Eastern Standard has definitely improved

I mean, we always liked it. The steak tartare was tops and the cocktails were always well made, and you can’t beat the busy comfortable vintage atmosphere. But most things were drastically oversalted, and the cocktail attitude needed to be adjusted — when I read your cocktail menu, I’d at least like to know the general flavor and format of the drinks.

Notwithstanding, we’ve been going there a few times a year now for several years, and this last visit, we realized: all those problems have gone. There’s a new cocktail menu, still a little oblique but at least you know whether you’ll get gin or whisky or fruit or bitters. Nothing that arrived was oversalted, and the scallops in spicy roast corn was truly one of the best things I’ve ever eaten there, perfectly balanced, creamy, spicy, savory and light.

So yay — a place we liked a lot before has a lot more to like now.

i *heart* my electric slicer

I finally broke down and bought a fancy electric meat slicer in order to properly slice the salumi I often get from my brother. Now, this is not the slice-everything-in-sight wonder that the brochure claims it is, but hot damn if it doesn’t slice the paper-thin bejesus out of my cured meats. Worth every penny.

Last night I sliced up some mole, finocchiona, and tartufo salumi to eat with the pasta and red sauce that was the sole dinner option after a hectic week. Yes, and it was only Tuesday. Yeesh. And today I was able to enjoy the leftover sliced goodness with a few slices of bread and fresh cherries for lunch. Summer does not suck.

at last, something useful to do with too-sweet cornbread

Whenever we get BBQ takeout, inevitably there is a bunch of obligatory cornbread, and because we are in the North, said cornbread is inevitably as sweet as cake. Eeew. I never eat it. But I feel guilty throwing it away if no one else eats it either. So this morning, I took a couple of pieces, crumbled them into a bowl with some canned peaches, poured milk over it like cereal and ate it for breakfast. Not at all terrible, and remarkably filling.

Frontera Grill – sparkling passion and chicken soup

We had the usual array of delightful things at Frontera Grill last night, but two things stood out clearly. One was a chicken soup appetizer that arrived glowing verdantly with bits of avocado and some leafy item. It tasted of rich, strong chicken broth and had bits of crisped chicken skin floating in there along with the vegetables. Spectacularly good.

The other was a cocktail made of Harpoon IPA, passionfruit juice, fresh lime, and hibiscus tea to tint it pink. Luscious, with a hint of bitter hops and bubbles cutting through the sweet passionfruit. Perfect for summertime.

brown rice onigiri

I couldn’t help it — today I was seized by an overwhelming desire for a rice ball filled with canned salmon and chopped kimchi, and I even waited to eat lunch until the rice was ready — but damn it if that rice didn’t collapse all over the place as soon as I picked up my nice pressed, molded treat. I have been buying the short-grain brown rice from Whole Foods. It’s tasty and easy to acquire in the course of normal food-gathering. However, I find that it is utterly useless for making onigiri — the grains don’t stick together for crap. This confuses me, because the grains are the same shape as the white short-grain rice I use for less-diet-friendly onigiri. However, that white rice I bought at the Korean market, so perhaps they are not the same varieties of rice despite their similarities. I would prefer, of course, to just buy one kind of brown rice, since it keeps much less well than white rice, but I guess I better trot over to the Koreans and see if they have any brown rice that can be used for my fiberrific rice balls. Or is it just that brown rice doesn’t work for this application? Maki at JustHungry claims that it does…

sweet holy hannah, achatz has done it again, damn his eyes

Check out the blurb on Huffington Post about Grant Achatz’s new restaurant and soon-to-come cocktail bar.

I already want to go to both real bad. The son of a bitch is gonna take MORE of my money, and I’m gonna enjoy it. Again. 🙂

ramping up spaghetti cooked in wine

Oh, what a wretched pun. Last night we made spaghetti all’ubriaco, the delicious pasta cooked in red wine that we ate in Florence, tipped off by E&O, our intrepid eating pals. And our other pal brought over a huge baggie of ramps that she foraged with her mom, and it seemed only logical to chop some ramps and add them to the pasta. Logical, and in actual fact, truly delicious. The ramps added a sharpness and savoriness to the buttery, nutty, fruity weirdness of that pasta, and made it even better. The other nice thing is that a bowl of chopped ramps makes your whole house smell terrific if you leave it out on the table for a couple of hours while you finish off some sliced salumi and bread and cheese and wine. Better than air freshener!