New York adventures

I was recently in New York for a legal technology conference and took the opportunity to visit for a day or so with my friend Chris, who is a man about town with the foodstuffs on offer in the Big Apple. He lives in Brooklyn and picked me up at the airport (making me feel like a movie star), because he is awesome. Soon after dropping off my gear at his place, we headed for the subway for a wild ride to our first stop on my New York food adventure: Bark Hot Dogs in Park Slope. Delicious dogs accompanied by disco fries and white birch beer (which I'm going to describe as a cross between wintergreen Life Savers and root beer - so not sure I'll ever order it again).

Very delicious, all natural etc. I had the classic NYC dog with sweet and sour onions and mustard. In the back is Chris' pickle dog. The food was great and I was particularly amused by the nine-year-old-going-on-25 little girl who sat beside me. She was interested in my opinions regarding the food and the beverages. Obviously I'm so very pretty and smart that everything I said to her needed to be repeated with great gravitas to her father. There is no doubt that I am a role model on the hot dog eating front, send your children.

 After hot dogs, we ambled around a bit to the Ample Hills Creamery for some of the best ice cream I've ever had. And I have had a lot of ice cream. I was tempted by the Mexican hot chocolate because I'm that way but in the end chose the salted crack caramel. Fantastic. The best part is that you get to make a very informed decision on what you're going to order because they let you try everything in the place, especially on a late January day when it's not exactly lineups around the corner in there. Not to mention, the store is crazy cute.

Now there are few things I enjoy more than street food and in Toronto, we do not have a good variety, so non-stationary food vendors were on the agenda as well. For dinner (before contra dancing!), Chris hunted down the Kimchi Taco Truck, which combined my love of food on the go with Mexican flair. Now in Manhattan, we grabbed our bags of deliciousness and walked up to Union Square to eat on a park bench on a very warm January night. I had a combo of the grilled Korean bbq short rib taco and the pulled chicken taco. Woah! Those short rib tacos were out of this world!!

The next day Chris invited me to join him and a group of friends for dim sum at a local Brooklyn restaurant (which I can't remember the name of) and it too was spectacular. We arrived early in order to get a table, which when we left through a horde of waiting and hungry diners, I understood. There were about eight of us, so we ordered many delicious things to share. It's a good number of people because it lets you try many things but you don't have to have a lot of anything. So a couple of dishes stood out, one was chicken feet, which was the only thing I was not brave enough to eat but was the choice of the birthday boy for whom we were gathered to celebrate. While the feet were not my favourite dish of the weekend, they did come out as the best photo.

I did however take a chance on the jellyfish dish as I'd never eaten it and all the rest of the food was pretty excellent so I figured this was as good a time as any. It was tasty although the texture was a bit more rubbery than I enjoy. There was also some octopus mixed in with the dish and it was all good.

So overall, probably my best-ever dim sum experience. And it was followed by a bit of Chinese new year celebrations on the street, which were enjoyable and left me with glittery bits in my hair until well into the following morning when I finally got to bed!

I left Chris on Sunday afternoon and headed to Midtown to check into the hotel and get into a work state of mind. That night I met a lawyer friend and some of her colleagues and ended up having a really fun time dancing the entire night away. Her flight was delayed and my plans for a swishy Mexican place in Chelsea didn't work out but my favourite Times Square-area standby Virgil's barbecue was called up to the plate and didn't disappoint. From the gang who had never eaten bbq before, there were smiles all around. That's the way they roll at Virgil's. Good, solid bbq that you just can't get in Toronto.

After dinner there was much dancing and carousing and when we finally got back to our hotel in the 3:30 a.m. range, my companions were hungry. So off to Ray's Pizza for some pie. Not the greatest but it hit the spot and allowed us the chance to have a meaningful conversation about health care policy with a lovely man from Seattle.

On the Monday night, I went out with one of my fellow editors and her sisters who had come down for a little r&r. We ended up at a tapas restaurant near 42nd and 8th. Nothing spectacular but a big selection of tapas and a very enjoyable variety of sangrias. A fun night out with new people, can't beat that! (bad pic taken with ye olde BlackBerry). The hit of the evening, I would hazard, were the dates wrapped in bacon. They just work.

Over the course of the next few days, ate quite a bit just around the hotel. The usual oatemeal for breakfast at the Astro Diner at 55th and 6th, which I always try to do when I'm at this conference. Had an excellent Chipotle burrito bowl (fast and convenient) and tried this odd French restaurant/sushi bar mashup Rue 57 again and had a fairly spectacular chicken pot pie.

Now all over Manhattan are these halal food carts that serve up gyros and chicken and the like. Apparently the one that is at the corner of 53rd and 6th is the most awesome. There is always a line up there, particularly late at night on the weekends after the bars close. It's quite a sight. So as I was wrapping up the trip, I decided to have my final lunch at the cart. It is a giant plate of happiness (with a Diet Coke) for $7. Underneath all that delicious white sauce there's a mouthwatering blend of lamb gyros, chicken, rice and salad. Enough food to keep you going for the whole day. Just bring breath mints because there's a big garlic punch.

So long and thanks for all the eats!

Local Food Tastes Good!

We've been subscribing to a meat and veg CSA box this summer and it has been a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it's given us some amazing meat and vegetables to eat, and a curse because there seems to be this ABUNDANCE of meat and veg to eat staring at us all the time!

If you aren't involved in a CSA program, I highly recommend it, though. Ours is through Cooper's Farm and Maze, and the quality of ingredients we have been getting has been amazing! Our biggest down-side for this farm (and a large part of why we may find something different next year) is that it's quite far away from us so it's a bit of a mission to get there every week.

Nevertheless, we've had lots of nice things to eat, peas, carrots, zukes, eggplant, tomatillos, lettuce, chard, and lots of lovely meat! The chickens have been amazing and the beef is very flavorful and fresh tasting, even when frozed! This meal was a very "local" meal for us, in that just about everything on the plate came from the farm!


The yellow is a sauteed zuke that was nicely cooked, but had a very bitter after-taste. Maybe it's the skin? The white to the side of that is a scalloped potato I made from a recipe in America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two magazine (which I HIGHLY recommend if you are a bit like me and have a hard time cutting down recipes to feed only two of you!) and a lovely steak of some sort pan grilled with sauteed red onion and mushrooms. Pretty much all local and all made at home.

Cooking at home is also a blessing and a curse. You may not think so, but with cooking and eating there is always clean up of dishes to do that, when you get home late to begin with, means the "dinner time" activities can often take up a couple of hours of the very short evening. I am trying to get past that, and I have realized that doing the dishes takes less time than complaining about doing the dishes, so it's been productive in that sense. It's really important to us though to start eating more at home. Long talks with my cardiologist (nothing major wrong, no need for concern, but I do now officially have a cardiologist) suggest that eating at home more and cutting down the portions (my biggest issue) would improve the issues I am having significantly because I would then have control over what's going into my food. Add to that the cost of eating at home being substantially cheaper than eating out, it's a win-win right now.

Plus, and I don't know if this is just us or what, but we are so tired of everything that there is to eat here. We still go to Rashnaa, and I love it to bits, but there is little else that is reasonably priced and inspiring to eat these days. Very little holds any interest, and I don't know if that's just dining out fatigue or what, but it's very much there. So eating at home more (even when that dinner is simple scrambled eggs and toast) has jumped in to save the day. Fortunately, the kitchen at Chez Hunger Over Thirst generally serves up tasty treats!

Dinners.

This past week has been an interesting exercise. I am trying to eat less wheat due to the stomach issues, but we are also trying to clear out our freezer and eat some of the things that have been languishing far too long... like these lovely pierogies!

This was a great dinner! We ate the pierogies (which had a little freezer burn, but were otherwise delightful) after they were cooked with a little onion. We topped them with low-fat sour cream. On the side, we sauteed some really lovely and sweet local carrots and browned some turkey kielbasa. (Note that I am saying "we" but this was all G. I mean, I was in the house and offering moral support, but it was not shake-n-bake and I did not help.) I have become a hughe carrot fan, and these were specatacular. I think G just fried them in a little butter in the pan until they were soft and delicious. Oh yeah!

We also had a lovely dinner of fricadelles, sliced fresh tomatoes, marinated mushrooms, and zuchinni salad! Delightful!

The zuchinni salad is a family recipe of G's. You microwave the zuke until it is soft, and then you dice it up and add salt, vinegar, garlic, and oil, and let the whole thing marinate in the fridge. This zuke was ridiculously sweet. It was really very nice, though. The marinated mushrooms were from Cumbrae's, and really weren't all that great. I wouldn't buy them again (and I wouldn't recommend them.)

And the freezer is getting cleared slowly!