Sweet Blog o' Mine

At Least I'm Doing Something That's Good for Me

Blogging is good for you.  Then again, I'm sure all the time I spend at the gym isn't so bad for me either . . .

6 Hundy

On Thursday, I hit my six hundredth Gothamist Food post.  SIX HUNDRED!!!! 

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

The people have spoken and I have swapped photos accordingly (see left).  Thanks for all the input!  Am off to the wilds of Massachusetts for a wedding this weekend, but am (for some odd reason) taking a detour to Pelham on the way -- as long as there's Four Corners Pizza involved, I'll be a happy girl.  PS -- went swimming last night after work and made it for over 20 minutes with no rest.  Looks like I might make it through this triathlon after all! 

Picture This

Someone recently pointed out that he thought my blog picture (above left) doesn't look like me in person, but that my flickr profile picture looks more like me (for those of you who have been reading for a while, you'll recognize the flickr picture as my old blog picture).  I'm not sure I agree with him -- they both look like me to me.  I'm kind of gussied up in the one on the left, and the guy who made this observation often hangs out with me when I look like a schlub and am wearing no makeup -- at the beach, on bike rides, etc. -- I thought this might be the issue.  Then again, it might just be the angle.  Regardless, the picture above is over a year old, so I'm thinking it's time for a new one.  What do you think of the one here?  Let me know in the comments.

I'm off to the beach for the weekend, where, among other things on the agenda, Joe is cooking -- yay!  I'm also going to try to squeeze in two runs and some lap swimming on the bay side of the island.  This may be wishful thinking . . .

Catching Up

Let's see -- just a little catching up since my last post.  I had a few relatively quiet nights this week, believe it or not.  Not too many, though.  Friday night, The Lovely Miss Katie and I tried out the new Blue Ribbon Bar -- definitely one to add to the regular rotation, although not too often, as it was pretty easy to go overboard, both on the delicious food and the wine flights (see the foie gras torchon above as evidence).  Saturday morning, after a workout, I met Dad at Chinatown Brasserie for some delicious dim sum, including my favorites, the shrimp dumplings with pea shoots, pictured above (love the eyes).  Sure, it's more expensive than Chinatown dim sum joints, but it's really worth it.  More pics of all the tastiness on flickr.

After some laundry and errands, I met up with Hugh for a drink -- it's hard to believe although we've "known" each other electronically for years, we've never actually met in person!  He was even sweet enough to draw me a cartoon on the back of my Gothamist card (thanks, Hugh!).  I did some cooking Saturday night and eventually fell asleep on the couch.  I suppose I was exhausted -- I slept for about 11 hours.

Today was Brooklyn day -- birthday brunch for Doug followed by a walk with Bill and dinner at Katie's.  In line with several of my other Brooklyn jaunts, I ran into someone I knew when I stopped in at Big Nose, Fully Body to buy some wine.  And now, I've tidied up my apartment and am going to hit the sack early so I can work out first thing before work.

Weekend Wrapup

Still dealing with the number crunching, but managed to fit in some fun this weekend.  Friday night I had sushi with Gabe at Le Miu, a spot in the East Village.  Some of the chefs have Nobu pedigrees, and although they are trying to do some inventive things with the cooked dishes, I think we both enjoyed the sushi the most out of everything we tried.  I got a good night's sleep on Friday and woke up Saturday for a great workout.  The rest of the day I did some work and cooked a carrot and potato soup out of this month's CSA bounty.  At 5:30 I met up with members of my Gothamist Food team, including the three new writers who I hadn't yet met in person -- it was great meeting them all and getting a chance to chat over drinks.  Afterwards, I moved on to meet John B. for dinner at Momofuku Ssam Bar -- that place absolutely rocks.  It even got the John B. plate-licking seal of approval.  If you don't know about it, check out this NY Mag piece on David Chang, and then hurry over there for the three terrine sandwich, the brussels sprouts, and the pork buns.  I'm going to try to gather a group for the whole pork butt that he does -- who's in?  Dinner was followed by drinks at various and sundry bars in the East Village, where we were joined by Matt, the Lovely Miss Katie, Meg, Jenn and others. 

Today I met up with a gaggle of food writers/bloggers for dim sum:  Augie, David from Thrillist, Alaina and Ed from Serious Eats, Jen from Snack, Andrew from Gothamist, and Jennifer and Chris from Savory NY.  It was great fun, and I plan to organize a similar gathering in the not-too-distant future.  After some quality couch time, I cooked up some more CSA stuff -- I roasted a half-chicken and more of the veggies.  I'll have plenty of food for lunch this week!  And now, maybe a bit of work, but then early to bed -- gotta hit the gym before work.

Just Catchin' Up

First of all, in case anyone was wondering what was up with yesterday's post, Vox is a new blogging system that's in previews right now.  I've been playing around with it -- let me know if you'd like an invitation.  Not sure I like the way it displays here on TypePad when you cross-post, though.

The other morning, when I went running, Lance Armstrong (or at least his voice) congratulated me on "my longest workout yet": a 4.8 mile run according to my Nike+iPod.  I don't think it was quite that long -- I think I need to calibrate the thing with a jog around Washington Square Park, which is roughly a half-mile.  Was going to do that this morning but couldn't get out of bed.  Perhaps this was due to the pig pickin' I went to last night -- we went to Daisy May's BBQ for the half-pig to wish Rob well before his six-week-long trek.

Thanks to all for the Waikiki food recommendations -- keep 'em coming!

I Know, I Know . . .

I haven't been writing as much here as I used to.  It's not that I'm not still busy, because I am.  It's true that the number of jackass stories has dwindled dramatically as compared to last year (thankfully). 

The main reason I haven't been writing as much these days is because we've kicked up the pace over at Gothamist Food.  I have to make sure there are two to three food posts up every day -- not all written by me, mind you, but it still takes quite a bit of time and energy.  If you haven't already visited, please check it out -- and let me know that you've stopped by.  Leave a comment, click on "recommend" a the bottom of the posts (it makes us feel loved), or just shoot me an email.  If you want to read just the posts I've written, you can do that too.  347 and counting (will be at least 349 and more likely 350 before the end of the week)! 

100 Grand

Okay, so I'm a little late, but I wanted to err on the safe side (if we're really counting accurately, I'm up around 101,968 visits including those from before I started using sitemeter).  Either way, I'm over the 100,000 visit mark, which is pretty exciting.  Thanks to all of you who stop by!

Feed Me

So some of you may have been getting sporadic email updates from Bloglet at times when I updated this site.  As you probably know, Bloglet has been incredibly unreliable lately; I've gotten comments from friends that they hadn't gotten an update in weeks and they were worried that I had cut them off.  It wasn't me, I swear.  Last week, I switched my email subscription service to FeedBlitz - you'll notice the new subscription box on the side.  Coincidentally, I got this email from Bloglet this morning:

Bloglet began as a hobby of mine to help manage the random blogs I'd read on a daily basis. This was back when words like "blog" and "rss" had yet to enter most people's vocabulary. Now "blogs" are being mentioned on the Daily Show, but Bloglet still remains a hobby. It's obvious that I don't have the time to turn this hobby into something that offers a fair level of service to users. On the other hand, Phil and the team over at Feedblitz has been doing a great job building their blog-to-email product into a viable service. They've even built a Bloglet-to-Feedblitz converter. I recommend that any current users of Bloglet give them a try.

So here's the deal.  If you were a Bloglet subscriber, I tried to import you.  If you have gotten a FeedBlitz email update, you're in good shape and you don't have to do anything.  If not, I mistakenly thought your email was spam and you'll have to resubscribe (oddly, there were a bunch of spam emails that "subscribed" to the Bloget update).  So -- let me know how it works, if you have any questions, etc.  And enjoy the new feed update!