careyanne:

While walking the dog on the first sunny - Springish day of the year, I passed two old Greek men doing jumping jacks on the street.

That sounds like a military scene, but it was more like one man was teaching the other to do jumping jacks. At first he could only do the hands then he could only do the legs. My walk didn’t let me see if he was able to put the motions all together. I’m thinking ‘yes’ since he had such a passionate teacher.

rubenfeld:

My apartment is being used as a film set. #Queens #Astoria

oh do go on.

navigeaters:

LAURA: Our Grecian meal was an early nod to Greek Orthodox Easter, the holiest and most gluttonous of Hellenic holidays, which falls on April 4 this year. The Easter celebration traditionally starts the night before with a church service, followed by a midnight feast, and then repeats itself the next morning with more church and more chewing. Since most Greeks abstain from all animal products during Lent, the spread goes whole hog—or rather, whole lamb—with a spit-roasted baby sheep as its culinary centerpiece. But without the appetites to polish off the whole creature, Adam and I decided to pull an Ozzy Osbourne—and just bite off the head.

ADAM: It’s not on the menu, but we’d heard that Uncle George’s in Astoria, Queens, spit roasts lambs’ noggins every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. They give you the whole thing—face meat, eyeballs and brain—and even pre-split the skull for easy access. We called ahead to reserve a face (we heard they went fast) and brought along our friends Bill and Tom to theoretically help us chow cerebellum.

LAURA: Before our server gave us head, we had some incredible cheeses, both in fried (saganaki) and whipped (tirosalata) incarnations, and a plate of grilled octopus, whose tentacles were as long and girthy as a toddler’s arm. Thankfully, they tasted better than one.

ADAM: Bill got all up on some tentacles, and had a little bite of brain when it arrived (video of him gagging here!) but mostly he and Tom just trained cameras on us (video of us chewing face above!) and made gross-out noises.

LAURA: My Greek friend Menia told us her grandma always said that eating the lamb’s eyeballs makes you smarter and helps you see better, but after swallowing down those squishy orbs, the only thing we saw clearly was how much we hated lamb’s eyeballs.

ADAM: I also almost re-saw everything I’d eaten earlier that day. We washed down the head bits with kokoretsi, another popular Greek Easter dish, which is lamb heart, liver and sweetbreads wrapped up in intestines. And understand: The meat isn’t stuffed into the intestines like a sausage, it’s actually encircled by the intestines like some kind of offal mummy. The taste actually wasn’t bad. The rich meat was heavy on oregano and the roasted intestine covering gave a nice crunch, but, truth be told, I felt kinda guilty eating it. With the lamb’s eyeball already in my stomach, I was basically forcing it to watch me swallow its heart. That’s just disrespectful.

Eats Deets
Uncle George’s Greek Taverna
3319 Broadway, Astoria
(718) 626-0593

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