breakfast – Exploring San Luis Obispo, One Fork at A Time

The Loading Page of Urbanspoon.

Since I got an iPhone, I have been searching for an application that will allow me to find the best restaurants in my area. Yelp and TripAdvisor will do in a pinch, but they often show the more prominent restaurants as opposed to the lesser-known ones, which, from what I have noticed, tend to have better quality and better tasting food, friendlier employees, and are overall more enjoyable. The apps are also somewhat difficult to use and crash more often than they should. I then found “Urbanspoon“, an app that:

Is fun and user-friendly
Adapts to your likes and recommends locations based on your previous likes
Shows what is popular in the area
Narrows down the search to make finding a good restaurant, based on what you’re looking for, NOT an impossible task
Does not cost a penny to download, and free is my favorite number

Click on any of the following pictures to see Urbanspoon’s features:

Urbanspoon Homepage That Allows You To Search Various Types of Food In Different Cities Near You

More of The Homepage.

The “Shake” Feature Randomly Selects a Restaurant For You Based on Location, Type of Food, and Price.

The “Nearby” Button Organizes The Search In Different 4 Ways: 1- The Closest Restaurants Based on Your Current Location.

2- Restaurants Near You In Alphabetical Order.

3- Restaurants Near You In Order of Popularity.

4- Restaurants Near You From The Lowest To The Highest Price.

A Regular Search.

The Sidebar Of The App.

All photos taken by Ashley Katzeff

Today, I am going for a slightly different post than usual. Today, I will talk to you about a tradition in my family, which, of course, involves a lot of food.

Every year, going as far back as I can remember, my mom made it a point to go out of her way to make birthdays extraordinarily special. The highlight of our birthdays? She would offer to cook our favorite meal not just for breakfast, not just for lunch, not just for dinner; but for all three. The only difficult part about this was coming up with what my favorite meals were, which always took a minimum of two weeks to decide on. However, after deliberating for so many days, I would always narrow it down to the same dishes, year after year.

Breakfast: Banana Chocolate Chip Pancakes
Lunch: Szechuan Carrot Soup
Dinner: Falafel Sandwich
Dessert: Chocolate Cherry Cake

To this day, each of these dishes bring me comfort, and are dishes that my mom always makes sure to have, ready to be devoured, whenever I come home for a visit since I am not usually home for my birthday anymore. For my birthday a couple of weeks ago though, my mom made it a point to send a care package with that delicious cake, which you will not see pictures of because it is already gone! Take a look at the following slideshow to get a feeling of what birthdays have been like in the Katzeff household.