Here's one of those thoughts. Been eating away at my brain. Just eatin'.

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.

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.

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.)

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!

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.

...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]

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.

This is one of those posts I probably should've written ages ago, but like everything else I should've written ages ago, didn't get written ages ago.

To remind y'all, I work full time at Serious Eats and did a bit of traveling last year to do research for our book.

And that book is NOW! ... HERE! Almost. It officially comes out on November 1, aka tomorrow. That gives you about one more day to pre-order it for $17.98, if you haven't already. Why should you pre-order it? So you can get some complimentary SWAG, specifically a Serious Eats bag and a bookplate autographed by the SE peeps and HAMBONE. THE DOG. HE IS AUTOGRAPHING TOOOOOOO. (We're just giving people what they want. They want us to exploit Hambone's paw.)

Oh, I should probably also mention why you should ... order it in general. Because it's full of info about our favorite breakfasts, sandwiches, desserts, fried foods, pizza, burgers, street food, and other stuff you probably like, along with recipes from Kenji, and a crapton of full-color photos that I spent a bunch of hours editing. (Also, you support my livelihood! I like living!)

So. Please considering buying a book (or five). Thank you!

Anyhoo, if you want a super short version of this post, head to Real Cheap Eats where I wrote about the almighty Cookies-N-Cream Sundae for the site's latest update earlier this week. If not, just look below for the words. I put 'em there for ya so you won't leave me.

Cookie chunks a-plenty.

"I think these cookie chunks may be too large. It's a bit hard to e—"

"NO, THAT IS INCORRECT, IT IS PERFECT, aren't you perfect? YEAH THESE CHUNKS ARE PERFECT."

I'm the crazy second person in this conversation, by the way. And the towering cup above is the thing of perfection: three kinds of cookies, chunkified, and mixed with vanilla bean soft serve. Dessert Club Chikalicious calls this sundae Cookies-n-Cream, but it's nothing like your typical cookies and cream-flavored frozen concoction. The cookie chunks aren't embedded in the soft serve so much as coated in soft serve. This dessert is an excuse to eat a cup of cookie chunks glued together by soft serve, basically.

AND IT IS SO GLORIOUS.

Let's go back to those cookies: The Situation, Situation Dark, and Chocolate Chip. The Situation is a kitchen sink-sort of cookie mixed with chocolate chips, corn chips, peanut butter chips, marshmallow, and pretzel. The Situation Dark has a chocolate cookie base mixed with chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, toffee popcorn, and pretzel. Chocolate chip is ... chocolate chip. The cookies are light and crunchy in some parts, denser and chewier in others. Couple that with the creamy soft serve, it does all kinds of things in your mouth! All the things! ... A few things! Good things. And all this for $6.95.

So my infrequent updates will be even infrequent-er. Sorry. But I will certainly have many things to blog about after this trip, things that, if all goes well, you may be able to read about in the next six months. ... Maybe.

As for why I'm here, my dad and grandparents live here and I haven't visited Taipei in about 12 years; that streak had to be broken. Lee Anne came with me to visit her grandparents and bring me to her favorite eating spots. Together, we will digest SO VERY MUCH. If only Nick were here too; we'll have to tackle his list of recs without him. :(

Ideally I would've mentioned this earlier, but if I have any readers here who'd want to join Lee Anne and me on a food outing this week, email me (roboppy@gmail.com)!

As for the other part of this post's title, I'm visiting Valencia, Spain, from October 25 to 29 for a press trip. Yup, I'm crazy lucky. I doubt I have any readers there, but if you're out there, let me know!

If you had to recommend 5-10 "must try" restaurants, regardless of budget, in NYC, what would they be and why?

When people ask me something like this, I usually respond, "What's the price range? What neighborhood? What cuisine?" to help narrow it down. But there are a handful of places I tend to bring people who are visiting from out of town, no matter the price/neighborhood/cuisine.

I wouldn't label the places below as "must try"—they're more like "a bunch places I like enough to want to go multiple times," mostly moderately priced since that's what I can afford. This isn't a definitive guide to my favorite spots in New York City (that post will take me roughly forever), but I hope it helps!

Shack Burger, you are mine.

Shake Shack: They make my favorite burger in the city. If you're craving a fat, juicy burger topped with bacon and caramelized onion on a brioche bun, this isn't the place, but if you're looking for a fast food-style burger—a thin, single-serving burger with simple toppings (some combination of lettuce, tomato, special sauce, onion, or cheese) on a basic bun—it's the best I've had. A single Shackburger is just the right size to make me feel satiated, which is a relief considering I have a tendency to eat meals that leave me feeling like a whale in a wetsuit. On that note, I also love their Shack Stack, which is gigantic and dripping in cheesy fried 'shroom-n-meat juice goodness.

"Uuuuugggnnnnhhh aaaaahhhhhh arrrrrhhhggu uunnngggh!"

That is the sound of:

1. Being slowly gummed by a toothless lion
2. Being gently prodded in the legs by a bowling pin
3. Being completely taken off guard by a surprise birthday party for the third year in a row

I cannot attest to the first two, so it's the third. You probably figured that out.

Inexpertly made with Dan Awesome's Rage Maker.

Why would I make such uncouth sounds after being showered with love by my friends? Love that still sort of befuddles me a bit because it's, like, a lot? (I still don't think I've done enough to earn it, pretty much. Still workin' on it.) Because...three years in a row! (Recap last year and the year before.) HAVE I LEARNED NOTHING?

(O_O)

The food just kept coming. And coming. And...coming. Until Morten, Kåre, and I were faced with a sort of mini buffet of Norwegian tapas more appropriate for a party twice our size. Whoooops.

WELL THE ONLY SOLUTION IS TO EAT IT ALL, I SUPPOSE.

Why did we end up with craptons of food? Because we weren't in charge of ordering it. Morten invited us to eat at Bryggen Tracteursted—located in Bryggen, more specifically in a schøtstue that was built in 1708—since it was part of the restaurant group he was working for. And since he knew the chef, we received a special meal, "special" meaning "nearly half of the menu." (Amusingly, the menu calls the dishes "savoury smallbits." It also calls them "Norwegian tapas," but "smallbits" is obviously the superior name.)

Now, a bunch of photos.

Bread and spread.

First, an assortment of bread accompanied by oil, Ramsløk butter (a sort of garlicky butter), and bacon fat topped with bacon bits.

Driving to the ferry. And arriving at the ferry!

"I'm in a car! On a boat!"

"Yeah..."

"On a boat!"

"Mmhm..."

Kåre probably didn't respond with such disinterest, but since I can't remember conversations that happened over six months ago, I shall turn to the time-honored practice of "making stuff up."

However, I'm pretty sure my part of the conversation is accurate—the part where I'm really excited about being in a car on a boat. Why? Because I'd never experienced it before—riding in a vehicle, in another vehicle, on water. That's like a cat hitching a ride on a porpoise to get across a river. Exactly like that. Or nothing like that. Something like that?

Mail truck, get on the boat.

...Well. The experience tickled me for some reason. Probably because I'm 500 percent landlubber. Kåre grew up with the ferry experience thanks to a childhood of frequent visits to his family's summer house in Tysnes, an island most easily accessible from Bergen by driving to the southern tip of Os and riding a ferry for half an hour. Which is what Kåre and I did because we were going to spent the night at the house.