The foodfest continued, and I must say that there was a wonderful continuity to the quality (after Porchetta.) Monday we went out to Brooklyn, to eat at Flatbush Farm with Amy and Jonny of We Are Never Full. The restaurant gets all their meat from our very own Fleisher’s, and they try to use local and seasonal produce. It’s the kind of refined home cooking that Brooklyn is doing particularly well, and we had a…
Month: January 2009
It’s been a pretty good trip so far from a culinary point of view. Saturday Ellen and I went to Porchetta, a little storefront joint in the East Village that’s been much touted as an excellent place to indulge in the Roman delicacy. Given the shitty snow and freezing rain, greasy slow-roasted pork seemed like a good bet. It was unremarkable at best. I read this effusive review just now, and but for the address…
It’s been out for a while now, but I’m finally getting to the post. Brooklyn Oenology contacted me last spring about using a piece of mine as label art, and here, belatedly, it is. My work ended up on the Social Club Red, a Bordeaux blend. All their grapes are grown on Long Island. Each year they choose a piece by a different Brooklyn artist to adorn the label of each wine produced that year.…
Sunday we schlepped into town to shop at the big supermarket because they’ve actually got the beginnings of a decent organic produce section there, and the other stuff we needed is way cheaper than at our little local joint. It pisses me off, but the difference in price makes it well worth the 16 mile round trip. I’m trying to buy more in a trip, but go less often, and figure that my haphazard meal-planning…
Back in June, I discovered that if you make a spinach pie sort of concoction but roll it up like a cigar (spliffakopita in Greek) you can avoid sogginess and have the whole exterior flaky and crisp. In order to avoid redundancy, here is the link to the post documenting this momentous discovery. It’s important enough to repeat that the addition of chopped broccoli really does take it to another level. We still had some…
There’s a rhythm in Moroccan Gnawa music called Sha’abi. It’s in 6/8, with the main pulse usually played on a bendir (frame drum) with syncopations from both karakab (castanets) fluidly creating a tension between the triplet and the 16th note- and clapping, by at least two people, forming triplets around a beat of four played against the six. Combined with ostinato bass from a sintir, and singing, it’s some of the most trance-inducing music there…
Right after Thanksgiving I semi-accidentally got a job as the food writer for Chronogram magazine. My first piece, about salt pickling and curing, is out now in the January issue. You can read it here.
My plans for our new year’s eve dinner proved to be more lavish than our appetites, so I reined it in after two courses. I went out to grab some provisions, though it was snowing pretty hard, and came back with some good salmon, three little Cornish hens, and a little rack of six lamb chops. I had visions of super-luxe yet homey three-course dinner (plus dessert) dancing in my head as I deftly avoided…