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When you live in a NY apartment real estate is precious, especially in the kitchen. Typically you have very little counter space and a tiny fridge. I have to say we are incredibly lucky that we have a full size fridge and while I am not sure you can ever have too much, we have enough counter space that we don’t feel too deprived. But when I started thinking about composting, I quickly decided that we just didn’t have the space. Besides, do I really need another project?!  It just so happens I very recently started a new job in a much more interesting part of town. There are more restaurants and shops that I know what to do with and best of all on Monday, Wednesday and Friday there is the Union Square market. One morning while strolling through on my way to work I noticed people dumping bags of stuff into garbage cans that weren’t your normal NYC street cans. It turns out The Lower East Side Ecology Center will accept my kitchen scraps and turn them into compost for me! Yeah! So now we have a little container in the fridge and when it is full I take in to work with me. I have been making a real effort to cut down on the amount of waste we produce and this will help just that much more.

I have been on a where does my food come from kick lately. While I mostly blame Michael Pollan, I have to admit this has been brewing for a while. I was recently diagnosed with a corn allergy and I recently realized corn is really hard to avoid. Every time I ate ketchup, I was giving myself a healthy dose of corn. So I found a recipe for ketchup and made it myself without corn syrup. My first try was a touch too sweet but I think I have it figured out for my next batch. I have been juicing lemons and adding rosemary for my seltzer. Fresh really is better. Lately I have been reading a lot about almond milk and how easy it is to make and how it is a great substitute for milk. It is definitely time consuming I will give you that. The almonds soak overnight, then you strain them, then the milk sits overnight. I am halfway through the process so I will have to report on the results in a future post. I am just glad M is so patient.

I have been considering dusting off my bike lately and riding to work once in a while. My office is in the process of getting renovated (right now it looks a lot like the set of Office Space) and we may have bike storage in the office. This is very enticing since I am not too hip on the idea of leaving any bike out on the street. I have to say that the main thing holding me back is I am sort of terrified of riding my bike on the city streets. Which is why I am glad I stumbled upon Ride the City. I can put in my starting and ending address and choose if I want a safe, safer, or direct (potentially dangerous) route. Unfortunately there is no safer route between my house and work, but there is a safe route come Spring I may give it a try anyway. via

I haven’t downloaded my pictures yet, this one is from here.

And another one down. This weekend I celebrated my… well it doesn’t matter which birthday, just that I did. As a birthday gift M&I hopped on the bus Friday evening and headed on down to DC where we met up with my mom and Bill. We only had one day together and boy was it jam packed! Breakfast at Lincoln’s Waffle Shop, museum, solar decathlon, amazing sunset behind the Lincoln memorial, and a dinner that included chocolate covered bacon. So much fun! We stayed in a cute little hotel that was right in the Penn Quarter which made everything very walkable. M&I decided that it was such as easy trip that we will definitely plan another before too long. Who knows, maybe Mom and Bill will make the trip out again since we can’t get them to come to NY! Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes!

I was recently gifted the audiobook version of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and have been listening intently to how everything I am eating is in some way or another corn. This is particularly distressing to me because I am allergic to corn. I am not going to go into all the specifics here, if you are interested I recommend reading or listening. What I will tell you is that I am now on a quest to find grass-fed animals as much as possible. I thought this was going to be an impossible task, but I have been pleasantly surprised to find that in NYC really isn’t that hard at all. Without even changing stores or routines, I will be able to find meat and cheese from grass-fed animals. Yeah! I can even go and visit a farm near my property upstate. Maybe now I can feel a little better about eating a piece of two of Silver Queen corn next summer because I haven’t been overloading on corn all year.

Things have been a touch crazy lately. Trip to see Isabela, left old job, started a new job, and somewhere in there we have been making trips upstate to clean things up a little. Phew! I am finally starting to settle back into the normal everyday chaos.

This past week has been a blur of relaxing, sightseeing, and spending time with family in Santa Fe. I used to live here so I have a pretty good idea of the kind of stuff I like to see and do while I am here. Top on the list is a visit to 10,000 Waves. Waterfall tub, check, hot stone massage, check, salt glow, check. Even if you think you don’t like spas and you don’t like massages, trust me, you will like it there. Second on the list is eat green chile whenever possible. I managed to make it to the elusive Bobcat Bite for a green chile cheeseburger and of course no trip would be complete without a meal at La Choza. Not to shabby. My favorite burger is still from The Burger Joint but they don’t have green chile. I also walked around the Plaza, went to Madrid, and have a stroll planned for Canyon Road, all to visit galleries and shops. If you find yourself in the City Different, check out this city guide at Design*Sponge. image via

Update: I was scolded by my New Mexican family for using chili to refer to chile. One is the dish with meat and beans and the other is the pepper. My bad. It has been corrected in this post. I would also like to add that today I had the green chile cheeseburger from La Casa Sena which blew the one from Bobcat Bite away and rivaled that of The Burger Joint.

I have lots of cookbooks, but I rarely open them. I usually start with an idea of what I want to make and then search Martha Stewart or Smitten Kitchen or some other trusted source for recipes. This means I have to either put my laptop in the line of fire (I am a very messy cook) or print the recipe which means wasting paper. M told me about an application called Sous Chef that he got as part of a bundle a while ago but like a lot of things M tells me, I didn’t pay close attention. Five years of marriage and I still haven’t learned that he knows his stuff! Today I have off work and I decided to finally open the program. I can’t believe how much I love the program already. Importing recipes is super easy and when it comes time to cook, you hit the full screen button and you can read the ingredients and directions from 10 feet away. There is voice control as well, I haven’t figured that out yet but it seems like a great feature. Now I can keep track of things that I made that I liked, make notes, add pictures and not waste paper. Apparently you can also find recipes based on what is in your fridge as well. I wonder if I can get a monitor built into my new kitchen…

As you can see we definitely need a better set up for picture taking.

M&I just celebrated our fifth anniversary. We have never really been big on big anniversary hoopla with presents and parties or fancy restaurants so this year while talking about what we wanted to do, we decided to make a miniature wedding cake. Armed with the cupcake cafe vanilla cake recipe, smitten kitchen’s mango curd and swiss buttercream recipes we felt up for the task. Here is the blow by blow. Monday: Shopping for 3″, 4″ and 5″ cake pans, gum paste mix and tools, and frosting colors. Tuesday: Make gum paste and let sit for 24 hours. Wednesday: Temperature in the apartment is 90 degrees, pull out all recipes, realize we do not have nearly enough eggs or sugar or butter, realize that we have papayas and not mangoes, separate more eggs than I have ever in my life, bake cakes, make and color buttercream, start making gum paste flowers. Thursday: Temperature in the apartment is 85 degrees, shop for missing ingredients, separate more eggs, make mango curd, make more gum paste flowers. Friday: Take all our pieces and parts to put together a mighty fine cake! All in all the cake came out very well. It was nice to spend all that time together working on a project. Baking a cake is very similar to creating a sculpture only your final product is edible. What would I do differently? Wait until it was at least 20 degrees cooler!

This past weekend, M’s sister Kelly came for a visit. When people are in town we tend to take them to the same places. It is easy, we know what to expect. Not this weekend! We started at the Brooklyn Flea which where we enjoyed People’s Pops and Shave Ice. I had a roasted apricot and lavender pop, M had a peach shave ice and K had a cantaloupe pop. All delicious. From there we headed to the Highline. This park is amazing, if you are in NY you should absolutely check it out. Then off to Chelsea Market for some cupcakes before we headed over to the meatpacking district to browse through racks of clothes we couldn’t possible hope to afford. This is where we veered back to what we know. Roasted corn and rice pudding in Soho and shredded orange chicken in our hood. I think we need to have guests in town more often.