Food, food, glorious food. I’m at my happiest state when I’m eating food and that’s all there is to it. Next week, I am taking a few days to go down to Florida because it’s my February break. This is when I think to myself, ‘who cares about a bikini body? I like to eat.’ I’m not sure who came up with the idea of taking a week off of school in February, but I, with my entire school, am surely not complaining.
Time off from school is a time to go out to lunch, relax, and possibly take the time to get out of my Netflix-and-chill-after-school mode to get out and do something spontaneous. Spontaneous is certainly a word to describe a night that I’ve previously experienced. Although over a month ago, my camp friend took me to the New Year’s Eve ball in Times Square in New York City – like THE actual ball that millions of people watch from all over; we got to go up to the top of the building, touch the ball (it wasn’t really advised to touch it, but oh well) and snap some really great photos to upload on Instagram. After we climbed the steps back down from the ball, we went to a restaurant row to a place called Becco. When I say that my camp friend likes pasta, she likes pasta, and she certainly knows where to go for a pasta dinner. She took me to a really good Italian place; there were loads of options and, although crowded, the service was good. We ended up getting the incredible all-you-can-eat pasta special, where they have pans and pans of three types of pasta and they come back as often as you’d like and fill your plate up again. The three pasta meals they were serving were spaghetti in a red sauce, orecchiette in a vodka sauce and gnocchi in a white sauce. I’ve only had gnocchi once before this meal, and they were little bite-sized pieces, but this gnocchi was big and filling.
This is the pan of gnocchi. All of the pans of pasta were this big and they would serve us until we wouldn’t pick up our fork for more. This potato-filled pasta was super good and very flavorful.
My plate looked like this after another refill:
This includes the gnocchi on the right, the orecchiette upfront, and the spaghetti on the right. Everything was really good (as I’ve probably mentioned many times before).
More adventures have taken place in New York recently. For me, it’s casual to drive twenty minutes into the city and grab dinner quickly with a friend. The other day, my friend Rachel and I went to Big Daddy’s Diner for burgers and shakes. We split the shake, and I’m glad we did because it was really, really big.
Big Daddy’s has the classic diner “vibe” with the juke box and dimmed lights and booths. This place is certainly date-worthy, especially if you decide to get a smoothie to share.
I had other adventures in New York, but it didn’t include the actual city. Another friend and I went to dinner at Mountain House, a quaint, local pizza place. I wasn’t impressed with the looks of the place, but my opinion quickly changed with the friendly waiter that we had taking care of us, the personality of the place and the smiles that were worn on everyone there. We ordered two huge pies; the regular cheese pie and the garbage pie (we were also with my friend’s older sister and dad). All pizza at this restaurant comes in a thin crust, so it’s pretty easy to eat an entire pie or two.
Here’s the plain pie, which was more beautiful even without the “VSCO” photo editing app filter that I used.
Although New York offers great Italian food and a smoothie at a diner, back in New Jersey, my sister and I went to the Farmhouse in Creskill and we were (as always), happy and satisfied with our usual butternut squash salad. I recently tried their iced chai-latte at Farmhouse, and it was AMAZING (did you get that? It was AMAZING), so it was a great (and probably sugary) addition to my salad. Here’s a photo of my salad:
Again, this has a photo filter on it, but it looked just as good, actually better, in person. This salad includes corn, roasted butternut squash chunks, other kinds of squash, beets, tomatoes, and a slice of bread with some spreadable cheese, all on top of lettuce with balsamic vinaigrette. This salad is always a favorite. Look out for my iced chai-tea latte on the upper half of this photo.
Last night, my mom and I made homemade pizza with butternut squash and other veggies on top. I got up to get another slice, when my mom said, “you BUTTERnut get another slice” instead of saying “better not”. We both laughed for a few minutes at the joke, but little did she know, she sparked the inspiration for this very blog post. Thanks, mom. I love you. And I love your cooking. 🙂
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