Our friend N from Maryland visited this weekend, and arrived bearing marshmallow donuts and the Best Bacon Ever, bless her heart. Bacon from the Hollins Market in Baltimore is thick-cut, super-fatty, and wicked smoky — when we first saw it in the market last fall, it looked so luscious I had to buy some and finagle it home on the plane. While we were at it, we got some smoked ham hocks too, for winter melon soup, which were so superior we won’t use any other hocks. (Hollins Market is also the home of Chuckie’s Fried Chicken, the Best Fried Chicken Ever, but that’s another story.) And so now whenever we visit her or she visits us, fabulous pork products end up in our kitchen.
yeah, ok, so there’s only 3 in the picture…
I was distracted by eating the first 6 or so
before I remembered to photograph –
can you blame me?But wait, there’s more: the 3 of us hooked up with littlelee & spleen to get busy with the awesome homemade dumplings at Taiwan Cafe in chinatown. Normally tallasiandude & I go there, order dumplings and something else (to fill the 20 minute wait for made-to-order dumplings), and can’t even finish the one order, so this time we brought reinforcements so we could order multiple dumpling types. It paid off handsomely. The pork-shrimp pan-fried dumplings were the best they’ve ever been, perfectly crispy bottoms with thin, tender tops, and the xiao lung bao were enormous and floppy with their cargo of delicious pork soup. The other dim sum things were pretty good, but not extraordinary, but we did order a Fu-chou style fish ball soup that was a knockout. The fish balls were the usual firm white smooth fish paste, but inside is a dark savory nugget of pork: two great tastes that taste great together. The balls were floating in a clear broth with lots and lots of pepper (yum), green onion, and tiny bits of celery in the bottom.
And last night for dinner we acted on tallasiandude’s craving and went to Kaya in Porter Square for the DIY Korean BBQ. They have terrific kalbi, super buttery and flavorful, and the bulgogi is damn good too. And the soft tofu seafood chigae is all that tallasiandude said it would be. It’s very spicy, with a buttery broth, and a wonderful texture that comes from the abundance of pillowy, disintegrating soft tofu. And they have chamisul soju, which not only makes you pleasantly tiddly in short order, but tastes great with kalbi.
All that plus some yummy vietnamese dessert treats (agar-agar in thin coconut milk, red beans in thick coconut milk, neon-green sweet rice with coconut milk), a box full of takeaway egg tarts and lotus seed moon cakes, and a last minute goodbye dinner of beef pho and Christina’s ice cream. (Speaking of which, Christina’s concord-grape sorbet is excellent.) A high-quality eating weekend — oh, and we did some sightseeing and stuff too. *grin*
mexican summer saute
A happy confluence of leftovers and farmer’s market goodies spawned this tasty dish (healthy too, shh).
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, diced
1 poblano pepper, seeds & ribs removed, diced
2 small summer squash/zucchini, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
dried oregano (1/2 tsp?)
ground cumin (1 tsp?)
chili powder (1/2 tsp?)
stewed tomatoes or can of diced/crushed tomatoes
2 grilled chicken thighs, diced
kernels scraped from 2 ears leftover corn
salt & pepper
Heat the olive oil over med-high heat and add the onions. Saute till starting to soften, then add the poblano and squash and continue sauteing. The high heat will add a bit of nice brown crust to some of the vegetables, so keep stirring so they don’t burn rather than brown. When they’re nice and soft, sprinkle a bit of salt on the veg, add the spices, and stir to distribute. Then add the garlic and saute for 30-60 seconds. Add the tomatoes to keep things from burning (the oil will have been absorbed by now). Lower the heat to low and simmer 5 minutes, or as long as it takes to fully soften the vegetables. Add the corn and chicken just long enough to heat through and blend flavors (about 5 minutes), or longer to reduce any extra liquid you don’t want. Adjust seasonings & add pepper to your taste.
Serve over white rice, sprinkled with cheese, cotija if available.
italian-style escarole & beans
This is my version of the classic recipe, which has been vetted as authentic by our Italian-American food-bigot friend Victor, who views any not-Italian food with suspicion at best. It is definitely one of those recipes where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Ingredients:
1 onion, sliced
2 -3 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
generous amount olive oil to saute (I use extra virgin, as I think it tastes nice)
head of escarole or other bitter green
can of chicken broth
can of white beans
salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes to taste
Saute sliced onion in olive oil till softened, then add garlic slices and saute those till softened (use enough oil so they don’t get dry or hard, or burn while you’re sauteeing the greens). Add sliced up head of escarole, or other bitter green, and saute until wilted and fairly soft — you want them pretty well sauteed before you add liquid, at least for escarole, because it tempers the bitterness. Add some pepper and red pepper flakes, if you like. Add a can of chicken broth. Braise a good long time till the greens are getting silky soft and delicious, then add a drained & rinsed can of white beans, and braise a little longer to flavor them up and blend everything (the broth thickens up just a hair from the bean starch). Cover at any point if you think the broth is disappearing too quickly. Salt to taste.
It’s just lovely as it is, with some bread and cheese as accompaniment, but you can also add chicken sausage or other cooked meat to make a heartier stew-like dish. The key is to not wuss out on cooking the greens longer than you may think is strictly necessary, at both the saute and braise stages, because when they get all soft and olive green, that’s when they taste most delicious. (I would even make so bold as to suggest that this might be the sort of thing that Marcella Hazan has in mind when she talks about insaporire as the wellspring of Italian food’s astounding yumminess. Roughly translated it means “to make flavorful,” and the general idea is to cook your aromatics (onion, celery, carrot, peppers, whatever) slowly in fat, building up layers of caramelization and flavors, before firing up the heat and adding the ingredient which is intended to be ‘insaporato’: given the flavor you just lovingly built up in the supporting ingredients. I think the beans are the target in a greens-n-beans recipe like this.)
dear merciful heaven
for the love of god, someone stop me — i can’t keep my head out of these foodblogs! Argh. This one is a new entry in my Register of Frustration & Deprivation**: the crisps and snacks category of snackspot.org. Memories of lamb & mint, chicken tikka, and pickled onion potato chips come flooding back…. yum. Sigh.
** thanks to Calvin Trillin for articulating and naming the horrible torture that comes from being a traveling food whore, wherein you discover and fall in love with delicious foodstuffs not available outside their native land.
this is how to run a business
Penzey’s Spices decided to expand their chain of spice stores. So they ran a postcard contest, and whichever city sent in the most cards got the store. Boston won — woohoo! (and no thanks to my lazy procrastinating ass, sadly). This is good policy in and of itself, being community focused and democratic.
But just now I got a phone call from a nice lady in Wisconsin who wanted to know my thoughts on a store location they’re considering. We talked about the neighborhood (Mass Ave near Arlington Town Hall), public transit access, parking, accessibility for those from outside the city (NH, or similar), and other general matters concerning whether or not it was a good spot to settle in. This is an amazing thing! They got my info from my order history (I buy a lot of stuff, I admit it) and called me up, person to person, to get the skinny from someone who would actually be going to the store, and who knows the area as a local, and they’re undoubtedly going to tally up all the responses to make a composite picture of what they’re getting into. Genius! Blindingly simple.
I feel strongly about supporting businesses that conduct themselves in a sustainable, customer and community friendly manner, and this just seals it. I can’t wait for January, when I can scoot over to Arlington anytime I want and buy fresh, exotic, yummy spices from nice midwestern people who do things properly.
kindred spirits in the blogosphere
I have long taken comfort in the presence of littlelee, spleen and hedge in my life, fellow foodsluts who provide companionship and emotional justification for my chow-related excesses. And though I knew there were others of our kind out there, now I can find them and read them at all hours of the day and night. Huzzah, MORE FOOD INFORMATION!
Of course, this should not be so shocking and exciting for me, since after all I have my own food blog here to provide entertainment and happy food thoughts to the public. But it never really occurred to me that anyone would read it; it was mostly for my own amusement. Then tallasiandude set up usage tracking, and it became clear that people are actually linking to, bookmarking and reading this here blog. Ay caramba! This of course led to a delightful two hours wandering around other people’s food blogs, our favorites of which (so far) are listed under links, below left.
Some of these have awesome recipes on them. Others are even nerdier than mine, which is utterly wonderful. And others are just plain people I want to eat dinner with. For instance, consider this musing on weight-loss. Not only is this exactly my own attitude on the subject, but it includes a diatribe against low-fat cheese, mentions of suet pastry, a completely justifiable gyoza bender, and a delicious recipe for cucumber salad. The only thing I’d add is a link to Margaret Cho’s website, wherein she discusses her own weight-loss epiphany.
I’m not sure this approach would work as well for us as it did for Margaret, because we didn’t have such effective hangups around chocolate cake and pizza in the first place — sometimes I think my whole life is a fuck-it diet — but there are fundamental truths there. The idea of leaving delicious food on the plate uneaten because YOU CAN GET MORE LATER is a mindblower. (I’ve only recently gotten to the point where I’ll leave it on the plate but then bulldoze the server into wrapping it to go for later.) There is not one thing wrong with eating suet pastry and triple creme cheese and white bread and toro nigiri and Kraft Mac & Cheese and b’giant steaks… it’s only how much of them you eat. And since I am no longer poor, I need to accept and internalize the fact that I don’t have to snarf up the entire contents of the free buffet, but can just run out and buy more nevat or organic chocolate or wild arugula or bulgarian feta anytime I like.
America. What a country. *grin*
(thanks to everyone who actually reads this blog, and to maki for having such a cool blog: I am inspired now to stop being such a lazyass and actually write out specific recipes for things.)
cantaloupe sorbet
For some reason, our garden cantaloupes have been starting to mold before they are fully ripe, so in order to deal with the mangled chunks of yummy but none-too-sweet ripe melon, I made them into sorbet. Taking a tip from the strawberry sorbet I had at Jiraffe in LA, I put some sauternes in with the melon and sugar. Holy cow! Just like the strawberry, the melon is pushed right over the edge into glory by that wine’s sweetness and floral overtones. The alcohol also helps keep the texture soft and velvety, rather than icy. I ate some every day for a week, and there’s still some left, which I think I might go eat right now. Oh, how I love the sweet fruity desserts!
(though still, as good as this melon sorbet is, the All-Time Best Fruity Dessert Ever prize still belongs to the lime sherbet made this spring. Hot damn.)
middle-brow food bucket
Original (low-brow) food bucket: Kraft Mac & Cheese, Hormel canned chili, hot dogs. Ideally cooked over a campfire. Intensely satisfying hike food.
High-brow food bucket: Homemade mac with real melty cheeses, homemade chili with ground meat and beans and tomatoes and spiciness, hot dogs. Usually made at home. Tastes great, of course, because of all yummy ingredients especially including cheese. But somehow wrong, contrary to the spirit of food bucket.
Enter last night’s last-minute dinner: Annie’s white mac & cheese, Stagg fancy-pants meaty canned chili from Costco, a handful of aged cheddar, chopped fresh tomato. No dogs, b/c the chili has lots of meat. It has the proper spirit, of cans and powdered cheese mix, but it tastes great because of the tiny bit of real cheese and higher-quality foundations. Mmmm…
mojito milkshake
Visit #2 to the Friendly Toast in Portsmouth NH found the frosty-drink machine in good working order, happily, and we had a selection. The blueberry-raspberry smoothie was lovely, pure fruit, not too sweet. The vanilla milkshake was perfection, as expected. But the mojito milkshake is where the real action is. Milk, sugar, lime juice and finely minced mint — it’s like minted, melty lime sherbet. Tangy and delicious. Worth not being able to finish the monster sandwich that accompanied it.
nevat
A creamy white, soft goat cheese from Catalunya. Utterly luscious. Texture like a firmish brie, with smooth, fatty, milky, goaty flavor. First had at LaBrea Bakery, but also found locally at Whole Foods Fresh Pond. *swoon*