One day when I leave New York, I know one thing I will miss is the number of great, “hidden” spots that are sprinkled all over the city – the secret restaurant that you can access only by walking through an unmarked door in what appears to be a pawn shop, a bar that you get to by dialing a phone in an old-school telephone booth, a Japanese speakeasy you get to by walking through another Japanese restaurant – the list goes on. A colleague just told me about a pop-up ramen spot that opens only after 1am in Lower East Side, and it’s in the basement of an unmarked building; really, you have to know someone to get into this place. New York is a city where it’s probably impossible to see, do, and eat everything. It keeps you wanting more – and wanting to be in the know.

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.”

Occasionally growing up, when we’d be on the road and would need to pull over for a firetruck or ambulance with flashing sirens, my dad would joke that it probably wasn’t an emergency, and they were just in a mad rush for their morning coffee or doughnut. Well, for the first time in my life today, I actually saw an ambulance with flashing sirens pass by me on Third Avenue today, run through a red light, and double park itself right in front of Crumbs, the ubiquitous cupcake chain in New York. As the driver of the ambulance got out, he gave a high-five to a guy standing in front who I’m assuming he knew. When the guy said, “You needed your sugar fix today?” He responded, “Yeah, I have to pick up some cupcakes!”

Got to love the abuse of power, along with the sugar craving. We’re all human, after all.

I’ve realized that of the Meetups I’ve been to, the most interesting times have been when the group is a big mish-mash of different people from different countries and parts of the world, and we’re generally eating ethnic food. Interesting food is what brings interesting people together.

Tonight, I went to a South Indian food meetup in Midtown East. I arrived later than most of the others because I get off work later than they do, so initially it seemed awkward because no one was talking. No one really started talking until we started talking about different food, which led to discussions about politics, cultures, and living in different parts of the world. We had two Indian guys from India, a girl from Malaysia who studied in Delaware and now works here, another who went to school in D.C. and now works at the Federal Reserve, someone else who is originally from Singapore, but his family immigrated to Sydney when he was young, and now, he never spends more than two years at a time in one place because of his contracting job as a statistician. We had two teachers, one who teaches kindergarten and another who teaches community college courses on substance abuse in the Bronx. Three of us work in tech.

I learned a lot of interesting things tonight. I learned but forgot that Alaska was mostly made up of men, but didn’t realize that the men who are there, due to the fact that Alaska is in the middle of nowhere, gets 23 hours of darkness for half the year, and is cold as hell then, results in five times the number of domestic violence cases as the rest of the country (this is told by the guy who never lives anywhere that long from Sydney). I also heard interesting hypotheses on why Australia is so Asian yet remains racist – hypotheses that I can actually believe. Maybe this will be my new goal – stop going to fru-fru restaurants for Meetups and stick with the well-priced, ethnic holes-in-the-wall. I definitely was not bored tonight.

I’ve lived in New York for almost six years and have never been to Kalustyan’s until today – it was the highlight of my day. For anyone who is unfamiliar, Kalustyan’s is a pretty well known specialty foods/spice store in Manhattan that’s been around since the 1940s. It has aisles and aisles of every spice that you never even could fathom existing. I think I counted about 15 different types of paprika – just paprika.

I suppose for the average New Yorker who has about ten inches of kitchen space, never cooks, and lives off of delivery and dining out, this wouldn’t be surprising. But for someone like me, whose happiest moments are spent traveling, eating, or cooking, this is a bit of a shock. It’s always been on my list of places to visit, but I just never got around to it. And then today when I Google Map it, I find out it’s just a few blocks away from my office. I’m there.

It was a fun experience perusing the aisles and picking up the few Turkish and Middle Eastern spices I had on my list, but it was definitely a very pricey place. Pickled mangoes and limes I could find at Patel Brothers in Jackson Heights were marked up almost triple, and most Chinese sauces were at least double what I’d find them for at Hong Kong Supermarket. My mom’s beloved chewy ginger candy was marked at $10/pound when I could easily buy it off of Canal Street for about $2. It’s a novelty for me since I haven’t really explore Middle Eastern spices like pul biber and and urfa pepper much before, but maybe I will save my next Middle Eastern spice run for a hopefully cheaper trip to Bay Ridge.

Last night, Chris and I went to get our Indian fix at Dosa Delight in Jackson Heights in Queens. As our usual routine, we’ll have dosas and mango lassies among other things there, and then we’ll stop by Patel Brothers to stock up on Indian spices, curry leaves, mixture, and plantain (banana) chips. I made a quick list of spices I wanted for our pantry, and one of them was asafoetida. It’s a very fragrant (or smelly if on your clothes or body) gum spice that gives a really distinct Indian flavor. I couldn’t find it immediately, so I asked one of the Indian workers there for help finding it. He walked me to the right aisle and showed me my options, and then started showing me other things I could use with it. Then, he asked me if I needed help finding anything else. He was so friendly and happy the entire time even though I had taken him away from stocking another shelf.

I thought about this in contrast with the tiny bit of help I’ve ever asked for at a Chinese supermarket (in Chinese, mind you), and I’ve always been treated gruffly and as though I was a burden. Chinese people in supermarkets are rarely happy to help you even if you are one of them. The difference is pretty stark… and pathetic. You’d wonder what makes Chinese people so miserable and Indian people so happy. Maybe Indian people’s smelly spices make them happier people. 🙂

Chris has officially boycotted kale and quinoa. While both are full of nutrients and are obviously extremely healthy choices to add to our everyday diets, he refuses to eat or buy them, as they are so trendy now that everyone seems to be serving them on menus everywhere, and as a result, the prices of both items have increased significantly. He hates how trendy and hipster they have become. While there are some fair points made here, I refuse to completely stop eating them. There are places to buy both items at fairly reasonable prices, and it’s not like we eat them every single day. I’m not one of those people who have actually succumbed to purchasing “kale chips” at the market (though I have tried to make them, and the result was that about 1/4 were crunchy, and the rest were just… steamed in the oven).

A decent group of individuals at my office have decided to pay $120 for a three-day juice cleanse. Yes, that’s $40/day – for non-solid food. And apparently, that is considered “cheap.” With that said, I think that there are far worse and stupider eating choices to make than eating quinoa and kale regularly.