Author: foodnerd

next food network star, year II

I found this email exchange between me & my friend C very amusing, so I decided to share it with you, the Internet:
C:
Speaking of which, what’d you think of the most recent Food Network Star show? I thought the winner was clear from the beginning, but still disappointing, somehow. I’ll try the show when it actually comes on, I guess.
FN:
I thought it was pretty clear about Next Food Network Star that Guy had it in the bag from the start and it was his to lose. However, I was rooting for Andy, the technique nerd, b/c I would totally have watched that show, plus he’s cute. And I felt bad that the amateur was the first to go — I didn’t think she deserved that. Give that silly cow with the bad highlights the boot!
C:
Yeah, Andy was my fave, too–he was so great with the cupcakes, and in the shared demo where he wacked the shit out of a pile of lemon grass. Most of the time, though, he was too uptight. Bummer. Silly cow w/ bad highlights: francophile girl w/ bikini? God, I could not *stand* her. Yech.
FN:
I don’t know — i was giving Andy the benefit of the doubt, since as a nerdy person myself I knew just exactly how awkward it would be to have to do all that TV stuff at the same time as you try to speak coherent english AND cook something. I remember last season people really got better over time as they got more used to it.
______________________
And then we got distracted by talk of where we are going to eat the next time C hits town, and how he’s adopted my beloved gimlet, and how a place out there in Portland makes them with *silver tequila* — mmmmmmm….

corn clam chowder, lazy style


I needed to use up stuff in my house, and I had a can of corn and a potato, so I decided I could make chowder. I sauteed some diced onion and put in some thyme and some smoked paprika to make up for the fact that I had no bacon or salt pork, and then I put the diced potato in to cook with some 1% milk, figuring the potato starch would thicken the milk up a bit, which it did. At the end, I put in the corn and a can of razor clams my daddy brought me from Seattle, and topped it with the last of the cilantro I had in the fridge. Remarkably successful, quite delicious, and low in fat, even. Yum!

bleeding heart bakery


Tallasiandude & I stopped in at the Bleeding Heart Bakery while he was here, because it caught his eye while we were at the Edmar. It’s a shade expensive, but everything is organic and sustainable, and the things we tried were delicious. We got two tea cakes, one meyer lemon and one chocolate-porter-hazelnut-dried cherry (we ate the chocolate one over vanilla and choco-peanut butter ice cream from Oberweis Dairy, mmmm), and a couple of day-old, half-price sticky buns, one with pecans and one without. I have high standards for sticky buns, and find most of them either doughy and bland or overly sweet, but these were very nice and balanced, with good caramel cinnamon flavor to them and a nice texture to the bread. Worth a visit if you’re in the area, and they have a few tables and wireless should you be inclined to linger a bit over your treat.

smørrebrød


I read the smørrebrød article in Saveur and got a little bit of religion. I want to have a big smørrebrød party, and have people over and make a shitload of these things, but i worry that not everyone thinks that eel and herring is as delicious as I do. So to scratch the itch just a little bit, I got out a tin of sardines in mustard sauce that’s been kicking around the cabinets for a while, and chopped up a hardboiled egg, and put it together into a salad and spread it on brown multigrain bread, with a sprig of dill and some baby pickles. Delicious! And to make myself feel like I was eating more healthfully, I made a salad of red peppers and fennel, which bizarrely went really well with the sandwiches.

i love it when a plan comes together

You have to picture me smirking and chomping on a cigar like George Peppard in the A-Team when I say that, by the way. Heh.
I woke up today hungry, so i ate a multigrain pita and a hardboiled egg, which should be plenty to get me through a couple of hours before lunch begins to occupy my consciousness. But i didn’t even make it out of the house and onto the bus before I was hungry again, and I was seriously considering stopping into the KFC that emits such wonderful smells where I wait for my second bus, even though I know it never tastes as good as it smells.
But I held out, figuring I’d just endure the shame and order lunch at 9:30am once I got to the office. And lo and behold, the professional-networking meeting that was held here last night had only two attendees, and so the fridge was FULL of fabulous leftover homemade cocktail nibblies, and I’ve been able to completely address the crisis with deviled eggs, roast-beef and red-pepper-mayo crostini, stuffed mushrooms, crab-goat cheese empanadas, and avocado-egg-creamcheese-caviar spread. I felt like I was at a London hotel, drinking my milky tea and munching on WASPy savories. How awesome is that?
Sometimes the universe really does provide.

pavlova


When your friend asks you to bring a dessert to a gathering, and you have a half-bag of shredded coconut, a handful of almost-overripe strawberries, and a few bananas, what do you do? You dig around in the cookbooks, decide that macaroons are not going to use up the berries, and that coconut custard pie is just too much work, and settle on a pavlova instead. Then you bike to the supermarket and buy kiwis and heavy cream, and get busy.
I used the Cook’s Illustrated Best Baking Book recipe, and the meringue came out beautiful, just perfect, but I couldn’t get it off the parchment paper when it came time to serve, so I guess it wasn’t so perfect after all. It broke all up into ugly sticky bits, but i shoved them back together and hid them under fruit and cream, and no one was the wiser save H who witnessed the whole thing. I put kiwis and strawberries and bananas onto it, drizzled it all with passionfruit puree, which is much runnier than I expected it to be, but is also so staggeringly delicious that I am putting it on every pav I ever make henceforward, and topped the works with toasted coconut. The whipped cream went on separately, because one of the guests was lactose intolerant, and the whole thing was rather well-received, happily. I was very happy with it myself, since the meringue base is very sweet but the rest of it is all just fruit and unsweetened cream, so the whole thing works once it’s together — and it’s easy to make, AND as a bonus it makes me think fondly back on my trip to New Zealand. What’s not to love?

blackbird, out of focus but delicious as always

My friend the ELF was in town for a big, important, stressful work event, and we made plans to go out for dinner the night she wrapped it all up. She brought along her friend and colleague Tha Directah from Jersey, and we all had a hell of a time, drinking just a little too much and eating a lot too much. I love Blackbird. 🙂
I haven’t decided if Tha Directah needs to become an acronym or not (TDFJ?). However, she can eat with me anytime, because anyone who can do this in a public place is A-OK with me:

The girls were running a little late because of work, so I was lurking at the bar waiting for them, drinking a perfect vodka gimlet that fabulous bartender Paul made for me just the way I like it, with half Rose’s and half fresh-squeezed lime juice. ELF joined me, and Tha Directah sweet-talked Paul into making his signature drink, which he refused to name but was his own variant on the French 75. Big points to the ELF for recognizing the resemblance on sight!

The amuse-bouche was a cup of sunchoke bisque with home-cured salmon belly. Not just salmon. Salmon belly. And it was a perfect little explosion of salty fattiness against the creamy nutty soup. It occurred to me that I like the bellies of lots of creatures: salmons, tunas, pigs, clams…

Then, inspired by tales of C the WineNerd, we ordered two rounds of appetizers. We were at least one sheet to the wind by this time, so it was all a little haphazard inasmuch as we could only agree on the contents of the course at hand at any given moment — but that made it more fun. So we got a salmon tartare with blood oranges and avocado and arbol chilies, which was very nice and perfect for summer — I liked it as a nice break from the meat-stravaganza that my dinners at Blackbird inevitably become, but the girls have had a few too many salmon tartare dishes in NYC, where they seem to be on every menu for all those skinny New York girls to order. And we got the succulent, i mean suckling, pig confit with blood oranges & balsamic, which was to die for as it always is, and the charcuterie plate, which is different every time and dreamy in all its guises. The crispy lamb’s tongues were my favorite this time, which took some doing because the country pate was pretty spectactular on its little brioche triangles, and the pickles this time were adorable little enoki mushrooms.

For the second appetizer course we got the diver scallops, with peas and preserved lemon, which was as close to failure as I’ve seen Blackbird get, which is to say that it was utterly delicious but the flavors seemed to exist on their own rather than blending together harmoniously into something even greater than the sum of the parts. And we got a walleye pike with pickled vegetables that may have been ramps, I don’t remember exactly, which was another light, fresh dish that wasn’t particularly challenging but for that I am grateful, because I don’t always want to work when I’m eating. And we got the green garlic soup topped with battered and fried frogs’ legs, which was ELF’s favorite. The soup was simple and fresh, and the little leggies were awfully nice, little salty crunchy mild meaty bites to contrast with the soft green soup. I don’t think I’d ever had a frog’s leg before, and it does taste a little bit like chicken, but somehow softer and more delicate.

A rose champagne materialized in there somewhere, courtesy of the ELF, which got the other two sheets flapping in the breeze. We didn’t have enough gas for three entrees, and sadly the pork rib had run out, so we shared the sturgeon with peas, onions and sorrel, which was very good but sturgeon just always tends to taste like dirt to me, and veal flank steak with morels and ramps and a sweet-tart vinegar sauce, which was more the sort of springtime dish I prefer. Yum.
Tha Directah hit the wall somewhere between the second and third course, once the adrenaline of the week’s work started to wane and the cocktails started to wax, so we skipped dessert entirely and took ourselves home to bed. There wasn’t any Allman Brothers this time, but I think they still had a good time. They’re coming back this week, and if schedules allow, we’ll do some more high-quality eating real soon.

persian market, middle east bakery

I was up visiting my friend H for a bit of rainy-day thrifting, during which neither of us was particularly thrifty (but we got some fabulous stuff — big white ’70s ‘badass superphones’ for H’s husband, some 1960s french sunglasses for H, and for me the prettiest rhinestone necklace I have ever seen), and by the end of all that I was ravenous. There’s a little pocket of Persian/Turkish cuisine up that way, and H highly recommended the Middle East Bakery on Foster between Clark & Ashland. I followed her suggestion and got a tasty spinach & cheese pie, and I followed my own gluttony and got a meat kibbe wrapped in a creamy starch (bulgur?) and deep fried to a greasy crunchy delight. They were both good, but that crunchy kibbe was really spectacular.
They have lots of greatlooking breads (it is a bakery after all) — i got two long flat loaves of soft white bread with sesame seeds, and some 7-grain pitas — and a cold case chockablock with homemade prepared foods. Their hummus is good, thin & nutty but a little too strong of tahini and not enough garlic & lemon for my taste. (Easily fixed at home, so no worries there.) The baba ganoush is super-smoky and really great, and the fool moudammas tastes strongly of green pepper, which is a little off-putting for me but the overall tangy & hot-peppery flavor won me over. There are two flavors of fresh labneh balls rolled with herbs and served in olive oil; i tried the mint-and-red-pepper version, which is addictively sheepy, creamy and spicy. There is something about middle-eastern dairy products that I just adore — labneh is one of my most favorite things to spread on bread, and the salted yogurt drink ayran is astoundingly refreshing on a hot summer day, though everyone else seems to think it’s weird. But then, I like drinking buttermilk too, so I guess it’s a thing.

Anyway… they also have a wide selection of nice-looking and well-priced bulk-packaged nuts, seeds, grains, legumes, spices and other staples like sugar and tea and coffee. I got some date sugar for TNR, 2 pounds of raw organic sugar, and a packet of pine nuts, along with a nice small jar of tahini. I hate having to buy a huge tub of tahini, because I can never use it up fast enough.
I also got a jar of the electric-pink turnip pickles that I have enjoyed with my kebabs & pilafs at several middle-eastern restaurants. Unfortunately, the jarred version isn’t that great — the texture of many of the pickles is soft and rubbery, and they have that weird undertaste that turnips have when they’re a bit too old, and the pickling brine is a little harsh. I think I might try making my own, since there’s a recipe in the new issue of Saveur.
I might try the black bean hummus recipe in there too, while I’m at it, and I have an eggplant waiting in the fridge… mmmmmm…..
oh right, this post was supposed to be about the persian market too — Pars Persian Market on Clark — it’s okay, but the bakery is better by a long shot, and friendlier as well. The Persian Market has more dishes and cookware, though, and you can get little wasp-waisted tea glasses and saucers, and several types of the long flat metal skewers for kebab kubideh, and tiny coffee cup sets, and hookahs, and it looks like the upstairs has belly dancing outfits. I did see some canned foods I’d never seen before, like a pomegranate soup made with split peas, and a huge selection of waters, like orange blossom water, but also cress water, borage water, peppermint water, dill water, and several with no english words on them at all.
Persian cookery, and Turkish and the other surrounding nations’, is just so extraordinarily delicious and combines flavors in such interesting ways, and even beyond that it’s very healthful in that mediterranean legumes-and-olive oil mode. It seems to me it should be taking off much more than it is, the way that Italian cooking did a while ago and Spanish cooking is now. Perhaps it’s coming soon… in the meantime I am going to sit happily and stuff my face with smoky eggplant and sheep cheese, and start planning my kebab kubideh cookout party. Seriously. I just need to get a grill….