Catching Up: New York, October 2009

This one is overdue, huh? I'd like to finish with 2009 before I move on to 2010 and 2011. My mom and I visited my sister in Brooklyn and ate our way through the weekend. Here are some highlights:

We began at the Doughnut Plant, at 379 Grand St.

I think we split a Valrhona chocolate glazed, and a chocolate blackout, and a pumpkin. I'm not a doughnut fanatic, but these were tasty. If I ever go back, I'd like to try the tres leches, having discovered an intense love of caramelly foods.

The store is petite and pretty, and features doughnut tiles:

Next, we went to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which is somewhere I've been wanting to visit for years. In 8th grade I wrote a research paper on Jacob A. Riis, who photographed tenements in the Lower East Side in the late 1800s, and I've been fascinated ever since. Visitors are only allowed access by guided tours, so we went on "The Moores: an Irish Family in America." The building, at 97 Orchard St., had been vacant since the 30's when the museum bought it, so the amount of remaining detail is incredible. I'd love to visit again.


After the museum we went to Guss' Pickles. Garlicky pickles were a great balance to donut breath.

The containers of pickled thingies were alluring, but not practical for the day's events.


So we bought a selection of sours and half-sours:


For lunch, we stopped at Vanessa's Dumplings in Chinatown.


I forget what exactly this was, but it was good:


Then we walked by bags of durian fruit, which is so stinky when opened, that many Thai business establishments have "NO DURIAN ALLOWED" rules. Do not try to bring Durian on the bus in Bangkok!


I bought some delicious eyeball fruits, I mean longans.


They look more like eyeballs when you take a bite our of them to reveal the seed.


We walked by a store that makes cream cakes. While I'm sure they are delicious, we couldn't eat anything else. The robotic cake machine is in the front window, and I found it fun to watch. I should have made a movie.


I thought these peppers were an especially nice range of colors:


Next on the list, the Highline, a former industrial train line that was transformed into a garden lined walking path. The photos on their Web site are better than mine.


There's a spot where there's a window onto the traffic below. Whoops, this is a little crooked!


On the way back down to earth, we ran into this character. He claimed that he was promoting Brain Playground Day, though the next day was Halloween. It was a challenge to pass him on the stairwell, good thing his matter was so spongey!


Next, we went to the Chocolate Show. Yum. Here's a photo of antique chocolate bunny molds:


For dinner we went to Di Fara Pizza, at 1424 Avenue J in Brooklyn. I dream about this pizza regularly. Dom DeMarco has been making his pizza here since 1964. It's old fashioned and delicious. He clips fresh basil onto the pizzas with scissors. the wait was long, and it got a little smoky inside, but our pizza was worth it.







And so our Day of Eating ended.

Coming soon. . .

2010 in review. . . Brimfield! Eating my way through New York! Flotsam and jetsam! New neighborhoods! Balancing acts! Cakes! Critters!

Cookie bars are the savior of the modern woman

Another late night baking session ended succesfully. Actually, the baking didn't go all that late, it was the washing up that stretched on into the wee hours. When I grow up, my kitchen will have a dishwasher. Anyhow, thinking he had done something incredibly fantastic and best husband of the year worthy, my coworker's husband brought home a case of sweetened flaked coconut. What does one do with a case of coconut? HAVE A COCONUT BAKEOFF!!!(Said in Oprah voice for greater effect.) Yup. and 12 days into the bakeoff, everyone is um - you guessed it, pretty sick of coconut.

I made Samoas bars (like the Girl Scout cookies) from the Baking Bites blog. She's created a more traditional round cookie version (as well as recipes for thin mints & tagalongs), but I had no time to roll and fuss with cookie cutters. I'm happy that I chose the bar version, though It was a difficult decsion. Usually I'm all about aesthetics, unless it interferes with getting a reasonable amount sleep. I think trying to manipulate the sticky caramel-coconut mixture evenly around round cookies with their centers cut out at midnight would have been scream inducing.

The Not So Fun Sunday. . . Followed by the Mostly Fun Sunday

Last Sunday was just not veey much fun. I had an 8 hour class all day Saturday and Sunday. We got out a little early both days and as far as classes go, it was pretty fun, but school wouldn't be in my top 10 fun ways to spend a day off. I'm nerdy, but I'm not THAT nerdy! On the way on Saturday I saw a couple things that caught my fancy, and I found myself saying yet again, "why don't you carry your camera with you all the time?" On Sunday I packed the camera. Some of the sites had lost their charm, while I saw other things that I hadn't noticed before. Here are a couple:

This sunday was much more fun, in spite of paper anxiety produced by last Sunday. I went to dim sum for the very first time. (But hopefully not the last.) For someone who loves gummy/ ricey/ salty/ dumplingy things it was a revelation. I learned that the reason tea is served is to aid digestion - the tea cuts the grease in your belly. Umpteen dim sum delights and four pots of tea later I feel pretty good. I don't even need a nap. On the way home, we stopped at the (best) Chinese bakery and I bought a lotus paste mooncake. I had to take a picture before I took a tiny slab and stuck it in the freezer. They're so very pretty.

And the kitty thought it looked tasty too, note her paw on my wrist trying to steal my wedge.

After the bakery, we meandered through the Common to Charles St., and ended up at particularly excellent store called Good. Good is very very good. They stock some gorgeous yet totally unneccessary things as well as incredibly lovely and timelessly classy jewelry; they type I love because it looks like it belongs in museum cases, recently unearthed from webby tombs.

This Sunday would probably be totally fun if I didn't have to stop farting around RIGHT NOW and work on a paper. (Thus, the "mostly fun".)

Frost Heart

Farewell, Pud!

Here are some photos taken by the lovely Karen at a farewell brunch for Pud at my house in early October. Thanks Karen!

Steamy waffles:

Kitty & mimosas:

Spiced dates and haloumi with pears:

The remains of baked eggs, spinach & parmesan:

Not fakin' bacon:

Farewell, Gourmet!

Welcome to the second annual Naughty Table function, farewell Gourmet Magazine! We all brought something from a Gourmet recipe, though funny. . . no one brough aspic!

Here are some cooling galettes (apple and squash-sage-caramelized onion-goat cheese) and pretty tiles:


Among the seven of us I think there were like. . . 12 desserts??? Totally spectacular. I tried to take a photo of one of the plates representing slices of each dessert but the combination of my laughing too hard at the absurdity of it all and the lovely candle-lit victorian dining room didn't make for a great photo. Yum.

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Apple Pie Bake-Off 2009

I won again. I don't think I'm going to be invited next year! The first year I made a very traditional pie. It had boiled cider in the filling and maybe in the crust, so it was quite good. Last year I made a pie with cheddar cheese in the crust. This year, I decided to make something completely different - so different that I thought I might have been disqualified. I made a candy apple pie. I found the recipe online, it won Apartment Therapy's best pie contest last year. It's insanely sweet - my teeth still ache. It began with a graham cracker crust. Once the crust cooled, I smothered it with caramel and chopped pecans. I cooked the Granny Smith apples in butter, sugar, and cinnamon. Once they had reduced, I poured them into the crust. The final layer was a thin cheesecake layer. The original recipe calls for a layer of whipped cream and then more caramel & chopped pecans. I decided that whipped cream would have been overkill, so I drizzled more caramel on the top and decorated the whole thing with whole pecan halves. It was good, but VERY sweet. The other contenders were fantastic as well. One was a French apple tart, another a pie with raisins and almonds, and another a very good traditional pie with a soft crust.

Here's my pie pre-carnage. The caramel dripped down the sides in transit, and I see that the pecans aren't where they were originally obsessively placed:


Here are all four contestants:

Here's my pie stratigraphy:

And because we hadn't had enough sugar, here's a lovely rootbeer float:

Pistachios, before you knew them

I found fresh pistachios at the Armenian market. They're covered in a squishy skin.



Which you peel away to reveal the familiar shell, which you struggle to crack to reveal sweet, delicately green raw pistachios.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

No, not Amanda Hesser, nor Judith Jones.

The Naughty Table! Before I explain who the Naughty Table is I need to backtrack even further. This has been an exceptionally tasty and educational summer! It all began when my friend the Kurdish Nomad, or K.N., and I started going to the Talking Taste series at The Institute of Contemporary Art. TheTalking Tastes were a lecture series where members of the restaurant community spoke and cooked. And they fed us, not an entire meal, but just enough to get our taste buds watering and our stomachs looking forward to dinner. The first guest speaker was my favorite chef from my favorite restaurant, Ana Sortun from Oleana (and Sofra Baker). K.N. and I left the museum totally blissed out (not without a tour of the Shepard Fairey exhibition) and drove straight to Oleana. That set a precedent. After each talk, we went to one or more of the restaurants belonging to the speaker. Or to Oleana, if the restaurant wasn't in the area; Pane e Salute sounds lovely, but a drive to Vermont wouldn't have been very practical.

Since then, we've been unabashed members of the Ana Sortun fan club. I think we've been to Oleana at least another 4 times between us, and to Sofra Bakery (just a fifteen minute walk from my house) too many times to mention. I think we went like, three Sundays in a row or something crazy like that. I can't really explain the menu. . . just look at their Web site.

A few weeks ago we went to a Dutch beer and food pairing at the Peabody Essex Museum as a tie in to the dutch seascapes exhibition. I had the best shared table experience ever - everyone at the table was interesting and funny and likes talking about food as much as I do. We had so much fun talking that we ignored the less than stellar lecturers, resulting in the group tag "the Naughty Table". We exchanged email addresses and vowed to share especially good information and to hopefully meet again

I took the commuter rail back to Boston with the two of the women who are about my age. It was spooky how much we had in common, spooky in an exciting way that made me feel happy that I'd found some of "my people". We all like visiting museums, traveling, (eating and cooking obviously), going on culturally edifying (read nerdy) field trips, and Mad Men (but who doesn't, right?) Upon further chatting, we discovered that their third musketeer is none other than my long lost fellow camp counselor from 1989! (I'd always wondered what had happened to him.)

Last Sunday, after a beer tasting at Formaggio, the Naughty Table AND my long lost camp friend came to my house for dinner. K.N. and I decided to make a selection of recipes from the Talking Tastes and from Ana Sortun's cookbook, Spice. We had a test run a couple weekends before, so we knew pretty much what we were dealing with. The goal was to have a light and fresh dinner that took advantage of the great late summer produce. Light was key, since we'd have just come from a beer and cheese tasting. We made:

Haloumi with Spiced Dates and Pears (from Ana Sortun's Spice): This is always a crowd pleaser, at least to those who aren't grossed out by haloumi, the cheese that squeaks when you bite it! Halloumi has a high melting point, so it can be fried to a lovely golden brown crisp on the outside but not melty on the inside because it doesn't really melt. When it's paired with sauteed pears and dates spiced with cardomom, cumin & coriander cooked in lemon juice, olive oil & brown sugar it's a winner.

Spoon Salad with Sorrel Granite (from ana Sortun's ICA lecture): spoon salad is a cucumber, grape, mint, dill & onion salad atop a dollop of sorrel flavored labne, embellished with a spoonful of sorrel granita. Before Ana's talk, I'd never had sorrel. It's a green with a light, fresh, almost lemony green apple flavor. It can be very difficult to find - it had a definite season, and it's not very in demand. It's work seeking out.

Heirloom Tomato Soup with Succotash: (from Frank McClelland of L'Espalier & Selle de Terre): Despite the tomato blight, the giant heirloom tomatoes were spectacular.

Nectarine and Lemon Verbena PaoPaos. (Ana Sortun's Spice, served regularly at Oleana): A few tablespoons of pureed nectarines and lemon verbena infused sugar syrup topped off with prosecco. We made the pear cardamom version a couple weeks ago, and I have to say that despite my unfailing love of nectarines, I prefered the pear cardamom

I didn't take photos of any of the finished products, but here are some of the works in progress:

Here's a blanched nectarine. I learned an awful lot about blanching!


Here's the sorrel on the way to being granite. It's such a spectacular color! It tastes just like it looks:


Heirloom tomato puree- not as pretty as the others: