Asheville to Asheville, Dust to Dust

It has been many moons since I had summers off as a student, but still in August it seems even in the corporate world that more emails than not return an "out of office" response. In this spirit, I am kicking off an "out of office" blog series, detailing a few of our summer travels.

The temptation here is for me to drone on and on like any newly returned traveler worth their salt who has invited over for dinner a friend who is unsuspecting that food actually serves as a cover story for deluging the unsuspecting guest with copious amounts of dreaded photos.  I will endeavor to be succinct while interesting, though the beauty of the internet is that you can pop right over to Google as soon as you feel your eyes glazing over.

Entry 1: Asheville, North Carolina

With family in Alabama, we picked Asheville a bit haplessly, in the sense that its geographical position betwixt Virginia and Alabama served as its main selling point. Nonetheless, the area offered several interesting haunts. Given a steady rain that settled in shortly after our arrival, plus a fair amount of time waiting for either my daughter (1 year) or my nephew (15 months) to wake up from various naps, I'll spare you the enjoyed family time and skip to a few of the local highlights.



The Eats:
Tupelo Honey Cafe: Probably my favorite of the trip, a southern-food-turned-modern cafe with killer fried green tomatoes and goat cheese grits. My fish was rather overwhelmed by a heavy cream sauce, but all other dishes at the table were home runs.

Asheville Brewing: Solid pizza & brew, a casual and family-friendly restaurant in downtown Asheville. Family friendly is certainly our gig these days; in fact, I will take this moment to officially apologize to servers everywhere for the blanket of cheerios dropped under our tables.

Chocolate Fetish, Chocolate Gems, and French Broad Chocolate: We did a bit of a chocolate tour through Asheville (someone had to do it!), sampling the wares from all 3 places. Chocolate Fetish won for most interesting displays (handpainted chocolate seashells and such), Chocolate Gems won for my overall favorite (dark almond bark was phenomenal), French Broad won for best brownie (though a killer line to go with it).

The Ogles:

1. Biltmore: There's really nothing I can say to do justice to the largest home in America. The 250 room French-Renaissance style home was built by George Vanderbilt, the grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt.  The Commodore initially established the family fortune through steam ships and the New York Central Railroad. While the acreage of the estate is significantly less today than it was in George's heyday, it still offered beautiful gardens much more extensive than we could explore in an afternoon.

George was one of Commodore's younger grandchildren; the majority of the family wealth went to the eldest grandchild Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who created a similarly opulent summer home in Newport, RI, The Breakers.

2. Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway
We barely scratched the surface here, but enjoyed a quick hour-long tour on the Parkway before deciding that night-time on a unlit road with steep drop-offs probably wouldn't be the wisest life decision.

3. Craft Fair of the Southern Highlands: An extensive hand workshop-type fair, featuring crafts from woven cloth to hand-carved brooms and furniture. We wisely decided not to take two babies through the tight aisles and "you break it, you buy it" mecca: they enjoyed causing trouble outside the center.

All in all, an excellent trip!

Win the Hour

When our daughter was born she was seriously fussy. Like purple-faced-screaming-for-hours-on-end-inconsolably fussy. Colic, reflux, whatever it was, it wasn't pretty. What I knew would be hard (bringing home an infant) started to seem impossible, and I plagued myself with questions of "What if it's like this for months?" "How will we survive feeling like the living dead?"

My husband's solution: Win the Hour

Pulled from a book on Navy SEAL training he had been reading in his abundant free time (read: pre-arrival of said screaming infant), Chris explained that all we had to do was "win the hour."

For those not familiar with SEALs, the training is notoriously brutal (not surprising), and the third week is aptly named "Hell Week," described by the Navy Seals website as "5 1/2 days of cold, wet, brutally difficult operational training on fewer than four hours of sleep." If that doesn't sound sufficiently terrible, they helpfully add:

Trainees are constantly in motion; running, swimming, paddling, carrying boats on their heads, doing log PT, sit-ups, push-ups, rolling in the sand, slogging through mud, paddling boats and doing surf passage. Being still can be just as challenging, when you’re standing interminably in formation, soaking wet on the beach, or up to your waist in the water, with the cold ocean wind cutting through you. Mud covers uniforms, hands, faces – everything but the eyes. The sand chafes raw skin and the salt water makes cuts burn. Students perform evolutions that require them to think, lead, make sound decisions, and functionally operate when they are extremely sleep-deprived, approaching hypothermia, and even hallucinating. While trainees get plenty to eat, some are so fatigued that they fall asleep in their food. Others fall asleep while paddling boats and have to be pulled out of the water by teammates. Teamwork and camaraderie are essential as trainees alternately help and encourage each other, to hang in there and not quit.

What is one of the hallmarks of those who can survive Hell Week? Those who can survive mentally, not getting bogged down by the thought of all the impossible training ahead, but knowing that all they have to do is "win the hour." Make it through the next hour, that's all you have to do. Don't think about the next one, don't ask how you're going to make it through tomorrow, just focus on this hour. All you have to do is get through it.

Bizarrely, this was comforting as the parent of an infant - and sure enough, the hours passed, then the days and weeks, and our purple bundle of terror turned into a happy, amazingly mellow baby.  I found myself pulling back the "win the hour" motto recently, when my aunt (an active Air Force colonel) asked me to run a half marathon with her. At the time, my longest run post-baby was 5 miles, and the half was only 6 weeks away, but a "win the hour" mentality helped make the idea of 2 hour training runs less indomitable. The run was last weekend, and we had a great time - beat our goal time - and put a bug in my ear to maybe train for a marathon. But if there's one thing I've learned, it's to not get too wrapped up in thinking about all that a marathon entail. All I need to do is win the hour.

Motherhood & Social Justice

Mother’s Day naturally sparks contemplation of motherhood. Your mother, your parents’ mothers, perhaps yourself as a mother. (To which I find Jane Churchill’s point helpful that “there’s no way to be a perfect mother and a million ways to be a good one.”)  In contemplating Mother’s Day yesterday, I ended up reflecting on social justice. 

Wait, what?

Let me back up a bit. Traditionally, the ideas of life and philanthropy have been distinct spheres; I have my job/family, and then I separately (hopefully) do other good things, like give money to charity.  The ultimate goal of philanthropy is social justice (in other words, improving the human condition), but this is not accomplished solely by cutting checks. It is accomplished through a mindset of the heart that meets the needs of the socially marginalized – the widows and orphans, to borrow biblical terms – through sacrifice, be it service in time or money.  This idea of service is broad; one example Tim Keller gives in his teaching “An Everlasting Name” centers around a friend of his who owns a string of car dealerships in the south. Like most car dealerships, the salesmen had an amount of leniency on price to allow for customer negotiation. The owner began to realize through a study of his sales data that distinct patterns appeared regarding what buyers received the best deals: men were better negotiators than women, white people were better negotiators than non-white, the wealthy were better negotiators than non-wealthy. The result was that elderly African-American women were receiving terrible deals on cars as compared to their male, white peers. The owner saw this as an injustice, that one people group was getting better service over another, less-resourced, group and decided to institute fixed pricing across his dealerships so that all customers received the same, fair price. This ties into Keller's explanation of the Hebrew word for justice (mishpat):

“Mishpat means acquitting or punishing every person on the merits of the case, regardless of race or social

status. Anyone who does the same wrong should be given the same penalty. But mishpat means more than

just the punishment of wrongdoing. It also means to give people their rights…. Mishpat, then, is giving people what they are due, whether punishment or protection or care. This is why, if you look at every place the word is used in the Old Testament, several classes of persons continually come up. Over and over again, mishpat describes taking up the care and cause of widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor—those who have been called ‘the quartet of the vulnerable.’”

(Keller, Generous Justice, pg 3-4)

Parenthood is perhaps the ultimate reflection of the kind of service that creates justice. Not only are your constituents dependent upon you for (literally) everything, they are constantly around you. There is no mental or physical distinction of “now I am headed off to the soup kitchen, where for the next 4 hours I will serve in a specific time and place;” rather, parenthood service runs around the clock: whatever kiddos need, wherever they are, with the ultimate aim of turning dependents into independent, productive members of society. In fact, service is so ingrained in parenthood that you often meet a need even before the child knows s/he needs it. This doesn’t happen immediately – parents bringing home a new infant hear the screaming and try everything before figuring out what the problem is. Meeting unarticulated needs comes from being so familiar with your child that you know their every expression, their every necessity.

The familiarity and integration of service into daily life that begins with our families must be expanded to those around us if we ever hope to achieve social justice as a society. It means really getting to know those around us, being on the lookout for unspoken needs, and finding ways of dealing fairly with everyone we meet – be it family, colleague, car-buying customer, or stranger on the street. In our society of looking down at our gadgets, it means looking up and looking out. 

When I was pregnant in NYC, I rode the subway regularly, and in 9 months exactly two people got up and offered me their seat. It wasn’t that subway riders were malicious and didn’t want to get up, it’s that they simply didn’t notice me. On long rows of seats, everyone was looking down – at their kindles, newspapers, iphones, ipads, whatever. They just didn’t see me. Having been for a long time the person with her nose buried in a kindle, this was a startling revelation to me to have the feeling of invisibility, a need un-noticed and un-met.While I had the resources and social standing to simply ask someone to get up, those most vulnerable in society typically cannot so easily resolve their injustices.

And so it is that in a society of injustice, I want to both challenge us to seek justice more voraciously and to toast those working to make it more just: those serving their children through 3 am feedings and scrubbing vomit off the bathroom floor, those dealing fairly in their businesses with employees and customers, those looking up from their gadgets to listen in the silence for unspoken cries for help.

Eating More than Apples in the Big Apple

The buzz. The lights. The bagels. These things can only mean one thing: NYC.

Chris, Emma and I spent last weekend in "the city," and besides a marathon of revisiting cherished friends/colleagues, I also did my darndest to hit all of the food I miss the most from living in NYC - all in a span of 3 days. I have since developed a slight waddle (just kidding - sort of), but hit many of my favs from the city.

Of all the fates for tourists in NYC, there is little more tragic than standing in Times Square and watching them wander blindly towards Olive Garden and TGIFridays. Not that I have anything against Olive Garden - my husband and I would occasionally go and duly enjoy our unlimited salad and bread sticks - but when you have one shot at sampling the fares of the big apple, to fall into the trap of the known/predictable is lamentable. So where should you go instead? Oh, let me count the ways of my favorites (alphabetic by meal):

Breakfast

Joe's Coffee (Grand Central Terminal & others): Great coffee - mellow but flavorful roast, not as bitter as Starbucks. Nowhere to sit, and pastries in my opinion are nothing to write home about, but coffee is amazing. (They do also sell Doughnut Plant dougnuts... check out the Doughnut Tour post for more on DPD.)

Manhattan Espresso Cafe (49th btwn 3rd/Lex): Don't bet on finding seating (grand total tables = 0), but this little cafe offers great coffee and is a hidden gem of baked goods (pastries, cookies, yum). 

Paris Baguette & Financier (various locations): A tie for croissant deliciousness. Also check out Financier's oatmeal and PB's loaf bread.

Zuckers Bagels (Lex btwn 40/41): Mmm, bagels. There are many winners in this category, and New Yorkers will frequently draw blood (at least verbally) over their personal favorites - Esso, Daniel's, Zaro's, the list goes on and on. This one wins for me for a chewy factor, and a ton of spreads, including great fresh lox.

Lunch

Just Salad (all over): This is a bit of an odd addition since it's a chain/fast food, but man am I addicted to the Immunity Bowl salad wrap.  Mesclun, grilled salmon, butternut squash, dried cranberries, wheat berries, seedless cucumbers, fresh lemon juice, chopped and rolled into a wrap. Bring it on.

Nobu (57 & Madison, among others): Really more of a nice dinner place, I think this is best at lunch. If you're going to "eat the ocean," best to do it midday to digest. Pricey, but ohhh the seafood amazing-ness.

Ronin Bar & Grill (37th btwn Madison/5th): Don't be deterred by the sketchy website - or the fact that it is called a "bar & grill" - this is actually a great ramen shop. There is arguably better ramen in the city (if NYCers don't draw blood over what bagels are best, they will over ramen). Ippudo in particular is great, but the spicy ramen at Ronin is fantastic, and you can usually walk right in ... unlike the 2 hour typical wait at Ippudo.

Dinner

El Rio Grande (38th & 3rd Ave): The mexican food is (very) good. The margaritas are phenomenal. Seriously. If the weather is nice, hit their outdoor deck but be prepared to get approximately 3 inches of personal space between you and the other patrons. It's worth it.

Kunjip & BCD Tofu House (both are 32 btwn 5/6th): Both great Korean. But if you don't know someone Korean (or at least speak Korean yourself), skip Kunjip - you'll never make it through the line, much less convey your order. Be prepared to wait at either place, but so worth it.

Old Homestead Steakhouse (9th btwn 14/15th): Many great steaks in NYC. I love this one for the flavorful meat, great seafood, and unpretentious/old school charm decor.

Peking Duck House (53rd btwn 2/3): A family tradition for over 30 years, when my parents started eating there. Get the duck. Even if you are alone and have to eat 10 pancakes worth. Seriously.

Dessert

Levain Bakery (74/Amsterdam & others): Chocolate chip cookies. Gigantic. Gooey. Unhealthy. Delicious.

Magnolia Bakery (various): Do NOT get cupcakes. Tourists get cupcakes here. (The cupcakes here are rather dry/boring in my opinion - look elsewhere for cupcakes, and don't worry, they're everywhere in NYC). Get the banana pudding. My word, it is fluffy, delicious, and addictive.

Momofuku Milk Bar (13th/2nd, among others): Major points for creativity, this place specializes in using cereal milk (ie milk mixed in with cereal and strained so it retains the cereal sweetness/flavor). Get a couple of compost cookies - way better than the name implies.

Ok, let's be honest. This dessert list is short. There are many, many, many more alcoves of deliciousness tucked away in the city. I don't have the time or space to describe them all - perhaps another post to come just on dessert? - but the above can fuel plenty of calories in the short term.

Caveats

A few caveats for those who cared to read all the way to the end of this tedious list. 1: All donuts are excluded - I wrote an entire post on doughnuts, and no one wants to sit through yet more doughnut prattle. 2: Non-Manhattan boroughs, sorry - you have amazing eats, but I am a wimp in terms of traveling to try them, so the above is very non-representative. 3: NYC readers, what did I miss? A ton, I'm sure. Tell me your favorites so I can improve my list next time I get to NYC!

I'll Make the Sandwiches

Once in a blue moon, there comes a moment where you meet someone, and it's as if your souls already know each other. For me, this happened at what would otherwise seem an unlikely moment: the month before my freshman year, when I showed up as an awkward newbie for tennis team tryouts.  I met Sarah there, a rising junior, and though life has taken us on at times converging and diverging paths geographically, our friendship has carried along, with an amazing number of moments where we give each other a weird look after having said/thought/experienced the exact same thing.

Today we celebrated her mom, who passed away two weeks ago after "engaging" bravely with breast and ovarian cancer for the last six years. This hit particularly close to home, as my own mother was diagnosed with breast cancer around the same time that Bev heard the news. And while we all miss Bev - though also celebrate her release from a long, painful sickness - it is her motto that I raise a blog post toast to today: "I'll make the sandwiches." Her motto spoke to her dedication in nurturing and serving those around her, a generosity of both spirit and resources that rang through decades of teaching reading to children and ESL adults, storing/distributing goods to those in need, and - of course - making actual sandwiches.

I find the mix of working full time with a baby brings a hectic tone to life that allows the weeks to blur by in a survival mode of sorts: head down, trying to keep up with chores, baby, life. But the service for Bev today was a much-needed reminder to raise my head from the sand of my own survival to pay more attention to the needs of those around me. As Ecclesiastes wisely states, there is a season for everything, and this perhaps is not the season where I can lavishly spend hours volunteering. But it should always be a season of being mindful of others, aware enough to care and to know what their needs are, even if I can't be the one to meet them.

Bev, this one is to you. May we all offer to make the sandwiches.

Some bright morning when this life is over
I'll fly away
To that home on God's celestial shore
I'll fly away

When the shadows of this life have gone
I'll fly away
Like a bird from these prison walls I'll fly
I'll fly away

Oh how glad and happy when we meet
I'll fly away
No more cold iron shackles on my feet
I'll fly away

Just a few more weary days and then
I'll fly away
To a land where joys will never end
I'll fly away

A New Year Idiot

The term “wild ride” doesn’t quite cover the last half of 2013 – I graduated business school, had a baby, moved states, bought a house (+ 2 cars), and started a new job all within 4 months. As I begin to emerge from the sleep-deprived haze of newborns (now that she is sleeping through the night, hallelujah – let me say it again, hallelujah), I am picking up a few things that were dropped by the wayside: this blog included. 

So, I would like to open 2014 posts with a declaration of my goal this year: to feel like an idiot.

Wait, what?

Right. To feel like an idiot. To explain this, let me first take a brief detour: during business school – which I attended on Saturdays while working full time – an alum explained the experience to me like this:

Every week you are juggling several balls. Your work, your family, your social life, school, hobbies. As you juggle, realize that one of those balls is made of glass. It absolutely cannot be dropped. The trick is that which ball is made of glass changes every week – you have to figure out what can slide and what must be absolutely protected in order to avoid disaster.

The first six months of parenthood made all of the juggling balls seem like glass (though likely that was a sleep deprivation haze talking, where everything seemed harder than it would have been otherwise). That fog has started to lift, and in figuring out how to prioritize spending some of my (limited) free time, I decided to give martial arts a try. Something I’ve always wanted to do, but have zero experience in – with the added benefit of helping lose that bit of lingering baby weight.

Queue class #1 last week: the adult-only classes (I didn’t want to start out in a class full of literal 4 year olds) are mixed skill level, and as I look around I see 7 other students: 3 black belts, a brown belt, and 3 blue belts. Oh yeah – and me. Ummmmm. Thankfully there were 2 instructors there, so one took pity on me and spent most of the class giving me one-on-one instruction. Results: felt completely lost in class, sore for three days afterwards. Other results: I plan on going back.

Why? 

As I struggled to keep up in class, learn Korean terms (it’s a tae kwon do studio) and new body movements while the other adults flew around like Gumby on steroids, I realized that it had been much too long since I had tried something where I had no idea what I was doing. That kind of mental challenge (and resulting humility!) was somehow simultaneously exhausting and refreshing, and I am resolved to keep trying. Even though I will feel like an idiot. Maybe indefinitely.

It could very well be that tae kwon do turns out not to be my thing in the long term, but that won’t affect my bottom line goal which is to put myself out there, try something new, and embrace falling flat on my face (in this case, physically as well as metaphorically).

A toast to the new experiences, and New Year Idiots everywhere!

NYC Donut Tour

It has been many moons since I posted - between working full time, graduating from my MBA program in May, and expecting a baby (next week), it has been a busy summer, and this is just the pre-infant beginning!  Posts may continue to be a bit irregular until we get our feet under ourselves with the new addition to the family, but I'll try to check in periodically.

Anyway, preface to today's real topic: donuts. Or doughnuts, depending on where you are from. Mmm. These rings of fried deliciousness are all over the city, but vary widely in style, price, and flavor. We set out to conquer as many as we could!

The facts:
Tour Guide: We joined Redeemer Presbyterian's  NYC Re-Imagined Donut Tour - kindly let by a (volunteer) donut afficianado
Stops: 6
Locations: Lower East Side to Brooklyn
Hours: 4
Level of post-tour Sugar Sickness: Moderate

The stops:
Stop 1: Locanda Verde (377 Greenwich St)
Locanda Verde is actually a popular brunch/general restaurant in TriBeCa, but nestled to the right side inside the restaurant is a 'to go' counter featuring a variety of espresso and pastry products.  Donuts are made in small batches throughout the day (we actually bought the last 4 donuts for the group and shared) - so they are fresh and tasty.  The cake-based style was a bit crunchy on the outside and covered in granulated sugar - ours were a soft lemon cake inside (though I believe the flavor sometimes varies).



Stop 2: Balthazar (80 Spring Street)
Like Locanda Verde, Balthazar is a full restaurant with a take-out pastry option. This one is actually a separate door beside the restaurant, and upon first going in seems to be full of breads, with a few muffins and other pastries. Visible donuts: none. Do not be deceived! Ask what donut flavors are available - there were 3 during our stop, including a banana pecan (which we got) - a cake-style, but with a thick top frosting (unlike Locanda Verde's simpler sugar coating). I found the icing a bit sweet, but my husband was a definite fan.







Stop 3: Babycakes (248 Broome Street)
Babycakes is most known for being vegan - no small feat, then, to create fluffy desserts, which they still manage to do.  We enjoyed a toasted coconut donut. The style was cake, though it was a denser, moister inside than most cake donuts (perhaps due to the vegan ingredient substitutes). I preferred some of our fluffier donut stops, but for those cruising for vegan treats, this is a great choice.

Stop 4: Donut Plant (379 Grand Street)
Donut Plant is one of our go-to donut shops in the city - though we typically visit the Chelsea location. The shop has a mix of cake and yeast donuts, topped with flavored glazes.  Donut Plant had by far the largest flavor collection of our NYC stops (bested only by Peter Pan in Brooklyn - Stop 6).  Seasonal flavor options included coconut lime, green tea, and more.  (My personal favorite: the Tres Leche cake donut.)

Stop 5: Brindle Room (227 E. 10th Street)
This was a "hidden" gem - at least in the sense that the restaurant in no way appears to be donut-related at first sight. It's a "normal" sit-down restaurant, but offers donuts on the dessert menu, which can be ordered to go. This was my favorite stop of the day, though the fact that they make the donuts to order meant that fresh-fried crispy deliciousness went a long way towards winning my heart. We selected the chocolate hazelnut donuts, a cake donut topped with Nutella and sliced almonds.

Stop 6: Peter Pan Donut & Pastry Shop (727 Manhattan Ave, Greenpointe Booklyn)
Peter Pan takes the cake (or at least cake donut) for being the "old tyme," classic donut shop. Offerings were equally broad and delicious, from gigantic cinnamon buns to myriad yeast and flavored donuts.  This was one of my husband's favorite stops - in fairness, it might have been one of mine as well if I wasn't already feeling a bit ill from so many donuts! I don't know how frequently we'll return, since it's a bit of a trek from our midtown abode, but definitely worth checking out.



After 4 hours of walking in the heat and subsisting on sugar (at 36 weeks pregnant, no less), I was seriously ready for air conditioning and vegetables by the end of the tour. But we had a great time, both enjoying donut delicacies and meeting other Redeemer-types on the tour. The intrepid crew is below!