Category: Food Finds

and in case that wasn’t quite clear:



Be frightened.

Last night tallasiandude and I ate dinner at Shawarma King in Coolidge Corner (before a free showing of Princess Bride at the theater, whee!) and with his chicken shawarma came a little cup of creamy white paste. It looked like mashed potato, but it turned out to be garlic. I asked the guy behind the counter what else was in it, and managed to wheedle out of him that there’s olive oil, lemon, vinegar and salt, but mostly raw garlic, all pureed up in the blender. Somehow they get a perfect balance of mild yet tangy garlic flavor, with a bit of tartness from the acids and enough salt to balance the whole works.
I ate a bunch of it with my lamb kefta & potato special, and when we were done with dinner I ate the rest of it with a spoon. YUM.
In related matters: I love me some Shawarma King, and last night was no exception, but there is another condender these days for my choice of Lebanese eats: Reef Cafe in Allston. Thanks to Arthur Hungry for the tip-off. We had stuffed cabbage (long thin elegant little rolls the size of extra-long fried spring rolls) and a lamb/eggplant/rice casserole, both delightful, with salty hot-pink turnip pickles that I loved. I think Reef Cafe has better tomato-cucumber salad & pickles, but SK has fantastic ayran and that garlic sauce… hmmm, a battle of titans. I will have to mack down more goodies, I mean peform more painstaking research…

Sorry for the lack of posts, people — it’s been really busy. Oy.
tallasiandude has returned from China, and he has brought with him a bunch of magical teas which come in the shape of little walnut-sized balls. The tea itself is delightfully fragrant and delicious, and just sniffing the hot steam as it steeps is pleasure enough. However, the magic comes when hot water is added to a ball, and it unfolds into a spiky green starburst with a flower in the middle, sometimes jasmine, sometimes other flowers. The one last night turned out to be a red globe amaranth, a decorative flower my mom used to grow for dried arrangements. And the starburst is formed by tying long tea leaves together with a string, with the wee flower in the center captured into the bundle so that the flower sits atop the cut ends of the leaves. Then the leaves are wrapped down and around the flower, hiding it and forming the tight little ball of tea. Very clever, and a joy for all the senses.

Our friends M + A came by today bearing bacon & rye bread, and we made BLTs & tomato soup for lunch. BLT on dark rye is fantastic — the bread gives a sweet-savory depth of flavor. Yummy! And we learned that cob-smoked bacon is much stronger flavored, more smoky and aggressive, than applewood-smoked bacon. Both are delicious, but in the sandwich, the cob-smoked stood up much better and the smoky baconliciousness came through more clearly. Both flavors were North Country thick-cut bacon, bought at Russo’s in Waltham. I’m a slut for anything smoky, the smokier the better, so I’m keeping an eye peeled for this stuff.

While I’m on the subject, the thick yogurt in question is water buffalo yogurt. This is a new discovery for me, but just today I saw it on the shelves at Whole Foods. It’s shockingly thick & creamy, almost a solid, much thicker than normal cow yogurt. And Woodstock brand at least comes in some swank flavors, like maple and black currant, in addition to plain.
From my reading in my new Harold McGee On Food and Cooking (thanks, santa!), I’ve learned that the reason for all this luxuriant creaminess is that water buffalo milk is drastically higher in fat: 6.9% to the average 3.7% of cow. Mmmmm, faaat.

Photogenic, too. This was a leftover photo from my week on the rural homestead, and I was unable to resist it. The pork roll and the Lebanon balogna both came in heavy stitched cloth sleeves like this, printed with a Penna-Dutch device and big block lettering.

The foodsluts spleen & littlelee have returned from Fiji and New Zealand, bearing gifts as you knew they would. (They managed to find the one thing I would most want from NZ – more to come on this in a future post.) They apparently befuddled supermarket cashiers, baggage handlers and customs officials around the globe by buying nearly 20 bags of various potato chips and lugging them home in a huge Fijian flour sack. We snarfed up the bounty in another installment of our now-infamous blind chip tastings. (We’re getting really good at figuring out what flavor things are supposed to be.)
There was roast lamb with mint (good, but inferior to the version we got in London), spicy tomato & vinegar (really good), burger (not so hot), chicken (bland), chilli & sour cream (yum), and a shocking number of pizza flavored chips. Who knew Fijians & Kiwis & Japanese would all have a fetish for pizza-flavored snacks? The absolute best snack of the bunch wasn’t a chip at all, but more of a cheeto-shaped corn snack, with staggeringly realistic-tasting pizza flavor crystals: Twisties Pizza, from Fiji. Tangy, sweet, spicy, tomatoey, & a strong oregano flavor. Too bad it was only a snack-size pack.

So after dropping tallasiandude at the airport for his weekend of vegas madness, I stopped at the supermarket on the way home to lay in supplies for tomorrow’s quasi-terrine… and was intensely attracted to the frozen pizzas. I lingered, trying to decide which would be the most pleasing, but ultimately I made the mistake of reading the boxes. I thought I was down with the trashy guilty-pleasure foods, but I guess it’s only particular ones, because I just couldn’t bring myself to buy a pizza, or chicken nuggets, or even a frozen dinner. The idea was too icky. I feel shamed.
Then on the way out I saw the bag of Zesty Tomato Terra Chips: “tomato, worcestershire, & celery.” Three of the best flavor-crystal tastes in the world, together on one Bloody Mary of a chip! I bought them. And ate them in the car on the way home. And AMEN flavor-crystals: they are awesome. But my god, how did I forget how utterly vile is the texture of Terra Chips? Ugh! Yuck! They’re hard and thick and hurt your jaw when you valiantly manage to crunch through a few. Just plain *wrong* for a chip. The suffering is just too high a price to pay for the tasty powder. (and note to Terra: the sweeter vegetable chips don’t go with Bloody Mary flavored crystals. Bleh.)
postscript: I finally started licking the crystals off the chips and throwing them away, until my parents arrived for a visit and I was able to palm the chips off on them. Never again, never.

I am finding that wedges of mixed-nut mooncake make excellent, highly-sustaining midafternoon snacks while working. Thanks, Renee!

*drool* H&J took me to Johnny’s Italian Beef out in some distant western suburb (Lake Forest? Forest Park? Lakewood? take two nature words, stick ’em together, and you’ve got a Chicago neighborhood — i can’t keep ’em straight) for lunch today. Italian beef turns out to be roast beef au jus on steroids: thin slices of beef, on a french sub roll, with giardiniera (pickled peppers — either sweet or hot) and thin gravy. It’s the gravy that’s the key; it’s kind of like beef broth with lots of salt & basil & oregano. You can get them dry, so they keep their sandwichy form, or you can get them wet, or extra wet, in which case they submerge the sandwich in lots of the yummy gravy so that what you’re actually eating is a smushy, gooey mess of pickly beefy goodness. Readers of this blog know how I am about sauce, so you know i got my sammie extra wet. French fries serve as a condiment, and homemade lemon italian ice cuts the grease. Bliss.