Poverexic in NYC

Today was team lunch with boss S who is on maternity leave because she recently became with child.  We went to Dean’s, just a hop, skip and a jump away from the office, a faux Patsy’s with delish pizza and salad.  Boss S brought little R who is just a little peanut (did someone say peanuts?!?!), and there were a few awk moments throughout the lunch where it became awkwardly apparent just how inexperienced I was with babies, such as when I asked if little R wanted a bite of my pizza (apparently 2-month-olds don’t eat real food, although I am pretty sure I was eating rice and fish by 3 months).  I alleviated the awkwardness by eating the rest of the table’s bowl of salad with huge chunks of tomato and artichoke, and then eating one slice of margarita pizza, one slice of veggie pizza, one half slice of veggie pizza that I split with J, then one half slice of veggie pizza that I split with M, and then the last slice of veggie pizza that was left on the table.  I watched nervously and hunched over my plate as the waitress came by and took away S’s plate, then J’s plate, D’s plate, M’s plate, K’s, A’s, L’s, mine-OH NO YOU DON’T YOU BITCH.  I’M STILL FINISHING MY PIZZA AND SALAD.

That became another awk moment.

And then boss S picked up the entire tab!!!!!!!!!  Awk moment alleviated once more.  She is like the Jewish mother I never had, she feeds me and keeps me healthy and alive.  ARIIIVVVVEEEEEEEE!!!

Today, I had salsa for dinner.  That’s correct.  Salsa for dinner.  There was some homemade salsa in the office kitchen today, leftover from some chips and salsa thing, and it was the most delicious salsa ever, with whole ripe tomatoes and perfect seasoning.  So I took 2 cupfuls of salsa, and that is what I had for dinner.  Then, I questioned my lifestyle.

Never mind.  I lied.  For dinner I also had a Newcastle and 2 glasses of Little Penguin at home while watching Top Chef Masters and thinking about prawns.  Now I’m WASTED!!!  Lightweight (not really).

OMGOMOGMOMGOMGOMGOMOGMOMGOMOGMOGMOMG
http://nymag.com/restaurants/cheapeats/2009/57880/

Had a free bagel for lunch today and the leftover plate of sandwich/salad/pasta for a 4pm dinner. And then coworker A gifted me an entire ziploc bag of

Reese's Dark

Reese's Whipps

Reese's Fast Break

that her bf’s mother had forced on her to get some meat on her bones.  Luckily I’m the only one around here who actively wants more meat on my bones.

Today was so frustrating.  Yesterday I went grocery shopping for the first time in 3 months and bought 10 canned soups, which should last me about 3 more months.  I brought the soups to work (I use my cubicle shelves as my pantry) and really didn’t want to already eat one today, but by 11:45am I was so starving that I just had to eat my chicken creamed corn soup.

Literally 3 minutes after I finished my tupperware-heated chicken creamed corn soup, I get an IM from coworker A: “FOOD IN MEETING ROOM 4.”

GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!!!!  I immediately ran over to meeting room 4 while hitting myself in the head going WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY and angrily shoved two sandwiches, pasta, caesar salad, and dessert onto my plate while I was still kicking myself over the fact that had I been patient for just a few more minutes, I would have not had to go into my own private stash of food for lunch.

THEN!!!!!!!!  It got worse!!!  And by worse I mean better.  At a presentation just a few minutes after that, there were boxes and boxes of pizza!!!!!  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!??!?!??! WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY and I again angrily took three slices of pizza still furiously annoyed at myself for having been impatient and gone into my own food stash when there was an abundance of free food at the office today.

Ultimately, I ate the pizza for today’s lunch and dinner, and saved the plate of sandwiches, pasta, caesar salad, and dessert for tomorrow.  I will not make the same mistake again tomorrow.

Ugh I was doing so well this weekend until today.  Yesterday I woke up at 1pm and thought I was starving so ordered my usual Tasty King lunch special beef and broccoli with pork fried rice and wonton soup for $5.50 — I usually eat it all in one sitting but yesterday for some reason I suddenly got really full after the wonton soup and just a couple bites of the beef and broccoli with pork fried rice.  And since I usually eat my lunch over 2 hours, it meant I finished my lunch circa 3pm, which means that I wasn’t hungry for the rest of the day (since I usually don’t eat post-5pm, especially on weekends in an effort to facilitate my inebriation process on as few beers as possible to lower weekend costs).

That means that today I had nearly an entire thing of Tasty King lunch special beef and broccoli with pork fried rice leftover, which I ate again as soon as I woke up at 1pm.  Today, however, by 6pm I was starving for some reason and had to make myself an entire plate of pasta, which I was really annoyed about because I was going on a really impressive streak of not cooking or making anything in our kitchen for 7 months straight since I went home for the holidays.  (Now that I think about it, I guess that means the pasta was 7 months old but I don’t think boxed pasta goes bad.)

I thought I was having such a low-cost weekend when circa 9pm as roommate L and I are watching “Music & Lyrics,” he suggests ordering prump dumpring.  Ugh I just couldn’t resist.  And I was still starving for some reason so of course I caved into the suggestion of ordering prump dumpring (I mean who could resist this prumpness):

Prump Dumpring

So I ordered my usual meat dumpring soup for $4, and I was kicking myself for it because it meant that I could have potentially only spent $5.50 on food for the entire weekend but instead I ended up spending $9.50.

TODAY THERE WERE PRUMS IN THE OFFICEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!  I took four.

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

THEN THERE WERE SANDWICHES AND PASTA AND SALAD IN THE KITCHEN!!!!!!!!!!!  I really had to act quick.  There was only one sandwich out and one wrap, so I swiftly grabbed the sandwich, a plate full of pasta, topped it off with some salad, and then immediately sneakily whisper-called each of my team members from the kitchen phone to get them over as quickly as possible.

They were too late… by the time they got there three minutes later, someone else had already swooped in two minutes later and grabbed the last wrap and the rest of the pasta.  Tsk tsk tsk how many times do I have to emphasize that you have to act at LIGHTENING SPEED around here, we work in PR, very fast-paced environment!!!!!!!!!

THEN!!!!!!  An hour later coworker A brought over a plate full of cupcakes from J’s office wedding shower and it was one of the best cupcakes I’d ever had in my entire life, I think it beat Crumbs Boston Creme cupcake!!!!!!!!!!!

Great office Thursday.

Yesterday was full of free food, bbq’s and patriotism, especially because I was hanging out with a bunch of Texans.  SS and I started out the afternoon at T’s bbq which had maybe the most impressive array of food I’ve ever seen in my life — there were burgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, pineapples, watermelon, fresh fruit and veggies, really good pickles, red velvet cupcakes and strawberry rhubarb cobbler.  It was incred.

The most entertaining part of the first bbq was, though, watching N eat his first hot dog ever in his life.  I know — so strange.  Apparently N had never eaten a hot dog in his life before because he’s had a hot dog aversion since he was a little kid that he claims is not penis related since he does like pickles — this is unlike my friend J who has a serious fear of hot dogs because they remind her of penises.  Like if you stick a hot dog in her face she will shriek “Eek! A penis!”  Not sure if her boyfriend A knows about this odd fear of hers.  Anyway, I usually don’t like to force feed people since I feel really strongly that people should never eat something if they don’t want to eat it because there will always be plenty of people around who do want to eat it and they should be the ones who get to eat it.  This is similar to how I absolutely cannot stand it when my mom tries to get my sister to eat delicious things like mussels and escargot that my sister does not eat and I am just like STOP IT MOTHER SHE DOES NOT WANT TO EAT IT, I WILL EAT IT GODDAMMIT LEAVE HER ALONE!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway I digress.  The point is I forced N to eat the hot dog despite my usual principles.  Apparently R who was also at the bbq had never had red velvet cake before, so I also forced her to eat a red velvet cupcake.  This bbq was full of firsts.

After that spectacle, SS and I moved on to bbq #2 to meet up with S and his Texan friends where of course there was plenty of seven layer dip, queso and beer.  There were also plenty of red and blue jello shots of which SS and I each had about 11.  I love jello shots and I experienced flash backs to freshman year when one of my roommates and I would make jello shots in our mini fridge every weekend and our other roommate M absolutely hated us for it because they left our fridge colorful and disgusting.  The rest of the evening consisted of playing about 6 rounds of flip cup, attempting to play beirut without a ping pong ball, and sitting around and eating vodka soaked watermelon.  We also drank delicious pink lemonade gin something out of turkey basters out of a huge cooler for most of the night and ran around spraying each other with 80 hour energy spray, which means that yes, I will be bouncing around like a ball of energy through Tuesday.  Good times.

Needless to say, this was a successful weekend full of free food and booze, and I guess there were some fireworks too.

AMERICA FUCK YEAH!  Coming again to save the mother fucking day yeah!!!

I love holidays because free food is 100% guaranteed, and I especially love July 4th because there are endless bbq’s.  I was in DC for the weekend, mainly because the 4th in the City sucks and I figured this would be a good opp to visit DC since the only other time I visited it was when I toured Georgetown in high school with my parents and had my Asian mother yelling in my ear the entire time that the only school worth going to was Harvard and I was wasting my time with all these other no-name schools.  <<shakes head>> Asians.

SS and I started out the weekend well by meeting up with N and D at some park whose name I don’t know where they had endless pitchers of sangria and salsa dancing.  We were excited about the former, not so much about the latter — we thought we had finally escaped salsa dancing when we left Latin America a few weeks ago.  Anyway, apparently this is the huge hangout place in DC and people get really friendly and have picnics and, most importantly, share food in the spirit of generosity and friendship.  N, D, SS and I were having our nice pitchers of sangria when these two girls came over in an apparent attempt to pick up N and D — they clearly didn’t care about SS and me but we cared about them because it seemed they had a nice little picnic of food under their arms.  We gave them a huge smile and enthusiastically welcomed them to our circle (”please! come join us, come come!”) and ate their cheese and bread and fresh veggies and drank our own sangria.

This picnic was followed by dinner at Rosa Mexicana followed by aimless walking up and down the streets of Chinatown and then agreeing to meet up with JO whom I hadn’t seen since he visited NYC several months back and I saw him for 2 seconds on Delancey Street, which we couldn’t find him on for hours because he kept telling us he was on “Valencia Street.”  Anyway, since I hadn’t seen JO in months, SS and I decided we would make the effort to go meet up with him wherever he was.  Apparently he was in the NE, the Brooklyn to NYC, the “danger zone” where no girl would dare travel, especially at night.  We got in a cab and as we were pulling up to this bar that JO was at, the cab driver counts our cash, turns around and yells “This is all I get?!?!?  This is all I get for taking you to this dangerous neighborhood?!?!?!?”  SS and I looked at each other… “dangerous neighorhood”…. wonderful.  We threw him another $1 and walked upstairs to find JO having margaritas with his high school friends.  Though this was quite the trekk, it was good to see JO and most importantly, we had some really good margaritas from their pitcher, which I proceeded to throw up this morning.  I hate it when I waste drinks like that!!!!!!!!!!!!

LAST NIGHT WAS AMAZING.  Coworker K IMed me circa 4pm to ask what I was doing after work – I tried to come up with a quick excuse in case I was about to get roped into something I didn’t want to do but of course my terrible-at-lying self couldn’t lie and just said “nothing, why.”  BOY WAS I GLAD I MADE MYSELF AVAILABLE.  Apparently her roommate R had just gotten promoted and in his ecstacy was inviting random people to dinner, and by random I mean coworker K and her boyfriend, and their other roommate who ended up not being able to go and so K started asking other people if they could come instead.  Good thing the rest of our team wasn’t able to go since apparently I was like the last person she asked, but luckily my I-never-do-anything-fun-during-the-week self was fully available to attend this impromptu dinner on K’s happily promoted roommate R.

The dinner was at this super secret top secret place called Bohemian, one of those NYC super secret top secret places you have to have the number for to get a reservation but the number isn’t available anywhere unless you get it in person from someone who has personally been there.  Rather than explaining in words, let me just show you a few photos of just a few of the items we were served at this incredible Japanese super secret top secret restaurant Bohemian.

Sample Meat Platter

Miso Black Cod

Kobe Mini Burgers

I can’t even tell you how incredible the food was — other deliciousness we ordered included a plate of sashimi (SO FRESH), rice balls, steak (SO TENDER), cauliflower, risotto, potato wedges, and sake panna cotta (INCRED), accompanied by two bottles of wine and a bottle of bourbon.  It was quite incred.  Exceeded my expectations.  AND the restaurant had one of those really high tech toilets that they have all over Japan that has an automatic toilet seat heater and a cookie cleaner and a bunch of other neat gadgets.  AND I became bff with the chef because he was Japanese and so we communicated in our native tongue.  He called me a “Japanese beauty.”  And then I nervously laughed and stuffed my face with burger.  Whatever, now I have his business card and have the super secret number to the place.