Mischa's Eggplant Saute Recipe

It's been a very nice weekend overall, even though I didn't do much to plan for it. First of all, since so many people have asked me for it, here's my recipe for my Eggplant Saute dip that I made today:

3-4 ribs celery, diced
2 carrots, diced
1/2 large onion, thinly sliced
1 cup cauliflower, chopped
2 tablespoons minced garlic
2 medium eggplants, thickly diced
2 bell peppers, thickly diced (about the size of a quarter)
1/2 cup olive oil
1 lime, juiced
6 oz can tomato paste
3 tablespoons red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 tablespoon dried oregano
Salt & pepper

1. In a large cast-iron skillet or Dutch oven, heat several tablespoons of olive oil over medium high heat and add vegetables one at a time to keep heat fairly constant. Start with celery and carrots, then peppers and onions, then garlic and cauliflower. Add salt and pepper as you go along to taste. As vegetables reduce, push them to the sides of the skillet and add more oil in the middle before adding eggplant. Add additional oil on top as eggplant cooks.

2. Stir in remaining spices, lime juice and tomato paste and continue to cook until everything is soft and well-blended. Serve on bread, top with Za'atar if available.


Friday night I went straight from Penn Station to the Greene Space to see Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming in concert. It was livecast online and it will be edited for broadcast on New Sounds on WNYC at a future date. But you can see me in the front row in the video, just right of center screen wearing a polka-dot top. It was a terrific concert, and probably the most intimate and hassle-free concert I've ever been to.

Kacey had invited me to a play on Friday night but I couldn't go because of the concert, but we made plans to see a different play on Sunday night. Saturday I went to the movies to use my free guest pass and saw Edge of Tomorrow and Godzilla, and part of The Fault of Our Stars. In the late afternoon Katie M texted me and we tried the Hedwig show lottery together, with no luck. So we went to Schnipper's for dinner and came back to TSMC to watch Shopgirl, a modern romance I've been meaning to show her, since she liked the Before Sunrise trilogy so much. As always we had a wonderfully intimate talk about love and relationships, friendships and subway etiquette.

Sunday I didn't do anything except cook and nap until it was time to meet up with Kacey and Becker for the play, titled "The Feminism of a Soft Merlot (or How the Donkey Got Punched)." I have to say it was the worst play we've ever seen together, and possibly the worst play I've seen in New York, which is surprising considering the talent involved (Diana Oh played one of the leads). The acting was good, but the story was uninteresting and borderline offensive in how it portrayed possessive and territorial monogamous behavior and the lack of agency in its female characters.

However, the evening was not a total waste because we got to hang out together on a walk back to their place, stopping at Trader Joe's and I got to test out a convention for group hugs with them when we said goodnight in front of the IFC Theater: 1) Stand in a circle. 2) Put your left arm up, turn your head to the right. 3) Step forward and embrace to share the love.

Ear candy

I just received a pair of HiFiMan HE-300 home headphones in the mail today, my third major headphone purchase in the last three years. Now I have a Ferrari red leather Phiaton MS-400 set, hooked up to a NuForce uDAC-3 headphone amp for the office, my Bose QC-15 noise cancelling ‘phones for the train, and this set for home. Plus a pair of Altec earbuds for all points in between.

Right out of the box, the HiFi Mans sounded flat and congested, which is the opposite of what a pair of open-backed cans should sound like. Open-backed means that instead of cups that hold all the sound in, these drivers are not sealed around the ear. Sound leaks out, and the effect is similar to speakers in a room where you can hear natural sound in an open environment – the opposite of earbuds. The manual says they need 150 hours of break-in (6 days) so I’m driving them with my Yamaha receiver tuned to the Peter Gabriel station on Pandora. I’m sure they will sound much better after a few days of break-in.

I’ve had headphones since I was little, but I don’t think I’ve ever had three sets of full-size headphones before. It’s mainly a function of circumstances: I work in an open office environment and my primary job is writing, so I need the office set to tune the noise out. I commute by train rather than by car, so the noise-cancelling is a welcome feature. Why don’t I use the Bose in the office? Well, frankly, the Phiatons sound a lot better, especially driven by the NuForce from my laptop. I listen to live concert DVDs all day to help me block out distractions ("Rockin' at work" - Nov. 18, 2011).

The home headphones came from the realization that I can’t get Amazon to stream music over AirPlay to my home receiver. So all the music I can now access with Prime Music I can only play on my mediocre Altec Lansing computer speakers, or via headphones. Since I don’t want to cart my Phiatons back and forth from the office, a set for home made the most sense.

I’m going to date myself a bit here, but I still remember the first set of headphones I fell in love with. I was shopping at a store called Cactus Records and Tapes, a chain of music stores in Houston that now only has one location left, on South Shepherd at Richmond. I used to ride my bicycle to the store to buy records and one day they had a curious box sitting on the counter with a pair of headphones hooked up to it. It was a vertically loading CD player, one of the first ever sold in the US. This was back when there was only one tiny bin of classical music CDs – packaged in cardboard longboxes so they would fit into record bins – in a whole store of records and tapes.

Curiosity piqued, I put on the Koss PRO-4X headphones and pushed play. From a velvety black silence, the London Symphony Orchestra exploded with the first bars of John Williams’ overture to Star Wars. There could be arguably no better introduction to digital music for a young person raised on the acoustic limitations and surface noise of records and tapes. I remember hearing the triangle roll very prominently – I wager if I were to hear the same setup and early digital recording today, it would sound horrible – but that was impressive to my young, untrained ears. I was hooked.

I later convinced my dad, a classical music fan, to buy a Technics CD player for the home stereo – we were one of the first people in our circle of friends to have one. And of course I had to have those Koss headphones as well, with piezo-electric tweeters capable of reproducing from 10 Hz to 40 kHz, far beyond the range of human hearing. This was back in the day when such lofty claims were difficult to enforce.

I used the Koss phones until the earpads literally fell off – they weren’t that well-made. I’ve always coveted a pair of Sennheisers, but they were always a little outside of what I wanted to spend at the time. When I was really young, I even played around with a crude wireless headset that used a loop antenna to broadcast an audio signal - meaning I ran hundreds of feet of cable around my house so I could listen to music anywhere within that loop. My brother had a pair of classic AKG 240s that I liked, but I mostly made do with smaller portable headphones in the age of the Walkman, the mp3 player (I bought my first unbranded one in Hong Kong on a family trip) and finally the iPod. I had a string of JVC and Sony headphones (some of which got passed down to Puck to be used up and destroyed) before I finally spent some bucks for the Bose headphones.

The most interesting pair of headphones was in my last full-blown home theater in Houston, a wireless set of off-ear Sonys that used an infrared transmitter decoding a Dolby Digital signal and simulating it using a multi-driver open-air earphone. I had two headsets so two people could watch and listen to movies in surround sound in almost complete silence, yet still hear any interruptions. I also found that one overseas and I can't find anything like it today. I think today's headphone junkies prefer to block out external sounds with fully enclosed earcups.

Although I disdain Bose as a brand (the joke when I used to sell stereos was “No highs, no lows, must be a Bose”) their noise cancellation circuitry in their headphones is impressive. I’ve invited many of my co-workers to try them on, just to see the wide-eyed reaction when they realize how quiet it can be if you eliminate noise, as if you were in a recording studio. And while the fidelity is adequate for casual iPod listening, the actual musical performance is just mediocre. The best feature is that the music comes from that inky black silence afforded by the noise-cancelling, just like my first experience with the compact disc many years ago.

Tony Awards 2014

Friday night I finally got to meet up with my dear friend Agnieszka and meet her boyfriend Mike at their new home in Cranbury. It's a gorgeous historical house with three bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths, but they plan to renovate it into a four bedroom, two-and-a-half bath someday. They've only been in the house for three weeks so it's still a work in progress, but it's already a lovely space with much of Agnieszka's collection of vintage bric-a-brac on display. Even the modern gas range is modeled after an old-fashioned coal-burning unit.

Since I was so late getting back to the city, I stopped by the MMMM and saw Kiwi for a bit before making my way home.

Saturday Liz and I met up for dinner at The Counter to have some made-to-order hamburgers and catch up - it's been nearly a month since she and Josh came over for Her at TSMC. Then we walked down to Urban Stages Theater and saw The Tragedy of Dandelion, my second time to sit through this marvelous three-hour play. We chatted with Joan and Bruce, and with Kacey and Azizi after the show. Liz also knows the playwright, Duncan, whom I met briefly at the PIT once.

Afterwards, Liz and I walked up to TSMC to meet Josh, stopping at a few souvenir shops so Liz could buy some prizes for her Tony Awards viewing party on Sunday. The three of us met up at the apartment and chatted for a while until it was time for them to get home.

Sunday I had a whirlwind day of three events in a row. First was Lori's singing recital on East 87th Street, then I went home directly after to make peanut sesame noodles for Liz's party. I packed up the noodles and went out to Williamsburg for Classic Album Sundays, which was playing The Cure's bestselling album, "Disintegration."

Then I zoomed all the way back up to East 88th Street for the Tony Awards party and got there right in the middle of Hugh Jackman's opening number. Guapo was suitably dressed for the occasion:

Even though I was in a room full of theater nerds, I managed to pick 10 correct winners, second behind the other Michelle (17) and Liz (15), winning me a souvenir shot glass for a prize. Liz also made a tasty shepherd's pie, and there were Oreo cheesecake cupcakes and an assortment of cookies from Smackery's (the bacon maple cookies were my favorite!).

Monday night Piper came over and we had dinner at the Playwright Tavern on 45th and 7th Ave and watched The Blues Brothers at TSMC. She also brought me some household things she was giving away on Facebook, and we also had a nice catchup (it's been about six weeks since our last visit, although we chat online often).

Tonight is my recovery night before Katie B's event on Thursday and meeting up with Angel and Lillian on Friday. I thought I was getting sick yesterday, but it seems to have gone away now, although my allergies are still troublesome. Judging from the noises in the office, I'm not the only one who's suffering though.

Finding courage

Last Tuesday night’s Open Love NY meeting was our best-attended ever, with about 65 people give or take, most of them fans of our speaker. She’s a blogger and contributor to Psychology Today, and she presented a lot of data and research about different relationship styles and the differences between sexes and orientations.

When I opened the meeting on Tuesday, I rattled off the usual privacy and safe space rules, and then I went off-script and rambled a bit on my thoughts about the Memorial Day shooting in UCSB, and how it relates to my passion for the national polyamory movement. I didn't have anything prepared, just an idea that probably came out of my mouth a lot better than it sounded in my head because when I finished I got a nice ovation from the audience. So I resolved to put the ideas down and this post on my public blog is the result. It’s gotten positive reviews on Facebook and it’s slowly spreading its way around the Internet.

Thursday Natalia and I finished up Season Four of Downton Abbey, and it was a marvelous ending, especially compared to the ending of Season Three. We had dinner at Larb Ubol, a Thai restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen, and we ordered a grilled tilapia, which is the first time in years for both of us to eat a whole fish.

Friday night I went with a group of friends to see Cabaret, which Puck has been raving about since they saw it. My friend Beth had four table tickets, so I got Lori and Andrea to buy in to see the show. We met up at a Vietnamese place called Cha Pa's Noodles and Grill around the corner from the theater for a bite, and then rushed over when it started to drizzle. The show was amazing and entertaining (Lori sang “Maybe This Time” from the show, and Cole Porter’s “So In Love” at her last recital I attended), although I felt Michelle Williams was a bit of a weak spot in the cast. Alan Cumming, who played Nightcrawler in X2: X-Men United and was the pansexual emcee of the show, was terrific, as advertised.

However, the night was not lacking in star power because after the show Andrea spotted fellow X-Man star Hugh Jackman sitting at the table way in front of us near the stage and getting a stage tour as we all looked on. The night was also not lacking in drama from the audience, because during the quiet breakup scene a HUGE row erupted from the mezzanine as a couple got into a loud, nasty fight and literally screamed at each other all the way out the door without any regard for the performance going on. Andrea looked at me and whispered, “Is this part of the show?” and I shook my head. We all gave kudos to the actors for staying focused and in the scene while this kerfuffle was happening.

Saturday I had my picnic in the park with Illona. We had near-perfect weather and we had a long, relaxed conversation about friends, communities, religion and relationships. We discovered a fancy grocery store going from the park to the subway so I picked up a few things. This is a really good walk to do any evening when the weather is nice. There's even some art sculptures along the way, but they have a tendency to get moved around.

Saturday night Puck came to visit from Boston. I was working at my desk with my earphones on (because of all the sirens outside) when they came in, so they completely startled me and I let out a scream like I’ve never done before! And that is why I don’t watch horror movies. We continued our reading of "Matilda" before bed, and the next morning we went to Ess-a-Bagel for brunch. We came home and watched The Grandmaster before heading up to City Center to meet their family, who was taking them to a performance that afternoon before they head back to Boston. I took a leisurely stroll around Midtown before ending up back home for the rest of the evening.

Monday night was Shotz, but none of the usual crowd could make it. I had to work late, so I’m fortunate not to have made plans for the early show. I went straight from the train station to the theater for the 8:30 pm show – the theme was “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s SHOTZ!” The conditions were 1) Something is in peril; 2) Someone has a secret identity; and 3) The line “Kapow” must be used.

My favorite for kitsch was the first one, about a pacifist superhero named Azure Mist being betrayed by the police commissioner who wants a more aggressive approach to crime. For laughs, the second play was the funniest, about two zebras, one gay, one lesbian, being asked to breed by their ingratiating zookeeper, who gets his comeuppance from a pair of undercover PETA activists.

The fourth play was an audience participation piece where people were asked to come up and “do something brave” with a cast member. The first pair did a shot of liquor, the second pair exchanged shirts (interestingly, they were both wearing black lace bras), the third pair exchanged a passionate kiss (two women, btw) and the fourth audience member got her face painted green.

The point was that we can all have courage in our daily lives (they all put on crusader masks at the end) and it wasn't lost on me since I feel like such a coward now for not raising my hand. I need to be better at letting art inspire me and not being just an observer all the time.