The Girl Who Ate Everything

rice bomb

Omurice is a beautiful thing. Like a sleeping puppy. A tiny puppy consisting only of an adomen. With delicate skin made of scrambled egg. And organs made of ketchup-coated rice.

...So actually, it's nothing like a puppy. For whatever reason I find the rice-filled omelette bomb especially cute. Maybe it's the happy yellow color? The bulbous shape? The abbreviated nature of its name? Puppiiiiesss?

Hiroko's Place

Yesterday I went to Hiroko's Place with Stephanie, thus ending that not-so-fun "no tasty grains of rice shall be a part of my diet" thing. I'm still asthmatic, but I figured I could take the risk. This is living on the edge, Robyn-style. I am so very pathetic.

Japanese reading material, lonely corner

A bookshelf of Japanese magazines and manga adds to the homey feel of the surprisingly spacious cafe. That is, if your home is full of Japanese magazines and manga.

the magazine is staring at me

Stephanie and I pretended we could read them (eh, we do have some elementary Japanese knowledge!) while waiting for the foods to appear. Magically. ...I mean, by way of a waitress. Japanese stuff is advanced, but not to the point of mastering teleportation. When they figure that out, they can take over the world.

salad

Entrees come with a complimentary salad. It's a standard iceberg lettuce-tomato-cucumber combination topped with that Japanese dressing. Ye know. It's...um...brownish. Ginger-carrot? SHOULDN'T I KNOW THIS BY NOW? Yes.

Well. I ate it all, except for the tomato. In case you don't know, raw tomatoes are the only common food I can think of that I really don't like. It's a combination of the taste and the texture, which basically means the whole thing is flawed to me. My distate for raw, fairly unadorned tomatoes (cooked is fine and raw with enough other flavorings is also tolerable) goes back to childhood. Or birth. Or possible the womb. While a normal person might be drawn to the scent of an uber-ripe tomato, such a smell would probably make me gag.

Maybe I have a defective tomato-loving gene, if there is such a thing.

the hot dogs are fondling the spaghetti!

Stephanie bravely went for the Napolitan Spaghetti, "Japanese Wieners w/ Tomato Sauce" (with a scoop of potato salad on the side). Man, how could you not want it with description like that? My mouth, oh, how it waters. I think Stephanie was a little disappointed by the hot dog bits, but judging from the spotlessness of her plate when she decided to stop eating (because there wasn't anything else to eat), she must've enjoyed it.

You already know what I ate, but surely you want another photo. A closer photo. Stick you right in the belly of the omurice (before I stuck it in mine):

tasty, tasty innards

Each plump little grain of rice was coated in ketchup. I've never had rice and ketchup before, but it works (if you like ketchup). While I wouldn't want it slathered on in a goopy fashion, the coating was just a tint of flavor. Ketchup-y flavor. And all this yummy ketchup-y flavor was encapsulated in a thin, delicate omelette...which was topped with more ketchup. Still, even that topping is restrained in the form of thin zig-zaggy lines, not plopped on like one might put on a burger from a stubborn bottle of Heinz bound by nature's rules for air pressure.

Service is nice and very relaxed. And by "relaxed" I mean..."slow". It wasn't such a bad thing as that gave me plenty of time to talk with Stephanie, but we were kind of confused as to what we were supposed to do in order to pay for our meal (which in preparation time wasn't slow). Stephanie, who was facing the counter, said that whenever she tried to get the waitress's attention, her action were timed just so that at the same moment the waitress would be looking away. Oops. My assumption is that you go up to the counter to pay...since that's what we did. It's a nice place to relax, so get cozy at one of their tables and prepared to be given plenty of time to digest. I wouldn't mind going back to try some dessert, which Stephanie and I skipped out on due to being carb-stuffed.

random photos

You like photos? Good. Here's some random photo-based commentary.

this special mode intrigues me

I spotted this bread machine while eating lunch at Life Thyme. "Special Sandwich Mode"? This baby was made just for me. Too bad it doesn't actually make sandwiches.

colorful

Life Thyme has some pretty salads, eh? Eat colorful food; you'll get different nutrients! (Figuring you're not eating Jell-O in five different colors. That might leave you overly chemical-ed.)

less healthy than salad

While walking around Park Slope on Thursday afternoon with John, we happened to pass by cocoa bar (which I had surprisingly never heard of!) and Chip Shop (which I have heard of and wanted to try since last year). Unfortunately, I didn't try either the chocolate or deep fried morsels of tasty death. Methinks a Park Slope fooding excursion of chocolate cake and fried fish is in my future.

chomp

There's proof that I'm eating! See! Chompy. While sitting in the Prospect Park Bandshell waiting for Yo La Tengo to music-ify some awesome undersea documentaries, I ate some leftover spirulina earth pie. This was one of my favorite desserts as a raw foodist, yet for whatever reason when I revisited it, it just didn't feel...right. If you can imagine a mixture of pulverized spirulina, almonds, dates, raisins, bee pollen, cinnamon, dried figs, brazil nuts, cashews, carob powder, and vanilla bean with a consistency nearly as dense as red bean paste then that's what it is. And if you can't (which is most likely), it's worth trying...er, or sharing with a few people. Obviously all that nut and dried fruit action results in something dense, sweet, and fatty. Is that a good combination? Hells yeah! But I ended up throwing out the last huge chunk that I couldn't fork my way through.

food trade, oh no

Eunice from Germany gave me this overloaded package of food in exchange for a Poofy pancake t-shirt! I felt like the luckiest girl in the world while unearthing all the snugly packed foreign foodstuffs from the recycled amazon.de box. (It doesn't take much to make me happy.) The ingredients are in German, thus I can't read them, thus I can't feel bad about potentially eating ingredients that I normally wouldn't want to eat, thus I can eat somewhat guilt-free! Mmm, ignorance is tasty.

Many thanks to Eunice! And Germany!

it googles itself

Hiroko's Place
75 Thompson St

cocoa bar
228 7th Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Chip Shop
383 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY

random stuff

Wulfmorgenthaler is awesome. SEE:

Breadophile?
Pigs are talented
I don't use knives; I just rip em with my bare hands
They're best when they're unborn!
If you're lucky, you'll get one that says, "One day I want to be digested by a human stomach."
I don't drink wine
Do they like acorns?
I do think that is a good reason
Think of the spoons; please chill your soup

Do you doggie-bag it? BRUNI INVESTIGATES!!! I don't recall every taking extra food home from sit-down restaurants while eating in NYC...really! One main reason is because I tend to eat everything (dammit) or eat so much that whatever's left over isn't worth packing up in a container that's probably 50 times larger than whatever morsel I decided to leave on my plate. Another reason is because even if there is something worth taking out, I probably won't want to shlep it around so that the next day I can feast on the same food I had the night before in a reheated, more oxidated "I sat in the fridge for many hours" form. Tasty, that is not.

However, in reference to Bruni's post, I've never eaten at a restaurant that served excessive petit fours. But even if I did, I bet I'd inhale em all right at the table. Isn't that the best part of the meal? Yeah, I thought so. Seriously, if I just ate the bread and desserts I would be a very happy customer. And very hated by the restaurant.

While growing up in NJ, my family almost always had to take something out. I could rarely finish portions served to me at our local Italian restaurants or places like The Outback. Japanese food was one exception, although we got Japanese take-out (run by a family friend) more than actually eating in Japanese sit-down restaurants (same with Chinese food, which we almost never ate in restaurants). I'm sure a large part of my childhood was sustained by the microwaved leftovers of Chinese and Japanese take-out food.

...I want a bag of petit fours. [writes that down on my birthday wishlist]

One of many favorite moments from The Simpsons (en espanol):

When I was little my brother and I, like many other impressionable youth, watched The Simpsons religiously. My dad disapproved highly of our retinas being glued to FOX on Sunday nights, thinking that the show would somehow rot our brains. Hey, we're doing alright!

Somewhat.

Maki is making me hungry for hot dogs, which never happens.

Ending thought: this entry was kinda weird and lengthy.