Home Again, Home Again

Well, Delaney and I got home from New York late on Saturday.  I was kind of bummed to leave the city; she’s bummed because school starts today.

But real life calls, so we don’t have much choice.  I feel like I handled the food pretty well; I didn’t come home looking like a dirigible or anything.  Here’s what worked, and what didn’t (plus some new tips we came up with):

1)      Walking.  Seriously.  It makes such a huge difference.  I’m convinced that if I lived in New York, I’d be thin as a rail, simply because it’s so easy to just walk everywhere.  We did take the subway a lot, because while I’m happy to walk 30 blocks, Delaney was less thrilled.  But even just getting to and from the trains all day long helped me feel like I was keeping the calories under control.

2)      Sharing.  This didn’t work as well for us.  At mealtimes we were hungry, and didn’t necessarily want the same things, so we each ordered our own.  We did manage to share snacks and desserts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we only ordered one!

3)      Skip the caloric drinks.  Easy enough—it was quite warm, so we were both thirsty for water the whole time anyway.  There might have been one very small iced chocolate, but we definitely shared that.  Oh, and the milkshakes.  But they were dessert, not drinks–a different thing entirely, right? (that picture above is of the part we didn’t drink–chocolate malted on the left, toasted marshmallow on the right.)

4)      Only eating the truly delicious things.  No problem. This wound up being the same as number 5.

5)      Not finishing things:  we were both surprised by how easy this was.  If it wasn’t phenomenal, we threw it away, because there was always something else amazing just around the corner.  Which leads to my new tips:

6)      Eat the best thing first.  We went to Levain bakery the afternoon we got there and shared a chocolate chip cookie that was by far the best I’ve ever had in my life.  It was the only cookie we finished the whole time we were there.  It was easy to throw away most of a compost cookie from Momofuku Milk Bar, having already been to the nirvana that is Levain.  A compost cookie, by the way, contains, among other things, pretzels and coffee grounds.  The coffee grounds make it taste like . . . coffee grounds.  Blech.  Again, the photo is the part we didn’t eat.

7)      Skipping meals.  Not something I usually do, but honestly, we were so busy, and logistics were so complicated that it was simpler (several times) to just not bother.  We also had cheese and bread in our hotel room a couple of times—the night we had a box of goodies from Milk Bar plus West Side Story tickets, and the night we wanted to go to WD-50 for dessert.

What I’m going to dream about until next time I go to New York:

That Levain cookie.  Oh my.  I don’t have a photo of that, because we ate THE WHOLE THING.

The pretzel croissant and iced chocolate at City Bakery.  Most perfect breakfast ever.

Dessert at WD-50.  It’s a molecular gastronomy restaurant, and the pastry chef used to be at Alinea, in Chicago.  Delaney and I each had the 5-course dessert tasting menu, and it was worth every calorie.  If you’re at all interested in broadening your food horizons, you need to find some molecular gastronomy.  It was amazing and indescribable—Delaney just kept giggling, and at one point I leaned over and whispered in her ear that this was possibly the most fun I’d ever had in my life.  And yes, between us, we had the seasonal variation of every dessert on the menu.

Other highlights:

Celebrity chef-spotting.  Yes, we’re weird that way, and possibly slightly stalker-ish.  We saw both Harold Dieterle and Wylie Dufresne.  Squeee!

The “Behind the Emerald Curtain” tour at the Wicked theatre.

Penzey’s Spices in Grand Central Market.  Food geek heaven.

The energy of the city—I could never live there, but I could never stop going, either.