Extra Weekend Friday #2

Donnie Darko made me breakfast!

Feeling fancy on a Friday morning off, I made some strange food choices. Here's oven roasted red skin potatoes, shallots, apples and wedges of everything bagel topped with melted havarti.

This was an avocado and kiwi salad with a dressing made from Lindt's coconut white chocolate tempered in bacon fat and mixed with black raspberry jam with crumbles of said bacon in the salad. I knew when I was making this that I'd regret not having a lemon to brighten the avocado. Still highly edible for how experimental it was. Next time... using lemon... going to be awesome.

Two egg omelet dusted with paprika. I'm working on that perfect roll of controlled chemical change that haunts tested chefs like the high school girl friend you thought you were going to marry that still sends you Christmas cards featuring her beautiful children. I, too, am still haunted by the elusive perfect omelet. It is, however, the journey and not the goal and this step along the way was delightfully delicate but still a touch too wet inside and seconds too dry on the outside.

And this was bacon. Kinda looks like a rabbit head. Wish I would have planned that...

Then, much later, dinner, even, was a platano con carnitas from one of my neighborhood favorites. Plantains and spiced meat wrapped in a hearty pastry and deep fried. I love living in Spanish Harlem.

sunday, lazy sunday

too lazy for capital letters. too lazy, even, to figure out why this is underlined and change it.

sunday was spent watching a season and a half of "entourage." in order to fuel such a feat of mental endurance, my roommate decided that eggs were in order, fried, over easy. and so it came to pass that sunday morning breakfast was a tidy, no-nonsense affair.

Well, almost no nonsense. You can see here my homefries, my 12-grain toast, my two eggs over easy. Also, there are what appear to be sausage links trying to crawl off my plate. You can credit the inch-worm facade to the fact that they are two halves of a hot Italian sausage. I cut the full link in half and fried them, starting with the break in the casing pinched closed and face down in the pan. The inch-worming started when I rolled them over.
But aside from that deviation from the standard bacon, eggs and potatoes, this was as normal a breakfast as it gets, just good, honest, high-calorie fare to keep the farm hands working through the morning. I didn't have the privilege of plowing anything this Sunday, though, just wearing a deeper groove in our adjustable recliner. It can get quite hot on the recliner, though, so of course there was an ice cream sandwich for dessert.

No, this is not the ice cream sandwich. This is a platano con carnitas from Chuchifritos on 116th street between Lexington and Third Aves. This was a bit of late lunch a little before dinner. We had rustled ourselves from the "Entourage" onslaught inspired by a sudden desire to down a few cans of Sparks. When our quest to find this hipster mead in El Barrio didn't pan out, I settled on this deepfried gloryball as a consolation prize. The insides are mashed plantains and spiced pork wrapped in a thin, doughy pastry and deep fried. They are simply amazing. I can't eat enough of these things. The secret ingredient is likely crack.

Then dinner arrived. Best darn delivery Mexican I've ever had: roasted pork chalupas, which are not like the Taco Bell food item, but more like the oysters on a half shell version of tacos. The chalupa shell, worlds different from the Taco Bell version, is a crispy, shallow dish made from corn meal, pressed into shape on a mold and then deep fried. They are sloppy to eat at first, and, much like training pit bulls, take a firm and steady hand from the start.
Everything about them was fantastic. The pork was expertly roasted, still succulent, even after having been delivered to my apartment door. The fixin's on top were all fresh, lettuce, peppers, a wealth of fresh cilantro, sour cream, and a crumbly white cheese (that the menu claimed was Parmesan, although I think that was an attempt to simplify the menu for gringos unfamiliar with the wealth of cheeses not produced in the U.S. or Europe) and their salsa roja added a great kick to the whole package.

Here you can see the mountain of pork cradled in the chalupa shell. This one I drizzled with the salsa verde, also very good, although I preferred the smoky edge of their salsa roja.

They come in sets of three, but two was well more than enough, especially with the platano con carnitas still working it's way through my stomach, so I still have one of these bad boys sitting in my fridge, waiting for a guest appearance on the lunch menu later this week.

Saturday, another weekend, another cookout.

Sometime Saturday morning, I decided to clean out the fridge. We had a lot of produce that was no longer safe for human consumption that needed to get thrown out. I also had some of my mother's cabbage rolls left, but I was reluctant to throw them out. I decided to give them one last hurrah, even though they'd been in my fridge for over a month now. There were only three left, but a great deal of cabbage and juices, so I reheated them in my everyday pan, allowing lots of time for the water to boil back into the rice. I also through a little fettuccine into the mix just to see how it would come out.
It came out pretty much how you'd expect pasta boiled in the juice of sauerkraut and tomato paste to come out, maybe even better if you don't expect that sort of thing to be edible. The cabbage rolls had seen better days, but still tasted edible. I did start to feel a bit off after a while, though and started to worry that I'd be too sick to attend my friend's birthday barbecue. Never underestimate the powers of a good Saturday nap-and-rally, though.

Birthday cookout at a friend's apt. In this city there isn't a lot of bbq space to go around. I was expecting a circular grill around 18" wide up on an unfinished roof. I love that sort of affair, especially for parties under 6 people. You get the most wonderful sense of isolation and retreat, the sort of thing that's very hard to come by in Manhattan.
This was not that kind of affair, although it was a delightful retreat from the city bustle. My friends' apartment building had the most amazing space in the back yard. "Yard" is actually a pretty poor label for the space. "Terrace" is a little more apt. Imagine a tierd series of decks sporting stone walkways and overhanging trellis running along a meandering country river. The river in question was the edge of where they dug Manhattan away from the basement floor to allow them terrace space of their own. Then spreading up and back a space almost as big as the building out front is a connected series of walkways and tables cradled in ivy-covered fences. It was at the peak of these terraces, in a full-sized grill, that my friend threw down on burgers stuffed with onions and cheddar cheese and some assorted sausages and red hots.
I put down two of the burgers. I also sampled the red hots and a spicy lamb sausage from Whole Foods. There was a whole rainbow of meat that I couldn't even get into since I was saving room for beer and salad.
"SALAD???!?!?!?!" you say? Well, all of this meat and the birthday girl was a vegan, go figure. I wanted to show my appreciation in culinary form, but I had a hard time planning a plate for a barbecue without any meat or cheese. I decided to go for salads, and picked up some interesting and/or versatile things at Trader Joe's on the way down to the barbecue. When I got there, the birthday girl's sister was already planning a salad, so we teamed up to put out a nice pair of salads.
First up was another variation of my Santa Fe meets Korea salad. This time the romaine hearts were dusted with cayenne pepper, adobo, cane sugar and a touch of ancho chile before being doused in lime juice and then tossed with black beans and pan seared sweet peppers. I need to thicken the dressing just a bit and back the lime up with a bit more earnest acidity. I wish I could find wheat vinegar here in the States. I found it in a specialty import shop in Osaka and it led to a fantastically delicate Philipino pork adobo, a story for another day.
The second salad was based more off the designs of the birthday girl's sister. She was planning a spinach salad with strawberries and blueberries. I had some raspberries with me and pecan pieces. We dusted the spinach with adobo seasoning and rubbed sage, then tossed in the berries. Foraging in a kitchen that did not belong to either of us, we managed to put together a dressing of balsamic vinegar, olive oil and grand marnier. Finally, we finished the salad with the pecan pieces after toasting them in a frying pan.
Both salads sat outside for a while without being touched. At first I thought I had made a terrible bbq faux pas, but then I realized that we just had no plates or forks with which to eat the salads. Rather than get forks, though, I incited a bout of salad drinking. The spinach salad worked much better than the Koreanesque salad in this regard. The romaine pieces were just to wide and springy to be effectively dumped into your open mouth from a cup. The spinach and berries seemed to slide down more effectively.
The birthday girl's sister's fiancée also made dolmas (stuffed grape leaves) stuffed with rice, pine nuts and rasins. They helped to polarize the palate of dinner into the strictly carnivorous and strictly vegan, making this one of the most conflicted, although very satisfying barbecues I've ever been to.

After packing in as much meat and salad as I could, I thought I was set for the evening, but the heat managed to change my mind. Later that night I found myself compelled to put down a Hulk popsicle. With summer in the city enveloping me in a haze of my own perspiration trying desperately to escape my body, the prospect of lowering my core temperature with direct application of ice was just too appealing. There is no shame in a grown man eating popsicles inspired by super heroes. None.

Monday

sunday

Another Saturday in Boston.

Having been out until just before getting on a bus to Boston, breakfast on Saturday came from one of those fast-food joints. Bacon, egg and cheese on a croissant and hash browns. There are worse ways to start your day. Also, because partying until well after dawn takes a lot out of you, my beverage of choice with this meal was water, and continued to be water for many hours to come.

Once in Boston I met a friend for lunch at a Shabu Shabu restaurant. This is a Japanese style of cooking where you are brought plates of raw meat, here I went with pork, on the right, and lamb, on the left.

Thinly sliced pork and beef, and cuts of chicken are very common in Japanese shabu shabu restaurants, but this restaurant also had lamb and ostrich. As tempted as I was to try the ostrich, the pork and lamb were available at a very reasonable combination price.
You cook this meat yourself in boiling broth right at your table. This sort of cooking at the table is popular in several versions in Japan. This particular restaurant was more of a combination of shabu shabu, usually cooked in a pot resembling a bundt pan with an over-extended central cone, with nabe, a Japanese winter specialty usually cooked in an earthenware pot.
Aside from the cookware, the primary difference here is technique. Shabu shabu is an active cooking experience where you hold the meat in the boiling broth until it's cooked to your liking, and then eat it immediately with an option of sauces or other additions. Nabe is more of a stew. Ingredients are added at different times according to the necessary cooking times to bring everything together at the perfect moment. After all of the larger pieces of meat and vegetable have been eaten, partially cooked rice is added to finish in the broth and form a fried rice finishing course.

This shabu shabu is nabe-esque in that there was a very large selection of broths available beyond the standard mild, salty fish broth. Here you can see a kimchi based broth on the left and a very rich broth made from pork bones on the right called tonkotsu. To the side are standard additions you can add to the broth or directly to the meat after cooking: green onion, garlic, chili paste and hoisin sauce. Also next to my plate is a dare (dah-ray) made from soy sauce, vinegar and a little ginger. The meal also comes with quite a bit of equipment, although none of it is really necessary. The wire scoop did prove useful when cooking vegetables, and the bowl and spoon proved handy for making the most out of the cooking broths, but I preferred to use chopsticks for most of the shabuing and I never used the fondue fork.

This was not an all meat affair. There were lots of vegetables to be boiled and eaten too. There was spinach, watercress greens, sliced daikon, cabbage, shitake mushrooms and corn. Also, on the vegetarian platter in the background you can see cellophane noodles, fried blocks of tofu and bundles of tofu skin. Also, each lunch order came with your choice of noodles to be shabued. We both went with udon.

The meal progressed as a playful experiment, seeing what would match which broth better and what were ideal cooking times. The lamb was extremely good, especially when cooked in a bundle in the tonkotsu just to the point the pink was gone from the outside, but still had traces on the inside. The corn took forever to cook and wasn't really worth the wait in the end. However, the very bold broths and the great selection of meats made this possibly the best shabu shabu I've ever had.

And, since I was already on a Japan kick, why not go sushi for dinner. Boston boasted some very good Japanese fare, and at about 60% of the cost of similar food in Manhattan, so I intended to make the most of it.

On the far left of the plate, the nigiri (sushi over a rice block) shown is a piece of hotate (ho-ta-tay, scallop) which is a delightfully subtle and succulent texture experience that really comes alive with a little drizzle of lemon juice. Together with hokigai (red clam), large shellfish are my favorite type of nigiri. They boast the most amazing textures and delicate flavors that don't usually overwhelm the palate but come across like secrets whispered while walking on the beach at dusk. Be very careful not to bury their sublime characters with soy sauce and wasabi.
The foremost maki (rolled sushi) was a shrimp tempura roll. This was easy to pack in, more of an American version of Japanese food than a traditional favorite, but I'm not a sushi purist and these were just plain good.
Center stage went to an "Alaska roll" which, if you couldn't tell by the name, is also not a traditional Japanese maki. "Alaska rolls" can also vary greatly by restaurant. I didn't ask what was in this one, but there seemed to be salmon and another lighter-textured fish along with avocado. This was also on the more subtle side of sushi although I did abuse a piece or two with a heavy dose of wasabi and soy sauce because this was my least favorite of our options and I had to get a shot or two of wasabi in there somewhere.
All the way in the back is a California roll that I did not take part in because I have had problems with crab, fake or otherwise, and just avoid it across the board. My apologies if you wanted to read about my impressions on this California roll in particular.
And not pictured was eel nigiri. I've had some terrible eel experiences in the U.S. but my friend is a big fan and I didn't want to rain on any parades, so onward through the fishy valley we pressed. Much to my surprise, this eel was quite fresh. There were no signs of storage abuse where the eel is allowed to go gamey and the fish stink is allowed to take over what is otherwise a distinct yet delicate piece of fish. These were cooked with care to preserve the moisture of the fish and presented very tidily. It's too bad we ate them before I thought to take a picture.

I also decided to expose my friends to one of my Japanese favorites, age dashi dofu (ah-gay da-shee do-fu), a block of soft tofu fried in a delicate batter, topped with shredded daikon and green onion and served in a salty fish stock. Maybe because this is a personal favorite and I have had it prepared to perfection on a regular basis in an izakaya (tavern) around the corner from my apartment in Juso (just north of Osaka) but this was a disappointment. The tofu itself was treated well, but there was only about 3 tablespoons of soup to go with 4 blocks of tofu. If you'd never had it before, you wouldn't know what was missing, but I came away missing the old neighborhood.

I also snuck a bite of some tempura from my friend's bento. This was sweet potato tempura, I believe. Sweet potato is actually very popular in Japan in forms as diverse as tempura, roasted french-fry-like snacks, kit-kat bars and ice cream.

And speaking of all those sweets, we had desert back at home, iced molasses cookies and Magic Hat #9, an apricot-flavored lager from Magic Hat brewery. Beer and cookies, maybe not the best mix, but better than beer and milk and cookies.

Friday was soaked in patriotism.

Well, when a weekend runs away from you, it really runs away from you. I've had a much more interesting than usual diet this weekend so it's taking me some time just to process it all. First up to bat on Friday was sort of a repeater, though. I reheated the last of the leftovers from the co-worker's birthday party, chicken wings and a little rotini.

Everything reheated very well in the oven while I whipped up an appetizer to take to a 4th of July barbecue. It was a pretty standard bean dip. Garlic sauteed in butter till soft, add the beans, some red pepper, some chili powder and some cinnamon, then dump in a shot of tequila or vodka, stir vigorously, and then serve. I added a layer of avocado to the top of the bean dip, then heavily salted the avocado with Adobo and sprinkled it heavily with lime juice.

At the party I served the dip with tortilla chips. Not a stunning blow of creative culination, i know, but it got the job done. The picture here shows it's mostly devoured state.

Then, of course I ate burgers and hot dogs.

The weather prevented us from grilling outside, so we settled for grill-pan burgers and foreman grill hot dogs.



That orangy sauce is "Gold Rush Barbecue Sauce," as created by my friend while working at his parent's restaurant in New Jersey. I doused my burger in it, slathered it on my hot dog and had to muster up a lot of restraint not to start taking hits from the bottle. There is probably some crack-cocaine mixed up in there. You can also see a squirt of tartar sauce running the length of the dog under the lettuce and onion. This is very advanced condiment pairing and is not advised for the faint of gut.

Yeah, a few of these↑ , a shot of this↓,

Not really a pair I'd recommend, but an entertaining diversion from the meat pile. Mmmm... meat...

And then, what better way to celebrate being American than a nice big slice of home-made apple pie. Looking at this photo of the pie, you might assume people started eating it with their bare hands in a lusty frenzy to revel in the glory of America's do-it-yourself grit, home-made wholesomeness and can-do attitude, and then added the spoon later in photoshop to hide the signs of their gluttony. This is only partly true.