Veritasty: Truthfully Delicious

Tonight, I had dinner with Frank Sinatra. For real! Cold Antipasta Hot Antipasta We had dinner at Leo's Grandevous (rendevous on Grand Street apparently).  It is a popular neighborhood Italian restaurant that has been serving Hoboken for more than 70 years, and its theme is unanimously and undoubtedly all things Sinatra. When you first walk in, there is a long stretch of a bar, but after you take your eyes off the shiny bottles of alcohol, you see the exposed brick wall...which is actually sparse once you realize that every spare inch of wall is decorated with photos and posters of Ol' Blue Eyes, as well as other famous patrons (Joe DiMaggio signed a photo on the wall!).  There is even a jukebox in the corner that plays his music.  I don't know if I've ever seen a real jukebox before!  We sat under a plaque with a dairy maid and holding a Samuel Adams beer banner, and a surfboard with Sinatra's face on it.  I'm not sur...

Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone.  I am thankful for my health and my family's health, happiness, and prosperity; I am thankful for my co-blogger. I have been pretty busy this break, with a Thanksgiving dinner, wedding, and a day trip to New Jersey all in the past three days, so here's my belated Thanksgiving blog post. meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow.... Every Thanksgiving, my family spends our evening at my cousins' house in Brooklyn.  Their house is actually a one-floor apartment - tight on space and high on kitschy/eclectic decoration, but always as cozy as I remember it as a kid.  They have also accumulated a menagerie of pets - a fierce pug named Poncho, and four extremely pet-able cats named  Blue, Highway, Maverick, and Remy. Thanksgiving dinner consists of at least 20 people, crowded around a dinner table artificially extended by other desks and surfaces.  This is our usual setting for giving thanks and feasting on this holid...

I am hugely pregnant with a food baby.  Because this is Thanksgiving week, I fully expect this to happen pretty much every day until next Monday (leftovers can cause food baby too!). Monday, we had a Pre-Thanksgiving/Birthday potluck at school and it was delicious.  Everything went off without a hitch; I'm so impressed you guys!!  What a great dinner! We had, in a logical dinner chronology: crackers, cheese, pita chips, hummus, macaroni salad, potato salad, pumpkin soup, sushi, baked ziti, penne alfredo, pizza, butter chicken, naan, a Bengali sweet fried dough, cheesecake, and cupcakes.  Too.  Much.  Food.  !! Everything was delicious (except no one ate the cheese that I brought...but I was kind of happy on the inside because I brought it home and now I have a log of extra sharp white cheddar cheese for my own enjoyment...score!). When we were abroad in London, Alex and I actually spent a fair bit of time in my communal kitchen and we ...

Plate #1 Last week, we attended a fundraiser/dinner/dance/oontz oontz party for a charitable club that we are part of at NYU. The event, Caribana, mainly celebrated Caribbean culture, and the charities contributed money to benefiting developing countries, particularly those in the Caribbean and South America (Haiti and Guyana, respectively). We volunteered to take photographs for them, and I thought the food was great and notable enough to blog about! Plate #2 The menu was almost foreign, except for a few recognizable things like chow mein and fruit salad. Most of it sounded like traditional Caribbean food. We were hovering around the food station and everything smelled delicious.  I had a plate full of roti, black rice and peas, poule en sauce (chicken in sauce? pardon my Haitian/French), and salad.  Alex had "doubles", chow mein, and Guyanese chicken.  Everything was very tasty, but most memorable were the poule en sauce and "doubles". ...

Minced Pork and Rice Vermicelli Today, actually like 5 minutes ago, I learned the beauty of Leftovers. Yesterday, we went to Saint's Alp Teahouse for a really quick no-nonsense and affordable dinner.  I always get the shredded chicken udon noodle soup, but I was really in the mood for something else.  I figured I would get the curry chicken rice because I love curry and I love chicken and I love curry chicken. Our food came insanely fast.  It made me slightly suspicious, but maybe these dishes are so popular that the kitchen is just crankin' them out all the time.  Whatever. At first bite, my curry chicken rice was stab-me-in-the-throat spicy.  In fact, I could even see that it would be spicy: the orange sauce was speckled with red spicy flakes.  I thought it would be more mild like a typical Indian curry chicken, but it tasted different: perhaps this was Saint Alp's Southeast Asian curry style.  The chicken  bits were really succu...

Chocoholics, prepare to part with $35 this weekend for the 14th annual Chocolate Show.  Also a recommendation: bring multiple outfits to change into so you can circulate the booths repeatedly, looking like different people, and grab all the samples of chocolate goodies you can!   So today, we went to the NYC Chocolate Show. Immediately, we were bombarded with free samples, bright colors, small children running around to the effects of constant sugar high, and a heaviness in the air signalling sugar was to be had. Our first round of tasting included some chocolate vino ...mmm.  I'm so glad we're 21.  There was one really creamy liquor that tasted sort of like Irish Cream or the Amarula we had in the Bahamas...really heavy, dense, alcoholic heavy cream basically.  Then, we tried a strawberry chocolate wine that was lighter, but very sweet. We continued walking around, spying... a chocolate company from the UK that caters to the Queen and the Du...

I'm a card carrying sausage lover What's better for dinner than a nice, hot, plump sausage? We went to this place called Sausage Inc. between classes and I found it to be a really, really, really good dinner.  In fact, I'm craving some more at this point. The perky cashier girl explained the different flavors of sausage: pork mixed with basil, chunky pork with chipotle, pork and bacon, turkey and cranberries and stuffing...mmm.  All the sausages are served in a pretzel roll, which I didn't really understand until we got our food. Peek - a - boo My "chipolata" sausage (pork and chipotle) and Alex's "farmer" sausage (beef and bacon) came in a crusty, crunchy roll - the pretzel roll!  The outside looked like the dark brown exterior of a New Yawk street vendor hot pretzel, but the inside was thinner and less chewy.  The sausages were topped with a little dollop of onions. The sausages were reeeeeally good.  Although the farme...

No, I don't have a stutter! Brown and Yellow, Brown and Yellow Our friends have been raving about this little hole-in-the-wall places in The Village, so in between classes we went for some macaroni & cheese.  The menu was pretty simple and straightforward, not as haute cuisine as MacBar, and not as rich as S'Mac.  I opted for the small marinara and Alex got the small spinach artichoke.  The containers were a decent size for a meal, not overly filling but just shy of being fully satisfying, I think. Our mac & cheeses arrived with a crumbly, crunchy crust on top.  Once I dug my fork past its golden-brown crunchiness, it gave way to a concoction of mac & cheese that was thinner than some other places.  I prefer my mac to be a little more liquid-y, but Alex likes mac a bit drier.  Macaroni Macaroni's macaroni & cheese was right up my alley! See Mom, I'm eating my vegetables! The mac & cheese remained piping hot while I was...

Recipe for bad breath This post should be read with your best Jewish-Brooklyn-accent. I got my first taste of quintessential Jewish deli cuisine at Lansky's on the Upper West Side yesterday before the NYC Marathon fireworks show in Central Park.  I've heard plenty about Katz's, and other Lower East Side establishments, but I've never had a big ol' sandwich full of pastrami or corned beef or whatnot.  Turns out dinner at Lansky's wasn't going to solve that problem either. This looks like a very...Crabby Patty We sat down and waiters brought us a bowl of pickles and coleslaw.  We noshed while poring over the menu. The half-sour pickles were very good: about the size of your thumb, still green and almost cucumber-y, just with a little bit of salt.  The actual pickles were extremely salty and sour, not as good.  The coleslaw was a bit too wet for my liking (there was a puddle of watery mayo at the bottom of the bowl), but it was very fresh ...

I've seen the Korilla BBQ truck around the city for a while now, and have been itching to try their food.  I heard loads of great things about Korilla: they make authentic Korean food accessible to New Yorkers (i.e. in portable Mexican-food-style burritos, for example), they were on The Great Food Truck Race, and the original founders and I went to the same high school (STUYVESANT PRIDE).  On Saturday, October 29, 2011, henceforth known as "White Halloween", it started snowing like mad while I was in lab, and around lunch time, we peeked out the window to observe the snow when my friend pointed out the Korilla truck was across the street.  Godsend. Turns out the weather was still terrible to suffer through even though I only had to cross the street.  The rain/snow felt like icy hail and it was bone-chillingly cold.  I came up to the truck and it looked like their lights were out and four guys were huddled inside looking really cold and lonely.  Aw. ...