Naw Ruz - A time to explore eating!

So this year like most, Naw Ruz came with the sudden urge to eat things one normally isn't interested in - preferable of course, during the day, but any time will do! James and I have begun a more adventurous exploration of New York food as our new year resolution (not really a discussed thing, but anyway). I think we have been sort of conservative on that front simply because we don't spend much time in Manhattan. However thanks to our pal Tracy, we now have a deck of 52 places in Manhattan to have a go at in the next year. Can it be done? I'm not certain since we got a late start, but so far we have tried 2.

On the eve of Naw Ruz we chose to dine with Matt and Karen at a little slip of a place on the lower east side. O.G. stands for Oriental Grill, I read. As a food critic I would say I probably wouldn't rush back, though I must say I did enjoy the food. Atmosphere was nice, waiter a bit nuts, but humorous enough. I would say the dumplings were the highlight. We tried Chicken and mango and a very interesting spinach and goat cheese. If you are offered the Tuna - don't. It wasn't good. However, the soon to be extinct (Karen gave me a lecture before ordering it) sea bass was quite delicious and had a very interesting coconut sauce around it. Yes to the chocolate spice dessert thing too.

Our second foray - in the same week even! - was the City Crab. Right in the Union Square area it seems a safe place to order seafood as it boasts it comes in fresh from the fish market each day (shouldn't that be a given?). A little pricier but hey, it is seafood, it was GOOD. We enjoyed cold crab for an appetizer but the true piece De resistance had to be my Red Snapper wrapped with smoked bacon with stewed apple slices on top, served with Yukon potatoes and very tasty, not over cooked string beans. What a fine combination! It's kind of a weird place inside - surprisingly large and during this sat afternoon a Jazz band was playing downstairs. However, as we were upstairs we were simultaneously hearing Spanish music. Not sure what that was about. Didn't get to dessert but they did look good....

We have also discovered two new things about bugsy. She loves sharp cheddar cheese, and she would eat crepes if she could only figure out how. This picture below is before she got it on the floor. From there, without the fold in the crepe she just couldn't find an end to pick it back up with!

Now that the weather is changing I am ready to come out of hibernation a bit more. Finally! And in just a weeks time I will be flying to Mexico. Life is good.

Electronic heaven

Today I became a little techie. Well not really. But I was gutsy enough to try and open up my own DVD player to extract a stuck DVD. Mind you there was some motivation behind it knowing that I certainly didn't want to pay $22 to Blockbuster just because I couldn't return it in time, so this is an example of how incentives work. Normally I'm too nervous to do anything to electrical equipment. My idea is immediately hand it over to a professional who can say this, that, and the other thing and after a fairly hefty payment on my end, the appliance is (hopefully) fixed. Today I did not fix my DVD player but I felt almost like I could. I had a mini screw driver and a credit card and felt all set.
I've dreamt of knowing more about things that confound me but truth be told, I'm not too interested. I know there are Dummies guide to everything these days and I could just pick up a book and read about it, but I really just don't want to. Carburetor shmarborator. Who cares if the gasket is blown or the mother board is on the fritz? Well actually I do care, but I don't care to know what to do about it. Unfortunately (and this is solely my perspective of the universe) the most conniving and corrupt people run the repair shops for electronics as well as cars. How many of us take the car in for something minor and don't get it back before we've forked out $700. (and isn't it strange how it's always somewhere around that number?). And then if that's not bad enough suddenly 2 months later you hear something else rattling under the hood.
Right now we are dealing with a computer that frequently tells us it won't start because the CPU fan isn't working. Fabulous. we just force start it anyway. I can't take it in because in the past we brought it in for that, among other issues, and guess what? it still is happening despite us having a brand new mother board, a brand new screen, a new CD and DVD and floppy drive and who knows what else! It's unreal. Of course that was all under the warranty. Now that it's expired I'm not even trying to find out how much they'll charge...!
If electronic heaven exists its a place where things fix themselves, grease their own joints and know exactly when to upgrade their software and update their anti virus programs.