Poverexic in NYC

I’ve been spearheading our Thanksgiving team lunch that’s scheduled for this Friday.  I am mainly spearheading it because ‘spearheading’ consists of choosing what foods to order for this meal.  So I asked admin A to browse around Whole Foods and Fresh Direct and see what turkey-sides-dessert combo she can come up with for $100 ($10/person) and I would review the order.

Unfortunately it turns out both Fresh Direct and Whole Foods are quite pricey ($60 turkey?!?!??!?!  KILL YOURSELF) so we decided we needed to come up with some alternatives.  Coworker M suggested we get rotisserie chicken instead of turkey, so I of course immediately thought KFC.  I guess I accidentally said that out loud (and by ‘out loud’ I mean I mass-IMed everyone) and apparently I was the only person who was enthusiastic about the idea.  Here are some other reactions I got when I suggested we buy our Thanksgiving chickens from KFC:

B: SICK
A: sick.  i really wouldn’t want that
K: no way

I guess I got shot down.  Not really sure why everyone’s so against it.  Could you imagine how much food we could get at KFC for $100?!?!??!  We could probably feed all of Africa.

Anyway, I was discouraged by that, but luckily I had this tonight to cheer me up:

HAPPY 16 YEAR ANNIVERSARY TO EQUINOX 19TH STREET
JOIN “AMERICA’S HEALTHIEST GYM” FOR ONLY $16 INITIATION*

WHERE EQUINOX 19TH STREET
WHEN TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17
WHAT Live music by DJ NEPALM, complimentary Spa chair massages, special body composition event by Personal Training, Patricia Moreno’s IntenSati Sweet 16 Dance Party, assortment of food courtesy of Pita Grill, cold beverages provided by M2 Ultra Lounge.

GASP!!!!!!!!!  ASSORTMENT OF FOOD AND COLD BEVERAGES!!!!!!!!!  Forget the $16 initiation fee, I am going there for the FOOD AND BEVERAGES.  And boy were they good.  They had wraps, chicken and beef satay, summer rolls, sandwiches, pita and hummus, jambalaya, agua de coco, etc etc etc.  I am so happily full, thanks to my Jewish mother A who invited me to this incred event that apparently happens on like a monthly basis.  Really good to know I am guaranteed free food at least once a month.

I have the best boss in the world — got this email from her this morning:

SUBJECT:  These turkeys…

BODY:  are coming in to see you when I get back to the office.  Yum!

Turkey Cookies

YUM IS RIGHT.  E is one of my fav bosses ever, and her kid T is prob the only kid in the world that I like.  Maybe I wouldn’t harbor such hatred for small children if all of them cooked and baked for me on a regular basis like little T does.  One week it’s cookies, another week it’s brownies, last week it was pumpkin bread and this week it was turkey cookies.  THEY WERE SO DERICIOUS.  They reminded me of the sugar cookies I used to make with my mom until I grew some brains and learned that it was my mom’s job to cook/bake and my job to do my homework and get into Harvard.  I haven’t touched an oven since.  I have, however, continued to enjoy baked goods made by the hands of others.

Literally all my roommates and I did this weekend was eat, sleep, drink, eat, sleep, drink.  This was a weekend full of sodium.  And oddly enough we were all on the same odd sleeping schedule.  On Saturday we woke up at noon, ordered Tasty (I got lunch special sesame chicken with white rice and a diet Coke), then went back to sleep until 6pm at which point we watched about 3 movies on HBO before going out to Loreley which has amazing wiener schnitzel.  I hadn’t had dinner yet (per the usual) so I took a slice of bread from M and stole the rest of O’s wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, french fries and salad while I distracted him with talks of gang bangs and good porn.  I don’t think he even noticed I took all his food he was so engaged in conversation.  But I knew he wasn’t going to eat it, so it was okay in my mind.

On Sunday we woke up at noon, ordered Tasty (I got combination boneless spare ribs with pork fried rice and an egg roll), watched a few movies, then went back to sleep until 4:30pm at which point we ordered yet another meal from Big Daddy’s because roommate K really wanted some fried cookie dough and pecan waffles with bananas, I really wanted a Hangover Helpler smoothie, and roommate L really wanted a chicken licken sandy.  After filling our bellies we went right back to sleep until 9pm at which point roommates M and L ordered some dericiously prump soups from Prump Dumpring, and M gave me his leftover dumpring soup including 2.5 dumprings.

My usual strategy behind sleeping all day is that when you’re sleeping, you aren’t hungry and spending money on food.  Unfortunately that was counterproductive today, given the sleeping this weekend made us even more hungry and made us order 3 huge meals every 4.5 hours.  Growing up, my mom used to always tell me that if you go to sleep right after eating, you turn into a cow when you wake up.  Thinking back on this now, I realize that she may or may not have been telling the truth.

TONIGHT WAS THE MOST INCRED EVENT EVER.  I LOVE LAUNCH EVENTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hanky Panky

OMG.  This was the best event ever.  There was a CUSTOMIZE YOUR OWN HANKY PANKY station which meant a FREE $32 RHINESTONE CUSTOMIZED HANKY PANKY LET ME REITERATE FOR FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  ANDDDDD we got a free gift bag that included *A-N-O-T-H-E-R* HANKY PANKY low rise along with an entire makeup set and free makeup goodies too!!!!!!!!  Melissa Joan Hart was there and she is tiny, she’s literally like 4’11”.  On top of that, Stoli was one of the sponsors and they had the best Stoli drinks ever, so I had one of each of the 4 different Stoli drinks and they were DELICIOUS.  And they had tiny little mini cupcakes that spelled HANKY PANKY and they were the most dericious cupcakes ever and I had 5 of them.  I saved so much money today.  Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of the adorable cupcakes but I did get a picture of an adorable Hanky Panky bouquet:

Hanky Panky Bouquet

HEART HANKY PANKY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wednesdays always mean Glee and chili bowls.  Except not really because the past forever Wednesdays have been ruined by the World Series and this was my FIRST CHILI BOWL WED NIGHT EVER AND IT WAS THE MOST EXCITING SURPRISE EVER!!!  My timing was impeccable — I literally got home 2 minutes before Glee started and right as roommate M was finishing up the chili.  Bread bowl and chili reminded me of Boston and Dallas, respectively, and in the words of Sue Sylvester, “First I was aroused, and then I was disgusted.”

Not really.  I was really just aroused.  You can see why:

Chili

Adding Steak

Spooning

CHILI BOWLS

Today was a huge disappointment.  I organized this huge event tonight at the Yale Club (GO CRIMSON) for current and prospective clients, and I didn’t eat all day in preparation for it because I knew the beginning of the event was going to start off with heavy hors d’oeuvres, and I LOOOOOOOVE heavy hors d’oeuvres because usually everyone else will start saying ‘no’ to the butler after a few rounds, and I never say no, and they are always hired to just keep serving until forever.  So I just keeeeeeep taking those delicious little mini bites off his plates until forever.

With such high expectations going into the event, I was doomed for disappointment.  I don’t know what I was thinking when working with the event coordinator when organizing this event, but I guess I was just too slammed with other work to pay more attention and closely review the most important part of her responsibility: THE CATERING MENU.  Huge mistake.  Literally the plates that came around during the cocktail session looked like something right out of the freezer aisle at a crappy grocery store.  AND to make matters worse, it hadn’t occurred to me before that as the main organizer of the event, I would have no time to pick at food since it’s unprofessional to spend more time chasing after the butlers than schmoozing with the clients.

Nevertheless, I was still confused about the selection of hors d’oeuvres after I got home from the event, and I went back through my emails and took a closer look at what the event coordinator had picked.  I immediately saw what was wrong:

• Santa Fe chicken flower — WHAT THE FUCK IS A CHICKEN FLOWER
• Vegetable dim sum — VEGETARIAN?!?!??!?? WHAT?!??!???!
• Spicy samosa with cucumber yogurt sauce — VEGETARIAN?!?!??!?? WHAT?!??!???!
• Rosemary skewed fruit kabob with honey — VEGETARIAN?!?!??!?? WHAT?!??!???!
• Blue corn tortilla cup with roasted corn relish, guacamole and salsa — VEGETARIAN?!?!??!?? WHAT?!??!???!
• Asparagus and prosciutto sundried tomato wrap — WHERE WAS THIS ONE I DEFINITELY DID NOT SEE THIS ONE OUT THERE AND THIS WAS THE BEST ONE ON THE MENU?!?!??!?!??!?!??!?!??!?!??!??!?!

Ohhhhhh the failureeeeee the failureeeeeee.  Alas, I had extremely little substance in my stomach and was starving leaving the event and cursed Zooey Deschanel and Natalie Portman and every other Hollywood vegetarian/vegan who made this a fad.  Now let’s go out there and KILL SOME COWS!!!!!!

This weekend was J’s bachelorette party in my hometown Dallas — my first bachelorette party ever AKA PARTY IN THE USA!!!!!!!!!!!!  This weekend was incred and completely brought me back to high school, not only because I spent the weekend with J and D but more so because we visited old high school fav spots like gay club The Village.  More on this later.

Anyway what I appreciated about this weekend other than the fact that there were penis icons everywhere was that this was a 100% poverexic friendly weekend.  L and M&M did such a great job acknowledging the fact that we are all poor and broke.  When L sent out an email regarding budget for this bachelorette party weekend a few weeks ago, I nearly had a heart attack when I realized how cheap everywhere in this country was outside of NYC.  This party budget was about half of how much moola it would cost me to get one night of blackout in NYC.

Friday night’s highlight was when we played ‘Pin the Dick on M’ and I won first place (my placement was impeccable and my instinct extraordinary) — my prize was a bunch of tiny candy penises which were about the size of Asian Ds.

Penis Candy

Then Saturday night started out at the W Hotel with this:

Bachelorette Punch

Followed by this (BIG BOY!!!):

Big Boy

M&M did a great job picking out such a beautiful looking cake with blue veins and pubes and all.  Then after the penis cake we went to a club that looked oddly very familiar to me….. why was it so familiar to me……. OH I KNOW, our friends and I used to go there when we were 17 because that was the only 17+ club in Dallas that played techno music and served underage kids, and the same drag queen Crystal who was there 10 years ago was still there.  She/he looked pretty much the same, except with a saggier ass and much more botox.

Another incredibly pleasant surprise was that drinks there were $2 (WHAT! only in Texas).  I guess the surprise lasted through the middle of the night when I woke up to projectile a gallon of pretty in pink $2 alcoholic juices into the toilet, which apparently woke up and disgusted M, prompting her to follow my lead in gagging up some of her liquor immediately after me.

Even with all the countless shots and I-couldn’t-keep-track-of-how-many drinks, this entire weekend of bachelorette activities was still way cheaper than one single weekend night in NYC, not to mention we ordered in dinner both nights (pasta on Friday, pizza on Saturday), and my parents took me out to sushi and steak lunches on Friday and Saturday, respectively, adding super extra bonus points to my poverexic weekend.

Can’t wait for J’s wedding over New Years — THERE’S GOING TO BE SO MUCH FREE FOOD AND SO MANY FREE BOYS.

I received a Facebook invite today from C with event title

Big Girls, Small Kitchen Cookie Giveaway

I love the word “giveaway.”

C – who is an amazing chef – has a blog called “Big Girls, Small Kitchen” and used to cook and bake for me in college when I was supposedly in charge of student open houses and was supposed to cook/bake for 400 students every month.  As you can imagine, 90% of that time was spent admiring C’s original recipes and “taste testing” every dish before it went out to the students.

Anyway, the Facebook invite got me so excited:

It’s cold outside now. Which means, more often than not, C is holed up in her kitchen baking batches upon batches of cookies. While P could (well, has) easily polish off a good dozen or two of her Deep Chocolate Cookies with Milk Chocolate Chips, we both thought it was probably high time to start sharing with friends.

Join the Big Girls, Small Kitchen Fan Page and leave a note on our wall with your favorite kind of cookie.  Three cookie-loving fans will receive a tin of their favorite treats from the Quarter-Life Cooks.

The lucky recipients will be highlighted on www.biggirlssmallkitchen.com next week.

-P and C, The Quarter-Life Cooks

A TIN OF MY FAVORITE TREATS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  MY FAVORITE KIND OF COOKIE IS THE BLACK AND WHITE COOKIES THAT C MADE SPECIALLY FOR THE “NEW YORK” THEMED OPEN HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  B&W cookies are one of the 2349872398748923743 reasons to love NYC.

I don’t care how poverexic I am, I ain’t eating there!

(…………………. or, I probably still would).

Courtesy of amor T, who has yellow fever.

Today was so free.  I didn’t go to work today because I needed to finish moving, and the cable guy was coming (TV and internet YES!!!).  Last night I went over to S’s to watch Californication and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and S and C ordered Rosa Mexicana for dinner so of course there were leftovers — C didn’t even touch his rice and beans and fresh tortillas, and they left half their bag of chips.  YES.  So naturally for breakfast today roommates L and K and I fried the tortillas and made puffy tacos with the leftover beans/rice/guac and fried some bacon to go in the tacos.  THEY WERE REARRY DERICIOUS.

Then later today roommate K was ordering dinner at 4pm and bought me a fruit smoothie because she owed me money from the tacos I bought her off the street over Halloween weekend.  And for herself she got a hamburger, an order of spaghetti and 2 cupcakes because she was really hungry.  The great thing about roommate K is that her eyes are way too big for her stomach.  She always orders like 3 meals because she’s “really hungry” and then barely finishes the first.  And then roommate L and I attack the rest.  Today she barely ate half her hamburger before she put it down, then only had like 3 bites of her spaghetti.  MORE FOR US!!!!!!!  Roommate L and I had a feast.

THEN!  Roommate M moved his stuff from Boston today and Poppa T gave him moving money, which he naturally just put toward ordering all of us Tasty King.  What generosity!  I wasn’t even hungry because I had been eating all day (which confuses my stomach), but in the spirit of poverexia roommate M encouraged me to order something anyway and save it for tomorrow.  I couldn’t refuse that, so I ordered my usual chicken and broccoli with white rice, ate a few bites, and saved the rest in the fridge for lunch tomorrow.