Poverexic in NYC

This weekend was a disaster.  Saturday was Santacon, which is probably the best thing about New York winters.  This would be my 4th year in a row doing Santacon and I was pumped.  And I was especially excited because J was in town from Dallas for work, and even though she had to leave for the airport on Saturday morning, I was determined to let her at least get a taste of Santacon by going to G’s pregame starting at 8am.

I set my alarm for 8am for Saturday morning after what I thought was a pretty calm night the night before of just going out to dinner with friends, then hitting up a few bars and only having like one drink per bar.  Apparently I guess I’d had a little more than that, and then also remembered J and I had started off the night finishing off an entire bottle of wine in about 20 minutes and several more drinks, which I realized when I half successfully puked up bits and parts of my Chimay from Jimmy’s No. 43 the next morning.  I was not ready for Santacon.  Neither was J.

But we forced ourselves to get up, I put on my red top and green scarf and Santa hat, and I cried as I felt like dying while leaving the apartment with J/B/T.  When we got to G’s pregame the smell of fried eggs instantaneously made me feel better, and the taste of the ham/egg sandwich on challah almost cured my hangover… until I turned around and saw the cans and cans of beer and felt like ralphing again.  People around me kept offering me beer and I threw up a little in my mouth.

Anyway Santacon this year started off at some odd locations, like Chinatown then Central Park where there was no drinking.  So we kinda came up with our own Santacon route, hitting up places we liked better like the West Village, and the entire city followed us.

Santacon

Finally around noon I started to feel like myself again, and good thing there were free cans of beer being passed around within our group the whole day because I essentially got wasted all over again for free, and the only thing I ate all day was the ham/egg/challah sandwich at 8am and a slice of S’s leftover pizza around 3pm.  By 4pm I was feeling golden.

Pizza

Our Santacon group was dying down around 7ish but we had another place to be at 9pm: S’s Four Loko party that we all thought wasn’t actually going to happen because we had bets on S passing out by 5pm and not being able to host his own party.

But it did happen, and it was a complete shitshow.  I had one watermelon Four Loko and thought I was going to die.  Roommate L had 3 Four Lokos — yes, 3 — and thought he was going to die X 3.  I don’t know what he was thinking.  We all knew it was time for him to go home when he started rocking back and forth on the couch with his eyes shut and a pained smile on his face.  Everyone knew it was time for me to go home when I half passed out on S’s bed and started hysterically laughing at things for no reason at all with B/T jumping on the bed around me.

Well when I finally got home at who-knows-what-time, I went to the bathroom to find L’s grape Four Loko vomit all over the toilet and my watermelon vomit followed shortly thereafter.  Let’s just say Sunday morning was incredibly painful and thank god for Chinese food without which I don’t know how we would have survived.

This past week S decided to cook another turkey.  Why?  I don’t know.  He wanted to cook another turkey.  To celebrate December.  I was up for it.  He talked about making a jalapeno turkey — I didn’t know what that meant but it sounded delicious.  It didn’t actually end up happening, but what did happen was S rubbing a shitload of duck fat underneath the skin of the turkey, then cooking chicken liver in a shitload of duck fat, then mixing the cooked chicken liver into homemade stuffing topped with a shitload of duck fat.

Thanksgiving feast #3 was amazing, but what was even more amazing was that S took one bite of his chicken liver stuffing and apparently it “wasn’t to his liking” so he gave me literally the entire pan of stuffing to take home.  I thought it was absolutely incredible, I don’t know what S was talking about.  I picked out most of the chicken liver, but the rest of the stuffing has lasted me 5 nights of dinners so far and still going strong.

Wednesday was SB’s birthday, which means celebration with the Dallas girls.  It also happened to be the first night of Hanukkah, so I was expecting to go out and eat latkes or something for SB’s bday since all my Dallas friends are Jews, but instead we went to some Chinese restaurant right in the middle of Chinatown that was apparently well known for their peking duck, or as I like to call it, peeking dick.  I was bitter at first since I usually refuse to go to Chinatown since there are very few things I hate in life more than being surrounded by crowds and crowds of real Asians, but SB was a good friend of mine and as hard as it was to admit to myself, this dinner wasn’t about me.  And besides, she was there for my bday at New Ashiya being a responsible friend and making sure I was constantly being fed shots of sake, so I knew I had to return the favor.

As much as I hate Chinatown, this restaurant was pretty good.  Only downside is that it was BYOB except we didn’t know it was BYOB, so we tried to order bottles of wine for the table and just got a silent head shake “no” from the waiter.  Good thing I had gifted SB a bottle of Ciroc for her bday, so she pulled that out of her purse, and since the restaurant didn’t have normal human glasses available, we drank shots of Ciroc the entire night out of Chinese tea cups and then chased them with hot tea.  It worked fine.

So this restaurant had a pretty good dinner deal.  For 5 people you get a peeking dick, plus a soup, egg roll/beef satay/steamed dumpring combo for appetizer, and three full entrees.  It was all awesome.  Here’s an Asian:

Asian

Here was our peeking dick:

Duck

Peking Duck

And for our entrees we got beef with scallops, general gao’s and green beans with minced pork.

Entrees

I’ll probably never go back to this restaurant again, but we do still have plans to celebrate the 8 nights of SB’s bday by lighting candles and getting shitfaced at our other favorite Asian restaurant, New Ashiya.  Nes gadol hayah sham!