Until I moved to NYC, bodega was just a word I learned and promptly forgot in my high school Spanish class.

Now, it’s kind of my life line. You can get pretty much anything at the corner store – milk, eggs, alcohol, full meals, toilet paper, duct tape, even lottery tickets if you’re feeling lucky.

And it’s open 24 hours.

Another perk to my bodega is the random fruit and vegetable stand run out of a van that parks in front of it. I pick up a lot of avocados from that guy.

My favorite meal actually comes from the bodega around the corner from my apartment and the best thing is that it costs $2.75.

Yeah, you read that right. $2.75.

For that amount, I get 2 pollo pastelitos and a package of Linden’s chocolate chip cookies. It actually took me awhile to learn that these magic, happy chicken pockets were called pastelitos because I would just point to the case up on the wall and ask chicken? My friendly bodega owner would then hold up a single finger. I would hold up two and then he would hand me my dinner.

I really love empanadas, and pastelitos look and taste a lot like an empanada, I suspect they may be the same thing, so I was pretty happy camper. At $1.00 a pastelito, they’re a pretty good deal. Two is plenty for me for dinner.

If chicken isn’t your thing, they also have beef and pork. There’s even a cheese one for you vegetarians out there.

Linden’s chocolate chip cookies are also my favorite kind of cookie. I know it’s a little strange that these weird, hard biscuits that were commonplace in public schools through the 90’s are my favorite kind of cookie, but they are. And they’re a little difficult to find.

I also love “bodega living.” Since I can get things like milk, eggs, bread, veggies etc. right around the corner, I’m more likely to just pick up what I need for a day or two. That keeps food much fresher.

Forgot a spice for some recipe? There’s a good chance I can run down to the corner and pick it up. If for some crazy reason I can’t find it in there, I can walk one more block down and that bodega will probably have it (but it doesn’t have the delicious pastelitos, so it will always be a subpar bodega to me).

Not gonna lie, I also like to minimize how much food is in my apartment because, you may have heard, roaches are kind of common in the city. I’d like to avoid infestations of any kind.