Friday 5ive- June 26,2020

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a weekly blog post about five things that caught my attention during the week. New York City has moved into Phase 2 this week, and that means restaurants can have people dining outside and retail can move to curbside pickup. So far, so good.

1)  This week's photos of flowers comes from our own apartment balcony. Our planters have really exploded this week, I'm not sure how much longer they will be able to be contained.

2)  Now that Phase 2 has started, restaurants in NYC can have outdoor seating. The problem with that is that there is very little space outside many restaurants. They have gotten creative in building outdoor dining areas right in the street, which I find a little disconcerting. It may work on a side street, but the first restaurant pictured has tables in the bus lane on Second Ave. I like what Petaluma did with their outdoor tables on the sidewalk- they have tall dividers that give some measure of privacy.

Formerly a bus lane, now fine dining

Tables on a side street

Tables on a sidewalk behind tall dividers- I like this one

3)  We were lucky enough to travel to Italy the last two years, and had hoped to return this year, but that was not to be. Our friend Alberto at Cortona Wine Tours started a Wine Club, and we were able to order a case of wine from him. It arrived this week and we will doing a live online tasting with him on Sunday. It's the next best thing.

4)  We had tickets to go see comedian Jim Gaffigan at Radio City Music Hall in April, but that too was a no-go. I signed up for text messages from him, and he has been sending videos of his comedy bits every day. They are just short 10 minutes or so, and it's always good to have a laugh during the day. You can subscribe on his YouTube Channel here. 

5)  I got a lot of reading done last week. For my Juneteenth Weekend Reads, first up was Jesmyn Ward's memoir Men We Reaped, about five young men (including her brother) from her hometown in the rural South who died at a young age. It's heartbreaking and illuminating, about race and poverty.

Saeed Jones' memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives, is about his life as black gay man growing up in Texas. He is a poet, and every word is deliberately chosen in this powerful, searing book. He won the LAMBDA Award for memoir this year and it is well- deserved. It's a good read for Pride Month too.

Imbolo Mbue's novel, Behold the Dreamers, was also a good read for Immigrant Heritage Month. It tells the story of an immigrant couple from Cameroon who come to New York City for a better life for their young son. The husband gets a job as a driver for a Lehman Brothers executive, and his wife studies to be a pharmacist. They work hard and life is pretty good until the destruction of Lehman Brothers at the beginning of the economic crisis of 2008 threatens everything. So many people recommended this one, I really loved it.

Connie Schultz's The Daughters of Erietown takes place in an industrial town in Ohio from the 1950s to the 1970's. Ellie, a young high school girl, becomes pregnant, and she and her boyfriend Brick put their dreams for college on hold, marry and move to Erietown, where he gets a job as a maintenance man and she raises their family. Like Behold the Dreamers, it's about what happens when your plans are derailed, and how that effects everyone. It's a terrific novel.

I hope you enjoying the warm weather and that you are staying safe. Wear your mask, socially distance, and wash your hands.

Weekend Cooking- Food, A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan

This post is part of Beth Fish Reads' Weekend Cooking.  If you have anything related to food, cookbook reviews, novel or non-fiction book reviews, recipes, movie reviews, etc., head over to Beth Fish Reads and add your post. Or, if you want to read food related posts, head over to read what some interesting people have to say about food.

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan
Published by Crown Publishing, ISBN 9780804140416
Hardcover, $26, 352 pages

Jim Gaffigan is a well known stand-up comedian and actor whose biggest claim to fame is his "Hot Pockets" routine about the frozen food item eaten mostly by drunk college students and/or lazy people with a microwave.

He has written two books, Dad Is Fat, about living with his wife and five young children in a one-bedroom New York City fifth-floor walkup, and his second is Food: A Love Story, about his love affair with food.

As a stand-up comic who has traveled all over the world, Gaffigan has eaten in many restaurants. When he travels on tour, he tweets to his fans, asking them where and what he should eat. This section of the book is terrific, and in addition to being very funny, it includes wonderful tips for traveling "foodies" (a term Gaffigan disdains).

Gaffigan divides the United States into five major food areas-

• Seabugland (Northeast Coast)
• Eating BBQland (Southeast/Parts of Midwest)
• Super Bowl Sunday Foodland (Midwest/Parts of East)
• Steakland (Texas to Upper West)
• Mexican Foodland (Southwest to Texas)

He is not a big fan of seafood, especially shellfish, saving particular distaste for oysters. His discussion of barbeque, which is used as "a verb, noun, and adjective and even a potato chip" is funny and informative.

Gaffigan recounts how each city is proud of its own unique recipe for barbeque, and that in every Southern city he meets the same guy who says the same thing "Obama ate there, and you can get it shipped anywhere you want." He also mentions places that you can get great BBQ not in the South, with Syracuse, NY (Dinosaur BBQ) on that short list.

He tells a funny story about dragging his family to a gas station in Kansas City, MO to eat at Oklahoma's Joe's, where Gaffigan joined a very long line at 11am. The line was filled with "predominantly, pudgy, balding, exhausted men in their thirties and forties," all happy to be there, though if these same men were confronted with such a long line at a grocery store to get milk or diapers, they would leave the store rather than wait for such unimportant items for their family.

Another hilarious story had him following a man in Kmart, who was drinking gravy from a styrofoam cup he got in the KFC located in Kmart.  His description of the ambience of Kmart as a store that always looks like "it was just attacked by a flash mob" brought a chuckle of recognition.

Food: A Love Story, had me laughing all the way through it, and as I was reading in on the treadmill (Gaffigan would disapprove of this- exercise, I mean), my fellow exercisers would look at me as if I was a little crazy. (Note: laughing while reading on a treadmill can be dangerous. If you get doubled up with laughter, you can potentially fall. Not that that almost happened to me.)

Serious foodies may take offense, but Gaffigan is a comedian who has found his niche in poking fun of his eating habits, and most of us can find something to relate to in this humorous book. He also loves his family (I adored his section about taking each child individually to his favorite deli, Katz's), and I got some great ideas on where to eat. (And anyone who believes that Shake Shack has the best burgers in world is my kinda guy.)

If you need a good laugh, and like to eat, (which is, like, everybody) Food: A Love Story, is for you.

rating 4 of 5

In my Reading Challenge for 2015, Food: A Love Story fulfills my Funny Book selection.