Happy Holidays!

This year, we had by far the best Christmas celebration ever. Apart from spending 3 days with our dear friends, we were also invited to their friend's dessert party. What? A dessert party? Yup, countless types of cakes, pies, pastries and appetizers that took more than 10 days to prepare.

Where should I start? Let's start with appetizers - olives, cheese and crackers.

A variety of olives.

Cheese, cheese and more cheese.





The hostess also made her own mushroom pates and pickled her own okras.



Many different types of cookies, almond cookies, ginger cookies, biscottis,  and many more. They have much nicer names but I can't remember all of them. *grin*

What are golf balls? It's an Italian dish. They are cheese wrapped with rice and deep fried.  They're so yummy. Once you pop you can't stop!



Once you finished with the appetizers, let's move on to the desserts! I think we had about 10 cakes and pies, I lost count. Here are just a few of them.



I really like this apple pie, the fruit and the crust are just so yummy!



I didn't expect to like this white chocolate brownies so much! This is one of my favorite!







Precisely hand cut opera cake.



There were way too many desserts and if I were to showcase all of them, I myself probably won't survive this update ... By now, I'm already hungry and hoping that I could take bites after bites into those uber-liscious desserts. *stomach growling.....*

Thanks Fran for the wonderful and amazing out of this world dessert party!



And the extras for the following day!

Thanksgiving

This year I was at New York for Thanksgiving. Here's a summary of my 5-day trip. 

Above are the yummy appetizers that our hostess prepared, crackers with lobster dip and cheese. The dinner also included roasted chicken, vegetables and home made apple pie! Yummmss.....

Our first dinner at NYC. Most of the restaurants in Korea town were packed, at 8pm, most of the restaurants had a half an hour wait list. So we chose the one that had the least people waiting and we still waited for 20 minutes. The food at Miss Korea was really good, we had the pork BBQ marinated in special house sauce, kimchi pancake, spicy dumpling tofu soup, squid and soju! By the time we were done with dinner around 10pm there was still a line waiting outside.

A quick snap shot of Empire State Building on our way back to the hotel.

Took the Staten Island Ferry to see Lady Liberty.

The view from the ferry.

Liberty Island was closed after Sandy's wrath. So the closest way to see her was taking the Staten Island Ferry.

We also visited the 911 Memorial, this was the only way I could include Freedom Tower and the memorial ground in the same photo.

I love Times Square. I love the lights, the billboards and everything dazzling about this place.

Good meals can be affordable in NYC. Prefix  at the Red Cat starts at $25 for lunch. We had garlic fries, steamed clam, burrata (gold and red beets salad), skate, oyster po'boys, omellete, burger, and banana boat! The food was simply splendid. The simple looking banana boat is so yummy, home made vanilla ice cream served with mysterious ingredients that made it taste so unique. Actually the ingredients were really simple, banana, nuts and fruits but there's something else that made it tasted different, salt? 

We were craving for good quality dim sum, we chose Nom Wah because it was the first dim sum place in NY Chinatown. It was cold and we were hungry, the first bite of shrimp dumpling was simply awesome. Not only the shrimp was fresh, the skin of the dumpling was perfect, thin and steamed just right. You can tell that all the dishes were fresh because after years of eating reheated frozen dim sum even at high ranking restaurants, these dim sum tasted just FRESH. I love it that they served using porcelain dishes. The place was so busy that the servers did not even have time to chit chat.

This time, we visited places that I have not been to at NYC. This is the High Line Park. A public park built on a historical frieght line elevated above the streets on Manhattan's West Side. The place was packed with people and it was quite an interesting walk to see the artistic neighborhood filled with art installations and upscale apartments.

I really love the Grand Central Station. The building itself is so beautiful. It looked really different in the movies and in real life. The building is just so magnificent.

I love New York. It's so beautiful, I had such a wonderful trip,  can't wait to go back again. :)