Tag: pictures of food

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Homesteading in Manhattan

Last 2026 summer date

Her: I could literally put peanut butter and bacon together and you would eat it.
Me: That sounds delicious.

A few months ago, RE Mike turned us onto InKind, which is this restaurant rewards app that essentially pays for the tip of alla your meals, which – in NYC – adds up.

What it actually does is rebate you 20% of your bill, which is about your tip amount, and then gives you a few bonus bucks as well.

I wasn’t really keen on it when I first got it, but we found out that so many of our fave restaurants around the way accepted it, plus it’s been a good excuse to venture out of our hood and check out other places.

Case-in-point, Sara was in the mood for arroyos con pollo the other day, so I spent a little time and found this cute little restaurant in LIC so, after work one day, the two of us went.

The kids, at that point, hadn’t been back yet so it was a good way to go on one last summer date before the school year started.

If you’re at all interested in signing up, click this link and get $25 for joining or scan this QR code below.

On a different note entirely, Sara’s been making sourdough bread pretty much every week since she started doing it at the beginning of the year.

Neither of us have gained any weight whatsoever, not just because it’s sourdough but also because of how we prep, store, and heat it up.

But, while she’s been making bread, I’ve been fermenting other things – in particular, my own salsa, which you can see next to her rising dough below – as well as some hard apple cider.

Her: You know, if we had a place in the suburbs, you could have huge kitchen to cook in.
Me: (shrugging) Eh, I’m too used to living in Manhattan.
Her: You could also have a whole room for all your stuff, and a garden.
Me: These are compelling points.

Honestly, I like homesteading in the big city.

All three have been absolutely delicious and insanely easy to make – as well as chock fulla probiotics.

I’m probably gonna write more about this later but for now, check out all this salsa we’ve got going on up in here.

Assume all links in this blog are monetized.
Location: the kitchen, making a crapton of salsa
Mood: accomplished
Music: don’t need to justify the way I live my life is mine (Spotify)
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Seeing my mom when I can

Chopstick envy

We went out to see my mom this past weekend for two reasons:

    1. The first was that it would be the last time for the kid to see his cousins for the rest of the summer and they wanted to hang.
    2. But the second was that my mom’s getting older and that’s something that I’m only now really seeing/accepting.

So, I’m trying to see and talk to her as long as I can.

When my dad passed, I saw him age in front of me as the cancer took away the energetic man I knew my whole life.

I’m always been accused of dying my hair (the white hairs I have belie this accusation), but my dad had pretty black hair until the cancer and the treatments squeezed every last bit of life outta him.

Sorry, I was telling you about my weekend.

This always happens. Don’t mind me.

So, yeah, I went out to see my mom this week.

My mom was at church in the AM, and my sis was busy so Sara, the kid, and I took the train out to Flushing and decided to head over to the New World Food Mall on Main Street, which is always a good time.

It was supposed to thunderstorm that day but the day we went, the weather was just perfect.

I always over-order food as I forget that, while the kid loves to eat like I do, he’s still a kid and can only physically eat so much.

Like Sara, he’s been on a hand-pulled noodle kick lately.

Me: You really want noodles on a day as hot as today?
Him: Yeah!
Me: (sigh) OK, guess I’m having carbs.

This is the auntie cooking up his food.

I kinda want a pair of chopsticks that long.

Chopstick envy, I suppose.

Sara, meanwhile, got herself a Beijing savory crepe called a jianbing.

Below is a video I found showing how it’s made.

Sara: Oh, my guy made mine much prettier.

She wasn’t wrong, it looked and tasted amazing.

She only had half, and my kid only had half of his meal so I ended up eating what they couldn’t, which is what I wanted as I didn’t wanna haul food around with me on a hot summer day.

We ended up taking the bus to my mom’s because we still needed to kill an hour and because the kid wanted to ride it.

We got to my mom’s where the kid lived his best life.

Him: Can I get wet?
Me: Well, I guess if…
Him: YAY, thanks, papa! (runs off)
Me: (to myself) …you can maybe get some clothes from auntie.

The other amazing thing was that my sister found this briefcase that I’d not seen in decades.

I realize now that it was my dad’s go-bag of important documents – you know, birth certificates, deeds, passports, etc.

Finding stuff from my dad is like finding treasure these days.

It’s funny, when your dad’s alive a stack of papers is just a stack of papers but once he’s gone, dude…

But that’s a whole entry of its own so I’ll tell you about more of that some other time.

For now, I got to see my mom.

I don’t put up pictures of her for two reasons: (a) I wanna respect her privacy but also because (b) while I still find her beautiful, the woman I see isn’t what I see in my head when I think of her.

That’s also a story for another time.

We ended the evening with dinner, where I got my usual huge platter of Greek food before heading back.

When we finally got home, we got the absolute worst surprise waiting for us – which is why I didn’t post this past Sunday.

I’ll tell you all about it in the next entry.

Location: my pad, unfortunately
Mood: grossed out…so, so, so, so grossed out
Music: you’re not wanted anywhere (Spotify)
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New Year’s in Chinatown (2X)

Papery/Paper/Plastic

Me: Can’t believe that the kid’s going to college in just seven years or so.
Her: You’ll be 60 then.
Me: Whoa! (thinking) Man, I look amazing!
Her: Eh, your face is getting a little papery.
Me: …
Her: What? It’s true! (laughing) You and your ego…
Me: …
Her: Happy New Year?

Sara and I had to run down to Chinatown twice in a week because it was Lunar New Year.

The first time around, it was Sara, her kid, and me. We went on New Year’s itself.

It’s been at least 30 years since the last time I was here for Lunar New Year.

We didn’t actually go for the festivities – that’s too much chaos for us – but we did see the aftermath, which was just as interesting.

Sara and her kid marveled at the sheer amount of debris left over the festivities.

There was so much that the street sweeper got clogged.

For serious.

Me: Look at all the plastic, this terrible.
Her: They should do something about it.
Me: It used to be a lotta paper. Now it’s all plastic.

I mean, we ended up going to another classic dive called Big Wong, which had a 45-minute wait, the longest I’d ever waited to get into a dive, ever.

But, man, was it worth it.

We both tried some new food – and her kid really liked all the new food as well.

Then, a few days later, we had to head down there again because I forgot to grab something the last time we were down there.

This time, it was just the Sara and me.

We ended up going to the House of Joy.

Me: This is one of the few classic Chinese banquet restaurants left.
Her: It’s so cute!
Me: A lotta Chinatown used to be like this. The last time I was here was for [my college buddy’s] parent’s funeral. So, this is a much better reason to be here.

We went at a really off time, so it was just us and a handful of other patrons.

Me: OMG, I haven’t had this in years!
Her: Oranges?
Me: Well, back when I was a kid, after a meal, the waitstaff would bring out sliced oranges and fortune cookies just like this. Man, I can’t remember the last time I had this…

Stuff like this makes me wish I brought the kid.

I’ll have to do it when he’s back.

Location: home, watching this insane snow come down
Mood: exhausted
Music: No one on the corner has swagger like us (Spotify)
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Did you just lap me?

Din Tai Mars 2112

Me: (laughing)
Her: What’s so funny?
Me: I just read this woman in her 20s writing about online dating and meeting men that married and divorced. She wrote, “It’s a trip when you go on a date with a divorced person and think, ‘Did you just lap me?'”

Decades ago, I worked a lot in NYC clubs – which is all I’ll say on the matter – and one such club I worked at was Mars 2112.

It was a Mars/space-themed restaurant that was enormous at 33,000 SF.

HUGE is an understatement.

It opened in 1998 and closed (ironically) in 2012.

Well, Din Tai Fung took over a chunk of that space and, despite it not being the entire space, man did it feel huge.

If you aren’t familiar with Din Tai Fung, it’s a major upscale Taiwanese restaurant chain with 170 locations worldwide with the Manhattan one as one of their flagships.

The main picture of this entry is just of its staff making dumplings. That’s a lotta dumplings, man.

Anywho, earlier last week, one of the Firecracker’s closest friends, the Liberian, was in town with her husband.

They have a cool story in that they sold off their home and most of their possessions here and bought a villa in Spain where they’re living their best lives.

The one negative is that they’re not getting the level of quality Chinese food they were getting when they were here in NYC.

So, that’s how we ended up at Din Tai Fung.

I’d actually been to the one in Taiwan before but that was it, and decades ago. So having it was a treat.

The food was pretty killer, as I expected, if not super carb-y, as I also expected.

Her: Carbs aren’t that bad.
Me: I gotta disagree – one in three teens here are prediabetic.

Anywho, it was weird being back in that space because it felt familiar yet very different.

On a related note, I should mention that the gym I go now also used to be a club that I also worked at.

Living in NYC your whole life means that things start to make laps in your life.

Wonder what these joints will be like in another few years.

Location: a street fair with an angel and her kid
Mood: full
Music: “Lonely or alone?” Way to Mars by Somersault & Xavier Naidoo (can’t find it anywhere)
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Boston 2025: A Wig Shop and Home

A Burger before home

At The Wig Shop, we ended up sitting across from a male-and-female set of cousins checking out the town.

The drinks had some hilarious names, but I had to have The Traveler’s Chosen, which had both (a) a 23 year old Ron Zacapa rum and (b) sour sop, which is in the same family as pawpaws.

Her: How is it?
Me: Unbelievably delicious. Try some.

She got the Channing Ta-yum, which was made with black pepper, a nice touch that we could taste – but not quite place – in terms of where the heat was coming from.

Luckily, our hotel was pretty close by, so we didn’t have to stumble back too far.

The next day we didn’t have too much planned except I wanted a Boston Tasty Burger before we left.

Her: Wait, there’s one right at the station.
Me: Perfect, we’ll grab one right before we have to leave.

Which is exactly what we did.

Turns out that it was good we ate so heavily because our train back was delayed.

They expected it to be at least 30 minutes late, but we heard from some train staff that it was gonna be much later.

We camped at a mall as we figured things out.

The Firecracker got busy and found out that there was a much faster (and more expensive) train leaving at 2:05.

It’d actually get us home a solid hour earlier if we caught it.

BUT, because of timing, the clerk could only offer it to us for free if our old reservation was 30 min late.

Our original train was supposed to leave at 1:30 so we had to wait until 2PM to get it for free otherwise it was gonna be an extra $300.

So, we waited and hoped.

At 2PM, the clerk told us to run to the train because she was able to get us tickets (!)

So, we ended up getting home on a faster train in business class for the same cost.

A great ending to a great trip.

Me: That was fun. You’re a good travel partner.
Her: Thanks, Logan! Same.

Location: earlier today, Omega, downtown
Mood: full and a bit tipsy
Music: Send me on my way, on my way (Spotify)
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Rando pictures 1

Clearing out the backlog

That project of mine is just kicking my butt so no real entry except for rando pictures that I’ve been meaning to put up, but I just didn’t have a reason to.

Just as good a reason as any to clear out the backlog, I suppose.

Like, I didn’t know what to do with this picture from the Matchbox 20 concert we went to.

Or this one, which was just outside of the concert venue.

And I cannot tell you how many rando pics of food…

…and drink…

…that I have.

Seriously, so many.

To say nuthin of all the rando videos I have here and there as well.

Seriously, though, I’ll put up a proper post once I’m done with this @!#$%!! project of mine.

Any day now…

Location: my desk, working, with a back brace. Fun times.
Mood: So. Busy.
Music: I took my turn, oh, what a thing to have done (Spotify)
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A joint birthday

A joint birthday at Pig and Khao

By the time you read this, I’ll be 52 years old.

Whoa…

Not only did the Firecracker live just a few blocks south of my pad when we first met, but she and I were also surprised that our birthdays were only a little more than a week apart.

So, this year, we decided to do a joint celebration in-between our two birthdays at Pig and Khao, just a few blocks from us.

My buddy Panda used to talk about how great the food was there, so I was looking forward to it – he’s a foodie and I trust him.

The food did not disappoint……although some dishes were pretty spicy for the Firecracker’s taste.

Me: I’m not sure you can eat this.
Her: (shrugs) Well, let’s find out. (a few seconds later, she turns red and coughs) Nope!

Luckily, the drinks were strong and cooling…

…plus, because it was our birthday celebration(s), they comped us some jello shots, which were fun.

But the star of the show was the ribeye steak we ordered, which – because it was our birthday celebration – I had with my first bowl of rice in at least a year.

Her: This coconut rice is amazing!
Me: God, yes. I can’t remember the last time I had a whole bowl of rice.
Her: Wait, your bowl’s empty, you’re eating mine. Hey!
Me: I’m just trying to save you a few carbs.

We ended the night with a dessert for her and a pickleback shot for me.

I think she may’ve enjoyed her selection more than I did mine.

Here’s hoping it’s the first of years worth of joint birthdays.

Location: the gym, trying not to get more injured
Mood: hoping
Music: don’t want nobody else (Spotify)
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Cutting weight

Summer’s coming anywho

Her: You know what, I’ll support you and do it too.
Me: Really? You – obviously – don’t need to.
Her: (waves hand) It’s fine. It’ll be good for me and us.
Me: Oh man, you’re the best!

Been on a hardcore keto diet for a few weeks now because my producer wanted me to cut a few pounds for an upcoming Scenic Fights shoot.

I figured, summer’s coming anywho, so I was fine with it.

And the Firecracker decided to help me by doing it as well, for no other reason than to support me.

She’s just great.

Case in point: She made this killer pesto chicken the other night for everyone.

Low carb and absolutely delicious.

All-in-all, I ended up dropping a few pounds really quickly because – between my usual cooking and hers, we were killing it.

Even managed to resist my mother-in-law’s mashed potatoes – which are so damn good – when I dropped the kid off the other day.

The Firecracker, however, took some cheat days like for her birthday, where she made herself a cupcake sandwich.

She was very pleased with herself.

Besides, she didn’t have a producer to keep happy.

But everything worked out because I ended up keeping him happy by losing exactly what I wanted to, showing up at the shoot, doing my thing and calling it a day.

Treated myself to a huge steak salad afterward.

We’re close to a million subscribers on our YouTube channel but we’re also having some cool stuff happen over at TikTok as well.

I’ll keep you in the loop.

Man…do I want some carbs…

Location: a cafe, enjoying the sun
Mood: slimmer?
Music: Mouth is alive, with juices like wine and I’m hungry (Spotify)
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The Firecracker’s Birthday 2025

Just a nappetizer

Her: I’m going to take a nap.
Me: A NAP?! It’s 6:21PM. How do you fall asleep at night?
Her: (shrugging) It’s never a problem. That’s just a nappetizer.
Me: Oh my god…

It was the Firecracker’s birthday, recently so tonight, we packed up the kids and headed to that Japanese BBQ place around the hood that we like.

Her sister and niece were available, so they joined us, my kid, and the Firecracker’s kid for dinner.

My producer for Scenic Fights essentially told me that I had to lose some weight, so I stuck to protein, fat, and rum and diet cokes all night.

All-in-all, it wasn’t terrible.

The copious amounts of meat swimming in butter didn’t hurt matters.

The kids were, decidedly, not eating keto as they filled up on dumplings…

…and eggrolls, which were all hits with them.

Seeing as my birthday is only a few weeks away, we got to talking about our (somewhat sizable) age difference, and how our childhoods were kinda similar but also, very different.

Me: Let’s do an experiment. Honey, quote that show you showed me on YouTube and see if she can guess it.
Firecracker: She’s gonna know. But ok. (pauses, affects a voice), “I’m so excited!”
Sister: (immediately) Oh, that’s Jessie Spano when she ODed on caffeine pills.
Me: (shakes head) That’s ridiculous. You two are ridiculous.
Sister: You totally missed that era of pop culture, didn’t you?
Me: So, it would seem.

The kids were more focused on their screens and the deep fried oreo cookies that we got for them.

 

Him: This is amazing!
Me: I told you you’d like it.

Everyone was stuffed but I legit coulda eaten another 2-3 plates of food.

But, I figured that I’m supposed to be dieting so I called it as we wrapped up.

Afterwards, we decided to walk the mile home just to work off some of what we just ate.

It was a good evening and everyone was happy, which is all you can hope for.

Me: Did you have a good night?
Her: Were you there?
Me: (laughing) Yup.
Her: Then I had a good night.

Location: 620 Amsterdam Ave, with lots of kids, protein, and drinks
Mood: moderately tipsy
Music: standing ’round this corner, tall enough to touch the New York sky (Spotify)
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Got injured…again

The only heart I want

Her: You got injured?! Again?
Me: Yes. But in my defense, I’m getting injured less often…ish.

Was at the gym the other day and this younger fella, whom I’m friendly with, just ripped my arm and almost broke it.

The last time we rolled, I could tell I was frustrating him, so he was intent on winning this round.

That’s the thing; I care a lot less about winning and more about just improving in general, so this was annoying, to say the least.

Afterward, the instructor came by.

Him: Is anything broken?
Me: I’m not sure yet.
Him: (laughs) That’s the perfect answer. Get some ice on it.

So, I did.

It wasn’t broken but it was super sore and swollen.

It also meant that I had to sit around at home for about a week-and-a-half.

Whenever I can’t go to the gym, I actually have to try and eat well since I gain weight pretty much immediately when I can’t work out.

My Scenic Fights producer even commented the other day:

Him: You’ve been gaining a little weight.
Me: Wha?!
Cameraman: (shaking head) Logan? You’re outta your mind.

Anywho, as for eating well, I made a slew of roasted spicy chicken hearts the other day.

Someone convinced me to try some years ago and I got used to making them as quick and easy protein snacks.

Honestly, they taste oddly good since they’re pure protein and meat, but I get that it’s an acquired taste.

The Firecracker, for example, is not a fan.

Me: Hey, do you wanna try some of these roasted chicken hearts I made?
Her: Baby, the only heart I want you to give me is yours.
Me: But these are roasted with lao gan ma.

In any case, soon enough, the below poor food choices will all be mine once again.

As soon as I can move my arm.

Location: planting strawberries with the boys on the windowsill
Mood: ache-y
Music: But I survived I′m still breathin′ (Spotify)
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