I’m heading out for the 9 miles this second, so I’m just dropping in for a quick moment to say that last night’s delicious dinner is now posted under the Reviews tab right here.
Ahhhh, I’m so scared of this run! Deep breath, deep breath, deep breath …
What kind of exercise scares you?
After work last night, Gina, Kate, Kareen, and I met for our regular (ummm, does every six months count as regular still??) Brooklyn girls dinner night. Gina and Kate have made several blog cameos, but Kareen can be a bit harder to pin down!
We ate at Kiku, a sushi restaurant mere blocks away from my apartment. Yay for convenience! I’ve ordered takeout from Kiku before (back in ancient history when I still had an income), but I’ve never actually eaten inside.
Here’s Kareen modeling her edamame appetizer:
I totally made her pose for that picture, so blame me if she looks slightly more scary than cute!
Kareen’s edamame made the rounds, and I had a couple small handfulls:
I instantly felt the sugar haze from earlier in the day starting to recede. What a relief!
Gina ordered the hot & sour miso soup as her appetizer. I didn’t have any, but the camera couldn’t stay away:
The restaurant was QUITE chilly, thanks to a pair of sluggishly closing doors, but we had fun nonetheless. While waiting for our main courses to arrive, we got to watch the artists at work:
I really wanted to try some fancy sushi concoctions, but I decided to play it safe after the day of food I’d had already! I ordered seaweed salad:
I love love love seaweed salad. It’s another one of those foods with the perfect balance of crunch and chew.
I also ordered a tuna roll with brown rice:
As much as I enjoy elaborate sushi rolls (especially when they involve avocado), there’s something so alluring about a simple tuna roll. It never lets me down! I ate everything (of course), including all the ginger and most of the wasabi. Sushi always reminds me of my senior year of college when I had a weekly Wednesday night sushi date. Mmmm, sushi. We don’t spend nearly enough time together these days.
Gina received a beautiful tower of spicy tuna and asparagus rolls and another kind (maybe tuna and avocado?) I can’t quite remember:
Kate got a tuna roll and a tuna and avocado roll (I think), and Kareen got a spicy tuna roll and a spicy tuna and avocado roll (maybe?):
Kiku does actually make sushi that does not involve tuna. Clearly, we had a prior arrangement with each other to be tuna twins (quadruplets?) last night.
And just for the sake of accuracy and all, I had to chop up a giant Hershey’s Kiss when I got home from dinner (someone brought it into the office yesterday) so I could put it in my chocolate bag in the freezer instead of eating it. I did, however, eat the crumbs (plus a piece of my blogger secret cupid lindt hazelnut chocolate that somehow managed to jump out of the chocolate bag and into the pile of crumbs):
And that just about does it for yesterday. How do YOU feel about sushi?
Last night after the NYU mentoring session, Kate and I headed over to Gusto Organics, NY’s first USDA certified organic restaurant, for an event hosted by NYU’s new Green Alumni Network. NYU has really been pushing the school spirit lately with all these food-containing events! While I didn’t actually have to pay for anything at this restaurant, my experience last night definitely made me want to return.
The latest craze in restauranting seems to be food with a philosophy. Gusto has jumped right onto that bus with the motto, “changing the world one meal at a tiime.” The decor was warm and peaceful with a candlelit feel and natural accents:
Kate and I had some of everything. We split four delicious empanadas, the flavor complexity of which no photo can possibly capture:
1/2 bruchetta-filled empanada; 1/2 ground meat-filled
1/2 cheese-filled
'nother 1/2 meat-filled
pretty exterior
And a square of verrrrrrrry thin crust cheese pizza:
And two squares of grilled veggie pizza with zucchini and eggplant, mmmm:
I had two more squares after this. And then I was on a roll, so I peeled the veggies off of probably 5 more slices and ate them :-). Gusto also had free sangria for the event!!
I drank about half of this before I remembered I don’t like wine. So I poured out the liquid and ate the fruit. And did the same for another glass:
So anyway, with such prompt service and quality taste for a free event, I can’t imagine the possibilities for an actual paid meal! My NYU undergrad degree may be the reason I’m poor, but that school is certainly doing its part to keep me from starving now :-).
On the way out, I found a box full of pins for all different ny neighborhoods … including mine! Now I can rock my slope pride in style:
The meal plan today is wayyyy up in the air since my schedule involves a lot of commuting (slope to upper east side to bay ridge to village and back to slope) until 9ish again with food appearing at various junctures along the way. I’ll come back eventually to let you know how it all pans out!
Don’t you love that the acronym for my blog is “TOE”? I know I do.
Anyway, since both breakfast and lunch today were exactly the same as breakfast and lunch yesterday, I thought it would be a good time to bring in a guest post!
Gina and I have embarked on many food adventures together since we met in college. You’ve actually already met Gina, too, most recently at this dinner. Over the weekend, Gina emailed to present me with the first official TOE-inspired meal along with a real, live tale of expansion from the frontlines, yay! Here’s what Gina had to say:
Your pancake breakfast inspired me! Chris made pancakes Sunday (not from scratch but from Aunt Jemima mix, so I’m sure not as healthy) and I added some strawberries from the frozen Dole ones I bought at Fairway AND I made peanut butter sauce! I did not have any yogurt so I mixed peanut butter and milk and heated it up a bit in the microwave to thicken it. Here it is!
Gina’s Tale of Expansion: Caruso’s Ristorante Italiano
These pictures (which did not come out very well because I did not set the camera properly and the lighting was bad, so most of them are blurry and dark) are from Caruso’s Ristorante Italiano in Warminster, PA. My grandparents are regulars at this restaurant, and we’ve had other family parties there before. It’s a pretty typical Italian place, and I believe the people who own it are Sicilian because all the pictures on the wall are from Sicily. Everything on the menu sounds so good and my grandfather told us to order whatever we wanted. There was no set menu. The restaurant is BYOB so we brought our own wine, although we are not big drinkers (we’re much bigger eaters!!!). We had 3 tables, a total of 22 people.
My grandfather had pre-ordered appetizers for the tables. I forgot to take pictures of those, but they were these HUGE plates of mussels, baked clams, calamari and (randomly) broccoli. Plus, he also ordered a couple orders of chicken fingers with fries and mozzerella sticks for the “kids.” Remember, these were just the appetizers! I was not at the kids’ table, but I had 2 mozzerella sticks, a TON of mussels, 2 baked clams, some calamari and some broccoli, which was quite good because the sauce was all garlic and tomatos. YUM!
I had ordered a cup of crab chowder because my grandfather was telling us how good it was, so that came next. The soup was good and thankfully it was a pretty small cup. Then, I also had a side salad before my entree came out because the meal came with a salad! Needless to say, I was already full before my entree even arrived.
The first picture is of my meal, Veal Oscar: veal with crabmeat and asparagus in a white wine sauce over pasta:
So yummy. I thankfully restrained myself from eating it all and took about half home. I think almost everyone had to take some of their food home because the entrees were VERY generous and we had already eaten all that food before the main courses.
The next picture is a very blurry shot of angel hair pasta with crabmeat and shrimp in a marinara sauce:
This is a special that’s not on the menu but that they prepare for my grandfather every time he goes to the restaurant. I told you he’s a regular! As you can tell, my family quite enjoys seafood!
Then I took pics of the desserts because they were pretty.
Chris's tiramisu
my chocolate mousse cake (but it tasted a bit of coffee with not enough chocolate and mousse in my opinion)
my aunt's cheescake with raspberry sauce
my grandmom's spumoni (ice cream with raspberry and chocolate sauce)
I was SO full after this meal! I should have taken a picture of my expanded stomach because it was certainly VERY expanded. I don’t know how I managed to eat that dessert — it was just such an overabundance of food! This is a typical family party for my Italian side of the family though. Even when we cook at someone’s house, there’s always way too much food and way too much dessert, in addition to way too many appetizers so that I’m already full by the time we eat dinner. Such is life in an Italian family!
Thanks for contributing, Gina! If anyone else out there has a tale of expansion to share, let me know in a comment and I’ll email you back!
As mentioned, I accidentally went out to dinner last night after the movie. Whoops! Maybe I couldn’t afford it, but it was sooooo good. Gina, Kate, the Feld, and I went to Union Square’s Le Pain Quotidien, a bakery/boulangerie chain that has recently added several new locations throughout the city. The specials board pulled us in:
Restaurants seem to be all about philosophies these days, and Le Pain Quotidien is no exception. From the menu:
“The idea behind Le Pain Quotidien is simply to make a good daily bread, a handmade bread with a good crust and a firm slice, the kind of bread that makes great tartines. Bread not only to nourish the body, but the spirits as well. A bread best shared around a table, to be savored among friends.”
Normally, I’m not so into chains, but this one was right there and we were
cold. As soon as we crossed the threshold, all chain skepticism vanished because the decor was so simple and sparse that we felt as though we were inside an authentic French country farm kitchen.
Gina ordered the Garden Quiche, and it takes the prize for the best looking quiche I’ve ever seen. I had one bite and discovered it was also the fluffiest and lightest quiche I’ve ever tasted. Usually quiches turn me off because they are dense and slimy, but not this beauty:
The Feld and I split the Goat Cheese & Arugula Salad with parmesan, toasted pine nuts, olive oil, and lemon (530 calories, as the menu so bluntly stated):
And the Ricotta Tartine (this is what Kate got, too) with mission figs, diced tomatoes, black pepper, and organic acacia honey (390 calories):
Here’s my portion of salad:
This salad had everything I love. I think it was designed just for me with these huge slivers of parmesan, mmmmm:
Here’s my portion of the tartine:
It was superbly delicious as well! I want to be able to balance all these exclamations of perfection with some complaints, but I can’t. Figs, ricotta, and honey can’t help but form a magical food trinity:
Then, the Feld had a brilliant idea! She topped her tartine pieces with some of the parmesan from the salad and gave me a bite:
The parmesan added just the right touch of saltiness to transform the tartine into a salty-sweet masterpiece. And for all of this deliciousness, I only spent $14, including tax and tip! (The price only becomes a problem when I factor in the $12.50 I had just spent on the movie and the $19 I had spent on dinner the night before. Oh well, I will make it up.) Definitely worth it.
The only downside was temperature. The restaurant was pretty drafty thanks to a side door that randoms kept using to come in from the street. I spent the last half hour fully bundled in my scarf and coat!
I took a picture of us, but again, we looked so cold and bedraggled in it (it’s just not prime photo season, is it??) so here’s one from July when we were neither cold nor bedraggled. L to R — Kate, Q (who couldn’t make it tonight but was present for this brunch), me, the Feld, and Gina:
And you know I couldn’t leave the restaurant without a little somethin’ somethin’ to bring home so, at the urging of the others, I wrapped these in a napkin and stuffed them into my purse:
hunk of French bread, slice of "organic wheat" bread
Perhaps there is French toast in my future???
Tales of Expansion: Baby Butternut Edition 