a family meal

Two weeks ago my family made a last-minute trip to New York to visit my ailing great aunt.  My siblings and I arrived late Friday but knowing the next day would be spent in a nursing home, with the bagpipes from the parade drifting on the breeze through the window and a drunken mess of a city to bid us adieu upon our departure that evening, we decided to make a rather mad dash down to Momofuku Noodle Bar.  This place has been on my NY bucket list for XX years; I don't even know.  Were my expectations high - yes.  Was it everything I'd dreamed of - um, yeah.  We toasted our great aunt and dug in; pictorial review below.  Some of the photos, taken with my phone, are a bit blurry due to the fact that I had to take them just faster than we ate, which was really fast.

We'll take one of each.  If not three.

 

Eat me!

The bun, rendered translucent by the grease of the pork belly, reminds me of Homer Simpson's one-time reverse diet, where a sandwich wrapper had to be see-through enough to confuse a flying bird in order for him to eat it.

I didn't have any of the oysters but I heard they were delish.

Not only was it after midnight on a Friday (technically Saturday) so we could eat meat but the chicken wings, for the purposes of my Lenten resolution, were not *technically* fried as they were crisped by their own sizzling fat.  The rice balls were starchy goodness, like savory rice candy.

Splitting soup is hard to do.

I mean, just...yes.  A group favorite.

The remains of chaos.

 

 The beet-lime soft-serve was refreshing but I was the only one really eating it because everyone else was distracted by these:

Cake batter balls could probably solve many of the world's problems.

less is more

Returning to the wall sculpture theme, my sister has been coveting these C. Jere brass urchin sculptures available through Jonathan Adler.  A cluster would look muy cool on a dining room wall.

Apologies for the mini photo!

Thanks to Martha Stewart for calling my attention to these significantly less expensive imitations, available on Jayson Home in three sizes.

It appears these have fewer needles than C. Jere's but the price is aaalllright.

how to get your downton fix in the off-season

About an episode into Downton Abbey Season 2, which I raced through on the PBS website last week before they took it down, it struck me--suddenly yet belatedly--that the Granthams are really just the next iteration of the Forsytes, which sated the reading, listening, and viewing public's voyeurism throughout the 20th Century.

Shortly after landing my first job out of college, one of my coworkers encouraged me to make use of my new Netflix account by renting The Forsyte Saga, a British miniseries about the comings and goings of a grand family and all of their exaggerated drama (i.e., the everything-that-can-go-wrong-does storyline that we see in Downton and, let's be honest, daytime soaps).  New to the Netflix thing back then, I dutifully ordered it and made my somewhat painful way through each of the discs in the evenings, eventually hooking even my dad, who generally eschewed tv shows and movies.  At the end of it, I thought, moly, that was barely tolerable.  The acting was laughable, being done in that stylized, halting, 1960s way and the only thing that got my dad and me through it was sheer wonder at how truly awful it was.  We wondered what all the fuss was about.

Well, come to find out, I'd ordered the wrong one.  My coworker's review was based on the 2002 version--in living color!--which, coming full circle, I plan to add to my instant queue now that I, along with the rest of the world, have to wait 10-ish months until Downton Season 3.  The Forsyte Saga may not compare with Julian Fellowes's production but it cannot be worse that its 1967 BBC made-for-tv predecessor.  Which means it will do quite nicely until we find out what the Roaring Twenties bring to Downton.