The main thing was that we wanted to get dressed up and go out to a nice place to eat. We decided to hit up ONE.midtown kitchen which seemed like a chic enough restaurant to fit the bill. They had complementary valet, and when we got out they opened the doors for us, which took us to a tiny, dark atrium lined with small lights on the walls. We pulled back the black velvet curtain to enter the restaurant. (I’ve included shots of the outside and one of the inside. My apologies for the blurry pictures, as I am still learning to use this camera.)
    

When we got in, they were really friendly though, which is great. The decor was quite nice and the bread! I usually don’t get excited about the free bread, but damn — you can kind of see the bread basket in the picture above – basically they had a wooden box with three types of bread. One type was the generic French bread, another was some sort of flat crispy bread, and the last was long stick-like bread. Anyway, A+ for presentation. Plus, the hummus, yum.

The food was good too. We ordered quite a bit since there were five of us (us three plus the two boys) and we each got a dessert. The entres were really good except everything had a hint of sweetness to it, which perhaps was a bit much for every single dish. However, I love that everything was a little surprising. My pork dumplings are pictured there. I assure you, I have had many a dumpling in my day, but never like that.

One of the dishes that was especially surprising was Dan’s dessert – he ordered the kit kat bar which was a chocolate confection of some sort with two ice creams on either end. The first was a peanut butter ice cream and the other was a curry ice cream. I guess I really hadn’t considered the many possible variations or uses of curry before. However, I remembered that I once had gone with a friend of mine and ordered a popcorn dish that was surprisingly good. Long story short, I decided to try combining the two and ended up with pretty yummy results. Hence, my very own Curried Popcorn recipe!

• One bag, white popcorn (e.g. little/no butter)
• Curry Powder
• Chili Powder
• Cinnamon
• Garlic Powder
• Black Pepper
• Nutmeg
• Marjoram

Instructions

Basically, just pop the popcorn and add whatever spices and seasonings you’d like. I’ve listed the ingredients in terms of what I think is the most crucial to the recipe. My recommendation would be to add the most curry and a good amount of chili powder, garlic powder, cinnamon, and black pepper. Then, add a hint of nutmeg and marjoram. Enjoy! Here’s what mine looked like if you want to get an idea of how heavily I seasoned mine.

Anyway, first day of classes were today, but I’m a bit too wiped to write about it. I think I’ll just crash for tonight, despite having a million things to do. Gute nacht.