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 87: BC 06 Lunch

I had a couple of college friends staying with me for the weekend, so I invited some of our other mutual friends to come over for lunch. We ate a delicious meal of breaded chicken, asparagus, popcorn cauliflower, sesame noodles, salad, and spinach kugel. I thought the sesame noodles that my friend Rebecca made were particularly delicious, though everything was really good. We ate Deena cake for dessert, along with chocolate peanut butter cookies that Michelle made, and some fruit. In the spirit of college, we spent a lot of time during lunch reading some textbooks that I had lying around. We also talked about the upcoming Komen Race For The Cure, in which many of us are participating in order to support breast cancer research, prevention and treatment. You can donate here (just search for the person you want to support). Lunch was a lot of fun and I am almost done washing dishes.

Day 55: Cartoon Review, circa 2009

I went to Circa today for the last of my Tuesday lunches with Steinberg (who just started his own blog!). I was greeted warmly by the management there and we chatted for a bit about their various offerings. They told me that the new Circa will be opening on Sept 1st with a salad bar, pizza bar, pasta bar, sandwiches etc, so those of you who work downtown should look out for that in the Fall. Circa had a split pea soup today, so I tasted it. It was pretty good, but I decided that it was too hot out for a soup lunch. Steinberg and I both opted for pastas – I got the whole wheat penne ala vodka from the Make-Your-Own-Pasta bar, and Steinberg ordered the penne-al-fredo with tomato sauce from the Entrées, which came with his choice of side dish (mashed potatoes in this case). We also split a side order of roasted sweet potatoes and butternut squash. I noticed that while Steinberg’s pasta had the benefit of coming with a side dish, my plate seemed more overflowingly full. And my order was cheaper. So if you really like variety, the entrée pasta with a side is a good choice, but if you can handle only straight up pasta with no add-ons, the pasta bar is a better value. The roasted veges were very tasty. I preferred the sweet potato but Steinberg liked the squash better. I think the potato was a bit sweeter (figures), but ‘berg thought that the squash had a little “somethin’-somethin’ ”. He always likes that little somethin’-somethin’.

Day 35: Dairy Debate

It finally stopped raining in NYC so I have been venturing out of the office for lunch more often. Today I met my favorite Early Childhood Educator (and my roommate), Mor, for lunch. We first walked over to Circa to check out the soup selection. Still no sighting of my favorite soup. I decided to talk to the manager about this, and he assured me that they would serve my soup of choice on Monday. We'll see . . . He also had me taste the eggplant soup which was not terrible but I think it was tomato based and I don't usually go for tomato-y foods. Mor and I then went to Rosas to check out the menu over there. The selection was not bad but we decided to go back to Circa, where we split a whole wheat personal pizza (her half with veges, mine with light sauce). The pizza was particularly awesome today. Good job, Circa. I also ate a side order of roasted sweet potato. I wondered if this counts as a vegetable side dish. Potatos are somewhat gender ambiguous like that. Google research confirms that sweet potatoes are in fact members of the vegetable food group.

Day 34: Something for Everyone

Today I had lunch with my cartoonist friend, Steinberg. (Check out my new Steinberg original cartoon in the blog header!) We went to check out the recently improved J2. J2 used to be a standard pizza store but is now billing itself as a "Gourmet Marketplace". In addition to the regular pizza / salad options, they now have fresh fruit in the front and a buffet- like set up in the back, where you can take different dishes and then pay by the pound. This is awesome for indecisive people like me or commitment phobic people like Steinberg (just kidding). It is also great because it lets you pick exactly what you want to eat. For example, they had mixed roasted vegetables, which I usually avoid since I don't like roasted peppers or eggplant. In this situation though, I was able to pick out JUST the squash and zucchini and eat only that. I also was able to take the cheesiest part of the baked ziti, the exact size of grilled fish fillet that I wanted, exactly 3 pieces of cauliflower tempura, a scoop of grilled sweet potato and one perfect looking strawberry. This came out to about 1.2 lbs. Everything was really good, in a somewhat greasy cafeteria style food kind of way, but it was waaay too much food. Not that I didn't eat it all. Hours later, I am still stuffed. I will definitely be back.