Seaside Heights is known for its boardwalk. Watched Jersey Shore? Yeah, that’s our boardwalk. Ever caught footage of MTV beach house debauchery, and you’ve seen the far north side of our boardwalk. Yes, it’s a little trashy. Okay, a lot trashy. But where else can you get the best sausage sandwiches, lobster rolls, birch beer, frozen custard, and rickety roller coasters?
Midway is the place for a sausage, peppers, and onion. Four years ago Jason ate three (3!) in one day, but he’s done proving his mettle to the family so this year he only had one. I even tried to do a split for another half each but he wouldn’t go for it. The sweetest lemonade in all the land washes it down. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.
Frog Bog and the water-shooting race are our only games, actually. We’ll dominate the frog bog, get a prize, and give it to the next kid who passes us by. Family-only water-shooting means we take over a booth but we don’t normally take a prize. This year after a malfunction with the water-shooting race I went up against an aunt in a re-do and won, and I kept my little Om Nom.
Turned out the one night we chose to go to the boards was the night a derecho descended on the East Coast, and boy did it come upon us fast! Games started closing and people fled the boardwalk—we got into the cars just in time, in fact. Of course, Jason just went straight back out, stormchaser he is. The shots were clearly worth it!
We will never be vegetarians. If you are squeamish, you may want to look away. Because crabbing, one of the most important parts of beach week, is the subject of this post.
Pop-Pop, Erin’s grandfather, was a longtime crabber. He taught us all how to crab, and in some not-insignificant way, waking up early to head to the pier on the bay is our way of honoring his memory. It just occurred to me that Pop-Pop died 13 years ago, but we still use so many tools that were his. Cages, the net, and of course The Stick, a small piece of wood that he marked with a 4.5-inch line (minimum acceptable width point to point). Even the bucket was Pop-Pop’s—though it just sprung a leak, so I put in a request for a white bucket (it will photograph better). We do a mix of cages and drop lines, about 4 or 5 each. Cages are an easier catch; drop lines take skill and patience—there’s something for everyone.
Most of the time spent crabbing is about waiting. Pull the the lines too frequently and you scare everything away! So a lot of what we do is chitchat. It’s some of the best time we have to catch up on all that’s happened in the last year. Everyone will make an appearance at crabbing at some point during the week.
I call the four of us in the picture above (me, two cousins, and their father) the “core crabbers”—we’re the ones who will always be there bright and early, no matter how late we were up the night before. One year, when the crabbing was bad, we tried to increase our luck by going out at 6:30 in the morning. (It didn’t pay off.) Sunday’s crabbing was pathetic this year. We caught one borderline crab and barely had any bites. Wednesday we went back and had a huge day! You can see how hopeful we were in the picture, before we’d even pulled a cage. Jason actually had some of the best luck that day, catching a 6.5-inch CRABZILLA with our most unlucky cage (the cursed green cage). In all, we got 13 that day. Lucky indeed.
We sat on the porch to devour Crabzilla just minutes after he came out of the pot. The sweetest meat comes from a crab you just caught, let me tell you! Because my uncle is allergic to Old Bay, we can’t use it on our crabs, but our boil in beer and water lets the flavor of the crabs shine. I’ve been cleaning my own crabs since I was little, and it’s easier than you think. Just follow the steps below. You’ll note that I scrape off the gills and the innards using the claw—you could just use your fingers but, um, I won’t do that. But I do like some of the “mustard,” called tomalley in a lobster, so I don’t scrape that off too carefully. And note the big lump of meat on the leg when it twisted out! Don’t miss out on a single morsel.
Bring a big pot of water to a boil, add a can of beer (family tradition dictates everyone takes a sip before it’s poured in, often necessitating another can be cracked open, so maybe it’s a can and a half of beer), and then drop the live crabs in. Everyone takes a turn dropping them in the water. Set the timer for 10–12 minutes, then drain and cool. You can eat them warm or straight out of the fridge up to a few days later. Yum!
Here’s something you should know about my (Erin’s) family: we are completely awesome. And for longer than any of my generation has been around, our family has been going down the shore to Seaside Park, NJ, for a week of sun, surf, good food, and great family bonding. At this point, the youngest in attendance is in his early twenties and the oldest, the matriarch of our family, is in her eighties! We all look forward to this week more than any other. Last summer we weren’t in Jersey at all—my cousin’s wedding in Georgia moved our vacation to Tybee Island instead—so we were thrilled to be rekindling our traditions back “home.”
The first thing we do when we arrive on Saturday (after chili dogs at Stewart’s) is take a walk to the ocean to “make sure it’s still there.” The house we’ve rented the last few years is the second one from the beach, the best location we’ve ever had. After that first night, each day follows the same general schedule: wake up as you will, enjoying crumb cake from Park Bakery for breakfast, and either make your way to the bay for crabbing or one by one go up to the beach itself. You wander back to the house for lunch when the time seems right, and you get in the water when the waves are begging to be ridden, but everyone knows to be up at the beach after the lifeguards leave, because that’s when our family happy hour starts. Back to the house for dinner or a trip to the boardwalk, and then we do it all again the next day.
Jason lost no time introducing a new tradition to our beach week, baking fresh cookies for all of us in his first year and every year since. This year, chocolate chip, oatmeal chocolate chip, and oatmeal cranberry. Mmmmm.
On the last night, as we ate pizza and drank wine on the beach in the light of the setting sun, my cousin’s boyfriend went up to Jason and said, “we are so lucky to have found two women with such an awesome family.” How lucky we all are to have each other!
One of the greatest things about New York City in the summer is the sheer number of free events you can attend. There’s Shakespeare in the Park, movie showings, and more. Every year, the New York Philharmonic has free performances in city parks, notably Central Park. That show is always packed blanket to blanket, so we went to the one in Prospect Park in Brooklyn along with our friend Holly—we hoped to have a smaller experience closer to home. We arrived early enough to be on the main lawn but thought the more sparsely populated edge would be a nicer location. (This was our first time listening at Prospect Park, and it turns out we were wrong: though you can hear the music pretty well, the speakers are not aimed at you, which meant many quiet parts of the pieces were completely lost on our area. This also means people in attendance chatter incessantly and don’t sit quietly. Next time, we’ll go farther in!)
We went the easy route and ordered food to go from Dizzy’s right near the entrance to the park. We spread it all out, ate, and then Holly and I both knit as the sun set. The show began at 8pm, when the fireflies were starting to come out and the sunset was casting a glow over the park. The performance included Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and two pieces by Respighi: Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome. None of us was familiar with the pieces, but they were beautiful. Erin’s always loved going to the orchestra but prefers being able to see the musicians playing, and Jason is eager to go to one where he can actually hear it; we’re looking into the schedule at Lincoln Center for the future.
After the concert ended, there were fireworks to celebrate! Though there was a tree in the way, we had great seats; this sure made up for the lack of explosions in the sky on Independence Day!
Take a listen to the concert yourself in the video Erin took.
Hot dogs and apple pie: It doesn’t get more American than that, right? Well, we had hot dogs, rabbit sausage, Mexican corn (elote) and strawberry-balsamic pie, and our friends are from all over the globe, but it sure was a great BBQ. And what’s more American than that?
Our friends Tania and Loc had people over to celebrate Independence Day on their rooftop deck. The temperature was pushing 100°F that day, which meant everyone was clamoring for the shade. We braved the heat for the sake of grilled meats, though. Christina brought rabbit sausage, Jason’s new favorite thing, while Erin insisted on good ol’ Hebrew Nationals for her July 4th menu. Erin made her family favorite cucumber-onion salad (recipe below) and a potato salad that uses goat cheese instead of mayonnaise so the heat wouldn’t make things too disgusting. Everyone found a spot in the shade of the umbrella and gathered around the great big table.
Cucumber-Onion Salad (at lower left in photo above)
2 cucumbers, peeled and thinly sliced (leave a small bit of peel for decorative purposes; use a mandoline to get really thin slices)
1 small onion, thinly sliced
1/2 cup sour cream
1/3 cup white vinegar
3 tablespoons sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
Combine all ingredients in a bowl. It tastes like summer!
We ate dessert in their air conditioned apartment. Strawberry-balsamic pie from Four and Twenty Blackbirds, plus homemade lemon meringue by Christina and a lemon-olive oil cake from Pam rounded out our citrussy, tasty dessert spread. Once the sun had set, we made our way back upstairs to see if we could spy the fireworks, despite their location over the Hudson. And we could see them, sorta.
Jason was committed to getting a great fireworks shot.
The Manhattan Bridge doesn’t get as much love as its iconic neighbor to the south. Though it may be lacking the elegance of the Brooklyn Bridge, it’s a looker of its own—and walking across this century-old bridge affords some spectacular views of the one Roebling built 26 years prior. After living here for years, we finally took a walk across the Manhattan Bridge.
Our walk began in Brooklyn, where we live, so that we could end up in Chinatown for lunch. Start by coming out of the York Street Station (from the F train), which lets you out just a block or so north of the pedestrian entrance at Jay and Sands. The pedestrian pathway is at the same level as traffic and trains, so the walk is noisy, and plenty of bikes don’t heed the direction to ride on the north path, so you’ll have a few bikes speed past you, but you’ll be too focused on the amazing view to the south to care.
The total length of the bridge is just a little more than 1 mile, so it doesn’t take long to walk across, even if you’re stopping often for photos. The protective fence dogs your steps the whole way, but in a few spots people have cut it and pulled it apart so you can take a photo of the view more easily. You come out in Manhattan right in Chinatown. In fact, as the bridge goes over the neighborhood, you’ll start to smell delicious things wafting up to the bridge. The grittiness of Chinatown is visible in all its glory from this vantage point—something we’d seen from the train many times but had never been able to capture.
