Smart Friends

We are lucky to have smart friends. Diva Bob knows who to call for tree problems. M and Destroyo know how to start businesses. And E, best pal and Fairy Queen soul sister for a quarter of a century now, knows this: when you go to an appointment, doctor, dentist, optometrist, manscaping waxer or whatever, BRING TREATS. I believe E books her doctor appointments at lunchtime and brings sandwiches for the office. I admire this behaviour, but had never followed suit, until this summer.

My motivations were many. For one thing, our house was overflowing with treats, a result of a berry picking and baking binge.

Raspberries, boysenberries (BIG ones!) and a few token blueberries for Phrodaux and dogs.

Berry scones, unintentionally pink.

Mixed berry hand pies, not gorgeous like the picture in Bon Appetit, but it was a hot day for pie dough.

But also, it was time for my annual eye doctor appointment, the only remotely medical experience I actually look forward to. I've been seeing Dr. Rock & Roll rarely but forever: once a year for more than 20 years. His kids are all grown up, his band disbanded, the office moved, but still, he and his lovely wife have shared their practice all this time. Once each summer, I sit in the big chair and we catch up amongst the eye charts and fancy equipment. This time, he calmly pointed out my bleeding head wound, which turned out to be raspberry juice above one eyebrow, the result of some last minute confectionery to add to my little basket of sweets.

Weird looking but good...melted bittersweet chocolate, toffee bits, and a berry.

When I first arrived for my appointment, the nice office ladies seemed taken aback by my "Hi, checking in, and I brought you some treats."

But as I sat reading magazines, I started to hear, "Look at that!" and "Did you really make these?" They gleefully announced the arrival of snacks to Dr. R&R but then tried to convince him that a) he might not like them and b) there might not be any left.

Overall, I felt like a rock star and they seemed surprised, pleased, and nourished. That, my pretties, is why we cook (well, not the rock star part) and why it's good to have smart friends. Thanks E.

Cocktails, part 1: The bastard series

Phrodaux and I have a couple of cocktail books; they are full of completely unappetizing recipes and pathetic names (really, would anyone ever order something called a Brain Tumor? Or a Cottage Cheese?).

Still, the books remind us of proportions for basic things (margaritas, cosmos) and give us a place to jot down our inventions. I say our, but I mean Phrodaux, the mad scientist among us. The creator of the Adios, Au Revoir, for goodness sake! And now, given that I've been picking berries and leaving little containers of berry pie filling in the fridge, there is the series of bastard drinks. Not my word, his. All his. It couldn't be the Berry Splendor or the Pretty in Pink, oh no. But try one. Trust us.

First, he made The Bastard.  Then the Gin Bastard. Finally, when made with Tequila, the Rat Bastard.

First you need to make a berry pie. Save a little pie filling (raspberries, marionberries, boysenberries, any combination, plus sugar and lemon juice to taste).

Second, grow some mint. Know that it will take over your garden. That's OK.

Finally, create your drink.

• Pick some mint and muddle it in a cocktail shaker
• Add a couple of tablespoons of berry pie filling
• Add a shot or two of booze (vodka, gin, or tequila)
• Add a little lemon or lime juice
• Taste your mixture; add simple syrup or Triple Sec if it's too tart
• Add ice cubes and shake shake shake until everything is mixed up and cold
• Strain into glassware of your choice, or just dump it in a glass with the ice cubes.

These are lurid pink and lovely to drink. Enjoy.

Overcoming fear...of puff pastry

The Fairy Queen never wanted to learn to cook. Why, she thought, full of teenage feminist fury, should some man expect her to make dinner every night?? So instead she learned to type (on a typewriter! Before white out!), thinking that if she could type, she would always be employable, and thus less likely to end up with that horrible man with his unreasonable dinner expectations.

And then she grew up. She was employable, and there were some nice men she dined with, but not one demanded regular home-cooked meals. Finally, when no one was looking and besides it was all her own idea, she thought she'd teach herself to cook, using Gourmet magazine. As newbies will, she skipped soup and rice and scrambled eggs and went straight for the hard stuff: pie, brioche, some insanely layered trifle thing her family fled from at the holidays. She once spent an entire Saturday collecting spices to make her own curry powder, ignoring the perfectly nice bottles of curry powder on the shelf, only to have the beau she was making curried vegetables for confess he'd be happier with a cheese sandwich (cold, not toasted, with plain yellow mustard).

And then she grew up some more and realized that just like many things, cooking took some practice. Soon she found that cooking and baking were pleasurable activities in and of themselves, that cookbooks were almost as good as novels, and that feeding people something nice that she'd made was one of the most satisfying things imaginable.

These days, she's a pretty good cook: bread, cake, soup, all manner of seafood and vegetable adventures, as Phrodaux is a pescatarian. But there was still one thing that seemed too daunting to contemplate: puff pastry. As soon as she encountered those words in a recipe, she turned the page and thought: too hard, too complicated, no way.

But then there was a Cooper encounter. Cooper Boone, of Cooper's Table and many other amazing endeavors. Seriously, check out this gorgeous site.  At a party much too fabulous for the likes of us, my assigned contribution was a fancy appetizer. I don't do fiddly bits very well, and when I heard there was puff pastry involved, I tried to appeal to Cooper's mercy. He was unmoved. In fact, he was stern: get with the program, girl (I may be paraphrasing here) and learn to love puff pastry!

As it turns out, I was busy doing other things at the very fancy party, but I did observe the construction of Puff Pastry Asparagus, spearheaded by a very lovely teenage girl who watches a lot of Food Network. I did get to apply the egg wash, though, and later, while bartending, I observed how people consumed vast quantities of these beauties in about 5 minutes.

So, upon my return to this coast and more normal life, I thought: Puff Pastry, bring it on. While perusing a paella cookbook on loan from Phrodaux's dad, I found a recipe for tuna empanadillas - baby empanadas. These are easy and amazing and make people swoon. They require exactly one box of Pepperidge Farm puff pastry sheets. They will not make you cry while you make them. And don't forget: everything is better with a cold PBR.

food in block letters on a white background

everyone has seen repo man, yes. If not, go see it now, and we'll all wait patiently until you can honestly say you have heard a stranger say "plate of shrimp".

we're waiting.

ok, now we are all on the same page. This post doesn't really have much to do with repo man, but you need to see it. Remember how all the food and drink is generic and labelled as "food" or "drink", if not go watch repo man, we'll wait some more.

Whenever the Fairy Queen is off on a Fair Queen adventure, I (Phrodaux), am left to my own devices as far as food and hygiene (actually, hygiene is mostly left up to me usually unless it is mostly "I have bathed, if the creek is clean enough for the trout, it is clean enough for my nether bits").

Food.

my default food of choice, when alone, is rice and beans. It is not like I cannot cook, I do cook, really, things with many, many ingredients, spices and food groups, and all. But I like rice and beans. Granted, my rice and beans has more than two ingredients, usually more like a dozen, and when I am feeling extra special fancy, a baker's dozen.

Rice. rinsed several times to get the powdery stuff off, it ends up not so sticky.
about a 1/2 cup, in the bottom of a sauce pan. Water enough to cover your hand if you put it flat on the rice (My friend Eddie taught me that, also he taught me it is acceptable to wear dress pants when going white water rafting, but that is another story). Usually I put in turmeric, as it is good for you (something about anti cancer or torus, but math is hard) and once I put in nutmeg (but that is another story)

Beans (usually kidney, but often black, because once you go... never mind)
peanut butter (just a bit, makes things better, everything better, EVERYTHING!)
walnuts (I have nothing funny to say about walnuts)
various chili powders (FQ will write about our "Magic powder" at some point I assume)
chipotle sauce (smoky spicy goodness in a phallic bottle)
anchovy paste (umami, just put in enough to brighten it up, trust me, I am Phrodaux, you trust me, I am much better than cats)
maybe a bit of rice vinegar that has had chiltepin pepper soaking in it since your friends from AZ gave you that plant that you brought on the airplane back to the great green north and you had to fertilize the flowers with a little paint brush, the whole time feeling a bit dirty... a dirty, dirty boy)

Did I mention that the Fairy Queen was off on an adventure?

Navigation bars

Phrodaux & I recently returned from a whirlwind trip to NYC and beyond, visiting our friends the fabulous twins. During our time in the city, it was HOT. As in, 95 degrees + 95% humidity, in the midst of cars and buildings and concrete. Ugh. Our typical travel mode is: pick a direction, wander, stop for randomness, beauty, and/or sustenance. This trip involved a lot more stops for liquid sustenance because, as I may have mentioned, it was HOT.

Thus, we offer our navigate-via-dark-bar guide to New York City. We apologize in advance for the lack of photographs. We hadn't decided to do this bloggy thing yet and thus were not in document everything mode. Links will have to do.

After a morning in Little Italy, Chinatown, and the restaurant supply stores along Bowery (with an interesting stop at Faerman's Cash Register Store ...how we were tempted!), we stopped by the Spring Lounge, partly because we were parched and partly because it seemed like something real on the edge of something...else.

Phrodaux has taught me many things, not the least of which is that people don't typically go to bars to drink...they can do that at home. They go to bars to drink and talk to other people. Plus he'll talk to ANYBODY, so we end up having interesting conversations every single time we sit at a bar. In this case, we learned that the woman on my left was playing hookie from her regular life, because she'd been called to jury duty but dismissed by 11am. The man to Ph's right shared that he never had to do jury duty, because he was a felon, "but just for drugs."

Later that day, we had lunch at Fanelli's, my new favorite place in maybe the whole world except for my house and my farm. At this point, though, we were behaving ourselves at a table, just talking to the Swedish tourists beside us.

That afternoon, we wandered through things we could never buy at Elizabeth Street Gallery (but oh, how I long for the French gaming table and the carpenter's tools) then trekked off to the East Village in search of obscure antiques and hidden bars. Found the antiques, but the bar in question (enter through the phone booth of the hot dog restaurant, or some such rigamarole) was not yet open. We talked to a slightly scruffy young man on his way to work at the hot dog emporium, who said about the bar, "It's OK. Just a bar. Kind of expensive. People like us would like this place around the corner better." People like us! For middle-aged, fully-employed, mortgage-holding Ph & FQ, those words were like a secret handshake! We HAD to go to the place he mentioned! Which is how we ended up at International Bar. The locals weren't that keen to talk to us, but the bartender was full of stories once we asked her about the hand-written sign forbidding piggyback rides before 2 am. And if you're hungry while you're there? You can get an MRE (1200 calories).

It's happened twice now, so it must be a tradition: when we visit NYC, one day must be devoted to an endless trek through Brooklyn, preferably in challenging weather. After buying presents at Items of Interest, struggling through the stroller-clogged sidewalks of Park Slope, and chatting with the nice bartender at Alchemy, the march began. I can't remember what we were looking for, but at some point we found robots and movie props, took a short subway ride, and decided to just get a glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge. But once you can see it, you're on it. At which point, Phrodaux's "in for a penny, in for a pound" motto kicked in and we said, Fine, I guess we are walking across the #$(&*(#$& bridge. Did I mention that it was hot? And we'd walked about 10 miles already? And it was hot?

[Side bar: This photo is from a flickr photostream belonging to Sue Waters,which is licensed this way.]

MANY miles later, droopy and worn out, there we were back at lovely Fanelli's, this time at the bar. While Ph chatted with his bar stool neighbors about New Mexico, Arizona, and the relative merits of various chile peppers, I noticed that the man who sat down beside me ordered eggs, bacon, and toast for supper, with an extra side of bacon and an extra side of butter. Which prompted me to ask: Has it been a very bad day, or are you celebrating something? He paused, considered, and at last said, "I suppose you could say celebrating." He did not elaborate.

But please, if you are out there reading this, elaborate! Tell us about a dark bar we must visit one day or what would make you celebrate with bacon x 2.

Cowboy

Fairy Queen here. The best thing happened to me yesterday! I was deep in the heart of the world's best book store (rhymes with owls), searching out a book for Phrodaux (The Good Life Lab, by the way; he highly recommends it). I reached the top of a staircase, looked up, and there he was: a cowboy. As in straight out of the St. Paul Rodeo sort of cowboy. Young enough to still have that round, boyish face, just a hint of beard. Wranglers, belt buckle, plaid shirt. And the hat; of course he had the hat.

But none of that is the best thing. The best thing is that he tipped that hat at me with the barest twitch of a smile and I SWEAR I could hear the implied "Howdy, ma'am" in that courtly little gesture. For once I didn't mind the "ma'am."

This is not the cowboy's hat. This is Phrodaux's, on our kitchen island. Still. Everyone loves a hat. 

first post!

Hello lovelies,
Welcome to Phrodaux and the Fairy Queen, a site dedicated to the pursuit of an adventurous life. We have day jobs and all, just like you. Phrodaux works to support our interesting life, while the Fairy Queen is lucky enough to have found her calling, a job she might do even if they didn't pay her. Which is a good thing, because frankly, they barely do.

But we digress. In our real, not work, lives, we try to pack as much creative, odd, interesting, and sometimes perilous adventure as possible. We're not really sure who will read this blog, but if you have even a speck of interest in art, cooking, welding, dive bars, gardening, travel, moonshine, baking, interior design, making rather than buying, and occasional bouts of co-mingled dinner preparation and confectionery, this might be the place for you.