Day 100: The Last Lunch

I am home sick from work today (sad face) and I haven't been to a grocery store since before my trip, so lunch today meant freezer food. My friend Shonnie very sweetly offered to bring me some chicken soup, but instead I pulled out pizza bagels. Microwaved pizza bagels are an awesome Friday lunch. I ate one earlier in the day and then left a couple others out to defrost, which left me with a challenge of figuring out how long they each needed to be zapped before they would be melty and soft without getting that overcooked feel. I ended up going with about 35 seconds on defrost and 45 seconds on cook. They were delicious.

Check back next week for a final wrap post!

Day 99: MEETUP and Special Announcement

On Thursday, I headed over to J2 with my coworker Jen to greet the rest of the MeetUp crew. Thanks to all of you who came out! It was fun to eat with all of you guys. I really love that J2 has the open buffet with so many awesome options. I had some mac and cheese, some baked ziti, really good roasted green beans, a small piece of fish, a little bit of Cesar salad, roasted cauliflower, and one perfect strawberry for dessert. I really need to learn how to take less food from these things. But everything tasted good and it made me wonder why I dont eat there more often.

At the meetup, I made a special announcement - Day 100 will be the last day of this blog.

Day 98: If you're tired, you take a Napa, you don't move to Napa!

Apparently wineries need special permits to have picnic tables or to allow food on the premises. Therefore, while waiting for our tour of the Robert Mondavi Winery, we hid in a corner of the parking lot and ate our sandwiches while sitting on the ground. My cheese and challah sandwich was deliciously melty from the hot sun of Napa Valley. I had two mini sandwiches (it was the end of the loaf of challah, so the slices were small). They were delicious and really filling. I could have used some cold water to go with it but there was none to be found. The challah did an excellent job of absorbing the wine from that morning's tasting at the Hagafen Winery. For dessert we had fresh grapes off the vines, almost ready to become a Cabernet Sauvignon.

Day 97: They Took All The Trees, Put ‘em in a Tree Museum…

On Tuesday, we spent the late morning and early afternoon hanging out with the Redwoods in Muir Woods. By the time we were done, I was starving. The plan was to eat lunch at the Point Reyes coast, which was our next destination, but I was so hungry that I decided to eat in the car. It's not so easy to make a tuna sandwich on mini bagels out of a bag of tuna while in motion, but I somehow managed. My sandwiches were good but I was still hungry afterwards and I had to scavenge for snacks.

NOTE: MEETUP THURSDAY LUNCH

Let's eat lunch together on Thursday, at 12:30 at Jerusalem 2 Pizza Marketplace on 37th and Broadway.

Day 96: Meat and a MEETUP

After a stunningly beautiful bike ride from Fisherman's Wharf up and over the Golden Gate Bridge with the sun blazing (note my very very sunburnt arms and face), we rode over to the Vista Point to get a view of the bay, the skyline and the bridge - and to find someplace where we could sit and eat. There were no picnic tables so we ducked undearneath a railing to sit on a little stone wall. Kids walked by and stared like we were in prison, sitting behind bars. I pulled out a package of freezer packed deli that I had been carrying around for 2 days (but refrigerated overnight) and made myself a sandwich of challah slices, pastrami, salami and ketchup. After the long bike ride and other days activities, I was starving and therefore I pretty much devoured the sandwich and tried not to think about whether the meat was spoiled or not. It may have tasted a little funky but it might have been in my head. After we ate, we finished the ride down into Sausalito, at which point I REALLY wanted ice cream but I did not have any.

REMINDER: MEETUP on Thursday at, lets say, 12:30. Place - Jerusalem 2 on Bdwy and 37th unless people have other suggestions / requests.

Day 95: Haight means Love and REMINDER: MEETUP on Thursday

I started lunch today with some Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream from the Ben and Jerrys scoop shop on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. The shops on this street are still 100% devoted to the hippie era that was birthed in this neighborhood, and B&Js is one of the only chain stores on the street. They are accepted in the community due to their Cherry Garcia, Phish Food, and Half Baked flavors and their happy cows. We walked with our ice cream through the Haight neighborhood to Golden Gate Park, SF's answer to Central Park. After wandering through the grounds and a Victorian flower garden, we sat on a grassy lawn and ate sandwiches. Once again, I went for a mini bagel with American cheese. It tasted delicious. I love Chocolate Fudge Brownie and melty bagel cheeses are pretty awesome so it was a pretty awesome lunch day. It was a good thing we ate a big lunch because when we were eating dinner on the ferry ride over to Alcatraz, a seagull ate my sister's sandwich.

Reminder: Meet Up on Thursday! More info to be posted soon!

Day 94: East Coast meets West Coast

On Saturday morning we checked out the local synagogue near our hotel in Nob Hill, SF. They were offering a lunch after services so we thought about staying to eat there. The meal was vegetarian and seemed to feature salads and perhaps a vege chulent. However, the table was only set for about 15 and there were a number of other visitors there, plus a couple of students and locals, so we decided to head back to our hotel where we had food we had bought in advance. We took the scenic route back and checked out some of the fanciest hotels in San Fran. When we got back, we enjoyed a meal of deli sandwiches, potato salad, cole slaw, and Israeli salad. We had brought the deli from NY but we ordered the rest of the food from Tel Aviv, the kosher market place in San Fran. We also ordered challah from them, and the challah was excellent. Different from the challah I normally eat in NY, but definitely doughy and soft and delicious. I used slices of the challah to make a sandwich with pastrami and salami. I added ketchup, but only on the salami side, not on the pastrami side. It was a very filling and delicious lunch.