I never had a regular “lunch break” until recently. Early in my career it was not by choice — in surgery training there’s really no such thing as a break, only a stolen minute or two here and there to pee or wolf down whatever food you can scrounge or nap in a chair if it’s the middle of the night and you’re on call. We did get a $5 meal coupon for the hospital cafeteria which could get you a cup of terrible coffee and a bagel drier than a bag of silica gel in the Sahara desert. ...
I love sandwiches. Below are some of my favorites and why. First, a few constraints I will impose to keep it to a reasonable number of sandwiches: these are limited to New York (not that I haven’t had amazing sandwiches elsewhere), sandwiches I’ve had at least 3 times, excluding burgers (are burgers sandwiches?), excluding falafel sandwiches (not that I don’t love them but I can’t pick a favorite spot and also then we get into wrap territory which is going to introduce too much scope creep), and excluding chain restaurants (not that I won’t crush a Subway or Potbelly sandwich if the mood strikes me). ...
One of the main reasons why I would find it hard to leave New York is that I have grown accustomed to having what feels like infinite food options and over the years have cultivated my list of good food spots in the city down to a tee. “Good” is a super subjective designation, especially for food. It can also be a sensitive and sometimes classist thing to talk about good food, so I would start by saying that I do not consider myself a foodie (even though objectively speaking I do think about food a lot and talk about it a lot and probably definitely spend an embarrassingly disproportionate amount of my disposable income on food because I genuinely enjoy eating so much). ...
When we lived in Tribeca, I could walk to Chinatown for breakfast. In general I am a morning person who avoids crowds and noise where possible1, so I especially enjoyed being in the usually crowded and noisy neighborhood when it was on the quieter side with mostly just the residents of the neighborhood out and about, getting ready to open shops and stands and whatnot. You can get a great breakfast—you can get great food at any meal or snacktime—which is too often classified as “cheap eats” just because the prices are generally very reasonable (which feels pretty reductive, and dismissive of the skill required to consistently make a perfect soup dumpling or pumpkin bun or hand-pulled noodles or what have you). The other day we made the long and arduous journey from Brooklyn2 to have breakfast at Big Wong which is one of my favorite spots because it feels like a diner and I love diners. We ordered the crispy roast pork, which felt decadent, especially for breakfast, along with a salted pork and preserved egg congee, rice rolls with shrimp, and a plate of greens. (I’m getting hungry thinking about it again.) I’m pretty sure the meal fueled the rest of my day. ...
During the darkest parts of pandemic lockdown there was not a lot to do or look forward to so I put a lot of time and energy into making elaborate meals entirely from scratch. (It’s on my neverending to-do list for this website to make some sort of photo gallery of all those meals for posterity, but for now here we are.) Now that I have settled into a new(ish) normal(ish), where thankfully there are other things with which to occupy my time than food prep, I have become a bit more of a utilitarian eater, in that I am less concerned with ✨ thoughtful complex flavorful meals that are time-consuming to prepare ✨ and instead more concerned with 🤜 getting sustenance into my gastrointestinal system 🤛. ...
We joined the food co-op. I worked my first shift the other night (after work work). You choose from available shifts and sign up for the kind of work you might want to do. I chose cleaning. I had been somewhat apprehensive about working the shift, not because it was work, or even that it was work I wasn’t willing to do or anything, but moreso that it was a New Thing to do and it had been a while since I had done a New Thing. ...
Coffee is so good. In addition to being physiologically and emotionally dependent on caffeine, I genuinely enjoy coffee. I have accumulated too many coffeemaking implements over the years, including but not limited to a French press, burr grinder, espresso machine, pourover cone, cold brew system, and probably others I’m forgetting that I use less frequently and are collecting dust in a cabinet. I started drinking coffee in college, mainly out of curiosity—I had a friend who said they couldn’t function without coffee, though I perceived them as a very functional person, and I thought, “hey, college is the time when you experiment with drugs, right? Let’s give this a whirl.” I really knew how to party back then. (My idea of a good weekend when I was in college was waking up at 7 am and spending the morning in the main library, then spicing it up in the afternoon to go to a different library, then going back to my dorm to watch Netflix DVDs and explore the internet for hours.) ...
As an adult I still sometimes have to trick myself into eating my vegetables. I made these roasted 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts yesterday that really did do the trick: 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts Here’s my incredibly imprecise recipe. 고추장 (gochujang) honey Brussels sprouts Brussels sprouts (you could probably do this with carrots also or any vegetable that is good for roasting) Honey (or any kind of sweet nectar—I used maple syrup this time) Lemon (or any kind of citrus/acid) Garlic powder Gochujang Wash your sprouts, cut off the stems, and slice in half the long way (if the bulbous part is a head and the stem is a neck, cut it in a coronal or midline sagittal plane). Check for aphids. If you have them, sorry. Dry your sprouts. You don’t have to go wild but the drier they are, the crispier they will turn out. I just blotted them with a paper towel and let them sit in the colander for about 5 minutes. Get a big bowl and dump the prepared sprouts in with enough olive oil to lightly coat them, plus a punch of salt and pepper. Some people say you shouldn’t salt before roasting because salt pulls out the moisture, like how osmotic pressure pulls water out of cells when there’s too much sodium in extracellular fluid in a human person, but I don’t think it makes a terribly big difference. The consequence of slightly dry vegetables is also less than that of massive intracellular fluid shifts in a human person. Roast the sprouts until they’re browned and crispy. In my convection oven at 425ºF, this ended up being about 30 minutes. While the sprouts are roasting, mix together the 고추장 (gochujang), honey (or maple syrup), lemon juice, and garlic powder in a small bowl until the consistency is similar to that of the honey. For a bag of about 15ish sprouts, I used a heaping spoonful of 고추장, a similar amount of maple syrup, three shakes of garlic powder, and enough lemon juice to thin it out so that it was stirrable (I think it was half a lemon). I then added more garlic powder to taste because you can’t go wrong with garlic powder, unless you are serving vampires or strict Buddhists. When the sprouts are done, dump them back into the big bowl you used to toss them with the olive oil (ugh, I washed it already, this is what I get for trying to clean as I go), drizzle the 고추장 honey mixture over, and toss like a bingo machine tossing bingo balls. Serve, enjoy, and go on with your day.
The cadence of life is a little different now that I live in Brooklyn and work from home. In my 12 years in New York City, I have: lived in Brooklyn and worked in Brooklyn lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan (the worst overall) lived in Manhattan and worked in Manhattan lived in Manhattan and worked from home lived in Brooklyn and worked from home and the one that feels most like not working at all is living in Brooklyn and working from home. The only thing is that, as always, the psychological barrier to completing inter-borough travel on a weekday evening feels insurmountable, even though it’s a subway ride that’s all of 15 minutes. ...
Yesterday one of my colleagues in a (virtual) meeting reportedly picked up a canister of coarse sea salt, announced “I’m just snacking,” and proceeded to eat the salt, which confused and maybe frightened the other meeting attendees. It reminded me of the time I was rounding with my interns and medical students in the recovery room after scrubbing out of a long case and I was hungry so I pulled an apple out of my white coat pocket, ate most of it, noticed that there weren’t any trash cans close by, and so I ate the core and seeds as well and then deposited the stem in the breast pocket of my white coat to discard later. ...