Mom's Visit to DC, January 2010

After Museum meetings, Mom and Jer explored for good eating. A great dinner at Potenza revealed that the restaurant also had a bakery cafe open from 8:00 am-8:00 pm. So the next day we went back for Morning Coffee and found them making fresh, home-made pasta.

Cutting the pasta into tagliatelle

Spinach fettucine

Homemade gelato, highly decorated

Potenza makes their own pasta, bread, grissini, coffee, and etc. We had a long chat with the sous chef who is from Puglia, Italy and before D.C. worked in Paris. sweet guy with believable credentials. He told us about the multiple "components" of the dishes we had eaten the previous evening at the restaurant. For our Morning Coffee, we shared an omelette sandwich on delicious bread and took away a bag of Italian cookies-pastaccine which were divine and the best ever ciabbata roll!

Flower arrangement at the Willard Hotel

Ceiling panel at the Willard Hotel. The elaborate ceiling has insignia from all the States.

Bench in the Enid Haupt Smithsonian Gardens

Another bench in the same gardens--note the leaves motif.

Bolognese a la Jer

Cooking with Roberto Donna

"Chef."

Our individual cooking stations in his kitchen.

The theme of the class was pasta sauces. Here, bolognese. Note my finely chopped veggies.

Check out his not very fancy range!

Making fresh pasta. It got much longer! Around the entire kitchen island.

Eating the goods.

The first course: pesto, puttanesca, and arrabiata. I forget the name of that tube shaped pasta.

Chef's tip: Make pesto but don't add the cheese. Put in plastic container. Let sit in fridge for 1 hour. Remove, top with olive oil. Place back in fridge. Will keep forever. Remove and scoop out desired amount to use, add cheese.

Thank you Sabrina for finding and to all for giving!

Click here to see all photos from the day.

UWS Hoop Dreams

Check out this NY Times article and video here (scroll down), about a Hunter H.S. Jewish point guard who transfers to Poly Prep in Brooklyn.

America's Crypto-Jews

A new article on this interesting subject, this one in Harper's. I oversaw a guy reading it on the Metro...

Sabrina's Birthday at the SpaCastle

We spent an amazing day at the Spa Castle in Queens! It was a bad weather day, so this was the perfect activity. And being outdoors in a warm pool with the cold rain coming down was fun!

This NY Times article and slideshow do a pretty good job of showing what it was like.

Unique aspects included:

- special shorts/t-shirts uniforms

- a variety of different style saunas complete featuring different aroma and high quality materials (in many of the saunas, you lay on the floor on cushy mats and lay your head on a wooden - curved - block!)

- the "Iceland room" for cooling off after a sauna with real snow for walls

- a quiet sleeping area with heated floors

- 2 outdoor rooftop shallow pools with dozens of different special seating areas with different style jets, a hot tub made of 300 year old pine wood for special aroma, and a waterfall area

- single-sex bathing areas with different temperature pools and individual "scrubbing" stations with mirror, hand-held shower, wooden buckets, soap, shaving equipment. I had to watch the Koreans to see how to do it right...

- And, of course, Korean food...but also ice cream, yogurt, smoothies, hot dogs, beer, etc.

Pop, you're next!