2 Inferior Posts in a Row. Blame Lisa.

Lunch Day 2. The leftover restaurant food theme continues, this time with Bindi Masala from Delhi Palace in Jackson Heights. For my nonIndian readers (Everyone except Kajal and even she might be Puerto Rican) that means "Really yummy okra. No seriously, it's good. Yes good okra. No, it's not even fried. It's totally good. Seriously." I would have certainly eaten all of it last night had I not had samosa chat and 1/3 of a dosa and some naan to fill me up. (I am seriously considering forgoing Friday's weekly weigh in -- ahhhhh denial you are my best friend.).

I offered to order and pick up take out last night on my way over to Amy and Joe's palatial Jackson Height's co-op for our evening plans of catching up on Lost. This is the nicest thing I have offered to do ever because I hate calling to order food. I can't explain this other than to say that I generally don't love talking on the phone especially when the phone call is being used just to relay info (as opposed to chatting) and I do not understand why all takeout places do not accept email orders. Ordering Indian food can be especially stressful since many of the dishes use words that my very caucasian tongue is not capable of pronouncing and there is a possibility (though a much smaller possibility that when ordering say, Chinese) that the person on the other end of the phone will not speak English or will have a thick enough accent that I will not be able to understand them. When this happens I usually just order a number 1 and bail out but when ordering for other this is not a viable plan ("oh look, 3 number 1s! how did that happen?!"). So I went to plan B -- ask my Indian friend (Ms. Boriqua) to practice pronunciation with me. Sadly she was next to no help, claiming that many of the words used were somehow not words in her vocabularly and implying that they could be from a secret different kind of Indian which momentarily had me excited about the prospect of a Native American restaurant right here in New York City (mmmm Fry Bread).

Lunch today was eaten in front of the weekly Settler's of Catan match where, as expected, there was at least 5 jokes made based on someone's acquisition of/need for/offering of wood. As I am always the only girl playing there might have been some sheepish blushing in my direction but in actuality there was none -- probably because I am also the person most likely to giggle at a good "I got wood!" joke. I got my ass kicked for the 400th time in a row.

Lunch posts are always boring: 2
No they're not!: 0

The Quality of this Post May Disprove its Content

There's a blogging advice book on the market (yes, that day has come) called, No One Cares What You Had for Lunch which is devoted to the topic of how bloggers too often write about boring crap. I haven't read the book since I prefer to draw uninformed conclusions but the author claims to offer interesting writing topics to snaz up your boring old blog. I'm all but positive that she forgot to advocate for public nudity or embarking on a series of awful relationships and thank god -- I need to retain my niche. Anyway, I suspect the book is mostly correct -- there are a lot of boring blogs out there -- however I also suspect that the problem is not a lack of interesting topics, it's the bad writing. Lisa and I were chatting on Friday and hypothesized that certainly lunch could make for an interesting post since really good writing is rarely based on having a good topic (though a good topic probably makes good writing easier to come by) so why not write about your lunch? Because we are huge rebels (who also love to eat stuff, especially at the noon hour!) we agreed to both write posts about lunch and since Lisa is a bit of an over achiever she decided to write FIVE posts about lunch. And since Lisa is also an evil bitch who wants me to lose all of my readers she decided I was also writing five posts about lunch. We'll see.

Today's lunch is leftover cassoulet from last weeks inaugural meeting of the Wine Club spin off "Eating Fancy Food and Gossiping About Celebrities Club" which was held at the restaurant AOC. How bourgeois do I sound with my frenchie lunch? I also just finished the Julia Child autobiography, My Life in France so I'm pretty much an expert on all edible French things. For those nonexperts reading this post cassoulet is a French tomato based casserole with white beans, duck confit and sausage and pork fat (read: ambrosia of the gods). My leftover portion of France's version of Hamburger Helper (queue all of France hating me, but those Pierres need to cut me a break -- cassoulet comes in canned form! You don't even add your own freshly ground ecoli infested chuck!) is smaller than I would like (since I would *like* to eat a bucketful) but I'm fairly certain that the calorie content is more than sufficient to constitute a full lunch. That said I foresee myself breaking into my stash of granola bars or possible sneaking downstairs for a PB&J come 3:00pm (so much for maintaining that fancy food allure). The best part of the cassoulet was the sausage which I ate every morsel of in the restaurant last week so today I am left with a piece of pork fat and a few bits of duck meat and a lot of white beans. Luckily the sauce makes the beans pretty yummy and also has the wonderful side effect of fooling my coworkers into believing that I am eating a very healthy lunch despite the fact that everything in my Tupperware is coated in a loving blanket of fat.

I am normally pretty disciplined about making some sort of healthy food on the weekend and eating it all week for lunch, this, along with my "oatmeal or cold cereal with 6+ grams of dietary fiber for breakfast" rule is my weight maintenance plan and generally offsets the evenings full of Indian take out and cornmeal pancakes made with 3/4 stick of butter (and consumed watching skinny chicks on Top Model). But the last 2 weekends have been busy (Especially this past Saturday when I had to not only lounge around in bed until 1pm but also needed to watch The Real Dirt on Farmer John and the Jamaica episode of No Reservations -- I really over booked myself) and I fear that the lack of healthy lunch combined with the fact that my new freezer totally keeps ice cream frozen (a feature not offered by the old model so obviously I had to buy a tub of Neopolitan Dynamite and eat it everyday) will result in me gaining about 50lbs. I may have to counter with a couple of liquid dinners or by farming myself out as a wet nurse.

I still contend that an interesting "what I had for lunch" post is perfectly possible... even if this is not that post.

The Land that Lunch Forgot

Up until a year and a half ago my place of employment was located in the Flat Iron district of Manhattan where foraging for lunch offered practically the full pallet of world cuisine. There were rows of Indian places 3 blocks to the east, a good hole in the wall Mexican place 2 streets over, and gourmet deli’s as far as the eye could see. I was also able to pop out at lunch to mail a package or go to the bank and after work I had easy access to shopping, bars, and night life. And then we moved to Dumbo.

This is the part of the post where I bait the people over at the Dumbo NYC to call me out as a hater which will probably result in a rain of rotten organic free-range fruit, used cloth diapers and Puerto Rican nannies being chucked at me from the windows of posh high rises on my morning truck from the dingiest subway station in NYC to the relative shelter of my office. Luckily writing for Alpha Astoria has given me plenty of experience as the enemy of an entire neighborhood.

Dumbo kind of sucks.

Oh sure, they tell you it’s the new SoHo with the wall to wall artist studios and cobblestones but what they neglect to mention is that Dumbo has next to zero shopping (unless you make millions of dollars), no post office, the neighborhood just got a drug store this week and there are fewer lunch options than taxi’s (I hope you weren’t hungry or looking for a ride out of this wasteland).

Out of the twin necessities of saving money and calories I am mostly a bring my lunch kind of girl but every Friday I grant myself the indulgence of a leisurely sit down lunch. When working in Manhattan this weekly outing was a much anticipated ode to noshing but now, stuck in Dumbo, I and my coworkers are left with very few sit down options none of which are up to our snobby Manhattan honed standards.

The worst lunch offender is Bubby’s. At face value Bubby’s seems like a harmless diner but if you look closer you’ll see that it’s actually the source of all mid afternoon sadness. The Dumbo Bubby’s outpost (I know nothing of the Manhattan version) is housed in a huge space that could probably seat upwards of 100 people but I have never seen more than 15 patrons in attendance at one time. You’d think the low customer turn out would at least result in attentive wait staff and quick order turn around but for reasons that remain a mystery it is impossible to get out of lunch in less than 90 minutes. Bubby’s: Dumbo is obviously struggling to make a buck as evidenced by their frequently revamped (and reduced) menu and hours. Time was they offered breakfast all day and 15 different sandwiches – these days they’re pretty much down to burgers and grilled cheese. When we first moved to Dumbo I would swoon over the mini sides of baked mac and cheese but even this small comfort was stolen from me when about a year ago a coworker discovered a crunchy cockroach center baked into his portion.

The other two most obvious choices for sit down lunch are Superfine and Water Street both of which rival Bubby’s for the much coveted slowest distribution of edible products award. Other than the lack of speediness both institutions generally meet the demands of Friday lunch though neither has a particularly interesting menu and the fries at SuperFine are awful enough to result in a veto virtually every week. Which leaves us with Rice and Miso both of which (especially Miso) would be completely acceptable lunch options say once every month or two – but how many Fridays in a row can I choke down the same meal?

I imagine that my non NY readers are laughing at this post. After all, I’ve listed FIVE options (and haven’t even touched upon the take out only joints), in most places this would likely be considered an adequate variety. BUT THIS IS NEW YORK! Where is my source for Thai or Mexican or Indian? Why doesn’t any place in the neighborhood sell magazines (or vodka, or candles)?!?

Go ahead, get with the bashing me in the comments – here’s to hoping I make to work safely tomorrow morning.