April 2 was one of the first pleasant days New York saw this spring, and there were about 10 people queued up outside when we found the almost unmarked storefront on Smith Street in Cobble Hill. It was just shy of 6 p.m., just before Battersby opened for the night. Chefs and servers paced inside, [...]
Some people go to church on Sundays. They file into pews, thumb through their Bibles, tunelessly mumble their hymns, confess their sins, partake of the body of Christ, and drone their way sleepily through the Lord’s Prayer. Whatever and ever, amen. I worship at the altar of bacon and Bloody Marys. I visit a new [...]
Hi. Hello. It’s Friday. Also, it’s Tim Sarrantonio’s birthday. Happy birthday, Tim. Tim — not the Tim that was my boyfriend but one who is friends with another guy who used to be my boyfriend (and this is where I stop talking about me) — turns 30 years old today. My gift to him: writing [...]
In honor of the 2012 Chicago Restaurants and Nightlife Survey, Zagat reached out to me to be part of the first-ever Zagat Chicago Blog Hop. The assignment: Post about a special night out in Chicago. So here’s the skinny, straight from the fat kid herself. I was a Yelper once. I Yelped a lot. Yelp was the [...]
The air in my apartment is layered with scents of autumn rapidly collapsing and fading to winter: dry, stale heat bangs out of radiators that have been sleeping since April; leaves fallen from the tree outside have gathered in damp gutters and under car wheels, decomposing with a familiar fragrance I’ve never been able to [...]
Thank you to P&G’s Have You Tried This Yet? program and Kroger for sponsoring my writing about trying new things and breaking out of my everyday routine. Click here to find great savings on high-performing P&G products at a Kroger store near you. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which [...]
Do you live in Chicago? Wanna hang out? Well, if you’re free on Monday and can write a haiku, it’s totally possible: I Wish Lessons let me put together a contest to give away a free entry ($50 value! BALLER!) to the March 7 sushi basics class at Trace. That’s right: I will go to [...]
So, in addition to all the other stuff I do, I also write about food once a month on a little blog called DishKebab, which is run by the Rewards Network. They pay me. It’s neat. There’s an archive of them on my site, with links! It’s up there, under the Food heading. This month’s [...]
No, Weight Watchers, I’m not struggling with weight gain. Real talk: I’m struggling with just plain hating myself right about now. I spent six days of the last week trying not to kill myself, much less eat my weight in pizza (5 points) and fried chicken (11 points). The only exercise I got was running [...]
The alarm went off at 5:55 a.m. I groaned as four chords assaulted my ears over and over again for two minutes before I finally fumbled for my iPhone on the night table to turn it off. There’s something just gross about a happy little song heralding the end of such a blissful thing as [...]