A Weekend of Eating: Part One

My parents were in town to visit me this weekend, and, since they certainly contributed to my passion for eating and drinking, I thought I would share some of what we had.

They rolled in at about 12:30 on Saturday afternoon after driving down from Massachusetts. Immediately, they asked me "what do you got?"--family code for "surrender your booze." Anyway, by 1:30 we had polished off a bottle of chardonnay that I just happened to have chilling in the fridge (and thank goodness--I was otherwise out of anything to drink except vermouth and tap water).

Our first meal was at this cute French place called Le Gamin in Prospect Heights--we settled on this after being turned away from a few other lunch spots on Vanderbuilt that were too busy. Now that I look at the website, it looks like there are three locations of this thing. They must be doing something right! Anyway, we had to wait a bit, as is to be expected on a Saturday afternoon, but not too long. We had a bottle of Muscadet that we all enjoyed (wines were the miracle of the weekend since we usually vehemently disagree on them, but we kept getting lucky). I had a tuna sandwich on baguette which was nothing to go crazy over, but the baguette was pleasantly sweet and was perfectly crusty. My mom had eggs Le Gamin, which was eggs in ratatouille over a shredded potato cake. She liked the ratatouille, but was disappointed with how dry the potato thing was. On a more enthusiastic note, my dad had Croque Madame....and damn, it was amazing. The bread was Texas toast sized and very soft, the ham was perfectly salty, and instead of putting the egg inside the sandwich, as I have usually seen it, the fried egg was on top of the sandwich over a bonus slice of cheese. This made the whole thing ooey gooey and wonderful when you cut into the still runny yolk. All in all, the waiters, etc. were all very friendly and the food was solidy good. I had never been to this place before, but certainly took note of it as a place to recommend to friends.

Le Gamin:


My short attention span is making the task of writing all this out at once, so stay tuned for more eating, drinking and swearing with the parents.

Irish Food

Let's be serious, people, St. Patrick's Day is pretty horrendous. I had sort of forgotten how bad it really is since I have spent almost all of my Paddy's Days either at home or in Ireland--where at least the drunken idiots are Irish.

The reason I usually go home is because my father's birthday is the day before St. Patrick's. His birthday occurs on this day because my grandmother drove to the hospital and demanded induced labor on March 16th because she was afraid that if she had her child on March 17th she would be forced by the Pope or Michael Collins or someone to name her child Patrick. Apparently, she hates the name Patrick. Enough to have induced labor. Yes, everyone in my family is crazy.

Anyway! So I had the utter joy this year of spending Paddy's Day in New York. Luckily, for most of the day I was hidden away in my office with no window. However, around seven o'clock a friend of mine and I decided to see if we could somehow defy logic and have a few drinks in a moderately crowded bar to celebrate her not having to go to Jury Duty that day. Long story short, everywhere was awful and crowded with Irish Americans celebrating whatever scrap of their DNA is Irish and wearing weird hats and left over Mardi Gras beads. We did find a place that was I guess vaguely Irish and had a table or two open, and I sat down to have two (bad, watery) Guinnesses and (here's where we get to the food part) a tuna wrap (also bad).

A Tuna Wrap?! On Paddy's Day? Yes. The truth is, and I know this is a shocker: Irish food is bad. Irish food is bad in America, and even worse in Ireland (well, except for full Irish Breakfast--delicious). And some of the stuff isn't even Irish:

Exhibit One and Only that I can think of off the top of my head: Every year, at some point, I get a lecture from my dad about how corned beef isn't Irish, and as far as I know he's right: the only place I know of that they serve it in Ireland is in Temple Bar in Dublin (tourist trap hell) and probably in some terrible place next to the Blarney Stone. Corned beef is, at best, Irish American. As in, when the Irish came to America, lived in slums and didn't have fridges, they ate corned beef because it was cheap. Newsflash, most people have electricity now. We don't have to eat that kind of thing anymore.

From my experience, on Paddy's Day, the tradition Irish meal is either fried chicken or lamb shawarma, or bad pizza, or nothing (Guinness is pretty filling...and it reminds us of how our ancestors starved in the famine--zing!)

Now, if you want to be genteel about it, Ireland really does have some wonderful food (see Anthony Bourdain's Ireland episode) and to celebrate you could have a salmon fillet, or a rack of lamb (lamb tastes way better in Ireland, btw. If you think you don't like it...try a grass-fed guy) as my grandmother recommends. Along with the traditional Manhattan cocktail taken directly after church. It is a religious holiday, you know.

Make Bittman: Cassoulet

I have a soft spot for the stew-y, rustic foods of Italy and France (sorry Spain--but paella? ew). There's something very comforting about these foods, though, believe me, it has nothing to do with childhood memories (we ate mostly Mexican food at my house...don't ask). I was excited to see, then, a recipe from Mark Bittman for cassoulet--a rustic dish with beans and meat and veggies--that didn't require the purchase of 800 kinds of meat. This is a economic crisis, people, and I am lazy and had already gone to the butcher once that weekend. In any event, here is my report on how my attempt at making it went.

First up, here's the original recipe.

Ignore the part about helping kids. I didn't do any of that.

Ingredients:
I used just a pound of sweet Italian sausage since I don't have duck confit sitting around, leeks not onions, garlic, carrots, celery (though now I have a ton left over...grr), zucchinis not cabbage, a can of crushed tomatoes (I can never find chopped for some reason), parsley, thyme, bay leaves, canned cannelloni beans (I am not yet converted to this "cook your own beans" thing), some wine and stock, red pepper flakes and ground red pepper (I didn't have cayenne for some reason--shocking).

Here are all my ingredients in a pile:



Ok step one was to brown the meat, which I started to do, realized that they would probably stick to the pot if there wasn't some fat in it, added olive oil, and then smoke went everywhere. Of course. Good thing my roommates and I took all the smoke detectors down for just this reason. Always practice fire safety! Anyway, the sausages were nice and brown and the air was nice and smoky so I took them out and laid them aside. Then I added butter to the pan, just for fun.

Ok so I chopped everything up, exhibiting some wicked Jacques Pepin knife skills which you can't tell from this, but I swear it took all of a minute to do.




Then I threw everything in the pan and added more olive oil, salt and pepper, and stirred it for a while, added the parsley, thyme and tomatoes...and eventually the bay leaves once I remembered them. Whoops. I added the beans and sausages and set it to boiling. You can tell I'm kind of making a mess.




So, I guess I was supposed to add broth or wine or something at some point...it wasn't entirely clear...I just kinda added some wine and stock when things started to look a little thick. Not too much wine though since I wanted some for me. Then, I took out the sausages and the bay leaves, which took a while because one of the bay leaves was hiding from me even though it was the size of my head. I chopped the sausage into bite-size pieces and proceeded to try and give this thing some heat. Well, after all of the ground red pepper I had left AND a good douse of red pepper flakes went in and it STILL wasn't spicy, I just gave up and realized I should have just bought some freakin' cayenne. Whatever. So here it is! I even made it pretty for it's close-up and used my real camera:




Incredibly, this somehow only took me an hour to make. I have no idea how since I usually add another 45 minutes to whatever cooking time is given (40 mins here) for wandering around and getting distracted by various things.

Verdict: Success with a few caveats that are entirely my fault. 1) Do make the effort to get a variety of meats. Don't feel too embarrassed to buy one pork chop from the cute butcher guy. 2) Buy cayenne. 3) Sausages don't really need olive oil poured on them to brown up. I'm just crazy.

Cooking Magazines

While I know there are more pressing things to worry about in the current economic shitshow, one of the ones that keeps me up at night is the possible (probable?) demise of cooking magazines. I mean, I love the internet as much--if not more--than anyone, but there's something about a cooking magazine that makes its presence, as a complete thing you can purchase, have delivered, hold in your hand and cart around with you, special. While I have New York Times piling up in my entryway--nothing in there that isn't just as well on the web (except the crossword)--I eagerly await the arrival of my cooking magazines. In proof: earlier this month I was, probably inordinately, angry with myself because I thought I had drunkenly discovered and subsequently lost my newest issue of Bon Appetit. Turns out that was just a bad dream, and it arrived safe and sound a week later. Phew!

I mean, sure, you can get all the recipes you want on epicurious.com and other, less trustworthy sites (I don't care how Mary from Montana makes chicken, bigoven.com), and, sure, you can even print them out for that real world effect, but there's nothing like a couple of pages of Gourmet stuck together with tomato sauce to let you know that, if you can manage to pry the pages apart, there's a good recipe waiting for you on one of those pages. And, of course, who can ignore the joys of editorial food photography spreads: pies on chairs in the middle of a field or a pork loin inexplicably balanced on a porch railing. Sure the pictures might be online, but somehow, it's just not the same.

When I'm home, I love going through my mother's collection of these magazines from the eighties--if only for the abundance of ads for cigarettes (shocking!) and booze, and all the big hair. But I also like to see what she dogeared: Did she really intend to make that ridiculous cheese ball? Or was she just marking it to show to dad later for a laugh? More philosophically, they provide a more immediate and detailed account of what foods we ate and how--the minutiae of which is something that cookbooks cannot capture in the same way.

So please, oh captains of industry, though I know print media is allegedly going the way of the telegraph, dodo bird and marrying someone from your town, please keep cooking magazines alive--if only for future generations' amusement in our current cultural obsession with all things edible--and so they can laugh and ask themselves if we ever really made a tongue steak for valentines day.

Bussaco: Premature Review

A new restaurant has moved in across the street from the Park Slope Food Coop (an organization of which I am a member, and yes, I know, they should have a hyphen: co-op =hippy sharing organization, coop=chickens). Previously in its space was The Black Pearl, a sort of vaguely Irish (maybe?) vaguely bistro-y place where I had bad mimosas once. Anyway, it's great to have something else there, and it was getting a little press, so I decided to make the SEVEN BLOCK trip to Union and check it out.

I read somewhere that they changed chefs about two weeks in and are going to "gradually transition the menu," or some such rhetoric. The point is, because the restaurant is new and in the middle of a shake up, I'm going to wager that experiences in the next few weeks will vary widely.

First things first, the cocktails are fab, AND the wine list/cocktail menu has a helpful graph in place of a table of contents. Everyone loves a graph. I had a Marconi (kind of like a Negroni but with prosecco and a Campari cousin) v. good; one of my friends had a cider martini which was good as far as girly drinks go, and another friend had a Rye Manhattan that I REALLY recommend.

This place takes drinking seriously, as evidenced by a picture of their bar.



The chef change became readily apparent when we heard the specials from our lovely waiter. He described something called "Testa" that was a pork puree--now anyone with Italian 101 knows "testa" means "head." When I called him out on trying to cover up the fact that he was describing "head cheese" (I'm a bitch, I know), he came back with the spiel that it's respectful to eat the whole animal or some coop/foodie bull. Anyway, I ordered it, and it was wonderful--a little crispy, healthily salted, and the lightly poached egg on top was just the right simple accompaniment. Other, more "normal" firsts came from the regular (old?) menu, but all were equally delicious, if less "adventurous."

The entrees, all from the menu, were generally simple affairs: thinly sliced duck with spaetzel and brussels sprouts (which google just told me there's an "s" on), steak with mustard greens and scallops in a white pepper--pear "gastrique" (ok, that's kinda fancy). All of these dishes were really very nice and well executed, but seemed a little too simple after the fireworks show that the appetizers put on. One friend, a vegetarian-ish person, was disappointed with her pappardelle and beets. I think it needed lemon...or something. Anyway, it was obviously a throwaway, obligatory vegetarian dish, and I'm not sure you can get away with that in the Slope, guys.

Desserts were rather lackluster, but maybe new chefie hasn't got around to it yet. For the time being, I recommend you let the sommelier guide you to an after-dinner scotch or one of their good selection of dessert wines.

As an added bonus, the restaurant was baby-free when I went (yess!), but the squishy booths could be seen as kid friendly...maybe...kids like that shit right?

Gadgets: Immersion Blender

I think Mario Batali said that any chef worth his or her weight in flour could make any dish with a basic stove, pan and spoon--or something to that effect. Well, sure, Mario, if I had all freakin' day and someone was paying me millions to endorse their pan, I probably could cook pretty much anything with those things. But really, why would I? And, more philosophically, why is it somehow more "pure" or "worthy" or impressive if I spend an hour and all of my energy hand-whisking egg whites? Mario, this is the future: we don't have to work so hard anymore! People in the future are busy! There are blogs to read, reality tv to watch, segues to ride. We do not have time for your grandmother's methods.

I love kitchen gadgets. And, as you can tell, I've got their back in this fight. I collect them like precious moments dolls collect dust. One of my favorites is the Immersion Blender. This guy is especially useful for making soups. Lots of recipes tell you to smooth out your soup by pouring it into the regular blender in batches. Um, guys, that is messy! And soup is hot! Bad idea. When pureeing soup, this guy is your friend:



Right there I am making "Azteca Butternut Squash Soup" which is basically butternut squash soup with black beans and red pepper in it. The base of the soup is the squash and tons of onion and celery. After that softens up, those three ingredients get blended. Now, I don't think the Aztecs had blenders, immersion or otherwise, but they were pretty smart, so they probably just programmed a sundial to do it or whatever. Or else, the name of the soup is just something made up by Bon Appetit to make it sound better. Shocking. Anyway, here's the soup post-blend:




Looks awesome, right? It was. And I didn't even have to spray soup all over my counter tops and myself to get it that way. Or squash it with my feet, like Mr. Batali would apparently have me do. Jerk.

Oh and here's a tip: My mom got one of these and immediately decided she hated it because it sprayed tomato sauce all over her sweater. It's called an IMMERSION blender. You have to IMMERSE it in the soup/sauce if you want it to work. K?

Bobo soso

I must begin by apologizing for the lack of updating, I have been suffering an endless slew of ailments (one of which being Christmas) and general malaise, so I haven't felt much like sharing or cooking. I also had to cut the drinking due to said ailments--you can see where the ill-will towards life comes in.

To go along with this general feeling of negativity I give you: a Negative(ish) Restaurant Review! I have to admit, that even though I love eating at and hearing about good restaurants, nothing can compete with the glee I find in reading a real burn of a review, especially by every food maven's favorite cantankerous culinaire, Frank Bruni from the New York Times. I really enjoyed his slam of a psychedelic Thai restaurant just because it was so grandpa-cranky. Of course, I probably would have hated it, too, from the sounds of it.

So anyway, I guess I should have listened to the Brunmeister when he gave Bobo one star--now, granted, one star is actually not terrible--but I forgot, or thought he gave it two, or whatever. In any event, there I was, with friend in tow, both of us just off antibiotics and looking for a party. I knew Bobo could be pretty scene-y, but it was the weekend after Christmas and we planned to eat in the more casual "Den," so I figured it wouldn't be too bad.

To give credit where it's due, we were graciously offered to sit either upstairs in the fancy dining room or downstairs in the more casual aforementioned "Den" even though we were, despite fancy shoes, probably not dressed for either. We took an upstairs menu and a downstairs table. So far so good. Our waiter was helpful and attentive to start, we ordered a tasty wine that was under $40, he offered to double a scallop appetizer for my friend to make an entree, we ordered oysters of the East Coast persuasion and we were happy.

Now before you envision some sort of seafood poisoning, waiter-tripping, kitchen fire disaster, I'm going to stop you right there. It was fine.

But that was just it: It was fine. My friend's scallops were ceviche-ish (which I like, but she didn't) and small (which no one likes) and the presentation was basically scallops tossed with pea shoots (?). I mean, maybe something was lost in the translation between appetizer and entree? I doubt it. The scallops, the shoots and the plate were all the same color, and the taste was nothing to jump around about either: vaguely lemon does not a flavor palate make, people. I had skate wing that sort of reminded me of country club food--nothing bad about it, but nothing good either. It was fried, which I was mildly perturbed about since the menu said nothing about its method of preparation, and I hate fried fish in fancy restaurants. The menu did say something about pomegranate, which I got, in the form of 5 seeds sort of next to the fish. It was dry. There was some tasteless mush underneath it--white bean puree? It was too dark to tell.

Oh, and our waiter totally disappeared for the rest of the meal, probably off to chic-er tables. We had dessert, which was good, although the gingerbread panna cotta had more random pomegranate seeds and the apple crisp (mine is better) was served in a coffee cup, which made it kind of hard to share.

So yeah, Bobo is ok, I guess, if all you want is wine, oysters and to be surrounded by people cooler than you. But I'll take fish and chips in a newspaper wrapping over tortured skate wing with indeterminate sides any day.