I flew home this past Saturday morning to make it to a potluck at my 104 year old great uncle’s senior citizen’s home. On his wall is a letter signed by George W. Bush wishing him a happy 102nd birthday.

On Sunday, I made an 18lb turkey and a pumpkin pie from a recent Cook’s Illustrated recipe.

I’m flying down to San Diego tomorrow for Thanksgiving, part 2.5.

Here’s a little snap shot from seat 17A of Jamaica Bay on Saturday morning, taken with the new (replacement) point and shoot.

I feel fortunate that my commute to work is a short jaunt down the R/W from 8th to Whitehall. In the morning, both downtown trains have already dropped off the Queens folk commuters in midtown, so the trains are usually comfortably empty. Most of the time the R/W straphangers are tourists headed to Battery Park to take the Ferry to Ellis Island.

One day I got onto the train as usual…except something smelled funny. We’ve all been on a trains where something smelled bad-funny (pee in the corner, homeless guy sleeping at one end of the car, someone eating on the train). However this smell was peculiar…it was the new train smell! I can only describe it as being as refreshing (or manufacturing-y) as “new car smell.” As if that wasn’t enough to make my morning, I had the whole car to myself!

Update: The MTA announced that the W line would be shut down as a result of impending economic doom.

On Saturday, Tam, Al and I went to Mitsuwa for the annual tuna demo where they broke down four ~700lb bluefin tuna through out weekend.

(Update: One commenter mentioned that bluefin is becoming increasingly endangered, which is very true.  The Monterey Bay Aqaurium has some excellent guides on how to eat sushi and fish in a sustainable manner.  Bluefin is unfortunately on the “avoid” list.)

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Here is the tuna.  It’s a 700lb bluefin tuna caught off the coast of Malta in the Mediterranean.  After being cleaned, the carcass weighed about 500 lbs.  The performance was very crowded…4 to 5 people deep around the demonstration pit.

No trip (… a 35 minute trek from the East Village to Port Authority, 20 minutes waiting for the shuttle in bus exhaust and 30 minutes on a crowded shuttle ride to Jersey) to Mitsuwa is complete without having a meal or two at the food court.

Uber sushi chef Nobuyoshi-san positions himself for the first cut.

With the “loin” removed.

The remaining meat on the ribs was scraped off with a spoon and packaged for sale.  Very little of the fish went to waste.  The quality of the scrapings isn’t sashimi grade, but we speculated that it might be good broiled, in a soup or as burger patties.

This is chu-toro, or loin.  We ended up getting a combination of chu-toro and o-toro.  O-toro is belly or fatty meat.  It was the most decadent, oily toro I’ve ever had.  It was awesome…and at $62/lb (event sale price), you better believe it was awesome.

Removing the back bone.

We made friends with one of the nice fellows who was packaging up trays of toro.  He first hooked us up with increasingly better pieces of o-toro, swapping our inferior pieces out with nicer ones as he saw them go by.  Then he asks, “hey, you want the bone?”  “Uhhhh….sure!”  “Five dollars,” he says.  Wait five dollars a lb?  That thing is probably pretty heavy–no thanks.  “Two dollars!” he says…for the whole thing!  Sold!  We’ll take it!

We ended up buying the vertebrae of the 700lb fish for $2.  They hacked it apart with a cleaver and mallet into one foot sections and triple bagged it in black garbage bags. We picked up other accoutrement like fresh wasabi root, soy sauce and tsukemono.

On the way out, the sky was an eerie purplish-pink hue–like the light of a really great sunset defused through a layer of storm clouds.

Back at the apartment, we took pictures with our bounty and Tam did some Nate Hill poses.

Al broiled a section of the vertebrae then broke it down and made a simple soup from it.  In between each vertebrae there was a golf ball sized amount of synovial or spinal fluid ripe for the takin’ (the white stuff in the middle).  The fluid wasn’t very tasty.

We gorged ourselves on o-toro, rice, picked stuff and soup.  Mmmmm! I love food adventures…this kinda reminds me ‘eating a still-beating cobra heart.’

Here’s a follow up post with some alive tuna.

I woke up early this morning and headed uptown to watch the NYC Marathon.  It was surprising not crowded so I indulged in 2 croissants and a coffee at Petrossian, arguably the best place for croissants in the city.

I watched the pro men and women finish, who where nothing but a blur standing on the corner of 5th(ish) and Central Park South. I was standing next to an Italian couple and the wife would shout “Bravo! Bravo!”  It was quaint.  I’m going to incorporate “Bravo!” in my vocabulary.

I just finished What I Talk about When I Talk about Running and I was really hoping to see Haruki Murakami running but after the pro’s finished, it became a sea of runners passing by.

Waiting for the first runners:

Every Saturday morning, I wander over to the Union Square Green Market with an empty reusable (gstar) bag and a bit of curiosity.  I try to buy at least one item I’ve never cooked or purchased before.  This past Saturday’s new items: leeks, winter squash and decorative squash (the knurly ones).  I made a great potato leek soup from Alice Water’s recent book and put the squash in a place where they’d make people think “yep, it’s fall.”

Other purchases: honeycrisp apples (my current fave), arugula, cornbread and Vermont maple syrup (for impending pumpkin pancakes).

A convergence of red things in Chinatown, or NYC patriotism.

An apartment, Williamsburg.

I bought a bunch of bananas from the friendly fruit cart guy near the Astor Kmart. I leave them on my desk at work.  First they attract senior management.  Then they attract fruit flies.

They have lots of potassium.

Summer is officially now over.  Today I felt cold. That’s how you know.

Here’s Sheep Meadow on a wonderful Summer’s day. [film]

Went to Moto with a few food blogger friends. They have a wondrous baked apple pancake topped with creme fraiche. It’s more of an awesome buttery skillet cake than a pankcake. They also have a great date cake.

I saw Sigur Ros last night with an Icelandic coworker.  I had opted to buy front row tickets from ticketsnow.com, which turned out to be 2nd row tickets for a 3x face value markup.  Nonetheless, it was a ridiculously awesome show.  They came across as a totally different band, way more energy and nuance than they could ever convey on an album.  I wish I’d bought tickets and a time machine for the night before last.

Here’s a little video:  ”glósóli”

Here are some photos from the show:

Toward the end they said “come up!” as the concert was in a theater of sorts, not a concert venue, so everyone was confined to their seats.  So every one got up and gathered around the stage.

It was my birthday a few days ago.  After birthdays and Christmases when was but a youngin’ I was forced to write thank you notes for every gift I received.  I used to boiler plate them out like none other.  Even though each note was exactly the same, it taught me the importance of a handwritten letter.

Nowadays, the only handwritten thank you notes I write are to my grandma back in the bay area.  She sends me the nicest cards (and a few shiny nickels) on non-present giving holidays like Halloween, Valentines Day, Easter, and Thanksgiving–along with the usual gift giving holidays.

So, I got some niiiiice Vera Wang stationary and I jot her a nice little bread and butter note whenever she sends something.  Thanks Grandma!

I suppose everyone has to see those damn waterfalls at one point or another. I went on free 30 minute Circle Line cruise, if you could call it a cruise.

I bought ahh ticket to The National at Hammerstein in October. I wish my National buddy was here. Anyone want to go? It’s $35 and includes a 1 year subscription to New York Magazine.

Here’s Matt Berninger at Summer Stage on some ilford xp2.

I got stuck in a elevator on my way back from lunch two days ago. This is not an uncommon occurrence in our building–about 1/3 of our company has gotten stuck at one time or another. However, it’s a bit awakening when it happens to you.

The elevator made a very sudden stop on going up from the 1st floor lobby to the 28th floor, sudden enough enough to give a moment of weightlessness. Fortunately I happened to be with my boss/good friend from work and it was just us. And fortunately we’d just come back from grabbing lunch, so starving to death wasn’t a worry of ours. We pushed the alarm button which just rings a loud bell attached to the elevator car. Nothing happened.

As I mentioned, other coworkers had also been stuck in one of 6 elevators for our floor, one time on our floor with the doors 7/8 closed–just enough to see in, but not enough to get out. When this happened, I thought I should try to be the hero and open the doors, after all, the doors were already cracked open, there were 5 very uncomfortable looking people in the elevator, and the primary function of doors in general is to open and close, so really why not try to open them? Well, another coworker watching the spectacle said, “No no, it’s a liability, building maintenance (or the fire department) will eventually come.” Maintenance did come, 20 minutes later, and opened the already open doors.

However, when you’re the one in an elevator, liability isn’t really a concern–getting out of the elevator is the main concern. So I’m thinking, this is bs, we shouldn’t be stuck in this stupid elevator. Time to give liability the upward fist. I push on the inner elevator car doors and they slooowwwly and heavily slide open and lock in place. We’re half a floor above the 18th floor. This is fortunate as our elevators only services floors 18-35. If we’d gotten stuck at floor 9.5, we’d be shit out of luck. I found the cam on the inner elevator doors to release and open the door. It slides open. Hmm, it’s a 5 foot jump down into the 18th floor elevator lobby. We contemplate worst case scenarios (edge cases as they’re called in our industry) — The elevator comes back to life and shoots upward as one of us is crawling out slicing the person in half at the waist. Or worse, the elevator decides to plunge 18 stories to the 1st floor with the same outcome as the previous case.

We decided that both of these cases are highly unlikely but just to be safe, we should exit quickly as opposed to leisurely straddling the guillotine of separation. I throw my pint of steamed white rice down into the elevator lobby and jump out. My boss follows with his combo #17 (fried founder sandwich on a wheat kaiser roll with fries). I push the up elevator button in the lobby like nothing had happened, we take a functional elevator to our floor, sit down and eat our lunches.

So, a little bit of mid-day adventure…things definitely could have been worse.

Just cruising around Central Park on a warm Sunday afternoon. Ate some lunch on the rocks. Watched a little softball.

I watched the fireworks from our humble yet awesome rooftop last night. It was actually a spectacular view–you could see the big 34th street show as well as the Statue of LIberty/South Street Sea Port show and another show in Brooklyn.

The gloomy weather lead me to a weird realization. The 4th of July is to celebrate our independence from the King and Queen, but I wonder if the use of fireworks in the celebrations stems from the fact that we’re actually celebrating war. The overcast skies created a scene of obscured flashes in the clouds, bright explosions near ground level and loud distant booms. Comparing it to the constructed revolutionary battle scenes from movies, (John Adams, awesome), I’d say the two are eerily similar.