10 posts tagged “food”
What's your favorite thing to drink when it's cold outside?
Over the last couple of weeks, I've really been enjoying an occasional Red Hook cocktail, which I first read about on the Cocktail Chronicles, and then again on gumbopages.com (which is also where I found the sazerac recipe I'm most fond of).
It's rye-based, so a perfect warming drink for a chilly fall evening. Yum!
The Red Hook Cocktail
(by Enzo Errico, Milk & Honey, New York City)2 ounces rye whiskey
1/2 ounce Punt e Mes
1/2 ounce maraschinoCombine with ice in a mixing glass and stir for at least 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
... are the greatest thing in the world!
I made a batch of them the other day, and we all loved them. And they're so easy: take some pitted dates, stuff them with little sticks of parmesan, wrap with bacon, and stick in the oven for 10 minutes.
The most difficult part was finding our box of toothpicks.
Made from this recipe, found via The Amateur Gourmet.
For the last two years or so, as I've been reading more food books and cooking more food, I've read about pimientos de padron a number of times, and they've always sounded delicious. I read about them first in Spanish Country Kitchen (still one of my favorite cookbooks), and then again in Calvin Trillin's Feeding a Yen, and they sounded delicious: tiny green peppers, cooked simply with olive oil and salt, with a wonderful smoky taste.
But I could never find them anywhere!
Until last Saturday, when we went to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. And just as we were about to leave, I spotted a stand--Happy Quail Farms--with a bunch of peppers, and with bags of pimientos de padron. I bought two bags, and that night I dropped them in some hot olive oil until their skin blistered, then dusted them with sea salt. And they were delicious!
Aside from the steamed pork buns, the crispy fried artichokes, & of course, the glorious Bo Ssäm--thank you, kind pig, as you were one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten--reason #57 to love Momofuku Ssäm Bar:
During our recent dinner there, we heard (among other things) Ghostface Killah's "Be Easy", Pavement's "At & T", and T. Rex's "Mambo Sun".
So but yes, aside from the amazing food: great music.
Over a recent trip & the requisite flights, I read Calvin Trillin's The Tummy Trilogy and J. Maarten Troost's Getting Stoned with Savages. The latter was an incredibly light read about the author's experiences living on a couple of South Pacific islands, and was exactly what I wanted for plane reading. It's fairly light stuff, which is fine.
But so The Tummy Trilogy is really quite interesting, as it's a collection of three of Trillin's short collections of stories (dating from 1974, 1978, and 1983). Trillin's a fantastic & hilarious writer, and most importantly, as a promoter of interesting & local food he's incredibly convincing--he's now made me intensely crave fried clams, smoked whitefish, and Cincinnati chili, for instance.
But what shocks me most about reading his stuff is how now, how current, a lot of it seems. Take the following passage, which sounds like it could be from any 2007 article or book about the qualities of local food (but which is actually from 1978):
A lot of vegetables at the Barnstaple market taste more like vegetables than shelf displays simply because they are the product of a kitchen garden rather than an assembly line. ... It is not unusual to come across a farmer's wife standing behind a table that holds, say, three dozen eggs, one chicken, three bunches of carrots, some beetroot, five turnips, six baby cabbages, a bunch of rhubarb, one marrow, a jar of apple chutney, and a jar of quince jelly. ... A preference for free-range eggs is based partly on the theory that a chicken that spends its life roaming around a barnyard instead of being crammed into the wire cages used for what are called battery or factory or deep-litter hens is a healthier fowl that is likely to produce a better egg.
I don't know whether to be happy or sad to fully realize how long people have been thinking & writing about these things. I think I'll settle on hungry, and leave it at that.
So so good!
[1] Maddy really wanted some bacon. I had it all chopped up & nice up on the counter, and she went up on her hind legs to try to get to it, trying to give me the look that makes me believe she deserves it. Everyone loves bacon!
What do you like to make or order for brunch?
Today I made a very wonderful egg scramble: 3 eggs, some chorizo, a small red potato sauteed in olive oil with rosemary, some white onion, and a small jalapeno; topped with some grated cheese, and served with toasted bread.
It was a lot of food, but oh so good.
There was a carton of (semi-frozen) bite-size fruit (melons, pineapple, grapes), but no forks or spears or toothpicks with which to eat said fruit.
So Anil and I created these lovely artistic glasses of fruit:
Or the start of it, at least.
