Food Disasters

On Friday night, my friend David had a college themed housewarming party at his new apartment on the west side (right by my old apartment, actually). I brought along Leo since I didn’t think I’d know many people:

We’re a matching couple! 🙂 There was beer pong, taps, and lots of beer (just like a college party!). We didn’t stay too long since it was getting late, but I’m glad David moved into the city (finally) and that he likes his new Ikea-ed out apartment.

On Saturday, since it was so nice outside, I went running in Central Park. It was absolutely packed! I’m glad that the weather has gotten a lot better – now I can finally go outside instead of hiding in my apartment. After running, Chris and I met up to go shopping in my area and went to Bloomingdales to try their frozen yogurt (Forty Carrots). We ordered the plain (not vanilla – they WILL correct you) and chocolate. The plain was actually really good and creamy, like Mister Softee (although Chris likes Pinkberry more). I like Forty Carrots more because:

1. Their portions are HUGE (we couldn’t finish a medium),
2. It’s cheaper than Pinkberry,
3. It’s creamier,
4. Forty carrots is closer to my apartment, which means I can walk there over the summer!!

After frozen yogurt, we went to Whole Foods to buy ingredients to make gnocchi with salmon and peas with salad. I pulled the gnocchi recipe from Michael Chiarello on foodnetwork. Since Chris eats really healthily, I thought it would be a good idea to buy whole wheat flour. MISTAKE #1. Look at our dough:

We also had potatoes left over from the previous week when we made Lobster and Chips, so we baked them and shredded them for the gnocchi (like it says in the instructions). People usually eye recipes, right? Well, we definitely did a really bad job eying the amount of potatoes we put in the recipe because we put around 3 pounds of potatoes into the gnocchi. Mistake #2. I was really frustrated because the dough was too sticky and we kept adding flour to the mixture, but it was really grainy because the flour was whole wheat, not regular unbleached flour. We eventually just gave up and started adding flour until the dough solidified and put the little gnocchi’s into the water to cook. While we were cooking the gnocchi, we were also poaching salmon, boiling water for peas, and making salad dressing. Here’s the final product of the gnocchi with salmon and peas:

It doesn’t look too bad, right? Maybe because I put an entire can of marinara sauce on the gnocchi to mask the taste. 🙂 We bought the marinara from Whole Foods (the store brand) and made it a creamy marinara, which actually tasted really good! I think if we made it again, we’d probably just make a creamy sauce and angel hair pasta. Here’s the table set up:

Chris made the salad dressing this time and was very successful – one part lemon, two parts olive oil, one part red wine vinegar, and a pinch of salt and pepper. We also had mangoes (frozen and from Whole Foods, which we defrosted while we were cooking), which was probably the second best part of the meal (next to the salad Chris made :)).

So, are you interested in how the gnocchi tasted? Well, Chris said, “I’m trying to find the best way to eat AROUND the gnocchi because the salmon and peas are good.” Thanks. Actually, the marinara was great and I basically had a creamy tomato soup with peas for dinner (I didn’t even like the way the salmon turned out so I ate around THAT, too). On top of not liking the dinner we made, it took two and a half hours to make! We ended up watching Saturday Night Live while eating because it took so long to make everything!!

What we did with the leftover gnocchi:

Well, you can’t win them all, right?

On Sunday, I refused to leave Chris’ kitchen with the idea that I cooked an incredibly disgusting meal the night before, so we decided to have brunch at his place instead of going out. We wanted to recreate Balthazar’s waffles with berries and sour cream for brunch, so we bought brioche bread from Balthazar (available at Whole Foods), and made French toast with berries and sour cream instead (no waffle maker = no waffles). Since the bread was only a day old, it wasn’t as stiff as I would’ve liked (especially for french toast), but we worked with what we had. Chris was in charge of making turkey bacon, I made the French toast and the eggs, and we made the smoothie together from the leftover berries we had. Since we had some extra eggs leftover, I made some scrambled eggs AND eggs over easy. Check out our brunch:

AND check out our seats:

We ate on his patio! I definitely redeemed myself, especially with the scrambled eggs (which were perfect – not too runny and not rubbery at all). We spent the afternoon lounging around, reading magazines, and catching up for the week. For dinner, we headed to John’s Pizzeria and ran into some of my friends from work, so we had an impromptu double date. The pizza, as usual, was awesome and a great way to start the week. This Wednesday – lobster rolls!