Fall continues its inexorable march towards winter and the holiday season. We’ll be hosting Thanksgiving and Christmas again this year, which is fun to prep for. Dad is getting some bespoke meats from Pat LaFreida; we’ve had lots of good roasts from him, but this year I think we’ll be trying his turkey as well. We usually just get the freebie turkey from Shop Rite, which I brine, spatchcock, and smoke on the Weber Bullet smoker we’ve been using for probably a decade now. I have to remember to get some smoke wood. I guess that’s my prompt to start a Thanksgiving project in OmniFocus!

So it’s spritzes now with some cheese and cured meats. There’s chicken in a marinade that I’ll be grilling shortly. Be well and thanks for reading.

Garden State Comics Fest at the Vineland Convention Center

That Vineland was hosting the Garden State Comics Fest somehow escaped my notice, but Joey and I rolled over there yesterday. I hated paying $30 a head to get in, but we both wanted to check it out (Joe especially). Aaron would have been keen to attend, but he was on a scavenger hunt with his pledge class in New York City, which is a decidedly more exciting experience for sure. YOLO.

The venue was Vineland’s recently rechristened Convention Center; it used to be an Amish Market, which is a regional trope in my opinion. They can’t possibly be truly Amish, and there are a lot of vendors that are local “English” hawking wares. The market closed in 2015, and has sat unused since. This was the first event to be hosted since it’s been turned into a convention center, and while I’m skeptical of anything downtown maintaining a foothold, I am hopeful that it will. Landis Avenue was once the crown jewel of a thriving city commerce center; it is long, wide, and boasts spacious sidewalk space. It’s a true shame that the downtown hasn’t witnessed the kind of revivals we see in nearby Camden County, but maybe there’s hope.

Joe and I walked around and checked out the vendors: there were lots of comic books, toys, and artsy/craftsy things available for purchase. There were some cosplay enthusiasts prowling around, including a notably awesome Darth Vader. It was small but fun.

Panasonic Lumix G 25mm f/1.7, a “Nifty Fifty” Lens

I took yesterday’s pics with a Panasonic Lumix G 25mm f/1.7 aspherical lens, which I found on eBay. I’m pretty sure I’ll purchase most of my photography lenses etc from eBay from now on; I’m not serious enough to need new gear, and what I’ve gotten so far has been in exemplary condition.

A 25mm micro fourth-thirds lens corresponds to a 50mm full-frame lens. It’s not terribly different from my 20mm Panasonic f/1.7 lens, but enough to look a bit different. 50mm approximates what we see with our eyes, uncorrected, so I thought it would be fun to shoot with. I still get great bokeh with this lens, but with a tighter field of view. So far, so good.

Black Stallion Chardonnay

Rhonda and I went to Five Points for parm and mussels last night, but we faced a 30-minute wait (and we were early diners). We said nah and continued on to another local favorite, the Savoy. While a long wait at one place often presages a long wait at another, we were relieved to be seated immediately. And Tommy’s house is a veal house, which is always a good thing. As an aside, the Savoy has been consistently excellent for a while now.

Anyway, we ordered a bottle of the Raeburn Chardonnay, which we had a glass of the last time we were there; it was recommended by the owner’s son, TJ, as a cost-adjacent but more interesting chard than the two house wines (Carmel Road and I can’t remember the other one). They didn’t have it on the menu, though, so I ordered a bottle of the Veltliner they had on the menu, which I figured we’d get into, since Bellview makes an excellent Grünner Veltliner and we have it from time to time.

The owner, Tommy, appeared within moments with a bottle in hand, and asked us, “Do you trust me?” He asked if we would consider the Black Stallion Chardonnay in his hand, and said of the Veltliner that we’d ordered, that the Austrians only make one wine, and it’s not that good. I pointed out that we had it at Bellview and loved it, but he said it’s different (which makes some sense, since we’re not in Austria). So we tried a sip and nodded our approval. It’s a bright, citrusy take on the varietal, less oaky. It was really good and I plan to shop for it when I need a bottle for a BYOB night. As it stands right now, we have a couple of bottles of Bellview’s rosé in the stash to ride out the lull between batches; they’re supposed to have a new vintage debuting in December, so we’ve a few weeks or so to sit on our hands and wait. I’m hoping they have it on tap again for growler fills.

Joe was inducted into Tau Beta Phi tonight. It was a secret ritual; he disappeared with his classmates and came back an hour later. We just mulled around until the students came out. Very proud! The engineering buildings at Rowan are beautiful.

A couple of weeks ago, Rhonda and I visited Aaron at Rutgers for homecoming/parents weekend. We had a great time walking around campus and dining out. I took my camera bag so I could shoot with both the OM Systems E-M10 Mark IV and my older Olympus E-PL5. I kept the Lumix 20mm f/1.7 on the E-M10, and the whacky TT Artisans 18mm f/6.3 lens on the E-PL5. Knowing the TT Artisans took interesting pictures when there’s plenty of light, I thought it might be fun to try to grab some indoor shots where there was a stark contrast between dark and light zones.

Here are two pics I took from inside Zimmerli, looking up from the ground floor to the skylight:

You can certainly see some differences, but I was impressed by how much detail the TT Artisans picked up, and how similar the images are.

The next two pics show renderings of stained glass, which compelled me to shoot them, as they were in a dark hallway only illuminated by ceiling lights, but because they were strongly backlit, I thought they would make a nice study in contrast between the two lenses.

Here’s the TT Artisans:

And the Panasonic:

The Lumix lens grabbed way more detail for sure, but the ultra-cheap TT Artisans did a great job rendering the image because of the light.

I was inspired partly by this shot I took the day before at Working Dog Winery, where I snuck this pic of a bottle of their unoaked chardonnay while we were sitting on the patio.

There’s nothing terribly compelling about this image, and Friday’s waning sun under the roof of the porch didn’t leave as much room for pics as I’d hoped with the TT Artisans. But I was gassed when I saw the contrast between the lighted side of the bottle and the shaded size that opposed it. It captures neatly the amount of light that the f/6.3 needs… but also some creative potential for future shoots.

Rhonda and I agreed, just after our last visit to New Brunswick to see Aaron, that we’d trade in our annual visit to Rehoboth, Delaware, for another trip up to New Brunswick to visit Aaron. New Brunswick is peripheral to New York City, and represents the tip of the spear where New Jersey converts from bucolic and spacious to the stereotype of what most people associate with the Garden State: choked with cars and traffic, the Turnpike, jug handles, and road rage. Getting your bearings in Camden County is a good training ground for the asphalt jungle of central Jersey.

I had, until I graduated college, managed to exclusively experience the southern parts of Jersey, growing up in Cumberland County, and traveling north to my grandparents’ house in Milford, NJ, a sleepy bedroom town bereft of Wawas and McDonald’s and malls. The landscape transformed before my eyes as we lumbered up old Route 206 to Route 29 from flat farmland and pinelands into windy mountain roads, and later, up the fast but unscenic Route 55 to 42 to 295. Our route’s evolution went from slow but scenic to a blur of competing race car ya-yas, until the familiar undulations of the inevitable Route 29 found our tires.

One thing I learned about Camden County, a place I’ve worked in twice since graduating college, is not the density (which is there in spades), but the sheer variety of experience there. Moore Bros. Great restaurants. Revived downtowns, evolving from sleepy forgotten retails hubs forgotten by 80s mall culture into bespoke cafes, bakeries, and BYOBs.

New Brunswick, and the peripheral Brunswicks, and Edison, and Sayreville, and Newark, all offer bigger iterations on this theme: culturally diverse restaurants, long stretches of highway with every chain restaurant imaginable, and every tier of shopping mall, all within short drives of each other. On our trips, we pop, damp and happy, out of farmland wineries, into the dense traffic of a million souls piloting vehicles in an urgent rush to somewhere.

In a short 90-minute drive, we deliver ourselves from sleepy farmscapes to burgeoning cities, all clinging to the greatest city in the world.

OK Alex, Shut Up and Tell Me What You Ate

Our trips to Rehoboth always feature dinner at either new or favorite spots. We’ve eaten at Salt Air many times, because it’s a consistent favorite. We’ve dined at other memorable spots there, too, including Drift, Blue Hen, and Le Fable, and our stalwart lunch spot, Miyagi Ramen. We go off season, because we’re suckers for a quiet shore town.

And while the familiar, and small iterations thereof, are always enjoyable, Aaron’s decision to attend Rutgers offers our adventurous troupe many opportunities to try new places. So far, so good: The Frog and the Peach was a great dining experience, and we’ve had some of the best Asian food ever in Edison.

While I was tempted to revisit the Frog and the Peach, I found the Metuchen Inn while prowling Open Table, and I made a rez for our visit last Friday. The stately old house welcomed our eager party with dim incandescence on a dark and damp evening, and we were efficiently shuttled to our table. And since the rise and fall of our local and beloved Winfields in Millville, the “American Cuisine” moniker heartens me.

A very good first sign: our server didn’t bat an eyelash at my asking for our Tanqueray Martinis up with olives, mixed at a six-to-one ratio. The drinks were stellar; while Rhonda and I have taken to enjoying a Manhattan preprandial, we still enjoy a Martini as a treat at a nice restaurant.

Another encouraging sign: having a hard time picking out an appetizer. I was very close to ordering the Blue Point oysters on the half shell, wrestled with the mussels, but settled upon the clams with chorizo and black beans. I think there’s something about a clam I’ll always prefer to an oyster or a mussel, although in the former case, it’s a culinary crime to say so. I love the assertive brine of a clam, on the half shell or steamed. These littlenecks were steamed to perfection, with a tasteful appointment of firm black beans and small chunks of dried chorizo. Gilding shellfish with a greasy, smoky sausage is always a pro move.

Rhonda tried the lobster bisque, a dish she favors quite possibly due to serially excellent executions of the corn and crab chowder at the Knife and Fork. It was perfectly viscous, avoiding the gloopy texture you’ll find at a lesser establishment, and redolent of shellfish roasted into the stock.

Aaron tried the charred octopus, which I am always tempted by, but often avoid, having watched a lot of YouTube videos demonstrating how much smarter octopi are than, say, me. I tried a bite, and it was pleasingly soft, with a nice smoky chair.

For entrees, I went with the sea bass after wrestling with the wild boar tenderloin. Wild boar and I have a history: on our trip in 2000 to Sienna, Italy, wild board ragù was on every menu, often served with pici pasta, a long tubular noodle expressly designed for soaking up condimento. I recently found boar on a local eatery’s menu, but it had sold out before I tried to order it. I was similarly tempted by the pork osso bucco and the venison tenderloin; there is something about a chilly fall night that invites a curated meat dish, especially game. But I had sucked down my share of wine that afternoon, and future meals loomed in the horizon, so I went with the special.

This was a spectacular dish: perfectly crisp skin, tender, flaky flesh, all piled atop cherry tomatoes and asparagus. Not a carb in sight. It’s the kind of dish you can eat and lick clean and not feel bad about it.

Rhonda went for the lamb chops, which looked fabulous. Aaron, my adventurous counterpart in all things culinary, waited to hear what I ordered before pulling the trigger on the boar. Plated tastefully around a mound of mashed sweet potatoes and a pile of asparagus, it was a sous vide masterpiece, cooked to a perfect medium rare.

The service was attentive and brisk, with impeccable pacing. This all fell apart once dessert was ordered; it took a long time to come out, and we had to flag down a server to bring us our check. It had been a long day of driving, and we were keen to get back to the room for some rest. And maybe some more wine.

I would go back in a heartbeat. It is, to my taste, the perfect spot to celebrate with the ones you cherish the most on a chilly night. Or any night, I imagine.