Happy Second Birthday!!!

Thank you for your support!

The Newfield Street Kitchen blog recently turned two years old, with almost 2,900 page views. And that’s without posting anything between the Third Annual Chocolate Dinner in late February and the first round of distillery tours in early May. In early March, my 13 year old laptop unexpectedly refused to start and I was too indecisive to replace it. I limped along for about six weeks using WordPad on my netbook from South America until I finally got a decent new laptop in mid-June. In the interim, all my advance reader copies from NetGalley expired, and I have yet to get back into my account to see what damage that has done to my reading profile.

Last year, I celebrated the first anniversary by making a chocolate mug cake in a paper cup in a hotel room while on business travel. This year, I’m going to keep it simple. I’m just going to try to express how grateful I am to you for sticking with the Newfield Street Kitchen through its second year. In fact, you all came back in early May, making the Saturday distillery tour post one of the top ten posts of all time. And I didn’t even #hashtag the distillery! The fact that you all still read about my adventures in my kitchen and out in the broader culinary landscape does a lot to keep me sane, focused, and out of trouble. And the fact that my nutritionist (Hi, Sue!) is one of my readers keeps me (somewhat) focused on eating good foods. Those weird alcohol posts really do take me forever to execute - especially the one about the botanical liqueurs - because I try to stay below my weekly allowance of alcohol. Although many may read like a boozy blitzkrieg, I’m really just doing a little tasting here, a little writing there, and slowly knitting it all together over a month or two. (Hooray for law review editing skills!) Except, of course, for last year’s cava cocktails post, which was written before I discovered that sparkling wine is also sold in very small 187ml bottles.

I do hope that you have learned something from my work here. Hopefully you’ve come away with more than just a good recipe for eggplant campanata or the secret to turning a creepy Buddha Hand into a delicious liqueur. That’s all well and good, but I’d like to think that my writing might inspire you to treat yourself better: by taking the time to make a home-cooked dinner, even if it means leftovers for a few meals; by experimenting with unusual foods or beverages, even if it takes a little research to figure them out; by doing kind things for others, even if it means frosting cupcakes at 4am; by using an off day to go on an adventure, even if it means flying solo.

The comments that I get about my writing - in person, by text, on social media - tickle me to no end and inspire me to embark on new foods and new adventures. For example, I recently met up with one of my favorite relatives, who is a regular reader. She was so excited to give me a bottle of local liqueur that she had encountered in her travels because she was genuinely interested in what I would do with it. I was very touched by her generosity and curiosity. Stay tuned for more on that episode in the future!

Now that I have over a year at my job under my belt and a decent new laptop in my home office, I have some capacity to plan what is in store for the Newfield Street Kitchen in the future. My short term goal is to minimize spoilage and waste of my CSA share at the local orchard. Four days before pickup, they are kind enough to send an email that details all the goodness in the basket, including use and storage. That should give me sufficient time to do some research on how to prepare the items that I’ve never dealt with before, like kale and kohlrabi, so they don’t go to waste. Here’s hoping that plan works!

My other short term goal is to get back into my NetGalley account and see what interesting cookbooks are available for reading and recipe testing. I’m hopeful that will happen soon, as now is the time that all the phenomenal October release cookbooks become available. Unfortunately, I can’t get anything new from my other source of advance reader copies, because I still owe them a post reviewing and/or recipe testing the last book I got from them. But at least getting back into NetGalley will be good for me, as it will give me material to work with that is different from the tried and true recipes I dig out of the family cookbook and the randomness that I find on the internet. I’ve discovered a lot of terrific books on NetGalley, and I’ve tried to share those discoveries through my Goodreads reviews and through my gifts at Christmas, birthdays, weddings, and so on. And reading before bed should be a lot more peaceful than falling asleep to Cutthroat Kitchen or Hell’s Kitchen playing on Hulu.

My medium term goal is to finish up all the posts that are currently in work, although I may just be swapping those out for other topics on my “to be written” list. At the time of this writing, I have six or seven different posts in progress, each at a different stage of readiness. Most have the introduction written and the research completed, but only a few have the testing underway. For example, I’m quite excited to finish my post about the Dumpling Galaxy Cookbook; however, each time I start the recipe testing for it, something in my life goes sideways, and I’m unable to get far enough to make the dough for the dumpling wrappers. That one has been dragging on since February! I’ve also completed the introduction and the research for a post on a fascinating new Italian amaro, but it is going to take another two or three weeks to finish testing the five cocktails that go along with it. Of course, that’s assuming that I don’t get sidetracked recipe testing the variations on my favorite gin and tonic that I found in an amusing internet article. And, yes, it is just my style to test both the losers and well as the winners…

Lastly, my long term goal is to go on more adventures. I have four fun trips in the next sixty days, which may offer opportunities for wine tasting, cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen, shopping in a foreign grocery store, and event planning. If I play my cards right, a distillery or two might cross my path during my travels. There will definitely be restaurants (and maybe a bar or two) but I’m going to continue to avoid writing reviews of these establishments. There’s so many people better equipped to do that than me, that I don’t feel that my voice needs to be added to the cacophony. Even beyond my planned trips, I’m looking forward to more of the simple daily adventures, like my impromptu tour of Negroni Week downtown or my solo cider works excursion. I still have to find my copy of the spirits trail because the paper copy is so much more accurate and informative than the website copy. And I’ve barely scratched the surface on the local breweries. Granted I found the ones on one side and the other of the cider works, but I’ve never been inside either. Further out in the Valley, there is the only brewery in the state to make the Food & Wine list of the craft breweries worth going out of your way for. Of course, I don’t know whether they made that list because they are awesome or because they are esoteric. If it’s the latter, I can always redeem the trip by going to the other brewery down the road. I know that one is a sure good thing.

So with the roadmap to the future of The Newfield Street Kitchen laid before you, I do hope that you continue reading this blog. If you talk with me or text with me about what else you’d like to see, I will do my best to oblige. But I will promise that you probably won’t see another post like this one at least until the blog turns three!

Thank you ever so much for reading!