The Girl Who Ate Everything

I met up with the lovely Kate on Friday morning for...a peaceful stroll in the park.

NO, FOOD YOU FOOL! We eat! That's it! With a bit of dabbling in other activities like "walking" and "breathing".

macaron day!...was not that day

Like the good pseudo-food guide that I am, I directed us towards Pierre Herme for an indulgent snack. The store had been taken over by a crowned and winged macaron homme thingy. I suppose the crown meant it was the king of macarons and the wings meant that it was flitting about in macaron heaven, or that as the king of macarons it naturally had the power of flight. I don't know. The eyebrows and evidence of nasal passages kinda put me off (surely this wouldn't happen in Japan where two bold vapid eyes and a simple line for a mouth are all that are required for maximum squeal-inducing cuteness), but the proclamation of A DAY OF MACARONS was brain tingling intriguing, the main problem being that I was leaving on March 17th and macaron day was on March 20th.

[insert sigh]

Update (4/6/07): The credit situation may all be a MISALLOCATION PROBLEM, which would be great. Because then I can stop feeling like death. But it's not 10000% confirmed yet. Argh. Thanks to anyone who has sent me a thoughtful email. Or unthoughtful—that's okay too. CROSS YER FINGERS!

macarons

On Sunday I went macaron hunting with Tina and four of her friends to see if anything could compare to the macarons whose awesomeness can bring you to tears. Conclusion: not really, but every place was oddly better than Bouchon Bakery in the macaron making department and we weren't terribly disappointed as we didn't actually think anything would reach the perfection of PH. (I guffaw at the thought. Guffaw! Like so: [GUFFAWS]) I will eventually write my macaron-laden entry, but for now check out Tina's excellent NYC macaron rundown and account of all the other stuff we ate that day.

Why don't I just write my entry now? Oh. Well. It has to do with the reason I don't feel like answering all the emails in my inbox right now; I am just so not in the mood. I can think of two reasons for this, one kind of personal, the other being related to being totally pwnd by NYU.

"Let's meet at 9 AM."

9 AM? What the...huh? Is the sun up at that time? I can wake up before 9 AM, but the idea of being on the other side of Manhattan on a street that enters the three digit numbers wearing non-pajama attire while being semi-functioning is another matter. It may not be akin to climbing Mount Everest, but hey, it's my Everest. The Everest for pathetic lazy people.

Silver Moon Bakery

...WHO LOVE MACARONS! 2000% macaron lover Tina suggested the 9 AM meeting time at Silver Moon Bakery to start our quest to find the best macaron in NYC. She somehow convinced her friends, Helen, Joo Hee, Giulia, Julie, and Seungmi, to join us on our gluttonous adventure. Not that convincing someone to eat at a bunch of bakeries for a day is like pulling teeth. Out of an angry hippo.

I love kim bap

Number -1: I love kim bob bap! Bop! I SO DO NOT KNOW KOREAN.

Number 0: Help me with this thing for school...

Take my survey about online food-related communities PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I've got enough responses, thanks!

And feel free to leave related comments at the end of this entry.

Number 1: I want to update and certainly have enough material to do so, but I don't feel like I have the time to dedicate myself at the moment (around 1:30 PM on Wednesday). If I don't update for a while, it's because it's a busy week. Possibly a busy two weeks. Just bear with me; I'm graduating soon. I'm supposed to be doing a lot more homework than I actually am, so there's some clogging in the old PROCRASTINATION pipes. They're filled with...the interwebs.

Number 2: The credit thing with NYU seems to have been cleared up. Missallocation of credits? Uh...okay, JUST LET ME GRADUATE, thanks.

Andrew Bird

Number 3: I heart Andrew Bird.

Yup, that's it.

THANK YOU, NOW I HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL, OH DEAR.

Update (a few hours later): I should've put these links up the first time, but here are the sites that I mention in my survey:

Chowhound
Egullet
Food Candy
Menuism
Hngry
Bake Space
Yummr
Group Recipes
Open Source Food
Coastr
Serious Eats

For those who are wondering, the sites that I didn't know existed until I sought them out for the purposes of my essay are Hngry, Bake Space, and Coastr.

So...in about three hours I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had received over 200 responses to my survey. From real people.

First thought: "What the..."

Second thought: "...Holy crap, cool!" [looks at results] "Wow, my survey was so poorly written!" (I forgot some obvious choices for the questions that many people have filled in under "Other". Oops.)

Third thought: "My food blog doesn't get that many visitors."

Fourth thought: "Hmmm, Serious Eats..."

So thank you, Lia and SE for directing people to my survey! In anyone is wondering, I didn't ask to be linked; Lia just links me from the bottom of her heart. :]

As I sit here, more and more responses keep coming in. Damn. You guys are amazing. KEEP EM COMING! Soon I will reward you with amateur writing of the highly unquality! Just you wait.

hold the vowels

My latest Gothamist post is up. Contribute to the burger madness!

Also, as Doug pointed out, yes, having my survey linked from Serious Eats skews the results a bit. 63% of the people who've taken it are members of SE, for instance. But it wasn't a very thoroughly made survey to begin with. So! [insert shrug, smiles] I've gotten more than 700 responses so far, which is amazing. Anyway, even with just my blog I'm targeting a food community conscious crowd to begin with, so I think the results are still valuable to my essay. Which is currently very far away from completion.

[sigh]

I'll have a real entry coming this weekend, promise!

You probably noticed that I dragged out my entries about my week-long vacation in Paris over a three week period (counting the entries I made in Paris), meaning that there are a few lost weeks of NYC fooding tucked away in my toxic subcutaneous later of fat (in addition to my flickr archives). In this entry I'll try to recount the best and worst of what I've eaten, hopefully succinctly enough so that you don't fall asleep reading it and that I don't stay up for the next few hours writing it. (Post-editing note: I wrote this over the course of a few days. Yes, I am just that slow.)

So. Let's go back...to March 19th.

way too much food

I spent my Monday after I got back from Paris eating lunch with Tina. We capped off our meal at NY Kom Tang Soot Bul Kal Bi with dessert at Bouchon Bakery because French pastries are a natural progression from hot stone bibimbap. In my world.

This doesn't really concern anyone but me...

...so this is just some advice.

I decided to dump all the junk comments from my database through PhpMyAdmin. I'm no MySQL pro (I'm a few light years away from that), but I have a very basic understanding of how to get PhpMyAdmin to do my bidding.

So. I put in a command that should've deleted all the junk comments. After waiting ALL DAY for my database to not poop on me (I could use much more vulgar imagery here to illustrate my frustration, but I'll spare you), it finally went through and deleted some thousands of comments. Wee!

You know how we live in this huge country (well, besides those of you who don’t) that has a bunch of states all smooshed up next to one another (50 the last time I checked, although there are those pesky two that are way out there…gallivanting) and there are just so many states that you don’t know where they all are (you don’t even remember the names of all of them), but you at least know where NY/NJ (because you live there) and you’re not very familiar with New England because anything north of NY (hell, anything north of NYC) is scary and far and cold and possibly infested with something that is largely contained within New England, like…American History, or something else that tortured you during high school?

YOU KNOW???

When fellow Disneyland devotee Charlie invited me up to South Norwalk to go chocolate hunting with him and his foodie friend Lydia at Chocopologie last Saturday, my first thought was, “Yeah, Charlie and chocolate, SWEEET!” before realizing that I didn’t know where South Norwalk was. A quick search on Google and at the Metro-North website told me that it was in Connecticut. What in the…I didn’t even know how far CT was, and I doubt I had ever been there before (although I may have driven through it). Charlie was somewhat appalled when he found out I had never ventured to CT. Hey, if I had friends who lived there and knew that it contained chocolate eating possibilities, maybe I would’ve been there by now. Before I just thought of it as, “Hey, that’s a state I heard a bunch of people live in.”

So it turns out South Norwalk is only an hour away by train, which would explain why it’s worth it for some people commute from there to NYC. For about $20 (round-trip off-peak) I had the pleasure of sliding my bum on nearly friction-less seats for 60 shaky minutes (Metro-North trains aren’t very smooth).

OMG, HISTORY

I was amused to see that history only existed to the left of this sign, which made me more curious to see what would happen if I foolishly wandered right-ward in my quest for anti-history.

store front

Sadly I wouldn’t get to defy the sign. Lydia and Charlie soon applied blunt force to my head and shoved me into picked me up in a red rental car and whisked me away to Fritz Knipschildt’s little chocolate factory. …Which was about a 2 minute drive away. (You could easily walk there from the train station.)

GIMMEH CHICKEN!

About four weeks ago (yes, I know I am very, very behind here) I met up with Jeanne, on vacation from California, and her friend Stephanie to eat at Bon Chon, one of many Korean fried chicken joints that have been popping up lately. Or later than lately. I didn't even know fried chicken was a popular dish in Korea until I read the NYT article. Even after reading the article I was only slightly interested in checking out the craze; even though I like fried chicken, I'm not crazy about it.

But this is not the fried chicken I used to eat at Popeye's and Roy Rogers when I was a young little fat-blob-in-training (oh, how the training paid off). Korean fried chicken is really really...awesome.

classy!

Bon Chon sits on the second floor of a building that otherwise looks boring, and by "boring" I mean "lacking in food". The elevator was not the most promising entrance with its hastily taped on sign, as though Bon Chon were just a temporary fried chicken joint filling in for whatever was officially inscribed underneath the sign.

Update (5/1): For those of you who visit this site regularly (!!?), I just want you to know that this is my last week of finals/presentations/academic goo, thus I probably won't update this week. I'll try, but I can't promise anything! GO AWAY, I HAVE NOTHING OF SUBSTANCE TO OFFER YOU! [goes into a corner and cries]

not my burger, but it sure looks nice

My latest Gothamist post about Landmarc is up. Read more about Landmarc at The Wandering Eater and Ed Levine Eats. I'm relieved that for once my post hasn't provoked any trolls in the Gothamist community. (Or did I just jinx myself?...)

So...I'm afraid this isn't a foodie post. Next time I will l have one. I hope. You'll be rewarded for sticking with me at some point.