Day 32

"Information overload" my ass. Or "too much to read, so just tell me" my ass. In an age with the Internet, these have been some of the lazy man's answers to the mere ten wedding advice blogs that I've written (out of nearly 700 blog posts I've written in total). It's like you might as well plan your wedding based on an about.com or aol advice column with ten easy steps. Oh, I'm sorry, it seems like ten of anything is too long. Here's a tip, criticizing someone's wedding advice is just as shitty as criticizing someone's wedding. At least be gracious that someone cares enough for you not to follow all the cookie-cutter shit out there. And, in case, if I was ungracious to anyone reading this while planning my wedding, I'm sorry. Now I get it. (Phew, good to get that out of my head. I hate thinking about this, letting it build up inside.)

Anyway, yesterday, I went to Sullivan Street Bakery and ordered one of each slice of the pizzas there and some savory bread thing. Slices included: tomato, cauliflower, zucchini, mushroom, and potato/onion. The savory bread thing was a brioche dough with prosciutto and cheese. It was delicious. I stopped here on my way to pick up a famous sour-cream apple-walnut pie from Little Pie Company for Margaret's potluck dinner. PIE! Jon had woken up at 6 or something early to make a no-knead brioche dough and peel some tomatoes. That afternoon, he added bacon and honey to the brioche dough and formed them kind of like Cinnabons for a savory bread, and with the tomatoes he created a composed salad: peeled cherry tomatoes infused with smoked salt, scallops, pickled onions soaked in balsamic vinegar, mint sauce, StellaDoro crumbs and some goat cheese Joy bought at a fancy shopping area in Park Slope where Jake Gyllenhaal hangs out with his niece. Both dishes were really tasty! I think the bread will definitely go over well at Thanksgiving, though maybe a shortcut may be to add the bacon and honey mixture to a Pillsbury crescent roll dough. Eh, the brioche dough worked nicely. It made for a really great bread for an egg sandwich this morning.

So Joy came over, and then Doris and Matt came with Hawaiian treats. Then we all drove down to Somerset, which is like in the middle of New Jersey. (It's about an hour away from our apartment.) At the potluck in addition to the items that Jon made, Joy made Brussels sprouts with pancetta, and brought the goat cheese above, and some delicious olives. Margaret and Gavin have a great, sprawling two-story home and a big, like a hundred-pound big, puppy, Calisto. (She's only one and a half years old.) They made some delicious freshly ground (with her Kitchen-Aid attachment) lamb burgers with vadouvan. (This vadouvan thing is new to me as far as I'm aware, but it was really good!) They were perfectly grilled too. They also made chicken, curried potato salad, creamed corn, roasted peppers, and sauce to go on the lamb burger. So good! For dessert, we had the above pie, and Eva made a lemony cake. We were stuffed and basically had to roll ourselves back to the car. 

It was a night of firsts: Matt's never been into a basement, Doris's never been into an attic, and I don't think I've ever been on the Verrazano Bridge, but that might be untrue since we somehow got from Long Island to Staten Island for Thanksgiving once--though I'm not sure of which route we might've taken.

Today we didn't do much at all, which was really nice. This past week was kind of busy. The last of the boxes are out of the apartment. We don't have to worry about it collapsing and knocking one of us into a coma. 

Caramacs! Sputs! Chili Peppah! Mochi pop! Pop! Pop!