Day #23- Thursday

Thursday we got up early and went to the Bronx to the New York Botanical Garden. They have a huge conservatory there that I wanted to go to. As it was all the way up in the Bronx, it took us about an hour via subway to get there. Then we had to walk about 10 blocks from the subway station to the garden. When we finally got there, I was so excited to see the Conservatory. We had gone to the Washington DC National Conservatory in April, and I absolutely LOVED that, so I had high hopes for this one.

When we walked up to the steps of the Conservatory, I noticed tons of potted plants all around, so many that the doors to the entrance were covered up. Then I saw a sign that said "Closed for Renovations until Nov 19th."

POO! What a let down! All that way up there for nothing!

But as luck would have it, there was a cooking demonstration that was just getting ready to start. So we got a front row seat, and watched the executive chef from the Braeburn restaurant show us how to make an heirloom tomato salad.

I learned some neat tricks. For example, he taught us how to make tomato water.

He said to slice up some heirloom tomatoes. Then put them in a food processor, add a couple tablespoons of water, and blend them just enough so that they are still chunky. then you take this mixture and put it in a cheesecloth and strain it over a bowl for a whole day. Then on the next day, take all the water that has strained out into the bowl and put it in a canister with a lid. He said that this can be frozen, so if you want to make something later in the year that calls for tomatoes, you can use some of this tomato water, and it will have that fresh summer heirloom tomato taste. Isn't that awesome? Winter tomatoes at the grocery are a joke. I'm not even sure you can call them tomatoes, they are so mealy and flavorless. So I am definitely going to do this when I get home! I can't wait to add tomato water to my pasta dishes and chili this fall and winter! Mmm!

After the awesome demonstration, we walked around the Botanical Gardens. Here is the closed Conservatory:

Next to this were several gardens. One was Martha Stewart's herb garden, which was very cool!

We also saw Michael Psilakis (another famous Chef) herb garden:

We read on this sign that he owns a Greek restaurant in Manhattan called Kefi. So we called Kefi right then and made reservations for that night.

Here is one of our favorites, Mario Batali. His herb garden was very cool also. We read about how to make a raised bed garden... I think we will attempt to do this at home next year.

Here are some more photos of our day at the Botanical Garden:

After a couple hours there, we got back on the subway for our hour long commute back to the city. We went straight to our dinner at Kefi. It was phenomenal!We started off with an appetizer of warm pita bread with a spread of olives, feta, tomatoes, anchovies, capers, and peppers.

The feta and olive mixture was warm as well as the pita bread. This would have been amazing, had they not thrown in a handful of tiny chopped red onions. YUCK! I hate when restaurants do that. If onions are in the mixture, then the menu needs to say that. Since the onions were chopped so finely, it was too hard to pick them all out, so I only ate a teeny bit of this. Stupid onions, ruining everything! Yuck yuck yuck.

Scott's entree was very good. He got the sheep's milk dumplings with tomato, pine nuts, and spicy lamb sausage:

The dumplings were warm, chewy and cheesy (very similar to gnocchi), the sauce was rich and tomatoey, and the lamb had just the right amount of spiciness... delicious!

I had the Branzino, which is Mediterranean Sea Bass:

This was some of the most delicious, buttery, flavorful fish I have ever eaten. It was lightly grilled, and served with small potatoes, olives, and tomatoes.

Overall, I'd give this restaurant a 9/10 (the only reason it wasn't a 10/10 is because of the onions in the pita dish). It was absolutely fantastic. Greek food is our favorite, so this restaurant was one of the best we'd been to so far in our trip. Good job, Michael Psilakis!

After dinner, we had tickets to see South Pacific.

The show was ok. I had really high expectations though as this show has been sold out every single night for the past 3 times we've been to NYC. So I thought that it would be absolutely unbelievable. But, it was ok. I'd give it a 6/10. In hindsight, I wish we'd seen Wicked or Phantom again. We've seen those and they were both wonderful. Oh well! All in all, we had a fabulous day!