The addiction that's more expensive than crack.

Yep, I'm talking about the iPhone.

I used to have a Tiny-Phone - or so my friend Smaddy christened it.

Exhibit A: Tiny-Phone.

I also had a BlackBerry bequeathed to me by my office - data only. But I still thought it was pretty sweet (ahem, please see Exhibit A for insight into this reasoning).

But as more and more of my friends brandished iPhones about town, my envy level rose as quickly as ... a teenage boy's libido? Yep, let's go with it - I had a hard-on for the iPhone.

Fast forward to Christmas 2009 - Momma J took pity upon her poor, un-cool, Tiny-Phone carrying children and purchased iPhones as the big present of the season. Complete with Spoiled Child Family Plan.

Huzza! Finally able to count myself among the "cool-kid" ranks, the thing became practically welded to my hand. And I ditched my BlackBerry faster than it would probably take the aforementioned hypothetical teenage boy to prematurely ejaculate if faced with the object of his libido-inducing desire.

But I didn't realize that I'd crossed into full-blown addiction territory until my precious iPhone was stolen out from under me.

At our skeeball bar, no less. My personal Cheers. The bar that hosted hundreds of people for the Brewskeeball National Championship, where iPhones sat charging by bathroom sinks, given nary a second glance, left well enough alone.

I held it together until my visit to the Apple store - more specifically, until my designated "Genius" informed me that I'd have to fork over approximately $500 for the right to replace what had been tragically taken from me, by no fault of my own. (Unless you count leaving an iPhone unattended for 5 minutes a fault of my own. Oh, point taken ... moving on).

Seriously - the iPad had just come out at this time, and was selling for $400. Yet I'd have to pay more than that to purchase an outdated version of a phone that I had already owned for five months?

I trudged home, sans new iPhone. I felt like I was leaving an intervention, told that I'd need to go cold turkey, give up my addiction and be sentenced to rehab.

I called Momma J the next morning from my office, looking for some sympathy. Sympathy that she really wasn't interested in giving - she'd sworn seconds after we unwrapped the iPhones on Christmas morning that they would be the only ones she'd purchase for us.

"If you lose it, that's IT."

And so it was. UNTIL ...

The bacon-loving co-worker from posts past (affectionately known to us as Apwam - don't ask) mentioned that he had an extra one.

What? Who has an extra iPhone just lying around? That they're willing to donate to poor, first-world-problem-afflicted 20-somethings?

Apwam, that's who.

Momma J overnighted that sucker from Austin to NYC and I was back to my Internet-absorbed, iPhone loving ways in no time.

I've managed to hold onto this one so far, and will probably give in and upgrade to the iPhone 4 once I'm eligible (stupid AT&T and its restrictive ways).

Because I - like all of those suckers that waited in the heat for hours on end the day the new model came out - have become an Apple addict.

It's unexplainable ... And I don't care - as most aptly demonstrated by my (and Smaddy and Carstee's) new favorite viral video. I just have to have it.

An iPhone 4 shopper walks into a store:

So here's to the addiction that's more expensive than crack. Maybe someday they will sell them in Walgreens - here's hoping.

Currently Coveting: Edition Numero Uno

Things that impress and inspire, excite a desire.

So, as I promised (myself), here's the first edition of things I'm currently obsessed with.

Heather Moore Jewelry:

This was a Guilt Groupe/Momma J find. If I could afford the $500 - $2,000 price point, I would totally rock one or more of these charms.

Robicelli's Cupcakes:
I'm clearly so obsessed, that I follow them on Twitter.

The freakin cutest local cupcake shop, based out of Brooklyn. Matt and Allison Robicelli bake bad-ass cupcakes with local ingredients in small batches, then deliver them to storefronts throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. Pictured above: "The Duckwalk"- Vanilla cake with blueberry port-mascarpone buttercream, homemade blueberry port jam, and fresh blueberries. The blueberry port jam in the center was my favorite part. Trekking around the LES in 95 degree weather to find it was my least. (But totally worth it.)

Other flavors I'm hoping to try (if I ever manage to get to the right spot at the right time):

“The Bluth” (which, let's face it, I would probably try just for the name alone. I mean, can I hang out with these people? I think we should be friends ...) - chocolate banana cake studded with chocolate chips and walnuts, with chocolate buttercream, ganache and roasted walnuts

“The Yvonne” - 2003 Late harvest reisling cake and buttercream topped with blueberry-thai basil compote (What? I wish I could tell you that I've come up with something half as interesting in the kitchen as blueberry-thai basil compote on top of a cupcake)

“The Maltz”(why, hello bacon, fancy meeting you here) - chocolate bourbon cake and buttercream with candied bacon

“Bea Arthur” (again with the toungue and cheek - ♥) - Black coffee infused chocolate cake with cheesecake buttercream and espresso ganache

“The Red, White and Blue” (4th of July special - yum) -  vanilla cake filled with wildberry jam, mascarpone buttercream and fresh berries

And since we mentioned bacon already ... :

Bakon Vodka - "a clean refreshing potato vodka with delicious savory bacon flavor"

Anecdotally, Momma J wanted to order this for her co-worker's birthday, as he's obsessed with the current all-things-bacon-craze (see BBCC). Since they don't sell it in the great state of Texas, I ventured over to Astor Wines & Spirits to purchase some for her. Once securely wrapped in approximately 5 lbs. of bubble wrap, I shipped it to Austin (illegally, of course) for their bacony-consumption.

Next up, buy some for myself and host a bloody mary brunch party, complete with a bar of bloody mary mixin's and copious amounts of bacon. If I'm really gonna go for it, maybe I'll try and candy my own bacon as a garnish. Updates to come, if this actually happens ...

And there you have it folks - 3 things that I'm currently coveting. Aside from leaving this flourescently-lit office for some sunshine and long weekend's worth of 4th of July celebration, that is. Hope you all have a great extended weekend!

The makings of a great V-Day are…

No expectations. And lots of great friends.

I honestly can’t remember what I did last year for Valentine’s Day. Which I’ll file under “success” as no memories are better than the drama-full/depressing/woe-is me kind of V-Days that many ladies speak of.

I’ve been guilty of wallowing in a bit of V-day related self-pity in the past – during the tender young years of my elementary school days no less. Momma J likes to tell a story about the time she read an entry in my diary about Valentine’s Day (thanks Mom…). Apparently, it went something like, “Dear Diary, Today was the worst EVER. No one gave me any flowers and my dog ate my chocolates.”

This year, I didn’t need flowers or chocolates – I had the Brewskeeball National Championship (BBNC), girlfriends, alcohol and arts and crafts.

I kick-started the 14th with Mad, her two roommates and Carstees at Ulysses for brunch. Mad is probably one of the only people that could get me to venture to the Financial District for brunch at 12:45 on a Sunday morning. It was definitely worth it – buffet style ham, turkey, pancakes, sausage, bacon, eggs benedict, oysters. etc., etc. Yum.

There were lots of couples and several families there celebrating V-Day. I’m sure they all appreciated our inappropriate topics of conversation and overzealous use of the F word. Also, Mad accidentally backhanded some lady’s face as she walked by the line of us perched at the bar. Success.

Mad and Carstees are also the only people whom I’d go to The Patriot with (ever, let alone on V-Day). They’re also the only ones that have ever invited me – hmmm. Correlation? If you’ve never been, picture the shadiest dive bar you have ever been to, then multiply times 3. Add in a crazy looking bearded guy who brings his toy dinosaurs to the bar every Sunday and orders them rounds of shots, and then you will have The Patriot.

Next stop: Full Circle Bar to watch our friend Rookie Monster roll in the Brewskee-Ball National Championship (BBNC). If you’ve read previous entries, you know by now that I belong to a skeeball league and that we’re kind of fanatical (OK, extremely fanatical). Watching Rook roll as one of the top 64 players in the nation was pretty awesome.

The bar was packed and the energy hit you like a tidal wave as soon as you stepped in the door. Being part of something that’s beginning to get so much attention and acclaim is exhilarating. For instance, one of our top rollers, Ocean, was just featured in a clip on ESPN. See below for “How to Hurl a Hundo” as well as additional picks from the BBNC this weekend.



metromix : BBNC pics

Last on my V-Day agenda was arts and crafts with part of my girl-entourage homance. The act of making the cards was actually more fun than handing them out to strangers.

Now that V-Day is over, we can all set our sights on St. Patty’s Day. Get ready for Hoboken everyone!

Christmas Chef-tacular

One of my first food memories is baking glitter cookies with my great grandmother in her kitchen. My cousins and I used to stage sleepovers at her house and baking inevitably worked its way into our agenda.

Grandmother Lang would measure out the dry ingredients for the cookies and let us pour them into the mixing bowl. We'd fight over who got to crack the eggs. She usually ended up fishing stray pieces of shell out of the batter regardless of which sous-chef won egg honors.

She had a kitchen table that folded away into the wall like a Murphy bed. The leg hung down just within reach of our little hands - we used to hit it against the wall like a door-knocker, re-creating the scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy arrives in the Emerald City while we waited for the cookies to come out of the oven.

Once the door to the Emerald Palace had turned back into a kitchen table, we'd spread Grandmother Lang's assortment of sprinkles across its surface while (I'm sure) she braced herself for the mess that would soon ensue.

Twenty-something years later Grandmother Lang is gone, but her recipes are still with us. We made her rolls for Thanksgiving dinner and one of my aunts brought glitter cookies for Christmas (even though we tease her for being the worst cook in the family - someday, I will describe "cake balls" and everyone will understand why).

My grandmother (Grandmother Lang's daughter) is also a great cook. The trait was passed down to Momma J and one of her brothers, and in turn, on to me and Lil'Bro.

This year for Christmas, Grandmother bought everyone a cookbook. This is nothing new - someone inevitably gets a cookbook every year- it was just the first time cookbooks were the featured present. I give her points for trying, but I think Grandmother might be loosing it just a bit...

The first few selections were perfectly typical. Lil'Bro got Bobby Flay's Bold American Food (one of his faves, along with Tyler Florence). He's already planning to make barbecued ribs with peanut-chipotle sauce for NewYears:

My uncle got Hubert Keller's Burger Bar. He's lucky he kept a watchful eye on it, otherwise it may have ended up in someone else's pile:

Then I unwrapped...  The Official Southern Ladies' Guide to Being a "Perfect Mother":

A few gems for your entertainment:

You know you're a Southern Mother if:
You took the initiative to help pick your daughter's husband, silver pattern, honeymoon destination, and even the flowers in the table decorations - at her birth.

You keep a discrete stash of sedatives for use during important events if needed.
Your Granny's idea of "going green" is with creme de menthe.

At some point in her life, every Southern female experiences the shock and awe of recognition: I have turned into. . .her. I AM MY MOTHER.
[so true. it's already happened to me.]

I mean, I get the joke - I live in New York, she wanted me to have a Southern cookbook. But... really? Forget Hubert and Bobby - clearly, I was gifted the winner.
 
Until Momma J opened her cookbook:

Morbid? But funeral food is also a big Southern thing, I guess...

Surprisingly, the biggest hit was a cookbook devoted entirely to bread, which Momma J had bought with the intention of giving to someone as a gift, but couldn't part with:

My uncle entertained us all by reading excerpts aloud, our favorite being Jim Lahey on the beginnings of his bread-baking career:

I baked bread for the first time to impress a girl. I was in college... Bread's sculptural quality attracted me. I don't think anybody else I knew then, crazy as they were, would imagine that thrusting a loaf at his girlfriend was the most romantic idea in the world.

The juxtaposition of "thrust" and "loaf" was enough to reduce us to inappropriate comments and laughter for a good half hour. (I love my family...)

Whether this fine selection of cookbooks was given in earnest or meant in humor, I can't say. All I know is, they definitely made for another successful family Christmas.

Annual Xmas Blizzard: '09 Edition

Last year, several of my friends fell victim to the huge snow storm that hit around Christmas-time while I was lucky enough to make it out.

This year, however, joke's on me - I spent the weekend snowed in with the rest of New York City.

After a tacky sweater party and a night on the town with the HLP and EV on Friday night, I was actually quite proud that I woke up on time, showered, "put my face on" (as my Southern grandma would say) and got to the airport in one piece.

The line to check in was a monstrosity, and of course, I had to check my bag since I'd opted to drag the largest of my suitcases back to Texas in anticipation of cramming a bunch of Christmas gifts in there for the return trip.

As I got closer to the front of the line, I noticed that a bunch of the flights were cancelled. My outlook was not so good as I stepped up to the ticket counter.

When the Southwest employee told me my flight was just delayed as opposed to cancelled, I got so excited that I apparently made a great impression on him, and he instantly fell in love.

I'm not kidding, he told me he hoped I'd "come back and see him real soon." Weird. But whatever.

I made it through security and to my gate, but realized I was probably going to miss my connecting flight. While waiting in line to try and sort it out, I struck up a conversation with this guy from West Point. We started chatting because he was wearing a Texas ballcap - which was weird since he proceeded to say some not-so-nice things about Austin.

Obviously, I pointed out the irony of this, and told him he probably didn't deserve to be wearing that hat. IAAB, as me and Rach would say (I am a bitch).

He was also an inch shorter than me and dipping. Cleary a winner - almost as good as my new Southwest Airlines ticket counter boyfriend.

Anyway, I was definitely going to miss my connection and there were no other flights going to Austin. They suggested I take the first flight (to Chicago Midway), stay the night, and then take the first flight to Austin the next morning.

Oh, and did they mention, they weren't going to pay for my hotel.

The next option was to fly out tomorrow (Monday) morning. As much as I wanted to stay in some random hotel near the airport in Chicago on my own dime, I went ahead and re-booked.

Next step: find the big-ass suitcase I had just checked. They told me to go wait by baggage claim and that they would have someone bring it out.

I waited. And waited. And waited. There were no Southwest employees behind the downstairs counter, so I finally went back upstairs to visit my SWA boyfriend.

Clearly, he was overjoyed to see me. Clearly, the girl he was talking to at the time was not as A) I skipped the entire line and B) the guy stopped talking to her in midsentence to help me find my bag.

Fast forward 3 hours later, and he was finally able to find out that they put my bag on the plane to Chicago. FML.

At that point, I was beyond being upset and instead had reached the place where everything goes so wrong that it ends up being hilarious. I took a cab BACK to my apartment (yes, $60.00 wasted) and, as I was walking in the door, got a call from my SWA boyfriend telling me that he had in fact found my bag at LGA and that he would hold it for me if I wanted to come back and get it.

FML x TWO.

I had him send it on to Austin, where it will (hopefully) be waiting for me. While I'm kind of pissed that I missed two days of scheduled vacay in Austin, I have to admit that the first real snow that piles up in the City is pretty magical. It only stays this pristine for a short time before turining into dirty, runny, brown sludge. I'll enjoy it while I can:

"I'm so fat, I want to eat my muffin top"

I love this saying, stolen from the always funny KH. It's not only funny but sadly true as well... Getting over this knee surgery has taken much longer than I thought and I've subsequently lost all motivation to eat healthy and count calories. That coupled with the advent of the holiday season means I'm in serious trouble.

For instance, I had eggnog and holiday cookies for breakfast this morning - thoughtfully provided by my office during our annual White Elephant gift exchange. (Also of note, they call it "Yankee Swap" in the North, apparently...)

The leftover cookies are currently displayed at one of the most high-traffic spots in our corridor right next to the printers and supply closet. I couldn't help but notice that all of the Santas, candy canes and mistletoe are gone while the blue dreidels and star of Davids basically stand alone next to the leftover eggnog. (Which then made me think of lumpy, curdled eggnog... gross.)

I've concluded one of three things:

1. Our entire group has a strong aversion to the color blue.
2. We're all religious bigots.
3. We're all a bunch of fat kids who immediately went for Santa's jolly, rotund face and the giant candy canes because they covered more surface area than the tiny stars and dreidels.

The fact that we have a menorah in the waiting room and that we handout an official guide to foraging for free food in each new intern's welcome packet clearly leads to number 3 as the obvious conclusion.

Guess this just means that I will be renewing my vows to love and honor Crunch come New Year's Day.

Silver Bells

It's Christmas time in the City...

And that makes me:

I've said it before, I'll say it again.

Everything's bigger in Texas and Thanksgiving is no exception. Although one of these years I'd like to stay in NYC and actually go to the parade instead of watching it from the couch in Texas.

Lil' Bro was in charge of several Thanksgiving dishes this year - he's quite the cook. I would say his future wife is a lucky lady, but I'm not sure his culinary skills will make up for all of the other crap she'll inevitably have to put up with.

Cooking with him is always fun - last time I was home he made watermelon-injected pork tenderloin with jalapeno watermelon salsa one night and New York strip steak with cilantro butter and buttermilk cheddar biscuits the next.

We come from a long line of cooks, and holidays are spent predominantly in the kitchen, picking at things as we make them, marathon eating our way through breakfast, lunch and leftovers for dinner.

And Grandmother has a special thing she makes for each of us. I am buttermilk pie, my mom is hanky pankies for breakfast (sausage and cheese baked onto cocktail ryes) and my uncle is cheesecake.

The year that my uncle and his family stayed in Arizona for Thanksgiving, Grandmother attempted to FedEx a cheesecake to his house. He said it took a minute to figure out what the football-shaped lump inside the package on his doorstep was supposed to have been. God love her for trying...

This year's Thanksgiving was no different. The gang was all there, hanky pankies and all. Momma J, Lil' Bro and I made the majority of the gorge-fest. Here's what we had:

Oven-roasted turkey

Smoked turkey

Herbed oyster stuffing

Sausage terrine stuffing

Brown gravy from homemade turkey stock

Whipped yukon potatoes with scallion

Great-grandmother's butter rolls

Steamed asparagus and green beans

Maple sweet potato mash

Gruyere mac 'n cheese

And my favorite thing of the entire dinner - prime rib with horseradish sauce

What about dessert you ask? We had some helpers in this category, but here's the laundry list:

Coconut cake

Buttermilk pie

Chess pie

Chocolate chip cookies

Homemade pumpkin ice cream

Clearly we should be professional eaters. And drinkers. That handle of bourbon we cracked open on Wednesday night barely lived to see another.

I think I'll fast 'til Christmas - don't think we won't be doing it all over again. Just substitute ham for turkey...