Tonight, we invited some friends over for dinner to see our place for the first time since we’ve moved in. We haven’t had many people over at all due to travel schedules and my parents’ visit, so this is really the only time we’ve had more than one person over at once. Given that it’s a Friday, I unfortunately wasn’t able to cook and instead opted to get takeout for us instead. Seeing what was in the area and what delivered, I decided to get some Napolitean-style pizza from Don Antonio, a spot Chris and I have been to a few times and have really enjoyed. Little did I remember that the pizzas were expensive – with toppings, anywhere from $20-29 each, and they really aren’t that large — just four pieces per pizza. With just three pizzas ordered, with tax and delivery tip, it already came to over $70. I supplemented the pizza with a spring mix/arugula, toasted walnut and pear salad, some grilled shishito peppers, mushroom turnovers, and dessert.

Is this really how much “takeout” for a party of four should cost? I thought you were supposed to save money by eating in?!

I decided that after a lot of negligence that tonight would be the night I’d re-season my cast iron pan. Cast iron is known to be frustrating in that if it’s not seasoned properly, everything will stick to it. I followed the instructions by preheating the oven to 450 degrees,  oiling the cast iron pan inside and out so it was nearly dry, and then sticking the pan into the oven. Almost immediately did the fire alarm in our new apartment go off, and when I say “go off,” I really mean GO OFF. A little voice kept on repeating “fire!”, and the alarm, glaringly loud, just kept going on and on. I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off. I turned the air conditioner on, then the fan, then even opened a window (for the very first time in this apartment). I finally had to call the doorman to ask him how to shut it off (he reiterated how sensitive those fire detectors are). In the end, it went off on its own after the apartment cooled down a bit, but wow, is that thing sensitive. Everyone on my floor must have hated me.

These are the nuances you learn about your apartment the longer you live in it. Maybe next time I set the oven over 400 degrees, I will just need to shut the fire detector off.

Last night, I invited a good friend over to see my new apartment, have some dinner, and catch up. Given that most of the last month has been spent on settling and moving in, selling the original couch, and having my parents over, we’ve had no time to really invite anyone over to see our place until now. My friend had her bike stored safely downstairs in the mail room, and as she entered the building, she said she felt the building was too fancy for her to be entering. And as she entered the different parts of our new apartment, she marveled over everything from the windows to the light to living room rug. “This is the nicest apartment I’ve ever been in in this city!” she exclaimed. She was wide-eyed as we were on the roof overlooking the Empire State Building, the Chrysler building, and One World Trade downtown.

The funniest thing about this apartment is that for New York, yes, it’s a big one-bedroom, but for the country or the world? Not at all. Even things like having a pool on the roof in our building or a gym in-building are no big deal and are expected in better kept apartment buildings in the middle of the country… like in Arkansas, as my friend from Little Rock likes to remind me. She’s still in shock to this day that the last apartment we were in on the Upper East Side was as small as it was.

It’s all relative as we always say. I’ll be honest, though; every day I am in this apartment, other than the days my parents were here, I think I love it here more and more. It feels really nice to have real space again and actually have different living spaces, and a real hallway.

I baked in my new kitchen with my new oven tonight, and it was absolutely glorious.

I was a little intimidated looking at all the oven options (there’s a heat setting for both the upper and the lower oven… I’ve never seen that before, but hey, I don’t really keep up with oven trends). But when I set the timer digitally to 350 degrees, the number gradually increases to show what the actual temperature is. Then, there are timers for how long you want to bake, and all are digitally set by the digits; no up and down buttons. Just type in what number of minutes. Then, the timer goes off twice; once when there’s only one minute left, and then there’s a seconds countdown, and the second and final time of course when the bake time has completed.

And the banana bread loaf was perfect, beautifully browned on the outside, and moist on the inside. Banana bread is my most often baked good, mostly because it’s so easy and fast, and you never need fancy ingredients for it (well, except this time, I used creme fraiche).

I feel like I’ve finally entered the modern age of oven technology now. No more crappy dials for me.

I’m 31 years old, but I still can’t let go of my stuffed animals and all my other miniature Japanese and Snoopy toys I’ve been collecting forever. Do I really act my age? Or are other people like this, too, and they just don’t talk about it?

We have two huge bags full of stuffed animals, and I can’t bear to give any of them away. I think I gave a few of them away before we moved, but the ones we have, even though we don’t have enough display space in the new place, I can’t give them away. We have my Snoopys out, plus Pooh Bear from our wedding, and a couple koalas to represent Chris’s home country. That’s really it. There’s no place for animals like Ponyo or the FAO Schwarz bears or even Classic Pooh Bear, which was gifted to me by one of my best friends when we were only 12.

Decorating is hard when you’re trying to balance being an “adult” and having a “modern” apartment with also displaying all the things you love and are obsessed with, regardless of whether they are “age appropriate” or not.

Ever since I first moved to New York, I always noticed the restaurant supply stores that line Bowery on the Lower East Side. I figured they’d be good places to shop one day when I had my own place (well, not a roommate, but a husband or a more permanent home), and I could peruse their aisles to see what I might like. On my mental list were things like massive stock pots, huge stainless steel pans, and maybe even cheap serving platters.

I left work early to go since they’re supposedly only open from 9-6pm Monday through Friday. And I showed up at 5:05pm yesterday, and I got turned away. “Closed!’ two different men shouted at me. And I said, what, I thought you guys close at 6pm? And they both rolled their eyes at me as though I was some deaf child and said they changed their hours over a year ago, how could I not know that?

Well, sorry. I don’t check your hours every single day because I don’t pass your store every day. And no, I didn’t know because I completely went by your Yelp posting. And no, I don’t really like your attitude when I was trying to give your stupid business my money.

This is why regular consumers like me go to stores like Bed Bath and Beyond or Williams Sonoma. We end up paying more for what we buy that way. But we don’t get treated like shit like at the industrial supply shops.

I’m not even sure I want to go back. How much money would I really be saving, anyway?

We planned to catch up with one of our couple friends for dinner tonight in TriBeCa. We pretty much never eat in TriBeCa, nor do we even go there. TriBeCa is one of those neighborhoods where the rent and general cost of living is stupidly exorbitant, the restaurants are equally overpriced and overhyped — and anyway, who wants to live there when during a hurricane, it will likely be under water and without electricity, anyway?

But I really wanted to try this Shanghainese spot that opened by the same owners who run Cafe China in midtown. It’s not located in any Chinatown, but I always enjoyed the food and am eager to try new Shanghainese places that sound authentic (so many places in Chinatown say they are Shanghainese.. but they really aren’t). And so I made a booking for us at 6:30 on Yelp and made my way down there.

So, the annoying thing about eating at a fancy Chinese restaurant vs. a regular Chinese restaurant is that when you go to a regular Chinese spot in Chinatown or other very Chinese area, they don’t care if you add one more person. If you add one more person to a “fancy” spot, they either won’t give you your table, or they will just have you get seated three hours later. Those were our two options tonight when Chris’s friend wanted to come join us… and couldn’t.

The food was very good. The service was just okay. And in typical Chinese fashion, even at a fancy restaurant, they made sure we were out of there within two hours when they had their next booking setup for our four-top.