -

National Gallery of Art - East Building - After a quick lunch on the mall, visited the East Building for the first time. Beatiful scultures in the open main level, sort of misplaced Sacred Made Real exhibit about 16th century Spanish religious sculpture and painting, an interesting space, complete with choral music setup for Mark Rothko, Many mobiles from Alexander Calder, cutouts of Henri Matisse, beautiful photos of windows, and an eclectic colection of 20th Century art. Highlight was probably Dali's Sacrament of the Last Supper.

Smithsonian National Museum of African Art - Walked down the mall en route to the monuments, but the extreme heat pushed us into this museum behind the castle to cool off. Only saw the first level where there was an exhibit on the use of animals in African art, mostly archeological, but some modern pieces.

World War II Memorial - Many of the war monuments are relatively new since my mom moved from the area so we did a quick walking tour. The first is a bit overwhelming... in size, not in emotion. The WWII memorial in its attempt to honor the contributions of every state and to organize their contributions visibly in so egalitarian a way, it is hard to really focus on anything in particular so I guess, I don't really get much from this one.

Korean War Memorial - This one on the other hand, though I have no personal relationship to this conflict, is incredibly moving. The tableux, statues expressing very human emotion realistically moving through a jungle, combines the natural elements that were such a large part of that conflict with a monument wall, memorializing the faces of so many contributors.

Vietnam Veteran's Memorial - Only saw this from the periphery, but again this stark monument provides a powerful focul point, the memorializing wall of names, shaped as a "V".

Friday PM -

60 Miles to Silver Lake - After a light dinner of homemade salad, took the bus down to Logan Circle to meet mom and go to the Studio Theatre where Sam and I have seen two other productions. This was a relatively short no intermission play taking place completely in the front seat of a car consisting of the conversations between father and son over several years.

Saturday AM -

Patisserie Poupon - I was not in attendence but mom got to rendevous with her old friend Pat for a lovely breakfast on the back patio of this Georgetown eatery.

Saturday Afternoon -

Politics & Prose - Wanted to give my mom a taste of this DC institution at which Sam and I are regulars. On saturday afternoon, Nan Chase talked about her book, Eat Your Yard about planting and eating edidble plants in even a small yard across any climate.

Northern Virgina Fine Arts Festival - Took the drive out to Reston, near my office, to this very large festival where mom ran across a couple old friends quite by accident. Many of the vendors we have seen at the Winter Park festivals along with many new booths of very high quality and reasonable price. Hope to return next year. Highlites were Valerie Bunnell, Lenny Campello, Kina Crow, C.L. Cunningham, mom's friend Ellie Diez-Massaro, Glenna Evans, Marie Gruber, Aaron Hequembourg, Clare Malloy, Woodrow Nash, Ginny Ganong Nichols, Scott Olson, mom's Art Tribe friend's boy friend Steven Olszewski, and Rasa Pranckunaite.

Saturday PM -

Dukem - This Ethiopian restaurant is fairly well known in DC as the place to go when you want to sample this cuisine. It is located in the up and coming U Street coridor on the periphery of what is now known as Little Ethiopia.

Sunday AM -

Dupont Farmers Market - Wandered the market, sampling cheeses and fresh fruit. Bought some chocolate/almond croissants and apple pastry to eat on a bench in the circle. Wandered the streets of Dupont circle, saw mom's 21st St House, and her regular hangout, the Phillips Collection.

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian - This is a stunning building architecturally. Started at the top floor to view a cool short film in a circular amphitheater then walked through some historical exhibits. Saw an excellent exhibit by a current Canadian artist, Brian Jungen titled Strange Comfort, where he uses many common items from our lives including sports paraphenalia to sculpt items of Native American significance. Glanced at the cafeteria menu and decided we will definately return for that alone.

Sunday Afternoon -

Walking the Dogs - headed to Montrose Park, adjacent to Dumbarton Oaks for a walk with the dogs, and utterly exhausted them.

Art Studio Openhouse - I could not find any link for this but there was a cool openhouse at an artist cooperative at Avon and R St NW across from Montrose park. This was catered by Whole Foods and there were some interesting artists on exhibit.

Sunday Kind of Love - Busboys and Poets hosts a poetry open mic the third sunday of every month (in addition to their other open mic events). There were some phenomenal voices here, both on the established side (Aracelis Girmay and David Gewanter), students of the genre, and amateur.

Wow. Vacation from vacation time.

The War Lovers

Evan Thomas was at Politics & Prose on Wednesday night at 7 so after doing a bit of apartment hunting, I headed over. He is an editor at Newsweek and preceded his talk by admitting that he was a slight hawk on the Iraq war and wanted to explore his hawkishness by falling back on the general American Hawkishness that seems to date back at least 110 years. He wrote a book about five characters, three hawks and two doves, in the lead up to the Spanish American war. His book is descriptive, offering no pat solutions to prevent our culture's general hawkishness from leading us into the next war, but he was a great speaker and I hope a good author as I did end up purchasing the book.

The Question and Answer period was mostly interesting, including one guy who challenged Thomas's self description as only slightly hawkish, lumping him into the general category of journalist that was not only hawkish but was critical of criticism from the doubters. I do not really recall anything He specifically wrote so I am willing to believe his retort that if we were to go back and review the record, that he did not fall into that extreme category. The questioner's anger was palpable and the reality was that the category he refers too was not really that extreme. It was quite common for the media to be critical of the doubters. Even though I can say with pride that I fall squarely in the skeptics camp long before March 2003, it is interesting that I have mostly moved on. I can understand, even though I rarely think about it, the extreme frustration of those that were proven absolutely correct about the merits of that war be shunned while those that were proven absolutely incorrect keep their lofty and privilged positions as arbiters of the truth and of responsible opinion, Evan Thomas included.

Drumming in the Park

We try to take the dogs to a new park every weekend as a way of getting ourselves to a new park every weekend. We are not totally rigorous about the effort, having fallen back on good old neigboring Dumbarton last weekend, but with an increased toll of guilt on Sunday, Oscar leaping in the air every time we left the house in anticipation of accompanying us, we decided on Meridian Hill Park. We had driven by the park back on Easter Sunday and thought the imposing western facade was very unique and wanted to make sure we eventually checked it out. This park is also know for having a Drum Circle every Sunday afternoon, so we got to kill two birds with one stone.

The park is not too large, only about two city blocks, but does have some impressive city views as at it's southern end, it is raised a good 20-30 feet above the city. This is where the drum circle performs. There are about 20 drummers with all manner of percussion instruments, and a crowd of about a hundred or so looking on or just relaxing in the general vicinity. Not being an expert in these things, I won't offer a classification, though I will hazard a guess at it being Afro-Carribean in origin. Very cool, authentic, "only in..." type thing to do. The weather was cooling off though so we could not stay long. We walked the dogs around the park once to try to tire them out (it does not take much) before getting back in the car. We canvassed to the Columbia Heights, Mt Pleasant, Kalarama Mews, and Adams Morgan neighborhoods to get a feel for them in our ever expanding apartment search before heading home.

Mikveh @ Theatre J

Mikveh is a new Israeli play recently premiering at the Jewish Community Center's Theatre J over at 16th and Q NW. It deals with 8 women of varying ages dealing with life, community, and religion in an orthodox Jewish Mikveh, or ritual bath center. This play captures a momemnt in the lives of these women very well, showcasing the realizations they come to about themselves and their community, yet leaving larger issues very much unresolved and uncertain as trying to do so would definately lead into the trite.

While I enjoyed the play, and identified with its idealogical themes, I nevertheless felt a bit like an outsider passing judgement over a way of life I have very little standing in which to judge. At it's heart, this is a very patriarchal community, and I think the message here could be easily extended to Muslim and some Christian communities which have parallel traditions, yet the success of the play is having characters within the community come to realizations inspired by their own life stories. Presumably much of the audience in Israel and at a Jewish community center in DC will share at least some of that identification and hence some of the authenticity of those judgements. My self, not so much.

Dolcezza

I just wanted to do a short post affirming the excellence of Dolcezza. They recently opened a new location in Dupont Circle at Connecticut and R, though we have been up to now regular customers of their spot in Georgetown on Wisconsin and Q. They make amazing gelato, especially in the nut and coffee family. My favorites are their hazelnut and pistacio, while Sam really likes the peanut butter. They also make very good fruit flavors such as Mango and Avocado.

There coffee is amazing. Not much more to say on that front. Just thought they deserved a post of their own.

Hank's Oyster Bar

After the failure of our EU Open House tour, we needed some food. I have criss crossed the streets around Dupont Circle a lot in recent months, always envying the sidewalk cafe crowds enjoying the various fares in this bustling neighborhood, so we decided to sample a bit of it ourselves. After peeking at the menu's at a couple of these venues, we settled on Hank's Oyster Bar, whose name I had seen on the Commonwealth site several times and seemed very promising.


We ordered a couple of beers since they had Troegs on the menu, but since Sam did not like here Pilsner, ordered a bloody mary, leaving her beer for me. Bloody Mary's here are top notch. They brought out some goldfish crackers and some very fresh sour dough bread with butter and jam to snack on while we waited. The service was a bit slow when we arrived; they may have been a bit understaffed to handle the full table load. I ordered one of their specials, trout over a bed of escarole with a side of fries. Sam had a crab cake benedict. Mine was amazing and fries were very good to. Sam's... not so much. They brought out a bowl of dark chocalate chunks broken from a block with the check that were also of very high quality. Prices were moderate, $60 for the meal before tip.

Shortcut To Europe

Most of our free time has been taken up lately by researching where we will live next as our lease comes up sometime in July. So we have been searching Craigslist and canvassing neighborhoods we like to find For Rent signs is promising locations. We took a break on Saturday to head to the European embassy open house tour throughout the city. We started at the EU embassy to get a map and figure out what it was all about. We did not really get any sense of it so we headed over to nearby Spain to start. The line wrapping around the cordner, eerily reminiscent of a certain destination in our last hometown of Orlando, scared us on though. We thought, maybe this one was an aberration, being so near what was probably a common starting point. So we walked up to the west end concentration of embassies just north west of Dupont Circle only to find that this was no aberation. The embassies visible from one corner on Mass and 20th, Luxembourg, Greece, and Bulgaria, all had lines with over 50 people in them, not exactly moving at a brisk pace. For whatever reason through, Estonia, also visible from this corner, was nearly empty, so we headed in to see what all the hubub was about. We gor to walk around a very nice townhome, well furnished, roomy, etc... but we did not get it. I mean, if this was all there was why was everyone waiting to get in. I felt distinctly like an outsider. I mean no insider would wait in line for this. So we ditched. The other embassies will have to remain shrouded in mystery. We'll always have Thailand...

Modern Times

Sunday Morning feels like a time for productivity so we headed out early to Modern Times, the coffee shop beneath Politics & Prose as they have advertised bagels from Georgetown Bagelry, ironically enough located in Bethesda which has been noted as one of the best bagel joints in DC. Bagels were pretty good though not as good as those from North Jersey. They also have an excelledn herbe mate late. There is also free wifi there so I did a couple of hours of blogging.

Passport DC - Thai Embassy

While canvassing the Dupont/Logan Circle districts looking for For Rent signs, we noticed massive crowds around Dupont Circle. I just took them for normal saturday afternoon about town types, maybe augmented by a flea market, it turned out they were all doing the Passport DC event, an opening of 30 embassies to the public for food and cultural exposure. Most of the embassies were open from 10am to 4pm so we basically missed it. Luckily for us, the Thai Embassy is located right here in Georgetown and was running it's event until 8pm, so we headed over. The first floor was filled with stalls from various Thai restaurants around the city. We started with some Mango Sticky Rice which was to die for and we took home some Papaya Salad (along with a recipe) to eat later as we were coincedentally going to be eating some Thai Red Curry I had defrosted a couple of nights before. This salad turned out really good too.

As for the est of the event, there was some cultural dancing scheduled that we missed, but much of the upstairs was a bazaar of clothing, handbags, jewelry, and sculpted flowers from soaps and melons. The last was pretty cool.

Dogfish Head @ Dean & Deluca

I found out about this event through the excellent calendar utility at the Washington City Paper's Young & Hungry blog where I can add events directly from their calendar to my own google calendar. This event was $20/person located in the cafe area (the outdoor seating) at the Georgetown Dean & Deluca location. A Dogfish Head rep was on hand to talk about 5 of their beers which were wonderfully paired with some AWESOME Dean & Deluca cheeses. Dogfish Head is a local brewery located out on the beach in Delaware so we are looking forward to a visit.

First up was a 90 minute IPA paired with a 3 year old Gouda. This beer was very good, not too bitter and the Gouda was a standout. I do not normally like Gouda but this one tasted more like a cheddar than anything else. Next was the Midas Touch which was quite exotic, paired with a goat cheddar. Then came their Red & White, a belgian style paired with a brie. Up next was Fort, the strongest fruit beer in the world at 18% paired with a blue veined cheddar (which we later bought a small sample of). Last was their World Wide Stout, the world's strongest again at 18%, paired with some dark chocolate squares.

We liked the last three so much we bought one of each along with our cheese.

Great Lakes @ Pizzeria Paradiso

Monday was April's Pizza & Brew night at Pizzeria Paradiso with Great Lakes Brewing Company, an outfit out of Cleveland. We got our table by the fireplace again and were seated with a pretty nice couple, beer enthusiasts both, who live in Maryland and attend beer events pretty regularly. They had actually been to this brewery and raved about it. The rep from the brewery really emphasized the sustainability of the company and our new friends backed him up on the excellent restaurant there. I think my idea for pairing road trips to cities I have not been with Yankees road trips just had Cleveland move up a few notches.

Food was once again excellent. They brought us out an extra small pie and an extra calzone which we split with our neighbors and took home (and I had for lunch the next day). I would say these two courses were my favorite. The paired beers were REALLY good, most in the Ale family. They debuted the Lake Eerie Monster, an Imperial India Pale Ale which was probably my favorite. These were all fairly strong beers.

Earth Day on the Mall

Not sure how we missed it but there was a big Earth Day celebration on the mall. By missed it, I mean heard about it before hand as we did end up seeing a bit of it. Sam had her kickball game, typically played in front of the capital delayed an hour because of it so we walked over and sat for a bit to listen. We had the dogs with us so could not go into the main crowd but there were some nice, fairly uncrowded areas just to the side of the stage. Unfortuneately we were between sets for pretty much the entire time we were there so did not really get the full experience. There were huge tents set up with what looked like a clean energy science fair but again the dogs prevented us from heading in.

Sam's team won in spectacular fashion just as the temperature dropped about 15 degrees. We headed over to My Brother's Keeper, the league bar over on 3rd just north of the capital for a couple of beers (dogs had water) before heading home.