Taking some touristy pics

Stopped by Rockefeller Center tonight to run an errand and took a quick picture of the famous skating rink.  It looks like a frigid Monday night may be the time to go for a skate, because the rink was relatively empty.  After taking a picture of the real thing, I popped into the Lego store to take a picture of the Lego version of the same scene :)

Sripraphai

Tasty, tasty Thai food.  I did some searching on NYC food blogs for the best Thai restaurant in the city.  A lot of people recommended Sripraphai, in Woodside, Queens, as having the best and most authentic Thai.  I was hoping that I would take my first bite and think, "This is exactly how the food I used to eat in Thailand tasted!"  It wasn't exactly that, but the food was very good.  I think somehow eating food from a particular country while in that country just can't compare to eating it elsewhere.  But, our meal was delicious, and the menu was quite extensive, so it definitely warrants a second (or third or fourth or fifth) trip to try a few more items on the menu.   

   

   

Snow covered central park and the big show

Central Park is quite pretty in the winter after a snowfall.  And there are some bad-ass city slicker ducks who ain't going south for nobody!

Tonight there was a show at Brandon's gung fu school for Chinese New Year.  Now you know not to mess around with this guy :)

Wonder warmers

Not really trying to do a product placement here, but I just had to put a picture of these amazing little guys on my blog.  Brandon got me a pair of these hand warmers for Christmas, and I have to say, this is definitely a winter made for hand warmers.  When they are in the liquid state, you simply bend the little stainless steel disc inside and instantly the solution inside crystallizes generating heat that lasts for about 45 min.  Slip 'em inside your gloves or drop 'em in your pockets and you are good to go.  The best thing about them is that they are reusable.  Just wrap them in a towel, put them in a pot of boiling water for about 10 minutes, and they return to their original liquid state as pictured above.

Red Baraat and a snow day

So, I spoke too soon yesterday when I downplayed the possibility of a snow day today.  Unfortunately, I didn't find out that it was a snow day until after I had arrived at work.  So I stuck around for a while and went home around 2:00.  

In the evening we went to see Red Baraat, one of the groups we liked from GlobalFest.  They were playing at  a club in Brooklyn.  All was well until I stepped in an ankle deep slush puddle with my sneakers on.

Winter wonderland

Pretty serious snow coming down outside.  Probability of me having a snow day tomorrow=next to nothing

Tacos

Made tacos tonight and made tortillas from scratch.  Much better than the store bought variety, and not too time consuming either.

Chocolate PB cookies

In a previous NYC adventure (pre-blog) I went to the Upper West Side to consume what I was told are the best cookies in the city, from Levain bakery.  And I was sold.  If you like warm, gooey cookies, this is the place for you.  A disclaimer, they are like paperweights, so consuming a whole cookie in one sitting is not advised.  If you have never had these cookies, you should go get some.  The only offer four cookie varieties, of which I have tried three, and my personal favorite is the dark chocolate peanut butter chip.  I have since been attempting to replicate the cookies, without much success.  If you go to Levain's website, they don't provide their recipe, but they have a link to some websites that have copycat recipes.  The first recipe that I tried didn't impress me too much--not enough chocolate flavor.  So this time I went back to my old standby, allrecipes.com, and found a recipe for choc PB chip cookies that had instant chocolate pudding mix in the dough.  I was much happier with these cookies, but they are still no Levain's.  sigh....  

A taste of the tropics

Today we ventured out to the Bronx to check out the New York Botanical Garden's Caribbean plant exhibit.  Surrounded by snow and ice, spending an afternoon in a simulated tropical environment was sounding pretty good.  We took Brandon's SLR camera along to try and pretend to be professional photographers :)

              

 

For dinner, we went to Washington Heights to check out a Venezuelan place, Cachapas y Mas, that I have been wanting to try.  We tried a cachapa (a sandwich with two pieces of arepa-like cornbread instead of regular bread), a patacon (a sandwich with tostones instead of bread) and a tacucho (similar to a burrito).  Pictured below are the cachapa (top left), the patacon (bottom) and tacucho (top right).

NY Transit Museum

Who would you rather have as your bus driver?

Going to the NY Transit museum may not be at the top of everyone's to-do list while in New York City, but sometimes in the middle of January you find yourself at a loss for something to do and you brave the cold to walk on over to the Transit museum.  And actually, it ain't too bad.  The museum is an actual working subway station, though trains do not come through there anymore.  You can learn a little something about how the subway tunnels were constructed, what the old turnstiles and tokens were like, and you can play around in some old (sorry, "vintage") subway cars.  Fun fact for the day: there is a large, powerful vacuum hose that the MTA uses to extract the coins from the bus fare boxes.

Winter indoor picnic and milkshakes

    

    

Now that the weather outside is *freezing* and we can no longer hang out outside in parks, we decided to check out some of NYC's indoor public spaces and have a burger picnic.  This one is at 60 Wall Street.  There is a large atrium with palm trees, tables and chairs and an ice cream shop.  Overall, not bad, but a little chilly and not as nice as the winter garden at the World Financial Center.  In the second set of pictures, we are making milkshakes with my uncle's fancy and professional-looking milkshake machine.  Fancy and professional tasting too :)

Shanghai cuisine

Baking bread

Tonight I took a second crack at homemade baguettes.  The first time I made them the taste was good, but they didn't come out with that nice crispy crust with the soft inside that makes French baguettes so delicious.  I did a bit of research and found out that one key to developing that crispy crust is to make sure that the oven has plenty of steam, especially at the beginning.  Apparently, the ovens of professional bread bakers are equipped with steam injectors to keep the oven humid at the appropriate points in the baking process.  So, before putting the bread in the oven I used a spray bottle to spray the sides and the bottom of the oven, and then did two or three more sprays into the oven during the first ten minutes of baking.  This time they came out with a much better crust on the outside.  I still think the bread could use a bit more flavor, so there is more tweaking to be done, but overall much better than my first attempt.
 

SICK :(

No adventures today, just resting to fight off a cold.  This seems to be the winter of the perpetual cold for me.  In the last two months, I think I've had more days with a cold than healthy days.  I'm hoping that I will develop resistance to so many cold viruses that I will never get sick again.  We'll see...

14th Street subway station

Okay, so I'm going to cheat a little bit.  I didn't really do anything blogworthy today--just some laundry, reading, and catching up with friends over the phone, so I'm going to post some pictures that I took earlier in the week.  The 14th St. subway station has these cute little bronze sculptures all over the place, which Brandon and I thought must have some sort of social commentary attached to them, because many of the sculptures involve moneybags and seem to represent "The Man" (so to speak) holding down the little guy.  Upon a little bit of research I found that these sculptures are part of a public art project called "Life Underground."  A couple of pictures that I took the other day are below, but you can see a more comprehensive collection of pictures at the artist's own website: http://www.tomostudio.com/exhibitions_subway.html
The entire collection can be seen here: http://www.nycsubway.org/perl/artwork_show?21

Brooklyn Flea

The Brooklyn flea market has moved indoors for the winter, and is in the space that formerly housed the Williamsburg savings bank.  A bit more elegant than your typical flea market environment.  We didn't end up buying anything, but we did have some good eats.  We shared a nice buttery lobster roll, a gourmet hot dog and some Salvadoran pupusas.  I would recommend going for the food, and if you are in the market for some vintage clothing, this is the place to go.

 

Brazilian party

Had a good night at Le Poisson Rouge; the live Brazilian music was just what I needed. Too tired to write anything more right now, but I'm going to try to post a short video.

BAMcafe

Went to check out a show at the BAMcafe tonight with Brandon and Aunt Diane. I was definitely impressed by the space-- it's large, has a nice vibe and a diverse crowd. The music itself was just alright. We went to see a guy named Blitz Ambassador, a Ghanaian-American hip-hop artist. The samples of his latest album sounded pretty cool when we listened to them the night before, but somehow the live performance didn't seem to do him justice. We're blaming our ambivalence on what seemed to be a poor sound system. The cupcakes were perhaps the highlight of the evening. They came from Everything Frosted, a bakery on Mosco St. in Chinatown. They have a lot of your traditional flavors like red velvet and chocolate, but also some Asian-inspired flavors such as green tea, red bean, and taro. They were quite good--a nice dense cake and a light frosting, and it was just sweet enough without being too sweet. Yum!

Making Magnets

Got crafty tonight making some fridge magnets out of flat glass marbles and pictures cut out of magazines. If you like them, ask me to send you some :)

Marumi and Milk and Cookies

Tonight I went with a friend to check out Marumi, a Japanese restaurant in the West Village. If you look at the window in the first picture, you will notice an "A" prominently displayed in the window. This is the city's new system for grading restaurants based on the health department inspection. A is good, B is less good and C is not all that good. So blog followers, do not be concerned about me, in this case the raw fish was in trustworthy hands. Having a little room leftover after a dinner of sushi and sukiyaki (pictured below) we braved the bitter cold to walk over to an establishment called Milk and Cookies. I had very high hopes for this place, and their cookies looked promising, but left us a bit underwhelmed. They were a bit too crunchy for my taste and did not contain enough chocolate. The best of the bunch was the chocolate chip cookie, but I'm afraid to say that it alone would not merit a trip back to this establishment. With each underwhelming bakery I try in New York City, my desire to open up my own bakery someday grows just a little bit stronger...

Rai Rai Ken

It's the perfect time of year for a couple of steaming hot bowls of ramen noodle soup. And these ain't your 25 cent packs of Maruchan ramen... The snow has already started--they say up to 10 inches tonight. Good thing I finally got a pair of snow boots!

Plenty o' pumpkin gingerbread

I have a feeling that food pictures will be featuring prominently on this blog. While I usually try to have interesting adventures over the weekend, during the week I mostly just go to work, do some errands and eat! (and sometimes bake). No one wants to read a blog about going to work and running errands, so eating and baking win by default. The dish du jour is pumpkin gingerbread, from a recipe I got at allrecipes.com: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pumpkin-Gingerbread/Detail.aspx

Cut down on the oil a little bit, add a little pumpkin pie spice and voila, a delicious winter treat!

Deep fried Oreos and a music festival

Today I did my arteries a disservice by consuming a burger, french fries, and for dessert... deep fried Oreos, a first for me. I think for me, eating deep fried Oreos is one of those experiences that I'm glad to have had once, but I don't feel the need to repeat again. I didn't care too much for the batter on the outside, and on the inside the Oreo becomes a little mushy upon frying. But it wasn't too bad with ice cream :)

But then I tried to dance off all of those deep fried Oreos at NYC globalfest, a music festival with artists from all over the world. There were a dozen different acts on three stages over five hours. All of them were pretty good, but the favorites were an Afro-Peruvian band, a band that played Indian Bhangra music and a band from Senegal. After all this fried food and dancing, I'm ready for some sleep!