Category: Food

Witchel Watch: Refreshingly Normal

You know how it is in blogland: if you can’t say anything nasty you don’t say anything at all. That’s why I’ve been slipping on hard-hitting analysis of Alex Witchel’s column in the NY Times Dining section.

See, her last essay, striking out at all the bartenders who give her weak pours just because she’s a wee lassie, was perfectly palatable and actually had me saying, “Too true, sister” by the end.

And then this week’s, about the tyranny of leftovers–whaddya know, also readable and almost entirely free of the worst markers of upper-class tedium. I don’t have sturgeon going to waste in my fridge, but I can appreciate how Nova lox could be like George Hamilton.

And get this: she admits to reheating and enjoying–and not dying from–food that’s more than a week old! I have to admit I’ve made myself sick from leftovers (only once), but I got right back on the horse. And I have proudly told people that really, you can just scrape the mold off the top of that salsa. So it makes me glad to see someone go public with this. Alex Witchel, I hear ya.

Best. Avocado. Ever.

It was only a garnish with a plate of chicken, and it was only about a fifth of one, nowhere near the whole thing. But there it was, bright buttery yellow with a rim of delectable green, and it tasted so good.

So sweet, I could see immediately how tasty it would be as a sugary drink, say–something that had never occurred to me about avocadoes until a few years ago, when some Ecuadoran guy told me this was standard practice.

And I’d never imagine saying this was a positive, but it was a little watery, almost succulent. This wasn’t the typical I’m-so-rich-and-fatty boasting of your standard Haas. This av was more confident–it stood on its own, and it was very clearly a fruit, which isn’t usually obvious with a grocery-store avocado.

This all went down at the fantastic Restaurante Los Tres Reyes, in Tizimín. Ideally when you go, I would hope you get to see the bullfight on TV, and get the good waiter: an older guy with gray hair in a ponytail, thick glasses and a jaunty hat. He knows what you want, and he just gives it to you. He’s proud of the food: the handmade tortillas (you can hear the pat-pat-pat back behind the screen–and then see the operation when you duck back there to use the toilets), and the fried winter squash, and he just tells you to get the special, which in my case was pollo en pipian.

I was expecting a thick green sauce, but this was reddish and light and bright, a little earthy, but the taste of the chicken really stood out. This may have been a chicken I saw strutting around by a speed bump just hours before, for all I know. I’d be raving about the chicken if it weren’t for that avocado.

About two-thirds of the way through my chicken (a thigh, a leg and a wing), I realized I’d totally overlooked the black-bean soup. Which was also delicious. And did I mention the smoky habanero salsa? And of course fresh chips.

Oh, and I have a huge soft spot for ridiculous boasting in a restaurant context (viz. Kabab Cafe): Los Tres Reyes says, in very fancy Spanish, that at the turn of the millennium, it is proud to be serving its fine customers, and testifies that it will serve them until the year 3000. And its food is “tradicional, tipica, regional, nacional, internacional, mundial e interplanetaria.” I can repeat this because my lovely waiter gave me a souvenir business card, after a brief lecture on the health benefits of chaya (a great leafy green that grows everywhere here), as well as an utterly perfect little cup of coconut pudding, flecked with chewy bits of coconut flesh and served with a shaker of cinnamon, so I could season as I pleased.

And was I ever pleased, as is abundantly clear by now. The trouble with Los Tres Reyes is that it’s in Tizimin, which is just a big cow town, and sometimes where people change buses. It’s genuinely worth getting off the bus for, but I doubt anyone will. Basically, the chance of any tourist not traveling in his own car, and not utterly obsessed with food, actually going to this place is nil. But for those who do: make sure you get some avocado on the side.

I love Spain: Despana Brand Foods

Even when I’m not in Spain, I love it.

Sunday Night Dinner was celebrating (loosely and late) Columbus Day with Spanish food, and I’d worked up a varied menu, but really, I was just looking for an excuse to buy a ham. Several years ago, some friends of mine got married in Spain, and at one of the parties, they had a ham hanging from the rafters, and everyone could just go slice off a bit–I always thought that was classy.

So yesterday I biked to Despana Brand Foods in Jackson Heights to buy a ham.

This was the first time I’d be buying a whole entire jamon, still on the bone, and I was excited. I’d never been to Despana, because for a while we had a Spanish grocery right in Astoria (now taken over by Croatians, alas).

Despana isn’t the most welcoming-looking place–there’s no display window, just a granite facade. So I walked in, blinking in the dim light (and waiting for my stupid glasses to adjust–Transitions, you suck). The place is quite small, it turns out, considering it is Spanish Ham HQ in NYC–and I was a little disappointed that there weren’t hams hanging from the ceiling.

Just on my right were a couple of shallow shelves, though, and they were filled with paper plates. The plates, in turn, were filled with five different sorts of chorizo, three kinds of cheese, wedges of quince paste, olives stuffed with anchovies, a heap of boquerones…and there was also an open jar of Spain’s answer to Nutella, as well as a little basket full of turron (nougat). They looked like plates of samples, but never in my life have I seen such heaping plates of free samples. There was a little clay bowl full of toothpicks, though, so I picked one up and speared a chunk of Las Cuevas del Mar cheese.

Just as I’m lifting the cheese to my mouth, a man springs out from the back of the store. “Debestomarelvinotambien,” he rattles at me.

Huh–I could’ve sworn I heard the words ‘drink wine,’ but I haven’t really spoken Spanish in a couple of years, and really, he must be joking, right? It’s 10:30 a.m. And where would I get any wine, anyway?

Well, out jumps another man, wine bottle in one hand and plastic cup in the other. Glurk, glurk, glurk…he fills my 8 oz. cup nearly to the brim, and hands it to me.

“El vino,” he says.

“Gracias,” I stammer.

This was all before I’d made any indication that I was a grocery high-roller, that I was about to plunk down $190 on an animal haunch. This is how they treat the common man in Despana! Did I mention it was 10:30 a.m.?

I finally managed to drink all my wine, and then I loaded my 17 pounds of pig into my bike bag (along with some of that cheese–the samples had worked!), and then I weaved home. (I blamed that on the fact that my bike was out of balance, not on the wine.)

Our dinner guests, predictably, made only the tiniest of dents in jamon, and now it’s hanging in our pantry. It was funny–I was thinking what a shame it was that the Spanish grocery here in our neighborhood closed, because it was a little more deli-like (whereas Despana is more of a wholesaler of prepackaged stuff), and I think it would’ve been able to buy pieces of ham bone there. And then I realized that, duh, I am the proud owner of a whole lot of ham bone. I just have to get to it.

I think this might be the beginning of an annual tradition of ham purchasing–though I’ll definitely be going back to Despana before then. Maybe next time I’m thirsty.

“Kitchen Cuts” on eGullet

Thought-provoking essay on eGullet about the best music to cook by, followed by spirited discussion, and a nod to this bizarre YouTube concoction. Reminded me and Tamara cranking the Zep recently, then pouring ourselves glasses of Lillet, and getting down to work.

But this was under the gaze of a video camera, so then, for syncing reasons, we had to do the whole thing again without sound. If you’ve never mimed rocking out to a classic guitar riff, I can tell you it’s a little awkward. I guess I just need to practice.

Putting on the music in the kitchen is Step One in getting into the mindset I like better than any other: getting ready for a Huge Party. I honestly like the getting-ready part much better than the party itself. Everything’s relatively calm, you can concentrate on one task and let your mind wander to later possibilities…

And you’ve usually got the place to yourself, or relatively, so you can blast (and sing along to) whatever music you like, which isn’t always the case at the party itself. That’s when all the loud guitar and rowdy lyrics and heartbreaking country twang comes out–you can get the party started right then and there, without having to go through the obligatory mellow-background-for-the-first-hour phase. Gang of Four, for instance, Loretta Lynn at volume loud enough to obscure my own terrible voice, Brian Eno…

One of the huge selling points of working at Prune was the top-volume David Bowie; one of the massive drawbacks of working at Dish was the mind-numbing top-40 radio (how many times can a body hear “It’s Your Birthday”?).

And then I hate it when I’m almost done cooking and I realize I never took the time to put on music–such a waste. Random play can produce pleasant surprises, but starting with a musical plan guarantees much better results.

Peter’s got “Freaks Come Out at Night” on right now, and dinner’s just done. Gotta rock and run…

UPDATE: Hey, the essay author is right: The Pretenders’ “Tattooed Love Boys” is a great song to cook to fast!

While I was out: Le Petit Prince bakery

While I was driving around rural New Mexico and eating meals that made me say, “Well, I guess this is pretty good, considering…” all of Astoria was on fire with news of the new French bakery, Le Petit Prince, on Broadway–where things are honestly good, with no qualifications whatsoever.

I can’t tell you how jealous I am that I missed all the initial flurry. Especially because I biked right past it the day before I left for New Mexico–but for some reason I thought that picking up my sewing machine was more important than discovering real French baguettes and buttery treats in my very own neighborhood.

I’ve complained about the faux-bistro phenomenon here in Astoria before, and I got burned at the supposedly authentic French bakery that was down on the other side of Broadway a couple of years back. But this is nothing like either of those things. This is real. The guys who run it are French. They’re selling French things. They’re using buckets and buckets of butter.

When I looked in the cases, at the pains au chocolat and the almond croissants, and the little pistachio macarons, I couldn’t help but gasp and clutch my hands together with glee. Tamara and Karl, who are already getting jaded, just sat and laughed while I did my little dance of joy. (For some pics, see Joey in Astoria.)

Then it was so heartwarming to sit there, sipping my espresso and nibbling my little raspberry-almond cake and watching people look in the window and react just the way I did: eyes widening, excitement growing, a half-smile conveying “I can’t believe I’m really seeing this.” And there were of course a few crotchety old ladies, who sniffed with scorn and kept walking–but they’re just part of what makes Astoria great.

For a while, I guess I wanted Astoria to have a little hipster scene, and maybe some more stylish, real-bistro restaurants. Now that Le Petit Prince is here, I realize that’s the only element of gentrification that I really wanted: great bread and pastries. And it’s a fantastic miracle that Astoria can get that without all the other byproducts of economic growth, such as cool home-decor shops, tapas bars, double-wide strollers, and lounges in converted factories. I will even quit complaining about the insanely ugly Pistilli/Eagle Electric building.

Astoria is complete.

Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer?

Amtrak, you break my heart.
amtrakmenuxs

Yes, that’s a quote from famous 18th-century French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of the wonderful, inspiring and absorbing book The Physiology of Taste. And yes, his name is misspelled.

But it makes me want to weep that somewhere in the Amtrak system, someone even knew enough about Brillat-Savarin to want to put his famous quote (second only to his quip “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are”) on the front of the menu in diner cars across the country.

Then it makes me want to weep even more when I open up the menu and see not a brilliant new dish, but many of the tired old ones.
amtrakxxs
You’ve got your burger. You’ve got your pizza. You’ve got your veggie burger (which I actually ordered, and the waitress tried hard to sound enthusiastic about it). Sigh.

If I hadn’t been depressed by all these wasted culinary aspirations, I would’ve been better able to appreciate that the food is actually kind of good, in a standard-issue way. At dinner, things like lamb shank are on the menu along with the pizza and the burger. The last time Peter and I were on Amtrak, a couple of winters ago, we had a quite delicious dinner in somewhat elegant surroundings, and met a very cool painter from Alaska.

This time, we were only on the train for breakfast and lunch, when the menu is in the all-American doldrums, and you only get plastic cutlery. But what the heck, our eggs were fine, and then at lunch, Peter’s burger was actually quite beefy tasting, and my veggie thing was veggie-like. (I really don’t know what possessed me to order it. It won’t happen again.) And then our waitress offered to buy us a cheese-and-crackers kit from the bar car to go with our second half-bottle of wine.

Lunch in the diner–it’s no dinner, but what can you do? Poor Brillat-Savarin, probably rolling in his grave.

Baltimore: The Saint Francis of Assisi Crab Feast 2006

I knew crabs were a big part of Baltimore, but apparently, they are so important that you get an automatic pardon for taking the Lord’s name in vain in a church basement.

See, there’d been a lull in crab delivery in Hour Three of the S.F.A. Crab Feast 2006, and one of our party had been moved to bellow, “More crabs, God damn it!” while pounding on the Kraft-paper-covered table with his little mallet. The monsignor, it so happened, was sitting behind him, but he only beamed and said, “Keep yelling!”

Not that we were going hungry or anything. Peter knew his way around this feast, as he’d attended one back right after he’d been down here as part of the PO-lice (he still keeps the entrance sticker from the last one in his old wallet with his badge). When we arrived, he took me first to the buffet line in the back of the drop-ceiling basement, where we could load up on tomato slices, corn, three mayo-based salads, hot dogs, pulled-pork sandwiches, and crab soup.

Peter’s old colleagues, his former sergeant and others, scoffed at this lighweight approach, which would surely ruin his appetite for the main attraction. They held out for the first wave of crabs–which were already 15 minutes behind schedule. Peter’s sergeant’s 12-year-old daughter was working the feast, though, so we were guaranteed to get served first.

Also at our table was a partially toothless woman who perhaps had not actually paid for a ticket, but had won an entrance badge simply by plopping down and insisting. The fact that she was a black bag lady made it pretty obvious she wasn’t with our party full of conservative, ghetto-hating cops, but she didn’t seem bothered. And really, neither did the cops. She happily sipped her beer, and smiled vaguely.

When the crabs finally came, she started slipping them into her purse. Eventually it became clear that she actually didn’t know how to clean a crab–unheard-of in these circles–so Peter’s sergeant cracked one open for her in about eight seconds. I was glad not to be the only crab novice at the table, and I felt better getting to watch a second demo, as the one Curtis had given me, the 30-second version specially tailored to Crab Retards, hadn’t exactly stuck.

Another interesting element to the meal, aside from the novelty of finally experiencing a Real Live and Legendary Baltimore Crab Feast, was that this was only the second time I’d met these people, who are from a chapter of Peter’s life I don’t know that much about. They call him “Pete” and heckle him for being a liberal and try to get him to move back to Baltimore. The first time I’d met them had been under very unfortunate circumstances, back when I was getting really sick last fall. We went to another B’more food tradition, a bull roast to celebrate some cop-related thing, and I’d spent the night feeling queasy and mentally calculating the distance to the bathroom or a potted plant, and I was also coughing horribly and worrying about the fact that my ankle was swelling to the size of a baseball. Plus the music was loud and there were tons of people. Oh yeah, and all these people had really, really loved Peter’s old fiancee. So that didn’t go very well.

This time, on a Sunday afternoon in a fluorescent-lit room, with the musical stylings of the Zim Zemelman band (accompanied by the monsignor on trombone) and the alluring tick-tick-tick of the Wheel of Fortune in the background, the social pressure was a little bit less. It was also aided by the simple communion of picking crabs. It kind of reminded me of that part in Moby-Dick when Ishmael is sitting around working the lumps out the whale sperm (not that kind of sperm–read the book!) with his pals, where he gets all loving and affectionate because the stuff is so lovely and they’re all working together as a team:

“I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, – Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.”

OK, so it wasn’t exactly like that. (And let me just add, it’s a testimony to how much I love Moby-Dick that it didn’t even occur to me to snicker at this scene until just now.) It was a little harder and prickly, but it was certainly chummy, being up to our elbows in Old Bay, and making massive piles of discarded shells and little spindly legs, and passing the beer up and down. (I guess now that we don’t hunt whales anymore, beer is the new social lubricant.) And I did have that great feeling of all-powerful omnivorousness, where you get to feel so proud for being a clever human with opposable thumbs and sharp teeth and tool-making skills (except the head of my mallet flew off the first time I tried to whack a crab leg with it).

Also, because we had an almost-endless stream of crabs, plus the buffet, the actual dining pressure was off, making it much easier to just talk to people. Slurping and cracking and reaching for beer, we were a sloppy, merry bunch, united in our dedication to sucking as much sweet meat as possible out of these recalcitrant sea creatures–and ocasionally checking our raffle tickets to see if we’d won at the liquor table. It was also just enlightening to hang out with Republicans, since of course in New York these are feared and loathed people swathed in legend and lore, but rarely seen in the flesh.

Despite the grousing about perceived crab scarcity, and the price of tickets, we all went away satisfied. I had managed to finesse my picking skills with each new crab, I’d argued politics a bit (beerily), and I came away feeling like I was no longer just the surprise wife who’d replaced the good fiancee. Thanks, sweet crabs.

Alex Witchel–the human face

During July, I slacked on the Witchel Watch, and had pretty much forgotten all about her and her annoying tendency to write about shallow socialite eating (or not-eating) habits. So it was a pleasant surprise to open the NY Times food section last week and start reading an essay, then realize it was hers, then realize it was not so terrible after all.

See, in this essay (“Childhood Was Just Around the Corner”), she talks about her life pre-social status. Turns out she went to Zionist summer camp for six years straight, which sounds to me like just the recipe for making you hate food for the better part of your life.

The weird thing is that she actually hankers for food from that era, which all sounds bland and white in her description, but I guess we all have our strange imprints (right now I really, really want an Italian sub from Sam’s in Seaside Park). The nostalgic-look-back-at-childhood-food theme is a bit of a tripe, I mean trope, but she does it with humor and self-deprecation, and a nice twist. And she made me consider white pepper in tuna salad, which is a little funky.

The long-term problem, though, is that Witchel has just one childhood to mine for essay material, but countless dull socialite dinner parties to attend in the future. Here’s hoping she keeps looking back.

Sea Urchins in Greece–finally

My days in Greece went something like this: wake up, put on bathing suit, make some random plan for going somewhere, walk down to the hotel lobby, and encounter someone else who will change my plans completely. Sometimes that was good, and sometimes it was very, very good.

The sea urchins were one of the latter cases. When I walked downstairs, I looked out on the veranda and saw Fani, my godmother, hard at work with a couple of her friends.
Urchins1
The funny thing was just how merry she looked about what seemed to be a really disgusting enterprise. They were cleaning a big tray of sea urchins. That involved, Fani explained, cutting out the soft “eye” on the bottom with scissors, then scraping all this brown jiggly goo out, while leaving the good part intact. All this while not stabbing yourself with the pointy bits.

They did look beautiful when they were done:
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I’d never seen the inside of a sea urchin, and the only place I’d encountered the stuff before was as a big jiggly orange blob on a plate in Japanese restaurants, where it has come to be the ballsiest thing to order after chicken sashimi. I once read a (favorable) description of eating sea urchin as “like going down on a mermaid.” This whole sexier/cooler/bad-asser-than-thou posturing has no place in food, I think, and the one time I ate sea urchin, I was annoyed at the gung-ho attitude at the table. Maybe I was just being contrary when I said, “Enh.” Like a lot of Japanese food, it seemed to be a lot about the texture–or whether you can ignore the texture, which is silky and slithery and a lot like barely cooked brains.

But seeing these little sea urchins in their natural state, as sparkling orange stars laid out in black shells, I could see the appeal. They looked even more appealing when placed next to a bottle of ouzo:
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The other accompaniment was fresh-baked bread, with which we were to scoop out the insides.
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So, we dug in. The orange goo, smeared on the bread, was sweet and salty, delicate but also unmissable. It got a little more missable as I drank more ouzo, but before that, I was astounded by the tender, full flavor.

I was also touched at the extent to which humans will go to find something tasty. Around the table there was a glee that could not be credited completely to the ouzo. It was also sheer delight that we humans had once again succeeded in foraging. We had used our exceptional cunning to find, in the most unlikely of places, something not just edible but delicious. We’d won against these sea urchins, and that was cause for celebration.
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Just a few weeks later, I got the same feeling at a crab feast in Baltimore, but that’s yet another story.

Tasty Link: The Ethicurean

I, too, am a little disappointed that when I say “tasty link,” I’m not talking about sausage. But the savvy Ethicurean makes me feel a little better. They have a cute picture of a pig in a bib. They have a clever acronym for eating responsibly. And they have good newsy bits about eating responsibly (this, so far, seems to be their major usefulness).

It also again makes me envious of all those lucky foodie people cavorting out in San Francisco, where not a day goes by that something delicious isn’t coming into perfect ripeness. Of course eating locally is much lovelier when you don’t have to subsist on turnips for half the year.