Ithaca

What’s a small moment from your past that you still think about years later?

I still remember my college roommate Ann making an actual meal in our sophomore apartment kitchen circa 1984. I had never done any real cooking growing up, and freshman year we ate every meal in the dining hall. It was a weird feeling to have a kitchen of our own. We were like…adults…and we could be vegetarians if we felt like it.

If you were in college in the 80s and had even a passing interest in eating less meat, you probably owned The Moosewood Cookbook, or borrowed it from a roommate and never gave it back. Mollie Katzen’s hand-lettered, hand-illustrated pages felt more like a friend’s notebook than a cookbook. Everyone made the same few things: a big pot of soup, something with lots of cheese and broccoli, and a very ambitious attempt at a dinner party for six. I still have mine.

Decades later, my son was in college in Ithaca, NY and I finally got to eat in the legendary Moosewood Restaurant in downtown Ithaca.

Their subsequent cookbooks, including “Enchanted Broccoli Forest,” were huge bestsellers, especially among young, liberal, vegetarian types. I bought “New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant” when it came out in 1987–the year I graduated college. I still have that one too.

Yesterday, my husband asked for my old “Apple Cheddar Cheese Pie” recipe, so I dug it out. It was in the New Recipes cookbook.

This one has typed pages, rather than the hand-illustrated look of the original.

He whipped up this pie while I was working on a painting yesterday.

We had no pre-made pie crusts on hand, so he made the crust too. Impressive, don’t you think?

It came out great. The layer of cheese under the streusel makes this pie feel more like an actual meal. I would not add ice cream to this, but truth be told, my husband did.

Moosewood Restaurant’s Apple and Cheddar Cheese Pie. The last time I made this was at least twenty years ago.

The cheese isn’t really visible, but you can taste it and it’s lovely with the apples and sweet topping.

My roommate Ann (far left) and friends in our first apartment with a kitchen.

Terrible photo of my other roommate (and dear departed friend) grating cheese in that first kitchen. It was probably for a Moosewood recipe. There is lots and lots of CHEESE in Moosewood cookbooks. No meat, but a few fish recipes are included.

Have you ever broken a bone?

I broke a toe once, really badly. I don’t even like to think about it. It hurt SO much. (I stubbed it on a futon leg while barefoot.) It was wildly out of alignment. My husband had to pop it back into place. OUCH! Doctors can’t really do anything about toes. They just taped it to the one next to it and I limped around until it healed.

Fortunately no bones were broken during our Friday night “bucket list” excursion in Ithaca. The take-off was much wilder than I thought it would be. I was holding on to the basket for dear life. But once we were floating, it was quite magical. I’ve been in a helicopter before, but this was different. It’s as close as you can imagine to being a bird. So very many shades of green. The bottom of the basket occasionally scraped on some tree tops. “No problem,” said our pilot Dar. “Basket cleaners,” he called them. And then handed us some leaves. 🍃

My husband and son got put to work on both takeoff and landing. I took pictures and videos.

Three people were already pre-loaded in the basket at this point. The rest of us scrambled in over the sides, once “Captain America” was upright.

Up we go, with Dar’s hand on the “flame throwers” (which were a bit loud, when in use)

We floated over some waterfalls in Ithaca’s Robert H. Treman State Park

The magic of floating in the air and Dar thanking his ground crew.

I really did not want to drop my phone, but eventually I relaxed enough to hand it to a fellow passenger from Pennsylvania. He took this nice pic.

Farms and fields and Lake Cayuga in the distance

I think we were all a bit nervous about the landing. Once he found a good spot, Dar had the heavier people, including my very strong husband, move to one side of the basket. We all crouched down with all body parts inside the basket. We dragged on the ground for a bit. My husband got out and helped hold us down, which he said was hard. (He got a rather large bruise as we attempted to “jump” the basket up and over a small ditch. Inside the basket, we actually jumped up and down.)

When instructed, I did not waste any time grabbing the bars and vaulting myself out of the basket in a move that my son described as “wildly athletic.”

My son was instructed to run out into the field and help the ground crew pull down Captain America.

My son and the ground crew pulling Captain America back to earth

Everyone helped put Captain America back in his bag.

We celebrated with a roadside champagne toast and then the ground crew drove us back to our car!

Experiences over stuff

50 Happens

GenX Mom Keeps Calm & Carries On

Moosewood

Hot air balloon flight