I took a couple of calls outside on my phone today because it was so warm out. I couldn’t believe it: it was 68 degrees F and sunny today! I wore a light coat and a scarf, and by the end of my walk, it was too warm. It felt so good to be outside and have the sun on my face… instead of being stuck in my apartment in front of a computer monitor.

This winter felt especially long and annoying. It didn’t help that COVID has been lingering and making us feel more isolated, like all we do is spend our time at home in front of screens, whether that screen is our TV, computer, or phone. It will be nice to be outside more and not have to worry about bundling up, slipping on ice, or whether we need to wear hats or gloves.

Since we both took Friday off and were out and about in Queens and at Costco, Chris felt very unmotivated to go out anywhere on Saturday. So I ended up spending some time on Saturday afternoon doing some of my own errands, from dropping off clothing donations, getting my sunglasses repaired, to stopping by Sur La Table to see if they had the Global knives I wanted to test out. The experience I had asking about knives, the craftsmanship, and the feel/grip was like night and day from the experience I had at Williams Sonoma.

Williams Sonoma is basically like the bullshit big-box “luxury” store that rarely has sales, and its sales people really know little to nothing about their products, so they are basically useless to you when you have real cooking questions. And when you walk in and they ask if you need help, they don’t really have any real knowledge in the items they sell to truly help you; they just pretend to “help” you by asking the most basic questions in the world that a five-year-old might ask you. I asked to test out a couple of their Global knives, and they had me try out one knife. They asked no questions in regards to what I was looking for and what I might need. It was a no-frills experience and the person who “helped” me really did absolutely nothing other than open a locked cabinet for me.

At Sur La Table, the assistant helping me asked me what I was looking for, other brands/requirements/thoughts I had on what might interest me most, and gave multiple suggestions not just for other brands and Global lines to consider, but also suggestions on knife sharpening methods. She had me test out a few other “similar” knives that were German and Japanese. She encouraged me to do more research online for both the Global Classic and the Global Sai line (which I had no idea about before I went in) before committing; it was the kind of customer service experience you hope to have when contemplating whether to drop $100-300 on a brand new, fancy knife. Honestly, although I am clearly big on cooking, I really don’t spend too much time in kitchen supply stores. But I will say that I do always enjoy visiting Sur La Table, and people who work there are always friendly and helpful. Plus, their cooking classes are approachable and fun. I’d choose them any day over Williams Sonoma.

After our Costco haul yesterday, we drove back to my original neighborhood in Queens to visit Tangra Masala, one of my favorite restaurants in New York City, if not on the entire face of this earth. I cannot think of anything tastier than the fusion of Chinese and Indian cuisine — the two most populous countries on earth. They now have a larger banquet location in Sunnyside, plus a Manhattan location that we’ve been getting delivery from in the last few years, but it’s not quite the same to eat their lollipop chicken at home vs. having it fresh out of the fryer at their restaurant. Plus, here, I get nostalgic about my first few years in New York, as I was a regular here and oftentimes got takeout from here on nights I didn’t feel like cooking. As they were then, they are still cash only, though they have fully renovated both the tiny interior as well as their front. They no longer look like a total no-frills, shabby spot like they used to.

I realized that despite having lived in that neighborhood for four years, I’d never taken advantage of their lunch specials, so today, we ordered their Tangra Masala fish, vegetable kofte Manchurian, which came with a tasty and spicy slaw, rice, and soups, and of course, the lollipop chicken. We got their corn soup and the hot and sour soup, and both were excellent — super flavorful, and the hot and sour soup was packed with different vegetables and tofu. I regretted rarely branching out from my staple dishes as we slurped their soups. And of course, their lollipop chicken was excellent — and a pleasant surprise: we got not five pieces, but SIX! The crunchiness and fragrance of eating them fresh was unmatchable. Love this spot and hope they continue to stay in business forever. We were happy while being the only indoor diners in seeing that many people were stopping by to pick up takeout orders, plus their phones were constantly ringing with more orders on the way.

Today, we took the day off, and Chris rented a Zip Car to take us to the Long Island City location of Costco. I hadn’t been to this location likely since 2010, and it had changed quite a bit: the products on offer seem a lot more Asian, and I cannot remember the fact that the ready to eat food was in a totally separate location than the regular merchandise. There’s an entire halal meat section, plus a freezer section that seemed to just be for different styles of Asian noodles and dumplings. In addition, there’s an entire section for local and niche craft beers, so we picked up two types, one of which is a small New York State brewery.

One item that has been particularly trendy across Asia in the last couple of years has been salted duck egg yolk products, and they’ve slowly made their way over to the U.S. A few of the Asian bakeries and restaurants have been selling them, but I hadn’t been compelled to buy any of the products just yet until I saw a whole box of salted egg yolk cookies at Costco – 60 individually wrapped cookies for just shy of $10. If I remember, a small bag of similar cookies at a bakery were $6. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to commit to this, especially since if I didn’t like it, I’d have a lot of cookies lying around, but Chris insisted that I just get it. I mean, to the point I made a few posts ago…. I’m not traveling or indulging in anything else, so why not buy it now?! So we picked it up and added it to what ended up being our $435 Costco haul. On average, we probably spend anywhere from $300-450 at Costco once per quarter, so this is pretty normal for us. I will report back when I try these cookies.

Our team has a bi-weekly team meeting where we all get together, talk about numbers, team results and goals, major projects in progress, and we also have a quick section where one person on the team shares “reflections” on something of their choosing, which is usually personal. My manager asked me to do the reflections for today, so I decided… I’m going to tell everyone how American I am in my obsession with productivity, with always doing something, that I got so obsessed with “making the most” of the sheltering in place due to the pandemic, that I ended up giving myself cubital tunnel syndrome as a result of it. And so I had to learn to slow down and ease my obsession with always “doing something,” and also took up meditation to slow my mind down.

My colleague, who I am friendly with, sent me a book recommendation in light of my reflection — Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing,” which would likely aid in my desire to slow down. Yes, reading is actually doing something, but I like the idea of the book: resisting the attention economy.

Haskap berry jam from Prince Edward Island. Passion fruit jam from Paris. Lingonberry jam from Sweden. Quince peach cinnamon compote from London. During our travels, we’ve been gifted or purchased small jars of jam when we come across something unique or different than what we have easy access to in New York. And for the longest time, we barely touched any of the jars since pre-pandemic, we rarely bought bread at home, and even if we did, I’d need to store it, sliced, in our freezer because we were never home enough to eat it all before it went bad. Then once the pandemic began, we started going through all the jars, one by one. And finally, we had our last smear of haskap jam (TOTALLY OBSESSED; I’ve looked into mail ordering it from PEI) from the same company), and Chris got concerned and immediately started thinking about buying raspberry jam. So he went off to Trader Joe’s, picked up a jar of raspberry jam, and on a weekend we had it on toast…. and realized immediately how cloyingly sweet it was, like TOO SWEET, like we were just eating sugar with a sprinkle of fruit in it.

This is what happens when you become so accustomed to having jams that are made in small batches, by small businesses who are interested in showing you the real flavors of fruit, rather than the mass produced, bulk packaged commercial jams that people in today’s fast moving society just readily accept as “normal.”

A couple weeks later, Chris made us do a detour to the Greenmarket in Union Square to get a small batch jar of Beth’s jam. We’ll see if it’s any less sweet than this Trader Joe’s raspberry jam.

Chris loves to look at trends in our spending year over year, and he noted that in 2020, unsurprisingly, our grocery and takeout/delivery food spend was at its all-time highest levels. Part of the reason it is like that is not just because we were all sheltering in place, not just because we couldn’t dine out at restaurants, but it’s also because all of our work and pleasure travel was completely cancelled. A lot of our spending on dining out, indulgent/specialty foods or drinks happens when we are traveling. During travel is when we’d pick up things we normally wouldn’t find here in New York, such as haskap berry jam, passion fruit jam, a South Australia wine vinegar, or a dong ding oolong loose leaf tea from a very specific region in Taiwan. In 2020, I surprisingly not only drank ALL my tea that I got in China with the exception of some high end loose leafs that I’m spreading out (and… I got a LOT), but I nearly went through my entire supply of Sri Lankan Dilmah tea, which we usually get when we’re in Australia because they do not seem to distribute to the U.S. So that led me to buy matchas, some other sencha and genmaicha green teas from the Japanese grocery store, and also a few Nepali teas. With the world at your finger tips, I’ve been relying on online sources to send me the world to enjoy through my mouth. We’ve also been more indulgent with things we normally don’t buy much of, such as Indian sweets. This last weekend when we were in Jackson Heights, we spent nearly $38 on rasmalai, gulab jamun, pista rolls, and kesar ladoos from our favorite sweets shop, Maharaja Sweets. It was a record! I normally never get more than a pound of sweets there (the pricing is roughly about $11-12/lb, depending on which sweet you choose).

We have saved a lot of money because of the pandemic, but we’ve also managed to indulge in other areas, and with us, “indulging” tends to be through food.