Day 330/365 - Good Stuff

I met up with Jenn and Erin for lunch at Good Stuff Eatery on Capitol Hill today. Good Stuff is a gourmet burger joint owned by "Top Chef" alumnus Spike Mendelsohn. We'd planned on lunching at Sonoma, but it turned out they were closed for the week (?!) so we fell back on Good Stuff.

Erin and Jenn were nice enough to wait for me, even though I was 15 minutes late (sorry!) due entirely to poor planning on my part (I didn't think the line at the bank would move that slooooooooowly). I hate being late. It's just rude and inconsiderate.

I'd been to Good Stuff a couple times before and had tried their patty melt and a bbq bacon cheeseburger. Both were yummy. This time I opted for the turkey burger with a dollop of old bay mayo, a small order of rosemary fries, and a strawberry shake. Yum on all counts. (Note for next time, try the toasted marshmallow shake)

The company today was even better than the food. The three of us held forth on such varied subjects of discourse as the inanity of "Twilight" and its fans, the fact that Nicholas Sparks is just plain mean, Jenn's decade long sabbatical from eating pork (which she'd broken just in time to get bacon on her burger today), melon soup, and the blasphemous heathens who are the new owners of Julia Child's old house in Massachussetts.

Good stuff, indeed.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 293/365 - World's Coolest Lunchbag

That's my badass, pirate-themed, insulated vinyl lunchbag ($10 at Target) framed inside a gussied up old police call box. I set up this shot today on my way over to the U.S. Botanic Garden Conservatory for lunch.

It was pretty cool sitting at tree-top level in the rainforest while I ate my lunch and read my book. A bit on the humid side, however. I really should've gone over there for lunch when I was reading all about the 'green hell' of the Amazonian rainforest in The Lost City of Z. That would have lent it the perfect atmosphere.

Although, come to think of it, there is a desert room at the Conservatory that would go well with the book set in Egypt that I'm reading now. Dang, I should've thought to sit down there today instead of trekking up to the gantry overlooking the jungle section.

I love themed activities.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 255/365 - Some Dim Sum

Met up with some old friends for a dim sum lunch today. We all started work at the agency at around the same time and they put us all together in a single room in the basement. We were only supposed to be there for a couple months while they built out a new suite of offices, but it wound up taking just over a year for the new space to be ready.

We got to be pretty tight during that year. We went out for a lot of happy hours and went a bunch of other places together. In the ten (OMG, ten!) years since we all met though, two of us have gotten married and had kids, one left to work at the FBI, and one moved on to become district counsel in Baltimore -- so we don't see each other much anymore.

Once a year we try to get together for lunch somewhere and this year it was dim sum at Good Fortune in Rockville. It was yummy and I ate loads, though I couldn't tell you what half of the dishes I ate were. I can tell you that I'm not a big fan of the turnip cake, however. It tastes pretty much like it sounds.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 191/365 - Lunch al Fresco

Today was a perfect weather day in DC, which meant I absolutely had to have lunch somewhere with sidewalk seating. I opted to walk to a little Thai place on Capitol Hill and had the red curry duck, coconut ice cream, and two Thai iced teas. I love Thai iced tea.

So, to recap -- Friday afternoon, Thai food, sunshine, 70 degrees, interesting book, and hot Hill staffers strolling by. Yeah, I've had worse lunches.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 155/365 - Hello to an Old Friend

This was one of my favorite lunches as a kid -- a peanut butter and jelly sammich with cheese curls and chocolate milk. It had been a long time since I'd had it, so when I was at the store earlier this week I picked up the fixin's. It was just as good as I remembered. If I was a condemned man, this might be on the menu for my last meal.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 75/365 - Lunch at Central

I met my friend Verónica at Michel Richard's Central for lunch today. Both of us had been wanting to try out the food there for a while. It had been some time since we'd gotten together. She had been away at a really prestigious fellowship program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, but now she's back in DC. We'd been trying to meet up for lunch for a couple weeks now but kept running into scheduling issues until today.

I'd been to Michel Richard's Citronelle once before and loved it, so I was really looking forward to dining at Central. Michel Richard is the top chef in DC and he's famous for his culinary masquerades. He'll make a dish that looks like it's one thing, and then you taste it and find out it's something else entirely. My favorite example of this is the lobster cole slaw at Citronelle. It looks just like regular cole slaw, but it's actually made with shredded lobster meat rather than shredded cabbage and it's ludicrously delicious.

Central is the casual counterpart to the more upscale Citronelle. It's a rather smallish space, but it doesn't feel cramped or crowded. It's well-appointed and has the perfect level of noisiness so you can talk without having to raise your voice, but still you don't feel as though the people at the table next to you are going to hear everything you say. And the food is like diamonds from heaven.

For my appetizer today I went with the mushroom risotto, only it wasn't really risotto. It was actually made with pasta pearls as opposed to arborio rice. It tasted like cheesy mushroom tapioca and it was heavenly, absolutely perfect on a cold day like today. Then for my entree I had the fried chicken, which actually was fried chicken. It wasn't like the standard conception of fried chicken, however. This was the fried chicken of the gods. The breading was very light and crisp and it was served over mashed potatoes with a mustard cream sauce and a small mixed green salad on the side. This was comfort food as Michelangelo would have made it had he been a chef rather than a painter.

Verónica opted for the French onion soup as a starter. They brought it out in a little pot and it was bubbling like a vat of magma. It was good, but extremely hot and somewhat difficult to eat. For her entree she ordered the lobster burger, which came with fries on the side. It was very yummy and the fries were perfectly done.

We were both too stuffed for dessert, but that's okay. Now I have an excuse to go back just for dessert and coffee.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 9/365 - Go Speed Racer, Go!

Most weekdays I eat lunch at my desk. Normally I have some kind of wrap (today it was turkey & swiss), veggies (today it was grape tomatoes), and fruit (forgot to pack fruit in my lunch bag today -- bummer). When the weather gets colder I switch from wraps to soup. Eating pretty much the same thing every day has never really bothered me.

During my lunch break, I usually either read, do the crossword puzzle, or watch a DVD of a tv show or old cliffhanger serial on my PC. Today I watched Speed Racer. It was the episode where he had to go up against the Mammoth Car (an all-time classic).

Speed Racer is my favorite cartoon of all time and possibly even my favorite tv show (although Northern Exposure and Jonny Quest are neck-and-neck for a close second place). The movie they released this year sucked tremendously, but the old Speed Racer tv show is tough to beat.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)