Volunteer week

It's volunteer week!  I am the school chaperone for all NYCares volunteer events so I spent my Saturday with my students fixing up Jackie Robinson Park, which is super easy to get to for me. But for my students, not so much.

The phone calls and texts ensued Saturday morning:

Student 1: "Miss, I'm lost. I'm in Central Park. I think I missed my stop"  

Student 2: "Miss, I'm lost. I'm in St. Nicholas Park"

Student 3&4: "Miss, we're lost.  We're on Broadway and all we see is a McDonalds"

Student 5: "Miss, I'm lost. I see a sign that says Lenox.  Do you know where I am?"

Student 6 & 7: Miss, we're lost.  People keep telling us the wrong directions.  It's okay miss, we'll use our GSP"

Oh my. GSP.
I give them props for even trying to make it to the volunteer event.  Also worth noting, the directions I gave them, with very clear instructions on how to get to the site, might as well have been in chinese.

We were assigned to paint the lines in the basketball courts.  Here's the before and after.

14 students participated.  For a Saturday morning, I'm surprised anyone showed up.  They all did a great job!

Lastly, I wonder if cutting out meat in my diet will only make me eat more sweets. Let's me think about this as we look at these hostess cupcake style cookies I made. 

 I got a little frosting happy. The last cookie was a tester.  It was ugly, but I ate it anyways. I might have overcooked some of them because they were a little dry but I ate them too. Frosting very easily covers that right up.  The recipe is here.

Carbo-loading

Recently, a good friend, Sharon, planned a NYC pizza tour! I was only able to hang out for half of it, but I left really full so I'm not sure how long I would have lasted anyways.  I still have a few pizza joints to try in New York, but summer vacation is coming soon.  Good time to carbo-load.

Behold!   Artichoke Pizza and plain slice at  Joe's Pizza in Greenwich village.  FYI, the artichoke pizza is super filling and tastes like spinach artichoke dip on bread. 

We continued to Motorino Pizza in the East Village.  Check out the ramps pizza with fior di latte and the seriously amazing brussel sprout pizza (we omitted the pancetta and it was still good!)

I still have yet to try Krescendo and Di Fara in Brooklyn!  Both are supposed to be awesome.

After eating at three pizza joints, we went to the Tompkins Sq. park to, of course, eat cupcakes from Molly's cupcakes, west village.

Holler to the chocolate frosted chocolate cupcake I ate. 

We spent the rest of the weekend at the Brooklyn Flea.  It was super crowded.  We had other food, but it was forgettable.I bought a really cute shirt and this also very adorable lobster roll from Red Hook Lobster.  We got to eat by the water and enjoy the view!

James and I took a class at the Brooklyn Kitchen called "Mystery Basket."  It was a gift from my cousin Amy and her boyfriend Chris.  Best present ever! That whole place is super cool and the store area has interesting products like DIY mozzarella kits.    The instructor was really nice and we had a great time.  We were split into two teams and given two different baskets.  The mystery ingredients were...

BARLEY MISO!
DRIED APPLES!
WHOLE FREE RANGE CHICKEN!

The pantry had random stuff from the brooklyn kitchen store, like brussel sprouts, organic flour, meyer lemons, and chicken broth.
The other basket had some sort of sliced ham, rainbow chard, and habanero peppers.  They made this kickass habanero cornbread.  We seared and roasted our chicken with miso and made an apple miso jus to drizzle over it, roasted brussels sprouts and sunchokes with agave syrup glaze, and some chili polenta squares with dried apples.  I think we're going back to take another class about pasta.  Because, you know, my goal in life is to one day be the ultimate ravioli lady....

That doesn't sound cool.  I need to rethink this title.

Spring break: Keeping Texas Weird

I spent spring break in Austin, Texas.  And came back to a whole LOT of stress. Seriously, I freaked out. My poor students.  I get crazy with them when I'm stressed.  

Austin felt like a suburban mix of hipsters and real life people. I wish I went to SXSW, but then again, it was nice to be able to SEE Austin instead of maneuvering through the people.

Why Texas?  Well, I've always wanted to go and we needed to pick a place. It was a cousins trip! We got to eat, drink, and go to the zoo!

 Don't worry, the turtle is not dead.  Life's hard.

This peacock was showing off. Strutting her stuff at the zoo without a cage!

I hope you get to visit Austin one day because the food truck scene is AMAZING.  It makes me want to quit my job and start a food truck.  

Patika coffee truck!

 Austin has a cool saying, "Keep Austin Weird."  And it is weird. Because everyone is super nice.  And that was weird.

 I enjoy coming back to the city though, we have a few food truck gems too.  Such as the Wafels and Dinges truck. Which smears fresh, hot wafels with a spekuloos creme, thats like some sort of highly addictive cookie butter. See below.  

Drool. I'm not even on twitter and I follow the tweets from the wafels and dinges truck.

     James and I are trying out a pescatarian diet this month. We couldn't give up sushi, but meat we can do.   I look forward to some of the new recipes I will try. Stay tuned!