Eat to live, live to eat

Man I have been eating well the past week. It all started when J's mom came in to the city last Saturday and took us out to Stanton Social (note: Mom, Dad, you remember that place?). We had delicious tapas shared among six people which meant we got to sample a lot of different things, and I think at the end of the night my favorites were the goat cheese and potato pierogies and the French onion soup dumplings. Then of course we had dessert at Il Labratorio del Gelato (I probs spelled that wrong) and got some donuts from the Doughnut Plant to take home.

The pierogies were pretty much the best thing I had ever eaten UNTIL MONDAY when I met my roommate from London for ramen at Ippudo in the east village. Yes it was a holiday, but it was still a Monday night and we had an hour and a half wait because you know what--they're food is so freaking good people will wait that long for it on a regular basis. I don't remember what the bowl was called that we ate but it was something with a dark charred miso soup basis and it was BEYOND AMAZING. (Ed note: just looked it up, it's called kogashi miso ramen. Here's a pic that someone else with more skills than I took: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicknamemiket/3889256661/). (We also had samurai ribs and pork buns too which were also good, but that's beside the point). I'm pretty sure this particular bowl is a seasonal specialty and will soon be rotated off the menu, but that just makes me even more glad that I decided to splurge a bit and eat there randomly (well, not too random as we were technically celebrating my friend having just paid off all her student loans. A contrivance? Maybe but who cares).

It does not get better than that, but don't worry, there was still other good food in my future. Another friend just moved to the city on Tuesday from SF, so on Wednesday we went to the Breslin at the Ace Hotel. After reading all the Yelp reviews I pretty much decided that I had to try the lamb burger, and in fact that's what we all ordered, and we were all MIGHTLY satisfied. I'm not usually one to go for lamb, and even though it was great it had a definite "lamby" taste too it, but it was definitely one of the juciest burgers I've ever eaten. The fries and cumin sauce were good too, but I was beyond stuffed after the burger.

Then last night after suffering through a long panel discussion on phone apps for books (which was actually sort of interesting and informative, but also makes me head hurt to think about), a few of us met up at Gyukaku for Japanese bbq. If only we had met there an hour later we could've taken advantage of their mad happy hour specials, but as it were we were all starving and ready to eat some grilled meat and veggies. Beef, beef, beef, corn, mushrooms, sweet potatos, and rice wrapped in lettuce with this crazy good sachu sauce.... Mmmm. The mushrooms and marinated steak were both out of this world tasty. Also I totally want to go back for their bibimbap because it's super cheap and bound to also be tasty.

And it doesn't end there! Tomorrow night we are having a pizza party because some Providence friends are visiting, and in the next couple weeks I have two restaurant week reservations (at Le Cirque and David Burke Townhouse) PLUS am hosting a Chinese New Year party (which is basically just another eating fest). I haven't taken any pictures recently to document my food adventures, but I will try to remedy that going forward.

And lest you think that all I'm doing is eating out and spending money, for the record I actually used my crockpot this past weekend and made some chicken salsa chili thing, which I have been eating for lunch all week long. This weekend I think I'm going to attempt bbq pork... although really neither of these seem particularly healthy. I should probably also buy fixings for a salad while I'm grocery shopping. Mmm food.

P.S. My only gripe about any of these places I've been eating at is the reservation thing. They all have this annoying policy that even if you make a reservation, they won't seat you until your whole party is there. I appreciate, first of all, that we CAN make reservations (I'm shaking my fist at you, Ippudo and Breslin, and your no-reservations policy) but it seems absolutely ridiculous and pointless that if even one person shows up at the time of the reservation, they shouldn't be allowed to sit at the table until the others arrive. I mean, shouldn't the restaurant want customers to be seated and comfortable and theoretically starting to order as soon as possible? And what are they going to do if not everyone shows up? Give the table to someone else? It's already set and waiting, just let us sit there until that last annoying late-shower turns up (you know who you are). ANYWAY these are the things we put up with in this city in order to have an excellent meal. An excellent they are... provided everyone in the party shows up on time!

New year and all that

I'm not even going to attempt an in-depth description of the holidays here, even though it's been forever since I last updated. Suffice it to say, December went by in a blur of parties and presents, eating and shopping and drinking and having fun with friends new and old. Traveled crosstown and into Brooklyn and downtown in the city for festivities, and then all the way to Chicago and St Louis for actual Christmas. New Year's Eve was spent close to home (very close... as in, 10 feet below us at our neighbor's apt) and with a few close friends (although amidst a crowded house party), which was definitely preferable to attempting to walk outside among the revelers are secure a spot at an overly crowded and overly priced bar for the evening.

All right! So now it's a new year and that means, so far, reconnecting with old friends. Had soup dumplings on Monday and caught up with a couple friends, drinks with an old coworker on Tuesday, a great turnout for movie night Wednesday, got to know the neighbors better on Thurs night by watching Gremlins and Friday had a fancy dinner at an Indian place, then went to a sports bar and caught up with lots of NYU friends. Oh and last night went bar hopping with a recently made friend and her friends and it was good times in Soho/West Village. Started at a cocktail lounge and had the most delicious Earl Grey MarTEAnin, then hit up old favorite Peculiar Pub for cheap beer, and ended the night at Public House with a bit (just a bit!) of dancing.

The bar hop went on after that but I went home so that I could get up for girls' (ladies'??) brunch this morning. Went to a cute French place nearby and had a Croque Madame (despite my usual indifference to ham it was quite good). Afterward went down to shop in Soho and have to say, January seems like a good month for shopping down there... as long as what you want is still in stock. The streets were not nearly as crowded as usual (probably because of the burning cold wind) and the stores still have almost everything on sale. I got some ankle boots.... oops. Good thing I didn't make it my resolution to stop spending money on things I don't REALLY need.

Speaking of resolutions, they are for people far more disciplined than I. I have one that I'm working on, but my other one was to cook more and so far that has only happened once. I cooked a good amount though! But the slow cooker still sits in its box, calling my name. It's just so hard when there's so much other good food out there I don't have to slave in the kitchen to attempt making... etcetc excuse excuse.

So it is a new year, but just like The Wire taught us, things never really change. (That show! So good! I'm still so sad it's over and we finished all 5 seasons!). This is good in terms of friendship and having great people in my life, but in terms of blogging fodder it doesn't leave me much to report. I'm still saying to myself I will do pilates... and then not doing it. I'm still saying I will work on a writing project... and then writing other little things instead here and there. I keep checking my calendar to see what I was doing at this time last year. We made a trip to Providence for last year's MLK weekend, and hope to that at the end of February this year. Friends from DC came to visit next next weekend in 2010 and it looked like that was going to happen again this year, but now I don't think so. I will, however, visit those crazy girls in February for President's Weekend, just like I did last year. However, unfortunately Chinese New Year is two weeks earlier this year than 2010, so I won't get to celebrate that instead of Valentine's Day. I'll just celebrate it on Feb 3rd and then pretend the other holiday doesn't exist a week or so after that. It's going to be the year of the Rabbit (my year)!

Anyway, so there's much to look forward to albeit January and February being my two least favorite months of the year (they're dark and cold and if there's snow then they're wet too). 2011 is already shaping up to be a very social year, and I hope that means it'll be quite enjoyable. Now here's a picture of the bean with snow on top:

quidditch quidditch quidditch

I can't imagine how those kids must feel after playing the game all weekend, but I was thrilled and exhausted just watching them! The first annual world cup! Such excitingness! It's pretty much all that I could ask for in a sport--literary base, entertaining to watch, and sometimes a bit violent! Well, I feel bad for the kids who had to get carted away on stretchers, and I was quite worried with all the snitch wrestling that someone's broom was going to break on impact w the group and someone would end up with some wood stuck in their body, but everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. My prediction is, either this is going to be the next frisbee golf and a small group of college kids from any school all over the country will play and there will possibly even be scholarships offered... or someone will end up getting seriously injured and some higher authority will put the breaks on the whole operation. Obviously I hope to Dumbledore that the league only gets more popular and the whole game becomes more fleshed out (since now it really is a sharp divide between athletes serious about the sport, and ppl who just love the books and want to run around and have a good time). With the last movie coming out next summer, I definitely think interest will endure for the next couple years... but after that will be the true testament of Harry Potter's influence, I think.

ANYWHO enough of my ramblings, here are some pics:tournament scoreboard

middlebury chasing the snitch

snitch evading the pitt seeker

looks like the tufts seeker is flying, right??

the pitch

final match between middlebury and tufts, just to give you an idea of the size of the crowd. and at this moment all 10 or so of the snitches from the entire tournament rushed the field in order to confuse the seekers and protect the actual snitch. good stuff.

all right, i'm ridiculously full of mussels and watching some daniel radcliffe interviews and about to pass out. harry potter movie on fridayyyyy!

a lengthy post for your Wednesday reading pleasure

2 train from Times Square to the Upper West Side at 8pm. Crowded, but in my heels and giraffe ears I am the tallest person in the car, hanging on to the rail and towering over all the others in their gray and black coats--not a one of them festive. There is a polar bear too, but she's with me. We grit our teeth as the train inches forward at a pace 10x slower than usual, but fortunately makes only express stops.

We disembark and walk 6 blocks to our friends' apartment. There we are greeted by a Tea Partier and Scott Pilgrim's blue-haired girlfriend. Soon and suddenly a penguin joins us and voila! We are an impromptu zoo: the brown spotted, the white and fluffy, the bird with a bowtie. More characters arrive--Cleopatra, Bella the vampire-abused, a Twister board, a video game-inspired deep sea diver, and Chilean miners whose only known word in Spanish is Hola. The couple wearing jeans and sweaters are given judgmental looks and slink to the sofa corners.

Soon it is time to depart to the chilly night air once again, and the Chilean miners escort us zoo animals back to the subway from whence we came. On the downtown platform one of the miners indulges in a gooey lizard treat and mercifully the train arrives promptly. A man missing several teeth vacates his seat for us and attempts to joke with one of the Chilean miners about fried rice; he keeps winking at me to keep me in on it, but the miner grows palpably more offended as the comments continue. Somehow soon enough we arrive at Christopher Street and return again to the wind and the cutting cold.

Another apartment, another odd assortment of guests. We stay for awhile and sip beers while admiring the setting. Exposed brick walls and a fireplace mantel decorated with candlelight and dragon statues downstairs, pink lights strung from the ceiling upstairs and a kitchen painted teal and yellow. There are also body parts hanging from the ceiling and blood smears on the floor.

We get a call to meet up with some vampires at a bar across town, so we bid our hosts David Beckham and a police officer lady goodnight and venture out to try and find a cab. We walk and flag and walk and flag. I take off my heels now, as by this point I am a giraffe with a hobbled gait, instead of a graceful stride. We walk some more and there is nary a cab to be had on streets or avenues, so we put our heads forward and determine to make it to 2nd avenue by foot.

By the time we arrive it is 2am and the party at the bar has begun its descent into pairings-off and unfortunate bathroom sicknesses but despite these peripheral goings-on, the vampires are still in the full swing of things. Some dancing, some drinking. People slowly but surely begin to beg off, and I have a pleasant conversation with Count Chocula about the perils of crafting wooden furniture before the polar bear and I agree to retire for the evening. This time, we manage to secure a cab home.

Sunday night we encounter the same west to east problem, as the other half of our party is once again on 2nd avenue and we are on the west side of 6th. Only this time the streets are completely choked with every creature real and imagined, which makes even walking difficult, descending into the subway near impossible, and hailing a cab completely out of the question. We blend in now but are also differentiated by our purposeful strides through the crowds, our desire to move as rapidly as possible away from the parade everyone else is surging towards. We make it to our destination eventually, limping and hungry, but the bar houses sustenance in the form of both ale and friendly socializing.

Later there is a stark contrast between the quiet of east 7th and the perpetual rowdiness of St. Mark's. As we round the corner on that block, it's clear the west side parade has made traction over here, but by now we generally ignore the revelry and instead make a beeline for a yakitori restaurant. By the time we emerge, satiated with grilled meat and peppers and tofu, it is officially November, but the zombies and faeries and ninjas are all still out to play, and it is clear they will extend their stay into the wee hours of the night.

I smile to myself at the childishness the city has revealed this weekend and climb into yet another cab. After all, 363 days a year the sidewalks are dominated by somber suits and down jackets in the winter, sundresses and short shorts in the summer. Yet underneath this society-accepted outwear lurk Mad Hatters and star athletes, XMen and butterflies and giant boxes of Cheesy Poofs. Once seated in the taxi I take off my giraffe ears and set them in my lap, thinking as I gaze out the window, What sort of interesting characters will gestate over the next year, finally manifesting themselves at this time in 2011?

Pumpkin Ale

Is my new favorite thing about fall. I already love the colors of the leaves, the crispness in the air, new sweaters, wearing jeans, hot apple cider... all of that, and now I have another reason for fall to be my favorite season.

It all started last Friday when we went out for drinks and I got this pint of some Pumpkin IPA that had sugar and spices on the glass's rim. Then Saturday night we went to this hole in the wall sports bar to watch the Giants game and they had pumpkin ale on tap (just a mysterious white lever w a pumpkin sticker on it) and a couple more of those and I was sold. Topped off a perfect weather day of playing in prospect park and wandering around the old 7th ave hood (and eating at La Taq! Miss you!), and was followed by a rather ridiculous night of dancing at a nearby "lounge".

Sunday I got my Halloween costume! And did grocery shopping! And ate a burrito! So those things got accomplished. Usually I put off the costume thing to the very last second, but I'm relieved to have it figured out already so I'm not standing in line outside the costume stores on Saturday and then scraping the bottom of the barrel for whatever masks/wigs/ears are left.

I've been passing the work week reading author interviews on the Paris Review site (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2000s#list). Very intriguing and hopefully, eventually, motivating. In other literature news, I'm becoming very interested in these e-reader developments of late. Color Nook? Lending program for the Kindle? We're inching closer to the actual release of a device that I'm going to be compelled to buy: a reader the size of a kindle with a color and e-ink screen, game capabilities, wifi, infinite lending capabilities, and (you know, since this is my dream device I'm just going to go with it) mp3 storage so you can listen to music while doing all that other stuff. Yes, basically like a glorified iPad but smaller. And whose primary function is reading ebooks. Once such a thing comes down to about $200 in price, I will have no choice but to chuck my ipod and buy it. The only question is: who will come out with it first? Amazon or Apple?

Weekend Update

Sam came to visit for Columbus Day weekend! She got in very late Friday night and luckily by the time we wanted to crawl into bed, the party in the apartment upstairs was winding down and the stomping was mostly done.

I wish I had a map I could post and highlight all the areas that we walked over three full days of gallivanting, but alas I will just have to describe our journeys. Saturday we headed out to Fort Greene to visit the Brooklyn Flea and picked up lots of cute handmade jewelry. Then we headed into Park Slope for more shopping and brownstone-gazing and at lunch at 'Snice (which inspired me to make my own goat cheese and grilled vegetable sandwich for lunch today... amazing). Because I had to have my birthday cake ice cream fix at Uncle Luigi's, we meandered up to 7th ave and took the train back from there... to Soho! Where we met Cynthia and did some more shopping! As usual on the weekends, Soho was super crowded and not really conducive to actually buying things, but I showed Sam the Young Designers Market and McNally Jackson, and those are the two coolest things about the area, imho. Then she and I headed up to W4th area to meet friends for dinner at Keste. The pizza, as usual, was amazing and I ate way too much of it. We had some beers at Belgium to finish off the night.

Sunday we tried to take it a little slower. Started with brunch at noon at Riposo 46 and it was delicious. We admired the lone chef in the kitchen churning out brunch plate after brunch plate for every single customer. Afterward Sam and I took the train wayyyyyy downtown to the Staten Island ferry, which we rode there and back and took lots of pictures of the statue of liberty and Manhattan skyline (above, which is now my phone background). Since we were down there and I remembered from when Melody visited that the park in Battery City along the west side is really nice, we sat in the grass there and then walked for a bit up to Ground Zero. Almost got swallowed by several tour groups but made it out alive.

For dinner we hit up Panna, the crazy Indian place in the East Village which is both BYOB and always a fire hazard. But awesome! Can't beat eating curry with christmas lights dangling in your face, amiright? Afterward we went back to Hell's Kitchen to chill at C+C's apartment and watched some Mad Men, then called it a night.

Monday there was more shopping. Like, lots more. First we went to the Highline, which didn't have much in bloom at this point but I still think is one of the cooler parks (and conveniently located). Then we descended to Chelsea Market and checked out Anthro and all the shops there. Really a good place to go if you're hungry... but we were holding out for tea! So midafternoon we went a little further south back to the West Village to Tea and Sympathy and got us some creamed tea (aka a pot of tea and scones with clotted cream and jam). Awesome Britishness, all around. After that we needed to walk it off (ha. ha.) so we went shopping around Union Square until it turned dark out (which is so early now, booooo!). J met up with us and we walked back up to 8th and 44th, which as I'm sure you know is now the proud home of Shake Shack. So that happened. Of course I hyped it up as I usually do and Sam's verdict was "this is a glorified Steak and Shake burger" BUT no one could deny the deliciousness. Also the pumpkin pie custard. Enough said.

Strangely enough (since it had been a beautiful weekend weather-wise up until this point) as we left it started to sprinkle and then pretty much right when we got back home it started thundering! and lightning! and hailing!? So we did not get to check out a rooftop bar for a final night in nyc drink, but instead drank some wine and watched harry potter. Still a win.

Sam left Tuesday around noon (sad face) and as I had the rest of the day off, I putzed around until evening time. Now I'm gearing up for a weekend getaway of my own... on Friday after work I'm off to Boston for a couple days, and looking forward to finally getting a semi-vacation from the city. It's no puerto rico, but I suppose it'll do!

Cupcakes!

And brownies and wine and more! Basically, cook book launch parties are awesome and you should never pass up the opportunity to go to one (and snag all the free baked goods you can, obvi).

Last night was the BAKED launch party at the Ace Hotel in the Flatiron area (or I think they're trying to brand the neighborhood NoMad, as in "north of Madison Square Park" but I don't think that's caught on yet). The Ace Hotel is this really awesome botique hotel/hipster hangout that has gotten really popular recently since also attached to it are the Breslin restaurant, Opening Ceremony gift shop, and Stumpton coffee. All of which are basically the epitomy of cool hip-ness right now (and by calling it that, I'm surely outing myself as very much uncool and unhip). Anyway I love going there and sipping hot chocolate in their lounge area with all the other young people drinking their cocktails, eating their cheese boards, and working on their Macs. (http://www.acehotel.com/newyork if you're interested)

So of course an invitation combining this setting plus free baked goods from one of the best bakeries in the city (actually it's in Red Hook, so the only time I've gone was after an IKEA trip and even then it's a bit out of the way. http://bakednyc.com/) was pretty much the best thing that could happen on a Tuesday night. I met up with my friend who does marketing for the book's publisher and we just made our way around the room, sampling treats and stuffing more in our bags to take home for later. That combined with the Halloween candy my coworker had bought earlier in the day basically put me on sugar overload for the rest of the night. So I went home and did some yoga. The end!

P.S. Sam is coming this weekend and boy do I have festivities planned for us. It's going to be nonstop eating, shopping, and walking around from Saturday until she leaves Tuesday afternoon. Very excited!