*CHOMP* Happy *NOM NOM* Thanksgiving *YUM*!

Sorry, I shouldn’t talk and eat at the same time.

I’ll be back Sunday night/ Monday with pics from a week of feasting! I already have one Thanksgiving dinner under my belt (quite literally). I have a potluck at church tonight, a family dinner tomorrow night, and a turducken dinner on Friday (and football to work all that off on Saturday).

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!!!

Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar

I got to check out the new Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar early. It was a friends and family/soft opening type of thing. Ed and Robyn went earlier in the day and brought back a bunch of stuff so I tried a several things already before going there myself.

The place is pretty much a bakery. There’s an open kitchen in the and a display case of cakes, pies, and cookies. Normally there isn’t a place to sit. There are waist level tables for standing and eating. On I guess special ocassions or reservations, the tables can be lowered and the wooden box stools stacked off to the side (just beyond the right side of the picture) are used as seats as a private dining room. There is a connection (to the left of the open kitchen in the picture) to Momofuku Ssam Bar.

My favorite dessert there, of the ones I tried, was the banana cake.  It was banana bread, banana cream, hazelnut crunch, gianduja fudge, and I think peanut butter on the top.

It’s the one of many huge cakes that they have. So with the fact that they give you a big slice it’s kinda hard to finish. It’s probably best if you didn’t try to finish one slice in one sitting or by yourself. Though I’m not sure if they’d change how much they will serve.

The peanut butter cookies were really good as well. And, I don’t have any pictures of them, but the compost cookies were really interesting. Yeah I know compost cookies don’t exactly sound appetizing and what they’re made of doesn’t help either. It’s made of potato chips and pretzels, chocolate chips, and butterscotch chips. It’s not the most even of tastes when you bite into one as you will sometimes taste or feel the pretzels or sometimes get a slight taste of potato chip. But overall it tastes like a chocolate chip cookie, even though it’s made from just whatever scraps there may have been lying around.

Momofuku Bakery and Milk Bar open officially tomorrow, Saturday. Here is their entire menu (via Eater).

Here are the rest of my pictures and here’s a much more extensive article and with better photos from Serious Eats NY.

Agh! Apologies! Here’s an Awesome Cupcake!

My bad, haven’t been blogging at all. Not really sure why. Lack of money? That’s probably the main reason. I haven’t had much to blog about. Contributing factors are the lack of motivation and laziness. So I’m sorry.

But here’s a cupcake, and awesome cupcake!

It’s a banana bread cupcake with peanut butter buttercream frosting and honeyed bacon sprinkles. Brownie of the food blog Blondie and Brownie brought a bunch into the Serious Eats office yesterday. I wasn’t sure what to expect but the three very different parts came together really well. Here is the recipe and here are a couple more photos.

A Quick Run Through Of What I’ve Eaten

[EDIT: Wow, this should've went up more than a month ago. Not sure what happened. Anyway here you go.]

Go to Cong Ly and get the Hu Tieu with the soup and noodles separate (#17 on the menu). @ 124 Grand Street between Bowery and Chrystie.

New bakery on Grand Street between Bowery and Chrystie is good and inexpensive (for now).

A Classic and Simple Dish at Big Wing Wong

The first time I ever had this dish was when I was in elementary school. It was a simple and fast dish to get, particularly useful since after lunch on Sundays I had to go to piano lessons. I think that’s where my love for cha siew was born. I knew what cha siew was way way way before I knew what roast pork was (I still kinda get confused). Wing Wong (original name) has my favorite cha siew. When it’s a mix of fat and lean meat it tastes perfect.

I think after all these years it’s still a dependable dish at Wing Wong (and probably at Big Wong). It’s a very simple dish where they just chop up some roast pork and throw it with some white rice on a dish. Something you might find missing are vegetables. Sure some other restaurants add vegetables but I don’t need vegetables. I don’t mind it but I can do very well without. You’ll also see the green stuff in the upper left. That’s gerng chung/chung yern (can’t get that second phonetic right, I use the first one more often). It’s essentially oil, minced up scallion and ginger, and salt. It’s great for those lean pieces or white rice. Hey, I can even eat it by itself (I don’t do it too often).

Another Really Good Burger and Etc.

[Hmm, this post should've went up yesterday. Oh well.]

Well another expensive good burger. So before going into meat of the post I want to explain that I haven’t really been a fan of burgers from since I was a kid. Which combined with the fact I don’t like soda makes me more weird, foreign, or healthy. I’d prefer think healthy. Anyway the reason I’ve probably disliked burgers is because the entire breadth of my experience with burgers have been with fast food. Yes even the the widely praised In-N-Out franchise.  AGH! STOP YELLING AT ME I’M WILLING TO GIVE IN-N-OUT ANOTHER CHANCE! I was only a teen back then and a more picky eater than I am now. So that’s my burger backstory. I hope you can somewhat understand where I’m coming from forgive me for being a burger n00b.

Wednesday I had lunch with friends from college at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe. I’ve missed seeing them in person and I’ve wanted to check this burger place out so it was a good opportunity. I initially heard about this place from a post on NYCnosh. The $4 burger seemed pretty cheap especially in that area. But alas they have raised their prices some time ago. The “Shoppe Burger” is now $6 and is the burger I got. According to the menu it’s a “char-grilled beef burger with cheese, lettuce, tomato and Shoppe sauce.”

I kinda expected the burger to be a little bigger. The burger was nice and moist and I didn’t really feel the need to add any ketchup. A similarity that I’ve found with this burger patty and the one from that Antique Cafe is that they taste like steamed ground beef. My reference for steamed ground beef is a homecooked dish my parents have made that’s not dry and does not have fat in it. (Hmm, I should learn how to cook that dish.) So yeah it tasted like that. I’m not sure what else to say but that it was good burger. I’m just not sure it’s worth $6 (that in the picture is all you get, fries and a drink are extra).

Upon heading to work I bumped into my coworkers and we decided to get soup at Brooklyn Bagel (beware: music on site). There wasn’t much selection at the time we were there, an Indian soup and Minestrone (I think). I got the minestrone and you also get a mini bagel; I got a plain.

The soup was ok. I liked the bagel. I hadn’t had a bagel in a while and it gave me something to chew on while working.

Cheeseburger, Flushing, Nathan’s, and One of My Favorites Dishes

So after reading Herman’s post about Antique Cafe’s cheeseburger being the best burger he’s ever eaten I was intrigued since I work a stores down. On Thursday I decided to try it out.