Who decided that Red Delicious “apples” should qualify as food? Blech. There isn’t any application I’d use these mealy, tasteless things for. “Very good” indeed. Feh!

Shrimp fajitas? Yes. Shrimp fajitas.

I know. Fajitas are made with skirt steak, but we were feeling like eating healthy, and shrimp seemed like the thing to do. Also, we really like shrimp. Now, usually I do my indoor fajitas in a cast iron skillet, but I thought shrimp would probably be too delicate for such an application. A 12″ sautee pan did the trick.

Naturally the shrimp had to be marinated, and the marinade was where all the flavor came from: the juice of two limes, about a tablespoon of adobo sauce (and one chile) from a can of chipotles, two cloves of garlic, about half an onion, and some salt and pepper, blended smooth. I only marinated it for about 30 minutes — I wasn’t trying to make ceviche here.

The other exciting part of the fajitas was the chance to use some incredible vegetables. The most delicious tomato I’ve had in some time and an onion came from Ledgewood Farms, an incredible farmstand in Moultonboro, New Hampshire. The bell peppers, chile peppers, and garlic came from our local CSA, and the parsley came from our backyard. Fun!

So: shrimp gets pan-seared in a little canola oil. Julienned vegetables get cooked in the same pan until the onions take on some color. Then, just pile ‘em up on tortillas with a few slices of fresh avocado and a spoonful of pico de gallo: tomato, onion, jalepeno, lime juice, salt, pepper, and parsley. (I know, traditionally, it’s cilantro, but we have parsley in the backyard and that’s what I used.)

Anyway, it was delicious. I’d make it again.

(Photos by Rachel.)

A few weekends ago, we drove down to New Jersey to visit my new baby cousin. Actually, this is my cousin’s child (his first), so I’m pretty sure that makes baby A my first cousin, once removed. (I had to ask my wife to explain the different kinds of cousins again; she’s a real hit at cocktail parties.)

It’s a long drive to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, from Providence, Rhode Island. Now, I don’t really dislike driving all that much. If I have an entertaining driving companion, or there’s something good on the radio, or my iPod is charged, I’ll drive just about any distance happily. This is a good thing since my new job includes a commute of at least an hour each way. The problem is that it’s one of those drives where the theoretical commute time is low enough that I’m never satisfied with my actual drive time. Google Maps says it’s 45 minutes, and I’ve never made it in less than an hour.

Maybe it was this pent up frustration that led to the following exchange, somewhere between interchanges 8 and 7 on the New Jersey Turnpike. As we inched forward in the nearly unmoving traffic, my wife sighed but said bracingly, “Well, we should be there in about an hour.”

“Could be longer,” I snapped.

“Could be longer”? Why would I say that? Was I trying to challenge the accuracy of her statement? Did I interpret her reassuring comment as a scientific hypothesis, and was I offended that it was untested? Why did I find her resigned optimism so infuriating?

I think it was this: my personal satisfaction with a drive isn’t determined my how long the drive is, but rather it is inversely proportional to the amount of time I spend in first gear. If we’d been an hour late but with nothing but open highway before us, I would have responded, “An hour? Pshaw!” and floored it. I would much rather drive for an hour and half at highway speeds than for an hour in a traffic jam.

Isn’t that stupid? At least it explains why I got snippy on the turnpike: we’d just missed our best chance to get off the highway and find a slower but less busy route. If I have one complaint about the New Jersey Turnpike, it would be that the exits are so far apart that once you miss one, you are pretty thoroughly screwed. Nonetheless, we made it to Cherry Hill with our marriage intact, to (I presume) the dismay of my uncle.

My uncle P— does not approve of my relationship with R—. It’s not that he – I don’t know – thinks she’s not good enough for me, or doesn’t like her in some way. I’d guess that he doesn’t even have an opinion about her personally. No, his problem is that she’s not Jewish.

My uncle and my cousins are the considerably more observant branch of the family. My siblings and I have always enjoyed visiting my aunt (my mom’s sister) and my cousins. We used to visit them at least once a year, including an annual summer trip to the Jersey Shore. As kids, we knew that they were more observant than we were, and we knew not to mention things like “pepperoni pizza” around them, but we always had a good time. And I don’t think it’s exactly a secret to them anymore that my immediate family is somewhat more lax, Jewishly speaking, than they are. I can’t tell whether or not they think less of us, but if they do, they don’t let on.

As adults, my siblings and I still have a great time with my aunt and my cousins, even if sometimes they don’t seem to get our sense of humor, and even if we’re slightly on edge the whole time we’re there, terrified we might turn off a light we’re not supposed to on Saturday, or forget a major upcoming holiday, or just blurt out “pork!”

When my uncle found out that R— and I were engaged, he started a passive-aggressive guerilla campaign to talk me out of it. I say “passive-aggressive” and “guerilla” because he never said anything to my face (or hers) about it. In fact, the first time R— went with us to visit them, she made a great impression on him (and the rest of the family) by talking to him at great length about genealogy, a topic that’s of great interest to him and to almost no one else. No, his disapproval was expressed in the form of unsigned newspaper clippings or packages, sent to me about every four to six months over the course of our two-year engagement. One might be an article copied out of the Philadelphia Inquirer, with a headline like, “Jewish Community Speaks Out Against Intermarriage.” Or he might send me an old prayer book, with a post-it note saying “this was your grandfather’s” and a bookmark distributed by a Jewish organization that blared the warning: “Will your grandchildren be using this book?” I guess Uncle P— thought that if he could just bring enough third-party arguments to bear, I’d see the light and break off my engagement.

Needless to say, he skipped the wedding. I was offended, but not too broken up about it, because my aunt and my cousins came, and we had a great time. (My cousins, interestingly enough, sat out the wedding ceremony itself but joined us for the reception, which I presume was their compromise between their religious disapproval of our hybrid/interfaith wedding and their familial desire to support and celebrate with us. I’m not sure Emily Post would approve, but they were a big part of making the hora work, so we were cool with it.)

We hadn’t really spoken to Uncle P— since the wedding, and I wasn’t really looking forward to any sort of confrontation, so I wasn’t too disappointed when, after we arrived at my aunt’s house, he came home and made a beeline for their bedroom without stopping to say hello. It was Saturday afternoon, after Shabbat services, and we just figured maybe he needed a nap.

We spent all afternoon having a great time with my aunt and the three of my four cousins (including two of their spouses) who were in the country. We polished off lunch, we paged through family albums, we trotted out inside jokes, we put a serious dent in a pile of coconut cookies and blueberry cake, and we passed from lap to lap the most adorable baby I have ever seen. As the day wore on, though, we noticed something odd.

P— never left his bedroom.

My wife and my sister and I were bunking in the basement overnight, and we stayed up pretty late into the night whispering about it. “Is – is P— hiding from us?” “I think he’s boycotting!” “Is he sick?” Surely if P— hadn’t been feeling well, it would have been explained to us, or at least one of his kids would have said, “Where’s dad?” The fact that no one, over the entire course of our visit, even mentioned his absence clearly indicated to us that it was pre-arranged. As far as we could guess, Uncle P— must have wanted to disown me for marrying a non-Jew, but couldn’t get the rest of the family to go along with it, so decided to just do it himself. It was a one-man protest.

The most surreal moment came late Saturday night while we were all sitting around the dining room table eating various extravagant sundaes brought back from Friendly’s. My aunt’s cell phone rang, and she picked it up. “Hello? No. Yeah. No. No. Ok.” My cousin asked who it was. “Dad,” she answered.

He called her cell phone. From the bedroom. To ask someone to bring him his ice cream rather than come out and get it himself – and thereby risk having to see or talk to us.

I say “us,” but I have to believe his beef is actually with me. R— may be a non-Jew, but I’m the one who married her. What makes his sad, silent protest all the more weird is that my family has tried this experiment before. I’m not the first one to marry a non-Jew: my uncle Joel was briefly disowned when he married his wife 20-something years ago, but after a while the extended family seemed to relent and let him back into the fold. I thought that we, as a family, had learned a lesson there; I guess P— didn’t.

R— and I debriefed from the weekend in a McDonald’s at a rest stop on I-95, on the way home the next day. (We were eating those new sesame ginger salads, which we almost avoided on principle because the commercials are so annoying, but which turned out to be surprisingly good. Maybe our standards were lower in a rest stop than they’d be elsewhere – and there’s a weird sort of cognitive dissonance that results from eating edamame at a McDonald’s off the highway – but we’d recommend the salad.) Did P— really believe that by sequestering himself in his bedroom for the duration of our visit that he was somehow punishing us? Given his attitude towards the two of us, did he think we’d be disappointed not to be able to see him?

What made it unbelievable was that, to spite us, or to lodge a lonely protest against what he thought was an unforgivable betrayal of the Jewish people, or something, he sacrificed 24 hours with his new four-month-old grandson. Who was visiting for a week. From Israel. I… I don’t get it.

At this rate, Uncle P— is going to excise himself from the lives of each my siblings one by one. My brother has dated a string on non-Jewish women, and I’m not sure that religion is top-most on his list of criteria when evaluating a potential mate. And then there are my sisters. (Lesbians.)

I’m sorry that he feels the way he does, even if I think he’s being a jackass. R— summed up our ambivalence about the whole thing very neatly: “I’m… offended? But… kind of relieved? And, you know, if he’s going to sequester himself in his bedroom every time we’re there, half of me wants to never visit ever again – and half of me wants to go visit every weekend.”

Last night, Rachel cracked open a fortune cookie and pulled out what may very well be the best fortune ever, beating such past favorites as

You will get some new clothes.

and

You will be on the list of the excellent people this year.

The new contender?

When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out — because that’s what’s inside.

Lucky numbers: 21, 44, 28, 33, 14, 8

It’s simple, elegant, self-evidently true, and (I believe) truly comforting to any one in need of reassurance that, in this topsy-turvy world, sometimes things are the way they seem.

Last Thursday, on the commuter rail home, I decided to finally take steps to make an honest woman out of JR. I’ve been certain for a while that I wanted to spend my life with her and I look at an engagement and the wedding as a formality. I’m not minimizing those things, but I don’t think they’re going to change our lives very much. This lack of change is the main reason I decided to propose.
JR’s got a lot of traveling going on this month, so after I decided to do the deed, I knew I was going to get right to it. Also, while deception and subterfuge are 2 of my strong suits, this is a pretty big cat to keep in the bag. This led me to a couple issues: how and where to get a ring, and how and where to give it to her. People take these proposals very seriously, you can’t nonchalantly plop a felt box onto the coffee table during a ballgame. It’s simply not done.

Getting the Ring:
Like the majority of people getting engaged for the first time, I had no idea what I needed to know to buy a ring. JR hasn’t ever made a point of taking me through a jewelry store hinting at what style of ring she would or wouldn’t like. This would have made my decision monumentally less intimidating, and guys, you might want to see if you can set it up if you have ANY interest in engaging your girlfriend. Refusing to be caught unawares I spent the better part of Thursday and Friday evenings, learning as much as I could about buying an engagement ring and wouldn’t you know it, the internet was a pretty handy reference. I learned a lot on this site and this one, while also spending a bit of time on Bluenile.com “building my own ring”.

So like any young buck looking to engage his mate, I felt a basic understanding of the 4Cs (cut, clarity, color, and carats (though they should probably include chape, as well) was enough to handle anything the jeweler would throw at me. JR had to go in to work on Saturday morning and that figured to be about my best ring-buying opportunity for the following six weeks so I jumped at it. At my first stop, I found one ring that I liked. However, after asking the saleswoman about the diamond, I was borderline offended when she told me the clarity and color ratings. It seemed like most of what they sold was crap so I decided on to keep on moving. Remember, I was under time constraints. On the way to the next place, I called JR’s mother, father, and sister to get permission (and hopefully fish for fashion advice), they were down (but lacked concrete advice). Luckily, the next place I visited was great. They won me over immediately with superior lighting. You wouldn’t think it would make such a difference, but actually being able to see the diamond sparkle does a lot to help it sell itself. The salesman also won points for trying harder to get me to buy a ring less expensive than my obvious favorite. Less than 20 minutes after walking in to the store, I was skipping out, the future in my pocket.

The Proposal:
I knew I had to do something, but unfortunately, my best ideas are usually too grandiose to accomplish on a limited clock. I contemplated the jumbotrons at both Fenway Park and Gillette, but both of those would have required waiting longer than I was willing and a intolerable level of public embarrassment (for JR). I wanted something memorable and remarkable, but not fantastically cheesy. I definitely got out Scrabble and pulled “W-I-L-L Y-O-U M-A-R-R-Y M-E J” out of the bag. Not knowing how to best utilize the letters, I put the tiles into my sock drawer, just in case, and went back to the drawing board. I’d had a sneaking suspicion since I decided to propose that if we were in the house, I’d use Charlie and James to help. So I did. I raced back after getting the rock since JR was supposed to be home around 2 and here it was 2:10 already. I had decided to tie the ring around one of the cats and a poem around the other. I tried the ring on James first, thinking he wouldn’t realize it was there. Unfortunately he did and kept putting it in his mouth and chewing on it. At around 2:20, JR called and said she was on her way home. I quickly tied the ring around Charlie’s neck and he actually didn’t seem to mind the bling too much. I knew neither cat was going to be happy about the poem so I wanted to wait to attach the ribbon until JR pulled in the driveway. So I waited, and waited. And waited. I didn’t want Charlie running all over the house with a ring around his neck, so I made him wait with me in the office. Which got hotter and hotter with the door closed and sun streaming in the window. 45 minutes later, JR called and said she had gotten a call from a friend and was talking to her outside a coffee shop and that she’d be home in a couple minutes. She came home, I tied the ribbon around James’ neck, carried him to the kitchen (knowing Charlie would follow us in), dropped to my knees and asked, “Will you marry us?” JR hadn’t seen the ring and thought it was a joke and when she realized I was serious, she started crying. Charlie, meanwhile, had decided to bring JR’s ring into the litter box. We grabbed him quickly, cut the ring off, JR tried it on, and said yes. Mission accomplished.

We haven’t seriously discussed any ideas for a wedding or a date yet, but I am REALLY excited to efficiently plan an extremely happening shindig. Really. When we do begin planning the wedding, you can come back here to read about everything we go through; to share in our joy and revel in our misadventures.