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celebratory Impossible burgers
Saturday, December 8 2018
After Saturday morning coffee, I spent the afternoon as I often have done of late: salvaging firewood from the nearby forest. I managed to gather the last of the firewood from the pair of trees 100 feet below where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile and then had to find more material. But there's always some other big fallen tree that I've somehow managed to overlook. The one I found on my first foray (for which I brought both a chainsaw and splitting equipment) was on the terrace between the just-completed salvaging site and the highest part of the Gulleys Trail. It was a large fallen chestnut oak whose only problem was moisture from excessive prolonged ground contact. In the end, I was able to salvage six backpack loads today, though they weren't as heavy as the backpack loads last weekend. This was the first salvaging operation in a while that hadn't happened after drenching rains, so the salvaged wood tended to be significantly drier, at least on the surface. I also didn't have to wade through a series of puddles on the Stick Trail a little north of the Chamomile.
I took a fairly early bath just after sunset, and by the time I got out, Gretchen was making noises suggesting she wanted to go somewhere tonight for dinner built around the Impossible Burger. Eventually we decided to go to Northern Spy, one of the few places where one can get an Impossible Burger in the Hudson Valley.
Once we arrived at Northern Spy, it was a bad sign that I couldn't really find parking in its rather large parking area and was forced to park in a dubious place on the grass. When we went inside, the place was crowded, partly because a large part of the restaurant had been taken over by a private party. The host told us that there weren't any tables available, and that seven people at the bar were waiting for a table (where diners were impolitely lingering in that way I find infuriating, especially when it's my table that is doing it). So Gretchen and the hostess seemed to agree that it wouldn't work out for us at Northern Spy tonight. So as Gretchen and I stood in the doorway trying to figure out where next to try, it occurred to me that if seven people were about the be seated, then there would be room at the bar for us, something that had been our backup plan all along. This idea seemed obvious to me, but for some reason Gretchen and then the hostess thought it was something just shy of brilliant. Now we could wait on a piano bench for the seven-top to clear, allowing the seven others to drain from the bar and give us a place to sit. But within five minutes, a new plan materialized: apparently a couple had canceled their reservation, opening up a two-top. The hostess wasn't sure we'd like the table, probably because next to it was another, much larger table where a dozen or more 20-somethings (several of them morbidly obese) appeared to be in good spirits. But it was great, particularly given our resignation to eating our burgers at the bar.
We both had wine with our burgers, though Gretchen had difficulty finding a red wine sweet and gentle enough to enjoy and ended up settling on a rosé. But she definitely needed a wine given all we had to celebrate: Clarence the Cat is gaining weight, Charles the Cat is no longer sneezing or coughing, we got got a windfall of tens of thousands of unexpected dollars, a lawsuit against us ended out of court, the Subaru passed its annual inspection, my new job is starting to feel more substantial and less crappy, Gretchen's creative writing class in the Shawangunk Correctional Facility is going well, and she also managed to get a prescription for xanax.
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