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'.

20120206bananacomic-1.jpg

>> Continue reading "Doodle: Ripe Bananas"...

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.

>> Continue reading "'The Girl Who Is Not Eating Everything' Because My Lungs Suck"...

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

Bingo sandwich
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.

>> Continue reading "Best New Things I Ate in NYC in 2011"...

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.)

20111226-xmas-dinner-norway-table.jpg

20111226-xmas-dinner-norway-plate.jpg

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.)

>> Continue reading "Merry (Belated) Christmas from Norway, Plus a Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe"...

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!

20111209-ohgod.gif
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

Georgian Bread
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.

Georgian Bread
One loaf is the size of...a whole buttload of quarters.
Georgian Bread
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.

>> Continue reading "Georgian Bread, Home of Awesome Cheese-filled Khachapuri"...

Posted by roboppy at 8:02 PM | Comments (10)

November 25, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving!

aww manatee face
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.

Gas time
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.

menu
"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.

sandwich ingredients
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.

>> Continue reading "Bergen, Day 7: Prawn Sandwich Party"...

Posted by roboppy at 1:41 AM | Comments (14)

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previous entries

» 02/06/12: Doodle: Ripe Bananas

» 01/27/12: 'The Girl Who Is Not Eating Everything' Because My Lungs Suck

» 01/22/12: Best New Things I Ate in NYC in 2011

» 12/26/11: Merry (Belated) Christmas from Norway, Plus a Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

» 12/09/11: [Not Food Related] Busted Memory Card: Oh Crap, Now What?

» 12/04/11: Georgian Bread, Home of Awesome Cheese-filled Khachapuri

» 11/25/11: Happy Thanksgiving!

» 11/07/11: Bergen, Day 7: Prawn Sandwich Party

» 10/31/11: Buy the Serious Eats Book! Preferably Now!

» 10/14/11: My Current Favorite Dessert: Cookies-n-Cream Sundae from Dessert Club Chikalicious

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Camera Info

May '10: Canon 7D with a Sigma 18-50mm F2.8 EX DC macro lens
Aug '07 - May '10: Canon 20D
June '06 - Aug '07: Canon Rebel XT
Before June '06: Canon SD 450
I "post process" all my photos in Photoshop to make them suck less. Of course, you need a camera to take semi-decent photos first, but without Photoshop, I am nothing.

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links

Please don’t hate me if I haven’t included you. I tried to whittle this down to a manageable list, but there are just too many food blogs out there that I like! I shall update this list every so often.

Blogs

A Hamburger Today
A Hungry Girl's Guide to Taipei
A Passion for Food
The Amateur Gourmet
Appetite for China
Baking Bites
Beef Aficionado
The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck
Bionic Bites
Blondie and Brownie
Boots in the Oven
The Boy Who Bakes
Brave Tart
Candy Blog
Cha Xiu Bao
Chubby Hubby
Chuck Eats
Comme un Lait Fraise
Crave
David Lebovitz
Deep End Dining
Dessert Comes First
Dumneazu
Eat Drink & Be Merry
Eat to Blog
The Eaten Path
Eating In Translation
Eating Asia
FastFoodr
Fifteen Pickles
Food In Mouth
French Revolution
Fries With That Shake
Grab Your Fork
Great Food Photos
Goldilocks Finds Manhattan
Hello Sandwich
The Hungry Cabbie
I live in a Frying Pan
i nom things
The Impulsive Buy
Just Hungry
The Kitchen Pantry
Law and Food
Lingbo Li
LUNCH
Maps and Fragments
Me So Hungry
Michele Humes
Ms Adventures in Italy
My Camera Eats Food
My Inner Fatty
No Recipes
Noona Blog: Seoul
One Wall Kitchen
Ono Kine Grindz
The Paupered Chef
Paris Breakfasts
Salli Vates
The Scent of Green Bananas
Seoul Eats
Slice
Smitten Kitchen
So Good
Street Foodie
Sui Mai
Suicide Food
Sustainable Table
Swirl and Scramble
Tamarind and Thyme
The Tasty Island
Thursday Night Smackdown
Tommy Eats
The Ulterior Epicure
umami
U.S. Food Policy
The Wandering Eater
We All Go Poopie
World to Table

Non-Blogs

Blogsoop
Brooklyn Chowder Surfer
Cheap Ass Food
Edible Queens
Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down
VendrTV
Serious Eats

Recurring Eating Companions

These friends have lent me their stomach acids on numerous occasions.

Adelyn
Alice
Allen
Chichi
Colin
Dahlia
Diana
Greg
Kåre
Kathy
Lauren
Melissa
Morten
Olivia
Tina
Tristan
Veronica