Lower East Side treats

After brunch, we headed to Essex Market only to find it closed today. Bleck! Guess I've never sauntered around LES on Sundays. No Roni-Sue chocolate covered bacon. Maybe that's a good thing for my arteries and waistline.

Kept moving west on Rivington past adult treats at Babes in Toyland (Seattle has a store, too!) to indulge the inner-kid at the best candy story ever - Economy Candy. This is really becoming an addiction and I need to seek some help or intervention. Luckily everything I bought today, except for sour apple and cherry gum, was for my nieces and nephews. L didn't buy anything - wtf?!

After the movie, I headed to Russ & Daughters with J. He wanted to pick up some lox. Since I was there, I might as well buy some Norwegian, and some gravlox. What's the difference? As their website describes, "[g]ravlax is an age-old Scandinavian specialty of salmon cured and coated in a delicate brine of salt, sugar, dill, and other secret ingredients" and Norwegian is "[a] lovely balance of smoke and salt with a nice firm texture, Norwegian is one of our least expensive salmon, but one of our best." Still it's not cheap. And to make it all worthwhile, the best scallion cream cheese EVER! They put big and plentiful pieces of scallions in there, infusing the whole white spreadable gooness with that green crisp flavor. Much better that the barely visible and almost hidden scallions in Zabar's version. Yep, they beat out Zabar's ... on this one item, and maybe the gravlox. Still, my neighborhood has some of the best fish - lox, gravlox, sturgeon, etc. - given Zabar's, Murray's Sturgeon Shop, and Barney Greengrass are all in walking distance to my place. Obviously, UWSers know good food, and we're too lazy to go to other neighborhoods to shop. But LES is rather fabulous, and they have better plethora of great restaurants.

So I headed home with lots of goodies. Damn, it is great living in the land of the plenty ... what can't you get in NYC? Yep, even some stuff ya don't want like public urination, spitting and bad Mexican food. Luckily today I got the good stuff.