Back in Time
The best part about typewriters was being able to pull your work out from the rollers and tear it up into little pieces or crumple it up into a little ball, if whatever you were writing wasn’t coming together.
Typing on a laptop isn’t nearly so satisfying. Last night I started a post and then thought better of it. The thing wasn’t quite working for various reasons anyhow. Maybe I’ll tackle the subject again once I sleep on it a bit. Or maybe it will get lost to the seas of neglect.
Anyhow, that left me in a bit of a lurch for today’s post. So I’m going to rely on a bit of a cheap trick and go back in time. The good news is that June 13 has been a pretty great day for posts in the past. Here, take a look.
AskTP – Last June in Jersey
It’s going down. I’m yelling, “Timber!”
We’re wrapping things up here at IAS. Yes, there are a couple of more weeks. There’s the chance to get in a few more lunches. I’m actually bummed that yesterday I missed the zucchini clafoutis with truffled polenta and tomato broth in the dining hall. If I can drop a few pounds, I may even be able to justify another visit or two to Hoagie Haven. But people are leaving for their home countries and the place is starting to feel a bit empty.
The U-Haul is booked. The boxes are standing by. We’ll need some more tape and to eat through a bit more of our stockpile of foodstuffs, but I’m sure we’ll manage. Plus, we know a couple of families that are staying on for another year. Hopefully one of them will find a use for a bag of chickpea flour.
In the meantime, life goes on. Posts continue to be posted. Readers come to the FLB and read. Commenters comment. Lurkers lurk. And occasionally someone asks a question. Even more occasionally, I’ll answer one. But I’ve made a commitment to answer all the questions asked in the comments section of the blog, and so I created this semi-regular feature called Ask the Profussor.
Today we’ve got a full sack. So, without further ado, onto the questions.
Delinquent
The endless vacation ends in less than three weeks. Egads. And honestly, I’m just going to have to leave some New Jersey foods uneaten, because I’m already north of my expected ten pound weight gain.
Should you ever get a chance to go on sabbatical, I highly recommend it. The truth is that neither Mrs. Fussy nor I ever stopped working. Work just takes on a different pace. Sure there are some responsibilities both of us left behind in Albany. But when I return, I know that I’ll be ready to pick them up with a renewed enthusiasm.
Or at least that’s my hope.
In the meantime, this relaxed pace of work has taken a toll. I’m feeling guilty about stories I haven’t written, initiatives I haven’t moved forward, and associations I’ve only loosely maintained. Fortunately, the FLB is a great outlet for such things, and if you’ll indulge me for just a few minutes I hope to make it worth your while.
Touring Trenton
Tomato Pie is a funny thing. For most people it probably conjures an image of a tomato sauce covered piece of focaccia. And that’s not wrong. Perreca’s in Schenectady makes a tomato pie like this that’s a regional delight.
Trenton Tomato Pie is entirely different. It’s more like pizza, but there is cheese on the bottom. Which is not the same as cheese-on-the-bottom pizza, because Trenton Tomato Pie is certainly not that either. COB buries a layer of cheese under a layer of tomato sauce making it almost like a Chicago Deep Dish without the second layer of crust.
In the case of this central New Jersey classic, the cheese and generous spoonfuls of glorious New Jersey tomatoes are intertwined. There is cheese on the bottom only in an attempt to protect the thin crust from the weight and moisture of the tomatoes, but there is plenty of burnished cheese on top to crank up the flavor of these pies.
I’ve been sampling a few of them here and there, including a head-to-head of Papa’s and DeLorenzo’s. But I had yet to widely try what’s available in the towns around Trenton that pay homage to this Chambersburg specialty.
That all changed on Sunday.
Weekend Reading
Let’s try something new, and we’ll see how it goes. Fridays come and usually I try and do some kind of post about wine or spirits. Because, hey, weekend.
But then there are two days of no Fussy. What’s a food lover to do?
Well, really you should be out there looking diligently for the good stuff. Trying local specialties that you’ve never gotten around to eating, visiting small independent producers who are doing great work, and buying amazing ingredients from local purveyors to turn into your own delicious dinners.
Still, somewhere during all of that you might have downtime to read something about food and there are two entire days without a word from the Profussor. I’m not going back to posting on weekends, but I can give you a silly long reading lists of interesting food tidbits from around the interwebs to keep you occupied until Monday.
Coffee Call
Call me curmudgeonly, but I have developed an innate distrust of food manufacturers and producers. It always seems as if they are trying to work the system providing as much mis- and disinformation on their packaging as allowed by law.
Maybe my scorn should be towards marketers who keep finding new and clever words to dupe consumers into buying their client’s products or the government agencies who think these practices are perfectly fine.
Regardless, over time I’ve been trained to become a close reader of product packaging. You’ll never know what’s lurking in a pint of cream, which butter has added flavor, or where zero calorie sweeteners will turn up when you are least expecting them.
So when I encountered the following message on a bag of supermarket coffee, I was skeptical at best.
Sacrifices
Life gets distracting, and time slips away.
That was the potential pitfall of Project Penzeys that I started about a year and a half ago. The idea was to thin out my spice drawer that was overflowing with old and seldom used jars. To ease the pain, I decided to take it one week at a time.
If I’m not mistaken, I did keep this going for a few months before we had to move. Instead of doing it weekly though, I slipped into monthly. Every four weeks two jars would get tossed and another two would get replaced with fresher, more vibrant versions of the same.
Then of course came the move to Princeton.
For what it’s worth, I think I’ve done a remarkable job resisting the temptation of hoarding new spices with both the Savory Spice Shop nearby and my deeper interest in Indian cooking. Sure, I’ve picked up a few new things like dried aleppo chilis and black mustard seeds. But for the most part, I’ve been able to make do with what I had on hand and buying refills of spices only when needed.
Now that we are getting ready to pack up all our stuff again, it’s time to leave some behind.
Hangers On
So, we’re moving again. Last time I was in this situation was July. We have until the end of the month to pack up our things and move on. This was the part that I thought I would hate. Truly. Ask me after moving back into our Albany home if I still feel this way, but right now I’m finding the exercise to be liberating.
There’s just too much stuff. We have too much stuff. And moving down here, we managed to rid ourselves of about a third of it. Now that we’re moving back, I’m going to take the chance to thin out the load another time. And when we clear out our Albany storage locker, there will be even more culling.
It’s true that I didn’t expect to use all the files that I brought down to Princeton, and I didn’t. But I had kind of hoped to finish some of the foodstuffs that I schlepped across state lines. Now I’m taking inventory of our pantry, and there are some things that have no chance of being consumed before we leave. Some we’ll bring back to Albany. There are actually a few forces at play which have created my current fix.
Checking Out NJ
Leaving San Francisco cost me close to twenty pounds. In those last few weeks I was trying to eat as many of the things I knew I wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere. So it wasn’t uncommon for me to have two lunches or two dinners.
The weight eventually came off, and I was glad to have made farewell stops to some of my beloved favorites. Even still, there were places I missed.
Now we’re in the final stretch of the New Jersey adventure. It’s June. Last month. On the plus side, I haven’t been here that long. There aren’t so many places to which I feel some deeper level of connection. Of course, there are also plenty of places I haven’t visited that have been on my list for a long time.
After this past weekend, I’m feeling a wee little bulge in my belly as I’m pushing to cram just a few more local delicacies down my gullet before heading back north. And I have big plans for next weekend too, but more on those later. First I have to confess for my gluttony.
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