The Girl Who Ate Everything

This post originally took place on December 29. I basically wrote the whole thing on the 29th. So why am I posting it nearly two weeks later?

I thought it may have been a bit too negative and crazy-sounding for a post about the rage begat by a sandwich (a...a sandwich!), in addition to it being poorly written. My intention was to tweak it a bit before slapping it on the interwebs. But I didn't get to tweak until...[looks at watch]...January 10 at 2:40 a.m. Time management fail.

Actually, I'm still not happy with this post, but as my standards are quite low at this hour in the day/night/whatever and I didn't want my blog to continue living in 2010 (oh yeah—happy new year, guys!), I bring you...thiiiissss.

Rageguy explanation for the uninitiated.

So. That happened. How'd it happen?

I had a craving for tomato, basil, and mozzarella, between bread. SO FULFILL THIS CRAVING, I DID. Or tried. While browsing through the Sandwich a Day archives on Serious Eats NY in search of a sandwich within walking distance of the office, I found Bluedog Cafe, whose #4 sandwich was described as such:

"Fresh Mozzarella, Roasted Tomatoes & Basil Pesto On Baguette"

And this is what I got.

Nooooooooooooo.

So...um, I originally wrote this post on November 6. Until now, it existed only as a Gmail draft. Similar to how I felt about my sandwich rage post, I thought this came off as too crazy-sounding and ill-composed to be worth unleashing onto the Internet. Also, I hadn't thought of a good way to illustrate the effects of the salad that you will soon read about. But tonight, over two months later, I whipped up an illustration. So here you go.

Last night I had a great dinner with Nick, Melissa, and James at Diner. It was great, aside from the gassy burger hangover I felt for the rest of the night, and mild face and throat swelling in reaction to an allergy I didn't know I had.

But that's not the topic of this post. Nope. It's. RADICCHIO. Subtitle: "OH GOD, WHY."

No, salad, noooooooooooooooo.

So. Although I rarely eat salads, I always get a salad at Diner because they're generally awesome. I've expressed this a few times. Farm fresh greens, eggs, bacon, pickles—some combination of this gets tossed together and coated in the appropriate amount of an appropriate dressing, the ingredients changing with the seasons. Last night's salad was a tricolore salad featuring radicchio, something green, soft boiled egg, and some sort of white beans dressed in an anchovy vinaigrette (can't find the description online; you'll just have to trust my untrustworthy memory). Although I knew I didn't like radicchio, I thought, "Eeeh there's a bunch of other good stuff in it! And these salads are always good! I'll go for it. Also, I'm really hungry after waiting an hour outside for a table."

I had rarely been so excited to dig into a pile of leafy vegetables. So I dug.

And then.

Lil' thing worth noting, maybe: This is the second post I've made today. Here's the first. WOULDN'T WANT YOU TO MISS THAT. I GUESS.

This blog is a constant reminder of my inability to write or edit photographs in a timely manner. I thought about the content of this post for hours before starting on it around 3 a.m. yesterday, and I rewrote this introductory paragraph three times before settling on these two middling sentences. [shoves head under a virtual lawnmower]

What I wanted to start off with was some blah blah-ing about how I ate a gabillion good meals in 2010 that never made it to this blog. That's why I didn't feel like doing a "Best of 2010"-type of post to kick off the new year: If I were only using content from my blog, it would be missing a lot of good stuff, and if I were to put in new content I'd be too daunted by the work it would take to dig out past meals from my brain's crusty fly-ridden pits that it would never get finished.

So...here's one of those bagillion good meals of 2010.

ENTER.

Sake Bar Hagi, a basement-level izakaya in Times Square, is one of those places I'd heard good things about but never felt compelled to eat at. ...Actually, that description applies to most of the places I eventually eat at. But Sake Bar Hagi more so because it contains the word "sake" paired with "bar," which to someone like me—a person whose reaction to the taste of alcohol usually goes something like, "Eeuuuhhhuuuuh, oh god, eeeuhhhbleeuhpoison"—doesn't scream, "EAT HERE."

But that's kind of dumb. Good alcohol is often paired with good food. And after Joyce invited me to at Sake Bar Hagi last November, I realized I've been missing out on a steady stream of awesome izakaya food for years. I'll make sure to rectify that in 2011. And then I'll be known as that annoying customer who never orders drinks.

PIZZA. IZ BEAUTIFUL.

Motorino isn't just my favorite pizzeria in New York City; it's probably my favorite pizzeria in the world.

Not that I've, like, eaten all the pizza in the world. And of course, that opinion is highly influenced by their pizza probably being the pizza I've eaten the most in my adult life*. Which is also influenced by its convenient location. (I'd call Paulie Gee's my very-close-second favorite pizzeria; I just don't go to Greenpoint as much as the East Village. My last dinner there was in September. It's been too long.) Or maybe it's because hours before my latest visit there last Saturday I had been steeping in grumpiness, and the first bite of sweet, creamy buffalo mozzarella on the just-chewy-and-thick-enough crust erased all the grumps, along with any ability to form complete sentences.

"Oh man...pizza....awesome...mozzarella...wha...[gurgle]..."

At least, that's what it sounded like in my head. Greg was sitting across from me; he could tell me whether or not I spoke in complete sentences. I think I did. A few times. (Thankfully, the success of our conversation doesn't rely on complete sentences. Our friendship is mostly based on sound effects, awkward pauses, and topics relating to poop.)

We shared the margherita ($14) and cherry stone clams ($17) pies. The mozzarella took the margherita from, "Mm, this is good, yup," to, "I see flying pastel rainbow ponies, magical ponies, omg it is so beautiful." You know how sometimes baby animals taste good in ways that older flesh cannot compare? This tasted like...baby mozzarella. Light, tender baby mozzarella plops, replete with the the flavors of youth and innocence. In buffalo milk-based cheese form.

Um, yeah, anyway. Good cheese would be all for naught without a good crust. Of course, the crust is awesome: puffy, light, flavorful, soft on the inside, crisp on the outside, not so chewy that it makes my jaw hurt, not so thick that it drowns out the toppings, not so thin that it can't stand up to the toppings or become a puddle of soggy dough. Sometimes when eating pizza I can't finish the outer rim of crust (erm, I mean cornicione), but at Motorino I made sure every bit of crust found its fizzling death in my belly of stomach acids.