I saw you lingering still

Happy Friday, folks!  I'm in a pretty good mood despite Cornell's crushing defeat last night against #1 ranked Kentucky ("your last name is Cousins because you're going to marry yours!"), and the fact that it's "spring" and yet still freezing outside (go away, winter!).  The upside to those is that I saw a lot of my friends last night to watch the game (yay!) and it was supposed to rain/snow all day and I see none of that - it's just cold.  AND, I'm technically "earning" money right now because my training day at work let out early but we get paid for the whole day.  Sweeeeeet.  I love being paid to sit and watch Freaks and Geeks and listening to She & Him Volume 2.

While I was in my (incredibly boring) training sessions, I flagged oodles of good stuff in Google Reader, the best of which I'm sharing with you here:

An interview w/ Julian Casablancas about The Strokes and their new album (which indirectly explains his absence from this other video):


This is my favorite Sartorialist photo of the week. (duh, it has a bicycle and a moustached gentleman!)

This is a great cover of "excuses" by the morning benders (who I just got tix to see next month! $12! totally affordable!) (video via we all want someone to shout for)




Anyway, I have a jam-packed weekend ahead of me full of visiting friends and randomly themed parties!  (maybe I should nap first...)

spring is upon us

Yesterday was the "last day of winter" but it got up to 73 degrees here in Brooklyn, and I took a walk around Brooklyn Heights/DUMBO.  It was beautiful out, and the lines at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory / Grimaldi's were absolutely insane.

It was also "Macaron Day" and I grabbed a delicious (and free!) pistachio one from Almondine bakery in DUMBO:

P.S. March Madness really is crazy.  I'm not a basketball person so much.  but dear darling CU basketball just made it to the sweet 16, so my Facebook feed has gone wild.

let's get together, yeah yeah yeah

Freshmen year! Wow.

Midnight before Ali and I left California, we (along with Kait) sang Happy Birthday to Maddie and made her open the presents from her family (we gave her ours on Thursday because we're impatient people).  I love birthdays, and I was so happy to be there for Maddie's 24th!!  Friends and birthdays are the best!

NY is great and all, but the best best BEST part of this weekend was that I was with so many of my friends!  And so many of them don't live in NY.  We're all spread out across the country now (literally, west coast, midwest, east coast) which makes getting together difficult (and expensive).  Maybe some day all of our interests will align somehow and we can live near each other again...? 

See you soon, California! (er...I hope.)  For now it's back to regular life/posting.

eat your way through the Bay

I'm fairly certain we ate our way through the weekend.  Here's a play-by-play

Thursday
Gracias Madre - organic, vegan Mexican food.  Way more delicious than it should have been (considering I'm not into vegan food normally).  I had tacos that were filled with asparagus and butternut squash.  mm.  Their salsa and guacamole were also really good.

In-N-Out Burger - there are about 18 photos that Maddie took chronicling my first trip to In-N-Out.  It was everything I dreamt of and more ;-)

Friday
La Note - we had breakfast/brunch at this cute French restaurant in Berkeley.  On Maddie's recommendation I had a lemon-gingerbread pancake with poached pears and blueberries, and it was AMAZING.  I love gingerbread!  Everything was great, I was stuffed to the max.

Cheeseboard - It was an excellent day to go to this Berkeley staple, because the pizza of the day was tomato, onion, mozzarella, pesto and pine nuts.  So so good.  We ate 2 pies.

Saturday
On Saturday we drove out to Davis for some pre-St. Patty's Day fun, including this feast-like lunch made by our friend Kait.  She made 4(!) loaves of Irish soda bread, and a lot of corned beef and cabbage.  It was all really good, and prepared us well for our evening in Sacramento on a St. Patrick's Day bar crawl.  We eventually came back to Davis for a late dinner and grabbed whatever we could (which wound up being sandwiches at Beach Hut, and pizza and Uncle Vito's).

Sunday
Bakesale Betty - Online it said that they close at 3, and according to the clock in Maddie's room it was almost 2.  So we hopped in the car and half way there we realized that it had been Daylight Savings, and was by then after 3.  But we went anyway, and thank god, because it was still open and we ate the best food of the entire weekend.

They have really amazing fried chicken sandwiches, overflowing with a slaw made with some sort of vinaigrette.  I also bought a ginger cookie, that had actual pieces of ginger in it (sooo good), and a lemonade.  We sat outside at one of their ironing board tables and ate and ate and ate.  The longer we sat there, the more food we got.  Why? Because they were closing and were giving away the excess desserts that they had inside, so we wound up with 2 extra slices of pumpkin pie, 2 extra strawberry shortcakes, and a lemon bar.  The pumpkin pie was delicious and the crust is really quite good.  Ali was in love with the strawberry shortcake and says that it's the best she's ever had.  That's quite the recommendation.

I left my heart in (the) San Francisco(-ish area)

I'm back from a great 4-day stay in the Bay area visiting some of my college friends (notably Maddie whose birthday was yesterday!).  There are a bunch of them out there, but they're mostly spread out, which meant that we spent time in San Francisco, Berkeley, Davis, Sacramento, and Santa Cruz.  It was a lot of driving around, but also SO much fun. 

I have so many things to say and chronicle about what we did, but for now, these are some of my favorite non-people/non-food shots of the weekend:

Golden Gate bridge, and a boat with fun colors

 

Way up on top of a hill stood a white sofa, and an amazing view of SF

I liked how this tree matched the house behind it

My favorite house that we passed in Santa Cruz

Gorgeous calla lilies across from the Seabright Beach in Santa Cruz

Up in the air

I am writing this post from however many feet in the air they fly planes these days*.  Clearly I am very knowledgeable on this topic.  My dad is one of those flying geeks that actually would know, because he would be listening in to the channel that the pilots talk on.  He's George Clooney in Up in the Air, but without the commitment issues, and not nearly that many travel days per year.  But still a lot.  I was raised to be a very efficient traveler, and to sadly echo many of the frequent traveler sentiments (distaste for people who go through security slowly, having to wait in lines, etc).  As a series of commercials has told me, Up in the Air came out on DVD this week, leading me to believe that it would probably be shown on this flight.  I was right.  I hadn't seen it yet, (though my dad talked about wanting to see it endlessly while we were in Hawaii, and then he did. Great anecdote, I know...) so I was pretty pleased.  Solid on all fronts, though I can see how other films might have managed to (read: did in fact) edge it out of winning an Oscar.  Not that I actually saw most of the Oscar nominated films or anything (except for Up...and now also Up in the Air - and coincidentally I saw both of them on airplanes).

I am not quite half way through this flight to San Francisco...it really drives home the fact that the USA is freakishly large.  I'm pretty sure I could fly to certain locales in Europe for this amount of flight time.  But it's all worth it because I'm positive that this weekend is going to be really freaking fantastic - I'll be with a large assortment of my friends, including the two friends that I lived with all 4 years of college.  We have not all been in the same place since Homecoming in the fall of 2008, which seems like eons ago!  Stay tuned for lots of Bay Area adventures to be recounted.

* Internet on airplanes?! Awesome!  (expensive...but cost/hour is not terrible on a flight this long...and this connection speed is not bad - I don't imagine too many people are actually taking advantage of this).

Bread & Butter

A little while back, I was walking along Henry St and realized that a new restaurant had opened in this neighborhood!  The menu looked great, so when my mom came to visit last weekend, we went there w/ my friend Ana.

The restaurant, Bread and Butter, is cozy and rustic in decor, with food to match.  I had the most delicious "deviled" shortribs, which had a crunchy, mustardy coating.  It was kind of the size of my head.  Added bonus: their pre-dining bread basket is full of biscuits and cornbread - it's like they knew I was coming. 

All of my photos were coming out pretty blurry (blech), but I'll share them anyway:

frosty flasks of flavored sugar

 

  

  

 above: strawberry-orange & raspberry flavored vodka flasks

Over the weekend it was Purim, the Halloween/Carnival-esque holiday of the Jewish year.  In honor of this festive debauchery, some friends came over, and we drank a good deal of these homemade candy-flavored vodkas.  Mixed with gingerale or tonic, with a little lime on the side, they were amazing.  I also made a Fruit Punch flavor, which wound up being pretty popular and never made it into a photograph (but really, they're all pink, so you get the idea).

I got the cute little glass flasks at the Container Store - I love them.

If you want to make your own Jolly Rancher vodka, I used about 8-9 pieces of candy per ~250ml of vodka.  I used empty water bottles to dissolve the candies into the vodka (because I gave them a few good shakes in the process), and then funneled the end product into the flasks.  Super easy!

PS - I'm so glad it's March, I have so many exciting things coming up this month!!