The Jersey Shore chronicles
Happy Fourth of July from my alternate life, and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! If you’re new, check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Crumb cake with jam at the Shore
Only in your dreams
Every Fourth of July, I escape the stench of rotting garbage that wafts through New York City and spend a weekend living my alternate life at the Shore*. I wake up every morning in an impeccably decorated shabby-chic beach house near the beach, the AC colder than it can ever be in a third-floor walkup. We gather round and fry eggs and pork roll, and my adoptive mother, who is smiling and fit, and loves hugs and making handmade Halloween costumes, pulls a fresh crumb cake from out of the oven. The smell of caramelized sugar and melting butter perfumes the air; the children, who are all blonde and tan with names like Suzy and Mary Lou gather round the table to eat. The crumb cake, is, of course, more crumb than cake, because this is my fantasy life and my fantasy life doesn’t cut corners. I would link you a recipe, but I don’t have one; it exists only in my dreams, which are realized but once a year.
*The Jersey Shore. There is no other Shore.
Cookie dough and cherry vanilla ice cream at Hoffmans Ice Cream
800 Richmond Ave, Point Pleasant, NJ 08742 (Several locations)
In my alternate life, every night after dinner, which we eat outdoors on benches off colorful paper placemats, we go to the ice cream store. In my alternate life there are no consequences for consuming dairy with wild abandon. There are only flavors of ice cream to concern ourselves with. I spend a long time thinking in line, and I decide to go with cookie dough, a classic, plus cherry vanilla, which sounds too Norman Rockwell to resist. Both flavors are wonderful, the non-dough part of the cookie dough ice cream is some carmelly-brown sugar flavor. The cherry vanilla ice cream is dotted with big halves of frozen bing cherries, nothing like the freezer-burned pints of cherry garcia Ben and Jerry’s I have in my normal life. A dog with three legs runs into the ice cream shop at all the children cheer. I am not making this up.
Patriotic cookies from Sand and Sugar
You can order these online
In my alternate life, after we eat freshly grilled hamburgers for dinner with grilled corn and beer and rose, we have impeccably iced sugar cookies in the shape of the letters “U-S-A” and fireworks, with hand-painted streaks of color on top. Yes, they are homemade. You all probably think I’m making this shit up because it’s too perfect, but I’m not, because you can order these cookies yourself here, by following Sand and Sugar on Instagram.
Key lime La Croix at the Shore
You can probably get this at Target
My alternate life exists beyond the realm of self-hating millennial hipsterdom, because it is too wholesome. So what I am saying here is that I drank half a dozen cans of La Croix without being a douchebag. I drank it simply because it was so sunny outside that I was parched. And also because key lime La Croix, which I’d never had before, is simply the best flavor of La Croix I’ve ever tried. It tastes like key lime pie, almost, and I love it. Like all things which I love intensely at first site, I will probably never lay my hands on it again, not in my normal life. But you can, if you’re less melodramatic.
Mini salmon lunch box at Woorijip
12 W 32nd St, New York, NY 10001 (There is only one)
Woorijip is a welcome home for weary travelers leaving Penn Station. I am one of them, arriving with a slight headache, sand in my shoes, and a backpack sweat stain on my back. Already the magic of the Shore is fading away; I’m covered in errant sunscreen and reminded of my 99 problems plus one. Thankfully, Woorijip is here for me, because the only possible thing that can cheer me up at this moment is what stands before my eyes: Rows of plastic containers labeled “mini lunch box.” Mini anything is one of my favorite things, and the fact that it’s under six dollars each is my other favorite thing, because I am small and cheap frugal. Also, the mini salmon lunch box came with the purple Korean multigrain sticky rice, which is my favorite rice outside of this one, at no extra charge.
See you next week,
Alternate Soph