The below are safety maps compiled by the nice people at City -Data. I just thought to repost here for those that are thinking of visiting NYC and want to stay in the safe zones. I find the maps to be a good starting point and generally accurate. To give you an idea of how dangerous an orange area is, a cashier in fast food restaurant is likely located behind bullet proof glass. In red areas, I have seen a slit in the wall where the food and money are exchanged.

Manhattan Safety Map

Queens Safety Map

Brooklyn Safety Map

Bronx Safety Map

Staten Island Safety Map

Here are my top 10 favorite meals from the past 3 years:

(1) Somboon Seafood (Bangkok): If they only have a branch in NYC, I would be there every month. The Crab vermicelli was out of this world.

(2) Mapo BBQ (NYC): Marinated Korean Kalbi on a charcoal grill along with 15+ banchans(korean side dishes), hubby and I report faithfully to Mapo every month.

(3) Fook Lam Moon (HK): The best roast suckling pig in the world! And excellent Cantonese cooking in general. See my reviews here and here.

(4) Aqua Grill (NYC): Loved their Jonah Crab Claws with pineapple slaw. One order is not enough. Their Maine lobster salad is also scrumptious.

(5) Ayada Thai (NYC): Fried Whole Red Snapper with Mango Sauce, need I say more?

(6) My uncle Yan’s cooking: Even though he is 65 this year he still loves to cook up a storm. A meal at his house is consists of at least 8-10 complicated dishes for 6 people. And I get to take home the leftovers because he used me as an excuse to see my aunt way back in the day when he was pursing her.

(7) Per Se (NYC): If I was rich, I would eat there every month.

(8) Portillo’s (Chicago): Their Italian beef sandwich is so yummy that every time my friends pass through Chicago, I beg them to bring me several sandwiches with giardiniera. It is not the best Italian beef sandwich shop in Chicago, but it is the most well known with the most outlets. How much do I love this sandwich? I was in Chicago for 4 days and I ate this sandwich every single day. This is so much better than the Philly cheesesteak.

(9) Yardbird (HK): Yummy yummy. Hubby and I dined here during our last month in HK and we went back twice. If only we discovered it earlier! See my review here.

(10) Taling Chan Floating Market (Bangkok): The seafood was so fresh and so delicious. I have never tasted anything like it. I wish I had more than one stomach. See my review here.

What are some of your most delicious meals?

I agree with him in that it is just seems to be an arbitrary hierarchy game. In fact I will go even further and state that while none of the meals I had that were listed in the Top 50 were bad, most are not in my top memorable meals of all time.

Here are my thoughts on the Top 100 restaurants on the list. I ate at the restaurants within the last 3 years so my memories should be fairly accurate.

#5 Eleven Madison Mark (NYC): Beautiful to look at, not so much in taste. I would return if someone else was footing the bill. My detailed review posted here.

#11 Per Se (NYC): I loved Per Se. But at minimum $300USD+ per person, the price tag is hefty. Nevertheless I would return for my wedding anniversary. It is the only restaurant on the list that really wowed me.

#15 Alinea (Chicago): My friend Gordon has wanted to eat here forever but has never managed to score a reservation at a time that he is free to travel to Chicago. He has talked about this restaurant for the past four years. I have never been and likely never will because you need to buy “tickets” 2-3 months in advance. And they only post ticket sale dates on their Facebook, and you need to follow them on Twitter. Jumping through hoops to dine at a restaurant never appealed to me especially since fine dining is a luxury. And one should never wait in line for luxury. If you want to skip the wait, the Mandarin Grill (HK) has a very similar concept and menu.

#19 Le Bernardin (NYC): Will be dining there in September for my birthday and will update my thoughts accordingly.

#24 L’Atelier Sait-Germain De Joel Robuchon (Paris): I tried the Las Vegas & Hong Kong branches, and they leave much to be desired. The bread cart may look grand but the bread is only a 8/10 taste wise. However the pistachio and raspberry pound cake like bread they gave as a take away gift was so delicious. If only they sold it in their bakeries!

#29 Daniel (NYC): Will be dining there for hubby’s birthday this month and will update my thoughts accordingly.

#36 Amber (HK): Hubby really likes this place.

#73 Caprice (HK): I liked it, Hubby is meh. Very beautiful dishes and cutlery though. My detailed review posted here.

#75 Lung King Heen (HK): While I really enjoyed eating here, it is by no means the best Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong. My detailed review posted here.

#87 Zuma (Dubai): Have not tried the Zuma in Dubai, but the Zuma in Hong Kong is pretty tasty.

#98 Jean Georges: Will be trying it sometime this July with hubby and my mom.

One thing that people rarely discuss when moving abroad is the filing of taxes. An American Expat tax return is especially difficult. Our 2011 Expat tax return was 54 pages just for the Federal portion!

The tricky question then is who do you hire?

For our 2011 Expat tax return, we hired a highly recommended and reputable accounting firm physically located in Hong Kong. The fee was a hefty $1160 USD, but that was the going rate in Hong Kong for a good accountant preparing US Expat Tax returns. So we paid up and thought that our tax problems were all taken care of. Little did we expect that the highly recommended and reputable accounting firm would make so many major mistakes! So many that we needed to amend both our Federal and State returns for our 2011 taxes.

Hubby and I were contemplating on doing our 2012 taxes ourselves until we discovered Taxes for Expats.

To begin with, the setup is simple. You can either fill out their questionnaire or send them all your tax related documents for them to retrieve the data needed for their questionnaire. You will be then paired with a EA, who will be the one in charge of your return. My EA was Mel Whitney, who was a pleasure to work with. Mel was extremely prompt in answering my emails, often within the hour if it is during business hours. Also Mel’s humor and patience with the multitude of questions I had also gave me confidence in that TaxesForExpats knew what they were doing.

The route I chose was to fill out their questionnaire and upload my tax related documents onto their secure server. Once all my documents were uploaded, there is a 15 day wait for my tax return to be prepared. Rush service is available but the 15 day wait was not a problem for me. 12 days later, I received an email stating that my tax return was ready for review. I had several concerns in which Mel addressed promptly. And with that my 2012 taxes were completed!

Best of all is their flat fee structure. You know exactly how much you would be paying. I saved over 50% in tax preparation fees by hiring Taxes for Expats to prepare my 2012 Expat Tax Return.

So for all the American Expats that live abroad, I heartily recommend checking out Taxes for Expats before hiring anyone else. You will be pleasantly surprised.

The mouthwatering chicken at Grand Sichuan International Eastern is the best I ever had bar none. Their signature spicy sauce is so delicious that I bring the sauce home after I finish the chicken. I wish someone can teach me how to make this…

Isn’t it funny that my favorite burger of all time is Hong Kong’s Gourmet Burger Union? Out of all the burgers on their menu, I only love their Double Truffle Burger. Everything else is just meh. The truffle sauce, the rocket arugula, the juicy grass fed beef, the caramalized onions, the melted cheese, the toasted sesame bun is perfection. Especially when eaten with McDonald’s fries and a Coke.

The Fried Red Snapper with Mango Sauce is so good at Ayada Thai that it even beats those that I have tried in Bangkok and Phuket. The portion size is also huge, enough for four generous servings.

The crab congee at Wong Chi Kee Hong Kong is one of those things I really miss about Hong Kong especially in this cold New York weather. I wonder what is their secret for such flavorful congee broth?

Gray’s Papaya’s hotdogs would normally never make any of my lists as I don’t like hot dogs. But it was one of the last meat meals I had in November before the start of my meatless December month…therefore…=P But I do like the fact that their buns are toasted, their hotdog is grilled, and the onions and sauerkraut is pretty good.

Check out the glistening skin on the roast suckling pig at Fook Lam Moon Hong Kong. I could eat that crispy skin forever…NYC restaurants cannot compete. =(

Mapo BBQ is a great favorite with both Hubby and I. The meat is marinated incredibly well and they use charcoal instead of gas for grilling. Additionally, I think they serve 15+ banchans when you order their bbq!

The Vaca Frita at Rincon Criollo is sublime. I like it best with extra garlic and extra onions. I also love their Passionfruit milkshakes. Tip: The Vaca Frita is even better warmed up the next day.

I never understood the fuss about hairy crabs until Hong Kong. Hairy crabs have the sweetest tasting crab meat and the best roe (this is coming from someone that usually find crab roe fishy). Hairy crabs are incredibly high in cholesterol so try not to overindulge. =)

I don’t possess a sweet tooth but Laudree changed my mind. Their green apple macaron is the perfect marriage of sweet and sour.

Overall: There were so many I wanted to add to this list but limited myself to 10 so I don’t bore my readers to death. =) Here is to happy eating in 2013!

This was my planned menu, I did not stick to it as much as I hoped but we still ate vegetarian the entire week. I added more variety and lots more flavor.

Snacks for the week: fruits, dried cranberries, and baked walnuts with sugar

December 1 Saturday:
-breakfast: (1) egg white & sundried tomatoes & basil on foccicca  (2) bagel & cream cheese & homemade green tea
-lunch: (1) chickpea sandwich & orange juice
-dinner: (1) basil & onion & tofu & kale stir fry (2) tea egg (3) vegetarian duck

The chickpea version of “chicken salad.” Very tasty despite appearances.

December 2 Sunday:
-breakfast: whole wheat blueberry muffins & Ruffles potato chips & orange juice
-lunch (hubby): concord grape jelly and peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat & homemade green tea
-lunch(kelly): chickpea sandwich & orange juice
-dinner: (1) Japche – glass noodles & vegetables stir fry (2) Tomato and eggs – classic Chinese comfort food.

Homemade whole wheat blueberry muffins with potato chips and OJ. The sweet and salty combo is perfection.

Vegetarian jap che. The secret is to use lots of black pepper and toasted sesame seeds. I like my rendition better than most restaurants.

December 3 Monday:
-breakfast: cinnamon raisin and everything bagel with scallion/chive cream cheese
-lunch: vegetarian singapore mei fun & vegetarian hot and sour soup (take-out)
-dinner: (1) julienned potato and cow horn pepper (2) braised wheat gluten (烤麩) w/ shiitake mushrooms, wood ear mushrooms, and peanuts.

Homemade Kao Fu…a Shanghainese vegetarian dish made with wheat gluten.

December 4 Tuesday:
-breakfast: sesame bagel with cream cheese
-lunch: scallion pancake & vegetarian borscht
-dinner: (1) steamed egg custard (2) baked mayo corn (3) stir-fried kale and button mushrooms

Homemade scallion pancake. My first ever attempt did not turn not so great. I need to get a rolling pin and need to work on making the inside crispier.

December 5 Wednesday:
-breakfast: steel cut oatmeal & scallion pancake
-lunch: (1) vegetable soup (2) julienned potato and cow horn pepper (3) braised eggs
-dinner: black beans & mayo baked corn & rice

This dish was a little bit too spicy for me. Next time I will use less cow pepper.

December  6 Thursday:
-breakfast: steel cut oatmeal
-lunch: vegetarian pad thai, vegetarian basil fried rice, vegetarian spring rolls (restaurant)
-dinner: stir fried celery & lily bulbs, broiled egg, stir fried mung bean, rice

Sauteed bean sprouts with celery & sauteed celery and lily bulbs. Very easy and quick vegetarian dinner.

December 7 Friday:
-breakfast: bakery bread
-lunch: seaweed salad, miso soup, vegetarian sushi rolls (take-out)
-dinner: steamed tofu, stir fried long beans, stir fried watercress with satay sauce

Sauteed long beans.

Watercress with Satay Sauce.

Stay tuned for Week 2!

After all the hard work in hunting and preparing the goose meat, I have to say that I was disappointed.  All four of us hunters did not enjoy eating goose.  Maybe it’s because we’re too accustomed to duck at home, maybe we undercooked it, maybe wild animals taste gamey in general, but so far I have not tasted one better than a duck.  I even tried the goose in Hong Kong (where it’s an expensive delicacy) to be sure, but I guess I just don’t like it.

Why didn’t we hunt ducks instead?  When we finally decided on hunting after months of indecision, we missed duck season.  Goose it is.

Those are the Canada Geese we hunted. I’m the one in the goofy Russian hat holding my Benelli M2 shotgun.

We had goose breast meat steaks the first night.  The meat looked better than it tasted.  It was a bit disappointing after the hard work of de-feathering and filleting the meat.  We tried multiple temperatures – medium-rare, medium, medium-well, well – they all tasted very gamey.

Slow grilling steaks on the rotisserie.

Different cuts of goose meat – all disappointing.

You can’t have a campfire without a couple of s’mores.

The second night we took turns roasting a whole goose on the spitfire.  It was slow and tedious.  The wind blew smoke everywhere.  We were afraid that the smoke would attract bears to our cabin.

The spitfire is slow and tedious work.

I went inside and loaded the shotgun with slugs just in case.  Tom readies himself with it and found time to light up a cigar.

Tom posing with the Benelli M2 back at the cabin.

Finally done roasting after 45 minutes. We were all choking with smoke by then.

This bird looked better outside in the dark. Inside it just looks unevenly cooked. We were not going back out to re-roast it.

The leg was all bloody. Mike did not really eat it.

Good thing we had Chef Kimchi (Mike) with us and he had a backup plan: well-done geese breast meat wrapped in bacon, jalapenos, jack cheese, and onions.  It’s true that bacon makes everything taste better.

Geese breast meat in bacon, jalapenos, jack cheese, and onions.

Another shot of Mike’s creation.

All in all, the trip was a great success.  We learned about hunting, we got to shoot some guns, and we actually did get to enjoy the food to some degree.  Best of all, we had a blast and took home some great memories to remember!

Goose hunting was easy with guides who knew what they were doing.  The hard part was prepping the game to eat.  I have never really cooked anything in my life, and here we were literally butchering our own meat.

Canada goose is huge and probably the second largest waterfowl you can hunt in the US (next to swans).  We bagged some near 20 lbs.  Most hunters just cut out the breast meat.  We did that the first day following instructions from the guides.  It was surprisingly easy for first timers.  We took our time to cut them out cleanly.

Mike practicing his surgical skills on the bird.

There is a glint in Tom’s eye as he holds the buck knife.

Bucket full of breast meat. You cook them like steaks.

The second day we decided on cleaning entire geese to bring home.  That was a mistake.  Feathers are very messy to pluck.  The guides had a feather plucking machine for us, but it takes practice and we were really slow at it.  It took at least 30 minutes to clean a goose, and we had 12 of them.

One big mess of feathers.

Plucking feathers on the machine is a frustrating experience.

There wasn’t enough time to finish them at the butcher shack, so we took them back to the cabin to finish up.  It was cold and our hands were freezing.

Back at the cabin, struggling to finish prepping before sundown.

After hours of agonizing plucking, it was finally time to cook.  Perry made us a fire with charcoal and firewood.  I’ll follow up with cooking the food in Part III.

Perry was a maniac with the lighter fluid.

Fire!

Goose hunting is 95% waiting and 5% action.  You sit for hours in the blind chitchatting followed by a few seconds of shooting.  But in those few seconds, it was pure excitement.  Adrenaline pump in fast, muscles tighten, and your mental acuity shoots up.  Everything rises to that singular objective – bring those birds down.  I didn’t hesitate.  There were no moral debates.  This wasn’t Bambi stopping for a sip in the stream.  These were moving birds flying 30-50mph – tough shots by any standards.

Perry and I in the blinds. That thing on my head is a hatcam.

This was my first hunting trip – a post-wedding Bachelor’s party with my three groomsmen in 2010 up in the Finger Lakes.  It was late season, cold as heck, and we didn’t know what to expect.  All we could do was over prepare in research and equipment.  Yes, we faced the possibility of not hitting anything.

It was quite an interesting learning experience.  We drove out to a corn field 6am in the morning and all squeezed into a “blind,” which is just a row of corn stalks propped up to hide us from the flying birds.  The geese were on their annual winter migration down from Canada to Southern US.  They slept at a nearby lake at night and flew out in the morning to feed.  Our “hunt” was hiding in the blind, calling, and waiting for them to come in close enough for a shot.

Corn stalk blinds at daybreak. All birds on the ground are decoys.

Does this remind you of Nintendo’s Duck Hunt?

Even though tons of geese flew by, it was not easy getting them to fly in close enough.  You have to tempt them with decoys on the ground and mimic their sounds with Goose Calls.  This is what you pay the guides for.  They provide the private hunting ground, set up the blinds and decoys, called to the goose, and told you when to pop out for a shot.  They also had a trained dog to bring back downed birds.

Our guides set up the decoys on the ground. They are a mixture of wooden cutouts and plastic hulls.

Stella the dog bringing back a downed bird.

Entire flocks bypassed us all the time.  Sometimes, a few birds broke away from the flock to investigate after hearing our calls.  We had to make those instances count.  Each of us had 3 rounds each in our shotguns (2 + 1 in chamber as required by law).  Half the time, once you miss on the first shot, the birds are already out of range and you are just wasting ammo.  What I remember most was that I wish I had a bigger gun with bigger shells.  Even the heaviest loads (3” high velocity shells) don’t seem to reach out far enough.

These snow geese flew too high up for us to call and shoot. Large flocks of 60-100 went by.

We were good shots and hit birds left and right.  Birds landing, birds turning away, crossing laterally, crossing overhead – there was nothing we couldn’t do.  As long as the birds came in, we always managed to take at least one (within range anyway).

First couple of hits.

It’s hard to describe the feeling.  No matter how many birds fly in at once, you zero-in on one and make it yours.  When you’re focused and dialed in, the shotgun becomes an extension of your arm.  You point into the air and say, “that one.”

The obligatory hunting picture. Stella the dog grabbed most of these birds for us after we took them down.

Mike posing with his bird.

Hunting was the easy part.  Prepping the food was long and tedious.  I’ll follow up with that in part II.

Snacks for the week: fruits, dried cranberries, and baked walnuts with sugar

December 1 Saturday:
-breakfast: egg white & sundried tomatoes & basil on foccicca, bagel & cream cheese & homemade green tea
-lunch: chickpea sandwich & orange juice
-dinner: basil & onion & tofu & kale stir fry

December 2 Sunday:
-breakfast (hubby): pastry & coffee
-breakfast (kelly): steel cut oatmeal & strawberry, banana smoothie
-lunch (hubby): concord grape jelly and peanut butter sandwich on whole wheat & homemade green tea
-lunch(kelly): chickpea sandwich & orange juice
-dinner: glass noodles & vegetables stir fry

December 3 Monday:
-breakfast: steel cut oatmeal
-lunch: grilled cheese sandwich & tomato soup
-dinner: basil & onion & tofu & kale stir fry

December 4 Tuesday:
-breakfast: whole wheat blueberry muffins & milk
-lunch: grilled cheese sandwich & tomato soup
-dinner: black beans & mayo baked corn & rice

December 5 Wednesday:
-breakfast: steel cut oatmeal
-lunch: grilled portobello mushroom & tofu & daikon sandwich
-dinner: black beans & mayo baked corn & rice

December  6 Thursday:
-breakfast: whole wheat blueberry muffins & milk
-lunch: grilled portobello mushroom & tofu & daikon sandwich
-dinner: steamed egg custard, bok choy, rice

December 7 Friday:
-breakfast: steel cut oatmeal
-lunch: toasted bagel & vegetable cream cheese
-dinner: steamed egg custard, bok choy, rice