Author Archives: plumpdumpling

My Superfantastic Weekend and What I Ate

Posted by plumpdumpling on March 28, 2011 – 12:05 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, it's fun to be fat, living in new york is neat, restaurant ramblings
Tagged as , , ,

I had such a great weekend that I’m actually going to talk about what I did rather than write some abstract post about “American Idol” or whathaveyou. Ready for this?

On Friday night, I picked Kamran up from work, and we rode the subway to Astoria, which is a neighborhood in Queens that’s getting to be known as the new Williamsburg (my previous neighborhood in Brooklyn), because it’s cheap enough that artsy, non-trust-funded types can actually afford to live there and eat from the plethora of Greek restaurants. It’s still not quite as settled as Williamsburg was, though, because there was a point where the streetlights just sort of stopped existing, and we found ourselves thinking, “Why did we agree to come to this god-forsaken borough?!”

But then we remembered we were about to eat CHICKEN, stuffed with CHEDDAR, wrapped in BACON, covered in MOLE, topped with melted MONTERREY JACK, and smothered in crumbled FETA at Fatty’s Cafe. Obviously worth it.


Lorraine seductively models the Contraband Chicken,
as if it’s not seductive enough on its own.


There were much better photos of Ash, Mike, and Lorraine,
but the look on Ash’s face here is SO GREAT.


Please tell me why Kamran posed normally in this photo with Jeff
but threw a gang sign in the photo he took with me.

On Saturday night, Kamran and I went to dinner at the famed Serendipity 3 with my longtime blogfriend Kim of Good Hair, Kim Luck. We’ve seriously been reading each other’s LiveJournals and then blog for years now but failed to meet when we both lived here, realized we probably made a mistake once she moved away for a while, and decided not to butcher it this time when she moved back recently.


The lovely and talented Kim shows off her young chicken sandwich and the hair
she had dyed especially for me, or so I tell myself.


Kamran sips espresso instead of helping me eat our giant Can’t Say No Sundae,
which included peanut butter pie, vanilla ice cream, bananas, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream.

After Kim and I had been talking about “Gossip Girl” stars and handbags for 15 minutes, Kamran leaned over and whispered that Sarah Michelle Gellar was at the table next to ours with her family, which prompted us to try naming more than three things she’s been in. I failed ridiculously and didn’t slyly take a picture of Kim with Buffy in the background, but rest assured that she’ll be ceremoniously added to my list of famous people I’ve seen in NYC.

Even though Kim was in a dress and heels, we coerced her to ride the tram to Roosevelt Island with us, which is basically a 3-minute ride in the air to the tiny island next to Manhattan. We used those 3 minutes wisely, though, by loudly talking about how people from Roosevelt Island are pathetic if they think they’re part of Manhattan.

On Sunday morning, Kamran and I were treated to brunch at La Silhouette, which I think is just trying to get the word out that yes, they serve brunch, and yes, it is awesome. As if my cheesy, crusty, piled-high-with-ham croque madam wasn’t enough,

they also served us the entirety of the dessert menu. (And we secretly kind of liked their sundae better than Serendipity’s!) The full review will follow on donuts4dinner.com, obviously.

Super fun times!

Finding My Childhood on eBay

Posted by plumpdumpling on March 25, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under readin' and writin'
Tagged as

The book I remember most from my childhood is The Monster at the End of this Book, starring “Sesame Street”‘s Grover.

But there’s this other book I think about all of the time. It was small, square, and black and had a rudimentary drawing of a peacock on the cover. My mom was a master of character voices (the voice she used to anthropomorphize hers and my dad’s first dog, Gussy, was asked for by name by the whole family: “Do the Gussy voice! Do the Gussy voice!”), and I distinctly remember her reading with her famous gusto, “Green meanies roasting weenies. Meanies jump in yellow jello. They turn into yellow fellows.”

But for the longest time, I couldn’t find the book anywhere online. I would type “green meanies roasting weenies” into every search engine I could find, never with any result. Until one day. I was a college kid working at the Columbus Public Library at the time and happened to Google it during my break for whatever reason. And there it was:

Seals on Wheels by Dean Walley

Seals on Wheels by Dean Walley. It turns out the book was printed by Hallmark Children’s Editions for a very short time in 1970 and had long been out of print by the time I read it as a child in the 80s, so my parents must have inherited it from someone else. Newly armed with the title and author, my Internet search began anew, and I discovered a single copy for sale on eBay.

For three hundred dollars.

So now I not only wanted the book for my own memory-keeping, but I wanted to make it my nest egg in case of future tough times. My childhood bedroom had long since been cleaned out by my super-neat father, but I hoped to find it among the things he saved for me in the old wooden toy chest he had made for my younger self and went home one weekend to dig through it. But of course there was no book.

I’ve since had a Seals on Wheels eBay search saved and often get e-mails claiming that a copy is up for auction, but it always turns out to be some sort of seal for a truck tire. You can imagine my heartbreak.

But a real, legit copy turned up today for $50. And then I thought, “Hey, doesn’t Amazon sell used books, too?” So I checked, and it turns out they have two copies! And fifteen copies of the paperback version! FIFTEEN!! For six or seven years now, I’ve been feeling hopeless about this book and wondering if I should’ve just spent the $300 on it when I had the chance, and it turns out I could’ve had it for $30.

Now that it’s within reach, though, I’m scared. What if it’s not as good as I remember? What if it’s too painful to read now that my mom’s gone? Is it better to have my memories, or am I going to kick myself again if I don’t buy this thing?

Here’s the very insightful conversation Kamran and I had about the issue:

Not so helpful.

What Are You Doing Here?

Posted by plumpdumpling on March 24, 2011 – 1:45 pm
Filed under administrative
Tagged as

I’ve been really into writing about food and not so much into writing about myself lately. WTF, right? If you don’t regularly read donuts4dinner.com, check out the sweets-centered posts from this week, including a review of this:

Also check out my best friend’s really excellent scrapbooking and general-things-that-are-pretty blog, Feast on Scraps. She’s actually been updating it lately, and the results are lovely.

So Lonely Even My Hair is Depressed

Posted by plumpdumpling on March 22, 2011 – 12:00 pm
Filed under creepy boyfriend obsession, living in new york is neat, narcissism
Tagged as , , ,

Kamran flew to California Friday morning to visit a client in Palo Alto but made a stop in Orange County first to celebrate the Persian New Year with his family, which now includes a baby nephew named . . . Cameron! My roommate wasn’t feeling well that night, so I went to Kamran’s apartment to take care of the 20 hours of “Criminal Minds” saved on his DVR but got out of the bus at 34th Street to enjoy a few minutes of walking through the almost-spring weather. I didn’t know anything about the whole moon-being-closer-to-the-Earth-than-it-has-been-in-18-years thing, but I did notice it looked particularly lovely over Long Island City across the river in Queens:

Big Moon

Along with the “Criminal Minds”, I watched the Alli-goes-to-stay-with-Johnny-at-college-but-they-don’t-make-out-WTF episode of “Degrassi” while recording the first two Harry Potter movies so I could later fast-forward through the FIFTEEN MINUTES OF COMMERCIALS the channel plays for every five minutes of movie and see how the films compare with the books now that I’ve succumbed and read the first two. (I guess I like all the detail in the books, but reading them is a lot more fun when I already know how everything looks in the movies. Maybe I’m unimaginative.)

On Saturday afternoon, I ordered the same kebab plate that Kamran and I get every Thursday night to enjoy while watching the previous night’s “Top Chef” episode. I’ve grown so accustomed to watching food-related shows while I eat with him that watching non-food-TV felt funny. It could’ve had something to do with the fact that it was a serial killer drama involving cannibalism, but still, it makes me wonder if I’d spend the rest of my life eating dinner to Tom Colicchio or Ina Garten even if Kamran wasn’t around.

My roommate, Jack, was planning to be home that evening, so I took a shower around 1 and then sat around for the next three hours checking obsessively for Kamran’s IMs, tweeting about hearing the ice cream truck for the first time in more than four years outside Kamran’s apartment, hating Dobby the House Elf so much, and finding out that left alone with the Ritter Sport Alpine Milk chocolate bar, I didn’t want to eat the whole thing in two bites as I had originally planned. At 5, I finally got bored enough that I decided to go for a long walk around the neighborhood and saw so many French bulldogs at the Beekman Place dog park and so many goddamned happy couples rubbing their coupledom in my face. A man with an impressive old-timey mustache made eyes at me, and I decided to reward myself with a black and white cookie, but it turns out I just don’t enjoy getting fat as much by myself and went home empty-handed.

I stopped by the convenience store in Kamran’s building on my way back up to the apartment for some soda and a Fage yogurt to replace the one I’d found all dried up without its lid on in the back of the fridge, and the man behind the counter said, “Where’s your guy? You look lonely.”

GRR! So even though I’d secretly been planning to stay at Kamran’s alone all night again, I decided to go to my own apartment and be entertained by Jack and his new Xbox Kinect. We ate bahn mi and bubble tea from Hanco’s, and I watched him play Halo for a couple of hours before taking the controls myself and learning that video games aren’t for girls.

The next day, I woke up late to meet my friend Ash for Macaron Day NYC 2011. My hair usually needs about 3 hours to air day, so I decided to save time and blowdry it for approximately the third time in my life and the first time in at least five years. I knew it had the chance to turn out looking like this, but I was willing to put up with that if it meant not going out with wet hair. So I took my shower, put on the big fluffy robe my grandmother got me for Christmas, watched an episode of “Southland”, made some oatmeal, and came back to the bathroom to check my hair’s progress. When I ran a comb through it, it was perfectly straight and lovely.

So I turned on the hairdryer, flipped my head upside-down, and came up looking like this:

Big Moon

So apparently you’re not supposed to blowdry upside-down when you don’t want a small afro?

When I met up with Ash, she said, “What happened to you?!” Luckily, the macarons were good, and Kamran’s coming back tonight.

I’m Famous and Well-Fed!

Posted by plumpdumpling on March 18, 2011 – 3:00 pm
Filed under uncategorized

What a wonderful place the Internet is! I started a blog on the salon.com blogging platform, Open Salon, a while back just to see what it was like. I don’t usually see much action over there, but it’s just a mirror of this blog, so I didn’t expect to. But this morning, I got four e-mails in a row saying I had comments and wondered what I had said to incite love from strangers, so I went to investigate, and it turns out my blog post from yesterday is one of their editor’s picks featured on the landing page!

How neat! Open Salon has a very robust community of active bloggers and commenters, and although I’ll admit I’m not using it to its full advantage at all, I’d definitely recommend opening an account of your own and checking out their editor’s picks each day.

Other than that, I’ve been blogging at donuts4dinner.com all week, for some reason. You probably don’t care about my new ratings system or burger review, but those of you who have heard my years of cries for dinner at the much-exalted restaurant will be pleased to note that I HAVE EATEN AT PER SE AND AM THE HAPPIEST GIRL ALIVE.

Oysters and Pearls at Per Se
tiny oysters and a big, ol’ pile of caviar

Now I can go back to eating nothing but pizza, assured that I have had all of the good food there is to be had.