Watermelon Lime Mint Punch

Although the weather is easing into fall, watermelon is still making appearances at farmers markets and end-of-the-season outdoor parties. Now, have you ever noticed that it's nearly impossible to eat a whole watermelon, or even for that matter, a half-size one? It's fun to eat, but hard to finish off all that volume. Even after dinners with friends, there are leftover pieces that languish in my fridge.

So this watermelon punch is a great solution to the watermelon problem. It's light and refreshing and a little sweet, and depending on how much seltzer you add, a little bubbly. I served it straight up in a pitcher at the double birthday party, so our pregnant friend and anyone else who desired could have some non-alcoholic fun to drink. For the rest of us, a shot of gin or vodka was the perfect accompaniment in our punch glass.

The ingredients below are rough guidelines -- you can take liberties as long as it tastes good. At a party last weekend, the host served a variation that also involved infused cucumber and St. Germain. I do recommend fresh lime juice (even though I admit to using bottled juice because that was also sitting in the fridge needing to be used up). Note that it freezes just fine, so you could freeze half to take a little bit of summer with you into the fall.

Watermelon Lime Mint Punch
half a large watermelon
1 handful of fresh mint
3 tbsp lime juice (about 3 or 4 limes)
seltzer
vodka or gin (optional)

Chop the watermelon into large chunks, removing the rind and any large seeds. Blend it with the mint and lime juice until smooth. You could strain it if you want to be extra classy, but it's not necessary. At this point, you can choose to store it in the fridge for a few days or the freezer for a few weeks. When you're ready to serve, mix the punch with seltzer, which thins it out and brightens it up. You want about 1 part seltzer to 1-2 parts watermelon. Add a shot of vodka or gin to each glass for a nice cocktail.

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Bed Bugs Part 2: How it affected my life

The unpleasant thing about bed bugs is not the itching. That is much worse if you have say, a mosquito problem, which I've experienced indoors and outdoors in Brooklyn. It's the way you have to live carefully, so that you won't spread bugs anywhere or to anyone else. It's the work involved in keeping your things meticulously clean and sealed up in bags. And doing it all over again when you realize you left a bag open after a late night of drinking or the cat tore it open. It's the paranoia that made me wonder if every itchy spot was a bite, at some point losing perspective on what was normal everyday itching and what were true bites. So looking back, I probably had fewer bites than I feared I did. It was also the indignity of negotiating solutions with a landlord who just. didn't. get. it.*

So from October 2011 to April 2012, I lived out of bags like this. I paid $1,000 a month to live in a ~70 square foot, windowless room in a railroad apartment that meant my roommate and her cat traversed through my room like a hallway.** We couldn't have guests over. Only my boyfriend, who somehow had the patience to deal with the system of coming over, immediately changing into the pajamas he kept there and putting all his stuff in a plastic bag. I did the same thing in reverse when going to his place, to prevent possibly carrying bugs there, which luckily worked.

Obviously during this time, the apartment wasn't a particularly enjoyable place to be, and it didn't feel like a home - more like a crash pad where I would return after work, rifle through plastic bags, to pack up my things to leave again in the morning and spend a night or weekend at my boyfriend's. You don't realize how important home is - as a solid ground where you can retreat and restore - until it's gone.

I'm also angry that it stole from me this time that was supposed to be a year of enjoying single living with my best friend, because I wasn't around as much as I otherwise might have been, and we didn't have parties or friends over the way we had hoped. The apartment that my roommate had decorated so cutely turned out to just be a headache.

The experience was particularly trying because after previous negative living experiences, I had told myself I would never let myself get stuck again. Yet, there I was, unable to move on.

The thing that got me through it was the belief that I would be living in a normal home again by summertime. A place where I could come home and just lounge on a couch or hang my clothes up in a closet. And, it came true, since I now live in a real home with my boyfriend.

* why don't landlords ever get it? why are they all clueless?
** but that's its own story about how the NYC rental market sucks.

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Bed Bugs Part 1: The Story

I was waiting for the bed bug ordeal to be over and my apartment security deposit to be returned before talking about it here. So now that it is safely past me (at least this time...because there is no guarantee that I won't get bed bugs again when they are so prevalent in New York) ...

There are two kinds of bed bug infestations. In the first one, you notice a couple bugs and bites and get sprayed right away, a few times over the course of a month and a half. You don't experience any bug evidence after the first spraying, so after the last one you can feel secure that the problem is gone and go back to normal living. This is how it seems to go for most people. It didn't go that way for me.

In the second scenario, the landlord ignores bed bug complaints for too long and doesn't handle the situation properly, which allows them to infest the whole building. I only know of a few other cases like this. 

Our building supposedly had bugs a year or so prior, and then they popped up in one apartment again, but the landlord ignored it for months before bringing in an exterminator. For some reason, those particular tenants didn't care enough to do much of anything about it, so their infestation spread to other apartments and continued to persist. Neither the landlord nor my downstairs neighbors understood the value of a preemptive, comprehensive approach. The landlord refused to spray the whole building on the same day. He hired an exterminator who would only come to our place on his days off from his regular job. Then he had his handyman "trained" as a secondary exterminator, who did a terrible job. Also, it was weird being in a text-friendly relationship with the exterminator that got so friendly he asked my roommate out on a date.

Our landlord also pressured me into not reporting him to the city, insinuating he would withhold our deposit. And since all I ultimately wanted was to be able to move out and get my security deposit back without spending time or money in the court system, we didn't report him. So now that I'm no longer fiscally or legally tied to him, I can say that Marek Kaczor is a bad landlord. It wasn't just the bugs. There were constantly things going wrong, like no hot water for a week, no heat over Christmas, no working oven for a month. Our neighbors downstairs said they had taken out two lawsuits against him. Unfortunately for renters, he owns several buildings in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area, mostly rented by Bedford Prime Realty.

I would have liked to just move out of the building, like many of the other tenants did within a couple months. However, my roommate refused to move - and I couldn't very well sublet a room with bed bug risk, I didn't want to pay double rent to live somewhere else, and since my roommate was my best friend, I couldn't just leave her to deal with figuring out how to cover my rent. 

Instead, after three months, the landlord realized it was probably because bugs could hide in our cracked floors. So we moved across the hall into a fully sealed apartment while he redid our old apartment. Things got better there, but knowing that the apartment below us still had bugs meant I could not, nor would I ever in that building, trust it was safe to take my stuff out of bags.

We finally moved out in May, two months short of our lease. Ultimately, it turned out for the best that we waited until the spring to move. By then, we hadn't had any definite bites in a couple months, so we felt relatively confident that the bugs were gone and we wouldn't be taking them with us. Which meant I didn't have to throw out or store away my stuff, or spend a month's worth of rent to fumigate all of my belongings, all ideas I had previously, angrily considered.

You can be sure that when I went hunting for a new apartment, I was thorough about checking into the landlord. Most people by now know about the bed bug registry. But in New York City, you can also search an address in the city's public database of building registrations and violations to look for past and current complaints, violations, and lawsuits, and to find out the landlord's name so you can google for any dirt to be found on them. I always ask the broker/landlord/current tenant if there has been any history of bugs or other problems. There is also a disclosure of bed bug history form the landlord is required to complete if you ask for it. See the city website for more on the laws related to tenants' rights and landlord obligations regarding bed bugs. 

This experience also taught me the value in trusting your gut when looking for a new apartment. My gut didn't feel good about choosing this apartment in the first place, but we took it anyway because we felt like options and time were running out. In Part 2 tomorrow, I talk a bit more about how this experience tested my patience and my sanity.

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Double Birthday Party

When we found out we were moving into an apartment with a yard, we instantly started to get excited about hosting Evan's upcoming birthday party at home. Originally we hoped to have an afternoon outdoor affair, but our bizarre daytime mosquitos dashed that dream (more on that later) so it turned into a nighttime inside-outside party. It was good motivation to get all unpacked and settled both inside and out within the month of moving, even if it did mean I was throwing up a few posters just before the first guests arrived.

Because we expected a large attendance, we went with a handful of appetizers rather than serving a full dinner. I made my white bean herb dip, which is versatile enough to use whatever herbs you have on hand. In the past I've mostly used rosemary, sage and thyme, but this time it was heavy on the parsley and marjoram because that's what's flourishing in my yard. The dip went out with a bowl of bruschetta topping (diced tomatoes, garlic, basil and olive oil) alongside vegetable crudite, sliced baguette, crackers and a cheese plate. The other birthday boy's wife made lemon ricotta sage butternut squash crostini and delicious mini tarts with feta, tomato, and cucumber (I think).

Like our party back in February, I like to put up a sign next to the bar suggesting cocktail options to make it readily apparent what's available. At this party, in addition to standard bar fare, we had a couple punches that could be enjoyed with or without the addition of alcohol - a cucumber limeade that a friend brought, and a watermelon-lime-mint punch (will share that recipe soon).

For dessert, I made mini flourless chocolate cupcakes - as expected, the miniature size is perfect because they are so rich that even the regular cupcake size is a bit much. I also made peach oatmeal crumble squares (pictured above) by adapting a Smitten Kitchen recipe for blueberry crumb bars. Since I don't have the requisite 9x13 inch pan, I did some math to determine that my 12 inch cast iron pan covers about the same area. I didn't believe that Deb was able to cut hers into 36 squares, until I started cutting mine and realized a little square will go a long way because they are tall and dense, especially so with my addition of a cup of oatmeal to the dough. And then, of course, there was the ice cream cake...

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How to Make a (Vanilla Blueberry) Ice Cream Cake

First, find a good reason to make one. I knew for months that I wanted to make an ice cream cake for Evan's birthday party. He tried to steer me away, saying it would be too messy, too hard to serve, etc. Indeed, I usually avoid making cakes for parties, preferring to bake simpler handheld apportioned desserts like cupcakes. But I felt a special occasion such as a double 30th birthday party (he shared his party with his best friend who was born only 10 days away) merited an extra special baking adventure, especially for someone who loves ice cream as much as Evan.

Second, decide on your preferred style of ice cream cake. It turns out it's hard to find basic instructions for ice cream cake. There are lots of variations out there, often involving elaborate cookie studded ice cream or unusual flavors. Some aren't real cake, just cookies crumbled into a layer topped with ice cream. I scoff at those. Some are made of ice cream spread between two whole layers of cake. But Evan doesn't like regular cake that much, so I didn't want to make the cake primary and the ice cream secondary. Some versions involve a layer of ice cream molded in a cake pan to perfectly match a layer of cake in size. However, those recipes call for a lot of ice cream (two quarts), which would consume too much money and time to make. Many suggest whipped cream as frosting. But I don't like whipped cream.



Decide on a cake of your own design: In my case, it was a Vanilla Ice Cream Cake with Blueberry Filling: half a layer of vanilla cake, topped with blueberry filling, then a layer of vanilla ice cream, then half a layer of vanilla cake, and then frosted with vanilla ice cream. After it's all spent time in the freezer together, the slightly-ice-cream-soaked-half-cake-layers are just the right size to provide a chilled sturdiness, while the pure vanilla ice cream shines and the blueberries jazz it up.

Two or three days ahead, bake the cake. I used Smitten Kitchen's Best Birthday Yellow Layer Cake. Like Evan, I think regular cake is kind of boring, but Deb did not let me down and this cake was surprisingly tasty, so I kept sneaking bites of the bits that stuck to the pan. I have just one cake pan that is a rectangle around 7x11 inches, so I diminished her recipe by a quarter and left out the buttermilk and salt because no one misses that. Cream 1 1/2 sticks of butter and 1 1/2 cups sugar, whisk in 3 eggs, 1 cup milk and 2 tsp vanilla. Dump in 3 cups flour, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1 1/4 tsp baking soda and beat to combine until smooth. Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes. I had trouble getting the cake out of the pan even after it had cooled for an hour, so I employed a trick of placing a wet washcloth around the bottom of the pan for a few minutes before trying again, and it actually worked. Wrap the cake in plastic wrap and store it in the freezer.



Sometime between making the cake and the ice cream, make the blueberry filling. It is essentially a blueberry jam, and you want to make sure you leave enough time for it to chill before assembling the cake. In a saucepan, combine 1 pint of blueberries, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup water, 2 tbsp cornstarch and the juice of half a lemon. Let the mixture simmer on low for about a half hour, until the juice has evaporated off and it's thick enough to spread. Let it cool completely.



One day ahead, make the ice cream and assemble the cake. Homemade ice cream is soft enough to spread easily after it first comes out of the ice cream machine, so you want to have everything ready to assemble as soon as it is done churning. I followed the trusty recipe for basic vanilla ice cream that is found in the little pamphlet that accompanied my ice cream machine. Whisk 3/4 cup sugar and one cup milk until the sugar is mostly dissolved. Whisk in 2 cups cream and 2 tsp vanilla. Turn on your ice cream machine, pour it in, and let it churn for 15 minutes.



While it churns, begin to assemble the cake. Remove the cake from the freezer and carefully carefully slice it in half. You probably want to use a long serrated knife. Spread the blueberry preserves over the bottom layer and stick it back in the freezer to let the blueberry layer firm up a bit.



When the ice cream is done churning, spread about half of it on top of the blueberry filling. Lay the second layer of cake on top and then spread the remaining half of the ice cream across the top. Leave the sides for last and do it quickly. As I learned, ice cream does not work that well as "frosting" since it melts and drips rather than adhering to the sides. Nevertheless, do your best and ignore the mess. You can cleanly scrape away the melted puddle around the cake after it has spent its time in the freezer.

Store the ice cream cake in the freezer until just before serving. Luckily, it fit quite well inside of my cupcake carrier, which fit just barely into my freezer. Otherwise I probably would have tried to wrangle plastic wrap around it.



When it comes to time to serve, make sure all accompanying items are at hand, since time is of the essence when it comes to serving ice cream cake. We ushered everyone outside to wait with champagne and sparklers, while I scrambled last minute to find a lighter for the candles. Then I was glad to have a real candlelit cake to present for the happy birthday chorus moment. This was followed by shouting "quick come and eat the cake before it melts!" while the other birthday boy was presented with his present, a bow-adorned bicycle. We got about 20 small squares out of this ice cream cake, which turned out to be enough, because as anyone who's been to a wedding knows, not everyone wants cake at a party.

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Ramekin Dreams

It was a certain someone's birthday last weekend. A certain someone who was turning 30 and likes cooking and has often wished for ramekins so that he can bake adorable individual desserts and dishes for guests. I commissioned my friend Andy Boswell to make a set of six as a gift for Evan.

When we were young, my dad took pottery lessons from Andy's dad. Now Andy too is a potter (or utilitarian ceramic artist as he calls himself), who shares his father's studio. His etsy shop is full of beautiful mugs, teapots, and other vessels. It is much nicer to have his unique and meaningful pieces added to our home than generic mass produced items from China.

Evan is happy that his ramekin dreams have come true. We used them for the first time last weekend to make mini frittatas for brunch for overnight guests. I plan on using a few as serving dishes for his big birthday party coming up this weekend. And I see lots of personal apple crisps in our future this fall.

Mini Fritattas

Arrange the ramekins (one per person) on a baking tray in the oven and preheat the oven to 350. Whisk two eggs per person in a bowl. Add whatever extras you would like, such as grated cheddar cheese, sauteed onions and roasted red peppers. Add salt and pepper to taste. Carefully grease the insides of the ramekins with butter. Pour whisked eggs evenly among the ramekins. Bake for about 20-30 minutes, until the eggs puff up and a knife inserted comes out only slightly wet. Let cool for at least 5 minutes before serving.

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Girls Getaway in Ithaca

It's become a yearly tradition that I get together with a few high school friends in Ithaca, as a halfway point between our various homes across New York State. The first year was the summer of Elaine's bachelorette and wedding (technically we were in Syracuse and Seneca Lake that year). The second, we went cabin camping with Elaine's puppy. The third, we stayed in a hotel to accommodate Elaine's pregnant belly, and this year we rented a house, now that she has a nine month old baby. 

Renting a house was a good choice, as it allowed us to relax comfortably while the baby crawled around and we cooked meals at home. This was my first time renting from Airbnb, so I was a little anxious about it, but the house delivered on our expectations of cleanliness and size and amenities (a deck for mosquito-free lounging and grilling! a swing for making babies smile!). Hopefully we'll stay there again next summer, and maybe we can do more hiking and camping in another few years once little Emma's older.

We always try to hit up the Ithaca Farmers Market, which is huge and is housed in a wonderful permanent wooden structure. We cooked black bean tacos the first night, and then supplemented it with vegetables from the farmers market to transform our leftovers into black bean burgers and salad the next day.

This annual gathering is a great way to catch up on our changing lives each year. As Meredith put it: "It's nice to spend time with people that you've known for a really long time! Even if we are not all in the same places in our lives right now, I think its good for us to see what each other are up to and how we all made different choices and have different ideas."

Also, I couldn't help capturing that great graffiti trying to alert the populace to the perils of fracking. Just say no...

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