Turkey meatball (with raisins inside!!) and the rest is self explanatory. I've never had meatballs with raisins, but I like the salty-sweet combination. And you cant even feel the raisin texture, which is why I don't really like them very much, so maybe I'll try this sometime.

Melissa is one of my top 5 food pals, and I always eat well when I'm with her (and any other members of the Finkelstein family). Sp I'm happy to say that I got to share her first dinner in her new apartment. Yup, baby chicken flew the coop and is a big chicken now, except that chickens don't fly and I'm not even sure where that phrase comes from or if it's even a fitting way to say "Melissa moved into a new apartment." Unless that saying doesn't actually involve chickens and I just made that part up.

weekend snacks

Yesterday was so beautiful and the farmer's market was exploding with so many good things.  I've been eating the same thing nearly every day for a while, and I think after being around the market, I finally got tired of it. Then I developed this overpowering urge to eat a bunch of snacks and cook things. So I spent most of today window shopping at a bunch of specialty food stores and looking through cookbooks and taking pictures of recipes I like because I'm a cheap jerk and don't wanna pay for the books. Well I will some day, like when I am a fully-fledged adult. Or something like that.

 Country pate from Stinky, on Finnish rye bread and arugula from the market

mini parsley pretzel

 

 Tamale verde from a taco truck in Union Square

peppercorn catfish sandwich from num pang

For a while, all I wanted to eat was the glazed pork belly sandwich from Num Pang. I thought it was heaven in my mouth, but I guess that's the thing with pork belly...you can't really go wrong. I finally decided to try something different there though, and went with the catfish sandwich with "housemade sweet soy sauce." Again, a really good sandwich that you probably shouldn't eat in public or around people you're trying to impress. But I think these sandwiches are really carried by the vegetables and chili mayonnaise, they work in perfect harmony with whatever the meat is, and it was sort of the star of the sandwich for me. Unless the sandwich has pork belly. Yup

Ground chickpea sandwich from 'wichcraft

'Wichcraft has good sandwiches, but it is a bit overpriced. I'm not sure why I went there, maybe because I really wanted the grilled eggplant sandwich. BUT THEY DIDN'T HAVE IT. So I went with this one instead, which was pretty good. The nice surprise were the thin slices of pickled (maybe not??) lemon rinds or something, but the bread was a little floppy.

new lunch obesession

Brown rice with persian cucumbers, tomatoes, feta, kalamata olives, and falafel

I am really obsessed with eating this right now, and it's great, for once, to really be into food that won'l make me feel like I need to lie down for a hundred years and never return to normalcy ever again. I mean, this is healthy, right? Ok, but don't worry, I'm not all about ~healthy~ things, I'm still me, I still don't know that if it hurts, stop eating. I just need to find a way to counteract the pain that I'm inevitably bringing upon myself by always eating things like this burger:

 

 from DuMont

 This explains a lot about why I've been eating that vegetable-brown rice for days. God, after a week of complete cheese-bread-pizza-taco-burger-cheese decadence, I had to go for something healthier. But man, I hate how much better I feel when I don't eat too much cheese and bread. It's just not right. Love hurts

taco weekend

You know you had a great weekend when you have nice friends and tacos two days in a row. And even better, two different kinds of tacos, so it never gets old.

pace food

Everyone is probably so sick and tired of hearing me yak about how much I just really love my job and everybody I work with, but whatever, it's my "blog," and I'm gonna talk about whatever I want. And I really do love it, from the most rock bottom part of my heart, but maybe "rock bottom" sounds a little depressing.  I have nothing in there but endless respect and admiration for everyone at Pace. I only work with the nicest, funniest, most generous people I have ever met. And the best part is that they all enjoy food and eating as much as I do, or at least they humor me. It's a real dream and I always feel supremely lucky.

 

Friday was Ann's last day at Pace, a day I've been dreading foreverrrr, but it finally came and there were tears and hugs and more tears. And I am going to miss Ann way too much, but she's going to do all these great things, so it's a bitter-sweet feeling. But it was a good day, very indulgent and a really great reason to start drinking before noon and go all day. We had mimosas and bagels in the morning...only to be followed by more bread and cheese in the form of celebratory/goodbye pizzas (plus wine and beer, duh).

Poppy seed bagel with scallion cream cheese, tomato, and avocado with some cayenne pepper on top. I meant to only eat this half but somehow ended up eating more than one whole bagel. 

Artichoke pizza from Artichoke
The pizza from Artichoke is really delicious and enormous, and the artichoke one is especially great, but that stuff is really heavy. One bite of it will weigh you down for the rest of the day, and even half a slice was already a little too much for me. It's just all cream sauce and cheese, and it's so rich, I can't imagine a whole pie like that. The first time I found out about this artichoke pizza is when some really drunk guy offered a me a bite because it was too much for him to handle. And if a very drunk dude can't finish this pizza at 3 am, then you know that it's too much.

Margherita

Meatball parm pizza
It tastes exactly like what you would expect it to but in pizza form, which is actually a tricky thing to do well because when it comes to ~crazy~ pizza toppings, like hamburger pizza or taco pizza, you'd expect it to taste exactly like the tasty flat version of that food, but it often comes out all weird and gross. This pizza was really good, but I guess meatball parm lends itself well to pizza anyway.

Strawberry gallette
This was made by Jodi, who is an amazing baker. I am always impressed with bakers because that is something I never do well and just don't understand how it is supposed to work. We had this with ice cream and I think lemon zest on top.

Brussell sprouts, proscuitto and fig jam, brie and cranberries, bleu cheese and honey, and I forget what that other cheese in the top right corner is, but it came with nuts...from The Cellar at Beecher's

Then after work came more wine, more beer, more drinking, and more cheese. Kristin, Ann and I went to dinner at The Cellar, which is the restaurant open for dinner in the basement of Beecher's cheese. It's sort of wacky down there, all dark with cow print chairs, but it's nice and comfortable. The only thing is that the music was a little too bumpin' for my dining preferences, but I guess it was Friday night. The food is also really excellent. We didn't try any of the main dishes because we had already indulged way too hard earlier in the day, but we ordered a 3 cheese platter, some meat and a side and it was perfect to share...and a real lesson in portion control. If I had things my way, there would have been blocks of cheese, but I also would have been dying on the way home. So you win some, you lose some. 

my first seder

April  6, 2012 -- The dream was finally realized, I was at the Finkelstein-Rothbart house for Passover! It was my first real seder. I think I did some serious fishing for that invite from Melissa, but I dealt with some major disappointment over missing Hannukah because I was back in Seattle, and I was not about to miss another holiday. So I had no shame in trying to weasel my way into this family's dinner, and luckily for me, they are all really nice and welcoming and willing to have Melissa's weird food friend over...I'm already counting down the days to the next holiday.

The seder plate: charoset (in the bowl), what I think is lettuce, parsley, egg, maror (horseradish), and zeroa (roasted lamb bone)...you can decide for yourself if I actually knew all of those words or had to read the entire Wikipedia entry on Passover seder to make sure I didn't write any incorrect information. 

First there was wine (take a sip while reclining to the left, yes! I remember this part!), then next comes the hand washing...but I don't think that actually happened, then the parsley dipped in salt water, breaking of the matzah, then a lot of information that I am definitely missing, reading from the Haggadah and a blessing, I think...and then this:

 

charoset and horseradish on matzoh

I was too nervous about the part that I had to read that I didn't read any of what looked like descriptive information in the Haggadah, so my knowledge of what actually happened at dinner is really not so great, which I'm a little bit embarrassed about. And reading the Wikipedia entry didn't help very much either since my post-dinner food coma was so extreme that I have very little memory of anything but shoveling food into my face.

Egg in salt water

Gefilte fish

My experience with gefilte fish was limited to the outtakes from Rush Hour (where Chris Tucker tries to order the kosher meal but can't say gefilte fish) and from the nasty kind that the RISD cafeteria served at Passover. But I really liked this, it was pretty fishy (ha, duh), but not in a canned sort of way. Let me tell you guys, everything they tell you about gefilte fish is a lie. It's actually good.

Matzo ball soup!!!! I want to eat this every day.

My dinner plate...I was bragging about eating this brisket all week before I had even tried it, but my preemptive bragging wasn't for nothing since it was sooo tender and flavorful. I wish I had gotten a picture of the whole plate, it was amazing.

Matzo covered in caramel, chocolate, and walnuts

Chocolate macaroons

Grilled cheese with fig jam from Beecher's (proof that all good things come from the Northwest) and pumpkin corn bisque, which looks pretty questionable, but tastes good. I think I made the wrong decision though, I didn't think the grilled cheese would be quite as sweet as it was, so that plus the soup made for a really sweet lunch. But I think that probably had to do with not evenly distributing the fig jam.

 

Kathy made me this: guacamole, basically, but without onions or tomoates (are those even official guacamole ingredients) and champagne mango slices. God, it was good. Sweet and savory and all tropical-ly