February 6, 2012
Doodle: Ripe Bananas
Since I have a brain, I have thoughts. Mostly shallow thoughts. Not in the superficial sense, just...not deep.
Here's one of those thoughts. Been eating away at my brain. Just eatin'.
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Posted by roboppy at 11:53 PM | Comments (12)
January 27, 2012
'The Girl Who Is Not Eating Everything' Because My Lungs Suck
Note: Sooo, this post is sort of the opposite of my previous post. There's no food porn in this post, no recommendations for where to eat. It's a pretty long explanation of why I'm changing my diet. Euh.
wheeeze
WHEEEEEEEZZZZE
wheeeeze
WHEEEEEEEEEEZZZZE
wheeeeeeeze
"...This is how I'm going to die, isn't it?"
Two Saturdays ago I had just finished eating half of a pomelo in my mom's kitchen in New Jersey when I felt the beginnings of a severe allergic reaction.
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Posted by roboppy at 12:01 AM | Comments (56)
January 22, 2012
Best New Things I Ate in NYC in 2011
Happy New Year! ...A few weeks late. :(
As is the tradition with year-end/year-beginning posts, here's a roundup of the best new things I ate in New York City in 2011 ("new" being new to my stomach, not necessarily the city), focusing on dishes I didn't get around to blogging about last year because 2011 was my crowning year of being super lazy. (Just wait until you read about my vacation in Norway. I spent about 50 percent of the time sleeping. It was the best.)
Apologies if this list is rather boring. Despite my profession, I don't make the effort to be at the forefront of the NYC food scene—at least, not to the degree I used to. I rely on my friends and coworkers for the good stuff.
Ok, let's get on to the fun stuff.
Best Stuff I Never Blogged About on TGWAE
- Brussels sprouts sandwich
Bingo sandwich at Shopsins: "Fried brussels sprouts, guacamole, jack, ciabatta." The "fried brussels sprouts" part is what jumped out at me from Shopsins' 21,000+ word menu, and as usual, those little cruciferous, fart-inducing balls equated to a winner. Crisp and tender sprouts taste great on their own, but they taste reaaaally good topped with cool globs of creamy guacamole and a layer of gooey cheese in between crusty ciabatta.
The sandwich was $13 when I first tried it last March, but it's $16 on the current menu and comes on asparagus bread instead of ciabatta. I'd hope it still tastes just as good as the sandwich I tried.
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Posted by roboppy at 1:38 AM | Comments (10)
December 26, 2011
Merry (Belated) Christmas from Norway, Plus a Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
Merry (belated) Christmas, everyone! (And to those of you who don't celebrate Christmas, happy winter! And to those of you in the southern hemisphere, happy December! And to those of who aren't currently in December for whatever reason, happy whatever!) I hope everyone's having a great holiday.
I thought I would manage to sneak in this post just before December 26, but I totally failed. And I didn't just fail by an hour, like the timestamp says, but by seven hours because I'm currently in Norway, visiting Kåre in Bergen. Hell, I didn't even start writing this on December 25. :( But, if you do the math, you'll see that I stayed up until 7 a.m. to finish this post. Because I care! Yeah! YEAAAAHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhuuuh.
I know I've been sort of dead this whole month. Not that dead; the other dead where I'm not actually dead. I don't have any good reasons—just the same old dangerous combination of working inefficiently/wasting time/unintentionally killing brain cells/under and oversleeping I never escape. (I highly suggest not staying up until 7 a.m.)
- Norwegian Christmas Eve dinner.
I haven't edited all my photos yet, but here's the spread from Christmas Eve dinner at the Sandvik home. Kåre's mom made the traditional Norwegian Christmas dinner of pinnekjøtt (cured lamb ribs), mashed swedes (aka rutabagas), boiled potatoes, and sauerkraut. If this sounds familiar, it's because she made the same meal for us when I visited back in February, just this time she made a lot more of it since her daughter Anne-Kristen's family—husband David, daughter Haley, son Kristian, and mother-in-law Margaret—is also visiting from England for the holidays. (Last night for Christmas dinner, Anne-Kristin and David prepared an awesome British meal. I will blog about it...eventually.)
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Posted by roboppy at 12:54 AM | Comments (12)
December 9, 2011
[Not Food Related] Busted Memory Card: Oh Crap, Now What?
Update: A friend has offered to take my card to a specialist who may be able to recover the photos. Thanks for your help!
- Bluhblahbleebloo.
Today I found an effective way to lose my appetite without inducing nausea: find out that my two-ish-year-old 16 GB CF card isn't readable on my camera or my computer. The illustration above shows how I felt on the inside. On the outside, I went ;_;.
It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have photos on it that I wanted, but since I procrastinated I probably have two weeks of photos on it. Somewhere. Deep down in its...guts. Made of...FAIL.
Since y'all are smart with the brainmeats, I figure some of you may have advice on what to do before I resort to one of these data recovery places. If so, I would love to harness your smarts. Here's some more info about the problem that may or may not be helpful.
The card is a SanDisk Extreme CF 16 GB 60 MB/S UDMA card. My camera is a Canon 7D. One moment it was all fine, then the next, the camera would no longer read the card. Not like I dropped the card in a puddle, ran over it with a car, smothered it in peanut butter, took it out of the camera while it was being read, etc. I put a different CF card in my camera and it works fine.
The first time i tried to read the 16 GB card on my computer (iMac, OS X) it appeared in Finder, but when I tried to access it, Finder crashed. The card no longer appears in Finder after I connect it to my computer. So. Hm. Yeah. I know there are programs that can try to recover data, but as my computer doesn't even detect the card, I'm guessing that's not going to work.
Doobeedoo. [twiddles fingers]
Well. Yup. If anyone has advice, please let me know (roboppy@gmail.com). Thank you!
Posted by roboppy at 7:10 PM | Comments (8)
December 4, 2011
Georgian Bread, Home of Awesome Cheese-filled Khachapuri
- A straightforward name.
I'm not the kind of person who'd be labeled as "the life of the party"; I'm more like the person who stands in the corner and looks lost or confused. So to shoot myself up the ranks without gaining any social acuity, I bring out the big guns: Georgian cheesy bread, aka khachapuri.
- One loaf is the size of...a whole buttload of quarters.
- This one had congealed a bit before we dug in. Still tasty, though.
Georgian Bread in Brighton Beach is a small bakery well known for their imeruli khachapuri ($6), a large, flat round of soft, slightly chewy and crusty bread filled with a mixture of cheese, egg, and butter. Buy at least two of them: one to tear into right away (preferably shared with at least three other friends, who will subsequently loooove youuuu) when it's fresh out of the oven, and one to eat later at home.
...Or to bring to a oven-equipped party where people will fawn over your contribution of warm, soft, curd-y (not so much gooey), salty cheese wrapped in carbs. Those people may not remember your name, but they will remember the khachapuri.
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Posted by roboppy at 8:02 PM | Comments (10)
November 25, 2011
Happy Thanksgiving!
- I didn't have any good Thanksgiving photos to go with this post, so here's a random manatee from Sea World to get your attention. Did it work?
...I mean, Happy One-Day-After-Thanksgiving!
[insert blubbering sigh of failure]
This isn't too belated considering my usual track record of blogging about things that happened half a year ago, but it's nothing to be proud of.
I am extremely thankful you guys still read this blog—even if just once ever few months to make sure I'm not dead—despite the giant lag between posts and decline of helpful information. All tens of you—you mean a lot to me! Without your support this blog wouldn't have turned seven years old in mid-November. So: Thank you [x] the cuteness power of a thousand Marus.
I'm hoping this blog will make it to the big one-oh (which in Internet years is about middle-aged), even if by that point I'm only posting once every two months. But I will continue to drag my blog along, even when the path scrapes its legs down to bloody stumps and its wails of pain terrorize my dreams. Because I AM (sort of) DEDICATED. And for some reason, I'm imagining that my blog's path is made of loose, jagged gravel.
Other things I am thankful for, in no particular order: that I've managed to stay relatively healthy (and by that I mean I don't have cancer yet, because otherwise I'm pretty unhealthy), that I've still got a sweet job where I work with awesome people, that my family members are all healthy and doing well, that I have an excess of awesome friends, that I have an awesome boyfriend, that I have an awesome roommate, that I know Mandarin (this is totally false, but if I put it on the Internet, MAYBE IT WILL HAPPEN SOMEDAY), and blah de blah blup I'm going to stop now before I fully realize I have nothing to complain about, ever...oops, too late.
I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. My mom roasted a duck and we made two vegetable sides to go with it, along with cranberry sauce. (Making cranberry sauce is only a quarter-smidge more complicated than boiling water. I wonder if people who buy the canned stuff know this.) I also made a pumpkin mousse pie that may or may not have been tasty. Also, I got a mild allergic reaction of the "haha, you've got asthma now!" sort to one of the dishes, and my nose was (and continues to be) 97 percent stuffed.
...So I couldn't taste much and I didn't eat much, but I still had a great time with my mom and brother because they're fun people. And that's what matters.
Lastly, here's a random video about how to make a sandwich out of Thanksgiving leftovers, in case you see sliced bread and leftover turkey and cranberry sauce as a riddle that cannot be solved. The recipe is nothing special, but the editing is pretty sweet:
After watching this video, if you wished that every full-palm application of a sandwich's top slice of bread could be accompanied by a thunderous "BOOM," then we're on the same wavelength. [fist bump]
Posted by roboppy at 8:48 PM | Comments (10)
November 7, 2011
Bergen, Day 7: Prawn Sandwich Party
This is the final post about the trip I took to Norway about NINE MONTHS AGO. Yeah, it's about time. Thanks for sticking with me.
Kåre and I started off the day with gas.
- Gasin'.
...For the car! At this nifty gas pump, aka a normal Norwegian gas pump. But it's far sleeker than those I've seen in the US—this specimen, for example. Or maybe this design is used in the US, just nowhere I've been. WHAT IS THE LIFE OF A GAS PUMP DESIGNER?
And so I wonder. And have no answers.
- "Påsmurt" means '"sandwiches." ...Heehee. Påsmurt.
For lunch, we stopped by Godt Brød, a local bakery chain. They specialize in bread and thus offer sandwiches, but they don't have a menu of sandwiches optimized for deliciousness—it's all DIY.
- Oh no, the choices...shiiiiiii—
In my case, DIY = sandwich failure. Sure, I could make a decent grilled cheese sandwich or tuna salad sandwich, but when faced with a selection of fillings that I'm supposed to combine in a cohesive manner, the "cohesive" part kind of shrivels up and collapses into a poof of dust.
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Posted by roboppy at 1:41 AM | Comments (14)
: This is the 
