When I began this blog a year and a half ago, I made it pretty clear from the get-go that while I shunned restaurant, take-out and sidewalk stand food, I’d never attempt to shun drinking in bars. That was beyond my comprehension. It still is, but as time goes on, you learn some new things. And one thing I learned recently is that drinking in — in someone’s kitchen, with a few friends and as little as three ingredients — can be just as intoxicatingly fun as going out. Mind-blowing, right?
But the actual science of it is easy. I’ve long been intimidated by the term “home bar.” This conjured images of tilted shelves, sticky cabinets and floors over-crowded with dusty, half-empty bottles of alcohol of every imaginable stripe. But you don’t have to be a rampant collector of booze to throw together a few good cocktails. Most cocktails are merely variables of one magic equation: 2 parts alcohol, 1 part sour, 1 part sweet. Or so I am told by Tobias Rower, who tends the bar at Gramercy Tavern and was kind enough to treat myself and some friends to a cocktail tutorial recently. Read the rest of this entry »
As a friend text messaged me earlier on the night of the 2nd Annual Cupcake Bake-off held by the Brooklyn Kitchen, some milk would be really good to bring along and serve with the cupcakes, instead of drinking pint after pint after beer after eating cupcake after cupcake (after cupcake). Well, a night later I’m finally taking up that advice with the leftover cupcake scraps stashed in Tupperware in my fridge, and damn. Is this ever the best combination. Read the rest of this entry »
Today marked the first two of hopefully many bike laps of Prospect Park I’ll ride this year. I fear the flab. I really do. It also marked an occasion for some gentler, fresher, milder and lighter fare that I’ll hopefully see much more of this year. Thin-crust pizza that more resembles a salad with breadsticks? Yes, please. Even if it involves few more than three ingredients and a seriously scant amount of cheese, I’m still calling it a pizza now and for all. ‘Tis the season. Read the rest of this entry »
Getting into the topic of the bottom-rung, low-wage, mostly immigrant workforce in a restaurant is slippery business. Dishsoapy-slippery.
Everyone knows it: the restaurant industry is fueled by these underpaid, undocumented and often mistreatedworkers who receive little or no benefits and often work two or three jobs literally around the clock. Food service is no egalitarian utopia, okay. The same goes for any other capitalist enterprise in today’s global economy, perhaps. But unlike with buying clothes from major retailers that were manufactured by kidnapped children in developing countries at slave wages (if any), the social dichotomy in a restaurant is right under our noses every day, three times a day in fact for anyone who eats out that much. Read the rest of this entry »
Darn unstoppable cravings. I’ve been hungrier for more things than ever this past month or so, and I don’t know why. I’m fairly certain there’s no chance I’m pregnant unless an alien abducted me during sleep. I’ve been cooking away at a happy clip for about a year and a half now, not worrying too much about troublesome conversions of restaurant to home-cooked foods. Not missing too many of the ones that I hadn’t yet tried to make. And then I get a mouthwatering taste of meaty, jujube-red raw tuna wrapped in chewy nori lodged in my sensory memory. And I stop. Disheartened. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s another video! Just when you thought I couldn’t get any worse on camera, here’s the latest installment of my ongoing battle with awkwardness. Um, um… yeah.
Greenmarkets are particularly exciting at this time of the year, because, like the public parks they often border, they’re budding with fresh, botanical diversity. Grand Army Plaza’s market is Brooklyn’s largest, with regularly a dozen or more vendors at any given Saturday throughout the year (it’s the second largest one in NYC, after Union Square). If this guided tour isn’t cheesy enough to turn you away from it, I hope you get to enjoy the scene soon, and cheer on your evidently very hard-working tri-state area farmers. (Video/genius credit: Matt Bagdanoff.)
This has been one of the weeks where I wish I could just put time on hold and say, Wait — I know it’s Sunday, but I still haven’t posted my tahiri recipe from last Wednesday’s foodie book club at The Brooklyn Kitchen, nor the seafood skewers from the barbecue after that, nor that little side project from a trip upstate today, the dishes are still piled high in the sink — can we just digest a moment?? I’ve been terribly behind. Then, a miracle happened. Before I could blog a belated post about all the great dishes that were shared at Foodie Book Club in honor of Madhur Jaffrey’s Climing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India, another blogger swooped in and did a fine job of it himself. With the help of Midtown Lunch’s Zach, here’s The Brooklyn Kitchen’s round-up of the recipes and good times at the potluck book club meeting. Read the rest of this entry »
This could be one of my favorite things I didn’t know I was making. Not knowing I was making in the sense that I had no idea it would turn out like this. I didn’t predict the asparagus would cook so perfectly, still juicy and a little bit crisp, and the egg’s yolk would combine with the lemony bechamel to drown it in an even richer sauce. Nor that a few scattered slices of Swiss would find its way into bites so mysteriously, hanging onto the fork in little melted strings. Read the rest of this entry »
I love it when people who are not necessarily big cooks tell me about a recipe they crafted themselves. It’s usually peppered with personal experience, and told in a way that reveals their trial and error with the ingredients and overall pride for its deliciousness. This type of story fell on my lap recently when an acquaintance emailed me his recipe for black beans and brown rice. It was simple, but fresh somehow. He insisted on starting out with dried black beans, not something I tend to do, and it included a whole bunch of fresh thyme and bay leaves in addition to onion, garlic and jalapenos. Read the rest of this entry »
Warning: it’s gritty. I did not take the advice from the Epicuious recipe I based this variation off of and expel the custard mixture of basil leaves with a “fine mesh strainer” before churning it into ice cream. That would have been more, well, refined. But then, aren’t home-cooked specialties supposed to be a little gritty? I should call this one Brooklyn Basil Lemon ice cream. Read the rest of this entry »
