Objectified

I object. I object to the phrase "Yoga Bunny." Also to the use of the word "Detox."

I do not object to "Sparkling" or "Grape." I do not object to any of the four ingredients, nor the fact that there are only four ingredients.

I do object to this company being cagey about the nature of the drink's "Herb Infusions." And I object to the way it was pretty much flat (not very sparkly) when I opened the can.

I can't say that I object much to the taste. It's mostly grape, plus the tang of "can," and a bit of mystery. But I don't not object. It just didn't quite make it for me. Maybe if they'd delivered on the bubbles.

-------

Eating Smorgasburg: June 16, 2012

Saturday was a glorious day in NYC. We started it off by picking up our CSA share, then upped the ante with a relatively quick trip to foodie flea market Smorgasburg (I took this picture in the adjacent East River State Park). It was quick, sure, but I still had time to stuff myself with...







Brooklyn Piggies' pigs in a blanket. We got three (2 spicy, one original) with BBQ sauce. BEST OF! Seriously, these are awesome. Eat them, eat them. I didn't want to share.



I always want to drink every flavor of lemonade and limeade being served by The Stand. Today we chose strawberry-rhubarb.Though I don't think the two should be baked together, I love them smushed into lemonade together. And I love that the drinks at The Stand are never too sweet. They're perfectly refreshing.



Not pictured: another olive breadstick. Here's a correction, too. These are not from TomCat Bakery, as stated in that previous post. They're from Commerce. Sorry for the error, Commerce! The baby and I still love how tender and flavorful these are. 


 
The Maine lobster roll from Red Hook Lobster Pound might be the most expensive item at Smorgasburg ($16). I'd heard great things about it, and I finally bit the bullet. You know what? I think I'm just not that into lobster. The pickle was great. The toasted bun and toppings were swell.  The lobster was pretty good, but I kept thinking, "I wish there was less lobster and it cost less." You know what? I think I just wanted a hot dog. If you're a lobster lover, you'd probably love this. Turns out I'm not.



Two pieces of buttermilk fried chicken and cheddar waffle with maple-vinegar dipping sauce by BFC (from the folks at Buttermilk Channel). I've had Buttermilk Channel chicken and waffles before. They are famous in their neighborhood -- and beyond -- for good reason. This chicken was moist and the breading was delicious. It was a great choice (by Dan) to round out the savory part of our meal this time around.



Now, on to the desserts! We started with one of Nana's (from Cecile Dyer of Pies ’n’ Thighs) frozen bananas with crushed almonds, coconut, and sea salt.  The woman who applied the toppings said it was only the second frozen banana she had made, so she was clearly new to the stand. Her technique wasn't great, and most of our coconut, nuts, and salt blew away on the wind (the photo above is of our banana's "best side"). When she was finished, she asked the woman training her, "How was that? Good, right?" and the trainer actually said no. But we still had to pay $6 for it, so...that was a bummer. Not worth the price (though I expect she'll get better at making them). One thing I did like about it was that the banana wasn't frozen solid. I've gotten them before (from other vendors) and find them really hard to eat if you have to saw at the banana to bite through it.

 

A "Strawberry Supreme" ice cream sandwich. Visiting The Good Batch to see what they're offering has become a tradition. This excellent ice cream sandwich featured brown butter cookies, strawberry semifreddo, fresh strawberries, and Adirondack Creamery vanilla ice cream. It was good, but that salty lemon cookie ("Laughter and Lemon") of a few weeks ago still haunts my dreams...


-------

Smorgasburg - May 12, 2012

This past weekend, my parents were visiting. I made sure to take them to local food market Smorgasburg, as a visit there is quickly becoming a near-weekly tradition. So, what did I eat this week?



Mighty Quinn's pulled pork sandwich (the "big" is $9). The sausage that is supposed to be included on this sandwich wasn't quite ready at 11am, when I arrived at Smorgasburg. That's no big deal. I knew I was taking that risk when I got in line. This was my first eat of the day because the line gets long quickly. I'm not sure I'd have the patience to wait in it as long as some people do, no matter how good these are. And they are good. I especially liked the flavor of the bbq sauce used.

Beware! If you don't ask for a small sandwich, you get the big one.  Also, the guy who made it told me the sandwich would be a dollar off because of the missing sausage, but no one told the guy taking the money. I'm not mad about any of that, though. It was delicious and I'm glad it was big.



Hash browns with Grafton cheddar and pickled jalapeños,  accompanied by bacon mayonnaise, from the Egg Hash Bar. From what I could see, fried eggs were not listed on the menu, but several people ordered them alongside the hash. These hash browns are an excellent new addition to Smorgasburg. I'd visit this booth again and again.

Not Pictured: The Stand Rhubarb Rose limeade. Wow! The baby made an awesome sour face when he tried it, then asked for more. It was really tasty.


Olive breadstick from ?? Dan bought this for the little guy, but we shared. Anyone recognize it? [Update: reader Mechanic says they're from TomCat. Update2: They're actually from Commerce.]


Margarita Sandwich from The Good Batch. The cookies outshone the ice cream, but the whole package was really tasty.

I looked everywhere for horchata, to have as a parting beverage, but didn't see a stand selling it this week. I miss you, horchata!!

Have you been to Smorgasburg? What should I try next?

-------

Last Week at Smorgasburg - May 5, 2012

Mozz Shop (Danny Lyu of Cemita and Matt Lief of Landhaus) "Italian Corn Dog": sausage and fresh mozzarella in a polenta batter. This is a great item. The cheese is melty and the sausage divine.


Rose Verbena tea (without tapioca "bubbles") by ThirsTea. A little weak, but still refreshing.

 
Shorty Tang and Sons cold sesame noodles. I overheard several people raving about these, and they sounded like a must-try. They didn't disappoint. A solid offering, without pretense. You get a good-sized portion for your money, too.


Peanut Butter Black and White Ice Cream Sandwich from The Good Batch: cocoa waffle cookies, housemade honey with peanut butter and sea salt, chocolate and vanilla ice cream.  I couldn't taste the honey, but it was still good. The previous visit's lemon cookie ice cream sandwich is my favorite so far.


Spicy Pineapple Lemonade from The Stand. A bit odd, in a good way. Not too spicy. The beverages choices at Smorgasburg are just as exciting as the food.

Do you think I can manage to try something from every vendor by the end of the season?

-------

From the Vaults: Eating Egypt: Day 7: Our last day in Cairo

I've been meaning to get this post up for about a year and a half!  It's the final day's food highlights from our trip to Egypt.  And it's nothing so complicated that it should have taken this long.

1. We bought an nut-topped ice cream from a shop down the street from our hotel...


2. We had a great mango smoothie from the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Zamalek, where we bought our wireless card...









We walked around the tentmakers' market and actually didn't see any other tourists there. That was a nice change of pace after the overcrowded Khan el-Khalili market. We even paid a local college student (who, though he didn't ask for money, probably wished to make a few bucks and practice his English) a little money to be our guide. I was suspicious of his sales pitch, which started as soon as we got out of our cab, but it actually turned out to be a great way to spend the afternoon. Dan got to take some pictures inside one of the mosques while I (a woman, and not allowed to enter through the front of the building) sat outside and watched passing children peek at me surreptitiously. We both saw a lot of amazing architecture.

3. On the street, as we walked, a fruit vendor handed me a banana.  Our guide said, as I tried to refuse it, "Oh no, it is a gift! You'll insult him if you don't take it." So I took it home and ate it in our hotel room.  It looked like a banana -- that's it. But it tasted better than U.S. supermarket bananas. The fruit in Egypt really is superb.




4. Our final dinner was served that evening, on the veranda of a fancy hotel on Zamalek, overlooking the Nile. There, we saw a local soccer star and enjoyed amazing food. I'll have to check my notes to see if I have the name of this hotel written down. I'll update here if I do. Once again, I could have made a meal of the appetizers alone. I really just wanted bowls and bowls of the garlic spread. The night grew dark as our little grill flamed. Everything was perfect.

-------

Day seven at last! My recounting of our trip to Egypt is now, sadly, complete.  Thanks to Adam and Omar, our thoughtful and well-connected hosts, we had an incredible time. Truly, I'd say we didn't eat a bad meal while there -- and we suffered no gastrointestinal distress (no small feat for some international destinations)!

Ah, Cairo. I will always dream of your baby eggplants, garlic dips, and tangerine juice. I hope to return someday.

-------

Pick-Me-Up

My morning coffee (and afternoon coffee and evening coffee) is hot chocolate.  I don't particularly enjoy the flavor of coffee and I love not being dependent on the caffeine of coffee or tea (though I do also like tea), so I often drink cocoa when I want a hot beverage.  

I'm sometimes given intriguing flavors of drinking chocolate as gifts.  One of the more recent was this Belgian white chocolate pictured above.  It's smooth and unassuming, heated up in milk (and my favorite office mug). Despite one co-worker teasingly announcing that my frequent breakfast of oatmeal and hot chocolate is "baby food," I'm not giving up this habit.
------

Don't Call it a Juice Cleanse.

Though I'm intrigued by many areas of holistic and "alternative medicine" (etc.), I'm pretty suspicious of fasting, cleansing, and [non-drug-related] detoxing.  Most of the time, these three things seem to be crash diets in disguise, and I'm not fond of dieting, either.  It may not be accurate or fair, but I will admit to jumping to the conclusion that many people doing cleanses secretly just want to lose 5-10 lbs.  I do think fasting is interesting as a spiritual discipline and/or form of protest (and sometimes necessary before medical tests*), but I hope I never convince myself to fast, cleanse, or detox to lose weight. 
 
Call it laziness if you want -- I certainly don't find myself to be disciplined enough to stick to a strict plan when it comes to food -- but I'm also not interested in regimented eating.  I eat basically what I want to eat (and can afford to eat) and I rarely feel guilty.  It's not because I'm not vain or insecure, either, and it's certainly not because I eat only healthy foods (as you can see on this site). If you want to, you can say I'm "just jealous" of the people who drop 6 pounds on "the Lemonade Diet" and feel super-energetic on day 4 (or whatever).

As far as "detoxing" goes, I trust my body to process what I eat and I know it will do a better job if I eat more things that are unprocessed and natural. Doctors seem to agree.  I have no doubt that it is good to eat in a mindful way, but I find it easier to swallow (so to speak) the idea that the best sort of "cleanse" one could do would involve eating a lot of fruits, vegetables, healthy fats, and whole grains.  I haven't read anything that convinces me that it is necessary to fast or cleanse on a regular basis.

All this said (and said and said), I was given (not by the company, but by an unafilliated friend) a BluePrintJuice cleanse drink and BluePrintBar.  And since I am happy to snack on food created for "cleansing" if it means I get a blog post out of it, I tried them both.

The drink? "Yellow Lemon Water Cayenne Agave."  You know, something about the inclusion of the word "yellow" on the packaging throws me off a little.  "Yellow" is not a food.  It makes me think of artificial coloring.  Not sure why they'd include "yellow" in the name. Are there other colors of lemons? Anyway, it didn't taste bad.  I liked the small amount of spice.  The lemon is pretty palatable, like lemonade, and I prefer its slight tartness to overly sweet commercial lemonades.  BluePrint's cleanse program has been described on a lot of other blogs, and most reviewers have described this as one of the better flavors of juice in the program.

The bar? "Cherry Orange Almond Date."  I was prepared to dislike this, as I do not trust "health food bars." I typically assume something "raw, vegan, wheat free, gluten free, soy free, and kosher" will be tasteless and/or terrible, but it was quite good!  The cherry flavor was the strongest, and it was bright and fresh.  Almond and orange both came through well, and balanced the cherry.  I didn't taste the dates as much, but they lent a pleasantly thick sort of texture to the bar.  I like that it doesn't contain any sweeteners, sulphur, or preservatives.



My verdict?  I won't be "cleansing" my system via an expensive program of pre-bottled (but otherwise unprocessed) cold-press juices any time soon, and I don't think I'm much healthier for having eaten the bar (though the packaging tells me that cherry "contains melatonin, which helps regulate sleep patterns, prevents memory loss, and delays the aging process"), but I'd snack on either item again.  Score one for fad diets!




*I always eat a doughnut after my annual physical, to apologize to my stomach for the pre-checkup emptiness.

-------

As the rest of the world already knows

Yup.  Real sugar does taste better.  But the can looks ugly when you write "Throwback" all over the vintage packaging.

-------

No Line? So Fine.

The problem with the original Shake Shack in Madison Square Park is that the lines are almost always ridiculously long.  When it opened in 2004, I was working nearby and managed to get in on the ground floor of the phenomenon.  The frozen custard "concretes," which are like Blizzards, and cheese fries were my special loves.  But as the lines grew longer, I stopped going.  I wasn't going to give up most of an hour-long lunch break waiting to place my order.  The food is good, but not good enough to justify the wait. 



Now, Shake Shack is expanding across this city and into others.  Until today, I had yet to try any of the new locations.  I guess I assumed the long line in Madison Square would be replicated at each.  But, happily, I see that I was wrong.  After an early afternoon at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (closed to the public on Mondays, but I have a hook-up!) seeing, among other things, the Alexander McQueen retrospective, we walked over to the Shake Shack on 86th Street.  It was about 4pm, so perhaps the time was a factor, but there was no line at all!



Dan's burger was good, he reported. My fried mushroom burger, filled with gooey melted cheese and topped with crisp onion and tomato and lettuce and pickles, was excellent.  The cheese fries were fresh, warm, and swell.  Dan's root beer didn't disappoint.  My lemonade was perfect. Our Coffee Bean Brownie (coffee-caramel-brownie-vanilla) concrete was sweet and smooth.  And, to make things even better, there was outdoor seating in a public plaza adjacent to the restaurant.  And the bathroom had a changing station.  Golly! What an afternoon of happy flavors and thoughts!



So maybe I won't wait in line for it, but I will take the train.

-------

Did I mention...?

Spicy cocoa?

I know it's not hot chocolate weather (in NYC, anyway) anymore, but I meant to recommend this fair trade cocoa to y'all.  I thought I mentioned it months ago and must have been mistaken.


------

Oh, yeah. And I drank one of these.

Yeah, so, I had a Shamrock Shake from McDonald's in March.  They can be hard to find in NYC, but I found it at the joint just around the corner from my house.

It wasn't bad, BUT it was clearly just a vanilla shake with some sort of colored flavoring mix stirred into it.  I could tell because it hadn't been stirred very well, so it was white and streaky at the bottom. I guess the woman who prepared my shake doesn't consider herself an artisan.  Or something.

Also, the whipped cream on top? Complete overkill.

-------

"We'll eat you up, we love you so."

Here's to the people and restaurants who provided special snacks and meals in the first several weeks after I gave birth to my son (three weeks ago today).

• My smarty-pants husband had Thai delivered from Cheers for the two of us, our doula, and the midwife, an hour or two after our home birth.
   
• Moss, Rachel, and Hero brought fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, biscuits, and slices of pie from Pies 'n' Thighs for dinner that first night.  Turns out that two pieces of fried chicken was EXACTLY what I wanted after 8 1/2 hours of labor.
  
  
• Nick came by with dark beer (good for milk production, they say) and ice cream and chips and...numerous other good things.  Matthew C. also brought beer (which turned out to be more for my husband than for me).
  
  
• Tim and Holly made lasagna and fennel salad, and delivered it with chocolate cake (and brought their gorgeous 6-month old daughter).
  
  
• David and Molly donated homemade chicken pot pies, ready to cook, and chocolate-coconut hand pies (pictured above).  Oh, yum!
  
  
• Carmine's was the first place we "ate out" with the baby.  We only purchased two slices of pizza at the counter, but they still let us sit in the back (which is usually reserved for people ordering from the menu), away from the construction noise on the street.

Inedible but Lovely "special mention" goes to Willow and August's cherry blossoms and two bunches of flowers from Matt C. -- not to mention all the other friends who stopped by or mailed cards and gifts of rattles, blankets, onesies, books, lullabies, and more.  Sorry I haven't named you all here!

I feel really, truly blessed.