From Friday, January 14, 2011, through Saturday, January 22, 2011, I went to New York for reasons that shall remain undocumented. I visited Di Yin and her parents, staying at their apartment in Forest Hills, Queens.
During the visit, I always ate at their house, eating Di Yin's mom's home cooking, which was definitely good stuff but she always cooked too much. Eating with Di Yin's dad is funny--no matter how long we sit at the table, he often forgets to eat.
Before my flight to New York City, I had time to wander around the part of SFO's Museum in Terminal 3. The main exhibit in this terminal was Second Chances: Folk Art Made from Recycled Remnants. It was neat: wire sculptures, dresses made from Tootsie Roll or Mary Jane candy wrappers, a chair made by weaving together aluminum from cans, and duck decoys made from painted milk cartons and cardboard.
My flight to New York was one of the easiest flights I ever took. I barely felt the landing. I grabbed a taxi to the apartment. The taxi had a GPS in it so I could watch where the driver went and make sure he took a reasonable route. I wonder if these are standard in taxis nowadays. (I generally don't ride taxis.)
Di Yin and I flew home to California in first class, perhaps the second time in my life that I've ever been in first class (and the first time that I paid for it). I was looking forward to the 180-degree recline seats, but the airline swapped the plane out at the last minute and I ended up with normal business class seats: spacious but not much of a recline. Ah, well. :(
At least we got good food. In fact, the airline even gave us a printed menu. My meal included: mixed nuts, shrimp accompanied by soba noodles, a salad (choice of dressing), bread (choice of type of roll), an entree (four choices; I selected the cheese ravioli in tomato cream sauce; the entree turned out to be lighter than I expected), and an ice cream sunday (choice of topping). The last was enormous and too much to finish.
New York City: January 2011
New York City Visits
From Tarrytown, I'd periodically travel to New York City. Manhattan hasn't changed since my previous trips. Both day and night, I like it and how it looks. The only thing that surprised me: I forgot how many street carts there are. Practically every corner in busy parts of the city has one.
This post describes some of these excursions to the city.
SuperFreakonomics
On Wednesday, October 22, 2009, I went to the city for a book talk by the authors of SuperFreakonomics (the sequel to Freakonomics). The discussion was okay. Watching the authors interact was revealing. It's neat to see and hear stories about how their relationship evolved from their initial dislike (Levitt to Dubner) and hands-off / object of study (Dubner to Levitt) to their current level of comfort. Sadly, the questions in the Q&A were remarkably poor in quality and as a whole I felt as if I might as well have skipped the show.
Before the book talk, I grabbed an unusual slice of pizza from Cafe Viva in the upper west side. It had sliced shiitake mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, caramelized onions, roasted cloves of garlic, crumbled tofu (supposedly green tea and miso flavored), and pesto sauce on a spelt crust. The crust held up impressively against the weight of the toppings--no bending--, yet it was easy to chew. The slice was definitely good for that brief period when all the ingredients were hot.
My Lawyer Friend
On Friday, October 30, 2009, I attempted and failed and then attempted again and succeeded at meeting a lawyer friend and ex-roommate of mine, D. First, I tried meeting him at his office a bit north of Grand Central for lunch, but he got pulled into a last minute meeting and had to cancel. My journey there, however, was not entirely worthless: I passed an RV dedicated to doing mitzvahs. It was labeled a "mitzvah tank" and the people within asked everyone on the streets, myself included, "are you jewish?" I think central Manhattan, certainly including Midtown East, is probably a good place for this. I imagine they're likely to find a good number of lapsed or non-practicing jews.
In the evening, I met up with D at Astor Place in the East Village. The East Village is cool. D shares my love of unusual food, and he led us to Otafuku for take-out Japanese street food. We got Otafuku's specialties: okonomiyaki (a type of flat Japanese pancake) and takoyaki (octopus-filled pancake balls). We walked to his apartment at Stuyvesant Town (also in the East Village) to eat them. They were good. As for his apartment, it was exactly what I expected my former roommate to have (though with the shocking addition of suits). It's nice to feel like I still understand him.
Halloween
On Halloween (Saturday, October 31, 2009), Di Yin and I returned to the city to meet up with my friends B and C. Di Yin took pictures on this outing. The link goes to the first picture she took this day. When you see a picture of her and Anwar (picture 94), you're done with the set of Halloween pictures.
We arrived in the city a couple hours before we were to meet them. Soon after leaving the train station we discovered a street fair on Madison Avenue. It was big: it started at 42nd Street and, when we turned around at 49th, looked like it continued for another couple of blocks.
The stands sold the usual street fair stuff. (I won't bother listing them here.) Regarding food, we saw lots of gyros (I guess this is New York's equivalent to the omnipresent meat-on-a-stick one sees at street fairs in California) and roasted corn on the cob, plus some more unusual items. Yona's Gourmet Delights sold borekas (a savory dish of phyllo dough filled with stuff, common in the eastern Mediterranean) and mini quiches. There were more vegetarian stands and smoothie stands than I'm used to seeing at street fairs. Also of note: the stand serving the usual street fair staple of kettle corn had a dozen flavors and offered free samples.
On our walk south from the festival, we saw one of the best Halloween costumes we'd saw see the whole day: four men dressed like ghost busters striding into the central New York Public Library. It looked exactly like the final scene in the movie Ghost Busters when the ghost busters enter the museum for the final showdown. Awesome! (Did the movie actually film the scene at the NYPL?) We followed them into the library so we could look at them more. Later, we got distracted and wandered through the library and looked at a few of its hallway exhibits.
As it got later and we walked to Chelsea, we saw lots of costumed trick-or-treaters, some going from shop to shop. It's good that even in Manhattan kids can go out trick-or-treating. It's also cool that some nice shops participated and gave out candy (though it was a little sad that many mis-planned and had to put up signs saying that they ran out of treats). Highlights included a girl dressed as a slice of watermelon and a whole family dressed as the flintstones.
Lucky for the trick-or-treaters, it only rained later in the evening after they'd all gone home.
Finally, Di Yin and I arrived at the Chelsea Market to meet B and C and explore it with them. The Chelsea Market is a former factory that's now been converted into an indoor shopping street for groceries and other foodstuffs. It's a fun place to wander and sample, with many interesting stores. Of note:
- the dairy, Ronnymilk, that is in effect a "milk bar" and ice cream parlor, with a decor to match.
- the bakery Amy's Breads with attractive breads.
- a cupcake store that has cupcakes with artistic frosting, each cupcake unique. I, however, wouldn't eat any. (They didn't look like they tasted good.)
- an amazingly huge fishmonger, misnamed The Lobster Place that, besides having a large selection of fish, has recipe tips for every fish. In addition, it also has an astonishing selection of smoked fish.
- a large Italian market (perhaps Buon Italia) with its olives, oils, antipastos, and cheeses galore, and more.
- another gourmet market that has James White drinks, which Di Yin and I had in London.
It was an awkward evening (I'm not sure why), though I appreciated seeing my friends before heading to China.
Other Tales
Other times I'd occasionally have dinner in the city after work. One day we met a friend of Di Yin's in Flushing, Queens, for Korean food. We had a dumpling soup (the dumplings were good; the rest of the soup was not) and bulgogi (good) and some generally poor panchan / kimchi. Another day we met a friend of mine, B, for, oddly enough, Korean again, this time at Gahm Mi Oak in Manhattan's Koreatown. From its atypical menu, we ordered a meat soup (sul lang tang, which was remarkably boring), a ssam (a platter of ingredients to use to make pork-filled cabbage rolls), and Korean-style pancakes (good with the seafood sauce dip).
On Friday, October 24, 2009, I again ate in the city. I selected Cafe Asean because it has an intriging menu with many dishes similar to or clearly inspired by Singaporean hawker fare. It's a cute, lively place. My good duck roll was Chinese-style bbq duck wrapped (with other stuff) in rice paper to resemble a Vietnamese spring roll. The steamed mushroom dumplings, in contrast, were meh: the mushroom flavor was too assertive.
I took only three pictures over the course of my visits to New York. Only one bears a connection to any of the above stories.
Drive North (New York to Maine)
We drove north from Tarrytown, NY through New Haven, CT to Kittery, ME on October 24, 2009. Gosh, the drive was pretty -- I can see why all the leaf-peepers emerge in late October to view the trees changing color. Sorry, I didn't manage to take any pictures from the road.
Here are notes on the meals we ate this day.
Tarrytown
I lived with Di Yin in Tarrytown, NY, in October 2009. Tarrytown is in Westchester County, the county just north of New York City. The area is commonly considered part of the Lower Hudson River valley.
I took some pictures of town that attempt to capture what life here was like. It's also described in more detail in the text below.
Di Yin, incidentally, also took pictures in Tarrytown. The link goes to the first in the album; when you see pictures of friends and I hiking (picture 21), you're done with the Tarrytown pictures. I'll link to the hiking pictures at an appropriate point later in this post.
Our Apartment
Our Tarrytown apartment, a walk up a serious hill from the train station, was one corner of an old Victorian mansion. It was a spacious one-bedroom with many windows opening into trees. The kitchen alone was probably 10' x 10'; the other rooms were larger. Besides the usual suspects (stove, oven, dishwasher), the kitchen had a crock pot and a top-notch toaster. The living room had a corner desk facing two windows, a large dining table, and a "day bed" (look up pictures on Google if you're confused). There were hardwood floors throughout. It was a nice place.
The apartment had numerous quirky decorations ranging from an attractive stick hanging suspended in mid-air above the desk, to models of industrial factories placed atop the kitchen cabinets. There were also more mundane yet nonetheless unusual items such as cactuses in the living room and kitchen, a large painting of a tree (on something like butcher paper!) taped to the wall above the bed, and funky lamps throughout. In further support of our subleaser's extensive interests, the contents of his bookcases were intellectual, sophisticated, and wide-ranging.
Tarrytown is located in the picturesque Lower Hudson River Valley. In fact, the street in front of our apartment has a good view of the Hudson (about half a mile distant). Perhaps this isn't as remarkable as it sounds -- Tarrytown is built on a hill rising up from the Hudson River, and most of downtown has pretty wide views of the river, which glows nicely near sunset. The street in front of our apartment is steep enough that on some mornings as I walked down it, I felt as if I could fall into the Hudson.
Incidentally, during the month I was there, the weather varied. Occasionally, days were cold and wet, with highs in the low 40s. A good number of days were warm and at least partially clear, with highs in the upper 60s, sometimes into the 70s.
Downtown
Tarrytown has a cute, small downtown. Here are some examples of shops worth mentioning:
- a local ice cream parlor, Main Street Sweets, that makes it own ice cream (many varieties), and has murals and fun signs on the walls (e.g., "$5 fine for whining"). This place has personality.
- an intriguing, tiny, hole-in-the-wall, lunch-only shop, also with personality, called Lubins-n-Links that specializes in beef on buns (either slow-cooked brisket or hot dogs). They make lots of homemade toppings; these are supposedly the stars of the meal.
- a gourmet food shop, Mint Premium Foods, that also has personality. It's an eclectic joint packed full of boxes and crates filled with high-end imported ingredients (cheeses, olive oils, vinegars, olives, chocolates, beers, and much, much more) piled high on top of each other. It's busy in the style of a knick-knack store, but not in a cluttered, disorganized way. Has a deli.
- a large, quality wine shop, Grape Expectations, with an impressive selection and good descriptions of nearly every wine they carry.
On my first walk around town, I was amused to find two churches facing each other and, half a dozen blocks farther down, two funeral parlors facing each other. Incidentally, I was happy to find two supermarkets (though these were not facing each other) that, although not downtown proper, were nevertheless easily reached on foot.
I expected Tarrytown to be dead at night. I was very wrong: not only are there people on the streets, but it's lively. The music hall has shows most nights of the week.
Residential
Tarrytown's certainly suburban; it's mostly large, single-family houses. Some houses are so large, they're more properly called estates. We saw one with its own playground. A couple are old mansions, complete with grounds, and hence are even larger. (Tarrytown was a popular retreat for the super-rich a century ago, most notably Rockefeller.) Most of these are now used for receptions and conferences and are open to the public for a hefty fee. I didn't visit any.
Tarrytown is commuter town (evidenced by the perpetual traffic on the two-lane highway that runs through town), inhabited mainly by people who work elsewhere (i.e., New York City) but want to live in and raise their family in a suburban environment. Also, judging by the amount of scarecrows, pumpkins, and other halloween decorations, many houses have kids. (I later confirmed this hypothesis with census data, geek that I am.)
Later, in mid-October, even more scarecrows popped up! Every third street-lamp or parking meter had a scarecrow. Most had nametags. The fence--a type of old-fashioned split rail fence--in front of the library had one on each post. I imagine there must've been one scarecrow in town for each person in town. This town really knows how to go all out for holidays.
On warmer afternoons, I jogged through residential parts of town. On the bigger residential streets, there are no sidewalks. (Happily, cars are rare.) Also impeding running, as I said before, Tarrytown is hilly. At least once I had planned a route on Google Maps, started running, and approached a road and said, "There's no way I'm jogging up that." But yet again on the plus side for running, the town's reservoir has a trail (Old Saw Mill River Road) running along its side. The trail is a pretty tunnel of trees adjacent to a placid lake overlooked by colorful trees. At one point, the trail threads between the reservoir and a pond. I can see why many people choose to walk there just prior to sunset. Indeed, one day as I jogged past two women walking, one looked down the trail and said, "that would make a good picture."
I also found the nearby high school has large, forested grounds and a few cross-country trails, but I stopped running there after I got lost in the forest for over half an hour near sunset.
Commuting
The commute to my company's offices in Manhattan took an hour and a half (assuming I caught the express train) because after I arrived in Manhattan I still had to take two subways. To avoid the lengthy journey, I often worked from home (three or four days a week).
Even though I tried not to need to take the train to New York City, I should mention the trip is pleasant. The train runs along the Hudson River for much of its length, then jogs along the Harlem River before diving underground into Manhattan. During the middle of the trip, the opposite side of the Hudson has cliffs that rise several hundred feet above the river. Colorful trees cover the bottom half of the cliffs and also serve as a multihued cap on top.
Farmers Markets
Early on during my stay in Tarrytown, I walked to the local Saturday morning Tarrytown Farmers Market. It's cute and small, with about a dozen booths including three bakeries and a cheese shop (which oddly appeared only once). This looks like the place to get good bread (muffins, sweet loafs, croissants, etc.). (There's no bakery in town.) One stand specializes in donuts! I ended up eating a variety of muffins and croissants from these stands over the course of the month. I think I tried a zucchini bread on this first visit.
One day I took the train to the Croton-on-Hudson Farmers Market. It was roughly the same size as Tarrytown's market and included many of the same vendors. I was only there for bread (got a baguette and some rolls), but got distracted and found a few other things to bring home. Most interestingly, I found a specialist pickle vendor, complete with barrels of different pickles and other pickled vegetables. I sampled his pickles and brought a container of half-sours home, with two three-quarters sours thrown in so Di Yin could get to try two varieties. (Interestingly, these pickles were kirby cucumbers, not the typical gherkins.) I also left the market with a loaf of sun-dried tomato, garlic, and basil sandwich bread (for lunches) (from a different bakery than the baguette), a pumpkin muffin (for breakfast) (from yet another bakery), and two different types of apples from a farmer who lives a mere 40 miles away.
Another weekend I returned to the Tarrytown market, this time with Di Yin. I might've gone a little overboard. From the booth with a dozen types of apples, I selected two. I also grabbed from them a container of apple cider donuts because they sounded intriguing. Elsewhere, I bought a cinnamon swirl from one of the bakeries. It was good and definitely better than I expected, and now I might be willing to try their croissants. (Cinnamon swirls are often made with the same dough.) At a different bakery, I picked up two muffins (blueberry, carrot) for later breakfasts. Finally, I bought an eggplant and a tomato (different stores once again--only one of the vendors who sold tomatoes had ones that smelled fresh/ripe). Incidentally, Di Yin also bought some items for our dinners and her lunches.
On my third weekend in Tarrytown, though we were to leave town at noon to start a road trip, I managed to sneak in another visit to the farmers market. Following my promising cinnamon swirl from the previous week, I bought a pain au chocolat from the same vendor.
Outing: Bear Mountain
One day, Di Yin and I met up with my friends B and C to go hiking in Bear Mountain State Park. It was beautiful, with stunning panoramic vistas about three-quarters of the way up. Leaves had just begun to change; I'm sure the views would really look amazing in a few days. We stopped to snack at a good viewpoint; Di Yin had brought fruit and B and C had brought neat baked goods from a Mexican market. From the top of the mountain, we took a different route down, a path that's actually part of the Appalachian Trail.
Di Yin took a good number of pictures on this outing; I took only three. The link to Di Yin's pictures goes to the first she took on Bear Mountain; when you see a picture of a street festival in New York City (picture 47), you're done. Stop. (I'll link to her New York City pictures in another post.)
After our hike, we wandered through a large festival (beer festival?) at the base of the mountain, then the four of us returned to home to Tarrytown where Di Yin cooked us all dinner.
Food
Di Yin and I ate a few meals in town together. I also ate some alone. I won't bother describing any of these here. I do want to describe, however, some get togethers I had in town with friends and family.
One day, Di Yin's parents came up to Tarrytown for lunch. With a lobster. They cooked the lobster Chinese-style and served it with vegetables and a number of other (store bought) dishes they brought. Di Yin's parents are talkative, fun, and interesting, and we had a good time, topped by a walk along the Tarrytown reservoir.
The next day, my aunt and uncle came to visit. We went to Chiboust, a bistro with an eclectic menu. My quiche and salad were good, and my uncle was happy with his eggplant-compote pizza, but my aunt's scrambled eggs looked small and sad. The restaurant's bakery items looked cute! My uncle used to work in this area, so after lunch he took me on a nice tour of the vicinity, pointing out places he used to work, diners he used to frequent, and roads he used to travel. The only disappointment of this visit was the incessant rain, meaning I didn't get to walk along the reservoir with them as I did with Di Yin's parents the previous day.
Misc
During our last day in Tarrytown, Di Yin wanted to take a walk to photograph some sights. Along the way, we found an open house: a three bedroom house with a picture window of the Hudson running the width of the living room, and with an attached sunroom (enclosed patio) with similarly expansive views.
Pre-Tarrytown
I spent most of October 2009 living in Tarrytown, New York. I detoured a bit before arriving in Tarrytown. This post describes the places I visited before settling into Tarrytown.
I flew into Boston on Friday, October 2, 2009, and got picked up by my parents and Di Yin, and we proceeded back to my parent's home in Maine. (Yes, oddly, Di Yin went up to visit my parents before I arrived.) Slightly hungry, and having not yet eaten dinner, my mom and I pulled together a dinner for me of a tuna sandwich (tuna+celery+mayo+tomato), pretzels, and tomatoes.
On a rainy Saturday, we emerged for lunch at Flatbread Pizza, a fun, quirky pizza joint in nearby Portsmouth, NH. I'd been there before and liked it. This time we had the "coevolution" (olives, rosemary, red onions, roasted peppers, goat cheese, mozzarella, garlic) with added (nitrate-free, my parents emphasize) pepperoni, the "carne special" (peppers, onions, sausage, and more), and the simple "jay's heart" (tomato sauce, mozzarella, and grana padano (a cheese like parmesan)). I enjoyed the simple pizza the most. Di Yin liked the pepperoni pizza, not for the pepperonis but for its rosemary and olives. My dad also liked that pizza quite a bit. Incidentally, as before, the pepperonis tasted more like sausage than most pepperonis do.
The afternoon was many intense hours of shopping for pants.
My mom's evening meal was pork ribs, pan-fried/sauteed potatoes, broiled asparagus, and brownies and ice cream. We had two decent drinks: a zinfandel and a beer (the latter being Fisherman's Brew by Cape Ann Brewing Company, I think).
On Sunday, Di Yin and I drove through early autumn foliage to Tarrytown, dropped off some stuff, and proceeded to Queens to meet her parents. They took us out to a tasty Chinese restaurant for a traditional peking duck feast. We had Shanghai-style smoked fish (which tasted much like sweetened spongy tofu one can find at many Chinese joints), jellyfish slivers (eh), a tasty fried lobster (whose meat was surprisingly easy to extract), peking duck wraps (which we assembled ourselves from the spread: wraps, sprouts, Chinese celery, hoisin sauce, duck meat, and duck skin), sauteed pea sprouts (good), sauteed bean sprouts with duck (okay), duck soup (good), plus a sweet sticky rice dessert (ba bao fan = eight treasures rice) with strange fillings (ginko nuts, unusual berries, etc.).
On Monday morning, I proceeded to work, found a seat on the tenth floor with pretty amazing views of Manhattan and the Hudson, and got some stuff done. Yay! Then I headed to my new home in Tarrytown, a trip made more appropriate by a detour to a grocery store on the way.
New York City: March 2009
I visited New York City on a less-than-48-hour trip that began Monday, March 25, 2009. I was there to see Di Yin and her parents before flying to Chicago with her. I don't really have much to say about this trip. I didn't do any tourist things; in fact, I remained entirely within Queens. I did have three good meals.
Tuesday
Tuesday began with an early lunch at Nan Shiang Dumpling House in Flushing. Di Yin's mom chose a particular time for our lunch because she knew one street was scheduled for street cleaning, meaning if we arrived near the end of that time, we'd be able to find parking. I thought this was ingenious. It worked. Apparently she wasn't the only one with this idea: check out this picture of a bunch of other people parked on the same street waiting by their cars for the street cleaning time to be over and, no longer at risk for ticketing, they could walk away and go about their business. (Note: that link leads to the three pictures I took on this trip, the other two being pictures of the Nan Shiang's menu.)
Nan Shiang is a Shanghainese dumpling restaurant that was on my destination list from my last visit to Flushing. In fact, I remembered looking in and noticing that every table was occupied. It was similarly packed this visit. For the first half of the meal, I thought the restaurant was sizable--until I realized the existence of a mirror running the length of one wall made me think it was twice the size it actually is.
We had a traditional brunch, a good meal consisting of:
- a Chinese donut, not as oily as most. For some reason, we found soy sauce made it better. Who would've guessed?
- soy milk.
- red bean puffs.
- xiao long bao (soup-and-meat-filled dumplings) (of course). These were the soupiest XLB I've ever had. Given the clientele, I think these will be my mental model of what authentic XLB should be. Incidentally, they worked best when one bit the top off, letting out some steam, and poured a few drops of vinegar onto the pork inside.
Tuesday evening, Di Yin's family, I, and her aunt and uncle ventured to the East Restaurant output in Elmhurst (Queens) for an insane buffet. When I say insane, I mean it: the offerings included hot pot, sushi, tons of Chinese stir-fry dishes, soups, peking duck, a robata grill, Korean stuff, American stuff (mostly salads and desserts), jello, and more. I borrowed Di Yin's camera and took pictures of about half the selections before someone asked me to stop. I ate a ton. Her family did as well. It's nice to fit in.
Here are the pictures from Di Yin's camera from dinner, taken by both of us. They continue until you see a caption that mentions Chicago. (Don't peek at the Chicago entries; I'll post about them soon enough.)
Wednesday
Wednesday's main event was Di Yin's mom fulfilling a promise she made to me through Di Yin: she taught me how to make a particular cabbage, mushroom, pork, and mochi stir-fry dish. I'd previously eaten this dish when Di Yin brought a container across the country with her on one trip. The dish feels homey. Supposedly a standard household Shanghainese dish, it conveys to me the same comforting emotional experience as mac-n-cheese. I wanted to learn how to make it, couldn't find a good recipe online, and Di Yin's mom said she'd teach me.
Well, she did, and it came out well. We had it for lunch along with sweetened steamed sweet potatoes and won tons. We also packaged some leftovers to bring with us to Chicago. :) The recipe seems simple enough. I'd never attempted this dish before, though I had tried cooking with mochi (glutinous rice flour cakes) in the past to poor results. I now believe the problems came from using poor-quality mochi, not in how I treated it.
Soon after lunch on Wednesday, we left for the airport, where it turned out we had tons of time before our plane departed.
New York City: Dec 5: Many Errands Before Returning To Boston
This day, my final one in the New York area, began with a leisurely breakfast with B at a Portuguese bakery, Riviera, in Newark.
Then came my crazily busy day of errands. There were a number of places I wanted to eat, and some that I wanted to buy food to bring to friends and family. Though I didn't manage to make it everywhere I wanted, I made it to many places.
First I went to Queens to pick up dumplings (sheng jian bao). Di Yin often brings me these dumplings when she travels to New York. I like them a lot. This day, I got to see where they are made and pick up some for myself. I also bought a little snack for lunch.
Then I went to the upper-west side of Manhattan for Magnolia Bakery, which received a ton of buzz a few years ago for its delectable cupcakes, to pick up a cupcake to try later. I was surprised the taste (when I tried it later) lived up to my high expectations. Magnolia, by the way, has more than just cupcakes; for instance, they have lots of mini cheesecakes.
Then, after a slight detour to Penn Station to pick up (what turned out to be way too many) rugelach for my parents, I made it to my (pre-booked) return bus on time.
More details about the day's adventures can be found in the this smattering of pictures.
New York City: Dec 4: Flushing and the Morgan Library
When I lived in New York and on past trips to the city, I never really left Manhattan. One of the goals for the day was to remedy that by eating my way through Flushing, a Chinese neighborhood in Queens. The other goal for the day was to visit the Morgan Library & Museum. Though in Manhattan, it'd been under renovation for something like the last six years. Supposedly one of the top museums in the city, it's perpetually been on my list of places to visit.
I took many pictures as I worked toward these goals.
After taking New Jersey rail once again to the city, the Long Island railroad brought me directly to Flushing. From the train, I spotted many satellite dishes. I imagine people want to receive channels from their homeland not offered by cable companies.
My main goal in the Flushing was to eat. With that in mind, I generally followed the guidance of a New York Times's article (Let the Meals Begin: Finding Beijing in Flushing) about casual, usually not-sit-down eateries in Flushing. I figured if I tried to see all the joints the article highlights, eating at a couple of them, then I'd end up exploring most of the major parts of Flushing. The article made this plan easy because it provides an interactive map of Flushing, as well as a corresponding printable version. Finally, the best feature of the article: the quality of the reporting. I did countless hours of research on chowhound about Flushing. Virtually all of the recommendations I read were mentioned in the article or the accompanying map. From my research, I added only a small number of places to my good-restaurants-in-Flushing list. (Many of the additions were fancier, sit-down, banquet-type affairs, outside the scope of the article. For the few within the scope of the article, all but one or two opened after the article was written.) In short, the article is a great summary of inexpensive eateries in Flushing that reflects the opinions of a group I trust.
Though I managed through the serendipitous spotting of a sign showing walking tours to see all of Flushing's historic buildings and to see many restaurants and supermarkets, there are many Flushing shops I didn't have time to see. (For details on what I saw and ate, refer to the pictures.) I did see most of the joints mentioned in the Times's article, except for a few in a tiny mall I couldn't find! (I later learned the tiny mall had closed and that I had looked at the correct entrance but there was no longer any sign that a mall had been there.) The fact that I found most of the places I planned to visit is no small feat: while many booths had menus with English translations and sometimes even pictures of the dishes, few booths had English names or even names transliterated into English. Thus, it was difficult to determine if one was in the right place and which booth was which. (This was harder than in India or Singapore.) I can imagine it would frustrate many visitors to Flushing.
The main feeling I got from this exploration of the Flushing food scene is a bit of jealousy that Flushing has incredible numbers of interesting regional food shops, especially from China, that are difficult or well nigh impossible to find elsewhere in the country.
After Flushing, I returned to Manhattan to visit the Morgan Library & Museum. More library than museum, most exhibits focused on books. Soon after entering, I watched the video introduction to the museum. It was bad: a history of the founder Morgan, with little on the museum's highlights.
I enjoyed the building's architecture. Morgan appears to be a true bibliophile. There are multiple rooms of libraries with wall-to-wall bookshelves in multiple levels (and corresponding narrow balconies tracing the bookshelves in the upper levels). The bookshelves, elegantly done in hard wood, house old hardcovers, one, two, or even five centuries old. There's also an ornate, formal study. Connecting these rooms is a rotunda that made me gasp when I entered. It has such vibrant colors and gilding in its ceiling that it looks like new.
As for the exhibits, there was one showing the (only surviving) first edition of Milton's Paradise Lost. I didn't expect to like the exhibit, but there was enough information about the history of the printing and of the book to make it interesting to me.
Another exhibit showed a first edition Gutenberg bible.
Also worth noting was the exhibit on Babar. It was fun to read some of the stories, and cute to see the father's and son's drawings together. (The son continued the series after the father died.) I like the colors in the son's later books. For me the highlight of the exhibit was not anything on the walls but rather a great, entertaining, lovely Babar rug!
I returned to Newark to meet B. When C returned to Newark, we headed to the Ironbound, Newark's Portuguese neighborhood, a short walk from their apartment, for dinner. We ended up at a seafood restaurant which turned out to be decent though unremarkable. Good enough, so to speak.
New York City: Dec 3: The New York Times Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Selected Shorts
The day's main goals were to see an exhibit at the New York Times building (which wasn't yet installed when I lived in the city), walk across the Brooklyn Bridge (which I never managed to do previously), and watch a staged reading of short stories by Selected Shorts (which rarely tours in California). These pictures document the day's adventures.
First, I took a slightly delayed train from Newark's Penn Station into Manhattan's Penn Station. (B and C say the rush hour trains run on time and the off-peak ones get less attention.) After grabbing breakfast at a mini-chain bakery in New York City, Hot & Crusty, I walked uptown to the New York Times building.
I went to the Moveable Type exhibit in lobby of New New York Times building. I heard about the exhibit in a radio segment (WNYC's On The Media via NPR). The lobby is filled with many dot-matrix/teletype-like screens that light up in a variety of ways. The exhibit was less cool in person than I imagined it would be--too many of the things the screens display were non-sequitur (e.g., noun phrases that lacked context). I started to like the exhibit more the longer I stood there, which I guess is because I got to see more patterns I liked displayed by the screens. For instance, I liked seeing the crossword puzzles filled in, reading interesting place names, learning about people's lives (as seen in obituaries), and seeing phrases with numbers in them (which usually conveyed a neat fact, or made one wonder why the New York Times printed that number).
After grabbing a train to south-east Manhattan, I ate lunch at Nyonya, a Singaporean/Malaysian restaurant of a type I ate at in Singapore. Indeed, it was recommended by a friend of mine (Mr. Lau) who lives in Singapore. The menu was full of familiar choices: all the standards from Singapore. I even saw them making Hainanese chicken the traditional way. I wish this place was near my apartment.
I walked by the edge of Chinatown, then spent a while hunting for the pedestrian entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a good day to walk across the bridge. Although cool, the sky was clear, yielding high visibility. Incidentally, the bridge has some bas relief panoramas (of the same view that the person standing in front of them sees) with notable buildings labeled: a nice way to inform the viewer what's what.
A short subway ride later, I made it to Pommes Frites, a Belgian fries shop in the East Village (a recommendation of another friend). My fries we made fresh when I ordered them: thrown into their own vat of hot oil, removed, salted, and tossed. Good quality.
With time to kill, after wandering a little, I ended up at the New York Public Library. I looked through the exhibits. I was struck again how fancy and lavish it is--everything is simply bigger and grander than, say, Boston's flagship public library (which I previously visited).
Given my large mid-afternoon snack, I wanted a light dinner. I headed to the upper-east side to try Papaya King, an acclaimed hot dog vendor. Though it has a few locations now, this is the original. I didn't think this hot-dog-and-papaya stand was significantly different than others I've tried in the city.
After a slow cross-town bus, I arrived at the theater to meet C and see Selected Shorts on stage. This was one of the reasons I made this trip to New York. Selected Short is a radio program where talented actors and actresses read literary short stories. I've listened to this show for years and wanted to attend a reading in person. The stories are often hit or miss for me, with the majority actually a miss, being too literary for my tastes. Nevertheless, I enjoy listening, and even the ones I don't like make me feel more sophisticated for having heard them.
The show is usually recorded in New York City, though sometimes they go on tour and record in other New England destinations and, occasionally, in Los Angeles. At one point, I almost planned a trip to Los Angeles simply to attend the performance. Well, given that I was in Boston, New York wasn't that far away, and I had other reasons to visit the city, I figured now was my chance to attend a reading in person.
I attended the performance Neil LaBute Presents The Grand Illusion: Tales of American Couples. The first two stories were too morbid for me. Intermission had a fun sing-and-answer game (which I never heard on the radio!), though some songs were too old for me to recognize. As for the final story, Neil LaBute's A Second of Pleasure, I really liked it. An amazing story composed entirely of (natural) dialog, further improved by great acting by the readers. C and I left in the middle of the worthless Q&A that followed the final reading.
New York City: Dec 2: Traveling
I rode the BoltBus from Boston to New York City. It was a cheap (< $20!), comfortable, and pleasant trip. The bus had fairly dependable internet access which made the time pass quickly.
Upon arrival, I met up with B and C. It was good to see them after so long. We went to dinner at Ali Baba, a Turkish restaurant I liked when I lived here, and had a good meal. Although I didn't take pictures of the food, being too busy catching up and not yet ready to do the embarrassing tourist stuff, you can read about what we ate.
After dinner, we went to their place in Newark, where I was introduced to San Juan, a nice card-based development game in a similar style as Settlers of Catan. I liked it so much that I plan to buy it to play with friends in California.
New York City and Newark Overview
I was in Cambridge/Boston at the beginning of December with relatively little to do. Then I (i) realized that New York City and Newark and my friends therein were a short and cheap bus ride away, (ii) discovered that a radio program in NYC that I'm a fan of was recording another episode on stage that week, (iii) recalled that Di Yin is busy during the week, and (iv) felt a bit antsy from hanging around in Boston doing nothing the previous few days. Consequently, I booked a bus ticket to New York City and ended up spending Tuesday, December 2nd, through Friday, December 5th, 2009, there. My friends B and C generously let me stay at their place in Newark, a short walk plus train ride from Manhattan.
Because I've written many previous posts about my times in New York City, I'm not going to rehash my impressions here. I will, however, mention new observations and features that, even if I noticed them before, suddenly struck me.
Riding the bus into the city reminded me that New York City is a real city. Everything is large in scale. Skyscrapers are too numerous to count. It's definitely a step up in scale from Boston and Barcelona.
While spending these days in the city, I noticed one contrast with Barcelona: in New York City, while one can walk in it as easily as in Barcelona, the existence of cars everywhere, densely packed on every street, makes it simply not as pleasant as Barcelona to walk around in. Nevertheless, NYC's an extraordinary city.
On my first full day in the city, I got asked for directions, and I knew the answer! Incidentally, I also got asked a few times in Barcelona. I guess I must often look comfortable in my surroundings.
I liked the fact that many bakeries sell hamantashen. I don't generally see them anywhere else. (It's not that I have an exceptional fondness for them; I guess I just like what having them for sale indicates.)
New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 8 (or, cards and home)
Bryson and I spent the morning chilling while waiting for Donald to come up from Philadelphia. Yes, I'm that cool that I can get a techie friend that somehow ended up in law school that I hadn't seen in a year to cross state lines to catch up ( ;> ) and share why and how this transition to law student is going.
Catherine returned home shortly before Donald was due to arrive, so the three of us picked up Donald from the train station and promptly went for lunch, on the way having intermittent awkward conversation because it was late and we were too hungry to think enough to be good conversationalists. It was good seeing Donald again and how he's changed: for instance, law school has made him dress more like a professional. (Not that he didn't dress fine before; it's just a change.) Lunch was a cute deli / market / cheese shop called Marianna, a short walk into downtown Metuchen. (It also has a restaurant / tapas bar / wine bar attached, but we didn't go there.) I had a amazingly large sub called "The Gallina," consisting of a pretty decent and substantial breaded chicken cutlet, the largest and more tasteless slice of mozzarella I've ever had (almost the size of a pounded chicken breast; I removed it after two bites), and some roasted red peppers that added some nice sweetness to the sandwich.
With happy stomachs, conversation came easier. As we talked, we headed back to the apartment and continued talking while playing Crates. Crates is a crazy-eights-like card game on steroids that I played in high school, briefly played with these friends in college, and hadn't played since. It was fun to play it again, and to try out the new deck of cards I specially designed and printed to make playing Crates easier. This served as a good play-test to help me revise the deck. (The end goal is to make the game easier for people to learn so I can convert more people to players.)
Anyway, after a too short time of talking and games, I had to leave to catch my flight and Donald had to leave to head back to catch the train for his evening events. My flight home was uneventful. Like my flight out, the plane was packed and I had a middle seat. Like the flight out, I ended up being perfectly comfortable -- this time seats A and C were taken by a parent and child (a well behaved one at that) that wanted to sit next to each other. So I got promoted to the window seat. :)
I should take vacations more often. And spend more time with friends, regardless of the physical distance separating us. What a great way to spend a week! :)
New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 7 (or, the Brooklyn Museum, Sri Lankan, and a gas leak)
These pictures document my adventures for the day, especially the Brooklyn Museum.
Having stayed up late on Thursday night, I slept in on Friday and got up around 10:30am. Since I'd hoped to meet Bryson and Catherine in the evening, I spent an hour thinking about places to eat and things to do and generally brainstorming and gave them some choices. Once that was out of the way, I headed out for breakfast/lunch and, after a brief internal debate, then was off to the Brooklyn Museum. (My internal debate was because I was somewhat tempted to see Flushing (in Queens) and because I was encouraged the previous night to look around some neighborhoods in Astoria (also in Queens). But the grandeur and size of the Brooklyn Museum -from what I remember from seeing the outside of it when I lived in New York- won out.)
But lunch was a first priority. Since I had known I was meeting Seth on Thursday and Seth was watching his weight, I had previously compiled a list of healthy and vegetarian restaurants in Manhattan that had good reviews. So for lunch I chose a nearby place from the list and went to Rainbow Falafel. Rainbow Falafel took a lot of hunting -- it's literally a hole in the wall. Literally. It's a market that serves food items and is well under a hundred square feet. My falafel was decent but nothing special (and quite messy, making it hard to eat and walk).
While eating, I hiked a bit to grab pictures of Veselka and The Turkish Kitchen, places I'd eaten yesterday but had thought I'd forgotten to photograph. (Apparently I did take a shaky dark picture of Veselka the previous night. If I'd remembered, I might've skipped this extra walking and instead went to the museum earlier.)
Then I went subway hunting, trying to remember where a subway stop was. Eventually I found one, but the fact that I had to wander a bit definitely embarrassed me.
And then I was further embarrassed when I got off the subway at the wrong station. I had remembered the Brooklyn Museum was right at the Prospect Park stop in Brooklyn. Indeed it was, but at a different Prospect Park stop on a different subway line. Rather than take the subway back (infrequent, given how few subways run through these stations) and transfer, I hiked the twenty-five minutes through a shoddy neighborhoods and alongside a sketchy side of the park and found my way to the museum. En route I passed the Brooklyn Public Library, which came in handy later.
Yup, that's a lot of walking today and yesterday. Remind me to wear more comfortable pants next time.
The Brooklyn Museum was definitely a cool way to spend an afternoon. It's an impressive five-story building (see the pictures). I was initially also impressed as I wandered through the first exhibit, Arts of the Americas, and noticed most plaques and signs had been translated into spanish. However, I soon found this property was limited to this exhibit. (I wonder now why they didn't translate other exhibits that have large numbers of speakers of that language nearby, like the Chinese exhibits.)
Many of the exhibits I wandered through at first only marginally interested me, like african art, pacific art (in general), chinese art, korean art, japanese art, indian and southeast asian art, and islamic art. In the process of viewing this series of international art, I found a special exhibit by Antonie-Louis Barye that pretty much consisted of many sculptures of animals killing other animals. Well done sculptures, and an unusual obsession.
The Brooklyn Museum has an impressively large series of exhibits on Egypt. I stayed in this section for quite a while and read a lot of signs because I find the mythology, the pharaohs (and how they fit in with the mythology), the pyramids (and how they fit in with the politics and the mythology), and the hieroglyphs (both as a reflection of language and thought as well as how they relate to the religion) neat. I took a few pictures, including one of a sign with a striking story of politics and religion.
Soon after, I found the small collection of European paintings. They all hung around a large court used for entertaining high-profile guests. (The museum knows what its wealthy patrons most appreciate!)
On the next floor I found a large selection of American artwork and was quite surprised to see how much of it I enjoyed. (I snapped a number of pictures.) I guess I like much of the Hudson River school of painting.
Then I was even more surprised to find a Rodin sculpture exhibit, very much like the one at Stanford. There were only twelve casts made of each sculpture and now I've seen two of the "originals" of many sculpture! Also amusing, the Rodin gallery was named for the Cantors, the same couple that sponsored the Stanford art museum.
Every museum has a permanent exhibit that is traditional but seemingly out of place. In this case, it was a small series of rooms decorated to "19th century decorative arts," basically showcasing furniture and other strategies in interior design. The windows blocking entry to the rooms were so clean I almost walked into one!
Nearby I found an exhibit on glass and glass working. Since I've been thinking of learning it, I read and learned and took some more pictures.
Running out of time, I wandered through the modern art section -it exists, but it's no Moma- and then the visible storage. Visible storage was a lot of glass cubes (temperature controlled) comparatively tightly packed with objects of all types. Labels on each cube listed its contents. You're on your own to spot the object you want within each cube. But it's neat to see this traditionally hidden side of the museum.
Finally, the last (special) exhibit I made it to was William Wegman. It included a lot of odd pieces in various media, much of it involving dogs. He loves dogs. I managed to find one cute video (available online) that was playing on a display there.
With the museum closed, I headed back to the public library, found a computer, and researched our dinner destination for the night. It's a habit I have, getting some idea of what people proclaim is good. Mostly it just make me feel less anxious of choosing what to eat and happier that I gave a restaurant a fair shake. After a bit of research on some review sites, I had a good idea of what people thought. The funny thing about this is the friends I was meeting for dinner did exactly the same thing! :)
Two subways rides and a long walk later -I'd planned to transfer a third time to get closer, but I missed that transfer station by accident of getting on an express train (I think the accident balanced out the increased speed of the express train)- I arrived on time to meet Bryson and Catherine at our dinner destination. From my nominations, they chose a place in the east village called Sigiri. It's the only Sri Lankan restaurant in Manhattan. (There used to be three but the other two closed in the last few years. Apparently Staten Island is where the community lives; it has a number of Sri Lankan restaurants.)
Sigiri was pretty good, although we weren't excited by the appetizers. We started with the appetizer sampler. It contained two-types of fried spring rolls (vegetable and fish, both like those produced by a mediocre Chinese restaurant), accompanied by an overly sweet chile dipping sauce, and along with a fine lentil cake and an interesting fried fish ball. The ball was like falafel in texture but made from a mix of fish and (apparently) potatoes.
Our entrees were focused around something called a hopper, a bowl-shaped pancake -yes, it was naturally curved- much in flavor like Indian dosi. To assemble a meal, take a hopper and fill it with another entree -in our case chicken lamprais-, perhaps add some of the good fried-to-soft-and-brown onions, and wrap it up and eat it like a burrito. The chicken lamprais, a combination of rice, chicken, fish, and hard-boiled egg wrapped in a banana leaf and baked, was tasty and worked well in its role as the filler. The dish was uniformly flavorful throughout, even the rice. Incidentally, one hopper was served with a fried egg inside, and its gooeyness and yolk added a nice undertone and helped meld the hopper to the filling.
We also decided we had to try the (pork) black curry. While the meat was low-quality, the earthiness and depth of the flavor made us still like the dish. We ate it over rice.
Incidentally, I tried a mango-based mixed drink -they called it a cordial- which was nice and not too sweet like most fruit drinks. Bryson had a good and fragrant ginger tea.
With the entrees foremost in our mind, Bryson concluded, "It was good. I enjoyed that." And Bryson and Catherine discussed how they'd order different hoppers (especially more hoppers with egg) and fillings next time they made it there.
Bryson had made reservations for us at a comedy club. So after dinner, another subway ride later we were walking down 23rd in the direction we thought the comedy club was. I claimed we must be going in the correct direction since I lived not too far away during my time in NYC and I recognized places. But when we reached the next avenue, we found out I was wrong and quickly walked the other direction. *sigh* I was too quick to try to reclaim this area of NYC as my home and show off to my friends. Happily, this error didn't make us late.
In fact, it couldn't have made us late. As we walked up the street toward the comedy club we noticed a fire truck nearby. We didn't give it much thought until we were in line at the comedy club, around the corner from the fire truck. Then we saw firemen with gas masks leave from the door we were waiting to go in. And someone came out and announced there was a gas leak in the building -the whole city block- and that the show would be delayed or canceled depending on how long the firemen take to investigate and/or fix it.
We waited around for a little while, gave up, and decided to hunt for dessert. After some failures of Google SMS (it can't do category searches like desserts near an address, only category searches for a city (as far as I could tell)), we wandered around and up 7th Avenue and eventually chose The Bread Factory Cafe near Penn Station. Besides a selection of pretty desserts, it serves a wide assortment of items salads, sandwiches, pizza, pasta, ... (but not at this time of night). We tried desserts -a cheesecake and a chocolate mousse (on top of a soggy rum cake)-, both of which could only be described as fine.
A train back to Metuchen, and thus concluded my last full day on the east coast for this vacation.
New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 6 (or, Moma, Turkish, and night-time wandering)
It's another day, another bagel, another type of cream cheese, and another train ride to Manhattan. It was Thursday and the weather was certainly more pleasant than the frigid Monday I spent in Princeton, a fact I appreciated in the evening when I was up and out late.
The daytime was devoted to (finally) visiting the Museum of Modern Art. I have many pictures from my Moma wandering that accompany this narrative. Some pieces mentioned in the narrative have no pictures, and some pictures aren't discussed in this blog entry. (There are also a few pictures there from the rest of the day's activities.)
Moma had everything I could imagine. Some things I thought were cool enough to write down:
* Furniture, design, and the like.
* Architecture, including a neat exhibit of lots of ghetty houses. Also had a large display with many photographs of one particular house from countless angles. I didn't really understand the point of it.
* Jackson Pollock.
* Roy Lichtenstein.
* Mondrian (they had lots!).
* Calder.
* Recent art that I don't normally consider "modern" like van Gogh and Picasso and Monet. I was struck by how large Monet's Water Lilies painting is (each panel is 6' by 13').
* Matisse.
* Miro.
* Derain.
* Seurat.
* Cubism in general.
* Malevich's Women with Water Pails.
* Leger's Propellers.
* Carlo Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli.
* Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player.
* Kadinsky.
* A special exhibit of photographs from around the world. Three in this exhibit really stood out for me: one by Stuart Klipper of a swell, and two of women with poems in farsi written on their face or hands. (Too bad no pictures of photographs were allowed.)
* A special exhibit on Munch with dozens of paintings made over his lifetime. The exhibit and his painting The Kiss in particular made me realize he is a more diverse artist than I thought.
* A special exhibit on architecture (mostly public buildings) in Spain with many miniature 3-d models. Many buildings were very impressive. (Too bad no pictures were allowed.)
* Two cafes and a fine-dining restaurant overlooking the sculpture garden. I'm not surprised Moma has a high-end restaurant; it helps woo wealthy donators.
An odd observation: every attendant I saw in Moma was male. How unusual... I wonder why that is.
After exploring Moma until closing, I met up with Seth for evening activities. As we walked south, we caught up, talked about future plans (such as what are we going to do with our lives), and debated where to eat. All similarly important. ;)
Eventually we decided on and found ourselves at the Turkish Kitchen. The decor, very red and with dim lighting (so dim we remarked we should've brought flashlights to help us read the menus), made me think it was a place intended for dates.
While Seth and I perused the menu, debated what to order, and examined what people around us ordered, one person at the neighboring table interjected and offered us advice and a free taste of his stuffed grape leaves. (They were pretty good, and we ended up ordering something similar.) This was something that happens rarely or never on the west coast, and brought us to discussing how New Yorkers are more well practiced interacting with new people on short notice, as there are so many people the average New Yorker runs into on a daily basis.
We were generally pleased with everything we ordered at the Turkish Kitchen. One appetizer, "icli kofte," ground lamb and spices in bulghur patties (a la bulghur falafel), was quite good but a bit oily and needed yogurt. (Meat stuffed in nearly anything is good, and this was no different.) Our other appetizer was grilled eggplant with (garlic) yogurt. The dish seemed authentic but it had too much yogurt (which we put to good use with the first appetizer).
As for entreess, the (boneless! how cool is that) cornish hen stuffed with rice (with pine nuts, dill, etc.) was very good. Each -the hen and the rice- was good by itself (appropriately tasty and moist) and worked well together. This came with a zucchini pancake much like a potato pancake that was also quite good. Our other entree was "etli lahana dolmasi," cabbage stuffed with ground beef and rice and herbs and served with yogurt. In essence, a pretty good dish like dolmas except made with cabbage instead of grape leaves.
After dinner and a quick stop at Seth's apartment to deposit my stuff, we headed to Brooklyn to a neighborhood Seth wanted to show me called Williamsburg. It's a recently revitalizing district just across the east river from Manhattan. The part we explored first was an industrial area with many brick warehouses and the like, the insides of which have been turned into hip bars and restaurants. The contrast between the exterior and the insides is a bit shocking at first. Although the area is still slightly sketchy off the main streets, a visible police presence on many corners made us feel comfortable. We looked around so I could get the flavor; we didn't go into any of the many bars or clubs. From what I could tell, I liked the crowd: on this Thursday evening the crowds were small but good -- what looked like interesting people, although of the type that are too hip for me.
One run-down end of the neighborhood had a tremendous view over the East River to Manhattan. Seth told me stories about the debates about building housing in the area and the restriction on builders regarding affordability and low-income housing. Throughout the evening while talking about our futures and where we (especially he) planned to live, we talked much about real estate prices and cost of living and especially how local ordinances and building restrictions are a significant cause of high housing prices. This evocative example and the negotiations between New York City and the builders further intensified this discussion. Where is the trade-off between revitalization and gentrification?
Before heading back to Manhattan, we stopped by a local good frozen yogurt chain called Tasti D-Lite. We chatted with the guy behind the counter, who apparently lived in Manhattan and commuted to Brooklyn to work. How odd. This conversation is another data point proving New Yorkers are friendly.
We exited the subway in the meat packing district, an area I never really explored while I lived in the city yet not far from where I lived. The meat packing district is an area with many clubs and bars, some without any visible signage. We wandered around a bit, observing many hip (and expensive) restaurants and some clubs and bars with lines of snazzily dressed people waiting for the bouncer's approval to enter. It reminds me of elementary school sports -- oooh, pick me, pick me! At one hotel with a rooftop bar, Seth approached two pretty German tourists and talked them into escorting us past the bouncer to get us in the building. Pretty slick, especially since neither of us were dressed well enough.
After snapping a few photos from the roof, we left the bar since it was packed and we were out of place wearing walking-around in seedy neighborhood clothes (which we wore for Williamsburg). Then we proceeded to spend two hours (or so) on a meandering walk through the village to cross Manhattan.
Near the end of the walk, we were in the East Village and two girls yelled out of a car and asked where to get good sushi. Some other guys on the street answered, but this is another example that New Yorkers are just more comfortable interacting and dealing with new people than many others. I can't imagine that happening at such a late hour in San Francisco. As another contrast with nearly everywhere in the world, Seth remarked the appropriate question for New York City was not "is there a sushi place open this late" but rather "which sushi place open this late is the best"?
Around 2:30am we had returned to the vicinity of Seth's place near Union Square and he wanted to show me his favorite 24-hour diner, Veselka. Veselka is a Polish restaurant (that serves a large quantity of traditional diner fare too). We stuck with small items from the Polish side of the menu. The blintzes we ordered, filled with farmer's cheese, were terrific, light and tasty! The peirogies, in contrast, were sad. We ordered them fried (expecting pan-fried), but the outside texture (and uniformity of it) made us think they were deep fried?! And they were luke-warm too. The place was fairly crowded and service was slow to the point of being bad (e.g., we had trouble getting the check).
After such a long day, we then called it a night.
New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 5 (or, Spamalot, coconuts, and not much more)
My plan for the day centered around Spamalot, another item on my reasons to visit New York list. As the show is really popular, the only ticket I could get was for the Wednesday matinee. (Spamalot apparently has inexpensive standing room only tickets for sale the day of the show, complete with little plaques on the floor about where to stand, but even these tickets usually sell promptly bright and early in the morning. I didn't want to risk not going.)
Before the show, I planned to eat at Barney Greengrass, a jewish brunch place on the upper west side that I'd tried and failed to go to when I lived in Manhattan. (It was closed the day I went.) Barney Greengrass, nearly a century old, is a New York institution, a combination retail market and restaurant. It's subtitled "The Sturgeon King" and famous for salmon and (not surprisingly) sturgeon.
I ordered one of its most famous dishes, salmon scrambled with eggs and onions ($13). It was quite good with ample pieces of salmon (not skimping on the salmon as most salmon and egg scrambles seem to do) but was poorly presented, simply thrown onto a white plate with no decorations or sides. It came with a bagel or bialy and I, having eaten a number of bagels recently, ordered the (onion) bialy. Definitely eh. In all, the scramble was good enough to be worth the money, but I'd really expect more attention to the presentation given the $10+ price tag.
I left over an hour to get from the upper west side to the theater district for my show. This was way more than necessary -in fact I could probably walk there in forty minutes-, but it turned out to be a good thing. At the subway station, they announced that there was "an incident" on a southbound train at the 125th St station and all southbound trains were running express until 59th St. That meant the train would skip me, at 86th St. After some confusion -the station operator was confused and kept telling us the trains were running and would stop and we only learned not to listen to her after a few trains went by on the express track- I grabbed a northbound train to 125th and then transferred to a southbound one. I arrived at the Spamalot theater with more than fifteen minutes to spare and was greeted by a massive line. (They were very inefficient at letting people in.)
Looking at signs while in line I realized that Spamalot was the 2005 Best Musical Tony award winner. Two best musicals in two days!
My seats at Spamalot were poor. Like Avenue Q, I decided to be cheap and buy nose-bleed tickets, this time in part of the theater that said "partial view" but claimed it only matters in two scenes for a total of fifteen minutes. But these tickets were worse than that. They were in the balcony in the last row ten seats from the side, and the curvature of the ceiling restricted by view of things high on the stage. Admittedly I could see the main action in most scenes but I found myself repeatedly slouching to try to get the full effect of events on stages, including actors on castle walls, the really tall Knights Who Say "Ni" (on stilts), and the atmosphere conveyed by the scenery.
Spamalot was pretty good, but nowhere near as good as Avenue Q. Much of Spamalot's quality came from the scenes lifted entirely from the movie; most of these were simply re-enacted (without music). I didn't like that a sizable fraction of the show was devoted to broadway mockery with songs like The Song That Goes Like This ("Once in every show / There comes a song like this /It starts off soft and low / And ends up with a kiss"), You Won't Succeed On Broadway, Diva's Lament ("What ever happened to my part? / It was exciting at the start. / Now we're halfway through Act 2 / And I've had nothing yet to do."), and Twice In Every Show. It's not that these songs were bad -they weren't- it's just that they felt like a crutch to fill up time because the writers couldn't figure out how to make the show long enough just by using traditional Monty Python and The Holy Grail material.
They did have at least one case of very Monty-Python-esque humor (certainly more Monty Python than the broadway parody). For instance, the show started off with a song and dance about Finland that lasted until the narrator interrupted and corrected the actors about the topic of the musical. Going along with this theme, the playbill even had a few fake and very funny pages about the Finland musical that included amusing actors' names and humorous titles for songs.
Some scenes did stand out. The choreography in the I'm Not Dead Yet song and dance was great. I'm also impressed by the audience involvement. In particular, they had a member of the audience find the grail and bring it onstage near the last scene. In addition, at the end they had the whole audience stand up and sing and dance to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.
Spamalot clearly knew its audience was much more male-dominated than most broadway ones -- there were lots of women singing and dancing throughout the show.
But perhaps the most interesting event of the day was not Spamalot or the subway incident (which I can't find any news about on the web -- there isn't enough local neighborhood-level reporting) was the coconut orchestra. Spamalot invited the whole audience to move to the courtyard by the theatre, gave them coconuts, and planned to (and did) set the Guinness World Record for the world's largest coconut orchestra.
I got my own set of coconuts (for free) (according to Spamalot's web site, a $15 value) and participated! It fun and fast. I'm surprised how easy it was to learn to play; I guess using percussion instruments to do a tune I've heard many times before isn't that hard. The whole event made minor news: playbill.com, broadwayworld.com.
Before heading home to Metuchen, I decided to spend a little time looking at coats at Macy's. Macy's, like Bloomingdale's, was also amazingly large: seven floors the size of city blocks. But the selection of coats of the type I desired was much smaller (although also cheaper). Of course, by charging $150 for a pair of stylishly ripped jeans, one can't claim Macy's is inexpensive as a whole.
Once back in Metuchen, I believe Bryson, Catherine, and I had dinner and played more settlers.
P.S. I took three sad pictures and one movie this day: one of the brunch place, and the rest of breaking the coconut orchestra record.
New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 4 (or, museum messes, strudel, Japanese grill, and Avenue Q)
Once again I started the day off with a bagel and cream cheese. (This time, though, I'd planned ahead so I wouldn't be flustered and decided on a sesame bagel with low fat vegetable cream cheese.)
The day's plan was to go to the city and kill some time before the 8:00pm show of Avenue Q. Avenue Q was on the list of reasons to go to New York; I tried getting half-price tickets a few times while I lived there in 2004, but since the show had just won the Best Musical Tony Award for 2004, tickets weren't available. (And I wasn't willing at that time to pay full price.) This time, however, I wasn't going to risk the unlikelihood of getting half-price tickets and instead purchased some (after much debate about the quality of the seats I wanted and how much I was willing to pay) in advance.
One other activity I missed during my time in NYC was the Museum of Modern Art. Its Manhattan location was under renovation then and so it moved to Queens, and I never made it out to Queens. Well, the renovation had been completed so I planned to spent the day at Moma.
Getting to the city involved the simple purchase of a NJ transit ticket. Well, I almost managed to screw it up -- I was waiting for the train on the same side of the platform as when I went to Princeton. But NYC is the other direction! Happily I realized my mistake before the train came.
After arriving at the endpoint of the rail journey -Penn Station-, I hiked the twenty-something minutes northward to Moma and breathed in the essence of the city. I was back!
And then I found that Moma is closed on Tuesdays. Oops.
My mind was already in the museum mind-set. The only other famous NYC museum I'd missed during my journey was the Pierpont Morgan Library; it was also closed for renovation during my time in the city. While planning my week, I noticed it was still closed for renovation (it's been years!) and due to reopen within the next month of two. But that meant it was out for a destination.
I thought about returning to the Museum of New York, which I'd enjoyed on my previous visit and didn't manage to finish. I'd arrived within an hour of closing; feeling guilty for making me pay, they gave me free tickets to return some other time. However, I'd left my free tickets at home. I believed that fact was a message from fate that today was not the day to return.
Thinking harder, I decided to go to the Design Museum. It was the only museum I could remember not visiting and even feeling remotely bad about. (Most museums I skipped I felt no qualms about.)
After walking north and east in the general direction of the museum for a while, I finally stumbled upon a subway entrance. I felt silly that I'd forgotten where all the stops were in the measly two years since I lived nearby. (This feeling of embarrassment will return again.)
Arriving in the upper east side but before walking to the museum, I decided to head over to someplace on my places to eat in NYC list. The place was Andre's Cafe, an eastern European bakery and restaurant that had been on my list ever since reading the article, The Lost Strudel (New York Times), profiling its production of this hard-to-find item.
The menu portrays itself partially as Hungarian but also offers some ordinary diner-type fare like hamburgers and eggs. But I didn't hover over the menu much other than to choose my flavor of strudel: apple -- fairly traditional, though not quite as traditional as cabbage and not as odd as cherry or potato and ham. My strudel was good, with sizable chunks of apples wrapped in layers of phyllo dough, sweet enough to be a dessert after my bagel but filling enough to complete the meal.
Speaking of bakery items, why is it one can find rugalach at nearly every bakery, deli, and coffee shop in New York but I never see it anywhere in California?
Happily satiated, I went to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. It was thoroughly disappointing. They had a vaguely interesting exhibit on "fashion in color," showing how different colors were used in fashion in different times and the affect they portrayed. And they had a small (sad) exhibit on "designs from Israel" which had a neat chair made of straws melted together. (Yes, the plastic ones you drink from.) That is all that is worth mentioning, in both the special exhibits and the museum itself. Despite listening often to the audio tour, I was still out of the museum in less than 90 minutes and promptly wrote in my notes "small and boring."
Now I had lots of time to kill before the show. I took the train back south to check out the menu of another restaurant I recently heard about. (I thought perhaps I could meet some friends there for dinner later in the week.) Then I checked out another such restaurant. (Ah, text messages to Google local is great for addresses of places you know the names of.) I called my parents. (It's the middle of the workday so the people I could call were limited, and I figured they'd love to hear from me while I was on vacation.) Eventually I took the subway and went shopping at Bloomingdale's, looking for a nice professional looking jacket. (You know, those three-quarter length ones that business-people and other professionals wear outdoors.) I browsed for a while, amazed at the size of Bloomingdale's selection, but, despite the late-season sales making the horrendous prices more reasonable, didn't buy anything. (I can't buy important pieces of clothing like that without a second opinion on how it looks.)
For dinner I grabbed the subway to the east village to head to Yakitori Taisho, a Japanese grill place recommended by a friend of mine. I arrived before 6pm and was told to come back after they open. (New Yorkers as a whole eat late.) So instead I killed some time and scouted out another restaurant I heard about in the area, a restaurant that I'd actually return to later in the week (see the post for Friday - Day 6). When I returned, it was after 6pm and they seated me.
I had really good grilled items and excellent french fries at Yakitori Taisho. (The menu offered a lot of different types of choices (mostly Japanese food with some Korean), so I tried to judge what to order based upon which items had the largest pictures and more prominent placement. That got me to the grilled items. And this seemed right, because as other people arrived, that's what they were ordering too. But they could have been using the same strategy as me... The french fries, however, I ordered because a number of yelpers recommended them.)
* One grilled item I got was a very good skewer of chicken meatballs. The meatballs were light, a mix of ground chicken, peas, and corn, and moist.
* The beef skewer, with a tasty juice marinate, was also quite good (but not as good) because the meat was slightly rubbery / hard to rip meat with one's teeth.
* The green onion skewer was very good. (I'd never had grilled green onions before.)
* The french fries with spicy salmon roe mayonnaise were excellent. The french fries came right out of the frier and started out too hot to eat. This caused me a few burns because they were good, dense from potatoes and fatty but not too much so. But the roe mayonnaise made this dish -- a wonderful creamy cool dipping sauce with a unique flavor.
* Still slightly hungry and wanting to try something besides a skewer to further evaluate the restaurant, I ordered one more item: a grilled rice ball with salmon. This was exactly as described: boring. They coated the ball with a sauce that allowed the outside to blacken without burning on the grill -I saw because I was sitting at the counter- but what I ended up with was a dull ball of rice with small overcooked dry salmon chunks inside. Disappointed with this item, already full, and feeling guilty from all the meat and carbs (especially the whole bowl of french fries), I left some of the rice ball uneaten.
Then, yet another subway ride later, I was in the theater district for Avenue Q.
Avenue Q was great! And my nose-bleed seats -in the balcony along the wall, third row from last- still gave me a perfectly good view of the stage. Perhaps the most mesmerizing feature of Avenue Q was that it seemed as if it was being performed simultaneously by two separate casts: the puppets and the actors holding the puppets. Both were on stage and both "acted" -- I kept going back and forth from watching the expressions on the puppets to watching the expressions on the people.
Avenue Q was clearly targeted at people in my age bracket recently out of college and looking for a PURPOSE. And while it dealt with this issue well with songs like Purpose and I Wish I Could Go Back To College, the concluding song to this theme felt a bit like cheating. Basically the message was wait, and everything will get better.
Avenue Q was filled with catchy songs with funny (and likely true) messages such as The Internet is for Porn, Everybody's a Little bit Racist, and even What Do You Do with a BA in English?. Yet the songs that touched me the most were slower: There's a Fine, Fine Line ("between love and a waste of your time") and There Is Life Outside Your Apartment.
In addition to lessons based on the morale and the theme, I learned something else from Avenue Q; I learned through the song Schadenfreude that I'd always been mispronouncing this word.
The only complaint I have about Avenue Q is that they had Gary Coleman as a character. This felt unnecessary, like a source for humor that wasn't relevant to the theme.
After the show I walked straight to Penn Station and arrived back "home" around midnight. One of the most striking features of the day was the number of familiar sights, especially so during my walk to Penn Station as the route was the one I usually used to walk to work during the time I lived in the city.
P.S. I took this small selection of photographs today. (The previous day's Afghan Kebab House #7, today and yesterday's Bagels-4-U, today's Andre's Cafe, today's Yakitori, plus one more photograph...)
New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 3 (Metuchen and Princeton)
I took a smattering of pictures during this day; these pictures serve as accompaniment and supplement to this entry.
On Monday I explored Princeton. On Sunday I'd realized I knew a number of people attending graduate school at Princeton (besides the friend I was staying with) and coordinated meeting for lunch with one of them.
Since Bryson went to lab early and Catherine had work, when I woke up I was on my own. After learning about train schedules, I figured I'd explore downtown Metuchen for a while, catch the train to Princeton, explore it a bit, eat lunch with Scott and Bryson, and then likely explore Princeton more.
Freshly showered, I dressed as warmly as I could and headed out. Downtown Metuchen is cute. There are occasional plaques denoting historic buildings and describing historical incidents; this give the town a lot of character and credit in my book. It's clear Metuchen is also mostly a commuter town -- many store open bright and early at 6am so people can stop by before they catch a train. It was quite empty when I explored around nine and ten am. Besides the nice traditional main street (literally named main street) with its assortment of small stores of virtually every type, the only thing I recall about the street is the surprising number of beauty salons / hair cutting places. I asked Bryson about this in the evening and he suggested that there were many stay-at-home mothers in the area and they frequented such establishments.
During the course of my wandering, I grabbed breakfast at a good place: Bagels-4-U. I spent a while mesmerized by their assortment of cream cheeses that they appeared to make themselves and paralyzed by the decision of which bagel with which cream cheese, that I, not having noticed all the bagel bins, when the counter-woman asked me for the third time what I wanted -ah, "New York" impatience-, panicked and said pumpernickel. And even that bagel was good. (Why oh why can't I get good bagels on the west coast?)
On the train to Princeton, I stared out the window and contemplated the land as we passed. It's nice seeing such a high density of trees -quite different from the CalTrain or BART-, although it did surprise me that there was so much undeveloped land in New Jersey (especially so close to a commuter rail line). And some people claim real estate prices will inevitably rise because land is in short supply...
In Princeton first I wandered along the perimeter of the campus, examining downtown Princeton and the university. I found a neat park downtown; view the pictures. The university itself was gothic, filled with elaborate dark gray brick buildings (with gargoyles) giving the impression of timelessness. (They did have a few newer buildings in a different style, but those really felt out of place.) The campus appearance seemed appropriate for the weather, which stayed around freezing the whole day. Together, the university and the town felt like (old) money, similar to what Stanford would feel like if Palo Alto and the campus were actually adjacent. (But Stanford would feel like new money.)
In the middle of my wandering, I stopped to meet Scott and Bryson for lunch. We decided on an innocuous choice: Panera Bread. Panera Bread is my favorite sandwich chain -- other chains do individual items better but Panera Bread is fairly consistently good. It always leaves me filled, probably from the whole grain baguette I get on the side at every meal there. (Conversely, Bryson complained it always leaves him hungry. But he doesn't order the baguette.)
It was good to see that Scott seems to be doing well and is happily excited by his research. He's living the devoted graduate student life, working hard and wearing a jacket in honor of meetings with his professor. (I guess economists are more formal than computer scientists?)
After lunch I looked around campus more. As you'll notice from my pictures, I found a number of weird statues around campus. Later I found an list of all these sculptures.
I also took an incredibly poor campus tour. The guide clearly had her lines memorized and we didn't go anywhere interesting. By interesting, I mean places I hadn't already stumbled upon during my wanderings. And it felt artificial: for instance, many times when the tour guide was talking about a particular department or activity, she cited a roommate that participated in it. I swear I counted at least half a dozen roommates.
I took the online tour afterward and found it faster and more interesting. But I did learn that some dorm rooms have 11 people so I suppose her claims can be true (though I doubt it). Also, on the online tour I found a picture of an unusual gargoyle I wish I saw in person!
All the same, on the campus tour, I did learn:
* Princeton was the capitol of the United States for a while; a fact I verified online.
* Princeton originally was called the "College of New Jersey" and changed its name a few times, becoming Princeton University in 1896.
* A cute superstition involving the main gate to the campus. I wonder how many students listen to it?
* Princeton's mascot is the tiger but was originally the lion. Like me, when I don't think too deeply, I can mix them up. And indeed students and alumni did mix them up over time, donating tiger statues when the lion was still the mascot and vice versa. Eventually, so the story goes, the tiger became the official mascot because the colors -orange and black- look better than whatever they were doing before with lions and manes.
Because of my prior exploration, by the end of the tour I'd been outside for a number of hours and was quite frigid, so I called Bryson and we headed back to Metuchen. On the way Bryson showed me a neat feature of the train seats -- all the rows are on sliders and can reverse to make them face the same direction or face the adjacent seats. California trains should be built like this! It's convenient: face the way you want and/or restructure the train to better accommodate large groups!
Upon returning to Metuchen we hung around the apartment for a while (partially to warm up a bit). When Catherine told us she wouldn't be back for dinner, we debated where to eat for a while, generated a short list of ideas, and headed out to downtown Metuchen. It being a Monday, our first choice was closed, so we took the opportunity to further wander around Metuchen and see what else was open. I got my chance to see the one street besides Main Street that had significant retail. (Main Street is better.) We also learned (or I learned and Bryson remembered) that most decent restaurants in Metuchen are closed Monday nights. Our second choice was one of these.
We ended up at Afghan Kebab House #7. The first food item to arrive after ordering was the salad that comes with the entrees: a small lettuce salad with tomato slices, green peppers, lemon slices (!), and lots of ranch dressing -I like ranch dressing but this was a lot for me and way more than Bryson would put up with-. In short, one of those lettuce and ranch salads some ethnic places serve to make unadventurous dinners more comfortable by showing not all their food is strange.
We also got bread with the standard two Indian sauces (red and green); the bread had a little oil flavor and a slightly more crunchy exterior on one side than I'd like, but wasn't bad in the least.
For an appetizer we tried the aushuk and were served a few thin dumplings well hidden in a dish mostly filled with yogurt and spices. While the yogurt was fine, the dish was disappointing because of the effective lack of meaningfully sized/filled/flavored dumplings.
Our entrees, however, were good. One was a mix of chicken, brown rice, pine nuts, peas, and orange rind. The orange rind was a fairly prominent (good) flavor and worked well with all the other ingredients. The other was a lamb steak -juicy though not particularly Afghani or Indian-, much like (very good) lamb chops my parents used to make.
Although the restaurant was very slow, we still had the rest of the evening to kill and so we watched Annie Hall. I had a general negative impression of Woody Allen from other movies so I figured it would be good for my edification to watch one of his classics. I found, to my surprise, I liked it: it feels funny, witty, sad, and true. And now my opinion of Woody Allen is more nuanced.
New York/New Jersey Trip: Day 2 (or, Indian food and puzzles: a relaxing weekend day)
On my first full day in New Jersey, I started my vacation on the right foot and didn't do much. I thought a bit about my plans for the upcoming week and e-mailed a few people to coordinate schedules, but mostly just hang out at my friends' place.
The only real event of note was our lunch-time journey to Moghul Indian in Edison, NJ. A quite good Indian buffet, heads above most other such buffets I've had.
Incidentally, en route to Moghul I got the feel of Metuchen. (It had a middle/middle-upper class feel with mostly single-family brick houses.) We passed one house with what I thought was an interesting piece of art on the lawn: what appeared to be black columns at odd (though mostly vertical) angles with trash cans as heads. When returning, someone suggested, rightly so, that it was likely trees wrapped with plastic bags and covered for the winter. But I still like thinking about it as artwork.
Anyway, Moghul Indian's buffer was surprising because in addition to the standard fare they had some chinese stuff (singapore noodles and a chinese stir-fry), imperial rolls (technically vietnamese but theirs looked more like egg rolls), and even continental (like potato skins or tomatoes stuffed with mashed potatoes, and fresh fruit). I thought perhaps this is what an Indian restaurant has to do to attract enough customers in an as unadventurous places as this area of New Jersey. (Clearly my stereotype of New Jersey is coming into play here.) But I realized later this rationale doesn't hold water when Bryson and Catherine drove me down Oak Tree Road in Edison, a quaint downtown with countless Indian places and clearly a strong community. (Thus, Moghul shouldn't need to attract white customers with this type of non-Indian fare; I suppose some Indian customers must appreciate the continental cuisine. Although frankly I'm not sure why they would -- I tried one tomato-wrapped item and it was bad.)
Digressions aside, Moghul was quite tasty. They had good staples like butter chicken, chicken curry, and saag paneer to more unusual dishes like an okra dish and something I've never seen that included crispy flakes (almost like rice crispies) and vegetables and spices that was made on the spot by a server. And every time I got naan at the buffet line, it tasted as if I'd just ordered it. Amazing! I was also happy I tried the dessert they had, a custardy cinnamon rice pudding dish.
The afternoon consisted simply of Bryson and I doing puzzles and such with Catherine's intermittent help. (She mostly had something work related to do.) We mostly did a set of hard word-play puzzles called "Scare Tactics" the New York Times published one recent Halloween. (Sadly, I can't link to it; the New York Times themselves has eliminated the page from its database. I do have a saved copy. If you want it, mail me.)
Dinner was, like the previous night, cooked at home. I helped contribute to dinner (by trimming snap peas) about as much as the night before. Bryson and Catherine used their wok magic to make a tasty Chinese spicy shrimp stir-fry with snap peas. (And I love snap peas.)
Later in the evening, -I'm not sure what incited this- Catherine decided she was in the mood for corn bread. And so she made some. Spur of moment corn bread, from a recipe that she's never tried before. I become instantly even more impressed with the food tendencies of Bryson and Catherine -- choosing good restaurants, cooking well, and doing neat spontaneous food ideas. (I don't do much spontaneous cooking.) And, yes, the corn bread muffins turned out well.
(Incidentally, a week after I returned, inspired by their memory I cooked my own corn bread. It turned out decently, though I don't think as well -- it had less structural integrity and was a little drier. But then my recipe in fact was simple and didn't use buttermilk or sour cream or any diary product.)
Posts
