Plastic is Fantastic
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When I was growing up, my parents did a lot of summer entertaining, before they divorced and ruined all the fun. Our house in Edgemont had a pretty backyard with a pool. Since my birthday is on July 3rd, we often hosted outdoor birthday parties, end-of-the-year school class parties, and elaborate Independence weekend fetes back-to-back for the first part of the summer season.
In fact, I recall the time between Memorial Day and July 4th as one big party.
My now long-deceased Bichon Frise, Ellie, would agree, having spent much of that time sipping margaritas from the half-filled cups left next to people’s lounge chairs and then falling asleep in the shade.
Of note, there was the bat mitzvah outdoor brunch with an omelet station, the Sweet Sixteen party to which I wore a rockin’ white, Oscar de la Renta bathing suit, and a Club Med party, during which my father burned his exposed stomach by grilling without a shirt.
For my mother, these parties were all about setting the table. Both she and my aunt had huge collections of Hellerware, that brightly-colored, stackable, midcentury mod plastic dinnerware originally designed by Massimo Vignelli. Remember Hellerware? You can still find it in museum collections, on Etsy and Ebay, as well as in my aunt’s kitchen. She now hosts us every Memorial Day, using the same iconic, blue and white Heller as always.
Over the years, melamine resin – or, high quality plastic – has become as integral a part of my summer as apple pie, SPF 60, and broken homes.
Plastic is fantastic!
Now that I have a home and a family of my own (intact), I, too, like to entertain outdoors. It’s summertime, after all, where the living is easy. My husband, Brett, mans the grill and I woman the cocktails.
Which brings me to outdoor table setting. This isn’t the 1970’s anymore, Farrah. There are now so many different, stylish innovations with melamine that it’s not necessary to pick just one pattern and stick with it for 40 years. What I like most about melamine is that it invites me to be more daring with my color and pattern choices than when picking a china pattern, since I can embrace the fun and not think, won’t this rainbow-striped platter look weird with a turkey carved on it? No, it won’t, because the only food going on this melamine tray is grilled hot dogs, hamburgers, and a marinated flank steak with my name on it. Because melamine is relatively inexpensive, as compared with real, breakable dinnerware, the fear of commitment is also low. In a few years, I can always replace that $2.99 green plastic wine goblet from Crate and Barrel. The Bacarrat crystal? Not so much. (Especially since I don’t own any Baccarat. That makes it truly irreplaceable.)
Whether you favor clean, modern design or French Country chic, there is plastic with your name on it. In fact, there may even be some with your
For a fun, mix-and-match color palate, head to Wish at 3 Purdy Avenue in Rye. Their windows currently show off delicious, candy-colored designs by French Bull, which are all dishwasher safe and range in price from $10-36.
And, because I can’t help but flaunt my high-low recessionista side, there’s always Target. My kids had to drag me away from “Tarshay’s” plastic dinnerware section a few weeks ago. “Mom!” They said. “We’ve got to get food and paper towels and toilet paper and snacks for school!” To which I replied, “But, kids, plastic is so fantastic! Let me just snap a few pictures.” And an idea for an article was born.
Cheers to dining al fresco!
(pictured at top: Melamine from Wish in Rye)
Columnist and blogger Julie Gerstenblatt writes with humor and candor about her life in Scarsdale, her friends and family, and the particular demands of motherhood and wifedom in modern-day suburbia.
Getting Warmer
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“Brett,” I ask my husband, “What’s the weather like today?” He has just come in from a brisk run and is panting a bit. “It’s nice,” he says, a slight hesitation to his voice. He knows what’s coming next. “Nice cool or nice warm?” I ask. “Should I wear a jacket? A sweater? Just a scarf over my t-shirt? Or, like, a scarf and a sweater?”
Brett ignores my questions and walks past me. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Maybe my leather jacket?!” I call up the stairs after him, but he does not reply.
My husband of 13 years does not reply because he knows me too well. He knows that I am hardly ever satisfied with my preparations for the weather and that, somehow, this is his fault. If he tells me I don’t need a jacket when we are walking from our house into town for lunch, I invariably complain the whole way about how freezing this 60 degree weather is. If we are headed for a Date Day in the city and I end up broiling in the 60 degree weather, it’s his fault for telling me to bring my wool pea coat “just in case.” Well, that coat is now slung over my arm, and it’s weighing me down uptown.
This is the story of my life in seasons. Fall and spring are the worst; it’s 80 degrees one day and 58 the next. Is it a break-
Which brings me to my long-time best friend – no, not Brett –the scarf.
You heard that right. A scarf is my true life’s companion. Too hot? Take it off. Too cold? Put it back on. Winter? I opt for a soft cashmere-and-silk blend. Spring requires something a bit stiffer, like crisp cotton. And an airplane ride, in any season at all, requires at least one of each type.
I’m like a magician with my scarves: one minute there is one around my neck and the next, poof! It has disappeared into the depths of my pocketbook. But then I may notice that a movie theater is a bit chilly, or that the table we have been seated at in a restaurant is located directly under a drafty vent. Poof! Scarf magically appears again.
Update your look with a new scarf (or, perhaps, a new husband?) today. For scarves, head to local retailers pictured above, including Beginnings, Pamela Robbins, and Great Stuff. For a husband? Try J-Date.
(Pictured at top: t-Shirt dress and scarf from Beginnings in the Golden Horseshoe, Scarsdale)Columnist and blogger Julie Gerstenblatt writes with humor and candor about her life in Scarsdale, her friends and family, and the particular demands of motherhood and wifedom in modern-day suburbia.
The Sandal Revolution
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The box arrived from Bloomingdale’s just as my husband, Brett, was walking out the door to attend a neighborhood meeting one evening. That’s bad timing, when the UPS guy comes face-to-face with one’s husband. The uniformed man stands at your doorstep, a guilty look on his face, as he hands over the goods. He knows the rules. He knows he’s supposed to drop the package when your husband is either a) at work, b) at the gym, or c) has left the house precisely eight minutes ago, but sometimes he screws up and gets caught. The husband looks at the return address on the box, sees the name of a clothing store like Bloomies, or an e-tailer like Gilt, or a supermegavirtualworld like Amazon, and shakes his head sadly at the UPS man. Dude, he thinks, You’re complicit in her schemes. I’m so disappointed in you.
Here’s what happened in our house.
“What’s in this box?” Brett said, stepping into the kitchen with the package. I could hear the tires of the UPS truck as they burned rubber up the street.
Now, there are lots of things a wife could say in response to this. I could have played dumb, saying, “I don’t know, let’s open it and find out!” I could have said, “Oh, nothing. Bloomingdale’s just likes me so much that sometimes they send me free stuff. Boh-ring.” I could have feigned sudden blindness, saying, “Box? What box? I don’t see anything…except spots…and now the world is tilting slightly…honey, put down that make-believe box and call 911!”
But, this time at least, I felt I had nothing to hide. Spring is here and I need new sandals. Desperately. Bloomingdale’s considers me 
part of their Friends and Family – they’re nicer than some of my blood relatives that way – and so I shopped with a 20% price reduction and free shipping.
“In this box, Brett, are two pairs of new sandals,” I said, pronouncing the sentence with pride.
“Two?”
“Yes, two. I need to try them on and see how they fit. I might even return one pair.” (Yeah, right.) My gaze met his straight on, daring him to challenge my need for spring footwear.
He shrugged and left the kitchen, heading out to his meeting.
I was free to open the package in peace.
The shoes were brand spanking new, with all the Styrofoam bits still attached and with thin pieces of tissue paper wrapped around the hardware buckles. No other woman’s feet had tarnished these shoes. They were so freshly picked from the store’s warehouse that they had never made it out on the floor. The scent of leather filled the kitchen. I breathed in and out deeply, feeling a Zen-like calm.
In front of me sat two beautiful specimens of this spring’s It shoe. Is it a platform? Sort of. Is it a wedge? Kinda. Is it a flat? Maybe. You may look at it and go, what the heck is that thing? And that is precisely why the fashion community has put their heads together to give this shoe a name. Readers, I’d like to present the newest in hybrid shoe luxury: the flatform.
The flatform is high like a platform and simultaneously flat like a ballet slipper. It’s a sandal revolution! In certain light, the flatform does seem kind of chunky and ugly, but once on the foot, it’s usually not. I urge you to try on a pair. Mine are simply divine.
I stepped into one pair – with cork platform bottoms and cognac suede straps – and strutted around my kitchen island. I am so tall in these shoes that my kitchen looked different to me. I suddenly understood how much more I would get out of life if I could see the world from the perspective of someone 4 inches taller. And then I realized that, with flatforms, I could always be that 5’6” person! And I could do it with free shipping! I was walking on cloud 9 and 4 inches.
Have you ever seen a woman wearing amazingly gorgeous heels or platforms that she can’t walk in? She looks like a duck, with butt angled out slightly, using her neck for balance. Well, I see these shoe victims all the time and think, oh, poor thing. She is not pulling off that look at all. Flatforms might just solve this insidious problem. In flatforms, you can be tall but not fowl.
I tried on the second pair – with a black woven rattan base and thin honey and black straps – and found that they were just as comfortable as the first, but slightly dressier. I instantly knew that I would be keeping both.
I will wear my new flatforms with walking shorts, and Capri pants, and skirts and dresses, and wide-leg jeans and skinny jeans.
Now that I can view the clothes in my closet from an entirely different angle, everything seems new again. Turns out, all I needed to update my spring and summer wardrobe were a few pairs of shoes. (OK, and maybe a cool belt and some fun jewelry that I’ll write about another time.)
Brett and the UPS man can breathe easy.
Viva la flatform!Columnist and blogger Julie Gerstenblatt writes with humor and candor about her life in Scarsdale, her friends and family, and the particular demands of motherhood and wifedom in modern-day suburbia.
The Chocolate Wars
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Let’s agree to agree: chocolate is delicious, and it’s also good for you. But, like all great love stories, this one has a twist: in order to reap any health benefits, the chocolate you eat has to be dark, dark, dark.
Here are some Real Facts paired with some Julie Facts about dark chocolate.
- Dark chocolate contains antioxidants and helps to lower blood pressure…but only in people of a certain age who already have mild to high blood pressure. I have pretty low blood pressure, and I like to think that’s because I have been eating chocolate all my life. I find that eating dark chocolate relaxes me and that’s why I always have some on my person. I also like to think that I am not “of a certain age” yet.
- If you eat the recommended 100-gram, 450 calorie chocolate bar
a day, you could significantly lower your blood pressure…and/or you could gain a lot of weight. Gaining weight might make you stressed out and, therefore, elevate your blood pressure. So don’t eat a whole chocolate bar every day, please, unless you are under medical supervision or unless you for some reason want to get chubby to fit back into your pregnancy jeans.
- Did you know that you cannot eat that dark chocolate with a glass of milk, because the milk actually counteracts the benefits? This is why I try to wash down my dark chocolate with a glass of red wine, thereby doubling my antioxidant intake and maximizing my chances of clean living. Not to brag, but I’m super healthy like that.
Chocolate makers read the science section of the New York Times just like we do, and so they know that we know that dark is the way to go. Ever since hearing that the average chocolate-eating public might start buying dark, these modern-day Willy Wonkas have been hard at work perfecting the taste of high performing, high-cocoa-percentage chocolates. If you’ve ever paid for items at a gourmet deli or Barnes and Noble, your eye has probably passed over the point-of-purchase displays of chocolate bars that whisper, “Buy me” and “Eat me.” You can even buy a chocolate bar while paying for your bras at Lord & Taylor, though I’m not sure why you’d want to. But you can! I bet you are a discriminating consumer like me, noting evidence of the artisanal chocolate bar craze, and wondering how the different brands stack up. Maybe you’ve even sampled a few.
If you don’t mind me asking, how fierce is your chocolate bar? Can you withstand 72% pure cacao? Do you like “intense dark chocolate,” as one 
Balducci’s bar says, or “really intense dark chocolate,” like another bar reads? What’s next after that, I wonder…holy hell chocolate? Crazy f*&%ing strong chocolate? We-dare-you-to-eat-this-and-talk-straight-afterwards chocolate? Some of these bars are downright scary.
So, to take the fear and the sting out of the morass of options, I would like to bring you the best of the bunch, in a very unscientific taste test. I have been conducting this hard work over the past few weeks, just in time for bathing suit season.
Godiva offers 3 dark options, a 72% plain, a 72% with almonds, and a 50% with sea salt, each $5.00. I’m a sucker for sea salt, so while I was buying some books at Barnes & Noble (a store loving re-named Nook & Godiva by my friend, comedienne/writer Karen Bergreen) I grabbed a bar. It was superyum. I now carry Godiva dark chocolate pearls in my handbag. (25 calories for 8 pieces!)
Vosges Haut Chocolate wishes you peace, love and chocolate with every bar and actually comes with instructions for “How to enjoy an exotic candy bar,” on the back label. The steps include “breathe, see, smell, snap,” and, finally, they let you “taste.” Still being a sucker for salt, I went for the Black Salt Caramel Bar. This bar should come with instructions saying not to eat it while driving a car because I ended up with caramel all over my hands and on the steering wheel. Weighing in at 70% cacao, this bar did have a “glossy shine,” to it, as the instructions suggest a good bar should, with a smooth and silky texture. Vosges has the most creative combinations out there. It would be fun to try a bunch of them with friends as an after dinner treat, instead of a more traditional dessert at a dinner party or BBQ. Break apart some bars!
Balducci’s makes several options that try to psyche you out with their sheer intensity. I found the 54% dark chocolate with salt to be a bit too salty, although the more I ate of it, the better it tasted. The “really intense” bars also come with pomegranate and raspberry flavoring. Balducci’s carries about 400 kinds of chocolate bars, though, so you can go nuts…or nut-free.
There are also several of what I’d call “Feel Good, Do Good” brands out there, including Sweetriot and Prestat. Both brands are committed to fair trade, helping farmers in Latin America and West Africa. The Prestat 71% Dark Chocolate English Mint Crunch has what I’d call a “grown up” flavor that I imagine British royalty enjoy. Sweetriot’s Pure 60% Dark Chocolate with Crunchy Nibs had a strong, earthy, bitter flavor that I can’t honestly say I liked, but maybe you will. Three stars. I had to wash that one down with some Godiva. Sweetriot also makes an 85% dark chocolate that I was too afraid to try.
My favorite dark chocolate treats are the Brookside fruit and dark chocolate pieces, which can be found at most health food markets. There are several flavors, from Gogi with Raspberry to Pomegranate and Acai. They are all delicious and they make me feel like I am eating fruit when I am definitely not. They come in a handy re-sealable baggie for snacking on-the-go.
So…where do you stand on The Chocolate Wars?
Columnist and blogger Julie Gerstenblatt writes with humor and candor about her life in Scarsdale, her friends and family, and the particular demands of motherhood and wifedom in modern-day suburbia.
Winners Announced in the 43rd Annual Scarsdale 15K/4Mile Runs
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The weather was cool but dry for the Scarsdale 15K and 4 mile runs on Sunday April 1. The race began on Brewster Road and continued through Fox Meadow and Greenacres where streets were closed off to accommodate the runners and water was distributed along the way.
Participation was good, with 199 runners finishing the four-mile run and 149 completing the 15K. For the 1 mile Kids Fun Run, 65 children ages 12 and under turned out.
The Scarsdale 15K and 4 Mile runs were conducted by the Scarsdale Parks and Recreation Department and co-sponsored by the Scarsdale Antiques Running Club.
The Race is the longest running race in Westchester County.
In both races, awards were given to the overall male and female winners and for the first three finishers in the following male and female
For the 15K race, the overall male winner was Russell Cruz and the top male finisher from Scarsdale was James Pilchik. For the women, the overall female winner and first Scarsdale female finisher was Jana Trenk. In the 4-mile race, the men’s winner was Sherman Lau and the women were lead by Leota Branche.
A complete list of winners in all categories is available here.
Pictured at top: 4 Mile Race Start. Photos provided by the Scarsdale Recreation Department.
