quinn's place

i'm SO happy to have visited new york city during the holidays last month. i just love love love it. four days there are never enough!

i went with my friend whitney! we went to nyc together last october and wanted to come back around christmas time. and that we did.

^^^ this photo above was the view from the roof of our airbnb. it was kind of cold while we were there, but we still went up here in the mornings for coffee & views. loved ittttt.

the airbnb we stayed at was all-around fab. great location in chelsea in a nice building, with everything we needed for a few days.

first meal of the trip: big salads from sweetgreen. so fresh & hearty! and the bevs they have there are super refreshing. nothing makes you feel more disgusting and slimy than a long ride on an airplane, train, and subway, so these salads were the perfect dinner choice that night.

mine had little bites of falafel and hummus atop. whit's was some sort of delish bowl of harvest. sweet potatoes & apples i think?

^^^ ca-uuute festive liquor store. ca-uuute friend waiting for da sub. ^^^

breakfast at bubby's! whenever i see this pic on my phone i want that blueberry pancake back, stat.

^^^ at tom's aka monk's from seinfeld :)

(i'm also watching seinfeld as i type this. #dweeeeeb.)

aMaAaAaAziNg cookies from levain bakery! holy wow. really good. howeeeevvverrr...i DO think that "THE COOKIE" from metropolitan market in the seattle area gives the levain chocolate chip a run for its money. in fact, i think i like THE COOKIE more, which is a very bold statement! if you have had THE COOKIE from met market, you know. how do they do it? i don't make this stuff up. truly. the BEST COOKIE EVA.

traveling is super exhausting. and a trip like this where you have to squeeeeeze all the new york city things into less than 4 days is a lot of work, physically. we basically didn't stop moving, walking, carrying, running across streets, riding subways, walking, eating, drinking, walking...the entire time. even though it was a vacation and we loved every minute of it, its just not "relaxing," per se. whit and i talked about how the most "relaxing" part of this entire trip was sitting on this sunny bench on a quiet street in harlem eating our cookies. HA!

new york's most exciting hotel experience.

alsoooo, yaaassss to fulfilling all of my home alone 2 dreams during this trip :)

^^^ must say... we were disappointed by the tree at rockefeller center. i guess all the movies and tv stuff we've seen throughout our lives make the tree seem GINORMOUS. i mean, yeah, its a bigass tree. but...not as big as we'd built up in our minds. glad we got to see it though! i was definitely excited about it. maybe we should have gone to see it at night instead.

we went to this secret bar called little branch that took us forever to find. if you blink, you will miss it! there are so many fun restaurants & bars in this town...it's really the best.

the butcher's daughter. sooo cute. great healthy food, too.

we decided that there are so many more "healthier" food options throughout new york city compared to seattle. i do wish there were more places here with lighter food options that you don't need to go across town to get to or whatever. they exist, but in nyc they are sprinkled all over!

seeing the 9/11 memorial for the first time was pretty intense and emotional! i didn't really know what the memorial looked like before we got there but once i saw it, wow. i didn't take many photos besides this one ^^^ on the right. seeing that gaping hole in the ground where one of the towers once stood was very overwhelming and insane. it is definitely worth spending time at if you're in the financial district or near the world trade center.

the oculus mall next to the world trade center. crazy place.

whitney & i got the chance to go tour the bon appétit magazine test kitchen in the world trade center! it was soo cool!

i felt very official getting my photo taken and them sending us up the fancy elevators. it would be a wild place to go to work every single day, just from the security perspective.

my manager at work got me connected with someone who works here in the test kitchen for a quick tour (thanks adrian & amelia!). i'm a lover/avid reader of bon appétit, so it was awesome to see how the cooking and photography portion of the magazine is created!

they have amaaazing views of the city from their floor, it was nuts. you could even see the statue of liberty. would be such an amazing place to work, in many ways!

it was a beautiful afternoon, so we walked across the brooklyn bridge!

this was really cool with different views of the city. it takes about 20-30 minutes to walk across, assuming everyone else is moseying along taking 87 photos of the same thing (me!).

DUMBO! down under the manhattan bridge overpass.

oh yayayyayy. this was one of our only solid plans we had for the trip. an evening at eataly in the flatiron district, and a neapolitan style pizza making class!

baita is this cozy winter wonderland at la birreria restaurant on the roof of eataly!

pizza class!

^^^that appetizer was super delicious. it was like a beet purée with pesto, burrata, and that fluffy potato + cheese bread (that's at least how i remember it). it was gooooooood.

our instructors were super italian, which made the class all the more fun. we learned a lot about what makes a neapolitan pizza actually legit. hint: simplicity!

the class was a little expensive, but it was like our birthday gift to each other since we both had our birthdays in december. it was definitely a fun life experience type of gift to take an italian pizza class from real italians in the heart of new york city at christmas time.

in addition to making our own individual pizzas and getting a pound of pizza dough to bring home (one of the weirder things i've been stopped at airport security for - next to the time i brought a paper coffee cup full of sea shells wrapped in kleenex through security in north carolina and they made me unwrap each shell individually...), they fed us a lot of amazing pizza, too!

a four cheese + gorgonzola & basil, a fancy new import of italian prosciutto + arugula & shaved parmesan, and classic margherita pizza - tomato sauce, mozzarella, & basil.

all were amazingly delicious, oh man. beer & wine tastings were also a part of the class. at the end, he made these nutella + cinnamon sugar treats with the leftover pizza dough, which were incredible. we definitely ate to our heart's content that evening. it was most delightful & fun!

cue SATC theme song.

we actually just happened to be walking by carrie's street on our way to breakfast, so we had to stop by her apartment and see what she, samantha, miranda, & charlotte were up to. (in my head, they're my real friends, it's cooooo.)

but really, sex & the city stands the test of time (i guess it wasn't that long ago, but seems like it! re-watch it and laugh at all the scenes where they're just figuring out e-mail and this thing called "google."). bitches still be crazy for it. some french chicks took this photo of us while they were also here to paparazzi carrie's abode.

festive, festive, festive.

breakfast at jack's wife freda!

i had the green shakshuka and whit got this supa fresh mediterranean breakfast salad with eggs, avo & pita. so much flavor!

the bright green hot sauce was amazing. must re-create. and how cute are their sugar packets?^

into the plaza for some festive christmas tree scoping.

sidenote: earlier in the trip we were getting out of an elevator at the ritz carlton after using their fine facilities, and our gal jennifer aniston was walking in! hiiiiii jen! whitney died a little bit since she is her all-time fav. she was very pretty and very small in real life.

beautiful!!!

afternoon at the metropolitan museum of art! such a massive building.

i wanna go back to this very rooftop in the summa summa summa tiiiime. or maybe spring spring spring tiiiime or whenever its not hot & humid as hell in new york.

again, new york, i love you. i will be back.

all photos taken on my iphone 6.

heyhey!! i took a little trip to hawaii recently with peter and a couple of friends. it was the best of times. you can't really go wrong in a hawaiian paradise!

^^^ just LOOK. so beautiful.

also...i feel like i fell off the earth on my bloggity and haven't posted since october - and that makes me sad! i have been SO busy, and as far as making new recipes goes....its freaking dark out all the time right now. i've been gone or busy for several weekends in a row and i'm excited to get back in the kitchen in the daylight of the weekend and cook baby cook & bake baby bake.

i've been on a few trips recently and have a major backlog of photos to post - its always really cathartic for me to get all these photos organized and out into the world. i definitely feel a mental back up when i have taken tons of photos that don't see the light of day!

so let me start with our week in MAUI, HAWAII!!

my best friend's ma & pa let us rent their condo in maui for the week, and it was a dream. shoutout D & B!! above is the view from the condo. 👌

we stayed on the west side of maui, just north of lahaina. it was nice to be so close to a cute little beach town full of restaurants and shops. ^^^ this is the aftermath of our delicious brekky at longhi's in lahaina. it has a view of the ocean and a cute airy ambiance with wide open windows.

one morning we got up around 2am to drive to the haleakala volcano to watch the sunrise. it was quite the life experience. none of us knew we were going to do this when packing for this trip...so we were pretty unprepared for the cold. so much cold.....

we got up to the summit parking lot around 4:30am and still had a bit of time before the sun came up. the parking lots get full, so you have to get there this early. we just slept in the car for a little bit and then walked up to the observatory area to freeze our faces off for an hour or so.

^^^you can see in the top photo of peter and me how miiiiiserable we are. it was SOOO cold. we even asked the locals the day before, "would you say its reeeeally cold...or is it just like kinda cold? i mean, we're from seattle soooooo..." thinking we were macho tough shit on the cold handling front. they were like, "yeah its really cold." um yeah. they right. it is FREEZING COLD, PEOPLE. pack your parkas and blankets if you intend to go up here for sunrise. this was also in november, so i don't know if the temperature changes at other times of the year.

we wore beach towels as scarves.

as soon as the sun came up...so much happier! even feeling one ray of sunshine on my face was amazing. but the view was beautiful, and so cool to be up above the clouds.

i would have liked to be up here for sunset. next time!! 😉

^^^ defrosting ourselves and checking out the wild cows as we drove back down the volcano.

nakalele blowhole! we walked a bit all over the hillside there where it was SO windy. it was an amazing view of the coastline, though! also, roadside coconuts from a local called moe!

group selfieeeee. not sure where i pulled my high school status backwards peace sign out from...haven't done that in years. ha! but a fun group pic nonetheless!!

we drove around to several different beaches all over the place. each of them were b e a u timus!

^^^ tacos at coconut's fish cafe in kihei (yummooo!), wow wow lemonade (double yummm & so refreshing!), shave ice at down the hatch in lahaina (also yummm! but mine was supposed to have booze and definitely did not. wahh.)!

we had so much fun at maui brewing in kihei! note the large scale connect 4 game in the background. so cool! that pink bev was a delicious boozy hibiscus kombucha. yum yum.

they also had live music and a woodfire pizza truck out front. i was ready to move in.

setting off on the road to hana! we went the reverse way that most people go and we think it was ideal because we didn't run into too many crowds along the way. head south driving counterclockwise along the road instead of heading east from the top of the island down and around clockwise. you also get the rougher, dryer parts of the road out of the way first.

into the bamboo forest we gooo....

bamboo forest was so cool!! definitely worth the time and the less than 2 mile hike/easy walk up. the sound of the bamboo clanking together in the breeze was pretty magical, too.

getting a bit sweaty on our walk was a-ok since we were planning to go for a dip in the seven sacred pools...

thanks, road to hana! you could definitely camp somewhere if you're up for it and spend more than one day exploring all there is to see along the road. there are a zillion adorable local island food stops like ice cream, pizza, banana bread, fruit stands, etc.

we stopped in paia for pizza and to chill after our longgg car ride around the island. ^^^this mai tai from charley's saloon in paia was the BEST one i had by far. i only actually had a few mai tais on our trip, but this one was just so so delicious.

^^^ lots of beach times and our ford explorer rental with all our day trippin' beach gear exploding out the back :) also pog and aloha maid and hawaiian sun bevs are what island vacation dreams are made of.

^^^ we had some amazing local fruit during the trip and also these smoothie acai bowls one morning. so refreshing.

^^^ can't forget hawaiian plate lunches. pete's favorite. the plate lunch photo above was from ono kau kau just north of lahaina. it was pretty darn good in my opinion! and i get tired of eating plate lunches like this after one day. so, bravo!

we were reaaally sad we didn't make it to star noodle in lahaina. looked so gooood and we've heard so much about it. this is why you need 10 days or 2 weeks in hawaii instead of just 1.😉

i loved kohola brewing in lahaina and was really impressed with all of their beers!! definitely check this place out if you're a beer drinker traveling to maui. my favorite was the 'talk story' pale ale. you go, kohola!