Resolute
Pennsylvania is a weird place. Yesterday I was hoping to buy some beer, but apparently the beer distributors are closed on Sunday. You can’t even buy beer in the supermarkets here. I complain sometimes about the restrictive laws of New York State, but perhaps I should learn to be lucky for the good things we have.
The above means that I’m far behind in my New Year’s Eve preparations. The meat store was closed on Sunday as well, so I don’t even have a locally raised pork roast to braise in sauerkraut for good luck in the new year.
Hopefully today I can pick up at least a bottle of bubbly.
It’s going to be an extra low key celebration on the farm this year. My brother-in-law is taking off early with his family, and that cuts the party down to just Mrs. Fussy and myself. Maybe the two of us will practice being really old and play gin rummy while waiting for the clock to strike twelve. Or maybe we’ll just sit on the couch and each read our own books. I’m going to try really hard not to lose myself in a game of Plants vs. Zombies.
Reading is one of those things I’d like to do more of in the new year. Here are some others:
My Year in Food
I’ve never done anything like this before. We’ll see how it turns out. I figure it will either be really interesting or perhaps the most boring thing I’ve written in a long long time.
Which does make me wonder which posts I’ve written that have just left readers scratching their heads. But I digress.
Saying that I’m obsessive about food is an exercise in the obvious. But the big contradiction of my food loving life is that I take a lot of pictures of what I eat, yet rarely post any to the blog. I’ve written about this as a modern-day secular blessing for the bounties we receive. But over time these pictures accumulate into a rather interesting archive.
No, I’m not going to share them with you today. I don’t do that sort of thing, and the pictures themselves aren’t noteworthy. What is noteworthy is the story they tell when they are all strung together. At least I think. Let’s see.
Sparkle
Before we get back to further examinations of the past year, there’s a little bit of new business to discuss. Really, though, it’s not new. It’s been rehashed every single year around this time in one form or another.
It’s the one thing that is on everybody’s mind once Christmas is fully over. I say fully because the day after Christmas still seems to be a part of Christmas. This holiday makes no sense to me at all.
Regardless, now all of our thoughts are focused on New Year’s Eve.
For the past couple of years my New Year’s Eve plan has been among the lowest of the low key. Mrs. Fussy, her father, and I try valiantly to stay awake until midnight so we can have one last toast before going to bed. That’s life on the farm. And this year promises to be no different. But even this subdued celebration is still a celebration. Even if you are in your PJs it’s hard not to sparkle when there are bubbles in your glass.
2012 The Year of We Broke Through
Holidays come and holidays go. Over the course of a year a lot of things happen. For better or for worse, mine is a daily food blog and that means there are over three hundred original essays on food published here every year. Almost every single one of them is written by me, and the vast majority get reviewed by Mrs. Fussy before going live.
In many ways this year was like every other. We went on more FUSSYlittleTOURS and I made my case in support of the FUSSYlittleBALLOT for the third time. I continued to write Eat This! for All Over Albany every other week, and was reinstated as a judge for their Tournament of Pizza.
Except this year something happened. I don’t quite know what it was. But in January the traffic numbers went up substantially from the same period a year ago (over 40%). And now instead of just complaining about the Times Union poll, somehow the paper adopted one of the meaningful changes I was pursuing, which eliminated Subway from the Best Sandwich winner’s circle. Without a doubt the FLB has been getting more attention both within the Capital Region and beyond its borders, and that is very exciting for me.
What follows isn’t so much a top 10 list of the most popular posts, but really rather buckets of what seems to have resonated over the past year. This is as much to help me figure out how to write more meaningful content in 2013 as it is for the curious or neophyte to either re-read or discover significant posts from the past year.
So here it goes:
Ho Ho Ho
Joke’s on me. Everything is closed today. Usually that makes it a great day to drive down to Pennsylvania and eat some Chinese food along the way. This year we’re traveling a few days late.
I’m hoping that means a night of Taiwan Noodle for me and the Fussy Family. But they may be packed thanks to a recent rave review in the Times Union. It’s good that they finally learned what many of us have known for a long time. Now the secret is clearly out. Good for the folks at the restaurant. Less good perhaps for those of us who are used to just breezing in and getting a table any time we like.
What I will be doing is heading over to see Albany Jane and join her for brunch. I’ll be bringing a few goodies of my own, especially seeing as how the butter caramels I brought back from Paris don’t quite fit into my new diet. It’s so sad.
But while my understanding of this holiday is still tenuous at best, it doesn’t stop me from giving some helpful advice to get through the day.
AskTP – All I Want for Christmas
Usually we drive down to Pennsylvania on Christmas day. There is a passable Chinese restaurant in State College that allows us the chance to have the traditional Jewish Christmas dinner. But then we hit the road before taking in a movie.
This year we are a little off our schedule. A big pre-apocalyptic trip can do that. While we were away I was scheduled to post my bimonthly Ask the Profussor. That didn’t happen. And now there’s even a bigger backlog of questions that has stacked up.
So today, just in time for Christmas, I will make sure that all pending questions have been answered. And as it just so happens to work out, this will be the last Ask the Profussor of 2012. Soon I’ll be spending some time looking back on the past year and contemplating 2013. But now it’s time to fulfill my commitment of making sure that every question asked in the comments receives an answer (provided, of course, it was written with proper punctuation).
So without further ado, onto the questions.
Cafe Culture
It’s not the coffee culture of Paris that I was enchanted by, it’s the cafe culture. And they are two different things.
I leaned heavily on David Lebovitz and his blog to guide me through Paris. After all, he was the pastry chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. In my book, that’s a pretty good indication that we would see eye-to-eye on what it means for food to be good.
Anyhow, he had a list of places to go in Paris to actually get good coffee. I got to swing by two of them, and they were a pleasure. David also warned about the state of coffee around much of Paris. Like Manhattan, despite the presence of some truly great places, there’s a lot of thin and bitter swill.
But the cafes of Paris themselves are utterly charming. These are different from the coffee shops. Yes, you can get coffee in one of these cafes, but that doesn’t seem to be the point. And I think it’s telling that they are more omnipresent there than fast food restaurants are here.
Let me tell you a bit about the love affair.
Repent
So today is the end of the world. Huh.
Stick with me for a moment. I remember way back to the late 1980s when I was still in high school. There I had a philosophy teacher–yes, I took philosophy in high school–and she was incredible. She was into kabala way before Madonna and one parent filed a formal complaint with the school that she was a witch.
It made sense, since she dressed like a gypsy and every Halloween she would read Edgar Allan Poe to the class by candlelight. She also read tarot cards and palms. So she embraced the whole witch thing. But I loved Mrs. L, and she was among the greatest teachers at the school.
Anyway she foretold as the current millennium came to a close all the kooks would come out suggesting it would be the end of the world. And she predicted that this phenomenon would likely persist for at least a good ten years or so into the new millenium. She wasn’t psychic. She was just extrapolating from history.
How does this relate to food? And what does it have to do with repentance? I’ll tell you.
Bread & Butter
Had I been clever, I would have written a whole bunch of posts on the long plane ride over the Atlantic. But there is something about the drone of plane engines that scrambles my brain and prevents me from being productive.
Instead I watched two movies, took a little nap, and read a bit about gin.
My time in Paris was short and sweet, so I need to be careful about drawing too many conclusions about the city or its culture. And I am so enamored by its cafes that I can hardly contain myself. But the thing I’m going to miss the most is the bread and butter.
Farewell to France
As I write this, most of you are still asleep in your beds. Mrs. Fussy and I are at CDG getting ready to come back home. It was a quick, but amazing trip. It was also the first time in probably three years that I took any midweek break in posting to the FLB.
There is far too much to see and do in Paris regardless how long your stay. I could imagine living there for years and still not doing everything I wanted. So, there were tradeoffs. Things that were left undone. Dishes that were left uneaten. Cheeses that were left on the shelf.
I suppose it’s always good to leave wanting more. Had I been traveling with ADS or Raf surely they would have pushed me beyond my own natural limits and I would have found a way to consume more food than humanly possible. After any visit with them I feel like a goose whose been gorged to fatten up its liver.
Before I dive into the trip summary, I think it should be noted how Paris is similar to Albany.
FUSSYlittleBLOG 