Salty Dogs on the Roof

At our first braai of the season, held, as always, on our rooftop, we served the usual: hot dogs, burgers, roasted vegetable kebabs, chicken kebabs, roasted corn, barbecued chicken, lemon and herb potato salad, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, lemonade and Cape Town Collins. My favorite new recipe was for Salty Dogs, a tart refreshing vodka cocktail. (Technically, it's a Greyhound with vodka instead of gin and a salty rim.)

Ingredients:

• 2 oz vodka
  
• 4 oz grapefruit juice
• coarse kosher salt
  
• lemon for garnish
  

Preparation:

1. Rim the glass with salt and lemon juice
   
2. Pour the ingredients into an ice cube filled collins glass
3. Stir
   
4. Garnish with a lemon wedge

It's my favorite new drink of the summer. Enjoy!

PS We were also going to serve homemade ice cream at our braai, but, as it turns out, our icecream maker--which is the old fashioned bucket kind that screetches and makes a mess rather than the dainty William Sonoma model--is a lemon. Guess this warrents another trip to our favorite dry goods store in Pennsylvania!

Pa, reprise

And here we are back in Pennsylvania. This weekend we attended my cousin's wedding at an Amish church in southeastern Pa. This gave us an excuse to enjoy an extended weekend in Pa, doing what we do best: shopping and eating! Eats included stacks of blueberry pancakes, peanut butter pancakes, waffles, veggie omelets, Eggs Benedict (bacon on the side), scrambled eggs with sausage, quiche, apple dumplings with ice cream and corn fritters with maple syrup. And that was just breakfast--lunch and dinner were equally extensive.

As for shopping, we got enough dry goods to weather the apocalypse, which J. anticipates with glee. I swear, we must have a year's supply of rice and beans in our pantry! We also purchased an ice cream maker, the old fashioned bucket kind, so we can try our hand at making ice cream for our next braai on the roof. When I was a kid, I got homemade ice cream at every birthday and beyond--there's nothing as delicious as a Pepsi float (hey, it was the Philippines, no root beer to be had!) made with homemade ice cream.


The wedding itself, on a hot Saturday afternoon, was absolutely beautiful and it was a treat to see my Pennsylvania Dutch relatives. There are always newborn second cousins (my cousins' children) to meet and new gossip to hear, like which of my cousins has started dating. It's a vast family--my father was one of seven children, I have 30+ cousins, and now my cousins have started building their own, large families--and I only see them at family gatherings held at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I love their old world way of life: canning produce from the kitchen garden, sewing clothes by hand, baking their own bread. Some days, I wish I lived that way. It would be a respite from my silly urban life where I run hither and thither.

Green Hills of Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania is one of our favorite spots to visit on a long weekend like Memorial Day. It's green, there's lots of beautiful produce to buy, enormous buffets of farm-style cooking to devour, antiques to peruse, furniture to commission and friends to see.

This is our very favorite place to order furniture, C&S Rustic Furniture, on Route 897. It's a family business, and the Amish guys, as we call them, will make any wooden piece that we dream up. J. is in the market for a new desk, and this fall we have our sights on a kitchen renovation, meaning that we will need lots of wooden cabinets. These days, they are too busy picking strawberries, zucchini and tomatoes to do much carpentry, so we'll have to wait for our pieces. After a long weekend of eating, shopping, and hanging out by the swimming pool we head back to Brooklyn...only to come to a dead stop in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike. I forget how bad traffic is every year, and every year I say "I'm never going to do that again!" But I do.