My New York Family

Both my parents are from New York, my mom is from Queens and my dad is from Westchester. As a kid, we went to NY often. My mom’s father loved to take us on adventures in NYC. He was a train engineer that went to work at 2 am to take the train from Grand Central to New Haven. He would get home from work, take a quick nap and then take us back to the city. Adventures included the 10 Cent Store, the circus and many of the classic NYC sites. Boy I miss him.

So my sister has a van with a bed, oven and fridge. She has these grand adventures and has included me now in two of them. This SUmer she picked me up in Maryland and we drove to New York to visit family out on Long Island, my aunt and her three daughters and their lively families. We shared a wonderful meal in the backyard with my cousin’s husband at the grill. I forgot what it is like to try and feed kids 2 to 10, fun and exhausting! The next night my sister and I walked my aunt over to the local German restaurant, Plattdeutsche. My grandma came from Germany as a young girl so this is comfort food for us. I wouldn’t reccomend going their for the food but instead to get a taste of Germany. My aunt loved her meal, a large pork shank and we enjoyed some delicious German pilsner on draft. Spaetzle was the highlight of the meal, not as good as my grandma’s. If you have never had spaetzle, let me tell you about it… it is a small, free form dumpling made with an extruder that you hold over a pot of boiling, salted water. When I was 13, we traveled to Germany to visit our relatives that owned an inn and restaurant in the southwest of Germany.