Click if you’re Irish, a Stevie Wonder fan, or have ever been in love.
first bite: marea
Carpaccio di Branzino con Finnochio e Pomodori. Photo credit Jori Klein.
First Bite, my new Metromix column, is a (literal) early taste of a chef’s signature dish prior to the opening of his or her buzzed-about restaurant. This month: Convivio and Alto chef Michael White’s gorgeous Italian sea bass carpaccio. Click to learn about the inspiration behind the dish, how it’s made, and how it tastes (hint: amazing).
five reasons to rock down to atlantic avenue:
Come to mama, Chocolate Cloud Cookies. Via Baked.
Two blocks, five types of awesome:
1. Persuade the slightly cantankerous but quite handsome Frenchman at Tazza to reveal when those Chocolate Cloud brownie-cookies from Baked will arrive fresh in the shop. For some reason he does not like parting with this information. They are incredible the day they are made—crunchy like a cookie on the outside and soft like brownie batter on the inside. I brought them to a Cyclones game last year. The women in attendance promptly stopped watching the game. Cookies vanished in a swirl of nails and hair-pulling.
2. The short, cute, bespectacled wine expert—Elana, I believe—at Heights Chateau Wine. Lady knows her way around vino. She introduced me to Elio Perrone Moscato d’Asti (tip: look for the orange on the bottle), a sweet Italian sparkler that you will drink all spring and summer long.
3. The Sahadis Guys. God, are they crazy. The owner cornered me once when he thought I’d come in too often to ask if I—a fair-haired, Irish-American woman—was opening a competing Middle Eastern store in the neighborhood. Then there’s The Coffee Guy, who seems hang out largely in that department, the better to lord over his domain. He will call you—as he calls everyone—“my love.” (“Would you like the beans ground, my love? Half a pound of each, my love?”) I heard him talking about the seven children he has with seven different women the other day. The man has very soulful eyes. I doubt he’s exaggerating.
4. The fish ‘n chips special at Chip Shop. You don’t need a child to buy the child-sized portion of cod ‘n chips, and they’re $5 and change. I like to haul ‘em next door to Floyd and read a Sunday afternoon novel over a Sixpoint Sweet Action.
5. The nautical/ dive bar wonder that is Montero’s. The old-dude bartender likes to eavesdrop on conversations and interrupt with relationship advice, the drinks are cheap, and the jukebox is kickass.
chickening out
One of the truisms being floated in the food press right now is that
Comfort Food Is In. Everyone wants roast chicken, casseroles, mashed potatoes, and pies. All the time. What, you don’t actually crave these
things? Too bad. Magazine editors think you do. When I was working at a
domestic monthly mag a few years ago, the editors went into a frenzy
whenever the economy soured. “More pies!” was the missive sent to the
test kitchen cooks: “People want pies to make them feel better!”
Well, I’m not much of a pie person, but dang if I haven’t been craving roast chicken all winter long. And having worked on this book—about which I will reveal more very soon—I am only interested in
hormone-free birds. So about once a month I bust out this Nigel Slater
recipe. It impresses the bejesus out of guests and is a breeze to make:
Smash chopped herbs (I used tarragon, but rosemary or sage is just as
nice) with a clove or two of garlic, two tablespoons of melted butter, and
salt and pepper, and carefully stuff between the skin and the meat of
the breast. Rub salt and fresh cracked pepper over the whole, squeeze
half a lemon over the bird, and fill the cavity with half a head of
garlic, a knob of butter, and the other lemon half. Throw in the oven
with chopped, par-boiled taters, the other half head of garlic,
tarragon, and some chopped onion. Cook at 400 degrees for half an
hour plus twenty minutes per pound. Deglaze pan with white wine for
gravy. High-five all and sundry.
If this recipe is too casual for you, pick up a copy of APPETITE. The way Slater writes—“if you find a little drum of ready-ground pepper in someone’s kitchen, hurl it in the trash”—is straightforward, very funny, and wholly accessible for the busy home cook. I come back to it again and again—which is, in its own way, quite a comfort.
make sure he’s just not that into you all over again
Did your lover make you mad on V Day? Forget the chocolates? Give you drugstore chocolates? Then serve him up this delectable artery-clogger—the love child of a Monte Cristo and a Cubano—as revenge: Pork. Swiss. Turkey. Butter. Bread. Eggs. Fried.
People.
To cop a phrase from my friend Francis, I would date this sandwich. Serve with maple syrup, because life is short. And even shorter now.
My Valentine’s Day? Oh, I had the flu. In my wooziness, I’d sort of forgotten it was V Day. So it wasn’t until I was mincing my eighth clove of garlic for sopa de ajo, eating chocolate chips straight from the bag, that I realized I’d become Bridget Jones. Not only was I flying solo on Valentine’s Day, I was eating garlic soup alone for Valentine’s Day. I may as well have had my head inside a carton of ice cream, sobbing and watching The Notebook.
But that’s cool, because today is the 15th, and I’m feeling better, unlike those people hungover from their fancy Barolos, or patting their rounder bellies after decadent desserts and—ok, ok, I’m a little jealous. That said, Netflix, I could have done without the full-color ad of roses FTD affixed to my copy of La Dolce Vita with the caption
IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO PLAN THE PERFECT VALENTINE’S DAY.
Well, hindsight is 20/20.
is dinner ready yet?
From left: Ashwin Balakrishnan; Michael Hebb; me; Matt Wiggins. Photo credit Ashwin Balakrishnan.
You guys are lucky I didn’t use one of my deadly puns to title this post. They are ingrained in my writing after stints at three magazine staff jobs: Orange You Glad to See Us?; Table the Matter; The Fearless Four. Of course, only two of those are puns, and bad ones at that, but I’m halfway out the door to drink recession-themed cocktails at a recession-themed speakeasy with other recession-fearing journalists. Don’t be so jealous. Anyways, this is my favorite pic from my wacky journey, and this is my table–er, OUR table–a sexy plastic 30″ square number, which I carried on my back for about 31 of the 32 miles towards dinner. More pix here.
utopian visions in my head
Buster the cat did not anticipate the evening’s culinary disappointments. His owner consoles him.
An ideal utopian January evening might comprise the following: 1) Gossip Girl, a show for teen girls I have no right to enjoy so much; 2) superplush butter-and-brown-sugar-drenched date cake from Williamsburg hotspot Moto; and 3) Beer. Microbrews, specifically—the heavier the better. Porter? Stout? Is “Imperial” or “Espresso” scrawled on the label? Bring it.
Under my bed—where like a bulimic, matrimony-crazed junkie I stash the food and wedding magazines containing my articles—lurked one last sample from a recent staff job. It lived in a glittering gold box. It was packed in velvet. And it was called… Utopia. The bronze bottle looked as though it could conceal a genie. Velvet, people! This was the Elton John of beers.
The noncarbonated elixir from Sam Adams sells for about $300 online, which is bizarre for a Sammy, but at respected site Beer Advocate reviewers raved about its caramel notes, bourbonlike qualities, and compatibility with oatmeal-raisin cookies and dates. Since I had recently lunged facefirst into Moto’s date cake, and Gossip Girl night was quickly approaching at my buddy Alita’s house, it was on: We would drink, eat, and watch Utopia. It would rule.
Our cake (add an extra egg to this recipe if the batter won’t come together) was a glorious thing. But that night’s episode of GG was a bit off. And the beer? Horrifying. I would have rather had—apologies to Philly—a Yuengling. The Utopia was cloyingly sweet (and I like sweet) and tasted like a poor man’s port. Were these dudes so rapturous over the beer because of its genie-like bottle? Did they not watch enough Disney movies as children? I should ask my beer-obsessed fellow food dork if storing noncarbonated beer under one’s bed for a year will mess with it. I have a feeling I know the answer. Regardless, I should have known better than to let Sammy define Utopia for me.
traffic island ceviche
Photo by Ashwin Balakrishnan
Because some weekends you catch a film or make a nice bowl of soup, and other weekends you walk 32 miles with a table strapped to your back to eat dinner on a traffic island under the I-5. A piece for Gourmet.
postscript: Pretty much any writer would find herself constrained by word count considerations when attempting to relay the minutiae of a 32-mile pedestrian odyssey. I’d like to add that though this journey was fraught with danger, the vision itself—walking through a vehicle-dominated landscape; bonding with strangers by foraging for food; creating a meaningful vignette around a dinner table—is one I find fascinating, which I hope was conveyed by the piece.
fried and true
Food writers are a breed prone to exaggeration. We lose our minds about a burger, wax poetic over small-batch ice creams, and regale you with stories about whatever we ate that day.
You hate us when we do this. I realize this.
But some scribes are awesome at conveying the wonderfulness of what they eat, particularly Duncan Hines. More than a name on the cake mix, he was one of America’s earliest critics, a Southerner who—per Rick Moody’s amazing Tin House profile a few years back—would go from chicken shack to chicken shack in the south in the ‘30s scribbling such accolades as, “the fried chicken in this establishment makes a man wish for a hollow leg.”
A hollow leg, folks.
This description was enough to make me want to buy a car, head south, and drive from chicken hut to chicken hut, patting my belly and swilling 40s of Old Gold from a paper bag.
This weekend I finally encountered such insanely good chicken, Mr. Hines. On Sundays at no 7, in Fort Greene, Tyler Kord (a man with Jean Georges cred) is churning out mind-blowingly good fried birds. Each piece seems to have a 2-1 ratio of fried crispy bits to juicy organic meat. Its seasoning is straight-up salt-and-pepper, and the treatment what Kord calls a “Texas secret, but really simple”—a mix of egg, flour and milk dunked in hot canola oil. Mr. Hines, I see you cruising in on your Vespa, taking a seat with your little lady, and tearing in. A basket of the stuff—5 pieces for a mere $10—arrives at your sunny little table crispy as can be. You could match it with beer, coffee, or a cocktail, and impress your girl with your Brooklyn brunch savvy. Yes, they offer waffles too, but one will run you $8 and it’s a little weak, so skip it. It’s just an excuse to drizzle syrup over the chicken, which you should do regardless.
Mr. Hines, I feel you now.
a pastry complexion
Journalists have been dog-earing their thesauruses of late transcribing the goings-on in the world: “dour;” “grim;” “unpleasant;” “scary;” “WTFOMG.”
But you know what’s not scary?
A smilng piece of coffee cake.
That’s right. And there’s an auction for it on eBay. Because this is America.
It seems the SanFran branch of the Barbarian Group, an interactive advertising (Read: nerdy, but lovably so) conglomerate owned in part by my old buddy Rick Webb, has collectively straightened its hunched-over-the-keyboard posture, adjusted its taped-up glasses, and is eyeballing the psychic-spiritual coffee cake market.
Starbucks unwittingly served this precious little number—they call him “Smiley”—to a Barbarian a few days ago, and for $57 + $10 shipping, it could be yours. Its eyes are made of an air bubble and a golden raisin, its smile of cinnamon. Its eBay listing reads like a loquacious fortune cookie: “An image of the universally loved Smiley has appeared before me in my Starbucks coffee cake. Surely it tastes delicious, but it is fated for guiding you, the lucky bidder, through a life of good fortune!!” Smiley will come to you swaddled in bubble wrap or packed in dry ice, though his current owner warns solicitously that, “Breakfast pastries are a crumbly breed and may not be intact upon delivery.” Indeed.