Cleopatra's Needle 



All of my memories of Manhattan come from one of my favorite shows as a kid, Family Affair,

the six-season (1966-71) long melodrama which took place mostly in a high-rise apartment on E. 64th Street, just a couple blocks away from the south Central Park entrance near the zoo.

It seemed every few episodes French or Uncle Bill would take Buffy and Jody down to the Park for a little 'green time.'  In heartfelt scenes depicting first-time male caregivers muddling through the daily tasks of the well-to-do raising kids in the big city, it was Uncle Bill's grandfatherly wisdom combined with French's insistence on precision that always managed to turn little troubles alright.  Without research or a visit, those images of fake green studio sets might have been about all I'd have to hang onto. At another glance,

you find that even though Central Park is steeped in as much history as nearly any other part of the city, it looks like the park has maintained its allure as a landscape full of mystery, unfolding almost like pages in a giant story book.

One of my favorite stories is of Cleopatra's Needle, the ancient Egyptian obelisk located just west of the Metropolitan, at the west central edge.  One of a grouping of four Egyptian obelisks unearthed and given to countries in Europe and the U.S.,

New York received this one as a gift back in 1879 from the Governor of Alexandria.  What's most mysterious is to imagine how they moved and re-erected a 71-foot, 244 ton stone structure with limited funding and technologies?  William H. Vanderbilt gave $100,000 for the venture, and the journey from Alexandria began by rolling the monument over a wooden contraption through a hole pierced in the hull of the steamer Dessoug.

Once at the Hudson River shores, the enclosed obelisk was transported along a special elevated rail track 10,095 feet which took 112 days, and finally installed at its current spot.

In something of a not-so-mysterious twist of fate, the heiroglyphs praising Thutmosis III along its side began to erode in the big city due to pollution and climate.  An archivist in Egypt has warned that if the park conservancy doesn't restore the ancient script, Alexandrians might come back to get their ancient possession.  Uncle Bill, an engineer, could have fixed it.

Miyagis 

You win some and you lose some when you try new chain restaurants.  On 94 east an hour away from Brookfield, two bars on the Ipad found for us fresh seafood at Mitchell's Fish Market located basically in the back lot of our destination at Sheraton.  So when we got there we ducked in for late lunch and had to try a round of fresh and charbroiled oysters, some sea bass and crab cake sliders.

Mitchell's is a limited chain with few locations around the country and prides itself on a daily rotating menu based on market available fresh seafood flown in and cut right there on premises which you can watch through a cute little window signed the 'cutting room.'

Jan thought the fresh Olympic, WA Miyagi oysters brought her back to her nautical days as a seafood server at Anthony's Home Port in Ballard, Seattle.

The blackened sea bass sandwich, charred perfectly, hot and smoky, and those three fresh crab cake sliders convinced us that we might have to take a little covert trek this afternoon across the parking lot back to Seattle at the mall.

Out to the Ballgame, Milwaukee to NYC



Now that the fantasy baseball season is in full swing, my own team, N.L. Hess, has managed to climb out of the cellar – last place – and risen above the Munchkins and Tims Thunder with the second best batting average in the league (only a little help from Brewers Ramirez and no help from Corey Hart or Maldonado...yet) and a dropping total E.R.A. with the help of sharpening outings by Milwaukee's Gallardo and Kyle Lohse.

As we get ready to test some of my players tonight at Miller Stadium vs. the Cubbies (Lohse pitching), it got me thinking baseball in the Big Apple where Julia and I plan to take in a Yankee / Blue Jays game in late August at Yankee Stadium,

located northward up a fairly long 'tube' ride to 161st st from Grand Central Terminal.  My own fantasy team is strictly selected from the National League, so we won't be necessarily cheering any players (although Julia loves Jeter...I wish I could have stolen Cano somehow for my N.L. team), we will have the great historical fortune of traveling through a brief glimpse of Yanks and Mets country. We'll subway past, for example, the old Polo Grounds area.  Just uptown from Central park,

nicknamed "The Bathtub," Polo housed any number of sports franchises over the years including the Yanks, Mets, the Jets and Giants.

The historical stadium is set underneath Coogan's Bluff, a historic site itself if for no other reason than sitting atop is the Morris-Jumel Mansion, George Washington's temporary headquarters for a difficult month in 1776 during the New York campaign.  In this photo, the mansion can be seen at the flying flag on top the ridge.  Decrepit and vying with any number of other Big Apple sports stadiums, the old Polo finally fell under the wrecking ball in 1964 and is now the site of the Polo Towers.  As one story goes in 1963 Casey Stengel,

the iconic Mets Manager, told one of his pitchers during what must have been a slow start, "at the end of this season, they're gonna tear this joint down. The way you're pitchin', the right field section will be gone already."  We can only hope that Lohse tonight fares better against the hapless Cubbies.

NY Harbor: You'd Get a Charge Out of that Turtle




Playing Trivial Pursuit it might be a bit of a challenge to answer the question, what does the first American submersible and Abraham Lincoln have in common? Sitting at the Beer Garden

at Battery Park lower Manhattan, though, sipping a Headwater Pale Ale

the answer would lay sunken out in the historic waters of the Hudson Bay.

Only a few blocks away from the Fraunces Tavern – meeting point for the Sons of Liberty – Battery Park, named after the fort walls and artillery stations created there during the American Revolution, looks out over that all-important port waterway which was the true target of capture for the British during the war.  If the port could be taken, the strategy had gone, then New England could literally be starved of its vital supply line and would come to surrender.  To help do his small part in defending against this dire outcome, David Bushnell, a freshman at Yale, invented a one-man submersible which carried a device able to bore a hole in the hull of a ship and to set a timed underwater explosive.

The Turtle, as it was named for its shell and shape, was sealed in a wood frame, tarred, stripped in metal, topped with six pieces of small glass for natural light, and filled with enough oxygen for a mere thirty minutes. Hand cranks, believe it or not, served as the source of propeller energy.  A ballast system at the bottom of the vessel drained or filled depending on the needed depth.  This was a similar floating system that a young Abraham Lincoln, a midwest patent attorney before becoming president, would later himself invent and patent for riverboats that he was tired of getting snagged.

On Sept. 6 1776 Gen. Washington commissioned a launching of the Turtle against General Howe's flagship HMS Eagle. In what would make for some pretty darn good cinema, (right up there with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) Ezra Lee propelled by hand through tide and current for two hours to reach the Eagle but was unable to bore through a hull fortified by metal.

Lee tried again, but no luck. The story goes that British soldiers stationed at Governor's Island saw something unusual that night bobbing in the Hudson and rowed out into open water to check it out.  Lee released his torpedo hoping the British might inspect it and find a very explosive surprise.  The British rowers, leery of the floating object, retreated and the torpedo went off in the East River.  A month later the Turtle was sunk on what was called its 'tender' vessel at the now historically familiar Fort Lee, New Jersey.  Washington said of Lee's failed attempt at the Eagle that it was "an effort of genius," but that "a combination of too many things was requisite" for such an attempt to succeed.  Bushnell reported salvaging the vessel, but its final fate is unknown.

Seed'em and Eat



With the help of a slow cooker, well-selected vine-ripened tomatoes can become a version of

classic Tuscan-style spaghetti sauce much more easily than some other cooking styles.  Slow cooking leaves the tomato flavor intact and the house smelling like a little Italian countryside kitchen for hours.  I've had grand plans of garden grown homemade spaghetti sauce before, but time and deer,

two known arch-enemies of fresh slow cooking, have prevented more than one attempt. I thought I'd skip the three-month wait for backyard tomatoes and relied on Festival's own selection, picked ten, brought them home and started up a sauce that begins with sautéed chopped onions and celery, some smashed garlic

a pinch or two of dried oregano, a dash of red wine vinegar and two Tbsps. of white wine from Villa Bellezza. This base stock you toss in the slow cooker.  The remaining bulk is the 8-10 seeded tomatoes.  To seed you can cut each tomato cross-wise in half and squeeze the soft seed tissue right into the sink if the tomato is ultra ripe.  Otherwise cut each into quarters and scoop out the seeds with your fingers.  When you drop the pile of fairly hard tomato skins into the slow cooker, it seems like the sauce will be very clumpy and it scares the home cook because one look at a pile of tomato peels by kids and it could mean a nose-up in reaction and a meal denied.  But the 4-5 hours in the slow cooker breaks those skins down and you can crush them into a food image more appealing.  Another help is that the recipe calls for blending half of the sauce then re-mixing in with the rest of what's left, tossing it in with the spaghetti noodles, fresh chopped basil,

some parseley, and finished off with a pinch of parmesan cheese.  The result is a sauce that you can actually taste each individual ingredient without the addition of sugar, a lot of salt, water, and other stuff that is added in the jar version.

Kid noses stayed steady on the plate, fingers were involved, and the noodles were slurped with fast lips.

NYC: Sons of Liberty, 18th Century Broad Street


Visiting big cities can get overwhelming quickly.  Vast and endlessly sprouting concrete facades, blinking lights, the chaos of people in and out of traffic, the questions of who to trust, which way to go, how to get there?  It helps in all of this to be able to see past the facades and chaos and envision instead the network of significance underneath it all.  With history as a silent tour guide, there's direction in trusting what you already know or what you're determined to find out. Times Square has its brilliant allure, no doubt, but you might find me at a little place called Fraunces Tavern, not far from Delmonico's near Wall Street,

a good spot to fire-up the historical imagination and see New York's early role in the Revolutionary War. Fraunces is one of the three oldest buildings in Manhattan – now a restaurant and museum – and which served not only as a hub of activity for the Sons of Liberty pre-1776, but would also famously host the party for George Washington's farewell speech in 1783

after eventual Patriot victory (the farewell address is one of the few historical examples of an all-powerful leader willingly relinquishing power at the height of a military career.  Washington wanted to retreat back to domestic life and farming, a deliberate act against the dangers of monarchy). The tavern would also come to serve as the Dept. of Treasury and War under Henry Knox from Dorchester Heights Boston fame.  You would not have wanted to be at Fraunces in August of 1775, however.  At the beginning of the Battle for Manhattan (Fort Washington), the tavern received an 18 pound cannonball through its roof from the British warship Asia.  The Sons of Liberty restored the building in 1907.

This time period marked some of the first military actions revolving around the attempted taking of New York, a critical geographical Eastern port at the time.  After evacuating Boston at the Siege of that city, General Howe retreated to Nova Scotia and recalculated his troops' next moves.  Washington  anticipated accurately that Howe would come for New York and built fortifications at the high points at what is now Washington Heights and across the Hudson at Fort Lee, New Jersey.  

Although the Washington Bridge now conveniently connects these two points, it was at the time a

critical narrows leading inland to control.  With the aid of some 3,000 Hessian soldiers (hired mercenaries from the German province of Hesse...don't think I'm related),

the British would take the Fort against a Connecticut regiment that General Washington became so angered over its performance that he berated the retreating soldiers and came supposedly within 100 yards of the battle lines with sword slashing only to be pulled back to safety by aides.  This defeat was one of the worst in the history of War.  New York was not merely a critical port, but in such taverns as Fraunces the infant network of Revolution had become an important political center.  British soldiers would occupy the tavern themselves until 1783.  At one point, Fraunces, the founder, fled to New Jersey only to be captured by the Redcoats, brought back to the tavern, and forced to cook for British generals.  The food must have been good too.

Daddy Day on the Road


It's always a bittersweet June day when we take Abby to Pepin for her two week camp.  It's a gorgeous drive along the Mississippi through Alma, Fountain City and Nelson.  Abby returns refreshed and seemingly rid of the previous school year...but it's also two weeks without our oldest kid! No letter writing or phone calls, just some secret texting (I know she's going to play some frisbee golf tomorrow with buddies). First day of camp happened to fall on Father's Day, so we piled in the great white whale and thought we'd hit The Creamery in Nelson before goodbyes.

Julia thought she would be able to avoid the camera altogether on this trip – and almost did...but up against the cat-like reflexes of the IPhone she didn't stand a chance.

Dripping scoops of Rum Cherry, White Chocolate Raspberry, Mocha Chip and Chocolate later,

it was time for the drop-off, where Carly quickly stole the show and a limb-swing from some unsuspecting camp counselor, only to just about fall off in one of those butt-slip-and-hang-on-for-your-life moves.  The camp grounds in the background, a wide open field, is lined with the cute stubby cabins that Abby and her friend Abby stay in. Facing Carly the Pepin lake beach stocked with kayaks and canoes, docks, a water jumping trampoline, and bonfire ring with bench seating around it in a semi-circle.  

On the way back, at the far outskirts of the town of Pepin, we had to stop by the new winery Villa Billezza, which truly looks as though it were a brand new version of something plucked right out of the Tuscan countryside,

so much so that you stand there in awe of the grounds and the question over and over again comes up, "is this Pepin, WI"?  It turns out that many of the south-facing riverside bluffs of WI share some identical geographical gifts of other European wineries.  The grapes were just budding in this June break-out day of sunshine

and luckily we had along with us a willing participant to sample some of the sweet vine fruit.

When we return in a couple of weeks to get Abby, we'll have try the reds.

The Eastern Tour Cont'd: 297 Miles from the Van Ornum Trading Post to Delmonico's


Like the water that nearly connects Lake Champlain at Ticonderoga to Lake George and southward along the Hudson River into the back pockets of NYC's five burrows, highway 87 just about links Janet's Dutch ancestry at Lake Saranac NY

down to a place where I'd love to try the best steak in the world, at Delmonico's, Wall Street – the first established restaurant in America.

Old Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, one set of Revolutionary heroes at the Siege of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, helped make an 'American' New York possible in the first place by generally disrupting British land grabs along the countryside in NY colony.  At the same time that Allen was demanding the surrender of the fort, Janet's Dutch ancestors would have have been settling the exact area of Lake Champlain. According to the VanOrnum Saga, 1962, "The English colony of Vermont lay along the east side of Lake Champlain.  This territory was settled by English people who came through, or from the port of Boston, Mass.  Among these people was a daring young woman who discovered that there were people on the west shore of the lake.  The lake was about a mile wide at Ticonderoga.  This young woman and a friend got into their Indian canoe and paddled across the lake.  They were greeted by the Dutch settlers with great Friendliness.  One of the Dutch families at the fort had the uncommon name of VanOrnum."  Around 1772 the young woman and a VanOrnum son married and moved northwest to establish a trading post at the now-considered jewel of the Adirondacs, Saranac Lake, where the likes of Albert Einstein and Mark Twain summered for its beauty and quaintness.

Five hours south on the Hudson, famished, sitting at a white clothed table, we could sample a steak that has a controversy attached to it.  What cut of meat, exactly, was the original Delmonico steak, prepared by the great 19th century head chef Charles Ranhofer?  A ribeye, New York Strip, bone-in top sirloin, a bone-less top sirloin, what?  Ranhofer, in his cookbook The Epicurean, names his specialty cut "Bifteck de Contrefilet Delmonico au Beurre et aux Fines Herbes Cuites."  Hard to find at Festival Foods, but basically a rib-eye rare, olive -oiled, and basted in herbed butter.

Abby might like the place because it was the first restaurant to have a female cashier; Janet because it was the first restaurant to allow women to congregate as a group; Julia because it was the first to offer Lobster Newburg; Carly because it was the first restaurant to have a 'star chef.'  I might because I get to write about it.

What's Cooking at Ticonderoga




There would be no better way to visit two important colonial eastern states at once than tour the ramparts of the old 'star fort' at Ticonderoga, located at the bottom of Lake Champlain upstate New York, officially, but sharing the border with Vermont.  Located as it is at the center of all these 

waterways – the St. Lawrence, Champlain, the Hudson River, and Lake George – it's no wonder this was a highly tactical position to possess for the French and British at its creation during the French and Indian Wars, 1758.  

As history quickly evolved, though, it was no longer the fur trade that dominated the scene, but the upcoming Revolutionary War.  The British held the fort up until the second major battle at Ticonderoga occurred in 1775, when a mere token force of 400 British was overtaken by Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, a militia first formed in the 1760's to defend against New York's 'Loyalist' plans to overtake and claim the area. Allen, demanding the surrender of the Fort below, and later credited with becoming one of the founders of the state of Vermont, would serve as one of the perfect examples of the sort of patriot

that was part of the Siege at Boston.  It would have been his capture of the fort and correspondence to the then surrounding militiamen at Boston, including Washington, that there was inactive artillery available for placement elsewhere.

In a continuing chain of cause and effect, this would have led to the 25 year old bookseller Knox to make his storied journey north to pack the much needed armaments and begin the the 3-month trek back down through treacherous frozen waterways to Boston at Dorchester Heights.  The Fort would continue to be a vital communication link between any occupying force and the northern waterways.

Today Ticonderoga is used for educational purposes, where courses are taught on how to convey the importance of living history and the location's importance to events in the French and Indian Wars.  I think I can see Abby, Julia and Carly now walking around the triangular bastions, maybe even visiting the old concrete bakery that used to serve upwards of 60 loaves of bread a day.