I Did a Thing: I Went on a Museum Hack Tour

For those of you who know me and Sarah, you might know that I went to art school and two of Sarah's four degrees (yes you read that right, she's crazy) are in Art History. What you may not know is it's a practical miracle that I passed my general art history courses in school at all. I was even at the advantage of being able to understand everything our professor said (apparently some students had a hard time deciphering her thick Massachusetts accent, to which I'd say 'what accent?'). So needless to say when I learned of Museum Hack tours a while back my interest was piqued.

Before we move on, what's Museum Hack you say? Ugh, not you too! A surprising number of Sarah's and my friends and acquaintances had never heard of Museum Hack, which may not be surprising except many of them were former colleagues of ours at ….museums. Now granted many of them no longer work in the museum field, but I didn't think Sarah and I were the nerdiest of our friends (I mean don't get me wrong, I know we're up there, like way up there: see above where we talked about Sarah's problem with accumulating degrees). And I hope we don't spend the most amount of time in the abyss (aka: the internet) of all our friends, but maybe we do? Anyways, I digress, Museum Hack leads unconventional tours in some of the world's best museums.

The first selfie Sarah insisted I take of the day, look at those 10 AM smiles! Look at how much her phone cleared up our skin!

Saturday Sarah and I traveled into NYC so that I could take one of these said tours to blog about while, as she would say, Sarah 'visited some old friends' at the Neue Galerie. I opted to take the Un-Highlights tour at the Met. When I arrived and met the tour guide, Anna, the rest of the group wasn't around. At this point she, most likely joking (though I'd never want to presume), told me to write only mean things about her. As someone who tries their best to follow the directions, challenge accepted Anna! Let's Roll!

I think Anna wanted to ditch us. The speed at which she walked from place to place in the museum makes me realize that moving through a crowd is an art form all its own and can be done faster than I've been doing it (though Sarah would say I'm pretty good at it, and is going to hate reading that I know it can be done faster now). But it's amazing no one got lost, or that we weren't subjected at any point to the lifeguard-like call of a museum guard shouting down the hall not to run. I can only gather that this could be attributed to one, though likely to some extent all, of three factors:

1. Since Anna said she had 8 hours worth of material to chose from for our two-hour tour, she wanted to waste no time in hitting the most of it. We're also left with the paradoxical question of is it 8 hours worth at breakneck speed moving from place to place, or 8 hours for the average moving human being?

2. So that we don't pick up any extra, un-official members to our tour group. Which I think we kind of did once, but I think Anna addressed it. However, it was all so fast and quiet that one can only speculate. Geez, where's the reality TV throwdown drama in that?

3. Anna has lived in New York City for too long, and should probably heed her mother's wishes to move closer to home, because honestly people tend to move less fast pretty much anywhere else in America. Fact: Once in Baltimore I had a bus driver very unhurriedly tell me where I was and how to get where I was going...and no one on the bus seemed the least bit annoyed that this added 30 seconds to their commute! That would never happen up here in the great northeast.

Me trying to keep up. Anna somewhere in the distance. Between us, thankfully, other members of our tour group.

Once you get over the fact that Anna wasted a huge life opportunity and could have gotten the gold medal in speed walking (who even decided that was a sport?!) in Rio, you realize she might only have balls and booty on the brain. No, we're not talking about sports anymore, and no, sadly we are not becoming pirates (we could have captured Robert Feke! C'mon!). If you're looking for a tour where you might hear the word 'castration' in relation to male singers, be told a story that ends with the possibility of a secret stash of ancient 'junk' being stored in the Vatican, talk about the first piece of intentional art in relation to Kim Kardashian, or find out how a depiction of Cupid peeing through a ring of leaves onto Venus is the Venetian equivalent of a 'wink, wink, nudge, nudge', well I think you know what tour you might like. I will say that while the Museum Hack tour I went on is for ages 16 and up, I might have a trio of male cousins ages 8 to 13 who would have immensely enjoyed all the more off color topics of discussion.

When we weren't talking about all the fun bits of a body, it was all about the booze. It's clear that someone should watch out for Anna at parties because she might just let the spirits move her a bit too much (you got that pun, right? Trying too hard? Maybe...I won't promise it will get any better). After finding out about the wonders of an autonomous drinking game vessel, the perfect present for a frat boy (or fraternity brother as my dad would say; being a Delta Kappa himself, he takes it seriously), we were tasked with finding our own item in the museum that we would want to take to a party. Which was actually a real challenge given the speed at which we zipped around the museum. Also because me and my camera phone don't always get along. I tend think 'my phone doesn't need a great camera, that's what I have all my cameras for!' ...hah!

The clearest photo my phone took all day, and the stillest Anna ever stood!

Without ruining any stories too much, in case you find yourself on a Museum Hack tour, I will say that most stories had ….hmmm, interesting morals. One of my favorites being 'not all art is good, and sometimes even the artist agrees with you'. Because seriously, true on all counts. Also, during the course of the story that lead to that moral, thanks Anna for putting the totally horrifying thought of being an early adopter of cataract surgery into my imagination. Anna: casually passing out nightmares at the museum since who knows when. She had a very graphic quality to her storytelling, which while engaging, easily led to that creepy crawly feeling you get when a mental image goes just a tad too far. Like, can I imagine drizzling olive oil laden with an ancient olympic athlete's sweat, dirt, hair and skin flecks in it over my breakfast? Yeah, I have a concrete idea of how gross that just might be. Would I have ever thought of it had I not gone on this tour? No, probably not, never. The good news here folks is that the initial tagline to remember when we were looking at that particular statue, 'if it has a stick up it's ass, it's Roman', was something Sarah totally understood and got a good chuckle out of. And let's face it, that is way easier to remember than anything I learned in art history.

Our tour came to its conclusion with the sharing of our party objects. I chose a metal goblet of sorts because A) it's shiny and B) I can't bite through it, which are two things I'm drawn to, you know, for varying reasons, not because I've ever accidentally bitten through a drinking glass...while sober...and drinking water...in the middle of the afternoon. Certainly not. It was not the most exciting choice. One other member of our tour did choose perhaps the exact same item to take a picture of, so zero points to me for originality, but honestly I'm just glad my phone agreed to take a picture of something without being a total blur as I tried not to get lost.

Way classier than a red solo cup!

Hopefully this hasn't been too much of a mean girl party a la Le Banquet Rousseau (you know the most surprising thing might actually be that I paid attention on at least 95% of this tour) aimed towards Anna. But if it was, it's obviously because she's the worst, gosh, I thought you'd know that by now. Though she almost redeemed herself by surprising us with little Polaroid (JK we all know Fujifilm was the one to step up to the plate to save Polaroid's aesthetic with Instax) prints of us posing with sculptures.

I think I captured this bear's doofiness quite well...

Sarah and I continued our day by....obviously going to another museum. The Cooper Hewitt was amazing, and that takes us to our final selfie of the day, and who knows, maybe I'll see you next Tuesday!

Look at those 5 PM faces! Look how much Sarah's phone made my dark sunken eyes rise to the occasion!

Disclaimer: sometimes sarcasm doesn't come across the written word well. Take it all with a grain of salt, Anna was great and the tour was obviously a blast!

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Stuffed Bell Peppers

This past weekend Sarah and I had a friend come to visit, so I looked in the fridge to figure out what I wanted to make for dinner. We had three bell peppers that had been in there for a little over a week, so it seemed the appropriate thing to do to cook those up. I decided to stuff them, which tends to be hit or miss for me (I think I may actually have a previous post on here about stuffed peppers from when I lived with Lilly) but I'm happy to report these were one of the better variants of them that I've made thus far in life.

I threw a tomato and some onion into my little food processor followed by a couple of garlic cloves.

Then I put in two sausages (I went with a chicken sausage that had apple bits in it) and an egg. I proceeded to blend it up for a few moments until it looked pretty unappetizing. 

Then I stirred in some melted butter, some stuffing mix (which I failed to capture a picture of, but I used the pepperidge farm stuff that comes in a bag, that lives in my pantry for occasions like this and to top baked mac and cheese...of course), and a little bit of water to just get everything moist, but not so much that it wasn't immediately absorbed.

Then came the peppers of course. Halving them, discarding the seeds, and filling them up with the sausage and stuffing mixture.

I topped them with shredded mozzarella and threw them in the oven at 400*F until the cheese was starting to turn golden brownd. 

We ate them with a small side salad and some prosecco, and I was glad they didn't come out terrible. One did magically become unstuffed in the oven though... I'm still not sure how that happened, but I just scooped the filling back into the pepper. Sarah liked how they tasted but wasn't a fan of the texture of the filling, it was too smooth and possibly too moist. But other than that success! See you next Tuesday!

Curry Chicken Salad

For this post I'm going to attempt a video post again. The actual filming fared far more successful then the last time (let's not talk about that...). Anywho the curried chicken salad came out great as always. Sarah and I had most of it for dinner as open faced sandwiches on a slice of home made bread as seen above. I ate the rest of it just out of a container, plain for lunch the next day. It's just so good. This time I made it from the left over chicken from a beer can chicken we had made the previous weekend when we had friends over. Last summer I just grilled up some chicken breasts to make it. You can also make curried potato salad the exact same way, just sub potatoes for the chicken (and personally I wouldn't use any sweet ingredients at the end, but to each their own), and that's also a delicious treat! So here goes nothing, see you next Tuesday!

Bread

Once upon a time when I was in college I made all my own bread for a while....my sister told me that I needed a girlfriend upon hearing this fact. Recently I've picked up this habit once more, because honestly as long as I'm home for a good chunk of the day on Sunday, why not? It's cheaper to make a loaf than to buy one, it's not that hard, it smells amazing, and it tastes pretty darn good too. But before I continue on to how simple it is to make a loaf of bread, I want to regale a tale of a certain housemate I used to live with. While in Providence my second residence was in a house with four other people. One time when a vacant room was filled a boy from Arkansas moved in. After a few weeks I asked him one day how he was liking Providence. He said it was nice, but that he couldn't find cheap bread. 

I won't lie, this piqued my curiosity so I bite and asked him the obvious follow up question: is bread that much cheaper in Arkansas? To which I got the response, 'Oh yeah, it's only like 98 cents a loaf at Walmart' ...'Have you tried going to Walmart here?' 'No, I probably should though' 'Where have you been getting bread?' ....turns out he'd been getting it at convenience stores. You know, only the most expensive place, typically, to buy a loaf of bread. The most amazing part about this conversation though was that as it turns out was that each other housemate had at some point or another in that week had the same conversation with him. 

The fact that he was so fixated on cheap bread could only then be met with the irony that when he moved out the boy who then filled his room baked a loaf of bread just about once a week. While I no longer live there, and neither does our bread making friend, I can only hope that whoever moved into that room also has a special relationship with bread. Anyways...

To make my weekly loaf for sandwiches and whatnot, I start with 3 1/2 cups of flour. Lately I've been using a roughly half and half unbleached white and whole wheat mixture, but all white flour will work as well. Add to that a 1/2 teaspoon of instant yeast and 2 teaspoons of salt. Then mix it up with 2 cups of warm water. Now you can definitely just mix it with a spoon, but I'm lazy and just use the bread hook on the Kitchen Aide.

This will leave you with a wetter bread dough that won't really hold it's own shape, but is perfectly suited for a loaf pan. Usually you'd want to just used an oiled loaf pan, but since the bread is removed from it before finishing being baked, I've occasionally run into trouble with the bottom sticking to the pan. So lately I've been using parchment paper to line the pan to guarantee a clean pop out, but it will leave an imprint of the parchment folds on the bread. Which I'm totally fine with, cause I loathe when it sticks to the bottom of the pan.

Pour the dough into the pan. Then cover it with a wet dish towel.

Put it in a warm place to proof (rise). I put it in an oven that I preheat for a few minutes then turn off. 

Let it rise until it's even with the top of the pan (usually about 2 hours). Then bake it at 450*F for 30 minutes.

Take the bread out of the pan and place directly on the oven rack to bake for another 10 to 15 minutes. In theory it should sound hollow when tapped when it's done, but I never quite know what that means, so I just make sure not to burn it. 

Let it cool completely before cutting into it ...I know it's hard, but it will stay better longer that way. Nom nom nom. See you next Tuesday!