2010!

Happy New Year! Happy not-being-the-00s-anymore, too. Sheesh. The more retrospectives I heard/read, the more glad I am that the decade is over. So, onward to the, er, tweens?

We have a new life now, too. The other day I was craving Thai food and COULD NOT FIND ANY. That is very different. (Jeff is picking up some tonight, though, now that the only restaurant within 30 miles is open.) The ethnic food options are not so good here in Rockland, Maine. Did you know that tortillas could be terrible? I didn't, until we bought the Mission brand at Hannaford. We are going to stock up on our next trip to Portland, because without tortillas we will either starve or get really fat eating Amato's sandwiches.

Jeff has decided that we should think of ourselves as characters in a warm-hearted comedy with a happy ending. So when a couple of city folk show up to a small town, and can't find their ethnic food of choice, and their cell phones don't work, and the man arrives at work to be told that his only local colleague is quitting, and the woman sits in the house all day trying to write a dissertation hundreds of miles from a research library...well, they just need to meet some lovable locals and learn the truth about The Way Life Should Be.

The movie might have to be called something like Fish Story, because what we do have here is some excellent seafood. Rockland is still a very active fishing town, as suggested by the Christmas tree:


In case you can't quite tell what's going on there:


Apparently we're in a fight with Gloucester, MA to see who has the biggest lobster trap tree. Lobster makes people competitive.

Naturally, I decided to take on a seafood-related challenge for New Years. I decided to make this fancy scallop soup. I hesitated at first because it requires a fish stock, for which one needs fish bones. You know, the kind you're supposed to "ask your fishmonger" for. But then I realized that there's a fishmonger I could ask practically across the street (we'd gotten cod there for Christmas--it's really a terrific fish market).

So I called up and said I was looking for "fish bones and heads" for stock; did they have any? "Ayuh," said the man (seriously! he did!), "I'm cuttin' cod latuh." Okay! So I drove around to gather the rest of the groceries. There was no thyme or parsley to be had. According to the grocery-store cashier this had to do with the oncoming snowstorm; people were stocking up on herbs early. I got some sad chives. Then I dropped off the groceries and strolled up the street to get the scallops and fish bones. They were in an opaque bag, and heavier than I expected.

After I got home and brushed off the snow, I pulled out this:


That is not what I expected bones to look like. Or feel like: heavy and slimy and cold and very unwieldy. How was I supposed to wrestle that into a pan? The idea of parsley began to seem absurd, anyway.

I spent a few minutes wondering what I was doing alone with a half-dismembered fish in my half-unpacked kitchen in the middle of a snowstorm on New Year's Eve. I considered throwing the thing out, then realized it would have to sit in a trashbag on the porch all weekend because we still didn't have a dump sticker.

Then I remembered to live up to my warm-hearted comedy. I changed into a machine-washable sweater and a waterproof apron, found the box labeled COOKBKS, and located a battery of knives. I hacked away at that thing--fish spines are tough--until I could bend it enough to wedge into the stockpot, and got rid of as much gory stuff as I could. I also poked out one if its eyes, accidentally. You will be glad to be spared pictures of this process.

Well, now I have a lot of fish stock in my freezer. And we had a very rich, mostly herbless scallop soup and watched Netflix while the snow came down.

I'd spent the whole week working on unpacking, and was very tired of it. So because the fish stock didn't take up the whole day, I'd decided to make bagels for the morning.

I used this recipe and they came out nicely, and kept me away from the boxes without much guilt.



I've never lived in New York and don't have a sense of what a "real" bagel tastes like, but Jeff said they were pretty close. Then he admitted that despite having eaten a lot of NY bagels his Platonic ideal might have originated in Saugus, Mass in the early 80s. Good enough.



He did not want to be photographed whilst capering his bagel.

We've done a lot of other stuff lately, too, but I find that I'm not very interested in recounting the move out of Chicago apartment (but thanks SO MUCH to the friends who helped us!) and the long drive, which for various reasons got extended across several days, and it was very cold and we'd managed to pack away all our hats and gloves. We were also trying to keep the houseplants alive, so there was a lot of late-night loading of bell carts with paper-swaddled pots, and some mystified night concierges. There was absurdity. There might have been a few tears. We got here in the end, and Mom and Dad came up to help us move in. The plants are doing OK, considering. As are Jeff and I.

And there was Christmas, too. It was really nice not to be flying in for a week and having to squeeze everything in. And if you're feeling jaded about Christmas it helps to have an almost-4-year-old around to be wide-eyed and thrilled about everything ("Look, this one is for me! Mommy, look! Oh, it's a notebook! I got a notebook! Uncle Jeff, Santa brought me a notebook!").



Emilia isn't really big enough to understand presents, but she found plenty with which to amuse herself (and us).


Sadly I don't have any good pictures from my family's Christmas, because it was almost dark by the time we got there and I'm no good at using the flash. We had a regular old fun time, and good food, and no one made fun of the blue sparkly tights I'd picked up at Target (not being able to find my box of tights) until the next day. A good jolly holiday.

This post has been all out of order, which seems to me an accurate representation of the last month. Now I think we're ready to settle into the new year.

We wish you all a happy new decade!