Curious!
I don’t often think about flavor profiles the way the pros do, but I can’t really avoid it when they slap me in the face by being surprising and utterly different.
In the billion years since I last posted here, I’ve moved from my (cozy) hovel in East Williamsburg into a nice walk-up in Queens, and an entirely new culinary world — read: not Italian — exploded with possibilities. I live a stone’s throw away from a half-dozen excellent Greek restaurants and commendable Thai and some shockingly excellent Indian food — it’s an embarrassment of riches and it’s tragic that what finally got me posting here today was a greek filo desert — flavored with rose water.
Intellectually, I knew that before vanilla was easily obtained and in vogue rose water was a flavoring of choice, but my tongue has grown up with cheap imitation vanilla and the luxuriously good real stuff, in decadent ice creams and cakes, and although I have always hated the perfume-like head of vanilla when it is abused, the kiss of it on your tongue is irresistable and utterly familiar.
Rose water, on the other hand, tastes even more perfume-y. Obviously, floral, almost plasticky to me, bottled and musty, but it had a coy, alien sweetness to it, and even though the first bite of the rolled baklava was arresting, I kept going back for more, trying to figure out whether or not I liked it. Maybe it’s like a lot of things, I’m too startled by it to enjoy it, or maybe it’s just too late for me to love any baking flavor other than vanilla.
New neighborhood brings new delights, butchers, etc.
I just moved into my new apartment yesterday morning and having spent most of this morning elbowing old ladies out of my way at the Union Square Greenmarket and cursing the bohemoth of a line at the Trader Joe’s around that corner, I finally staggered back into Williamsburg only to find that I live near BUTCHERS. REAL ACTUAL BUTCHERS. People who UNDERSTAND AND CUT MEAT. My GOD. I nearly had an orgasm on Graham Avenue, my friends. I’m not kidding at all.
The irony of listening to Christina Aguilera, “Beautiful” — shut up, don’t judge me — as I write this isn’t lost on me, okay?
I’m not a coffee snob in the traditional sense. I probably couldn’t tell the difference between a Folger’s brew and Kopi Luwak. I have a limited amount of rational ability and I choose not to use it on coffee. Instead, I choose my coffee based on its environmental impact: I like fairly-traded, I like shade-grown, I like organic and raised by small farm cooperatives that still allow birds to roost in their trees. And while I don’t like Starbucks, they purport to sell coffee that follows at least the first two of my preferences, so every other day or so, when the 115 May’s Pond bus up to Mill Creek drops me off at 164th St. in Lynnwood, I truck on over to the Starbucks and order up. And if I don’t order drip coffee, I end up with, and I am not making this up, this is my serious actual order: “one venti skim chai–light on the syrup–with two shots, please.”
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “God, you’re the gayest straight woman ever.”
Yes, I know, and yes, I agree, but if you go to the Starbucks Oracle, it can tell you so much more! Yes, folks, you can have your entire personality read by your drink order. And this is what it thinks of me:
Behold the Oracle’s wisdom:
Personality type: High Maintenance
You pride yourself on being assertive and direct; everyone else thinks you’re bossy and arrogant. You’re constantly running your mouth about topics that only you would find interesting. Your capacity for wasting other people’s time is limitless. Your friends find you intolerable, that’s why they’re plotting to kill you.
Also drinks: Water. Bottled, chilled, with four ice cubes, a twist of lemon, in a crystal glass.
Can also be found at: Trendy martini bars
Sadly, all v. v. true. What about you guys?
Bainbridge Island Adventure! The newest chapter in the Boxcar Children saga, obvs.
Bainbridge Island, located in the Pudget Sound, is accessible by hour-interval ferries — and on it is a Pacific Northwestern Pleasantville. K, S, T and I made the trek out there Saturday morning — in part for professional reasons (K) and in part because it was Saturday and we all deserved a girls’ day out (S, T and I), and it was a perfect day to go: gray sullen skies melting into golden sunshine by midday.
Bainbridge is charming, it’s all bike-accessible, and the narrow streets are lined with deep forests and small shops, a post office, a high school. K meant to do an audio report on the location, and I went — like I go everywhere — to eat. We got started, after a trying journey in the car with a box of assorted Safeway donuts (in my defense, I only ate half a bearclaw and half a jelly donut, the rest were already gone by the time I climbed into the backseat), at the local coffee Shop, called the Blackbird, to load up on coffee and pastries. But mostly coffee. I mean, at least for some of us. Because clearly, some people were into the pastries:
Walking down the length of the island toward the waterfront meant walking past the downtown of specialty paper stores and the farmer’s market, a tiny strip mall that looked like battered beach property — and then destination: Doc’s Grill at the waterside.
Where we ate like kings.
Clams and mussels came perfectly steamed, tender, served in a white wine sauce with butter and lemon to drizzle and dip, with a side of foccascia bread. The shellfish were delightful, perfect, with a great bite to them, and the sauce was ambrosial: indulgent and richly briny, with a touch of garlic that made it an aromatic feast…which, guys, seriously, had us all moaning like we were chick-meat in a Ron Jeremy bonanza blowout flick.
K and I followed it up with clam chowder, which, while a little oversalted, was wonderful: creamy and thick from slow-cooking, and not overly-reliant on butter. The clams were plentiful but so were the potatoes and celery — Doc’s served the best chowder I’ve had in Seattle so far, and I had to go to a semi-sports bar famous for burgers to get it.
Sadly, the fish and beer-battered chips I ordered afterward was underwhelming: overcooked, overfried, and bland, although the french fries were delicious and the scoop of slaw that accompanied was divine. Light and not too heavy on the mayo, with the faint sweetness of the vegetables and their crisp perfectly preserved and not soggy like so many (many, many) coleslaws I’ve eaten in my long career as a Southern girl with an appetite.
And dinner, sadly, acquired in the international district at The Purple Dot Cafe was pretty craptacular — which was depressing after a pretty craptacular first half of the Seattle Sounders v. Minnesota Thunder soccer game. (Aside: I find, and no one will convince me otherwise, that soccer is the most appallingly boring sport in the world to watch — I’m sure it’s loads of fun to play, I remember enjoying it as a kid — but as somebody sitting in the stands watching the ball zip up and down the field and no points scored, ever — ever – it’s the sports equivalent of stabbing yourself in the eye over and over again. Give me baseball, give me basketball, give me a good hockey game — but my God, never give me soccer tickets at Qwest Field again.)
I’m always hesitant about ordering off the menu at Chinese restaurants unless I’m intensely certain about the quality of the food at that particular establishment (see: Evergreen Shanghai Restaurant, Chinatown Manhattan), so I can only really blame myself for the tasteless, misnamed, and overcooked Sechuan spicy beef noodles I ordered.
But there are things at the Purple Dot to be adored: their congee menu is extensive and generous, with enormous, deeply-filling bowls of subtly seasoned rice porridge available at less than $3 a pop — one is enough to stuff you for hours. Couple that with the delicious if very Americanized garlic eggplant hot-pot (in no way Chinese, but still delicious), and you have a passable meal — but beware ordering: there’s a reason I only come to this place for dim sum.
Seattle food diaries: despair sets in.
One of the reasons I had difficulty discovering the nature of the Seattle food scene, I think, is that there isn’t a cohesive one — there’s no community personality for eating, and while there are good restaurants (man, are there good restaurants), there’s no thesis to the entire restaurant scene. And while I recognized this as an oddity but not a major problem, I faced my first true moment of food horror yesterday while dining at Capitol Hill’s upscale Southern restaurant (I was homesick, all right?), the Kingfish Cafe.
Located at 602 19th Avenue East, Kingfish is tucked away in a pretty quiet, heavily residential area shaded deeply with trees and approximately 6 billion miles away from a gas station (as our rapidly de-fueling car found yesterday night). There was a line out the front door, but our wait for a table for three ended up being just twenty minutes spent at the bar — which was the location for the deepest trauma I have suffered yet this summer:
Guys — Kingfish Cafe doesn’t have sweet tea.
Say what you will about catering to your clientel, about the capricious nature of eaters, about regional differences in cooking, but the one uncompromising punctuation of any Southern, Southern-esque, purportedly-Southern, Southern-lite meal is that I can get sweet tea off of your menu.
Iced tea was listed, with “(unsweetened)” written next to it, and I wondered if maybe that just meant you had the option of getting it without sugar. You know, for heathens. NOT SO, the bartender clarified — your only option for tea was unsweetened, which began my campaign to make myself as obnoxiously, obviously from North Carolina as humanly possible. I wailed, I bemoaned. I flipped over the guest check at the end of the meal and wrote a heartfelt note to the restaurant management about the grievous error of their ways and ended it with a genuine “thanks” and a smiley face — but I think we all know that smiley was strained by lack.
What was more disappointing was that the rest of the food was wonderful — really really wonderful. On a Thursday night at 8:30 they were already sold out of their ribs, but still had buttermilk fried chicken (which I ordered) and a menu that stretched toward Louisiana and then back to the eastern seaboard.
The corn chowder was creamy if short on crayfish and slightly on the thin side — and weirdly, serviced with matzo. Yeah, I have no idea. Neither did Roommate 1, who gave it an odd look before shrugging and dunking it into the chowder. Fried green tomatoes, although deliciously handled, were probably the most anemic looking tomatoes I’d ever seen: tiny, plucked too early, and disappointingly small — although all the requisite flavors were present, the produce selection could have used a lot of help. The hushpuppies served on the side were excellent — better even, strike me down, than similarly made hushpuppies served at the Chapel of Nouveau Southern Food: Crook’s Corner in Chapel (T)Hill.
The buttermilk fried chicken was overfried — which made the thin breading a little surly, just as Southern ladies don’t sweat but glisten, a Southern lady should never be in a position to gnaw at her chicken, although the meat was perfectly cooked and falling from the bone tender, getting to it was a trial. It was more than compensated by the enormously delicious potato salad, served still molded into a scoop shape and garnished liberally with parsley, made with red potatoes, red onions, and a smattering of celery for bit. And that was paired with collard greens, cooked to absolute perfection: salty, sweet, and vinegar-rich with flavor and a smooth, wonderful texture that spoke of long hours in heavy pots. The cornbread, served on the side, was good and rich, nearly cake-like in texture — something that might be attributed to the fact that Kingfish makes them with creamed corn and Pepperjack cheese in addition to fresh corn kernels and jalapenos in the batter.
Kingfish is good, if slightly higher on the price scale than Southern food should (ever) be, but we can chalk that up to location, and clearly defective in the drink department. On a scale of A to F, Kingfish’s food gets a B; Kingfish’s drinks get an F—- (that’s three minuses), because any Southern restaurant that doesn’t serve sweet tea is a big fat faker in my book. Good effort, bad execution — and total score for me would be a C+.
CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG
My roommate is making beer.
Photos and updates on Beer 1 and Beer 2 (avec blackberry honey!) as they crop up — original shots of boiling barley, crumbling in hops, pouring in malt, and my many and sundry “EW this tastes like the disgusting herbal medicines my mom used to make me drink as a kid!” faces at tasting the component ingredients weren’t taken, given the extreme heat of the kitchen and lameness of me — stuffing my face full of pizza while Roommate was making booze.
Seattle Food Diary #1: “Eating local. Literally.”
Most places have a food personality: the South has its hot oils and crisp skins, its savory and rich; China has its fresh and fast and green, with sweet and salt blending on the tongue; and now Seattle. We’re still feeling one another out.
My first real Seattle gastronomy experiment was at Eva’s, a Greenlake restaurant with a focus on local ingredients and flavors and a killer champagne cocktail called an Eva’s Special, introduced to me by my wonderful dining companion J.
I forget the exact makeup of the drink but there was a sugar cube at the bottom of the flute: sweet with a bite and just enough of a reverb of liquor bitter — utterly delicious. At just over $8 a glass, very much the chosen drink of the evening in what looked like a wonderful wine list to begin with — plus, with tons of reasonably-priced half-bottles.
We followed that up with an organic green salad with paper-thin pear and mozzarella slices and a wonderful red wine vinaigrette — good but not good enough to pursue it at the restaurant. It was a great, light counterpoint to the following course, but at around $7, it wasn’t that much more amazing than anything I could put together in you know, a plastic tin out of the local Whole Foods.
J. elected to have an asparagus tart after the waitress informed her the mussels were demolished for the evening, and it was gorgeous with a pile of watercress on top. I resisted the urge to just dig my fork across the table and steal all of her food. But! I think honestly? I got the best dish in that restaurant that night, and not just because I got to say “Yamhill County pork loin”:
It’s a seared pork loin perched on top of a rouget of fennel and salt pork with two grilled pieces of fennel on top of a spring pea puree — utterly divine. As I just told my roommate, “I want to go back there right now and eat like, four of them.”
Oh, and to top it all off: chocolate Guinness cake served with a shot of whiskey — amazing.
Dinner at Eva’s was unquestionably excellent but it can get to be kind of a pricey proposition given that most of the drinks will run you anywhere between $7-$12 a glass, half bottles are anywhere between $22-42, and while all the entrees are under $25 and deserts under $10, add that all up with tip and our dinner ran the two of us about $100 — a great romantic date restaurant, or you know, for neighborhood friends.
I still have tennis elbow. And a serious food aversion.
My first job (ever) was at a Marble Slab Creamery my next door neighbor opened when I was a freshman in high school. He needed young people willing to work for $6.50 an hour and I was still fourteen enough to think that $6.50 an hour was the kind of money worth suffering the indignities and pain of food service. All I could think of was the number of Mocha Freezes I could purchase at the local Borders Cafe, the $5 flip-flops from Old Navy, and other such fourteen year old pursuits. (You add eight years to that age and I would have been calculating the costs of hookers and blow — mostly because nothing tickles the funny-bone better than the phrase “hookers and blow.”) You see, I didn’t understand the undertaking: working at an ice cream store is the darkest, deepest corner of hell. Dante knew it, too. That’s why the Seventh Circle is cold.
Scooping ice cream, for those who have scooped it, is bad enough — but places like Marble Slab and Cold Stone compound that pain by getting their counter biscuits to hand-mix things like Oreo and M&Ms and cookie dough (my gravest enemy during those harsh days) into the ice cream — on a frozen slab. If you’ve ever thought just scooping ice cream was hard, wait until you have to mix hard objects into it.
As employees, we had the right to a free ice cream with every shift (another HUGE BOON I thought at fourteen, despite the fact I was too busy trying to develop anorexia to truly appreciate it) — by the end of my four (five?) month tenure of late nights (we purportedly closed at 11 p.m., I never managed to get out of that store any earlier than 12:15 in the morning) I hated ice cream. Seeing it make me nauseated, and as sad as you might think this was, it ushered me into my Super Overconcened About My Weight And Other Such Things That I Can Never Fix Like My Bone Structure Or Worse Yet My Skin Because Wow Considering Peeling Off All My Dermis To Replace It With Skin Filtched From Alicia Silverstone Is Way, Way Creepy. So at least I could take comfort in always saying, “No thanks, I hate ice cream.”
But it’s summer again in North Carolina, a scorching 90ºF (and up) week, and all the lawns are wilting under intense punishment, both from above and around, as water restrictions start tying up hoses and sprinkler systems throughout the county. And guys? As much as I hate ice cream? It’s all I can think about.
THANK SWEET JESUS.
For some of us — cough should be all of us cough — who are addicted to the electric crack that is Bravo, this news that casting for season four of Project Runway has begun should sent your little heart pitter-pattering. I know it’s done it for me, easing, temporarily, the pain of not having access to Bravo and thereby missing YET ANOTHER season of Top Chef. However, if you are evil and enjoy laughing at people who aren’t aware of the power of the internet, you, too, should skedaddle over to the BravoTV repository of casting sessions for season four.
And just to give this a little bit of a food slant?
Mother’s Day Ciopinno
My mother’s love of seafood is rivaled only by my love of hardcore Southern cooking — sadly, she wins because ultimately, mussels are better for you than fried okra. (Sad.) So for Mother’s Day this year I offered to make her a seafood cioppino and let my father do the grocery run — a call I will probably regret until the day I die. Still! The soup turned out wonderfully in the end, and both parents are packing it up for lunch tomorrow. This is a delicious, fancy-looking dish that is actually very easy to put together, and fabulous for impressing people. But seriously, do your shopping on your own.
• 1 lb mussels
• 1/2 lb shrimp, de-veined, with shells split
• 1/2 lb flaky, white fish
• 1 lb littleneck clams (NOT the footballs my father brought home)
• 1 26 oz can crushed tomatoes
• 1 c. dry white wine
• 5 cloves garlic
• 1/2 c. onion, diced
• 1/2 c. green pepper, diced
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 tsp oregano
• salt and pepper to taste
• 5 tbsp olive oil
• 1 c. clam juice
• 3 c. water
VERY IMPORTANT: Clean your seafood well — scrub your mussels and clams thoroughly to rinse away dirt and sand, and be sure that your water runs clear when you do rinse them, you don’t want that stuff in your soup. Keep in mind you only want fresh, live mussels and clams, so discard any with shells already open when preparing the meal.
(1) Combine olive oil, green pepper and onion in deep, tall pot — cook until soft, 3 to 4 minutes.
(2) Add all remaining ingredients except for seafood and bring to a simmer for 4 to 5 minutes.
(3) Add, in the following order, to the pot: (1) fish (2) mussels (3) shrimp (4) clams — cover and cook for 10 minutes or until the mussels and clams have all opened.
(4) Serve hot and immediately, with your remaining (chilled) white wine.
(Or, super secret step (5) in my house, where I had to pick out the ginormous clams and halve them before I could serve in our bowls. Classy.)
Eating my way from Greece to Southern China
Friday, my brethren and I made our way to the local Greek Orthodox church festival. Bonanza. And then this morning, my same cohorts and I made a trip into Durham, to the Hong Kong restaurant (not what it’s called in Chinese, oddly enough) for dim sum, and luckly Dex photodocumented the entire experience — even when we were slipping into a catatonic food coma.
The point is: there was a lot of eating this weekend.
I feel that eating half of this festival made up for my exposure to Greek culture coming primarily from one reluctant viewing of the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Sort of, anyway.
Short of an unnatural and somewhat suspect love for moussaka and baklava, I know almost nothing about modern Greek culture — it’s a tragedy, I believe, because there was some pretty bitchin’ stuff going down at the festival: from forcing small children to dance in ridiculous clothing for our amusement to astonishingly good pastries, this was a culture that shouted “Oppa!” and broke dishes and got their jones on. I managed to restrain myself to thinking about thieving tiny, adorable Greek children dancing only once or twice (or once or twice times 893749834594875, but the point is I didn’t actually do it).
Moussaka, I think, is possibly the most perfect food on the face of the Earth: It combines savory and creamy and hearty and if you make your bechamel just right, the most wonderful flirtation of nutmeg sweet on the back of your tongue, and this moussaka was excellent. The best recipe I’ve found for this delightful treat on the internet has been by written up at the fabulous Tigers & Strawberries and is available with accompanying photographs here, in case you want to try on your own. The version being sold at the festival was made with beef instead of lamb, and heavy on cream and starches — with creamy whipped potato and cream topping and delicious boiled potato psuedo-crust, that cooked itself in all the wonderful juices from the eggplant and beef and vegetables in the filling of the moussaka during the baking process. It was unreservedly indulgent.
As if the moussaka and spanikopita sitting around waiting for me to devour them ferociously wasn’t bad enough, there was a pastry table at least as long as the entree table, and they were selling everything from loukoumathes (Greek doughnuts: only fresh-fried and drizzled in honey and sprinkled with nuts — I KNOW) to galaktoboureko (baked custard with phyllo soaked in honey — I KNOW) to ryzogalo (savory sweet rice pudding — I KNOW) among other things whose names were somehow even harder to spell. It was a labor of love to restrain myself from flinging myself in the general direction of the shortcake cookies, the spindly fried cakes, the beautiful phyllo-layered sweets, but I did it somehow.
I caved, ultimately, as I always do, in the face of baklava, which is such a killer combination of honey-sweet and nuts and crisp phyllo that it’s never even a fair fight, and this stuff was amazing. I bought a triangle and managed to make it last two days: half for desert after the moussaka and half with breakfast the next morning, and it felt like I was biting into a vacation in the Greek Isles: so sweet and wonderful it burned like sun. In fact, the summer I worked in Washington D.C. I used to brave what I affectionately called the skanky side of Pennsylvania Avenue (those of you who have lived/do live/have worked/do work/gotten lost near Capitol Hill are nodding and thinking, “Oh, next to the Cosi!” right now, even as we speak) to go to a subterranean Greek restaurant and buy containers of baklava to nurse me through my day — so all of my associations with it are of heat and delight and the bright spots of my day — as I imagine it will continue to be in the future.
On the other hand, my familiarity with dim sum culture and Asia is pretty good, if only because I’m kind of a glutton and all things food-related with the motherland are points of interest with me. If you’re a dim sum virgin, this might be a good place to get started on your lurid path to food-whoring your way through the morning tea service:
Living in the Southeastern United States doesn’t leave a lot of room for amazing Asian food — there’re pockets here and there and holes-in-the-wall patronized heavily by native Chinese/Japanese/Koreans, but they’re exceedingly rare, and with the subtle and fine art of dim sum, it’s even harder to find. Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant — apologize in advance for the character defamation — looks, from the side of the street, peeling off of the highway, like the sort of place where you would sooner find cat in the kitchen than chicken. But despite the poorly-disguised 1970s decor and appalling parking situation, on Saturdays and Sunday mornings between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. it’s your absolute best bet for semi-authentic dim sum in the Triangle. In fact, it’s really your only bet — trust me on this one: I’ve made the rounds, the other options aren’t worth your money.
They serve Chrysanthemum tea with its traditional rock sugar accompaniment and carts start rolling around the claustrophobic dining area: with steamer carts of dumplings and wraps and mysterious things and other cards with spring rolls (not to be confused with egg rolls) and egg custard cups and rice noodles, with shrimp folded inside, shu mai and fried turnip cake.
For the uninitiated, dim sum can be a pretty scary proposition — if only because you don’t know what to order, but it’s well worth the effort of learning. (All photos taken by Dex, which you can tell because they’re of better photographic quality than my own.)
Dim sum is tallied on these little sheets: usually with divisors like “small plate” and “medium” and “large,” with spaces with noting which kind of tea you ordered (we asked for Chrysanthemum, as should you), and any for-order dishes the kitchen had to pitch in additionally to serve up. Dim sum is easy and fairly inexpensive as a general rule, the three of us ate like kings for less than $35 total including tip, and we nearly had to be rolled out of the parking lot.
Clockwise, starting from the top: (1) sprouts, green pepper, and shitake mushrooms julienned and wrapped in tofu skins, braised (2) shrimp dumpling, a rice flour wrapper (note how its translucent) enclosing shrimp and waterchestnut mixture with ginger, amazing texture and subtle savoriness (3) wayward shrimp (4) “fen,” in Chinese, which just means large, flat rice-flour noodles, enclosing a vegetable and shrimp mixture and doused with an addictively good dipping sauce. Be aware: these were the leftovers after we’d demolished the actual plates.
Left to right: (1) shu mai, pork, water chestnut, and shrimp filling in wonto wrappers steamed (2) shrimp dumplings (2) “cha shao bao,” barbeque pork steamed bread — nothing like American barbeque: sweet and savory but not at all spiced. There is not a drop of cumin anywhere in that sauce. Note the cup of rock sugar.
The tofu-skin wraps before we uh…attacked them like feral dogs.
Oh Lord, how to describe this: in Chinese it’s called ‘zhong zi,” and they have a long and colorful social history that involves dead drunk poets and fish eating their bodes (please don’t ask, my people are wrong and wrong and sometimes wronger than wrong). But what it is, essentially, is sticky rice with filling: could be sweet, could be savory, ours was a mix of shrimp and pork, and then wrapped in a lotus leaf and steamed. As Dex noted, the rice comes out with an amazingly wonderful tea smell and taste, and the texture is fantastic. An incredibly time-consuming dish to make, which is why mostly you get them at restaurants like this, or, if you’re me, you trade your mother household favors in order to get her to teach you how to make them — a la the “Teach me how to make shu mai!” debacle of Christmas 2007.
And last but not least, the desert of choice for T and I, egg custards:
This has not been — at all — a comprehensive list of things available at morning tea services, but it’s a pretty safe one, and the food listed herein was enjoyed by all and pretty much safe for all to partake in. I know people get wary about Chinese food, especially when there are long menus and strange names and you are seriously concerned you might be eating a body part you totally do not want to even be thinking about — but the pictures and names here are a good guide for a beginner. But like with anything and everything else — I recommend you branch, and branch wide.
