Prague Reunion Weekend

At the beginning of November Jeff and Noelle were in town with young Benjamin and I met up with them at the Museum of Natural History.

So guess what? After the museum Ben and Noelle went to the airport but Jeff, Jeff stayed in New York. To party.

First we partied by walking to the river

Then we partied BIG time watching the last game of the World Series from Henry from swim team's restaurant, Hank's Juicy Beef. What a roller coaster! And what a win!

These ConEd guys loved keeping an eye on the game through the window but would NOT come inside (I think they couldn't stay on the clock if they did or something?)

Then Thursday we woke up into that new world of Cubs being World Series champions and went and had lunch at White Gold, April Bloomfield's new UWS butcher shop/restaurant. If you're looking for a place packed with the worst and most obnoxious Upper West Side stereotypes imaginable at lunch time, may I suggest this establishment? My fancy chop cheese and roasted broccoli were pretty good, though. (And the bathroom had cool wallpaper)

Then we learned about the Ansonia Hotel and walked around Fairway 

Then we had to run back to the apartment because my friend, Jeff's former roommate Ryan, flew into town to participate in this long weekend adventure, too. But I don't have any more pictures until that night when we went to Famous Sichuan with ex-Nashvillain Matt. I love Famous Sichuan and it was a big hit with everyone else. Success! Also: the last time Jeff and Ryan and I had hung out was Jeff's wedding in Prague, so that's why I called this post "Prague Reunion Weekend." And also, clearly this all took place over well over a weekend. 

Check out this chill license plate at the jail (and wow, cops have nice cars)

Friday we started off with lunch at Momofuku Ssam. I'm not crazy about their new barbecue-vibe lunch menu, but the classics are still classic and these new Korean ribs were dope. File this place under: "Visit for dinner" for the time being.

Then we went down to the Financial to look at where Jeff used to work and do a lot of walking around

Then it was dinner at the Chelsea Market (no pictures of that, apparently) and hit up the Whitney with Mattias. The portrait exhibit is sitll dope but I wish I had set aside more time for the videos exhibit

Saturday morning we saw Dr Strange with Jeff and then headed to Dumont Burger, followed with ample Brooklyn explorations

Now I'm getting confused, but I think these pictures are from Monday? I must not have taken an Sunday pictures? But here's Monday. We started off with slices from Patsy's, went to the UN, and walked around midtown a little before taking pictures inside a building lobby we weren't supposed to take pictures in. 

Now here is something interesting

We walked by Trump Tower, totally innocent of what would soon happen on election night, and there was this one pen where they kept all the Trump protestors AND the Trump supporters to both wave their signs and yell what they had to yell and also make very kindergarten level complaints to the cops of "He touched my sign! She pushed me out of the way!" The police kept the crowd moving, so to get a better look at everything, Ryan and Jeff just went into the pen.

October Food was Carnitas

I did a nice amount of home cooking in October, but what turned everything upside down was my deciding to try out a carnitas recipe I found on seriouseats. Reading the recipe, I felt there was something going on there, so I decided to try it out. Maybe you saw my snapchat/Instagram story about it? Heavy production values there. 

As you may have seen in the video, just after I started roasting the pork, I got called into work. So I had to wait until the roasting was done, then I put the pork in the fridge to finish another day (the recipe said that would be ok).

The "another day" came that Saturday when Alexis and Angelique came over to help me finish the cooking and test what we wound up with. Here's the pork come out of the fridge. All I had to do was add the pork fat I had separated and held onto back to it and put it under the broiler and then, Wow. Things got serious.

I mean, maybe that looks burnt to you but actually it's just right.

There was a salsa verde recipe that came with the recipe but I used a different one from Alex Stupak's Taco cookbook that I had a hunch about. I was cooking on hunches all over the place.

And here's the spread, just before testing. But actually it really didn't need testing. I could have thrown it all out if my intent was really just to test it because it was 200% clear from just the smell that this recipe was dynamite and that the carnitas would be killer.

One taco of many many.

My helper guests. 9 months in my new apartment and finally having people over to eat!

Inspired and motivated by my success with the carnitas, the next morning I dared to cook chilaquiles from scratch from my leftovers. Those chips? I fried them out of my tortillas! They're not from a bag!

So, in conclusion: this carnitas recipe was great and is easy and makes the best carnitas imaginable. When I was in Utah this past week I whipped it up for Kristen's family and they were all nuts about it and then I brought it over to Grandma's the next day and she ate FOUR tacos. Four tacos! This pork is great! I'll make you a taco! Just ask!

Epilogue

I also wanted to show you these lentils I made, plus the Arby's pork belly sandwich, which was so good.

October Overview

Here's some nice miscellaneous items from October that weren't Owen visiting (that was a few posts ago) or me testing cameras (that's my next post)

There was this one night where I met up with Broek for Tacos No 1 and Los Mariscos at Chelsea Market because I've happened to go there nearly every week since Los Mariscos opened and on the way home we got donuts at the Donut Pub. Guess what? This S'mores fake Cronut wasn't great. Should just stick with the normal classic Donut Pub donuts, they're great.

Second weekend of the month Jesse was in town and I was so lucky to get to get dinner with her at the Noodle Bar.

Some of the classics we ate that night: spicy cucumbers, scallops with corn and chicken skin and the brisket buns

Wrapped it up with dessert at Superiority Burger

Then there was this Friday where I went to Tacos No 1 and Los Mariscos with Kim and discovered that the ceviche tostadas at Los Mariscos are GREAT and so much better than the just fine fish and shrimp tacos.

Then we dipped into the Whitney for a bit to check out their portraits exhibit for a minute before the museum closed for the night. Was a pretty good show, I ought to give it another look.

For dessert that night I tried Ample Hills' orange and brownies Donald Trump ice cream

That Sunday, a magnificent occurrence, Keri happened to be in town and I found out by running into her in the hall at church

The next Friday Ned had a number of us over for some very fine Korean food that James cooked up

Accidentally got off my train home a stop early but I made up for it by snapping pictures with my sporadically-used f/1.1 lens all the way home

The next day I went over to the far west side to check out a camera show (all about that in my next post) and walked the final phase of the Highline (plus the rest of it) for the first time. When the "new" MoMA opened in 2005 they had this exhibit about the plans for the Highline and I remember looking at it and being all "Yeah, like that will ever happen" and now here we are and the whole thing's built and beautiful. 

Look! A Quince!

That night, what a night, first I caught La Sera with Victoria at the Mercury Lounge and then we went and watched the Cubs win the NLDS (that's a baseball thing, not a church thing) at the bar where I had watched them lose it in 2003.

The next night, man, what a month for visitors, Rebecca and Derek were in town and we enjoyed a fantastic dinner at the far too undervisited Ma Peche.

Imagine there being a group photo before these food photos, because I really should've taken one of those.

That week I found myself with an unexpected Wednesday off so I took my camera out to try zone focusing—that's a type of manual focusing where you don't focus? You just set a wide angle lens (in my case a 28mm) to a high aperture (in the case of these photos, f/11) and then your depth of field is so great everything is in focus for a certain range (in this case, everything from approximately 4 feet to infinity). It was fun and neat to commit a whole day's walking around to learning to use a new technique. Also, I grabbed lunch at Mission Cantina with Brook where they had a great new burger and found the mole chicken wings to be served with an amazing dill yogurt sauce that had me not letting the servers remove the plate once the wings were gone.

Morgenstern's had a very scary Halloween costume, I could not bring myself to go inside. It was all orange and things were hanging from the ceiling.

Nailed it!

Sheesh, you know what, this post is getting long? I'm changing my mind about things now: there will be an additional post about the rest of my October food. For now, let's just wrap up with a little Halloweening.

Saturday night I hit up some Halloween parties with Victoria the Bat and unleashed Count Tacula, the Taco Vampire, upon the world. I had never seen people run away in terror before, it was exhilarating. 

Only click on this video if you are very brave (and yeah right like you haven't seen this before it was one of the most popular videos on the internet this year) 

On the actual Halloween I went to see Conan O'Brien tape his show at the Apollo. And I'm a rule follower, so when the tickets said "No Cameras", I didn't bring a camera. So just trust me, Count Tacula was in the audience and everyone was like "We would feel much less horrified right now if it was just the Phantom of the Opera here."