Stress pasta time 🍝
drown me in a blanket of hot carbs
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, let’s eat some stress carbs. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Rigatoni with butternut squash and sausage from San Marzano
117 2nd Ave, New York, NY 10003
Is it the holidays yet? And is my story out yet? Every morning I wake up with these two questions burning in my mind, and let me tell you, it will all be out soon, or so help me God. Until then, I will continue to wreak havoc on my digestive system (and my personal life, advance apologies) by drinking cups of milky coffee and Seamless-ing pasta coated in butter and other good things. Thankfully, New York is a great city to have a stress breakdown in, because it’s literally a city made of stress and it’s pretty much the best place in the world to get takeout in. Case in point: This pasta, which arrived miraculously al-dente even after a 45 minute delivery time. San Marzano (which I’ve never been to in person) has a create-your-own pasta menu and I went with rigatoni (because I had a craving for tube pasta and tube pasta ONLY), coated in a super-silky buttery white wine and sage sauce with sausage and chunks of butternut. It was very, very good at damping out some of the stress.
Maccheroni al Ferretto alla Norma con Ricotta Salata at Piccola Cucina
184 Prince St, New York, NY 10012
I am going to tell you about something I cherish and keep hidden. But after I tell it to you, you’ll have to go up a mountain, find a tree, carve a hole into it, whisper the secret in the hole, and patch it up with mud, so that it can die there forever. A little dramatic? Me? Never. Anyways, it’s really more of an open secret (or love), which is that for $11 (and tip) you can get some of the best pasta in New York, and for even more 🤯 you can order it for takeout.* All the lunch special pasta as Piccola are excellent (I often order the alle sarde), but the only vegetarian option might also be the best one. The bouncy-chewy short twists of pasta are coated in some kind of bright pink-red tomato sauce (it must have cheese or something in it, so umami and creamy it is), little bits of eggplant, and a light showering of ricotta salata on top. The eggplant must be roasted, the little chunks are so flavorful. The first day, it was sublime for a desk lunch, and no, it wasn’t as good for dinner on the third day, reheated and with the addition of some garlicky spinach, but really, are any of us as good on the third day?
*Have I already written about this? Sorry if I have. This newsletter only works in one direction, which is forward, and hardly ever looks back.
Tokyo supergreens salad at Just Salad
325 Hudson St, New York, NY 10013 and a bunch of other locations.
This is a good salad to eat when you’re bored because it takes a full solid hour to chew through it. It’s also a good salad to order for someone who feels like there’s never quite enough salad in the bowl, for the same reasons. The taste isn’t bad either, although you better damn like cruciferous vegetables. There’s kale, raw sliced broccoli, carrots, almonds and a pretty good tofu mixed in (the tofu is warm). Anyways. This is a review of a “healthy” salad from a chain salad restaurant what did you expect.
Cafe au lait donut at Dough Doughnuts
Various locations; you can also get it at select Whole Foods
At the beginning of the week, my co-worker triumphantly announced that she had developed an aversion to sugar over the course of a week-long vacation. By the end of the week, she was revelling in these donuts from Dough. I’m not saying these donuts can cure your broken sweet tooth, but I am saying they are very, very good. I don’t have enough words to describe it because I’m short on brain juice this week, but something about how donuts are so sublime because they’re a mix of salty and greasy and fatty and sweet. Oh, and they’re glazed (but never too thickly!) and topped with a smattering of chopped pecans. Sure, they’re a little on the $teep side, but they’re also giant and very well made and we shared one donut amongst our entire team so there’s plenty to go around.
Colombia Supremo beans from Trader Joe’s
Your local neighborhood Trader Joe’s
Two weeks before a deadline is when I officially throw my “a coffee a week” guidelines completely out of the window (of the 13th floor office building). At 4PM, I was considering buying a nice fancy latte and then decided it was a more economical choice to buy a whole damn canister of beans from Trader Joe’s for about the same price (if not even less, since Fancy Milks slap another dollar on top of the five-dollar latte). These beans really impressed me. They have that fancy-coffee coffee bean taste (aka they don’t have the shit roasted out of them), and are a nice medium roast. A pretty solid poor man’s Stumptown.
P.S. How the heck do you get your soy milk not to curdle in your coffee? I have tried warming up the soy milk separately for about 30 seconds in the microwave before mixing it in, but alas, it still got grainy. Pls send advice.
Ciao,
Soph