Cincinnati Museum Center

Dear Husband and I recently enjoyed a visit to the Cincinnati Museum Center with his parents. The former Union Terminal--a large art-deco building--is now home to a variety of exhibit spaces, including the Cincinnati History Museum, the Museum of Natural History & Science, the Children's Museum, an Omnimax, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center. You could spend all day there, but we just did a morning, hoping to beat the crowds. No such luck, as it was a rainy day the week between Christmas and New Year's, so we enjoyed the exhibits--masked--with many families and children. It was almost like the before times.

We explored the Duke Energy Trains at Holiday Junction, which includes train sets for kids as well as a larger set with smaller figures. Both were very inventive. In another space, there were also Lego dioramas. Next we wandered through the Cincy history sections, then the science parts, from hands-on physics demonstrations past dinosaur skeletons to preserved flora and fauna. We ran out of time to look at the displays about outer space or see a documentary. Next time?

View from above the O-gauge train set, at 1/48th actual size, dusted with powdered snow.

Two trains pass each other; the one on the upper track is carrying presents and Christmas decorations. During the holiday season, the trains travel more than 100,000 "miles"! Below, the conductor has popped out of his track-side shack as a train passes by. I caught him before he retreated and the door shut again.

There were "Easter eggs" hidden among the kids' train sets, including butterflies, dinosaurs, and astronauts for a science-themed "I spy" game. 

There was the requisite Thomas the Tank Engine set, where parents and children named the trains to each other. It included a rotating water wheel, a windmill, and a bumpy incline circulating back and forth between two cliffs.

The next picture shows Cincinnati's town hall made entirely out of Legos. Reportedly it is a very beautiful building to tour in person.

So much to look at! Legos celebrating Chinese New Year, Santa Claus and his reindeer, and DH much captivated by everything going on. Below, the Ghostbusters are saving a church.

In the history section, I was of course drawn to the olde-timey pharmacy with its patent medicine bottles.

They have a (replica of a?) paddleboat of the kind that made Cincinnati "Queen of the West" and a gateway for internal migration as well as for products such as pork and Proctor & Gamble's Ivory Soap.

I also noted the food references, such as the boarding house sign advertising "meat served 4 times per week" and this collage of a sausage factory.

The natural history section was interesting, even if the spelunking experience was closed (presumably considered too claustrophobic for COVID). A large selection of nature photography in the four seasons gave way to a display about fireflies (do you call them lightning bugs?). There were cases of butterflies and of a variety of stuffed animals, including bats, a fox, owls, and this red-shouldered hawk. The last photo is of preserved mushrooms.

For lunch we met DH's brother at The Incline Public House for a lunch of burgers, cheesesteaks, and fries out on the heated/covered back deck. Too bad the rain dampened the famous vista of the city of seven hills. Next time!

Cooking with Frau Doktor Doctor: Christmas Edition

Him: "You? Freelanced? In the kitchen?"

Me: "I plead the fifth."

You see, Dear Reader, I wanted to make Creamy potato broccoli soup for our Christmas Eve dinner. Because Dear Husband is a church musician, he works on Christmas Eve, so we can't leave town to celebrate with family until at least Christmas Day (sometimes later depending on our respective work schedules). When we lived in Champaign, DH would be gone for most of Christmas Eve either rehearsing or playing for one of several church services, so I asked him to come home in between, usually for a steak dinner by the light of the unity candle we had lit at our wedding.

This year he suggested thawing the Montgomery Inn ribs his parents had sent for his birthday. Usually I would make his favorite side dish--mashed potatoes--but I came upon this plant-based recipe and decided to give it a go. Let's just say, I should have re-read the directions before starting. Here's how to prepare it, Frau Doktor Doctor style:

1. Once you've located the recipe on your phone after much fruitless searching on your laptop, put on a nice holiday movie like Love Actually, Die Hard, or ... The Beguiled (the recent Sophia Coppola version). In my defense, I thought it was a ghost story based on the trailer a couple years ago. (Ghost stories are too appropriate for the holidays; Exhibit A: A Christmas Carol.) Spoiler alert: The Beguiled is not a ghost story. It is a whole movie with a singular plot line that, when it is over, makes you wonder, Was that all? (Reader: it was.)

2. Assemble ingredients: 2 pounds Yukon gold potatoes (or whatever fingerlings are leftover in the fridge, since we were imminently leaving town), 3 garlic cloves (for the first time in my life, I actually used fewer than the recipe suggested, because the head I currently have offers enormous cloves), 1 large yellow onion (eh, I had a half leftover from something or other), 3 tbsp extra virgin oil (now this I had), 1 quart vegetable broth (oops, the carton in the pantry was chicken broth), 1/2 raw unsalted cashews (all we had were honey roasted), 1 pound frozen broccoli florets or 4 cups steamed fresh (I opted for the latter), 1 large carrot (check), 1 tsp dried thyme (ground or flaked?), 3/4 tsp dried dill (yes), 2 tsp white wine vinegar (located at the back of the cupboard), 1 tsp Dijon mustard (oui).

3. Figure that the potatoes will take the longest to cook, so chop them into a pot of boiling water.

4. Since the broccoli was supposed to be well cooked, chop that next and start to steam it.

5. Dice the onion, mince the garlic, and skip the step about stripping the potatoes of their most nutritious part (aka the peel). Sauté in olive oil.

6. Add cashews and a pinch salt. Note that you were supposed to cook the potatoes in the broth in this pot. Too late now.

7. All of the potatoes are supposed to fit into a blender?? You're making a generous batch, so figure it will have to be done in parts. Blend several spoonfuls of potatoes with a generous splash of broth and a spoonful of broccoli. 

8. Pour this into the pan with the onion and garlic. Re-read the directions again and finally comprehend that only the potatoes were supposed to be blended, not the broccoli. Whoops.

9. Jiggle the blender, plug and unplug it, and hope that the smell of burning motor doesn't mean it's dead.

10. Blend the rest of the potatoes. With the rest of the broth (works better that way).

11. Heat everything in the pot with the rest of the seasonings and "julienned" carrot strips. Decide you had selected an extra large carrot and eventually eat what's left as a cook's tax because you have plenty of carrot ribbons, and you know DH doesn't particularly them.

12. Serve hot with some crusty bread! This was the first course for our Christmas Eve dinner of ribs, homemade orange-cranberry sauce with walnuts on a bed of spinach, and rosemary roasted carrots. It was okay, definitely not as life changing as the online recipe promised. It probably could have used a little more salt and to have cooked down some. Looks like it will freeze well to have in January on a night when we don't feel like cooking.

To drink: leftover Orange Crush soda from the hospital. To watch: Downton Abbey.

We actually had a second dinner with friends after the Christmas Eve service: butternut squash soup, homemade wheat loaf, lasagna, and the green salad pictured above with red pepper, spicy pepitas, bakery-bought baguette. I had contemplated making some whipped rosemary butter but gave up for lack of time. However, I did improvise a salad dressing from this recipe, swapping a rest of a packet of sriracha sauce for the freshly grated ginger. It had just enough kick to be interesting! The special treat of course were the pomegranate seeds, which I will only spend the half hour of picky labor on for this particular hostess.

For Christmas morning brunch, I baked cinnamon waffles and made this pear compote topping. I used half as much brown sugar, included the special rum vanilla from cousin EH, and punched up the plating with cinnamon, walnut halves, and pomegranate seeds. Not only was it delicious, but it sustained us through noontime mass at the Catholic cathedral.

Here you can see what we did for Advent already. We still have to travel to Ohio to celebrate with that part of the family. New Year's will be a balancing act between work, travel, and small celebrations. With 55 degrees and rain, it could hardly be more different than Christmas 2020. This is last year's post, although what we remember most is a snowy walk late on Christmas Eve to look at lights on the houses, and a snowy walk on Christmas Day through Frick Park. I'm finishing this blog after a nice long, rather damp walk around the neighborhood to look at lights. It's time to go to bed with my new book (Atul Gawande's Being Mortal from DH), with the lights on the tree shining through the doorway. Merry Christmas!

Home Sweet Office, aka office makeover part II

When I finally got my own desk at work, I was so excited to personalize the space (part I). There were just a few finishing touches I wanted. Workmen kindly retrieved the junk that had fallen between the desk and the wall, pushed the desk back 4-6 inches (it really does make the space look bigger), took down the bulky wooden file holder, repainted the wall, and hung my graduation art ("Oh, the places I've been").

I found some like-new battery-operated fairy lights on Facebook Marketplace to hang in the fake tree.

And for Christmas this year, My Awesome Parents purchased me a blue gamer chair to go in the corner. Basically a rocking cushion, it's been a hit with my colleagues as well as students and residents. I use it on long days when I'm tired of sitting in my office chair and can accomplish tasks on my laptop.

On the left is as close as I've got to a "before" picture, as I neglected to take one before the workers came to remove the file holder. And on the right is the "after"!

Here are close-ups of the gold-flecked green glass finial my SIL got me for Christmas; I hung it in the branches like a rare piece of fruit. It's a beautiful piece of art from the Pittsburgh Glass Center, and I love it!

Looking pretty festive!

Advent 2021

In our household, "Christmas" (Advent) cannot begin before Thanksgiving. (I hear about it every time the grocery starts holiday muzak early.) Due to work and Dear Husband's desire that the tree last through Epiphany, we typically start our preparations the first week of December. This year we went to pick out a tree from our favorite vendor, Trees for Veterans, only to discover an empty lot. We are afraid the pandemic claimed the tree supply, the business, and/or the friendly man who ran it. So we purchased a likely specimen from a hardware store and decorated it after its poor branches had a chance to fluff out while we attended a service of lessons and carols at one of the big episcopal churches nearby, complete with a choir that processed in robes, a string quartet, and--of course--the organ.

My Christmas present to DH this year was brunch at the Inn on Negley on St. Nicholas Day (December 6). We can't usually brunch, since local restaurants typically seat on Sundays, so it felt luxuriant to dress up and go out on a Monday morning. We arrived with big appetites at 9am, just as breakfast was wrapping up for the B&B's overnight guests. This meant that we essentially had the room to ourselves. Everything was beautifully decorated, with an entire Dickens Village under the sideboard.

We started with fruit cups, mini pastries, cranberry juice, and individually steeped teas. DH chose the sweet entrée, which was chunky French toast, while I opted for the savory, some of the best-seasoned eggs and potatoes I have ever tasted. So full that I couldn't even touch the toast that came with them, we asked them to box up our eggnog cheese cake desserts to go. It was really lovely to have this time together to catch up with each other.