You may recall a post from April 2009 (see here) in which Craig and I sampled the food at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida while Craig was attending the Florida Film Festival. If you don’t want to click, I’ll sum it up for you: the food sucked. We ate corn dogs and bad Mexican food at the Mexican pavilion. It was fine theme park food but nothing that deserved attention on a food blog; though many passionate Disney fans chided me in the comments, pointing out our terrible decisions and defending Disney as a decent dining destination, if you know where to go.
Stand back, mere mortals. You are about to encounter a sandwich that is not meant for the meagre constitutions of wimpy humans. This is food for giants, food for gods. “God” is even in the sandwich’s name: meet The Godmother at Bay Cities in Santa Monica. A sandwich with so much meat on it, if Noah opened a deli on his ark, he’d still have nothing on this. We’re talking Genoa salami, mortadella, coppacola, ham, and prosciutto. That’s like 40 pigs right there.
Last week I decided to take a field trip to Williamsburg.
While working on my book, I did take a weekly sojourn to Park Slope, my old stomping grounds, to grab sushi at Taro and to do work at Gorilla, but I did that because it was comfortable and familiar (and I think Taro has the best, most reasonably priced sushi lunch deal in New York); I also like working at Gorilla, it’s a nice change of pace from my daily West Village routine. But Williamsburg? Williamsburg I know very little about.
Cooking, sometimes, is like a game. The game changes from dish to dish, but often, for me, the game is: How Can I Make This Better Without Leaving My Apartment?
This is a fun game to play, especially when you’re making something as pedestrian as an egg salad sandwich. You boil the eggs, you peel them, then you put them into a bowl and look at them. That’s when the game starts.
As autumn conquers summer, and I stroll through the Union Square Farmer’s Market, I start to panic and worry about all the fruits and vegetables I didn’t buy during those precious few warm-weather months. Which explains why, during one Saturday saunter, I came home with four giant red peppers.
I didn’t really have a red pepper agenda, but after watching this red pepper video on Food52 I decided I wanted to roast them. Then marinate them. And who knew that from that simple act I’d get three more dishes: a sandwich, a salad, and a gussied-up mac & cheese?
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes you’re at a restaurant, waiting for your food, and you see a dish appear on the pass. You think to yourself: “Ooooh, that looks so good, maybe I should’ve ordered that?” You stare it for a few more beats and begin chastising yourself for ordering the thing you ordered instead of that other dish. “What was I thinking? That looks so much better! Mine’s going to suck.”
That’s exactly what happened to me the other day when I had lunch at Prune, only there was a twist ending: when the waiter picked up the plate to bring it to the lucky person who ordered it, I quickly discovered that the lucky person who ordered it was me.
Recently, I had my friends Rob and Kath over for dinner. They live in our building and we were chatting about the neighborhood, our favorite places to eat and, inevitably, The New French came up. “You know it’s funny,” I said. “At first I didn’t love The New French, but recently I discovered their tuna sandwich and it’s seriously the best tuna sandwich of my life.”
