I am dusting off the cobwebs from my personal blog and sharing some of the work that I did during my first semester at journalism graduate school.

The back story goes like this - for my intensive writing and reporting class, all of the students picked by lottery number a neighborhood within the five boroughs of New York to write stories about. My number was 88 out of 95. I knew I had to pick somewhere obscure.

When I first moved to New York, I was lead on a food adventure by my personal food guru to eat Central Asia Jewish food in the outer reaches of Queens. Consisting of mainly spiced lamb, pickles and hand-pulled noodles, I was quickly hooked. Using this singular culinary criteria, I picked Rego Park, Queens as my beat to write stories about.