Showing posts with label Ice Cream. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ice Cream. Show all posts

Monday, July 21, 2014

hamilton park picnic

"if i didn't move here, i would probably never do anything like this."
      - the words of my fiancé, who repeatedly tells me that he's so grateful to live such a fulfilling life in a smile-worthy place. 

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yesterday we set out for a picnic in hamilton park, casually organized by napoleon and belinda of e.tittlemouse and marinell and chadner of eighty magazine.  we packed up the picnic basket, filled with dinnerware, cloth napkins, box wine, seltzer water, and (of course) some homemade goodies.  we packed the blanket, the camera, and walked a whole 5 blocks to the picnic!

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our well-received contribution to the food spread was corn, goat cheese, and quinoa hand pies! as much as we would like to take credit for the final product, it was just a mix of the filling from the sween corn and goat cheese stuffed peppers recipe from thekitchn.com and the pie crust from the infinite kitchen sink hand pie from lady and pups .

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a surprise visit from milk sugar love and a generous hand-delivered bucket of ice cream, and everyone went crazy.  phones and cameras came out like paparazzi, everyone cheered.  i guess that's the sort of entrance you live for when you own an ice cream business ;)

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when we got there, we were greeted with wine, endless food options (mostly filipino), and a community of jersey-city-loving new friends.  what a group to get you inspired! a lot of the people there were entrepreneurs, designers, and creatives, all with a passion for their business and art.  nearly every sunday lately we've spent meals with friends, but this was a new and fun idea of bringing together those with a common bond (food) in a place we love (hamilton park) to form new friendships (and put faces to instagrammers i already stalk) and have a great time.

while living in such an urban environment, especially so close to big, scary new york city, i never would have thought that i would have found such neighborhood pride, so many local connections, such a small-town feel.  it's events like this that really make us feel like we made the right choice to plant our roots in jersey city.  we felt honored to even be invited to such an event with so many talented people, and can't wait for the next one!

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cheers to monday!
jenn


p.s. go check out these new-to-me local artists/entrepreneurs/creatives from jersey city:

eightymag
chicpeajc
sewbie
caviar noir
e.tittlemouse (not-so-new to us :P)
joan michel
eat and be mary
downtown natch
modest mind clothing
deen boutique
chadner navarro

Monday, April 28, 2014

from the weekend

hello friends! how was your weekend? sunday nights should be for getting to bed early to get a fresh start monday morning, right?  well, that's the goal anyways, but i never fail to stay up later than usual making monday "seem" to get here later.  that is, until my alarm wakes me up at a sunny 5:45am (i swear it only stays dark out for an hour on sunday nights)

...and when sundays are filled with purging, putting things up on craigslist, giving things in our home a permanent home, doing laundry, and spending the evening with friends for an always-fancy sunday dinner , i'd have to say sundays are my favorite these days.  i don't feel obligated to get out of my pj's until i need to leave the house (which means, if i don't leave the house, they don't leave my body)  i don't feel obligated to be social. i can enjoy the crazy amount of natural light spewing into my apartment at the peak hours of afternoon sunshine.  and, most of all, i get to spend quality time with that roommate of mine that i normally refer to as my fiancé.

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Monday, February 3, 2014

shenanigans

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my weekend started off with a feel-good 7-mile run, and it all went downhill from there
(or uphill, i guess i'll leave it to you to make an opinion)

hung and i had quite the social weekend, hosting people for dinner twice and going to a super bowl party in manhattan. saturday night though, was one for the books.  hung and i hosted a few friends to eat banh xeo.  if you're not familiar with vietnamese food, banh xeo is sort of like a crepe, sort of like an omelet...  but not really.  the crepe is made from tapioca flour, coconut milk, and scallions, and the filling includes chicken, shrimp, and bean sprouts.  it's a pretty simple dish, but it's so tasty.  you can order it at saigon café in downtown jersey city (see "saigon crepe"), but making it at home is pretty simple too (hint: keep reading later this week for a recipe!) 

so the night started with the intentions of getting stuffed on banh xeo, but then i had the bright idea to tell my friends i never had spam before.  next thing i know, mr p is poaching eggs, hannah is frying sliced spam, and lenny is prepping rolls from philippine bread house .  i will have to say, it by no means tastes "bad", it's just super salty.  i think it can have a great purpose cubed in fried rice or sweetened with honey or something to take the edge off of the saltiness.  it actually almost tastes like super salty turkey bacon, haha.  it's really just another cured meat that's been canned.  i'd totally eat it again!!

after a few more drinks at the keyhole and barcade , the boys insisted on getting fried chicken (literally an hour earlier they said they couldn't eat another bite of food).  we brought hollywood fried chicken back to the house, scarfed it down, and hit the hay. 

talk about gluttony!! at least i had a good workout on friday, right? (sigh)

yesterday we watched the super bowl on the big screen at rockwood music hall before heading to another friend's apartment near times square.  talk about ghost town!! for times square being such an even bigger tourist trap for the days leading up to the super bowl, it was a rather pleasant awkward scene for it to be so empty....

photos above:
  1. pit stop at torico thursday night after getting dinner (with unlimited free drinks!) at park and sixth .
  2. i'm loving all the murals going up in jersey city.  see the initiative here.
  3. spam sliders: spam, poached egg, pepperjack cheese, sweet roll.
  4. i heart my hung and my hannah banana making a heart (or, at least trying)
  5. selfie with my combover... an even shorter pixie would give a better one.  haircut happening soon!
  6. one of the many creeper eyes lining the walls of the chambers street/world trade center A/C/E train station. so creepy, dontcha think?
happy monday friends!
tell me about your weekend shenanigans!

cheers.
jenn

Thursday, January 23, 2014

downtown yogurt (gosh, finally!)

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to some places, the whole self-yourself-froyo thing is gone, done, out the door, never coming back because it was exploited so much when it was popular.  to you local people, hoboken is a good example.  when i moved there, i was in the middle of the froyo "boom".  the second year i lived there, falafel was the big boom, with 5 restaurants/take-out places opening in less than a year.  today there's far fewer froyo and falafel places, and quite possibly there may be another "fad" food that's taken their place.

i've lived in jersey city for over 2 years now, and for as long as i have been there, the froyo fad never came.  local ice cream shops served vanilla soft serve yogurt as an alternative to ice cream, but that's it.  until now!   i admit, even when there were 6 froyo shops in hoboken, i still frequented them at least once a week (i couldn't help it!! it's so good!). this place is one of a kind for downtown jersey city right now, and being in such a convenient location, how could you NOT at least try it out?

downtown yogurt opened a few weeks ago, just across the street from the grove street PATH station, but it wasn't until monday night that i had my mind set on getting some! mr p isn't a froyo fan, and convincing him to go get some sweets that he doesn't enjoy and I certainly don't need was pretty far-fetched.  i made it a plan to convince a group from kickboxing to walk down after class (hey, it's better than NOT working out and eating froyo, right? right) after about 8 of us got our bucket of froyo (yes, bucket, those sneaky kids know what they're doing when they give you huge containers to fill!) mr p couldn't resist.  no yogurt for him though, thankfully they have softserve sorbet too!

i'm not one to eat the crazy flavors they come up with, 99% of the time i'm a original tart and sprinkles sort of girl. and the good thing about self-serve yogurt is that you can get as much or as little as you like!  (as you can see from the photo above, i barely filled the bottom of the bucket, and that was the perfect sweet treat!)  for those of you who DO enjoy eating the different flavors, downtown yogurt has a whole wall of handles, pouring out your favorite flavors, and endless toppings, including my two favorites of rainbow sprinkles and toasted coconut, and mr p's new favorite of "boba".  the boba there is nothing like what you see in bubble tea though, these little balls are more like gushers! they have a chewy outside, but a burst of tangy goodness pops out after biting into them.

now it's your turn to try downtown yogurt . afterall, if you ride the grove street PATH train, it's just a few steps away!!  and why not support another local business, right? DTJC needs it!

cheers.
jenn

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

irresistible ice cream, 40 years in the making

make that 45 years in the making...

45 years of delicious, homemade ice cream.  jersey city wasn't always a "happening" place.  luckily for us, there are tons of businesses helping to revive it to a family-friendly, art-centric, destination location just a 7-minute, $2.50 train ride from manhattan.

some of these businesses are new and hot (read: razza , thirty acres , kanibal home , sam a. m. , jc made , and smith and chang  are my latest faves), but some have stuck it through the hard times, and having revivals of their own. torico ice cream is of the latter.  after going through a major renovation within the past few years, it's right back to booming with the rest of the community.

we're lucky enough to live close enough that through out living room windows, we get sniffs of waffle cones being freshly made on a breezy summer day.  i've tried practically every flavor they have to offer, but most of the time i stick to a vanilla cone with sprinkles or my usual ginger ice cream (i figure the ginger eases my stomach after this lactose-intolerant girl eats all that ice cream)

but i guess all those times i do the "try a few flavors, but still get ginger" scene, i never tried butterscotch.  hellllooooo new favorite! i love butterscotch, but i didn't think it could be that great in ice cream.  i mean, when you have so many great flavors to choose from, butterscotch seemed about as inventive as vanilla.

to my surprise, it's more creamy than any of the other flavors in the case, it's sweeter, and it hits the spot.  mr p always gets a scoop each of pumpkin pie and cinnamon, and even this time he settled for a scoop of butterscotch.

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my new " get fit " endeavor might be severely challenged if i continue to cave into this indulgence!

but hey... it's better than plopping on the couch and eating a pint of ben and jerry's, at least this place is local ;)

have you been to torico yet? better stop by soon! but, i don't think they will be leaving the neighborhood anytime soon, they still have a line out the door on some weekend nights! (in november, people!!)

cheers.
jenn

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

sunny skies and sammiches

rainy days like this on the east coast only make me think of better places to be... like california, where it's sunny ALL THE TIME... where you can spend days like this at huntington beach.  we took a quick trip down that way before a wedding we went to a few weekends ago .
 
a band was playing, we walked the pier, got a delicious waffle sammich from bruxie , a cookies-n-mint-chocolate-chip ice cream sammich from the scoop on cookies , and perused the cutie lil shops in the area. 
 
success... california, you stole my heart in 1 afternoon.
 
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wish i could have brought that sunny-n-seventy weather back to the east coast so i can get some sun on those ghostly white legs of mine!  we're lucky if we get that in the summer, let alone all year long!
 
cheers.
 

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

lately




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DSC03346.5   Photobucket 1. creamy avocado pesto pasta with roasted spaghetti squash instead of "actual" pasta
2. chocolate italian ice from torico tastes EXACTLY like a fudgsicle, AND it's dairy-free, AND it's sitting on top of...
3. spicy eggnog ice cream (move over, McD's eggnog shake, this one takes the cake)
4. this is the view you'll get if you try to go to the union square holiday market on a satuday at 2:30
5. a healthy lunch: arugula, spicy meatballs, brussels sprouts, wheatberry salad, and coconut red cabbage salad from dig inn... followed by
6. the only thing ever to win in the battle of my sweet tooth vs. sweets: choco chip cookies and hot chocolate from city bakery...
7. fishs eddy... i could live in that store.
8. hot chocolate from westville (chelsea, manhattan)
9. totally "not" posed.
10. market sides from westville
11. chorizo, egg, and gouda burrito and greens salad with lemon-dill dressing (westville)
12. empty subways when it's a rainy day.. apparently new yorkers don't like to go outside in the rain
13. always amazed at the mosaics in the subway stations
14. brooklyn tabernacle christmas show (it's free! you should go see it!)
15. brooklyn tabernacle christmas show
16. unexpected, incredibly delicious, and certainly appreciated sweets from the first day of hanukkah
17. pretty christmas tree at brooklyn tabernacle
18. kodak moment with the bride to be :)
 
last weekend left us exhausted, but thankful for having so many friends who want to spend time with us! we were able to spend a night in for dinner and a movie (even though i fell asleep, sorry babe), go to kickboxing, shop in the city with the girls, go to an engagement party, get christmas card photos taken, have brunch with 4 out-of-towners and 4 in-towners-that-we-haven't-seen-in-a-while, and see a christmas show with friends we hadn't seen in a LONG time.
 
jersey city & new york city, you've been good to us!
weekend. deemed. a success.
 
cheers!