The Epicurious Runner

I feel like I’m on a roll! I’ve been working out for 6 days straight and I feel great! This hasn’t happened in a long time and I feel like I am FINALLY getting back into the schedule of working out regularly, which is coming just in time for my Marathon Training.

I’ve been doing mostly indoor things, using hand weights and lot of abdominal exercises. Tomorrow I am planning a 2 mile run and then I’m going for a big 6 miler on Sunday morning with my friend Sandy.

This is going to be a good month because I am going to make it a good month. I can’t believe it’s already July though, kinda crazy. I’m ready to run my ass off and start gearing up for the next biggest race of my life!

I had Oatmeal Squares with a banana for breakfast, which I have declared my favorite cereal of all time, it’s so good!

This picture’s not so great because it was taken with my phone. My camera battery is dead and my really good camera is up at Joe’s house, along with everything else >:(

I don’t have much planned for this weekend for the 4th of July. We are having a Beer Tasting Party on Sunday night, but unfortunately it’s only going to be a few of us. It should be a lot of fun though and I am really looking forward to it. Don’t worry there will be a full recap on Monday.

An update on my car: it’s finally on it’s way to being fixed! YAY!!!!! I cannot wait to get it back, I miss you car. It would be a miracle and absolutely amazing if it was ready this weekend, but I doubt it. It’s going to seem like a brand new car when I finally get it back, the hood and the mirror are going to be fixed

It seems like I’ve forgotten about this poor old thing huh? Well, I have not and I do not have an excuse for not writing except for the fact that I am ALWAYS so busy.

I’ve been trying real hard to keep up with my training for my HM that is in 2 1/2 weeks, but I’ve been having trouble finding motivation. This weekend will be my last real LONG run before the race, so I better make it a good one. I am going to shoot for 10-12 miles and hopefully it won’t be 900° again like it was this past weekend. I attempted an 11 mile run this past Saturday and it was just not happening. It was impossible to battle the heat!

I’m hoping this weekend will be a lot better!

I’ve been real busy with IRLF lately, but in a good way. There are new interns writing for the site and they are all doing really great!

I’ve also been training at work, I am going to be a full time logger on the night shift. My new hours will be 6pm to 2am. I was a little bummed out at first about the hours, but now I’m over it and I have come up with a list of all the good things that they could possible bring. I honestly think I will be able to write a lot more with these hours. My mind is way more focused and relaxed in the morning than when I get home at night. The only real negative thing that does kind of suck, a lot, is that it messes up my running schedule. My main time frame will be the middle of the day when it will be the hottest and it’s going to be real hard to run in the heat. I’m sure it will all be okay and I will figure something out.

Derek has been working like crazy this past week, I’ve barely seen him at all. Most nights he doesn’t even get home until after 3am! I miss him.

This is my last free weekend for the month because the last two weekends in June I will be traveling back to NH. The weekend of theh 19th we are going to the American Craft Beer Fest. We are going with Kerri and Scott and I absolutely cannot wait! These festivals have kind of turned into a tradition for us, I’m not sure, but this is maybe the 4th year we’ve gone? It’s held in Boston and it is always such a fun time. The weekend after is back to Boston for my second half marathon!

I’ll be back soon I promise.

I leave you with a picture from my favorite restaurant…ever!

Last night was a crazy night of drunken shenanigans. The only thing I would like to share about it was the bar that we went to. We went out to this place called The Back Room Bar for the wrap party of the film that Derek was working on. It was designed like a 1920′s speakeasy and all of the beer and alcohol was served in coffee mugs or tea cups to help hide the fact that it was alcohol. My favorite part was that they served the bottles or cans of beer inside a paper bag! The bar itself was pretty awesome too, it had a good DJ and it was really comfortable.

A ridiculous picture of me with my paper bag beer. It was a really fun night but it sure did make for a rough, rough morning. I am ready for some real sleep tonight.

My friends and I had a little Easter dinner planned for tonight and I was in charge of the main course. I cooked my very first roast and I also made roasted asparagus with hollandaise sauce. The hollandaise sauce was also a first and everything came out great! Dave made scalloped potatoes and Erin made a Chocolate Cream Pie. It was a delicious dinner and there are lots of good leftovers to be enjoyed.

The roast beef was surprisingly really easy to make and I already can’t wait to make another on in the future. I followed this recipe.

This chocolate pie has inspired me to make a Coconut Cream Pie ASAP. It was so good and I absolutely love cream pies, they are my favorite!

****Don’t forget to donate to my TNT fund, all proceeds to go the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society!****

I have less than 2 months to raise $1300, please HELP ME OUT!

Steph’s Fundraising Page

Derek and I randomly decided to go to the Blind Tiger Ale house to get some wings and beer! I have been craving chicken wings for like 2 weeks now and I could not wait go. We stayed for a couple hours and ended up getting 3 beers each and two appetizers. An order of hot wings and a quesadilla. For beer, I got a

• Brew Dog Dogma, which is a Spiced Ale
• Victory Harvest Pils – German Pilsner
• Mc Neills Blonde Bombshell.

I have decided that this is my favorite bar in the city. Okay yes, I have not been to many bars at all, but this places is seriously amazing and any other bar I got to has a lot to live up to. The food there is always so good and they are all about the quality and taste. The hot wings were spectacular and totally exceeded my expectations.  The quesadilla was also surprisingly good an I was surprised with how much I enjoyed everything there. I also wrote about the Blind Tiger at Mapcidy and IReallyLikeFood (dot) com.

This happened a few days ago, but I got offered two free tickets to see “The Miracle Worker” on Broadway. All I have to do is write a review. I’m so excited, especially because it will be my first show on Broadway. Derek and I are going on the night of February 18th.

Magnolia Bakery is right down the street from Blind Tiger so we of course had to stop there on the way home. We were going to get cupcakes, but we changed our minds and ended up getting two mini cheesecakes to split. We brought them home and enjoyed them here.

Caramel Pecan and Pumpkin Cheesecake. Yum!

As I had mentioned earlier, I made Alton Brown’s Macaroni and Cheese last night for dinner. This was my first real time actually making baked macaroni and cheese. It was quite eventful, in my opinion. I had a lot of pressure from Derek also because he typically doesn’t like mac and cheese (I know, who doesn’t LIKE macaroni and cheese!?). I was really hoping he would like this one, especially because it is Alton Brown’s recipe.

Anyway, it was delicious! It had a ton of flavor and the consistency was perfect. The did not have onions in my version though, that was the only ingredient I was missing. It still tasted great without it. I am going to eat some leftovers tonight, that is certain! Here is the recipe, if you are interested. Baked Macaroni and Cheese

We paired it with a Southern Tier ‘Cherry Saison’ which we have had for probably almost 6 months.

The beer was delicious. Not at all what I had expected. I thought it would be a lot sweeter than it was. It’s actually 8% alcohol and has a very strong bitter, hoppiness to it. It went well with our meal.

For dessert, I ate a yummy peanut butter ball! These things are amazing and I must have the recipe. They are made by a friend of Derek’s family and I look forward to them every Christmas.

I gotta run, I am working on making Roquefort Cheese Balls for the New Year’s Eve Party tonight!

Today was a dreary, rainy day and I did not want to go outside at all! My plan was to go to the track over at Astoria Park to do some speed work, but! I did not want to run in the rain. I went out once to bring my friend Ryan over to the park to check out the scenery because he is planning on shooting the rest of his film there. After leaving I had no regrets for canceling my run. It was cold, rainy, and really windy and it was a good day to take off from running. I did more core work today, I actually just did it right now and it was nice and quick and simple. It may have not seemed like much, but my tummy is pretty sore already so I didn’t feel the need to go over board.

I did front and side planks, followed by some side to side ab work (as seen in this post). I also did side crunches with a weight and regular crunches.

Tomorrow WILL be my speed work day! I look forward to it actually, I quite enjoy the track since I can run without having to wait for dumb cars! It’s going to be cold tomorrow and I am dreading that, but I know once I get started I will warm up quickly.

I need to pick up a hat and gloves asap!

Yesterday I made a waffle PB&J. I had bought this package of “belgian” waffles about a week ago and we are out of  bread so I figured they would make a good sandwich.

It was good, you could tell the waffle had a lot of sugar in it though!

My food today wasn’t very exciting. I ate a cheese omelet for breakfast and I honestly can’t remember what I had for lunch or if I even at lunch! We are completely out of everything in the house, but I did realize that we have all of the ingredients to make a home made pizza. This was probably the first time I’ve ever made pizza dough from scratch. I used bread flour instead of white or wheat so the crust came out nice and thick.

The final product came out well, I did however take it out too early because it was still a little doughy. So after I took a couple bites of my piece I threw it all back in the oven for about 7 more minutes.

…and a Saranac Brown Ale

I ate three pieces of pizza and I was stuffed. Derek can have the rest : )

Derek and I headed out on a double date with our friends Kelly and Cory to The Heartland Brewery. There are 5 or 6 locations around the city and I fell upon one the other day while doing something for work. We decided to hit up the one in Union Sq.

On a side note, I’ve decided to start giving restaurant reviews, with this being my first official one.

It’s a large place with plenty of seating up and down stairs. They also hold events quite frequently, which is a plus because in my opinion it is hard to find a great food and beer place to hold any kind of event. The menu is great, the only downside is that it’s a little pricey. Even the sandwiches were $10+ which is sort of a let down for me right now because I have no job so I had to make sure I didn’t get something super expensive. Otherwise I usually don’t mind spending a little bit of money on good food.

I decided on the Pulled Pork sandwich just like the rest of the table. Yes, we all got the same thing. Before the food though, I had to figure out my beer selection. I was very happy to see that they had a sampler available. There were 6 house beers and they also had 4 or 5 seasonal selections. Of course all the beer was brewed inside the premises. I went with the sampler that included the 6 house beers + 1 seasonal selection, in which I chose the Smiling Pumpkin Ale.

It was great to try 75 % of their beer all in one sitting. I honestly can’t wait to go back to try the rest of the seasonal beer.

The house beers are in order from the first one pictured here in the bottom left hand corner then around to the right and the Pumpkin Seasonal is in the middle. My favorite was probably the pumpkin, it had a strong flavor and wasn’t too sweet. After that I enjoyed the Indian River Light second best. I couldn’t believe how much flavor it had for being a light beer.

The pulled pork sandwich was excellent! The fries were good, they were labeled as spicy fries, but really they didn’t have much flavor in the spicy department. I finished the whole thing though. I especially liked that it came with a pickle.

Because it was a little pricey…

Rating: 4 out of 5

Okay I’m a little late posting this, but what else is new right? Derek and I have been dating for 6 years since this past Wednesday, the 23rd. I can’t believe it’s been so long, time really does fly. We had an amazing anniversary. On Wednesday we had our first paid job. We helped film a live webcast of a business conference that was based on electric transporation. It was pretty interesting, but a pretty long day overall. The conference was over around 230 and after that we packed up all the equipment and ended up going out for a drink with some of the ‘business’ people who put the conference on. We went to a place called The Algonquin, which is a hotel and they had a really nice bar inside. We both had Hemingways, which was a pretty girl drink, but they were damn good. It was the suggested drink of the afternoon. The woman in charge paid for every one’s drink!

We came home, got changed and did some research on where we should go out to eat. We couldn’t find anything that really sparked our interest. We were really hoping to find a place with good food and even better beer. We decided to just stay in the area and walk around until we fell upon a good place to go. We ended up walking for a lot longer than I had expected, well what seemed a lot longer because my feet were absolutely killing me. I wore shoes that were apparently too small for my feet.

Anyways, we finally decided on this place called Sanford’s.

It was a small place and pretty dark inside, but the menu looked fantastic. They did have a great beer selection, but unfortunately nothing was on tap. It was our anniversary though and we knew we had to go all out with everything we ordered.

First up, the appetizer; it was a special for the night: Mussels

And beer, OF COURSE!

The Oktoberfest was my first beer.

The Jenlain was Derek’s first, which was REALLY GOOD! I don’t know why I didn’t order one.

The mussels were good, definitely some of the best I’ve had, but nothing has yet to live up to the mussels from the Portsmouth Brewery. I was really impressed with this place, we will definitely be going back! The atmosphere was great and the service even better. The manager/owner came over to our table towards the end of the night and introduced himself to us. We had a good little chat and he said that he is a wine guy and his brother is the beer guy  (They also have a HUGE selection of wine). He gave us his card and when the waitress gave us our check she said  ’The dessert is on Chris (the owners name), Welcome to Sanfords. We couldn’t believe he gave us free dessert. We were totally high rollers that night!

Here is the rest of our food!

This is what I ordered, a medium steak with cajun fries.

Derek got this mountain of pork that literally fell of the bone and was so delicious with garlic mashed potatoes. He always manages to order the most extravagant thing on the menu.

Derek and I both ordered this beer for our second round. It won the ‘Best Beer in the World’ award from Beer Advocate in 2008. GOOD!

A Belgian style waffle with pecans, bananas, and caramel. YUM! This is what we got for free.

We split this bottle for our dessert beverage. It was really good, but I was STUFFED by the time we left.

It was a great anniversary! I love Derek so much and we really are perfect for each other!

Oh yeah, we FINALLY have internet in our apartment so you can expect a lot more posts more frequently! I’m going out to the Heartland Brewery tonight in Union Sq. Be back later with a recap on that.

Edited to add:

Because there was absolutely no beer on tap:

Rating: 4 out of 5

Okay I know I haven’t posted in like FOREVER, but I’m sorry I’ve been extremely busy and I don’t have internet in the new place yet! Once I get internet, I promise I will post at least once a day.

So, like I said I’ve been busy, but lets start from the top. The big move was quite successful. We arrived at our new apt at around 330 or 4 on Saturday evening. All of our friends were there to help  us unload, which was awesome! It was done in no time and I appreciate everyone’s help SO much! Our room was filled with boxes and we had a lot of work to do.

My dad and nephew, Cody stayed the night. We unpacked, drank beer and ate really good pizza.

We are yet to be unpacked 100%, but we are pretty damn close. There are only 3 boxes left in the bedroom, filled with ‘junky’ type stuff. Derek and I still had to go back to our old apartment to clean it out. We ran out of time on Friday because packing up the trailer literally took all day. We made it a one day trip and went back to Manchester this past Friday to wrap things up. We literally drove back, cleaned for 3 1/2 hours, then drove back home to NY. It was a long day, but I was glad to get it done and keep the weekend free to finish unpacking and cleaning.

I’ve been interning at my roommate Matt’s work for the past week. I started the first Monday I was here. It’s going well. I have learned a lot! I was basically just shoved out into Manhattan to find my way on my own. I feel very familiar with things now and I am not so scared of the subway anymore. I have to deliver things, pick things up and I’ve been doing some basic office work. I’m really itching to get a paid job though, or at least an internship that has something to do with Art. I would rather be working for free in an area that I want to be working in in the future.

I have someone to run with now and I’m so excited! I’ve already gone on three runs and I love it. Matt didn’t run much before, but he impressed me with his ability to run the 4 miles home from work in one shot. We ran home from work twice and then went for a 5 mile run yesterday. It’s nice that I will be able to keep up with my running here, I was slightly worried about it. I’ve also been eating really well, which surprises me because I figured I would be stressed out and eating anything and everything.

I get 10 bucks everyday for lunch and I’ve been trying new places every day. I work in Rockefellar so there are a lot of places just in the concourse on the bottom floor.

Here are some of my eats:

Roasted Eggplant Sandwich from ‘Wichcraft

Three Cheese Quesadilla and Orange flavored Green Tea from the Beach Street Eatery.

This past Saturday night we all went out the the Beer Garden and it was awesome, okay I may have expected something a little different, but I had a really good time. They definitely had good beer on tap and they served HUGE glasses of beer. The options were a half liter, a liter, or a pitcher. I had a half liter and a liter. I can’t remember what the first beer was that I had, but the second I believe was a local beer called Capt. Lawrence Freshchester (pictured).

Derek and I with our new roommate Matt.

Derek and I absolutely LOVE it here and we are already comfortable and feel like we are really living here now.

Coming Soon: Pictures of the apartment!

I had such a great weekend! I went out on Friday night with some co-workers to Jillians, drank lots of beer and at lots of nachos and didn’t have to to pay for anything! The best part was just being able to hang out with my awesome friends from work. I will truly miss them.

Saturday was the big party day. Kerri and Scott threw us an AMAZING party at their condo! I had a great time and I think everyone there did also.  A lot of great people showed up and I can’t wait to hang out with them all again. By the end of the night it did get a little out of control, but seriously the party was a hit! The people there were awesome, the food was fantastic and the beer was even better! There were three different beers on tap, a dark amber ale and a cream ale that Scott brewed and Kerri’s first homebrew, a watermelon ale. Yum! They were all so good and I think we all drank 10 gallons of beer that night, haha. I know that is a short recap, but I just want to say THANK YOU  to my sister and Scott, the party was way better than I could’ve ever imagined, I love you guys and will miss you SO MUCH! I will now leave you with some of the best pictures of the night.

I still have two more going away gatherings to go to. One on Friday night with more co-workers and then a family one on Sunday. So busy!