Mega
This past Saturday at the Farmers' Market we reaped the pinnacle of all things tomato = a 1.5 lb German Stripe heirloom tomato for FREE! (Note the plate in the picture is a full-sized dinner plate!)
Over the past few weeks we've been trying out all sorts of different heirloom tomatoes, enjoying the varied flavors, colors, shapes and textures. Two weeks ago we ran across a sunny yellow tomato with streaks of red inside, with a sweet flavor and juicy texture. We found out it was called a "German Stripe," prized for its "good tomato flavor."
So on Saturday we showed up in the late afternoon; all the tomatoes were picked over and only the bruised were left. be was busy peeking into some stacked crates of tomatoes when he spied a mega German Stripe. The vendor immediately told be he couldn't sell it since it had a bruise on one side - so he offered it to us for free! After he weighed it and declared it was worth $5.00 just by itself, we happily took the tomato and bought some hot peppers, rosemary sprigs and a handful of other tomatoes. I don't recall the name of the vendor but they've been in the NE corner of Union Square for the past few Saturdays. It's the one with all sorts of heirloom tomatoes, eggplant and herbs. There's only a few more weeks of tomato bounty so enjoy them while you can!
Meanwhile on the dinner front, i really felt like cooking tonight so i baked 2 pans of cornbread, 1 pan of peach crisp (with Farmers' Market peaches! so good!), fried up 2
green tomatoes with a cashew chutney and heated up some
Tabatchnick vegetarian chile. I've been waiting for the neverending heat wave to end so i could run the oven without running out of the kitchen. I've been craving cornbread with crunchy crusts. It just made sense tonight.
A good tip i learned online: instead of buying a whole container of buttermilk (where you use 1 cup and the rest solidifies into a white lump of scariness), you can make an easy buttermilk substitution with:
1 cup of regular milk or soymilk
1 T of lemon juice
Stir together and let stand at room temperature for 5-10 minutes. Use as buttermilk.
I couldn't detect a difference using a soymilk/lemon substitution and neither could be. We're always stocked with soymilk and fresh lemons, whereas i only buy buttermilk for cornbread.
Global
Coincidence? Today dude emailed me a link to a metafilter thread about
Chinese food around the world. Not an hour later i notice the NYTimes has an article entitled
Craving Hyphenated Chinese. While i liked the article, i can't say the same for the majority of the metafilter comments.
One of the best resources on the Chinese food diaspora is
Cheuk Kwan’s documentary series,
Chinese Restaurants, covering Chinese cuisine in: Argentina, Brazil North and South, Canada, Cuba, India West and East, Israel, Madagascar, Mauritius, Norway, Peru, Turkey, South Africa and Trinidad & Tobago!
Alert! Those in the NYC area: 2 Hurricane Katrina benefits for affected Asian American communities, this Sunday and Thursday. Details
here at Kontrast's site.
Without Concern
be's been having stressful times at work. He also loves French things - food, art, film, way of life. We'd been meaning to try
Le Sans Souci for a while, plus it's
Queens Restaurant Week so it all added up tonight.
It's only a few blocks from us in Astoria on Broadway at 44th Street. It opened earlier this year and seems to be doing well in terms of business. We were surprised to mainly hear conversations in French all over the front dining area. There's also a back garden and a seating area on the sidewalk. The overall feel is warm and casual and it didn't seem like we were in New York at all!
Earlier today i had called to check on their vegetarian options. I love
menupages.com for this particular reason but unfortunately they don't cover the boroughs yet. I was told they could make me a vegetarian version of tonight's prix fixe, which happened to be a shrimp-filled pastry appetizer, grilled swordfish over cous cous for the main and an apple tart for dessert. Usually most restaurants are more than willing to make a special dish if you request it, especially in advance.
The service was very friendly and unrushed, but i couldn't say our dinner experience was great. We aren't demanding customers and be even goes out of his way to give people the benefit of the doubt when we come across bad service. For a few key reasons our dinner took a longass time: 1) Our self-admittedly new server forgot to give our order to the kitchen, so people who arrived after us finished dessert before be got his appetizer. 2) I assumed our dinner was taking longer to prepare because i requested a vegetarian prix fixe, but was told 1/2 hour later that our order was lost AND they couldn't make me a vegetarian prix fixe! even though i called ahead to ask! 3) Since our order was lost and a long time had passed, they ran out of the shrimp pastry but replaced be's appetizer with crab cakes. 4) For the same reason as 3, they replaced be's tarte tatin with a chocolate cake and ice cream.
I ended up getting a "vegetarian plate" which consisted of assorted heaps of vegetables and mushrooms, surrounding a seared portabella mushroom cap filled with peas. It was simple and tasty but not worth $18.00 in my opinion. be's dinner of crab cakes, a generous piece of swordfish over cous cous and the cake dessert was $19.64 - much more affordable. He told me all his seafood dishes were excellent and that he'd definitely order them again. As for me however, i don't think i'd go for dinner but brunch. At least then i could have an omelet or a cheese plate, salad or French toast. One noteworthy item was the bread offered when we sat down: a delicious rosemary and olive "baguette" served with a creamy sweet unsalted butter.
The bottom line is: food at Le Sans Souci = very good, atmosphere = friendly, service = needs improvement. I'll certainly go again for brunch. But as we're now on the subject of cheese plates, i'm drooling thinking about the Dejeuner aux Fromages at
Artisanal!
Crack Cupcakes
Basically, if baking in Manhattan were the drug trade, then cupcakes would be crack cocaine: cheap, profitable, available in bulk, and prone to creating repeat customers. And, in some cases, turf wars.
Author Adam Sternbergh's 4 page
article on New York's cupcake wars was a very interesting read. I had heard bits and pieces about the cupcake rivalries but didn't know that the major bakeries were linked by Jennifer Appel, described in the article as:
“She’s like the cupcake godmother,” says Feierstein. “If you did a family tree of cupcakes in New York, she spawned out the seven families. She’s the Don Corleone of cupcakes."
Who knew such happy childhood-inducing baked goods, full of sugar and pastel colors, had such a history here?! Personally, i have yet to try Magnolia Bakery's cupcakes, but i do like the ones from
Buttercup Bake Shop. I haven't tried any of the others mentioned in the article either, but i did think that
Cupcake Cafe's were beautiful yet untasty (but they don't seem to the part of the cupcake war anyways.) Lastly,
Podunk does sell some yummy, utterly homemade-tasting pink cupcakes once in a while.
For more cupcake madness, check out
Cupcakes Take the Cake, a blog on all things cupcakes.
Thanks to Anmol - my cupcake expert - for the article link! (When is Chocofest 2005 gonna start, dude?)
New Cats
I always tell be that there are two kinds of cat-people: the ones with 2 cats and the ones with 200 cats. This past weekend we moved from the former, two steps closer to the latter. Although the new kittens Luna Nova and Minuit Etoile haven't formally met our older cats Harley NO! and Cutie Pie, i think they'll get along okay. They're quarantined in the study until their tests clear - but they're having a ball with paper scraps, mouse toys, rolling balls,
Cat Dancers and cardboard houses. Who knew such tiny kittens could make so much poo?
Vermonster #3
A Vermonster
always seems to happen on bloatedly-full stomaches 10 minutes before closing time. #3 occurred Thursday, September 8th at the East Village
Ben & Jerry's with
O,
ob and
be - directly after a big meal of sushi. They unfortunately didn't finish the entire Vermonster in the 10 minutes before closing, mainly due to the fact the Vermonster-makers made it with extra large scoops of ice cream, the brownies were on top of the ice cream and thus were harder to eat, AND apparently ice cream after sushi is a no-no. be claims the rice really filled him up and expanded in his stomach.
There was much more at stake with this Vermonster because apparently, if you break the record of 2 people in 15 minutes, you get a certificate for a free Vermonster. The staff that night were really excited about it and offered them the certificate if they could finish it by closing time ... but at 10 minutes they still had about 4 scoops to go, which they finished outside.
For those who don't know what a Vermonster is, it's a bucket containing:
20 scoops of ice cream, frozen yogurt or sorbet
4 bananas
4 ladles of hot fudge or caramel
3 large chocolate chip cookies
1 huge fudgey brownie
10 scoops of chopped walnuts
2 scoops of 4 toppings, your choice
topped with real whipped cream
I have to say it never ceases to amaze me. The most ice cream i can eat in one sitting is 2 small scoops!
(For the record, Vermonster #1 with be, O, Darian and Mas was finished in 10 minutes. #2 with be, O and Jude took 13.)
Beauties
be and i've decided to cancel
Urban Organic, that infamous box of produce i wrote so much about last year. Sadly, due to monetary, quality and freshness issues it just didn't make sense to get it anymore. Instead, we're looking into joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Program but meanwhile we're buying produce at the supermarket or the Union Square Farmers' Market.
I love the Farmers' Market. Late summer and early fall are wonderful times to revel in the beauty and the bounty of fresh produce. Last Saturday we picked up:
1 pint cherry tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes: 1 "Ugly," 2 Yellow, 1 "Red Pepperish" and 1 "Jalepeno"
3 Clapp pears
4 medium crispy apples
4 small sour apples
1 yellow watermelon
9 differently-colored carrots
1 bunch baby bok choy
1 white eggplant
5 ears white corn
1 large bunch basil
All this for just over $20.00! We're definitely heading back this Saturday just to try more
Heirloom tomatoes. They're nothing like those bland, pink mealy tomatoes from the grocery store. The cherry tomatoes were small and didn't look that great, but when we washed off the dirt and tried them out, they were the best ones i'd ever had. The "Ugly" tomato was very juicy and intense, the Yellow ones milder and firmer, the "Red Pepperish" was sweet and had good flavor and the "Jalepeno" (thus named for its shape and color) was crisp and a tad sour. It's like a tomato flavor explosion in your mouth!
And as for those
carrot beauties, we found the white ones to be starchier than the others, with the sweetness growing as the carrot colors deepened. The red ones, unfortunately, weren't red inside - just on the skin - but the yellow ones were greenish inside! All very crisp and great for eating raw. be claimed they didn't taste "soapy" like store-bought carrots.
Queens Restaurant Week
Oh Yeah! The
2nd Annual Restaurant Week in Queens will be September 19th to 23rd, 2005. Participating restaurants will offer 3-course dinners for $19.64 (in celebration of the 1964 World's Fair).
Here's a
list of restaurants taking part, which are spread out all over Queens and represent a diverse offering of cuisines. I was a little disappointed that places in Jackson Heights weren't taking part, but Astoria's out in full force - easier on my lazy self.
Thanks to JR at queens.about.com, where i heard about it
first!
Bean Town
A few weekends ago i was in Boston* for the 3rd Annual
APIA Summit. Big ups to Boston Progress, who are also running the
East Meets West Bookstore in Cambridge!
Upon stepping off the bus from New York, O decided he needed to eat this infamous "heart attack sandwich." Luckily, we found the Chinatown Food Court first and had our quick dinner there. It's a 2nd floor food court with 5 stands and a shared seating area. There were 2 Chinese food places, a Vietnamese place, a Thai place and a juice/smoothie bar. Not as notoriously cheap as O remembered, but it was still a good deal for post-bus eats.
Lunch the next day was at Qdobo with Miss N and Beau. Qdobo is a Mexican restaurant chain similar to Chipotle but better - and both are way more upscale (and flavorful) than Taco Bell. My burrito was a foil-wrapped giant, surprisingly tasty and fresh. The cilantro rice wasn't undercooked and gross like some places make it. The hottest hot sauce was merely okay. Maybe it's crazy hot for Boston?
Running around between events, be, Miss N, Victor and i grabbed take-out dinners from Summit sponsor, Taste of Asia. They offered both Chinese and Vietnamese menus. be got the long beans with tofu while i requested a special dish of fried tofu and vegetables in a light sauce. Both were quite tasty and hit the spot. Most notably, their plain white rice was so fragrant and soft.
Somewhere along the way, i picked up a bag of
Cape Cod Japepeno & Aged Cheddar potato chips. These chips actually quite hot! Plus they have a great satisfying crunch. I haven't seen them anywhere outside of New England, though. Looks like i'll have to order a case online. Check them out if you like hot chips!
*Last year's Boston trip: After the AAAS conference, we checked out the legendary Chocolate Buffet at the Langham Hotel's
Cafe Fleuri. Two of our crew got regular brunch foods while two others chose the buffet. (You don't have to wonder which side i was on.) And yes, it really was an all-chocolate buffet: made-to-order crepes, numerous cakes, a chocolate pasta, chocolate candies, cookies and creamy desserts. There's really no way you're going to get your $26 worth - one can only eat so many slices of dense chocolate cake - but it was fun to sample nearly 40 desserts and
say you ate at an all-chocolate buffet. I would certainly go again if someone else was treating!
Southwesting
Check out these yummy treats be brought me back from New Mexico!
1) Chile
pistachios, which are deliciously salty and quite hot. You're supposed to eat all the chile coating off of the shell prior to cracking it open for the pistachio nut. Addictive stuff!
2) A bag of NM Hatch
chile powder, ready to be made into some famous NM red chile sauce!
3) Chile gingersnaps from Maria Rosa's (505-203-4522), yummy snappy cookies with a slight hint of chile. I love gingersnaps and the chile is a great addition!
I found out from Hank that Frybread Mama in Olde Towne Albuquerque actually had a fire and burned to the ground a while back! A new restaurant has since opened in its original location. I'm glad i got a chance to eat there but neverfear - good frybread is easy to get in the SW. One memorable frybread meal was at a tiny roadstand off the highway, in front of Chee's Navajo-owned Gift Shop en route to/from the Grand Canyon. That was the best ever.
In Albuquerque be immensely enjoyed a vegetarian Southern meal at
La Siringitu. He claimed it was the best BBQ tofu and greens ever. Even more, he absolutely loved this poached egg brunch dish from the
Gold Street Cafe. A few nights ago he replicated the dish (with a not-so pretty poached egg), which contained sauteed spinach, fresh tomato chunks, chevre (creamy goat cheese) and toasted bread. The original dish used a green chile brioche but we substituted some Italian bread from Parisi. There seems to be a lot of great places to eat at in Albuquerque!
(If be had his archives up, i'd absolutely end this post with a link to "Satan's Proctologist.")
Poupon & More High Class
It was 2:30AM and Alton Brown just finished making himself a delicious-sounding
grilled cheese sandwich on his show Good Eats. I'm easily influenced by delicious-sounding foods, so i made myself a similar sandwich in my aforementioned trusty cast iron skillet. Unlike his recipe, i didn't press the sandwich between 2 skillets nor did i grate the cheddar - i just thinly sliced it - but i DID use some dijon mustard and freshly ground black pepper. (Plus i used insanely good cultured butter instead of a spritzing of olive oil!) Shit, this sandwich was the best grilled cheese ever. E.V.E.R. It was totally that high class Grey Poupon mustard. Aged sharp cheddar and mustard is such a natural combination (think of
Welsh Rarebit); too bad i never thought of it myself for a grilled cheese!
Ever since i
first mentioned Andes Candies being "high class candy" when we were growing up, be and i've been making a list of other "high class" foods. It's like an 80s flashback:
1)
Andes Crème de Menthe Thins2) General Mills International Delights - that instant flavored coffee that came in a rectangular tin
3) "Excuse me, do you have any
Grey Poupon?"
4)
Vienetta - a fancy ice cream dessert cake that's now discontinued in the U.S.
5) And this isn't food but still high class: "
Calgon, take me away!"
