Lloyd and I had planned to see ROTK today, but decided instead to postpone until Sunday so that we could sleep in. This left me with a nice unstructured day to do whatever I wanted. I decided to catch the bus to Jackson Heights and poke around in Indian groceries for a few hours, but first I read this little heartbreaker of an article in the New York Times about the hard fortunes of my beloved Pittsburgh, where Lloyd and I had been planning to move until we learned just how broke the city was, and how uncertain its future is. If you’ve ever wondered what happens to a city when its primary industry disappears and the tax base shrinks (40% of city property is tax-exempt, half of city-based corporations are tax-exempt, and 2/3 of the workforce commutes in from the suburbs and is subject only to an annual $10 occupation tax), well, this is it.
After that, a nice field trip was in order, so I walked around the block and got on the bus. Imagine my surprise to discover that the bus did not go to the heart of Jackson Heights, but rather to LaGuardia Airport. I took this as a sign that I needed a nice long walk, and after several bizarre detours that will be shared at another time, I found myself on Steinway Street, the largest and most famous shopping drag in Astoria. I stopped in an Indian grocery on 30th Avenue, where I found a tub of bitter melon, and, inspired by aethele’s beautiful photographs of broccoli romanesco that she took in Germany, I asked the nice man behind the counter if I could get a picture. He was more than happy to oblige.
When I got home, after first popping into Manhattan to have some arepas for lunch, I decided that I’d had enough bitter for one day and was ready for some sweet instead. Since I have received a lot of e-mail about the ginger fingers, I thought that I might as well make a batch of them and take a picture to a) convince the fence-sitters that these are definitely worth the effort and b) remind myself that even without a bakery, I am still a bakerina. (Go ahead, bake a batch. You know you want to.)
