Family and food, as usual.

Sunday was Mother's Day, and my older sister and her husband and kids came in to the city to celebrate.  They went to the Gazillion Bubble Show, and then I met up with them and we went to the Central Park Zoo!

Here are the backs of my nephews' heads while they watch the Polar Bears rip open bags and dig through buckets to get some fish.  I had so much fun hanging out and looking at the animals with these two, and with the other grownups, too, of course.  I had to scurry home to finish my paper after the zoo, but from what I've heard, they had a very successful trip to an Italian restaurant, where dessert was ice cream shaped like a bear.  

The nice thing about living in New York City is that, even though we're far from family and friends, the city usually convinces people they want to visit without us having to do much work.

I finally turned in that paper yesterday morning.  The topic was too broad; it would have been much better as a longer paper in which I could have explored things more deeply.  Oh well, it'll just have to be a book, I guess! Research trip, anyone?

Strawberries are on super sale everywhere.  I read a while back that unseasonably warm temperatures in California and Florida meant that both states were flooding the strawberry market at the same time, leading to a glut on supermarket shelves and lower prices.  I'm not sure if that's still affecting prices, but over the weekend we got 3 packages of strawberries for 5 bucks! I decided to make some strawberry jam.  We usually have preserves in the fridge and eat them on toast/sandwiches/waffles, but I also absolutely love to mix them into Greek yogurt.  So good!  But I saw a blog post about making strawberry-rhubarb jam the other day, and it looked pretty easy, so armed with my piles and piles of strawberries, I got to cookin'.

It came out great!  I used these directions and it only took about an hour.  Since it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision, I didn't have any canning jars around, so I sterilized an empty pasta jar and used that.  I filled it to the brim (we have enough strawberry preserves to last us a good long while) and screwed the original (sterilized) cap back on, and the cooling process even pulled the little button on top of the lid back down, so it popped this morning when I opened it!  Next time I'll probably use a little less lemon zest, but it's delicious overall.  And, given all the talk of what the incredible high levels of chemicals in our food and our environments can do to us, I'm happy knowing that the strawberry preserves in my fridge are just strawberries, sugar, and a little lemon zest.

The bread is left over from last week, when E and I made Spanglish sandwiches for dinner.  Known as such because they were created for the movie Spanglish, a lot of people think they are the only good thing to come out of the film.  I actually didn't hate Spanglish as much as everyone else did, but I do have to agree that the sandwich is pretty amazing.  It's basically a BLT with monterey jack cheese and a fried egg, and goodness gracious me, it is delicious.  I overcooked the egg a bit (it was HARD multitasking that much!) so we didn't get the runny yolk effect, but I can't wait to try again and get the full experience. 

I'm off to campus for the last time this semester, to finish up my work-study tasks!  Last time being locked in the scanning lab til Fall, hopefully.  Is it bad, though, that I want to bring this book on Disney design and architecture and scan every page?  Some of the concept art from the 50s and 60s is SO COOL, and I don't want to return the book to the library!