Just a quick note to mention that my piece about the process behind the opening of Fish & Game for Edible Manhattan, a revised version of the one I wrote for Edible Hudson Valley, is featured in Best Food Writing 2013. It’s gratifying to see my name alongside those up there on the top, as well as many others inside. I look forward to reading through it once my copy arrives.
Category: Awesomeness
You wouldn’t know it from this joint, but there’s been much afoot here at corporate headquarters and elsewhere lately.
I was taking pictures at Fish & Game on Sunday, and they had a giant puffball in the kitchen that they were running as a bar snack: brushed with olive oil, grilled, and served with lamb sausage and a scallion-chili salad. Zak gave me a couple of slices to take home, because as I ate one of the soft, slick slices it occurred to me that the mushroom could out-wonder Wonder bread as a grilled cheese substrate.
I decanted last fall’s vinegar crop over the weekend, and it was a good one. Three kinds, all fully fermented and super sour: straight cider, made from biodynamic apples, cider macerated with sumac for a few days and then strained, and blackcurrant. Half a gallon of each should last us a while. The cloudier bottle of cider was from the bottom of the jar; it has settled now and is quite clear.
Fresh morels, sautéd in butter with wild garlic, white wine, heavy cream, and herbes de Provence, make excellent crostini on homemade sourdough. Oh, and I just saw that Edible Hudson Valley has the last issue online. You can read my piece about Tuthilltown’s fire and their new gin, and also my article about homemade vinegar. I also took the photos for both. Enjoy.
In the current issue of Edible Hudson Valley I wrote a piece about Zak Pelaccio and Jori Jayne Emde’s Fish & Game, their new restaurant set to open next month in Hudson, NY. I spent three days with them over the course of three weeks, shooting a metric shitload of photographs and getting to know them and their crew pretty well in the process as they developed recipes and techniques for all the great ingredients…
This predates Christmas, and thus was photographed without a flash, but it was a pretty good dinner and warrants a quick mention. Kind of a mishmash, it nonetheless managed to be both seasonally resonant and really fucking good to eat. Which you look for in a dinner.
Consistent with the tradition in this house, there was no turkey for Thanksgiving. Turkey is boring and hard to cook well unless you take it apart. We did, however, have Milo’s awesome Lego turkey as part of the centerpiece. Also keeping with tradition around here, the meal was a seven-course exploration of whatever perfervid visions had swum into my insomniac mind during the preceding week. It’s funny; I was listening to the radio as I made the dough for the foie gras oreos—one such idea—and the guest was saying something like “The key to a stress-free Thanksgiving is never to cook something new for the first time when people are coming over.” I think that takes all the fun out of it; three out of the seven courses were things I just made up and figured wouldn’t suck.
It’s always a joy to find sushi-grade tuna, especially out here in the sticks where the seafood is not renowned for its freshness. I do love raw fish, even though large pelagic species like tuna contain more and more mercury, courtesy of coal-fired power plants, making it less and less safe to eat with any regularity. Since canned tuna is thus more or less absent from our diet, the occasional indulgence in some number one ahi can be justified. But since it’s chilly, and cold food is not indicated for such conditions, I put a little spin on it to make it seasonally appropriate, and followed it with a real winner of an accidental discovery.
For the second entry in the Charleston Wine and Food Festival contest thingy, the Rappahannock River Oysters company sent me a box with a big bag each of their oysters and clams. I had been thinking about what to do with them for a while, and worked out a couple of ideas that I was excited to try. Then, of course, Sandy hit, taking our electricity for most of a week, so I had to modify both recipes to require only the stove top and grill.