Around 7:00 last night, Kate, Gina, and I arrived in Long Island City for an event we’d been planning for weeks.

The NYC Food Film Festival!!!

The festival has been going all week long, and last night was the final night of it. The idea is that you get to sample the food featured in the films FOR FREE while the films are screening. Could anything be more brilliant?

What made the event even more perfect, however, were the facts that (1) the rain had stopped for the first time in what seems like a decade and (2) the festival took place at Water Taxi Beach, a man-made beach in LIC (with amazing views of the city) that I’ve always wanted to visit but never had until last night!

Sand!

We started at the Jarlsberg cheese station.

Appetizers round 2 (you can review round 1 here):

I had two slices of baguette with boursin cheese, radish, and Israeli cucumber; Jarlsberg with olives; manchego with local honey (meant to correspond with Save the Honeybees about the colony collapse epidemic) drizzled on top; grapes; and chocolates.

Gina, Kate, and I nibbled on our cheeses and admired the view … and then needed to pose in front of the view (obviously):

As we nibbled, servers came around with the next course: okra gumbo with shrimp and chorizo.

This gumbo was deeeeeeeelicious, so I had two cups. I believe this course was meant to correlate with Mr.Okra, a delightful film about an old man who delivers produce throughout the streets of New Orleans.

Next up, we had Swedish meatballs (from Ikea, no less, hahahahahahahaha!):

I had seconds of these little guys, too! So tasty. The Swedish meatballs went along with … ummm, I’m not sure? I don’t think we saw a film about Swedish people or about meatballs!

While we waited for the sun to go down so the films could start, my favorite men arrived on the scene to display the power of their hoses:

My heroes.

Back to the food vs. men debate from earlier this week … these men would win, no contest. The FDNY makes food obsolete.

We had to cool off after the water show, so it was time to make a beverage run, the only thing that cost us money the whole night.

Kate and I each ordered The Bees Knees (I think?) cocktail on the left; Gina ordered the other option that had tamarind and lime. I was excited about my drink because it supposedly had blueberry bitters, but it just tasted like a too-strong margarita. Funny how the one thing that cost money was the one thing that disappointed!

Before the films began, the festival kicked off with an awards ceremony for the films that had been screened throughout the whole week. The prize was a slotted spoon, and this little boy got his hands on one and went wild in the sand:

Finally, it was dark enough for the movies!

While we were watching, some buttermilk ice cream made the rounds.

(Sadly, the buttermilk movie was not one of the ones being screened last night.)

Finally, the moment we had all been anticipating arrived. Name that Easter candy:

Did you guess?! I can now say I was in attendance at the world premiere of The Power of the Peep.

Save your jealousy because it gets better. Not one to miss out on a colossal marketing opportunity, Peeps provided the NYC Food Film Festival people with 10,000 Peeps to hand out.

I don’t love Peeps, but they were there and they were fluffy and fresh.

I ate too many to count.

Side note: I don’t quite know how this happened, but I found all of this stuff inside my bag when I got home:

Peeps for the next century, hooray!

After the festival last night, we gawked at the view some more:

And then floated our over-sugared selves to the Water Taxi (which was, keeping with the night’s theme, operating for free until 2am!). It was my first time on the Water Taxi, and I quite enjoyed it, so I put together a little virtual tour:

Embarking:

Inside (hi Kate!):

Outside and up the steps:

On the deck!

Bye bye, Water Taxi Beach!

Helloooooooooo NYC!

I hope you enjoyed the tour as much as I did 😛

The taxi let us off in midtown east, so we made our way to the subway and then home. I had a complete sugar crash on the subway and passed out. Kate was worried I’d miss my stop, but I’m a professional subway sleeper, so I got home and was in bed by 1am with no drama. That was a late night for this old lady, but what a fun time! I’ve lived in New York for so long that I sometimes forget how much more there still is to explore. Having my feet in the sand last night was the best feeling, but the Peep baby in my belly today is not so much …

And now for the most seasonally appropriate question of the year: How do you feel about Peeps?

… aka an excuse for vendors to pawn off pounds of bars on unsuspecting compulsive free foodists.

(The loot)

After work yesterday, I met Kate and Gina for this event:

The “Wellness Retreat” was being held in the old Virgin Megastore … which looked very sad stripped of its rows and rows of merchandise. The demos and random orange carpet strips didn’t do much to help the ambience:

Kate, Gina, and I only stopped in briefly as a way to kill time between work and our next event, so we did not partake in the strip-dancing class (but the event is going all weekend long, so you never know what might happen …).

We did, however, find time for a million free samples.

Plus a random plate of parmesan-crusted basa fillet with whole wheat couscous from nu-kitchen, a diet food delivery system in NYC:

This was not very good at all, and the couscous was the plainest thing I’ve ever tasted. Gina and I ate our fish pieces, and I packed our couscous into my leftover lunch containers to take home where it could be salvaged!

Once we had seen all we needed to see at Vitaljuice (which just reminds me too much of Beetlejuice), the girls and I crossed the street over to Whole Foods to try our sample luck. We came upon blackened swordfish, parmesan-artichoke dip, and spinach-artichoke dip:

At that point, I got busted for taking pictures in the store. There were more samples, but I can’t remember them! Oh well, less free advertising for WF — their loss. Sufficiently “appetized” for the evening, we headed out for the evening’s main course.

To be continued …

What is your favorite thing to do with an energy/health food bar? Do you eat them straight, crumble them on yogurt, bake them into treats, let them collect dust in your cabinet until an emergency (usually what I end up doing …)?

I’m breaking Friday up into pieces because so many exciting things happened in the world of my food, and I’m getting overwhelmed just thinking about it!

After my last breakfast crepe yesterday morning, I had to be ridiculously on time for work because I was scheduled for a child abuse training from 9-1 (no, that is not the exciting part). In the training, I snacked on a package of Peeled dried bananas, yummmmm:

After the meeting, I saw that Nydia had released her Edible Arrangements package from Thursday to the conference room table. Most of it was gone by that time, but I helped myself to the kale garnish and two skewers:

I ate the skewers then, but the kale came home with me for later use 🙂

Lunch was the last of Olivia‘s soup and ecstasyontoast crostini, along with some Edward & Sons rice toasts (I ate like 10 more than pictured) and an apple:

Thanks to Belkis and Mildred, I was able to supplement my soup with veggies and rice and beans:



Afternoon snackage included more (and more and more) candy from Belkis’ candy jar and two more ginger almondine cookies from Lillian:

And my strawberry-chia-flax-hemp yogurt:

This will happen again, assuming I get more strawberries in this week’s CSA!

And, because it’s my office, there was cake(!!!) in honor of one of the parent group graduations:

I didn’t actually go to the graduation since it wasn’t part of my department, but Jose went — he’s part of everyone’s department because he does IT — and shared because he is so so so so so generous. Here he is slicing off a piece for Belkis:

And here’s my piece!



It was a very custardy tres leches, mmmmmmmmmmm, LOVE custard.

From there, I was off to more events, but I’ll have to save those stories for later!

What is your favorite layer cake filling (i.e. custard, jam, frosting, tomato sauce (just trying to think outside the box…))?

Well, Thursday was kind of the opposite of Wednesday in terms of ideal-ness. This nonstop rain has put everyone in such a funk! But, no need to dwell on Thursday (since today is Friday, yay!!), so we’re just going to go featured contributions style. And the contributions began bright and early yesterday morning when Lillian offered me a ginger almondine cookie.

I enjoyed dipping it in my yerba mate immensely, so I had two more 🙂

Then, Inginia offered me a few blueberries, and those were lovely paired with the office almonds (and followed by several more scoops of almonds straight):

Lunch was a return of Olivia‘s soup and a piece of her this-is-what-heaven-tastes-like crostini.

Among other things, I supplemented the soup with the last bit of all my coworkers’ sancocho, a Dominican soup with everything under the sun, including plantains, sweet potato, and big giant hunks of yucca:

A butter cookie from Beryl:

(Plus a bite of unpictured oatmeal raisin cookie from Lawrence)

This arrived for Nydia from a secret admirer:

But Nydia wasn’t at work yesterday, so I couldn’t eat all her fruit. Instead, I ate too much candy from Belkis’ candy jar (way more than pictured):

But I made up for it when I ate a banana in class that also came from Belkis 🙂

Oh! One more quick little thing. I didn’t finish my soymilked yerba mate yesterday, so I left it in the fridge overnight. Once again, the vibrant color this morning astounded me!

Even though it’s happened before, seeing this color first thing still makes me so happy 😀

Oh, I lied. One more thing AGAIN! My friend (and occasional guest poster) Gina caught up on all my posts from the past week yesterday, and I had to share this one comment she left about a chat she had with Chris, her husband, regarding my first CSA pickup:

OMG, Chris just made me laugh so hard, I cried and it was in reference to your blog! I said, “I need to go read about Sarah’s CSA pickup” in an excited tone. So Chris said, “What is that, like, a man?” LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL! It was probably funnier to me, but still, I guess b/c I was all excited about reading about your “pickup”, he thought I was talking about a guy! HAHAHAHA! Little does he know we get much more excited reading/talking about food!

Hahaha, Gina, that is hilarious!! Thanks for sharing 😛 In a food vs. men competition, who would win?

Yesterday was one of those ideal days at work. I was so slammed the entire day that I literally could not think of anything BUT work, and I was shocked when 5:00 arrived because I felt like I had just walked in the door. I get stressed with busy days like this, but I also love them because they make me feel useful 😀

My usefulness really got a chance to shine at lunchtime when we had an agency barbecue on the back patio in honor of Sam’s upcoming wedding (and just to encourage inter-department bonding in general).

Though he was the guest of honor, Sam was also in charge of the grilling, as usual:

Congratulations, Sam!

Look at all that green! You’d never know we were really on a narrow slab of concrete in East Harlem 😛

The food selection was superb. Lucia made this green salad with arugula, lettuce, and spinach from her CSA and dressed it with a refreshing mix of sherry vinaigrette and Greek yogurt:

Lucia also informed me that the food pantry produce donations we get at the agency come right from a farm, too! I can’t believe I didn’t know about this. She invited me to come down and observe delivery on Friday, so I will go and document if I have time.

My plate:

Clockwise from top center: Lucia’s green salad, peanuts and brazil nuts, raw carrots and broccoli, apple slices, grapes, a chicken wing, spicy Italian sausage and chorizo, chips and salsa. Ohhhhhhhh yummmmmmmmmmm.

I had more sausages:

(Sam really knows how to work the char!)

And lots more chips and salsa:

And more nuts, por supuesto:

I thought it was all over at this point, but then I saw something from across the patio that made my jaw drop and one hand fly to my mouth:

I may have actually climbed over dozens of chairs, tables, and employees to get closer. I don’t think I even knew I was doing it. I see carrot cake and instantly disappear into some sort of hypnosis state.

Didn’t Pura do an excellent job of accessorizing that cake?!! Those little bottles are darling.

I had a slice with more apples, nuts, and grapes:

And just because I’m into torturing you all:

I grabbed another little half slice-ish sliver as I left to run up to my next meeting:

This cake was so moist and light and textured, and I could have eaten the cream cheese icing from a tub. It was perfect and just the right amount of sweet. Siiiiiiiiiiiiigh, I love my job 😀 (And I promise I don’t only love it for the food.)

Before I left the office for the day, Jessica brought me a couple of caramel kisses:

They were excellent fuel for the hot yoga class last night, where I was sweating and sweating and sweating the Nile River. The Wednesday night class is so much more intense than the Saturday morning class! It feels excellent, though. And no one laughed and pointed at my embarrassingly short shorts, phew.

I got home at 8, pulled some things together for tomorrow, enjoyed a cup of Olivia’s cauliflower-sweet potato soup with honeyed truffle crostini, and then got myself into bed by 9 … finally!

What needs to happen for you to consider a work day “ideal”?