Quest for Banh Mi Magic

Sometime late in the fall, when a few leaves still clung to thinning city trees, I became obsessed with finding the perfect Vietnamese sandwich. The Banh Mi is a sandwich delicacy, made up of fresh baked French bread, thinly sliced vegetables, cilantro, and usually some kind of spicy/meat spread and some version of pork and/or other meats (it's a lot to take in, I know. For help, see diagram.)






Baogette, conveniently located across the street from the Curry Hill Armory and location of the Victoria's secret fashion show, was my first foray into Vietnamese sandwich world and had me at hello. Their version of the Sloppy Joe, the "Sloppy Bao," barbecue pork, and catfish options offer a twist on the classic Banh Mi and immediately had me hooked. I quickly dragged Sam to several Chinatown establishments, one of which was located in the back of a jewelry store.






Additionally, Banh Mi Saigon, as it's known, have deli cases full of mysterious Asian drinks, sides, & puddings. Sam and I tried a drink that was full of basil seeds, which was slightly sweet and perfectly tasty, if a little strange texturally.













When our classic banh mi's were finally ready, we had taken inventory on the plethora of colorful décor, from dish tanks to shrines to we're-not-sure-who:













The banh mi itself was the perfect blend of spicy, sweet, and soft bread with just-crispy-enough crust:







Most recently we discovered a Banh Mi place right down the street from our apartment, appropriately called "Banh Mi"--there emphasis was on noodles, sandwiches, and bubble tea, which I had always been intrigued by but never bothered ordering. Like the basil seed drink, it came with giant jelly-ish balls floating in it, and an oversized straw to slurp up all the strange goodness. It's like a distant cousin of tapioca pudding, in drink form:







The banh mi's weren't too shabby either, if a little on the too chewy side.

Get thee to your neighborhood Vietnamese sandwich shop yesterday, friends, and take hold of your culinary destiny.

An afternoon at the Prospect Park Carousel

Cinematic Moment of the Week: Where the Wild Things Are at Brooklyn Botanical Garden

This dude who specializes in making giant sculptures out of sticks, Patrick Dougherty, has am amazing installation at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden right now. He builds the structures on site and leaves them for people to explore and enjoy. Standing inside each of the little hut-like pieces, I felt like one of the creatures in Where the Wild Things Are, carving out a home for myself in the woods. This would be the best camp out spot evah!

Fall movie preview: Subway platform ads

Y'all there is something about the ads on subway platforms that I am kind of obsessed with. While you are waiting for your train to arrive you are sort of forced to stare at these posters over and over again, and you can see the details better than when you drive by a billboard on the interstate. There is even an art to defacing these posters, with some people having a special knack for peeling off parts of posters beneath the current one to reveal new (though unintentional) messages.

This poster for The Town is creepy yet intriguing. I think the first time I saw it I gasped a little. The cast looks very interesting as well. I will be curious how Jon Hamm does in a non Don Draper role. 

Well someone has scratched poor Jesse Eisenberg's eyes out on this one and given him red eyeliner, but like the trailer, I think this ad is just brilliant. If you haven't seen the trailer, it features a great version of Creep, sung by some kind of boys choir or something. Director David Fincher may have knocked this one out of the park. I tend to heart everything he does.

I am still shaking my fists at the heaven's that I wasn't able to work a day on this glorious production (I blame my lack of period haircut) which was shot all locally and seemingly took five years to shoot (I think it was more like a little over a year, a long time for one season of tv). I can only imagine what the budget was on this little piece of prohibition era eye candy. Let's cross our fingers for a second season and longer hair for me.

Cinematic Moment of the Week: My life is a Rap Musical

Recently I was walking to meet Sam and some out-of-towner friends at our favorite sushi joint, when I passed a group of young gentleman standing outside of our neighborhood convalescent home. They looked kind of like this, but with nursing home building features behind them:

This was strange because A) the only groups of people who usually hang out in front of the convalescent home are the convalescents who live there and B) they seemed to be checking out the ladies who were  walking past them, and in front of a convalescent home seems a strange place to do such an activity. But maybe I am not up on the trends of men attempting to pick up ladies on the street. (Sidenote: In NYC, there are certain things a lady experiences when walking alone or in the company of another lady, that most of her man friends/spouses never have the good fortune of witnessing. This includes men whistling at you, howling at you, and my personal favorite, making kissing noises at you. (when I say favorite what I really mean is I want to punch these men in the face, because the kissing noise is not cute, is not flattering, and does not make me like you. It's rude and gross.) It happens on a weekly basis and I've been here long enough that if I perceive a potential kissing noise/yelling-awkward-pick-up-lines-at-me-as-I-make-a-bee-line-for-the-corner situation, I will do my best to put my head down and get out of the line of fire as soon as possible. One out of every 50 times a dude says something to you on the street, it is actually kind of cute/funny. But those ain't good odds.)
So I've got my head down, I've sped up and am walking past them very quickly, when I realize they aren't barking pick up lines at ladies, they are making up raps about them on the fly and singing them boyz2men style on the sidewalk. Unfortunately by the time I realized this I was already rounding the corner (otherwise I would have walked slower than usual to enjoy this original rap about myself, duh), but I did make out some fresh beats that were something along the lines of "she's wearing her sunglasses and her dress by burberry" which was hilarious, because A) I was wearing this dress:

And B) I was wearing the prescription glasses I've had for the last five years, and they don't look like sunglasses at any angle. Still, the ditty had me smiling for the rest of my journey to spicy tuna roll land, and for a minute there I felt like I was in a scene from some kind of Spike Lee joint.

Summer in the City - Ways to beat the heat

Seems like summer started extra early this year (I recall feeling it was too hot to wear pants sometime in early May), so I keep telling Sam, shouldn't it be cooling off early (like now) since summer started so soon? He insists that August is always brutal, and we are in for at least another month of sweaty muggy hot, but I am still hoping for an early fall. Sometimes you have to get creative on super hot days, and New Yorkers have their own methods for staying cool:

Find a sprinkler. They have them at all the playgrounds here, but I recommend borrowing a child you may know and bringing them with you.  

Retreat to commercial A/C. Most New Yorkers aren't blessed with central air conditioning, but big commercial spaces, like the Brooklyn Museum, have loads of cool air they blast all summer long. Here I'm cooling off at their cafe, while the man next to me ingests copious amounts of sugar packets and a splash of coffee.

When you can't escape the outdoors, take in something beautiful, like here, at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. This will distract you from the fact that you have sweated through your thin t-shirt and your heavy application of deodorant isn't cutting it as the heat index tips above 90 degrees. Also, they have loads of old beautiful trees which you can escape beneath for a few glorious, if brief moments in the shade.

And when all else fails. Iced coffee. Loads and loads of iced coffee. I cannot think of a time or place when I've ever purchased iced coffee as I frequently and desperately as I have since I've lived here. Seriously. I think it's saved my life at least six times this summer alone.

Spotted on the streets! today in Brooklyn

Some days living in NYC, you just have your head down and you're mostly focused on getting to the train/bus/taxi before it passes you by. There's a lot of rushing around. Which is unfortunate because when you slow down and have time to wander up and down the streets you discover the most wondrous and strange things. Today as I was standing on the corner I saw this cadre of grown men in boy scout uniforms...I wonder where they were going?

Next I ran across an amazing fruit and vegetable stand. The squash was wrapped up in tissue paper, and arranged in neat rows, like they were little newborn babes waiting to be plucked up by loving parents. 

Instead of garage sales, stoop sales are a very popular way to get rid of all the extra junk that's laying around your apartment. I was perusing this older chap's stoop sale goods when I ran across these beauties. Anyone need some old, outdated and useless remotes? Anyone? No? Alrighty then.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

New York and my world in general has been ate up with Mad Men of late. Recently I got to fulfill my dream of being a human statue for a day outside of Radio City. A couple of days later I spent the evening posing for pictures with the majority of the tourist population at the Mad Men Season 4 premiere in Times Square. I have to say it is a bizarre feeling to either be 1) frozen, and having people take pictures of you like you are a museum exhibit 2) frozen, and having random people jump next to you, snap a picture, and run away, like you are not really real and they are posing with an actual statue but 3) I think it is even stranger still to have people show up to the Mad Men premiere dressed up in 60's attire and want to get in pictures with you, who is getting paid to be dressed up like they are. Then it's just a bunch of strangers dressed in 60's attire, and randomly in a picture together, you know?

I wish I had some examples of me in pictures with these other people who are dressed up, but alas, the only fan photo I have been able to come up with is this one:

The lovely gentleman posing for pictures with me is Josh, a fellow Southerner who just relocated to New York a couple of months ago. Josh and I decided to fulfill our duties as Mad Men human statue people we needed 1960's/alterego people. So I referred to him as Jimmy and he called me Dot all day. Apparently he is really moving up at work and I am his faithful secretary, recently having had a lobotomy and unable to charm everyone around me like I used to, but still able to type with the best of them.
Here we are being stared at by onlookers:

And HERE is a fabulous video from the premiere in Times Square that Cindi spotted with her brilliant eye in which I make a couple of cameos.

And if you haven't heard enough and I haven't completely turned you off of Mad Men for life, I have entered the Mad Men Casting Contest. There's a month of voting left and I am in the #11 spot for Women. The Top 10 move on to the final round where Matt Weiner (exec producer of the show) will pick the winner/runner-ups. So VOTE today (for me), and often!

Whew. I'm exhausted. I need to sit down.

Shopping Carts in the City--kind of like gold on wheels

After we moved to New York a couple of years ago, I was alarmed the first couple of times we ventured to the grocery store to find the storefront looking like this. I couldn't figure out for a minute why a store would purposefully make their entrance look so...unwelcoming (at least it seemed that way to my untrained southern eye). I thought it must be a mistake or a grocery store chain that had fallen off her rocker, until I visited several more grocery stores that had the same bars covering their storefront. I think Sam finally had to explain to me that the bars were not a poor design choice, but a way of keeping people from STEALING the carts. In a place where few people have cars to transport groceries home, baskets with wheels aka carts are a hot commodity, as it turns out. You see homeless folks carrying around their valuables in them. But I guess other people have been known to snatch a cart or two, if the opportunity presented itself and they had so many bags to be desperate for something to help them get their loot home.

When working in the city on a show a couple of months back, I was assisting with the stocking of dressing rooms and we had to buy copious amounts of bottled water for the likes of Ludacris and Soulja Boy. I was all, "how the crap are we going to get 500 bottles of water back to the dressing rooms?" (which were a good 4 blocks away). Well, in some stores (K Mart in this instance) they will let you borrow the cart on the condition that you leave your driver's license with them. Who knew? A final note on the magic of carts:

it's silly but most Targets in the area are two stories and come with their very own separate escalator for your cart. I love pushing it in there and watching it ratchet up to the second floor, while we ride alongside on the human escalator. It probably makes up for the barred grocery store inconvenience that I experience elsewhere, it's so magical.

And the Award for Sketchiest Pet Shop Ever goes to...

I have walked past this Brooklyn Pet Shop several times now, and this picture doesn't do justice to how scary this place looks. Every time I approach I slow my walk down to a shuffle in hopes of catching a glimpse of an actual animal inside, mayhap a few of the "exotic fish" one sign says they "now carry"--but always to no avail. I'm a pretty adventurous person when it comes to checking out random things in the neighborhood, but somewhere between the gate, the bars over all windows and doors, and the three cardboard signs insisting this place is a PET SHOP (there's even arrows to help direct you) I lose any nerve I might have to go inside and check the place out. And seeing as someone was just shot a block over from this location a few weeks ago, I may be avoiding this stretch of street for some time now. Until we meet again, Sketchy Pet Shop, I will continue forming conspiracy theories about what kind of operation is really going on in there....

The Highs of Spring

The past month has been the busiest and wackiest I've had since moving to New York. Some visuals:


Here is the finale of the Cartoon Network Upfronts I worked in April. An upfront is something all the tv people do every Spring to preview what is coming up for them in the next season. It's a good way to attract potential advertisers and also get some press attention for exciting new programming. On stage you can pick out Andrew WK and band, several mascots including a chicken (fake) and ram (real) that were shooting tshirts into the audience, a man wearing a backpack basketball hoop with several other boys trying to shoot baskets, a giant dog from a new show called Adventureland (manned by two guys playing said dog's legs), and a 12 year old boy who was either riding atop the giant dog or running around stage. Also, not pictured (sadly) there was a drummer called the Ice King dressed like a wizard in a cave above stage, surrounded by 400 pounds of dry ice. It was awesome.


The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens are in bloom! Their Cherry Blossoms are legendary, but every year I miss them. This year I got to see one late bloomer, but the rest of them had already wilted. But, have no fear! Their bluebonnets are now in full blossom! Who doesn't love a field of bluebonnets, I ask you?



Our friends Jack and Cindi came to visit us for a few days, and besides lucking out with "VIP" tickets to Dave Letterman on Monday, we also got to see awesome guests Evangeline Lilly, Sam Rockwell, and The Million Dollar Quartet! Ending Monday with a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at dusk made for pretty much the best New York day any tourist or New Yorker could ask for. I could walk across that bridge a thousand times, I believe, and still discover something new every time.


The Gaga. I worked on Trudie Styler's Rainforest benefit concert last week, and everyone was gaga for Gaga. There's so many stories I could tell, but I only managed to get a couple of snaps, this one of a small snippet of fans waiting for Gaga after the show on the streets. My friend Joe and I were hanging out in the room next door to Gaga's dressing room, and as we surveyed the fans and stalkers outside, many of them started taking pictures of us! (it was dark-ish enough that they may have just hoped/assumed we were someone awesome based on the fact we were looking out the window)--we started to wave at them and they waved back, hoping Gaga would show herself.

I have no idea who this girl is but had to find a subtle way of documenting I was actually there...



Went to the Brooklyn Museum friday--they have a huge section of the museum devoted to recreating rooms from Farmhouses in Connecticut in 1789 and such things. When I rounded a corner I happened across the scariest puppets of all time, life-size with giant heads, and set up to look like they were living inside these historical rooms. I think I will have nightmares for the next week. I mean, yikes.

Scary Humans: Part 2

Several weeks ago I was working in Times Square and our group was allowed to use the Levi's store's employee bathroom for the day. Arriving at the bathroom I found a bit of a line. There was a girl in front of me, and a guy who had gone in what felt like five years ago and was still taking his sweet time. The Levi's employee girl and I stood silently for a long while, and then out of nowhere, she drops this bomb, "Do you think I'm skinny?" I did a double take to make sure she was talking to me, because, who asks a perfect stranger that sort of question, and what in the world am I supposed to say to that? Appearing to weigh a good 10 or 15 pounds less than me from the best I could tell, I said, "yeah." (meanwhile my mind is racing trying to figure what kind of a person would ever ask another stranger that--is this some sort of trick question?) The girl persists again, "No, really, do you think I'm skinny?" (Apparently the yeah was insufficient--why is the guy still in the bathroom!) Trying to come up with something complimentary for this person I don't know, I expounded, "Yeah, you look small. What are you, like a 2/4?" Big mistake. All at once, the guy leaves the bathroom, the girl practically bursts into tears and yells "No, I'm a zero! You just called me fat!" and runs in the bathroom and locks the door. Wow. Never claim to know a person's clothing size, especially a stranger who asks you if you think they're skinny while waiting on the employee bathroom.

Chikalicious?

Sam's birthday was last week, and we ventured to this place around the corner from where we ate dinner, "Chikalicious" for dessert. It had come highly recommended and was described to me as "just about perfect." We arrive and are quickly seated at a corner table. The website describes Chikalicious as having a "3-course Prix Fixe menu, described as American desserts, French Presentation and Japanese tasting portions, and includes an amuse, dessert of your choice, and assorted petits-fours."
For those of you who don't watch Top Chef or something similar, an amuse is like a mini-mini course, meant to be eaten in one bite. The menu items are pretty frou-frou-ey, and I feel like I am watching Sam feeling more emasculated with each passing moment. Nonetheless, we decide on the lime soup with lime sorbet and brown sugar biscuit (props to Sam for actually speaking those words aloud) and the coconut panna cotta with kiwi and passion fruit relish. Our amuse arrived first, some kind of rhubarb jell-o type situation with a dollop of "vanilla milk sorbet." It came in a dish you would normally put a couple of squirts of soy sauce in for sushi. The combination of jelly-like substance with cold-creamy sorbet was sort of weird and I didn't particularly like it. And it was so small! But this was the amuse, so ok, it's supposed to be laughably, ridiculously tiny.

Soon after we arrived, a couple who were probably related to Methuselah came in. The only empty table hadn't been cleaned off yet, and the hostess/owner told them she'd seat them as soon as she cleaned the table up. The elderly lady, we'll call her Marge, took one look at the table, rolled her eyes, and said, "Well, I should hope so." Meanwhile the husband looks like he is fighting for every breath. They sit down and order their dessert, along with two cappuccinos. The poor hostess/owner brings their drinks not a minute later, and Marge looks at her like she's insane. I hear hostess/owner say, "we always bring the drinks out first, but I'd be glad to take them back if you want them after your dessert." To which Marge waves her wrinkled purple hands and replies, "Yes, take them away, bring them at the end." Who does that?

Back at our dessert table, our "main course" arrives. The presentation was lovely, but again, this is the smallest plate of panna cotta I have ever laid eyes on. Sam and I enjoy hearing the chef bring out each course (and I use the word "course" very loosely here) and describe it to us with painstaking detail. The lime soup with lime sorbet is actually so delicious, I just wish they'd quadrupled the order. The panna cotta (all three bites of it) is very tasty as well. I can't figure out how they've made brown sugar biscuits the size of croutons. This is like dessert for teeny mice people. Or maybe they actually have mice in the back making all of this stuff, with little tweezers, kind of like Ratatouille. I'm thinking about where they might be hiding the mice chefs, when Marge pipes up again.

"What is taking so long?" she demands of the increasingly exasperated hostess/owner. It takes all of the husband's remaining might to nod his head in agreement. "How old is this dessert?" The hostess explains that everything is made fresh and that she just saw their tarts in the oven and is sure they'll be ready momentarily. Marge huffs and puffs a couple more times about what is taking so long, and her hubby taps his cane on the ground in agreement. Sam and I wonder what they are in such a extreme hurry for. A few theories we role played while waiting on petits-fours:
"I've got to get him home so I can feed him his back pill at 9:30"
"We have to go home and plug in, we're robots and our batteries are almost dead"
"We turn into pumpkins if we don't get home in time, very very old pumpkins"

Our petits-fours arrive. I know you will be shocked to learn that they were extremely small. They consisted of two sugar cube-sized marshmallows covered in seven pieces of coconut each, two chocolate truffles the size of gumdrops, and two of the tiniest pieces of pound cake ever created by humans (or rodents). A scrumptious three bites later, we were out the door, leaving Marge and co. to wait on their second attempt at cappuccino.

Scary Humans: part 1

I've decided to devote some time on the old blogaroosky to the weird New Yorkers I have interactions with on a daily basis. There is something about living in the city that lends itself to strange conversations with people around you.

Today, I was running 10 blocks uptown to get to a casting I was helping out with (where I would go on to be bored to tears signing in models for a Comcast advertisement casting. 200 girls in their swimsuits, jumping at the chance to play a "beach mom"--some of them didn't even bother bringing bathing suits. scary.) and a man (who was probably homeless)--was trying to sell me fruit roll-ups at $2 a pop (which is horribly expensive for an individual fruit-roll up). I usually tell people who try to hock something on me that I don't have any cash, or that I'm flat out not interested, but every now and then somebody catches me without an excuse. Today I happened to have some cash, and the guy had fruit roll ups, which I didn't even know they still made! He fed me some line about how I was helping basketball playing children in india or the like, and I said, "alright, you got change?" I pull out a twenty dollar bill, and the guy proceeds to try to talk me into paying $20 for 10 fruit roll-ups. "It's for a good cause!" he kept saying. "I'll take 5. Final offer." I said. (even as I agreed to it I was thinking, I can't believe I am paying this much for fruit roll-ups, and I also, what am I going to do with five fruit roll-ups??) He offers me the box of roll-ups, then proceeds to grab a wad of cash from out of his SWEATPANTS and betwixt his nether regions. He counts out ten one dollar bills and hands them to me. "You have a great day, now." he calls, as I shutter and throw the damp money in my purse.

Williamsburg "Advertisements"

Williamsburg is full of aspiring musicians, artists, and the like, and more than other parts of Brooklyn or Manhattan (or maybe it just seems more concentrated because I live here), you find all kinds of homemade "advertisements" posted on the street--political statements, propaganda, inside jokes or things that seem like inside jokes, and surprisingly beautiful little artistic statements. I remember the first time I noticed one--and I stared at it for five minutes trying to figure out what "product" it was advertising, what was the catch. It was so lovely and professional looking I was sure it was some sort of viral campaign for a product. Really someone just wanted to communicate a sort of "advertisement" (I call them that since there is no official term for them I've heard to date) about an IDEA. With no ulterior motive or intention to make money or profit from it. Just to pass along the knowledge, man. Hmmm. Anywho, I've posted a bunch that I've taken pictures of--most of these are up around the Bedford Avenue area, the sort-of "downtown" area of Williamsburg. Sometimes they are put up on random spots on buildings, and also frequently outside construction sites. I suppose the large wooden panels they put up at construction sites here to keep out the riff-raff make for excellent canvasses for large creative statements. The "lost my shit" ad was on the platform on the subway--but if you look closely, the place where you tear off someone's number along the bottom, contains a web address, lostmyshit.com, which if you visit you'll find doesn't exist! so someone went to the trouble of making this flyer, making photo copies of it, and putting it up around the neighborhood, I guess just as a joke? I don't know, it's kind of bizarre. Some of the quality is lost in the pictures, but I hope the spirit comes across adequately. I'm interested to get your thoughts on them.

New York Mystery #42: Why do New Yorkers always wear black?

One of my favorite things to do in New York (although, sadly, less and less as I become less of an expatriate and more of a "local" the longer I live here) is take pictures of funny things I see around the city, especially, as I'm sure you have noticed, things on the subway. I always used to wonder when I came to visit friends here why so many people wore black all the time. This picture illustrates the abundance of black as the favorite color choice among city dwellers. Having lived here for a little while, I've noticed you're always sitting/leaning on/holding onto/brushing up against things that are potentially dirty, whether it's on the subway, in cabs, or on the sidewalk. You have a lot less control over coming into contact with grime and grit, and New Yorkers have to be out in the elements more than most--this is one of the reasons why New Yorkers have that steely can-do spirit, too. And also a reason why they wear a lot of black. It shows dirt much less than it's white and light colored counterparts, and New Yorkers don't have time to go home and change in between work and after-work soirees. (This coming from the girl who carries a bright green purse and wears a bright orange coat almost every day.) Oh well. Guess I'm not quite a local yet.