When you live in New York City, it's easy to overlook popular, tourist destination restaurants that are actually good. Take Katz's, the over century-year-old home to hefty meatpiles featuring pastrami, corned beef, brisket, and other sliced or ground up animal parts. It's one of the city's most famous restaurants; you don't need me to tell you to go there.

But every now and then, I need people to remind me to go there. Because two years went by between my most recent Katz's visit in March and the one before that. And thus I was reminded of what I'm missing when I don't eat at Katz's:

Reuben. I love you.

That's half of their Reuben sandwich: a floppily stacked mound of hand sliced, meltingly fatty, tender pastrami (by request; the default is corned beef) topped with sauerkraut, a few slices of Swiss, and a slathering of Russian dressing for $16.55. Sure, the pastrami doesn't need extras, but they don't hurt. It's a different kind of awesome from eating a plain pastrami or corned beef sandwich. Also, messier.

Although $16.55 may sound like a lot for a sandwich, consider that half a sandwich should overly satisfy most normal-sized stomachs—and the sandwich comes with a generous plate of pickles to further pad your belly—making it an awesome dinner-for-two for about $8 per person. I say that's a steal. Why the hell don't I eat here more often?

Sometimes, this is how I feel.

"THOSE ARE THE CHIPS I WANT. RIGHT THERE. RIGHTTHEEEERRRRE."

I don't usually think that loudly while shopping at Whole Foods, but my bag of chips was right there, and I wasn't expecting to find it. What I wanted was, quite specifically, a small-ish bag of tortilla chips fit for one woman and a bowl of guacamole (as opposed to the more typical one-pound bags fit for a Super Bowl party-for-20), filled with chips of the thick and freshly fried variety. My shopping basket was chip-less as I reached the store's final frontier of prepared foods and steam tables. I was ready to give into subpar tortilla chips.

But on top of the salad bar was a row of small, lunch-sized paper bags filled with freshly fried tortilla chips—"Our Own Homemade Tortilla Chips," according to the Whole Foods-branded sticker on the bag. The chips looked appropriately golden and thick. Could...could it be? Could I be this close to filling my mouth with the painfully sharp shards of crunchy, corny awesomeness I so madly craved? I could see my future in those chips, the grand night of tortilla-chip-and-homemade-guacamole that would ensue, aka "EPIC ROBYN PARTY FOR ONE."

And then, as soon as I got home and dumped all my stuff on the ground because that's where stuff goes (my mom didn't teach me that; I learned it on my own, after many years of honing my dumping technique), I hastily shoved a chip in my mouth. And that high I was riding—the high that comes when you get something you really wanted but didn't expect—suddenly stopped. And, following the laws of physics, even though this is metaphorical, I was flung off into a wall of disappoint (which is a bit different from disappoinment, but I don't feel like explaining that now). After one bite, the chips crumbled like my dreams-of-one-second-ago. The chips looked hearty, but it was a lie; their texture was brittle. They looked corn-alicious, but their flavor was wan and marginally salted. And then the ingredient list gave away their substandard origins: They were made of flour tortillas.

Mei Li Wah

UPDATE (5/5/12): Just days after writing this post, I must dock Mei Li Wah a few points. :C Last night I went there around 8:30 p.m. only to find that they don't make rice noodles that late—thus no rice noodle roll-wrapped crullers for my friend and me. Make sure to go earlier for rice noodle action. We also tried their "Big Bun" stuffed with pork, chicken, mushroom, hard boiled egg, and sausage, but it tasted like one of the ingredients had died and infused everything else with the mild scent of decay.

In my mind, there's only one appropriate reaction to reading the words "Fried Salad (3 Pcs.)" on a menu:

"Holy shit what is a fried salad what what what oh my I AM DEFINITELY ORDERING THAT."

If you though the same thing, great! We are obviously very mature adults with progressive curiosities, like a modern-day Archimedes. Before I take you on a magical journey to reveal the mysteries of the salad, let us indulge in a celebratory fist bump. [bump]

As for the rest of you who didn't think the same thing...well. I guess you can come too. TAKE MY HAND I WASHED IT AND EVERYTHING, JUST FOR YOU...

All I knew about Mei Li Wah's fried salad before I ordered it was that it could be measured in pieces and each piece was worth $1.316. Otherwise, it was a mystery. A fried, oily mystery. I assumed it also involved fried vegetables. Or fried toppings. Or perhaps a variety of fried crust bits, tossed with dressing.

If you're wondering what to cook a lobster in, I highly suggest against this:

Lobster, you're really not going to like this.

I mean, a clear steamer works, but it's also a sadistic viewing chamber into your lobster's final dance—or lethargic flails, more like—with death. Understandably. I too would flail a bit if I were being cooked alive.

And then one and a half hours later, we feasted on lobster rolls! Steam Chamber of Death was just a forgotten blip of the past! Yay!

But...let's go back in time a bit.

Kåre's on a boat.

Last May I visited Boston with Kåre to visit Adelyn, one of our most favorite people in the world. I hadn't been to Boston in over a decade*, despite that it's close to New York City and seemingly every college student in the Tri-state area hops the Chinatown bus to Boston at some point to visit their army of friends who goes to college there. Of course, people also visit Boston if they don't know people there; it's a major city with...rich history...and stuff...to do.

* The last time I went to Boston (from New Jersey) was in 9th grade. ...To see a Beck concert. And to meet an Internet friend. To say I was a bit obsessed with Beck and the internet friend is an understatement. I thought I'd be a raging Beck fan forever and be friends with that person forever, neither of which happened. GUYS, REMEMBER HOW WEIRD IT WAS TO BE A TEENAGER? REALLY WEIRD. I AM SUPER GLAD THAT IS OVER.

But the main reason I wanted to visit Boston was to see Adelyn. I didn't care much about what else we did; we could hang out in a fetid landfill, and as long as Adelyn was there, it'd still be fun. (We did not hang out in a fetid landfill.) I didn't do much in the ways of food research, or, um, anything-not-food research.

Groupon helped us plan our first activity though: a trip on the Boston Lobster Tour. Adelyn found a nice deal where we could take the one-hour-ish tour around Boston Harbor for $90, 50 percent off the normal $180 price tag. Throw in the prospect of fresh lobsters—you get to keep whatever the captain pulls up—and it sounded like a fine deal.

"Do you feel healthier since going on your diet?"

This is the question I've heard the most in the last few months. I mean, aside from basic questions like, "How's it going?" or, "Did you go to bed at 3 again?" or, "What are you eating? Can I eat that?" (which is only asked by Hambone, the official Serious Eats dog, and it's not so much spoken as desperately transmitted through his glistening puppy eyes).

My not so encouraging answer: "Not really. Maybe less asthma, but otherwise I feel about the same." Not that I expect drastic changes so soon; it's only been about one and a half months since I started my healthier diet to prevent allergic reactions to food. The rough guidelines:

• No deep fried food (Alas, after a month of avoiding french fries, I've caved in two times so far.)
• No spicy food (I've cheated on this a few times too, but unlike with the fried food, it was accidental)
• No pizza (pretty easy to stick to since I didn't eat much pizza in the first place)
• Wheat only once a week (At first I wanted to cut it out completely, but it was too damn hard. And I must admit I ate wheat two days this week. Also, I still use soy sauce with wheat in it. I keep forgetting to look for the non-wheat kind.)
• Fewer non-wheat products (I tend to eat rice when I go out, but I've stopped cooking it at home.)
• More fruits and vegetables

Imagine a pen of a dozen playful kittens. Magical kittens made of marshmallows, with delicately velvety fur covering their cushiony, sugar-scented skin. Now, imagine you're lying in this pool of warm kittens. (If you're allergic to cats, also imagine that you're not allergic to cats. And if you don't like cats, imagine that you like cats.) You're surrounded by tender feline fluffballs hobbling over your torso with their nubbin paws and legs, gently licking your face with their wee tongues, overall just cuddling the shizz out of you, resulting in paroxysms of giggles, or permanent happy Tom Haverford face, or a bit of both.

Put that joy into food form and you've got Ample Hills' ooey gooey butter cake ice cream: small chunks of St. Louis ooey gooey butter cake (more commonly called gooey butter cake) suspended in vanilla ice cream. When it's cold, ooey gooey cake isn't especially ooey or gooey, but you can taste its potential for ooey gooey-ness. Its texture is less cake, more brownie—specifically, like a prized corner slice of brownie, blessed with maximum crustiness and chewiness by the pan's edges. Imagine that bit, condensed, sans chocolate, with more butter. Yes; that's the stuff. Despite its temperature, frozen ooey gooey butter cake tastes like sunshine. Sweet, buttery sunshine.

A few months ago, Diana told me she wanted to go to Berlin. And I told her I did too. And then I invited Kåre. And thus, we are all going to Berlin from April 5 to 12.

We haven't really done any of that "planning what we're going to do" stuff yet—for one, we might take a train outside the city for a day or two, place TBD, time TBD, everything TBD—but we're definitely going because we already bought our plane tickets. And while we will research activities, places to visit, and restaurants to eat at, I'd rather ask you guys for advice first. Since I obviously don't know anything. And many of you are well traveled and have less lumpy brains than mine.

So! Have any of you guys been to Berlin? Or perhaps live there? I'd love food recommendations (I won't be super strict about my diet), but recommendations for...well, anything would be awesome.

Thank you for any help you can give me!

Egg sandwich from Cha Chan Tang

Yup, a simple egg sandwich. Usually a folded omelet-thing or mass of semi-scrambled egg in between square slices of plain ol' white bread with the crusts cut off. Sitting on a menu next to more interesting items like salt and pepper squid or baked ham and chicken in cream sauce with spaghetti, it doesn't scream, "ORDER ME!" to the casual eater. It's a weenie snack of a sandwich that provides two textures: egg-soft and bread-soft. (Sometimes the bread is toasted, in which case you've got some crispness in there too, but it's mostly soft.)

But damn, how I love that soft-on-soft. Out of all the kinds of egg sandwiches in the world, this one is my favorite. That sort of buttery, fluffy scrambled egg mass on soft, squishy Chinese white bread. Sans crusts. That's important. There's no reason five-year-olds and tea sandwiches should get all the joys of a crust-less existence.

My attachment to these egg sandwiches may be sentimental—when I was a kid my mom made me egg sandwiches the way other moms made their kids peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—but ignoring my plaintive-grasping-of-childhood thing, I'm pretty sure these sandwiches taste awesome. Besides, my mom's egg sandwiches weren't very good. (She knows it's true. The whole wheat bread she used was the antithesis of Chinese white bread. And she sure as hell didn't slice the crusts off.)

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]