2yo: “Daddy, I pooped! It’s THIS biiiiiiig! Bigger than the whole wide world!!
It has blueberries in it.”
I thought I’d start a separate blog for all things that make my two crying boys smile. If you want to share yours, send the pictures of your laughing and excited kids to reasonsmykidissmiling@gmail.com!
This Sunday, more than 25 NYC-based homebrewers descended on the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg. Part of the Food Book Fair, the event, called Brew Pub, is a “project by Portland-based artist Eric Steen [which]…explores home brewing as a form social activism.” Whatever you say, dude. Mostly it’s just an excuse to taste lots of really good beer.
While most of the brewers we spoke to said they would enjoy making brewing a full-time career, by and large they earned their livings in other ways. Among others, we talked to a chef, a law student, an environmental consultant, an artist, a budget analyst, and a programmer.
The beers on tap were as diverse as the people brewing them. Notable standouts included Chris Harris’s Rock rock y’all, freak freak y’all, to the beets y’all, a beet-infused kolsch, Travis Collins’s and Matt Joyce’s Janszoon van Salee Moroccan Ale, a “a rich and dark porter with a spicy Moroccan charm from ginger, dates, cinnamon, and cloves,” and Brandon West’s Bushwick Fig Dubbel, made with figs from a tree in Bushwick.
Our long national nightmare is over: On Thursday, America got its very first cat cafe, a pop-up shop run by pet food company Purina. Which makes this as good a moment as any to pause (paws?) for a moment and understand how, exactly, we decided it was a good idea to combine espresso and felines. Cause who doesn't love a good cat-ucino?
A flyer for a Japense cat cafe (Sean Bonner/Flickr)
Cat cafes are public spaces where people can pay to hang out with cats. There's usually a food and drink element too. Smithsonian Magazine says the first cat cafe opened in Taiwan in 1998, although the establishments have since become most popular in Japan, which has more than 150 such establishments. Most cat cafes seem to have anywhere between two and 20 cats.
As to why cat cafes took off in Japan, some point to a popular culture where cats are pretty central (think: Hello Kitty). Others suggest more a more practical explanation: many Japanese apartment buildings don't allow residents to keep cats as pets.
It's partially a marketing gimmick: the cat cafe opening in New York is a pop-up shop run by pet food company Purina.
But it also has a lot to do with the fact that Americans just really like cats. They are the most popular pet in the United States beating beat dogs by a little, and birds and fish by a lot.
When people like cats, they seem to really like cats: the average cat-owning household owns 2.1 felines. The number is lower for dog-owners is lower with an average of 1.6 pets per household. Sometimes people who love cats but can't actually own one. Luckily, there's a cafe for that.
Sharla, a university student studying in Japan, has posted what is arguably the best video tour of Japan's cat cafes (there is admittedly not a ton of competition).
First, you have to decide what you want. Most cat cafes charge by the by the hour of time spent with the cats. Judging from Sharla's video, the going rate for an hour with cats typically hovers around $9-$10 (or 1000 yen, as pictured in the price list below). Most cat cafes that Sharla visited offered prices for 1, 2, and unlimited hour visits. Some include a drink in the price.
After that, cat patrons trade their shoes for slippers and wash their hands.
And then its pretty much what you'd expect: hanging out with cats. The two most popular activities appear to be petting the cats,and feeding the cats. At Kyariko Cat Cafe, which Sharla visited, she spent 300 yen (about $3) to buy cooked chicken for the cats.
Inside Paris' first cafe (Bruno Vigneron/Getty Images News)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, public health officials aren't totally sold on establishments that are home to animals and sell food. Aspiring cat cafe owners have found their efforts stymied in Boston and San Francisco, where it is illegal to have cats and food service in the same space. "They cannot operate in the same physical location," said a spokeswoman for San Francisco's public health department told Time . "You can't have cats in the same place as food."
What little research we have on cat cafes suggests this caution is probably warranted. One study of cats living in Japanese cafes found some to test positive for an intestinal parasite called Giardia duodenalis, which can be transmitted by drinking from the same cup of water. Bottom line: don't drink from the cats' bowls, or let them lick your cup.
At the New York cat cafe, Eater reports, food and drinks are prepared in a separate room from where the cats all hang out. Patrons are, however, allowed to bring their various beverages into the cat area. So, yes, you can live your wildest dreams – if said dream involves sipping a macchiato and petting a Maine Coon.*
*We have not actually verified what breeds will be at the Purina Cafe, although Maine Coons are among the most popular cat breeds – and the only one created in the United States!
One of the two cats in Germany's only cat cafe (John MacDougall/AFP)
This...is an area of somewhat active debate. When the United Kingdom's first cat cafes opened earlier this year, John Bradsaw, of the University of Bristol's Anthrozoology Institute, wrote an article questioning the wisdom of putting lots of cats in the same place – where they would constantly come into contact with strangers.
Cats evolved as "solitary, territorial predators," Bradshaw writes, noting that its difficult for even experts to predict which cats will and won't like a multi-cat household. He notes that, in multi-cat households, there's typically a group that bands together and builds social relationships – while others tend to be loners, and have tense relationships with the other cats.
The difficulty is figuring out which cats are the more social ones.
"If scientists who have studied cat welfare for decades are still unable to predict which cats will adapt to a particular situation and which will not, can we rely on the choices of
the enthusiasts who set up cat cafés, or wish to set them up in the future?" Bradshaw writes.
Junko Kimura/Getty Images News
At the one opening in New York this weekend, probably not. The cats at Purina's pop-up Cat Cafe are all rescue felines who are available for adoption at the nearby North Shore Animal Shelter (which also happens to be the country's largest no-kill shelter). A spokesperson for the shelter told Gothamist that the cats in the cafe "were carefully selected to make sure they'd be comfortable with people."
Yes, in fact! Chelsea Marshall at Buzzfeed asked the cats at the New York cafe some hard-hitting questions, including whether they were adding catnip to their coffee and some of their discriminatory policies against dogs. The cats were...evasive.
Easy question: that's got to be KitTea, the cat cafe currently seeking crowdfunding to launch in San Francisco.
Junko Kimura/Getty Images News
If you're really serious about this, here is Mashable's list of the top 10 sites to score cheap plane tickets. If you're semi-serious about this, Purina will be running a live-stream from the cat cafe during throughout the pop-up cafe's run.
The post Now Hiring in Brooklyn: YouTube, Citi Bike and 5 more cool places to work appeared first on Brokelyn.
WAKE UP, SHEEPLE.
Via imgur.com
Via terezowens.com
Via therapup.net
Jon Schubin288/6.3 is a good number. We shouldn't forget to celebrate the good months as the economy improves. As we near 6%, we're getting back into a 'normal' cycle.
Also, we should savor this as we're almost certainly closer to another recession that we are from coming out of the last one (which ended in 2009).
America's non-farm employers added 288,000 jobs to their payrolls in April, far more than were expected. Economists' consensus was that employers in April added 215,000 jobs. The report also represents a sharp acceleration from March, when non-farm employers added 203,000 jobs.
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, fell from 6.7 to 6.3 percent. That 0.4 percentage point decline is the sharpest since December 2010.
April marks the third straight month in which the economy has added more than 200,000 jobs. The positive report may be a sign that the labor market is healing despite a harsh winter, which many economists say weighed on growth.
The broadest measure of unemployment, the U-6 rate, which includes people who have stopped looking for work and those working part-time for economic reasons, also fell from 12.7 percent to 12.3.
However, the labor force participation rate fell from 63.2 percent to 62.8 percent. This is a measure of the share of the population either working or looking for work. It may signal that the sharp decline in the jobless rate was in part due to people stopping looking for jobs, rather than finding work.
Jerome LOL said it best when in his recent GvsB takeover he described what London based label/crew PC Music and leader Hannah Diamond were making as “Perfect British future pop.” Diamond’s newest single, “Attachment” is an apt introduction to her simple, wide-eyed brand of pop. It borders, sometimes quite dangerously, on kitsch, but it escapes this trap by putting on display some of the most bleeding edge sonics we’ve heard in a pop song all year.
PC Music feel like an exciting extension of the explosion of great pop tunes coming out of the UK right now, and just when that field is starting to feel a bit crowded with Disclosure imitators, PC are taking after SOPHIE, exploring weird, experimental takes on the cheesiest bubblegum pop songs of the 80s.
Check out a playlist of PC Music’s output so far, below:
Read more articles like "REC’D: PC Music’s Hannah Diamond, “Attachment”" on PMA - Pretty Much Amazing.
Tags: Hannah Diamond, PC MusicJon SchubinThis makes me sad, because clearly this was a dream project for someone. I'm sure they loved it, and they want to share it with the next owner. It's hideous, but I cringe at how we mock it.
Jon SchubinThere won't be fare hikes (except for the two we already planned).
After a two-year stalemate, the MTA and its largest union reached a new contract agreement that will raise wages by eight percent over five years, increase medical and dental benefits, and offer paid maternity and paternity leave. In concessions to the MTA, employees will contribute more toward health-care benefits and new hires won't receive full pay rates until they've been employed for five years. Governor Cuomo was asked to step in this week when the union threatened to strike, but if approved, the new deal means the subway will keep running and there won't be any fare increases (aside from the hikes already planned for 2015 and 2017).
Read more posts by Margaret Hartmann
Filed Under: mta ,stand clear of the closing doors ,transportation
Jon SchubinA pretty good article for 538.
This data is so fetch.
Wednesday is the 10th anniversary of “Mean Girls,” the movie that made Lindsay Lohan a household name and grossed $129 million worldwide doing it. In “Mean Girls,” Gretchen Wieners didn’t make “fetch” (for the non-Plastics among you: fetch roughly equates to cool/awesome) happen, much to the satisfaction of queen bee Regina George. But a decade later, the social media age has.
I was curious about how “fetch” and other “Mean Girls” catchphrases have permeated American culture. After all, the film is “the most quotable, gif-able, and mash-up-able movie for the Internet age,” as my former colleague and “Mean Girls” authority Jessica Goldstein noted on The Washington Post’s Style blog. Some of the memorable lines — “You can’t sit with us!” — also inspired these 10 Huffington Post charts and diagrams, which are certainly eye candy, if not data-driven.
The rise of “Mean Girls” has dovetailed with the rise of the meme. As social media sites allowed their content to easily be shared from one user to another, cultural catchphrases and tropes were able to grow exponentially until they reached meme status. Tumblr, especially, has helped to propel “Mean Girls” memes into our Twitter feeds and onto our Facebook walls (even Hillary Clinton has personally been victimized by Regina George). Tumblr shared some stats with us: In the past month (March 12 through April 10), the community of 402,000 Tumblr users created 10,200 posts and generated 477,300 notes on posts that mentioned “Mean Girls” (either in the body of the text or in a tag). Most of the posts consisted solely of images.
Twitter provided us with some nuggets, too. On Oct. 3, which “Mean Girls” devotees call “#MeanGirlsAppreciationDay” on the platform, tweets about the film spike. In 2013, “Mean Girls” tweets on Oct. 3 were 31 times the daily average. (This search accounted for select phrases I asked Twitter to search for, so the numbers may be even larger.)
I also decided to take a peek at Google Trends to see which quotes fans have been searching for over time. The information I found was based on searches worldwide from 2005 through last month. Google Trends displays results relative to the total number of Google searches (the data is normalized and presented on a zero-to-100 scale). I picked five oft-repeated phrases (“It’s October 3rd” (blue line); “On Wednesdays, we wear pink” (red); “so fetch” (yellow); “Stop trying to make fetch happen” (green); and “You go, Glen Coco” (purple) to see how they stacked up. “You go, Glen Coco” picked up steam in 2007 and 2008, but fetch’s ascent began in 2010.
Note the sequential spikes of the blue line: On October 3rd, it’s always October 3rd. But as “Mean Girls” memes have taken off, October 3rds have gotten even more fetch.
Jon SchubinTotoro cream puffs!
Some of these beauties don’t even need time in the oven.
This gluten-free Domestic Sluttery recipe is a little dose of Easter magic. Just pour cake batter into hollowed-out eggshells, bake in the oven, then try to look modest as everyone around you shrieks about how fiddly this must have been. (Here's a video showing a special BuzzFeed recipe, too.)
Caleigh / domesticsluttery.com
End the bunny-based tyranny of Easter with these beautiful Studio Ghibli-inspired custard cream-filled baked creations.
Flickr: bluetune / Creative Commons
Disney / shutupdumbfuck.tumblr.com
What's the best way to eat a hot cross bun? Straight from the oven or toaster and heavily buttered, obviously. And what's the best thing about a dough ball? It's baked with the butter already inside.
Laura B / domesticsluttery.com
Jon SchubinNo. Typical Observer contrarian trash. New York's dining scene is generally quite wonderful at nearly all price points.
The loss of Suenos, which by all accounts served just fine food at OK but not that cheap prices, isn't something to be too worried about. The restaurant scene here thrives on innovation, and Mexican restaurant #4209 isn't actually worth saving.
New York's oodles of cheap delights from new chefs from around the world, bizarre concepts and brave opinions in the mid-level, and the occasional Sushi Nakazawa type triumph at the top mean that dining is perhaps the best it's ever been.
Do climbing real estate prices mean that some areas might get flattened out, with expensive safe bets? Yes. Chelsea is a great example. Most of Williamsburg west of Bedford (at least below 11th street) is another. But good restaurants survive, and are even multiplying.
The greasy spoon can't stay just because it was always there.
Illustrations by Robert Samuel Hanson
Sueños, a restaurant I liked a lot, is going out of business. Its talented chef-proprietor, Sue Torres, is admired by nearly everyone I know in the business for her Mexican food, which somehow managed to be painstakingly authentic but also urbane, refined but totally rustic and uncompromised.The room was intimate, the crowd mostly devoted neighborhood customers—the kind who come in on a Wednesday night twice a month, the kind who keep local restaurants alive. It had a $30 prix fixe early bird menu, and it had a great margarita and it did party business at both lunch and dinner.
I can’t ever remember not having something good there. I ate bright, citrusy fish tacos there, and smoked duck confit with plantains and five-spice lamb barbacoa. The main courses all hovered at about $25, but that doesn’t even matter, because nobody went there for the main courses. (I suspect that the low prices helped kill the place; a low check average is as bad as an empty seat over the long run.) The restaurant was a success. It had been open for over ten years, which made it ancient by Manhattan restaurant standards. It was profitable. It was written about frequently. And now it’s as dead as Bob Hope.
The reasons were given out plainly in an announcement sent out a couple of weeks ago. “We could go on for hours about the plight of small businesses in these economic times, but we are sure you have heard enough of that in the news,” it began. You hear the same kind of language over and over again in the restaurant business, a kind of fatalistic despair, as if every independent restaurant was a Duane Reade waiting to happen. And maybe they are.
My life in New York, and my memories of it, is inextricable from its restaurants—especially the cheap ones. At NYU, I ate 50-cent hot dogs, robotically served by bored men at Gray’s Papaya. I consoled myself after a breakup with the tuna melt at Eisenberg’s, a 1929 luncheonette miraculously preserved on a prime block of Flatiron real estate. I ate with my stepmother, both before and after my father’s death, attacking the fried pork chops with undiminished gusto at La Dinastia, a dirt-cheap 50-seat Chino-Latino in the middle of a huge avenue block on the Upper West Side. Eisenberg’s and La Dinastia are still there, but there are many others that aren’t, including the West Village Gray’s. Life Café, made famous in Rent, is now gone, replaced by a high-end tapas bar. Manatus, a Bleecker Street staple, just went down for the dirt nap.
I am intensely grateful for the Eisenbergs and Dinastias of the world, because I know they won’t be around long. Soon Manhattan as we know it will exist entirely as retro styling. You don’t need to look far to see what this will look like. The Stage Restaurant, on Second Avenue off St. Marks Place, is unchanged and ancient, the last of the great working-class restaurants of the neighborhood. It consists entirely of stools and plywood, and you can have a dinner of roast pork, kasha, cucumber salad, and thick, buttered slices of homemade challah for $12. When that lease is up, it can’t exist. Meanwhile, a block away, a flashy new retro diner called Archie and Sons sells meat-loaf wraps, pizza bagels and stir-fry vegetable pitas. It makes me want to put a gun in my mouth every time I walk by it.
The math is simple. A restaurant at best might make a 15 percent profit, or 18 percent if it’s wildly successful. There are a lot of expenses connected with running a restaurant: labor, food, insurance, taxes, PR and much more. A restaurateur could start out paying 5 percent of gross revenue to rent. If the rent doubles, as is not unusual, the monthly rental nut becomes 10 percent and eats up a third of the profit. After the next rent increase, you’re working for the landlord.
Then the next step is Brooklyn or Boca, depending on your age. Some places get by passing the enormous burden onto their customers; I went to the Waverly Restaurant the other day and got a side order of hash browns and a cup of coffee for $11. How long is that going to last?
To make matters worse, the city is filled with rich people looking for vanity projects and write-offs. Marco Canora, one of the great owner-operators, looks beyond the abstract issue of rising rent. “The real problem,” he says, “is that, my God, there is no shortage of people who want to open up a restaurant in your space. New York is an anomaly in that there are all these big whale investors who have money that needs to be spent. They’re not really creating a viable business model. Which makes it hard for us.”
Just a few blocks from Canora’s restaurant, Hearth, on the corner of First Avenue and East 12th Street, there are two brand-new, expensively appointed tapas bars. Both are tiny and have pretty much no chance of making money. Remember, a restaurant can’t earn a penny until its opening costs are paid off; for a nice new restaurant created from the ground up, even a little one, that can take years.
“It’s impossible,” said a one restaurateur who is locked in a legal battle with his landlord. “I’ve already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’m never going to get that back. I’m an independent owner. How am I going to get a reasonable lease when this one is up? Even if I win, I will be out of business.”
He gets more animated as he goes. “I don’t care. I won’t give up. We’ve done everything right here. We put everything we had into this place and it makes money. But the real estate matters more than the people that make it what it is. It’s crazy!” He excuses himself; he’s livid. “Don’t use my name though. We are in a complicated lawsuit with the landlord. There might be ramifications.”
So who does that leave? The big ballers. Jeffrey Chodorow (two restaurants this year), Ahmass Fakahany (two), the Ken Oringer group, extending downward from Boston, the Landmarc group, various nightlife operators like the EMM group, LDV Hospitality, the Stillman Group, and other well-funded entities. And it’s not like they are rolling the dice. Even the most well-funded owners aren’t taking any risks. So expect to see more big-bore Italians (Ristorante Morini, L’Apicio), big-bore stations (Villard Michel Richard, Rotisserie Georgette), more iterations of existing places (Ladurée, Tao Downtown, RedFarm) and other low-risk ventures. That’s why you see so many fried chicken outposts and trattorias and gastropubs. Chicken and spaghetti and big hamburgers and “reimaginations” of diner food.
“Doing something dicey is not that appealing,” says Ben Leventhal, the co-founder of Eater.com and still one of the restaurant scene’s most acute observers. “These guys are on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It makes them risk-averse.” The result is, predictably, a city where half the restaurants look exactly the same. “If you take 10 restaurants in Midtown,” Michael Whiteman, president of Baum+Whiteman International Restaurant Consultants says, “and you tear the top of the menu and shuffle them around, there’s no way to tell which is which.”
The top of the menu consists entirely of Cheesecake Factory food, designed to hit all the bliss points but masquerading as something better. Pulled-pork bao. Duck fat “house made” tater tots. French onion soup dumplings. Buffalo quail. Bacon compote. (I am making these up, but they may appear on some actual menus; if so, no offense.) The mains are cheap proteins—chicken, lamb ribs, pork “collar,” hanger steaks the size of a Hershey bar. You know the rest. You’ve seen it all before.
And that’s the high end. On the other side of the scale, the current squeeze has been a big boon to the lowest rung of the restaurant business, fast food. A McDonalds or a Sbarro or a Taco Bell can afford its rent easily—aside from having vast resources, it doesn’t take up much space, has minute food costs and does a ton of take-out business. It also sells food all day long, and not just for a few hours in the afternoon and evening.
The picture isn’t entirely bleak. A good number of smallish, one-off neighborhood establishments maintain good relationships with their landlords, many of whom are aware that part of the value of their area derives from having good restaurants there. For that reason some have developed a guarded optimism about their futures. “I have a great relationship with my landlord. I keep in touch, so I know what direction he’s going,” says Joey Campanaro, the chef-owner of the West Village classic, the little owl. “Five years into a ten-year lease, I ask for another five. I do outside events, I hustle, and I get as much revenue as possible, so I have reserves to be ready for another renegotiation.”
Karma McDermott of the Chef Agency, a culinary headhunting firm, agrees. “I think blaming the rent can be kind of a cop-out, actually,” she says. “Yes, the rent is more expensive. Meat is more expensive. Dairy is more expensive. Everything is more expensive. Why should rents be different?” To Ms. McDermott, it’s more a question of the right concept for the right space. She points to the success of the RedFarm restaurants in the West Village and on the Upper West Side, as small enterprises that have thrived in expensive neighborhoods thanks to “a credible business plan.”
RedFarm, a green-market Chinese concept, has a huge turnover; the place can feed 1,000 in a day. It has a good lease. It didn’t cost a fortune to build. And of course, it had Jeffrey Chodorow behind it to carry it over the rocks of its early days. He had Joe Ng, one of the country’s best dim sum chefs, and Ed Schoenfeld, the ultimate Chinese restaurant guy.
But RedFarm, I think, is the exception. There are short guys in the NBA, but not many, and not for long. For every RedFarm that comes along, five places like Sueños will go out of business. And each time one does, their neighborhood will be a little poorer and a little less livable. One of the things that makes rent high, Mr. Leventhal points out, is the number and quality of their restaurants. (Mr. Leventhal cofounded the real estate fan site Curbed.)
“The quality of the neighborhood drives the value of property, and the fundamental driver of neighborhood quality is great restaurants,” Mr. Leventhal said. “You would want a Sueños or a Tertulia in your neighborhood before you would want another Chase. No one wants to live in an area composed entirely of endless strips of banks and big-box retailers.” At least, no one here does. If they did, they’d move to northern Florida.
Nor, on the other hand, does anyone (i.e., me) want to be shuffled off to some outer-borough ghetto where you count yourself lucky to have five choices for where to eat. It’s not the luxury destination restaurants, after all, that make a great restaurant city; those are pretty much the same wherever you go.
It’s the local institutions, the ones nobody writes about, the ones that mark the years and grow old with you over a lifetime. There will come a day when Eisenberg’s and La Dinastia will close. And when it does, my New York will die, to be replaced by what? It doesn’t matter. I will be long gone by then, along with the New York I loved.
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
(Photos: Daniel Leinweber for Razberry Photography)
Last time we checked in with roving rave producers BangOn, they were blowing up a reproduction of the Titanic and using it as an inflatable slide. This time, they went with an Easter Island theme for a rager that started on Holy Saturday and went past sunrise on Easter Sunday (aka “4/20″).
The rave occupied a massive East Williamsburg warehouse where movie trailers and golf carts were stored; in the center of the sprawling dancefloor was Thunder Gumbo’s Burning Man art car — a massive army truck transformed into a bilevel viewing platform for erupting fireballs, video projections, and a monolithic moai with glowing eyes. Oh, and there was a bouncy castle.
We took the above photos shortly after 4 a.m., when Yentalbeats and The Golden Pony were hypnotizing the main room and Subset was rocking the tiny tent of a side room.
A missing 3-year-old boy was found playing with the toys inside a claw machine at a bowling alley Tuesday.
Jon SchubinYes yes yes habibi
Apparently “رقصة البطريق” or “The Dance of the Penguin”, is massive in Saudi Arabia right now.
Congratulations, you’ve graduated from the Cronut-and-Katz’s pastrami level of your NYC eating education. In this advanced class, we’ll explore lesser-known and often overlooked foods that actually taste better anyway.
A sandwich, but instead of bread, the insides (the best ones are filled with cheese, shredded chicken, or pork) are held together by two giant smashed, fried plantains. (1329 St. Nicholas Ave., Manhattan & 107 B Dyckman St., Manhattan)
Vanessa's is best known for its cheap eponymous dumplings, but the sesame pancakes — which consist of warm bread stuffed with pickled vegetables and either duck, beef, chicken, or egg — are the real stars. Dousing with sriracha recommended. (In Manhattan: 118A Eldridge St. & 220 E 14th St; In Brooklyn: 310 Bedford Ave.)
Jon SchubinI've watched the first three episodes. It's good.
Welcome to Sweden is a Swedish fish-out-of-water story (not to be confused with a Swedish Fish out of water story, which would be a terrible sitcom about how candy is gross when wet), loosely based on Amy Poehler's brother Greg's real story of moving to Sweden for love. The show, which is coming to NBC this July, already aired in Sweden and features more blond people than the groom's side of the upcoming Game of Thrones wedding.
Read more posts by Jesse David Fox
Filed Under: welcome to sweden ,amy poehler ,greg poehler ,trailer mix ,tv
Spice up your prom experience! Or, original recipe your prom experience.
Of course you have.
Via reactiongifs.com
Yum! Brands, Inc. / Via kfc.com
Kind of takes some of the glamour away, if you ask me.
Nanz & Kraft Florists / Via nanzandkraft.com
Yum! Brands, Inc. / Via kfc.com
Sneak in a comma to turn it into a backhanded compliment.
Vincent West / Reuters / Via Kevin Tang
"I flushed my poop before he could look at it."
Submitted By: Kyle S.
Location: Missouri, United States
Plus, an ingenious new use for matzo. (This post is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Eat More Better: How To Make Every Bite More Delicious .)
Dan Pashman
During a single night's observance, Jews are supposed to consume four glasses of wine as we recall the plight of our ancestors. But why not drink enough to forget the plight of our ancestors? After all, they don't want us to worry about them. They only want us to be happy. Can't you just hear them?
"Don't worry about us. We only want you to be happy. Go, have a good time with your friends. We'll be fine. We love building pyramids for the Pharaoh. Heavy? No, these bricks are light as feathers!"
Manischewitz Wine: A red wine with lots of sugar added.
Charoset: Represents mortar from the building of the pyramids; generally chopped apples, nuts, cinnamon, sugar, and more Manischewitz, although recipes vary widely.
Maror: Bitter herbs to represent the Jews' suffering in Egypt—usually horseradish.
Dan Pashman
INGREDIENTS
1 bottle (750 ml) Concord grape Manischewitz
1 cup kosher for Passover calvados or brandy
3 cups charoset (click for recipe; don't use the sugar)
¼ cup fresh lemon juice (I used/pictured bottled, but I shouldn't have)
¼ cup fresh lime juice (ditto above)
Pinch salt
4 (1/4-inch-thick) slices fresh horseradish, a.k.a. Maror (optional)
Seasonal Fruits (optional)
Orange, grapefruit, or tangerine, peeled and segmented
Kiwi, peeled and quartered
Cherries, pitted and halved
