Sunday Dinner

The weekend is not complete without a sunday night dinner. Ben, god bless him, has started cooking on sunday nights and rather than help with the dishes, I thought I would write about it...

Tonight we had:

Grilled Chicken Breast stuffed with Goat Cheese with Smoked Cilantro Sauce, courtesy of our man with the grill, senor Bobby Flay.

It was a bit ambitious, as it involved smoking and roasting peppers, blending stuff and then grilling other stuff. A blender was involved (which sounds exactly like our vacuum cleaner - "What are you doing in there"), various peppers, cilantro and last but not least goat cheese.

The end result was executed brilliantly, the chicken was cooked to perfection and the sauce was beautiful... but there were too many flavors and amazingly none particularly stood out (I have been watching way too much Top Chef).

I hope this is the first of many sunday recipes!

Furniture - Some Assembly Required

I am on a mission... an interior mission. Moving from a 450 square foot apartment in Brooklyn (we used to round up to a cool 500) to a 1000plus square foot apartment has been an eye-opening and wallet opening experience. Suffice it to say you can not furnish an apartment with just a couch, chair and TV... contrary to frat boys and bachelors everywhere.

So we have been furniture shopping... let me break it down for you:

Thinking that we could go the vintage and antique route, we started at the Santa Monica Antique Fair at the Santa Monica airport. We figured this event was for die hard bargain hunters so we showed up at the gates at just past 6:00AM (the gates opened at 5:30) and to our shock and awe, most vendors were not even fully set up yet. They were still unpacking their "vans-o-crap" and hob nobbing with other vendors. Most of there conversations started with, "so I have been coming here since 1982, and back then....", this conversation starter is the equivalent of a snooze button and being that it was 6:00AM... well you get the picture. All in all, the Antique Fair was were they send cast offs of the Antiques Roadshow. Nothing to mention just a lot of crap and a lot of vans (which one leads one to ponder, what came first the crap or the vans?)

After this adventure, we headed off to IKEA trip #1 (if you are short on time - SPOILER - we ended up going 6 times), where we got a wonderful knock-off Tulip table and some quasi knock-off clear Lucite chairs (Lucite being the design word for plastic). We bought them because they are "soooo LA" and just in case you did not catch the metaphor - LA is made of plastic, and our chairs our plastic, so in short we have a vacuous yet chic dining room. Dining room - check.


From NYC we didn't bring any of our bedroom furniture, which meant we had to literally start from scratch. While I would have loved to ship my $20 dresser with us, to which I applied a rare paint technique called "crackle paint", we figured the best thing to do was to sell it for next to nothing at our stoop sale. So our bedroom was a blank canvas, bar our lovely Marimekko tapestry that we so lovingly mounted onto a frame. So we headed down to Room and Board... awesome! Seriously folks, if you are even thinking of purchasing furniture and have a Pottery Barn budget, put the catalogue down and check them out. They are awesome!

We went into the Room and Board store and I more or less picked out the furniture the moment I saw it... but I didn't actually purchase it until 2 weeks later because purchasing things above $1000 scares the crap out of me. It may have helped if I bought each drawer, head board and frame separately because somehow purchasing 10 things at $100 a piece does not bother me as much as spending $1000 all in one go. Case in point IKEA - genius, while they don't put the furniture together they do set there prices deceiving low making it so easy to spend $1000 and yet still come out with ten different things. Guilt - none, Bedroom - check.

Between IKEA's trip #2 & #3 we went to the Rose Bowl Flea market that occurs every 1st Sunday of the month. As it's name implies, it is at the Rose Bowl. This place was gigantic, but totally cool. We didn't buy anything, however I did have my eyes set on this handsome little fella.Which curiously enough we saw his twin on another aisle.. its an invasion:


While we did not purchase anything at the Rose Bowl Flea market, we wanted to and that's a nice feeling at a place where everyone is selling shit and aliens.

So I know you are all dying to know, IKEA trips #4 was all about the office or "man" room. I seriously wonder if that room name was invented by HGTV, and it was, than "HA!", we have managed a way to intrinsically de-masculinize your room. So the office has bookshelves, a desk and filing cabinets. The "man" room has guitars, skateboards and recording equipment... grunt, grunt, grunt, scratch, scratch, scratch.

And finally, IKEA #5 & #6 have been consumed with returning impulse buys from trips #1, #2, #3 & #4, oh the beauty of owning a vehicle. The days of taking the IKEA shuttle from Penn station to Elizabeth NJ are long gone.

So to make a long blog entry short (or longer - depending on how you look at it) we are slowly but surely settling in. Only 5 more IKEA trips to go...

Houdini - Escape from Los Feliz

The little cheeky monkey!

Ben said to me when we first arrived, we will know we are settled in when PJ is finally comfortable and less "sketched-out". And I have to admit, we were getting there. We may be reading a little too much into dog-psychology.. but i believe in that transfer or energy crap (and crystals and enya - don't judge).

PJ has had a lot to grow accustom to:

1) Yard - Imagine living a life in which the only time you are outdoors you are kept on a 3 foot leash. Can you also imagine pooping and peeing on said leash? Then all of a sudden you are allowed to go outside on your own free will? Talk about an existential crisis or Cartesian dilemma... whatever you classify it as, it was some heavy shit

2) Skunk - Imagine you are in said "yard" and you encounter a black and white nasty, hissing and scary rodent. For weeks, PJ thought that the yard had a keeper and that keeper was one bad ass, ying and yang looking mo-fo.

3) Dogdoor - PJ no longer has his dog-walker during the weekday, instead we have replaced this service with a dog door. Talk about a shitty deal and only adding insult to injury, we decided to "teach" PJ how to use the dog door after having a little too much to drink. Poor PJ was being pushed through the door, back and forth like some inhumane (but entertaining) drinking game. We learned two things, PJ is a pretty easy dog to train and neither Ben nor I fit through the door.

4) Crappy Dog Park - Oh how we miss prospect park, our dog park is located between 134 and the 5 freeway and has one patch of grass that is quarantined by orange construction mesh. So needless to say, PJ doesn't get off leash much... except for in his yard, when the skunk is MIA.

Taking into account the above mentioned things... the events of Tuesday, April 1st were inevitable.

I was out at a business lunch when I got the call: "PJ has escaped from the yard, some woman has him in her backyard... I am going to pick him up now". My heart sunk as I pictured our little pound puppy scared and alone in our East LA neighborhood, one wrong turn and he could have ended up on Hilhurst or (parish the thought) Sunset. Ben picked him up and brought him back home. He barricaded the dog door with a cardboard box and his drum and then returned to the office.

Then when I was on my way home (6:00ish), I got a call from Ben: "He did it again... PJ got out, some woman called me and they picked him up". Ben gave me the number and I called the woman immediately, "Oh, yeah, hope you don't mind we picked him up. He is just running errands with us, we have him in our car. Where do you live, we will come and drop him off"!

How nice is that! Amazing, I gave the woman our address and they came by 15 minutes later. A cute couple in their early 30's, two toddlers in the back seat and PJ, sitting up and looking out the back seat window. As if this was just a casual playdate. I gave the woman a big hug and asked if I could do anything to re-pay her. At first I was going to offer my babysitting services, but thought better of it, as I doubt this couple was going to think I was capable of taking care of two tiny human beings, when I could barely keep my canine under lock and key. We made introductions, they were incredibly nice and we both went our separate ways.

Back inside the house, I noticed that the barrier for the dog door was intact. There was a tiny 5 inch opening between the dog door and the cardboard box, and there was no way that our lovable but very uncoordinated dog was going to fit through that small space, so inevitably the conspiracy theories started to build.

The leading contender, was our neighbor, we will call him "gay", complained about PJ crying while we were gone. He also has a tendency for parking in our designated parking spot and complaining about the construction going on next door. During one of our interactions with him that started with the phrase, "Hey, I hate to be the annoying neighbor, but..." he mentioned that he used to have keys to our apartment as he used to walk the Chihuahua that lived here before us. Well if that isn't foreshadowing I don't know what is... Ben and I were convinced that our neighbor was unlocking our door and letting PJ out, because he was a passive aggressive dog hater. While Ben and I were mapping out our neighbors elaborate dog escaping plot, PJ snuck around the cardboard box and went out the dog door.

So Ben and I are learning a couple of things while in LA:

1) Our dog is a scheming Houdini who is only 5 inches think (never under-estimate the power of fur).

2) Strangers are incredibly accommodating in our neighborhood

3) Perhaps we should ask our neighbor is he wants to walk PJ - I mean he already has keys

4) Perhaps Ben's theory is not particularly accurate... the dog seems fine, it's us that still can't shake that New York neurosis.