YUMMY!!!

I Was Forgotten!

This is the very first trip since I was adopted that I was forgotten...it was a very sad Thursday morning. However, my mom took pictures and promised to take me to New York next time. We'll start with the good then move to the ugly. She arrived in NYC Thursday evening and met friends (old and new) at a Tapas restaurant, Pipa in the Flatiron District to celebrate Renee's birthday. It was absolutely packed with people and the photos from its Citysearch review didn't do it much justice. Prior to the trip we were trying to figure out what this place was about, since its website goes to some sort of random carpet site. Anyway, Bryan explained that you can buy the chandeliers in the restaurant (all gorgeous!) and the chocolate shop, (also listed on the carpet site) Chocolat Michel Cluizel, apparently gave away $2 Million worth in chocolate. Hmmmm. Anyway, Pipa is Spanish slang to have a good time. And a good time, they had indeed! Celebrating with loads of sangria, chorizo, stuffed dates, calamari, shrimp and paella. A great time, great company and a Happy Birthday for Renee! The next day, mom took her mom out for a walk around town. They visited Chinatown, shopped in SoHo and discovered the wonders of Dean & Deluca! Fay went crazy and they had to hold each other back from gluttony. They settled for a snack - two ginormous scallops and one even bigger crab cake. That night they joined for a girls night Indian feast at Yuva. Where they dinned on roasted lamb, chicken korma, saag paneer, naan and some sort of grilled chicken. Everything was delicious and healthy! It was the perfect start to a Friday evening in New York city. After dinner they caught a cab uptown for the "First Friday" event at the Guggenheim Museum. This was the first time she visited any Guggenheim, and as beautiful as it was there were two not so great things about it. It was so crowed that you could barely walk anywhere on the floor. And she was wearing heels (stupid!) and in so much pain from walking around...not to mention she got her heel stuck in floor grates (that must've been pretty awesome, too bad I wasn't there to witness it myself). The girls all seemed to think they were living a fabulous night in New York right out of Sex and The City. I'm going to skip Saturday events for the next posting after this, as it's too important. On Sunday they packed their bags and headed to Joe's Shanghai for soup dumplings. What exactly is a soup dumpling? Well, they are delightful little gems of dumplings containing soup. Definitely worth it if you're looking for something different! Now comes the ugly...so we headed to JFK airport to catch our flights. Marlene boarded the plane only to sit on the JFK runway for 1.5 hours, not moving. Yes, that's right not moving. But to make things worse, she was also in the last row next to the fabulous bathrooms and squeezed into a seat overflowing with Italian newlyweds (quite irritating as they made everyone around change seats). She arrived in Los Angeles only to find that her luggage looked like it was mauled by coyotes on a wild rampage which was then kidnapped by some sort of mad robot with a hate for plastic. And finally, 3 hours after she landed she made it home...thanks to the extremely slow Lot B busses and retarded parking lot pay system at LAX. Delta sort of blows too. Keep that in mind next time you fly. Sadly, they also forgot about serving snacks to those lucky people sitting next to the bathrooms.

Salty Pies

Yes, I have a "day job" and one of the owners of this company is French. I've always loved French, in fact I took French in college but truly sucked at it, because I always wanted to answer in Japanese (the first language I learned). Anyway, I was speaking to Val, the French lady, and she told me she absolutely adores "salty pies" - or to the rest of us, the quiche. We looked up quiche recipes (in French) together and I realized the quiche recipes didn't use eggs, which is what I thought a quiche was. A little puzzled, and a lot intrigued by these eggless salty pies, I decided to search for a recipe that sounded good to me. I didn't search long because I found a fabulous recipe (again) in that French cookbook I purchased. This recipe is called "Tartelette Au Saumon Fume, Poireaux, Et Citron" and translates to Smoked Salmon, Leek and Lemon Tartlettes. The recipe is actually for 6 mini tarts but I decided to go big (ummm, I didn't have the tartlette pans). I've made it a couple of times but today, I created one especially for Ogy...my hilariously fun co-worker who can't eat much, but loves these salty pies (she grew up in France too).