Tonight, Chris surprised me with a handmade pasta making class at Taste Buds Kitchen, which specializes in fresh, handmade cooking classes and “culinary experiences.” The class was less than 20 people, and we all got grouped into stations organized into three categories – marinara sauce and fettuccine, butternut squash ravioli, and spinach ravioli. Chris and I got placed into the marinara and fettuccine group with another couple. The marinara sauce was pretty straightforward since I’ve made similar versions many times, but the pasta making part was the most exciting. We made it from scratch using just flour, olive oil, salt, and eggs, formed the dough, kneaded, moved it through the pasta machine (a KitchenAid stand mixer attachment), and left it to dry. Then the assistants helped us boil the noodles and ravioli, and we were ready to eat. Nothing compares to freshly made pasta. The texture in your hands and the mouth-feel are a world away from dried, packaged pasta noodles.

So me being me, we went home, and I immediately wanted to look at the prices of the different pasta attachments. Apparently there is no single attachment that can just have a switch flipped to produce different pasta types, like linguine, fettuccine, spaghetti; if you want to create different types, you need to buy additional attachments, which go for around $75-100 each. I personally like the wider noodles the most, as I find it far more satisfying to eat wide strips of papparadelle or fettuccine than thinner spaghetti or angel hair.

I can’t wait until we get a bigger apartment or house so that I can buy my dream KitchenAid stand mixer with all my wide noodle pasta attachments, ice cream attachment, meat grinder attachment, and sausage stuffer kit. 🙂

I can’t believe it. I just did a Yelp search for “tacos and tequila” (sudden craving since it’s Thursday and I just want the weekend to come), and I can’t believe how many results show up for the East Village area. Granted, the number increases almost exponentially when you just search for tacos, but this is such a huge change from when I first moved to New York. Taco spots were non-existent, Dos Toros did not yet exist (and I believe it now has four locations, one of which is in Williamsburg). Even nicer places like Anejo and Empellon are opening up, and even tequilerias (mmmm, love). Mexican places in Manhattan are growing, so it looks like I won’t have to trek out to Queens for good tacos or tamales anymore.

Thai food in New York is almost as ubiquitous as cabs. In pretty much every neighborhood in Manhattan, you can find some cookie cutter Thai place that serves the staples, like pad thai, basil fried rice, tom yum soup, etc. Most of these places, like Spice and Qi, are pretty well priced, especially around lunch. It’s like the cool and affordable Asian food to eat even now. The better Thai places are in Queens, but unless you live in Queens or are someone like me and like to travel for food, you probably don’t care about this.

So I was really confused when I was in Midtown Atlanta for the last three days to find out that what is considered a decent Thai place was going to charge me $15 for shrimp pad thai for lunch… and then charge me an additional $3 because I asked for tofu with it. There are no lunch specials like you would find in San Francisco or New York – the lunch prices are the dinner prices. It was really shocking since pretty much all of the other restaurants I’ve eaten at in Atlanta seemed pretty cheap. And for the record, though the shrimp was cooked well, the pad thai itself was sub-par and on the verge of being flavorless like the Yelp reviews said.

And then Chris made me think about it when he said that Thai food is probably still considered exotic in Atlanta, so the restaurant feels like it can justify its relatively high prices. Like my classmate told me the other night, Korean food right outside of Atlanta is good and cheap, but anywhere else in Atlanta, it’s nearly impossible to find good, authentic Asian food. Southern food and BBQ would probably get tiring after a while.

Today, I spoke with someone who is from South Florida and told me that she finds New York City daunting. It’s so hard for me to relate to this because I grew up in a major city on the West Coast and spent most of my childhood dreaming about how amazing it would be one day to live in the concrete jungle of New York. She said the closest she had gotten to living in New York was Baltimore, where she hated it because cars were constantly getting jacked and broken into “by hoodlums!,” so this is how she imagined New York was. Well, I told her, if she lived in Manhattan, she most likely would not own a car, and Manhattan is so crowded and bustling at all hours of the day and night that it would be hard to break into someone’s car and not be noticed.

We love what we love and know what we know, but I am happy that I do not have this misconception of “big city life.”