gnat does new york

guys, i am exhausted. in the last two weeks i have flown five times and slept on four floors in six cities. i'm in chicago now and needless to say i am so happy to be back at home base, sleeping on my own mattress on my own floor. (yes, i sleep on a mattress on the floor. there is a bed frame involved. it's a long story. actually, no it's not. i bought a broken bed frame on craigslist and so my mattress sits on the floor inside the frame. i swear it's very comfortable.)

anyway, one of the floors i slept on happened to be in my friend jimmy's apartment in new york city. i informed him before my visit that my biggest priority was (surprise) to try as much food as possible, and though i was only there for 42 hours i managed to eat many, many things including breakfast at tom's restaurant in morningside heights (which you may recognize),

a hot dog and papaya juice at gray's papaya (famous hot doggery),

the inside of which is decorated like a tropical pinata,

and where i discovered that i'm not super wild about sauerkraut but that i do find the hot dog/papaya drink combination strangely delightful,

wafels and dinges (dinges is apparently dutch for "things" or "stuff" as in the stuff they put on waffles),

where i had a wafel with spekuloos spread (which is seriously amazing - it's like a peanut butter but made of ground up gingerbread cookies),

koronet pizza,

where i got a jumbo slice of pizza,

which was bigger than my head and totally overwhelming,

(i'm not the only one who felt this way),

and absolute bagels,

where i had a fresh bagel with lox spread (and it was the best bagel i had ever eaten).

not pictured are a burger which was not really memorable but to which the soundtrack was a choreographed karaoke rendition of men in black (complete with costumes and props), a street pretzel, and a reuben which was technically not from a "new york deli" but hey, my time was limited. in case you weren't counting, that's eight meals in a day and a half. be impressed.

of course, i also did things that WEREN'T food related (to kill time between meals). i saw strawberry fields in central park, across the street from the apartment building where john lennon was shot (may he rest in peace):

the lincoln center,

the GE building at 30 rockefeller plaza,

(and rockefeller center right under it, although somehow i missed the statue of atlas)

and times square, which i was resistant to the idea of visiting but which i found strangely soothing after a long day... something about all of the movement and ambient noise and huge billboards flashing has a totally unexpected (and counter-intuitive) calming effect if you sit there long enough...

i also got to spend a few hours at moma, which has a spectacular collection (including many pieces i would have sworn were in europe):

van gogh,

rousseau,

monet,

boccioni,

picasso,

braque and picasso,

warhol,

rothko (not reeeeeeaaalllllly my favorite),

pollock (which i never understood until i stood two feet from one - at which point i finally got what was so exciting about it),

and my favorite, chagall. (i remember the first time i saw a picture of this painting - i was six years old. he's been my favorite ever since.)

there were a few things i missed - the painting above is the only one of chagall's on view, and although moma has persistence of memory (probably dali's most famous painting but far from my favorite) there is only one other dali - but i saw so many more exciting things than what i've put above and there were even more that i didn't see because i got kicked out when the museum was closing. 

(as a side note, i think it's strange that i was more self-conscious about looking like a tourist in new york city than i ever feel when taking pictures of things here in chicago. i wonder why that is?) 

after new york i was in la, then back to chicago, rounding out the top three largest cities in the country in a span of five days. (it sounds cool, but it was borderline miserable - when i finally got back to chicago for good on thursday i slept for 15 hours then proceeded to lie on the couch for another two days. i am only now starting to feel like a normal human being again.) many thanks to jimmy, especially for accompanying me on many of my food related new york adventures, and to everyone else whose floor i have slept on in the last few weeks. 

and now, back to your regularly scheduled chicago-related programming.

gnat's continuing love affair with the chicago bean

as if the bean needed any help being completely awesome, the city of chicago made it even more excellent by putting on something called "luminous field" last week. they put up huge lights that projected colorful geometric patterns on the floor, which were reflected in the contours of the bean (all of this set to a soundtrack of trippy music). 

i'll admit - for the first few minutes i was down there, i sort of looked at it like "this is it? that's the whole thing?" for some reason, though, the swirling patterns became more mesmerizing the longer i stood there watching them:

in completely unrelated news, this is the 100th post on gnat's chicago experiment! (and it almost wasn't about chicago at all - more news on this next time.)

gnat cries wolf

after two days of anxiety, tense conversations, visits from supportive friends, and general freaking out, cara and i signed the forms to say that we have withdrawn our intent to sublet the apartment.

(it was only fitting that we celebrated with a cupcake from more)


what this means is that i'm staying - until when exactly, i'm not sure, but i will not be vacating at the end of march.


it's dramatic, i know, but coming that close to giving up the apartment felt something like the chicago residency equivalent of a near death experience. until the end was staring me in the face, i didn't realize how much i wasn't ready for it. my life in chicago has become routine - i guess i've lost my sense of wonder, or at least my will to act on it and take advantage of everything the city has to offer. it's time to shake off the complacency and really enjoy what remains of my time here. i want to be sure that when it actually is time to leave, i don't do it with feelings of regret.

that said, it's time to make a bucket list. what things do i absolutely need to accomplish before i leave? what things do i need to go back and do again? help me interwebs - i want to do this right.

gnat bites her tongue

i may have lied yesterday - more news on this later (if and when i have any).

gnat sets an end date

and it's saturday, march 24.

...i'm not ready.

gnat makes the same mistake over, and over, and over

you would think, by now, that i would know better than to trust weather.com, but no - every morning i faithfully check the day's forecast and clothe/shoe myself accordingly. this proves to be a stupid, stupid idea almost every time. 

this morning weather.com told me that it would start to snow late this afternoon, perhaps early this evening. no problem, i said. partly sunny until 3PM? i'll definitely be home by then, i said.

well friends, it is snowing. a whole lot of snowing. 45 degree angle snowing. remember the time i wore ballet flats out into a snowstorm? because in about fifteen minutes i will be repeating that experience.

gnat's picaken experiment: a culinary feat never to be repeated

the "picaken" has been a sort of running joke in my life for a few years now. when jalees, cheex and i first tossed around the idea of making a turducken for fakesgiving 2010, one of them suggested that a pie baked inside a cake would be the perfect dessert. we all laughed it off, of course. since then, every once in a while i've gotten an email from someone with a picture of a picaken, since apparently my friends know me and my predilection for strange kitchen experiments all too well. i usually laugh and respond that i'm not really much of a baker.

the last such email came from eileen, and contained a link to the first recipe that i had seen actually call the baked good behemoth a "picaken." what was so different about this email that made me suddenly entertain the idea of following through on this stupid, stupid quest?

the subject line said "challenge."

(unfortunately), i am not a girl who backs away from a challenge easily, which is why three days and several sticks of butter later this happened:

but i digress.

the first person to whom i made my intentions known was my little sister alex, who immediately asked "what is with you baking things inside of other things?" i wish i knew, alex.

so last saturday, after extensive googling of pie flavors and cake flavors and polling really everyone about potential combinations thereof, i assembled the ingredients and equipment and cara and i began picaken-ing. you may be wondering how exactly one accomplishes such a feat. lucky for you, i have pictures.

first you bake a pie. i had never done this before, so it was an experience in itself.

we made a nectarine filling (which, if you think about it, is totally ludicrous considering it was january in chicago. on second thought, not that ludicrous in comparison to the whole rest of the experience).

then you bake the pie. bonus points if you do it in a pi dish.

if you live in a big city and can't cool your pie on a windowsill (like in tom sawyer or dennis the menace or whatever) you open your bedroom window to let in the frigid january air instead. this was surprisingly effective.

this is the point where normally you would stop. after all, you've just baked a beautiful pie. or, you could remove the pie from its dish and set it in a springform pan...

and pour yellow cake batter over it.

where did it go?

it comes out of the oven looking like this. voila! picaken.

you could also stop at this point. picaken accomplished, after all.

cara and i did not stop at this point. what we did instead was assemble another pie, this one banana. we baked it, we window-silled it, and we popped it right out of its dish.

...flipping a perfect, fresh baked pie out of its dish is something of a harrowing experience.

we put it in the springform pan,

and covered it with batter. this time, lemon cake.

we piled our two picakens onto a makeshift cake stand (an upside down cast iron skillet covered in aluminum foil) and frosted that bad boy.

then we invited as many people over as we could so that they could help us eat the thing.

after the first slice came out, i may have cried a little on the inside. the inside of our picaken was far from beautiful. the banana pie turned purple - google offers little guidance as to why this happened, except that it has "something to do with potassium." it also maybe didn't hold together as well as it could have, as demonstrated by the "slice" i am holding below.

despite its less than winning looks, the picaken was delicious. 

i won't tell you how long the whole experience took, because frankly i am a bit ashamed to admit how long we spent on it. was it worth it? absolutely - picaken challenge accepted, and totally dominated. next person who emails me a recipe is getting this photo of a double-picaken slice in response. done and done.

you may have noticed in the first picture that a blue and pink candle were inserted into the finished picaken - because how much of a shame would it be not to use it in celebration of some important event? cara and aleck blew out the candles in honor of their recent engagement (congratulations guys!).

i would like to say that i've learned my lesson about ridiculous food assembly (and my reluctance to back down from a challenge) but picaken-squared was totally worth the time, effort, and mess. that said, i'm never ever going to do it again. probably. we'll see.

gnat is reminded what "real winter" looks like

i've been back in chicago to for two weeks, but the weather conditions have been causing me to wonder if i hadn't fallen through a wormhole to a universe where the state of illinois had relocated itself 700 miles south of its actual location. it's been in the 40s and 50s since i got back, not that different from the northern california winter i returned from.

well, it definitely looks like "real winter" today. i woke up to heaps of snow falling out of the sky, upsetting pedestrians and blanketing cars, trees, and just about everything else in sight. in seven hours we've had upwards of four inches of snow, and it's still going strong out there.

unfortunately instead of spending the morning giddily dancing around in the snowflake melee (which is what i did last year) i had to be a real person and stomp off to the library. i'm not sure how it's possible, but everyone else walking around me seemed to be unaffected by the weather, whereas i arrived at school with my coat, hair, and scarf encrusted with a thick layer of ice. cara says that she too looked like a snowman in a class full of dry, composed students. maybe snow has a honing system that helps it preferentially attack non-natives? so much for being better at winter the second time around.

i'm off to warm up with a huge pot of posole.