Friday Night Lights

Posted on July 30, 2011 by fast eddie

The lights at East Dillon High are dark tonight. Friday Night Lights said goodbye last week after a great five season run. Coach Taylor, Tami, Julie, Matt, Buddy, Riggins and the rest of a memorable ensemble cast have moved on but left some great memories. Every so often there is a TV series that draws you in and makes you feel part of the family. Friday Nights Lights did that for me. It was about family, marriage, community, small town America, underdogs, and a little football too. It brought tears to my eyes almost every week. I will miss it.

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Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse

Posted on July 29, 2011 by fast eddie

For the grand finale of Family Time, we celebrated my mother’s birthday with some Jewish soul food at Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse on the lower east side of Manhattan. My mother grew up eating the kind of food they serve at Sammy’s, and it’s no wonder that she, I, my sister, our kids and most Jews of Eastern European descent suffer from high cholesterol and chronic heartburn. The primary ingredient in almost everything is schmaltz (rendered chicken fat), which was used for cooking by Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe because butter was not kosher and olive, peanut and sesame oils were unavailable. If you don’t get enough schmaltz in the cooked food, there is a pitcher of it on the table so you can smear it on your rye bread as you peruse the menu searching for your preferred means of self-destruction.

Appetizer choices at Sammy’s included chopped liver with fried onions, schmaltz and gribenes (crispy fried chicken skin), chopped eggs with onions, broiled chicken livers with fried onions and karnatzlack, a Roumanian sausage made from ground beef, veal and garlic. Then, of course, there was chicken soup with kreplach (meat-filled dumplings). Main course specials included flanken with mushroom barley gravy, calves liver with fried onions, Roumanian tenderloin steak, stuffed cabbage and chicken fricassee, with sides of potato latkes (pancakes), with apple sauce, mashed potatoes with schmaltz and fried onions, kishka, and kasha varnishkes (buckwheat and farfalle). This was all topped off with rugelach and egg creams.

The meal was accompanied by live Jewish music and an entertaining waiter who dished out the insults and schmaltz in equal measure, resulting in a festive evening that brought my mother back to her days growing up in a Jewish immigrant household in Brooklyn. For the rest of us, we just thanked our lucky stars that her family got out of Eastern Europe and we only have to eat this stuff on special occasions.

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Family Time

Posted on July 28, 2011 by fast eddie

Warning: For those of you who only like the funny ones, you can stop reading now.

July is my family time (hence the recent spate of nostalgic photos). I am fortunate that both of my parents are still healthy and active, and I make it a priority to enjoy the quality time we have left together. There is a ten-day stretch from my father’s birthday to my mother’s birthday in late July that generally provides the excuse for a family event. Sometimes, like my father’s 80th birthday this year, it provides the occasion for a major family reunion, which we just hosted at our house this past weekend.

We all have these events in our families–landmark birthdays, weddings, graduations, bar mitzvahs, christenings–that give us the opportunity to see our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, take out the old picture albums, make new slideshows or videos set to My Way, We Are Family or Sunrise, Sunset, and reminisce about the good old days. The youngest members of the family are introduced to relatives they never knew existed and stare quizzically at their elders as they are educated about the differences between second cousins and first cousins once-removed, while waiting patiently to go swimming. The twenty-somethings proudly share their most recent academic achievements, exciting new career developments and maybe even introduce a potential spouse to the rest of the clan. The boomers put their best face forward spinning their stories in the most positive way, bragging about their kids and masking their mid-life woes as much as possible. The elder generation reflects on times past and the people who are no longer there, passing along family history and tales of their youthful exploits, while wondering silently whether they will see some or all of the group again at the next reunion.

And throughout the party we take more pictures and videos to share at future reunions. For anyone who’s interested, here is a slideshow of my father’s 80th birthday party made by my daughter.

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My Baby Sister

Posted on July 27, 2011 by fast eddie

In 1959, my parents had a baby girl. She was cute but she cried a lot. About two years later when she learned to talk, she started breaking my balls and, except for some brief interludes for biting her nails and smoking cigarettes, hasn’t stopped. She used to put dirty socks in my mouth when I was sleeping to keep me from snoring. She once chased me around the house with a big kitchen knife (she was slow). In 1984, she got married and my brother-in-law started absorbing most of the flak. Then, she had a son and he took some of the shots. But he grew up to be 6′ 6″ and 250 lbs. She stopped bugging him around 6′ 180 lbs. I’m thinking of hiring him for protection.

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House Gifts

Posted on July 26, 2011 by fast eddie

We have a whole closet just for house gifts. We have a lot of guests during the summer so we get all kinds of gifts. One is a platter that looks like a hamburger. This was once an easy gift to use (see Burgers), but I’ve cut back on red meat and it just doesn’t work with halibut. Besides, we have several gift platters that look like fish. We also have some salad tongs that have palm trees for handles. I can’t remember if these were originally a joke, but I hope so. A guest also gave us the game of horseshoes. I am still waiting to find someone to play with. I think it was last in vogue in the late 1800’s in the Old West. Even the guest who gave me that game doesn’t ever want to play.  The gift closet has loads of picture frames that we rotate by reframing our family pictures just before each gift-giver returns so they think we love their gift. Sometimes we are so busy that we forget to put our own pictures in the frames and just leave the pictures of the blond-haired, blue-eyed families that came with them. People get confused because those people are much better looking than we are.

Some of the gifts have never been used. We reserve these for regifting (the giving to others of gifts previously received).  Regifting requires better administrative records than we currently maintain. Sometimes we forget who gave us a gift. This can result in inadvertently giving the gift back to the person who gave it to us or bringing it to a dinner party where the original giver is also in attendance. Sometimes I wonder whether there is a gift still in circulation that nobody has ever used–it is just a perpetual gift.

Sometimes people bring perishable gifts. Inevitably, this is food that we never eat like jars of tapenade or marinated mushrooms or fattening sweets that we would prefer not to be tempted by. One guest even brought freshly-picked fruit and organic vegetables for her own healthy diet and brought us a bakery basket of muffins, brownies and cookies. Often, it’s just an excuse for the gift-giver to eat treats that they would feel too guilty to buy for themselves. I once had a guest bring a delicious raspberry-cherry pie and then had to fight her to get a slice. (You know who you are!)

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