Food: Bobby Flay's Burger Palace

We probably watch too much Food Network or HGTV at our house for our own good.  While I do like Alton Brown, I'm probably a bigger fan of America's Test Kitchen than anything else on Food Network.  I particularly dislike Bobby Flay, who symbolizes the worst of Food Network---a flashy, rich, full-of-himself television chef loudmouth with little substance and a chili gimmick.

So when a friend of mine recommended Bobby Flay's Burger Palace (BBP), I was a little skeptical.  Still, there are a couple of locations relatively close by and we were craving burgers one night, so we gave it a shot last week after work.  It took us almost an hour in traffic to get there, so we were pretty hungry when we got there.  The decor looked like an upscale fast food restaurant and the place was pretty crowded.

Bobby's Burger Palace

There aren't that many different burgers on the menu, although the options do cover a wide range of flavors.  One of the gimmicks is getting your burger "crunchified", where they use potato chips as a burger topping.  It's mostly a marketing gimmick, but I wonder if it's also small tribute to those campus grease trucks that pile on french fries, onion rings, or other deep fried stuff into your sandwiches.  We ended up getting a Crunchburger (a classic cheeseburger crunchified), a Philadelphia Burger (provolone, grilled onions, and hot peppers), sweet potato fries, and a mango milkshake.  When we sat down, there was an assortment of special sauces beyond just ketchup and mustard.  Predictably, there was a Chipotle Ketchup option, but there was also a Jalapeno hot sauce and a mysterious, gritty Burger Sauce.

I have to admit, the food was pretty good---as much as I dislike him, he does serve a pretty good burger.  The burgers were more of a "restaurant" hamburger rather than a "fast food" burger---a nice thick hamburger.  The meat was nice and juicy and by default they cook the patties to a nice medium pink color in the middle.  The potato chips really didn't add anything but make the burger a little more dry, so I'll probably pass on them next time.  I'm a big fan of sweet potato fries and they came with a nice honey mustard sauce.  The mango milkshake was also good---not too thick and not too light and a pretty unique flavor.

Overall, it's worth trying, but probably not worth driving an hour out of your way.  Still, it's relatively cheap for a good burger, although I'm a little disappointed in the lack of hamburger options.  For example, much closer to us is a 25 Burgers that has 25 different burger styles, including some of our favorites---there's one with a pineapple slice and teriyaki sauce and there's another with a fried egg (mmm....fried egg on burger...)  On the other hand, 25 Burgers is definitely on the fast food burger side, so BBP's burgers are definitely a step up in terms of quality. 

Special sauces

Sweet potato fries and mango milkshake

Crunchburger

Philadelphia burger

 Mmm...nice and rare on the inside...

More on Our Lemon Kitty

As I mentioned earlier, I never really thought of myself as a cat person.  Most of the people at work tend to be dog people too.  I guess I can agree with them with respect to most cats---the stereotypical cat kind of keeps to themselves, but Snowshoes are different.  When we were looking for cats, we definitely met some cats who displayed stereotypical cat behavior.  They acted pretty standoff-ish, didn't like to be held or touched for very long, or even hissed at us when they got mad.  Our lemon kitty Marquis, however, has never made an aggressive move towards us.  He's always been very sweet and loving.  We joked that he was raised by dogs but had the advantage of knowing how to use a litter box. 

He would do things that are pretty unusual for cats.  We didn't let him sleep with us since my wife has some slight cat allergies, but he would come up and wait patiently by the bedroom door each morning to welcome us.  He used to come down to the door and greet us when we came home from work every day.  His favorite activity was running up to us and then flopping over for a belly rub and then twist and turn.  He was a licker---he would grab our hands to rub his face and lick it all over.  He could do this for hours if you let him.  He was a pretty lazy cat and didn't even show any interest in laser pointers or other cat toys.  He would just sit on or next to us the rest of the night, occasionally grabbing our hands for a belly rub.

He was sweet tempered enough that he would sit quietly when we trimmed his claws (he had six toes on each foot).  We could even wash him in the shower and he wouldn't complain.  If he got sad or upset, he wouldn't strike out---instead, he would go and sit in the corner until we came to pet him.  Once he got diagnosed with chronic renal failure over a year ago, we were able to subcutaneously inject him with 50 mL of saline daily to keep him hydrated and he didn't complain.  I don't know if we would be able to do that with most cats.

He's so sick and weak now that he barely has energy to move.  He can only walk with a slight limp to the litter box.  But whenever he sees us for the first time in the morning or when we come home from work, he still has enough energy to grab our hands and rub his face over them.  Now he can only last for a couple of minutes, but you can tell that's what he's been saving his energy for.  It's what he lives for---even in the end, all he wants is to be with us.

As weak as he is now, he still has enough energy to grab our hands for a good rub.

Food: Sockeye Salmon

It's a little strange since my parents own a restaurant, but I didn't really start learning how to cook until grad school.  This was partly due to living by myself without the safety net of a dining plan, but also due to the incredible fresh food available in California.  Now cooking is something that we enjoy a lot, although it is tougher to get good ingredients in Jersey.  I think that cooking reminds me a lot of chemistry, except that you have more freedom to deviate from literature procedures and even failed experiments are usually still edible.  There's something relaxing about preparing all of the ingredients and then combining everything into a final product.  We try to cook as much as we can since it's cheaper and usually better than most of the food around here, although it does get hard on the weekdays when we're tired after work.  However, we'll try to cook a nicer meal at least on the weekends when we have time to experiment with new recipes. 

While out shopping at Wegmans, we saw some wild Sockeye salmon.  We typically settle for the cheaper farm-raised salmon as it's cheaper (although apparently not as environmentally friendly as you would think according to this NPR interview), but we thought we'd try out the wild type.  We just did a simple pan fry with a little salt/pepper and lemon and served it with some roasted potatoes and asaparagus.  For an appetizer, we made white-wine steamed mussels and paired it with a Chimay.  The salmon was pretty good---the texture was more tender and flaky than farm-raised salmon and the flavor was stronger.  When we make farm-raised salmon, my wife usually makes a honey-miso sauce to go with it, but the Sockeye didn't need it as it was flavorful enough on its own.  Is it worth almost triple the price?  Maybe not all the time, but it's a nice splurge.

Beer and mussels

 Pan-fried sockeye salmon with roasted baby Dutch yellow potatoes, white wine steamed mussels, and broiled asparagus

Physical Exam

I recently had my first physical exam in probably several decades.  Now that we're finally back on regular dental checkups, my wife and I figured that we should probably get everything else taken care of as well.  We also didn't have a general family doctor yet, so it was probably about time we found one.  We ended finding a pretty nice private practice close by that got good reviews.

The visit mostly entailed some blood work and an EKG as well as a quick once over.  The blood work looked good---my good HDL cholesterol is pretty high while my bad LDL cholesterol is pretty low.  My blood pressure is a little low to normal and my heart was healthy on the EKG readout.  All in all, it looks like I'm in good shape.  I guess I must have good genes as I could probably eat a little better and exercise a little more.  My wife also had no major problems.  I have to admit, I was a little terrified about having to go through with a prostate exam, but I guess it wasn't necessary yet...but it's only a matter of time...

Otherwise, I'm no longer in pain after getting my wisdom teeth removed, so I'm not hopped up on Ibuprofen every day.  Everything's not quite back to normal---I still have three big holes in the gums at back of my mouth that haven't closed up yet (although thankfully the stitches have finally dissolved---having them dangling around really bothered me).  It feels a little surreal, but every night I have to take the a small dental brush and clean them out.  It's actually a little morbidly fascinating how much food gets stuck in there that you have to pull out.  At least I think it's food...

Food: Santoka Ramen

$9 for a bowl of ramen?  For years, I always associated ramen with those uber-cheap, freeze-dried noodle packets that I survived on in college for literally pennies a meal.  Even my family in Hong Kong would eat packaged ramen, or "cartoon noodles" as they called it, for a quick snack.  They came in a variety of flavors with mysterious powdered soup bases to add.  I even knew someone in grad school who added extra salt to her ramen as well as someone who spiced up their ramen with canned tuna.  I can barely eat the stuff now.

However, that was before I discovered real authentic ramen.  Not the Cup of Noodles but actual ramen.  One of our friends in our postdoc lab was from Japan and introduced us to a few ramen restaurants in California and now we can't get enough---fresh, never-frozen ramen noodles in a thick bowl of soup with tender slices of meat?  It's an entire meal to itself.

Last night, we went to the local Mitsuwa Marketplace in Edgewater.  It's basically a Japanese grocery store that sells high quality, relatively expensive Japanese goods, but the real draw is in the food court that contains many different Japanese restaurants.  You can get assorted rice plates, gyoza, a variety of tempura, exotic cakes and dessert, but the star of the show is definitely Santoka Ramen, which specializes in authentic, Japanese ramen.  They offer the ramen in three flavored broths:  shio (salt), shoyu (soy sauce), and miso, in order of thickness.  We typically go for the miso ramen (you might as well go all out).  It starts as a thick broth from a base of slow cooked pork bone (tonkotsu) that is almost milky or creamy in texture.  That sounds a little weird, but there's almost no equivalent in American food---it's almost like melted butter with a rich, salty pork flavoring.  It's a robust, complex, hearty soup that supports the firm ramen noodles---these aren't your typical fried and freeze-dried ramen noodles.  They then top the bowl with tender slices of chasu (fatty pork) that melt in your mouth as well as a smattering of other toppings.  The end result is a big bowl of hot noodles with a flavor that I've never encountered before and I discover again each time I taste it.  It's like taking a sip of a fine wine compared to the boxed wine you drank in college.

Is it worth $9 a bowl?  Absolutely.  It's worth driving over an hour through traffic to get there.  The other nice thing about the Edgewater location is that the food court has floor to ceiling windows with an amazing view over the Hudson onto downtown Manhattan.  What better place to slurp your noodles?

Wisdom Extracted

On top of taking care of our sick kitty over the past week, I also had three of my wisdom teeth taken out.  Either alone would have been bad enough, but having to do both made things particularly overwhelming.  I've known for years that my wisdom teeth needed to come out---as you can see in the picture, the bottom two were impacted and coming in sideways, while there was one on the top that was out, but crowding the rest of my teeth.  I guess I wasn't wise enough to have a fourth.  You can also forget all of those cavities that you see there...by the way, why do wisdom teeth come in sideways???  What purpose does that serve???  That seems like a pretty bad design...I don't see how anything good can come out of it...

Still, I tried to ignore the problem.  After all, everyone was telling me horror stories about getting their wisdom teeth out.  Some people ended up swollen and literally black and blue.  Most people had to lie sick in bed for days if not weeks.  One person had projectile vomit (which actually sounded kind of cool).  Other people ended up permanently losing some of the nerve endings on their face!  One of my coworkers even mentioned that they tried to put him under but he ended up staying awake during the whole ordeal---at one point the surgeon had his head in a headlock trying to wrench the tooth out.  As much fun as that sounded, I decided to wait.

Sadly, about a month ago, the gum around one of my wisdom teeth got inflamed and infected and I could barely eat or even open my mouth.  The wisdom teeth were starting to "erupt" and come out (I think they deliberately pick the most pleasant sounding names).  So that's when I finally got pushed over the edge and scheduled a date with my oral surgeon.  I eagerly opted for going under (I fear pain, but that will have to wait for another story...).  I was shocked at how fast the procedure was.  It lasted only half an hour and then I was done.  Apparently, the surgeon does about 6-7 procedures a day.  I had no idea there were that many people getting their wisdom teeth out.  It sounds like a pretty lucrative business.

So far, luckily I've been one of the good cases.  I didn't get black or blue or even that swollen.  As far as I can tell, I can still feel most of my face.  It was pretty painful for the first day or two, but then it wasn't too bad.  The worst part was feeling weak from just eating a liquid diet for several days.  But a week later, the stitches have dissolved and I can eat solid food again.  I ate a hamburger as my first meal after days of soup and oatmeal and it was the most delicious thing that I've ever eaten.  Overall, it wasn't that bad and I probably should have done it sooner.  Oh well.

Our Lemon Kitty

I never thought of myself as a cat person.  I've always thought of myself as a dog person, but having a dog just doesn't fit well into a modern professional lifestyle Being stuck at work, we just don't have enough time to take the dog out each day.  In contrast, cats can be more independent and can look after themselves more easily.  Plus, my wife preferred cats, so we decided to look into it.

However, we started doing some research into different cat breeds and Snowshoe cats immediately jumped out at us.  Snowshoes tend to be more sociable and affectionate and "dog-like" than typical cats, so we thought this might combine the best of both worlds.

We visited several local animal shelters and had a chance to visit with different cats.  We quickly saw that each cat had a distinct and unique personality---some were louder and more playful, others were more shy and timid.  And others, like a cat name d Andrea, only tolerated petting for several minutes before turning her back on us and hiding in the corner.  We didn't find any cats that really stood out to us.

The old saying that "you don't choose your pet, your pet chooses you" became true for us.  We browsed Petfinder for a while until we saw a listing for a Snowshoe named Marquis up in LA.  Taking a chance, we drove nearly an hour to visit with him.  He was sitting in his cage, but as soon as he saw us, he perked up.  He immediately started rubbing his head against our fingers and then even grabbed our hands to lick them.  We immediately fell in love and just had to adopt him.

However...the big problem was that Marquis had an eye infection.  In fact, his eye was squeezed shut and oozing .  The shelter had him checked out by a vet who said that it wasn't anything serious.  We just had to treat him with some eye medicine.  This probably should have been sign, but we just couldn't help it---we had to adopt him.

And so that's how we ended up with our "lemon" kitty.  He's always had problems.  He eventually got over his eye infection (although it sometimes crops back up again), but after a few months we had to take him to the vet who diagnoses benign cysts in his ears.  He had bad teeth and we eventually had to take him in to get some teeth extracted after they started getting infected.  That's when we found out from the blood tests that he had early chronic renal failure, which we've been treating for over a year now.

And despite all of this, he's been the most sweet, loving companion we could ask for.  I don't know if anyone else would have picked a cat with an eye infection or could see through all of his health shortcomings, but he chose us and has loved us ever since.  Maybe we could have gotten a younger, healthier cat, but we'll stay with him no matter what.