We Built This City...

On rock and roll, you hum?  No!  On compost.  Kudos, congrats, kol hakavod to New York City for running a pilot city compost program.

While visiting my sister Reba this week I saw the bins along her street.  Naturally the neighborhood is the perfect place to try it out:  she lives in a part of Brooklyn where you have a lot of organic food pushers.  So glad NYC is moving along with this.

Further to my music reference above, I am happy to report that my end of year visit to Manhattan was wonderful all around.  It was fueled by the music that I love best.  I saw friends and family both at the shows and in the times in between. We went to museums, consumed many a brunch, walked through Central Park with the kinderlach, and hung with the cousins. Levi did well with his mama out two nights in a row and I was grateful to my sister and brother in law for facilitating that.  Sadly I didn't allow my children to watch a movie on New Year's Eve, and that was a break with their tradition.  My children were acting way overtired so I just made them to to bed by 10.   Why I couldn't get it together for them to be sitting at a movie by 8 I don't know why.  Oh right I have a baby.  But what about my Stango help?  Obviously I failed in delegating and giving him some guidance.  Gotta work on that. 

While I would love to wax poetic about how Madison Square Garden is the most festive, fun, youthful, for-kids-of-all-ages-perhaps-15-and-over celebration in all of New York City, I gotta get dressed and make school lunches.

And just because you should see the greatness of what New Year's Eve could look like


 And here's to 30 years of Phish (didn't see it yet as I didn't go to the New Year's show)



If it was the secular New Year that means that Chinese New Year is coming up which means it's time to make Marci's "chinese New Year's cookies!"  I have had the ingredients for a while now.

Oh, so much to do...
And just because

Lantern Festival: Happy Chinese New Year Today!!!

The Year of the Dragon is upon us, and today is the date for Chinese Lantern Festival.

Last week we went to our local Chinatown (oh, how so very different than New York's various Chinatowns, whether on the Lower East Side or in Sunset Park!), and we sought out Chinese New Year's greeting card red envelopes used for money gifts for children (the Chinese do gelt in their own way).

Here is one that we got, in a multipack of other licensed characters:

Stango didn't give me $ in this, but instead he wrote a love note.  I know, I know, wrong holiday...but next year, when we know better, we will do it right.  And since we don't celebrate the holiday that is on February 14th, this was a good time to jump the gun.

My friend the Nunever consulted with his friend, who is Chinese, and I received  the following quite lovely translation and interpretation:

"The top line means be auspicious and wishful, and bottom is happy new year.  That's very good because it's integration of Chinese tradition and American culture.  Localization always means to me the symbol of being rooted, accepted, united and harmony.  We see peace as well from those."

And that is what the Whole Phamily is about.

Of course, we were eating Chinese food when we gave the cards.

We are Jewish, after all.




(What I REALLY want is to make my friend Marci's "Chinese New Year's Cookies" which are so deliciosu and not at all Chinese but they are made with lo mein noodles, butterscotch chips, peanuts, chocolate chips, and it can all be varied.  Marci, would you post the recipe?!?!)