There's nothing like a seasonal fruit pie to bring people together. I was lucky enough to be joined on my roof by a handful of friends willing to share it with me and to stick out the 100 degree weather we are having in New York.
"I wish the pie was bigger", I said. "Bigger, like the size of a Volvo" said Melissa. Yes.
On a busy avenue in a nondescript neighborhood that's not quite the East Village and definitely not Gramercy Park, Amai Tea & Bake House is an oasis of taste. While they offer a wide array of tea and herbal infusions, the real star is the baked goods. Tea is incorporated into most of their handmade goodies, but the infusion is subtle and never heavy handed. The slight bitterness of Earl Grey accents the sweetness of the currants. White tea mellows a strawberry cookie; rooibos tea and vanilla are incredibly smooth and sweet. My all time favorite? Hojicha sesame. A winning combination of roasted green tea and carmelized sesame seeds. Not too sweet, a little savory, perfect with a cup of anything. And the packaging is beautiful, too, making Amai's cookies the perfect present to pick up on your way to a dinner party, baby shower, or for movies in the park with friends. 
I made flatbreads the other morning before going off for a consulting job, as these guys were coming over for dinner that night. Good thing I did – they came straight from the Fancy Food Show and brought with them about 10lbs of paté. And 8lbs of Valrhona chocolate. I'm going to make flatbread more often if that's what I get in return!
"How good is she?", to borrow Darren's often used phrase when referring to his lovely Lizz, creator of this blueberry-a-licious muffin. Brought to our door at 8:45 yesterday morning, this gorgeous piece of baking was just further proof that we live in the best building in Brooklyn. While most New York apartment dwellers can barely trade glances or "good mornings", we exchange baked goods, vegetables, recipes and dinner invitations. Hell, we have even gone on vacations with our neighbors, our friends.
Lizz is one of the best bakers I have ever known as was evident by this light and delicate muffin packed with sweet juicy blueberries picked in Pennsylvania this weekend. Could I ever leave this building, this cornucopia of gastronomic interchange? I'd rather see a church burn.
Thank you Natasha.
It happened last Thursday at our usual gathering over at Gina and Stefan's place. A low key evening as evenings go at this weekly event. We had already been through some difficult times over the past two weeks, the passing of Gina's grandmother, the Leeloo tumbling down the stairs at Garrison, head swelling and blackened eyes still visible. We needed a little something, something to remind us of the good things that life had brought to us all, and the fact that life had brought us all together.
But it was a sorrowed joy that we would poured that night. As Stefan crossed the room sheepishly, hand placed gently around Macallan's shoulder, there was a look on his face that bore the words he could not speak. It was almost over for Macallan, a friend that we had only been introduced to about this time last year. The kind of friend that you felt you knew forever, the kind of friend that made you feel content and omnipotent.
Why is it that the good ones always leave us too soon? Sounds trite and flippant I know, but when it hits home, this kind of sentiment hits hard and all to fast. Macallan, eighteen, gone. Some may find solace in saying, "Oh, you have such good memories, let's speak of the good times, Macallan would want it that way" or "Don't worry, there will be others, 10's become 12's and 12's become 18's", but we all know that it doesn't happen in a sherry oaken world .
So now Macallan, I walk away from the empty vessel knowing that your ghost has crossed over the River Speywill to walk the Easter Elchiesonly with kin that has come and gone before you. We sing your praise, a song with no regret, no what ifs, only longing and memory that teases the palate and warms the heart. Good bye Macallan 18, so young, so old, so good.
I've been practicing, not only for those tomato sandwiches of summer, but for Dan's birthday – a sandwich dinner, complete with homemade bread. Quite an audacious commitment for someone that has never made bread before.
But I was determined. I mean how difficult could it be? Well, I've learned that bread making is a craft. It takes nurturing, patience and practice. And patience is a virtue I was not born with. Hey, I could have worse faults. And I seem to have the nurturing and practicing down.
I had recommended the book Dough to my old roommate Charlie who lives across the pond and works in the same office space on Flood Street that I used to work in, all those years ago. His glowing reports (and instant messaged instructions) made me have a go. I can't tell you how rewarding it was.
I didn't cook the first batch for long enough and didn't have enough mist in the oven for a good, crusty crust. With amendments, the second batch tasted like baguettes "from a bakery" (quote). Result! Those skinny jeans are well and truly out of the window.
Click on for the sandwich menu. I'm also working on getting the recipe into "American" form (volume as opposed to weight, although weight may be better with something as precise as bread making).
Yup, you heard correctly. Now we can't take credit for this – it only entered my mind because this recipe was part of the pulled pork menu devised by Gourmet magazine. And we faithfully made each part of this menu (and might again on July 4th, if we can get up at 4am to start the pork), but the best thing was not the 10 hour meat, it was these buns. I'm serious. Amazing, buttery, light, fluffy – make these and you will never go Wonder again.
Here's the step-by-step:
Roll out your raised dough. Doesn't it look podgy? I couldn't resist poking it with my finger.
Use a cookie cutter to make the rounds:
Put each cut-out bun on a greased baking tray.
Bake for 14-20 minutes and there you go! These make me positively weak at the knees.
As Natasha ran off this morning to contribute to a struggling American economy and the need to put food on our personal table, I was left here at my computer to contemplate our weekend. Or as voiced in a more simple directive from Natasha, "Isn't it about time you did a post for the blog?"
I sit here now, well into my second cup of tea, attempting to pen an ever-so-brief and compelling documentation of our weekend together, I begin to wonder why we write these posts at all. Where do we find the value in throwing out photos and snippets of our lives and experiences into the flotsam and jetsom of a self-important and indulgent sea of blogs? Are we modern day Samuel Pepys or pathetic individuals tossing out keywords and topics into the void in hopes of finding ourselves on the top five listing of someone's Google search, or at the receiving end of a reader's comment?
By creating content, do we create meaning for others, or even ourselves? By showing our person do we create friendships or only networks that offer our art and opinion as just another way of creating commerce? When does sharing become a labor, and not a love?
Anyway, here is something I did love this weekend, a treat well-deserving of my labors in the form of pictures from "Stink Fest 08" that took place yesterday on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens. Plenty of New York City-style street fair crap, but also some rather good eats offered up by The JakeWalk on the second day of summer. Fish tacos, fried cheese curds, fresh coleslaw and pickles and even Raclette served up by a guy Jen thinks is hotter than the strange iron that heats up the cheese into a bubbling goo.
Far be it for me and and Natasha to give our friend Darren something that isn't pork related for his birthday. Last year it was Stéphane-Reynaud's Pork and Sons, along with The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating by Fergus Henderson, hard cover of course. What can I say, the man loves his cloven-hoofed non-ruminating swine. And what does his devil-may-care dietary regimen desire most? Pulled pork, of course.
Thanks to a timely special grilling issue from our good friends at Gourmet magazine (yeah, we wish) we were provided with a number of recipes to create an amazing Sunday dinner featuring North Carolina style pulled pork with all the fixins'.
After a bit of a late night out with my friend Marc Dennis that went into Sunday morning, Natasha got me up at 8am to fire up the charcoal grill and get things moving. After ten hours of indirect grilling, basting and turning of the pork we had meat falling off the bone and a table full of freshly squeezed watermelonade with vodka and mint, okra and cornmeal fritters, fresh creamed corn and black eyed pea and bean salad. However, the pièce de résistance, or rebel yell in this case, was the pulled pork with a spicy hot pepper and vinegar sauce piled on a home made hamburger bun and topped with creamy coleslaw. It was all washed down with gushing words of praise from our birthday boy and beer from Boréale that I pick up on our trip back from last weeks Canadian Grand Prix.
We ended the evening with a wonderful red velvet cake that put us all over the edge and into a food coma. Hell, it was one long day of cooking and running around, but frankly my dear, we gave a damn. Happy birthday Darren.
It was 1985, Reagan and Bush were in power, the yuppie scene was exploding, there were million dollar restaurants, and the “design of the year” was passé six months later. I was appalled by it all.
I decided to open a restaurant that if possible didn’t need any design; a place that was already in existence, and looked as though it had been, and would be, there forever. Somewhere that was not on a main street. If you tell people that you know a restaurant on, say, Broadway, they won’t really listen. But if you say that you know a restaurant that’s impossible to find, that‘s in the weirdest place, people will be curious: “What? Where?” The more difficult it is to find, the more a certain clientele will be tempted to go, and in another way it stops the wrong people coming. So it’s a way of having an invisible velvet rope with bouncers, and choosing your customers.
The diner that I found fulfilled all my dreams. It was unpretentious and out of the way, in an eccentric neighborhood—New York’s meat district (like les Halles, in Paris—though I left Paris because it was too pretentious, and not eccentric enough). The American diner was a perfect setting, because it made people feel very comfortable, in the same way that a bistro makes people feel very comfortable in Paris. The only thing I did to the place was put a banquette with a mirror along the wall, which is very French, so people facing the wall could see the rest of the world and not feel like they were in purgatory. I kept the counter, the Formica tables, the stools, the fluorescent lights and that was pretty much it.
The most important ingredient of a successful restaurant is that the food is good, and worth the price. the second most important thing is that the place has a feeling of being a home, an environment where you feel comfortable as soon as you set foot inside the door. here, it’s the decor and the politics. People know that Florent is a bastion of liberal ideas. It’s a place you know you’re not going to be judged, whatever race you are or sexual preferences you have. It’s a place where you go to take a bus to demonstrate in Washington. It’s the physical and the abstract place, the ideas behind it, the mirth and the glow. Some restaurants have it, and some don’t.
The graphic design very much fit with spreading the message of the restaurant’s environment. Tibor and I hit it off very well; he was smart, and good at pushing me. For a restaurant my size the amount of advertising that was done was absurd. I was M&Co’s wild account and in return we fed them four days a week, from 1985 to 1993. Since then I’ve worked with other people but there has never been nothing like that relationship.
—Florent Morellet, from Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, edited by Peter Hall and Michael Bierut
We went to Florent last night to say goodbye to a place that not only represents history in many New Yorkers' lives, but one whose iconic design/food relationship stands true today, and outshines a lot of the work I see still. At the counter we sang our hearts out with the waiters to Spandau Ballet, ate our chocolate mousses and stumbled out, a little drunk, one last time. New York is steadily becoming like London – there's no room for the small institutions that make up a city's fabric and history. As Muji, Topshop, Mango and Zara take over Broadway, our city center is becoming a mirror image of our European counterpart. First CBGB's, now Florent, what's next before we lose our character entirely?
Seeing as it's been 100 degrees since Friday, I'm only hanging in there by the godly grace of AC, rosé and iced tea. And I don't even drink iced tea.
Well, I'll correct that by saying I don't drink Snapple. But a bit of fresh iced tea I can go with.
Lemon verbena or verveine is a herb used in cooking, but mostly as a tisane or tea. It tastes citrusy but not sharp. We normally harvest our leaves at the end of the growing season and dry them for tea in the winter. It only occurred to me to make iced tea as Rosie brought over these leaves from her plant (I haven't picked ours yet, it's still fairly small but growing at a rapid pace). And it's 100 degrees outside. Did I mention that?
So here's a recipe, although you probably won't need it. Make some lemon verbena tea, mix in (or don't) a touch of honey and chill. Add ice and lime. Read a book outside in the glorious sunshine!
It started on Friday evening with dinner. It ended on Sunday evening with rosé. My friends were only supposed to come over for the evening.
But our "night out" included David Lebovitz's chocolate mousse and rhubarb cocktails on the roof terrace, complete with hats and sunglasses. After falling asleep while watching The Incredibles, we woke up and I decided to make brownies and we went off with them "cooling" in hand in the 100 degree weather for a picnic in the park. After that there were more cocktails, The Incredibles (again) and us falling asleep, again.
Sunday morning found us walking in the sustained 100 degree heat over to Red Hook, a fantastic brunch at on the roof at Alma, with white sangria and the best margarita I've ever had (pineapple and vanilla bean – I know it sounds sweet and sickly but it wasn't) and then we ambled down Van Brunt, hopping into Saipua, the splendid Erie Basin and the renowned Lenell's.
We then found ourselves in a cab over to Atlantic Avenue, won over by the beauties at Darr, their sister – or should I say brother – men's store across the street, Hollander and Lexer. We then found ourselves at Butter, dizzily trying on shoes we couldn't afford and sunglasses we lusted after. Shored up by Vietnamese sandwiches and Vietnamese coffees from Nicky's, we walked back through Downtown to DUMBO. I realized that not only had my friends not left my house since Friday, but we hadn't left the borough. Brooklyn bloody rocks! While I'm at it, I'll list some of the places to go in Red Hook and Atlantic Avenue after the jump.
Jenn tried so hard to get me Ladurée macarons. On her trip around Paris, she made it to one of the stores and very kindly bought me some, lovingly packing them into a bag to carry on to the plane, to make sure that they arrived intact.
Standing on a escalator in the airport on the way back to New York, her husband accidentally kicked the carefully packed bag and it went flying and bounced its way down to the bottom of the escalator. Running to retrieve it, Jenn lifted the crumpled box out of the bag, and these beauties stayed pretty much intact.
So I got to revel in pâtissier history with these beautiful, crispy and colorful – but slightly shaken – beauties. I wonder how newbie Paulette in LA compares to the old school?
Paulette photo by Paulette
As I waited in the doctor's surgery today, marveling at how strange it was that I couldn't understand what anyone was saying due to my lack of foreign tongue, I opened The Botany of Desire at exactly the right time. I had just come from the Green Market, where I went a little crazy buying vegetable plants. You have to understand that teetering on the edge of what is a fairly prolific vegetable growing season for someone with only plant pots in the sky of Brooklyn, this is very exciting.
I realize this is strange from the looks my friends give me when I enthuse, over and over again, about growing tomatoes. And this love and strange pull towards growing plants, as Pollan tells me, is not my fault. If they weren't so goddamn tasty, I wouldn't want to grow them again, now would I?
So in the "ground" are all heirloom tomatoes; eight Purple Cherokees, a Ceylon (I'm Sri Lankan, I had to), a Purple Calabash and a Jaune Flamme. We also got a Wonderberry husk tomato, Kamo eggplant, Red Rib chicory, red mustard greens and Wallonne endive.
But probably the most exciting thing we bought was a Feherozon paprika plant, which grows as a pepper which you dry and crush into powder. Most exciting thing. Ever!
Pictured is also some red sorrel, lemongrass and random herbs floating around. We got all of our vegetable plants from the outstanding people at Silver Heights Farm who have by far and the away the best list of rare and heirlooom vegetables. They have five different kinds of brussel sprouts, for God's sake...
Seeing as we've been in the countryside (we just got back again from a trip upstate, this time with my dad and our friend Karen, both visitng from England) we've been cooking like our lives depend on it. And they kind of do, because there ain't no takeout restaurants anywhere near. But it also means that I keep forgetting to take photos of the food as I am too busy cooking. You'll just have to believe that last weekend we made rhubarb crumble with pecans and some rhubarb and cold custard.
This weekend I tried the pizza dough recipe again (success!) and made a rhubarb pie. Last summer in Pennsylvania I made this pie and just used the basic recipe again for the rhubarb pie. It's a really good crust and holds together well for a really "solid" pie. Don't laugh! What I mean by this is: the pie filling holds together well and is juicy but not sloppy, the crust also holds together and is crispy on the top and the bottom and doesn't crumble too much but still has a lot of flavor. I was going to photograph it properly the next day, but all I was left with was this little slice after I brought it out to the table. Testament to a good pie I think.
You would have thought that being out in the country would yield more food options than the big bad city we live in. Farms, local producers and all that? Nope. What we got was the venerable Food Town (where getting mint is a stretch) or the meager farmer's market that opened this weekend and had only doughnuts.
So we had to be a little imaginative and also cater to the myriad dietary requirements of the team of nine – three vegetarians, one lactose intolerant and a shellfish allergy. Thank God pizza stepped in to save the day.
Before going on a day trip, I had my first go at making pizza dough. Unfortunately, when we got back, four hours later, the dough had not risen at all. We used it anyway, and got five more pounds of dough from our beloved Food Town.
Inspired by this recipe in Gourmet, which we made, we kept going and going with our seven pounds of pizza dough. Here's what we made:
Gorgonzola dolce, caramelized onion
Bresaola, parmesan and arugula
Buffalo mozzarella and cherry tomato
Eggplant and tomato sauce
Ramps, mixed wild mushroom and parmesan
Grilled vegetables and tomato sauce
Salami, buffalo mozzarella and tomato sauce
Correct me if I have forgotten any, youse people. I'm still getting over eating that much pizza in one sitting. Well two, we had the rest cold for breakfast the next day. It was a really lovely communal event, all of us coming up with different toppings. Thanks to Tom who ruled on oven rotation duty!
I had a blissful Memorial Day with the people I call my good friends – you know these guys, some of these guys, some of them. Amongst just sitting in the glorious sunshine and reading, we saw Indiana Jones, walked around an architectural masterpiece, played Scrabble, hiked to Doodletown and went to Millbrook Diner.
It was a wonderful long weekend filled with silly amounts of eating and a fair amount of cocktail dabbling. Melissa made smooth mint juleps, Cindy potent scorpinos, Jenn kickass lychee/mint martinis and I herby pink grapefruit/rosemary martinis. Hence the fact that I really can't talk about it, I can just show you pictures. Words just don't do it justice.
And armed with canvas bags, we were ready and willing to buy 15-20 tomato plants in anticipation of eating only tomato sandwiches for the duration of the summer. Alas this wasn't to be, so we consoled ourselves by watching the British peeler-man hawk his wares. We, like everyone else, are mesmerized by his speech and deft peeling skills, but, like everyone else, have never bought one. I am always too shy to step forward in front of the crowd and hand over my five bucks.
Until today! After our fruitless (he he!) search for the tomato plant lady we returned to 16th Street and there he was, alone, no crowd, just quietly munching on a carrot. A little star struck (I'm so sad) I triumphantly made my purchase. Along with ramps, fiddleheads, rhubarb, sorrel and mustard greens it was consolation for the absence of tomato plants.
Oh yeah, and I had a pumpkin doughnut too.
Ah chocolate cake. I make it all the time, but it rarely lasts long enough to photograph. This poor piece was the lone survivor of a recent cake massacre. Natasha rescued it from a sad fate of joining its cakemates as additional padding around my thighs. This particular incarnation of chocolate nirvana was a standard chocolate chiffon with added sour cream for moisture and tanginess, instant espresso powder to accent the chocolate, and a box of pudding because, well, why wouldn't you throw pudding into a cake? Not wanting to stick with the usual vanilla or chocolate frosting, I tossed two teaspoons of cinnamon and a pinch of salt into the standard buttercream base of butter, powdered sugar, and milk. The result was an intensely cinnamon and spice frosting that played incredibly well against the dense chocolatiness of the cake. (If I do say so myself.) Ah chocolate cake, once is never enough. Off to make another!
Founded in 1924 by immigrants longing for a taste of the homeland, Germack Pistachio Company knows how to process a nut.
Located in the heart (or rather, it is the heart) of Detroit's historic Eastern Market, the Germack Co. has been turning out perfectly roasted pistachios for over seventy-five years. Mild, salty, and crunchy they are the perfect companion to almost any drink, but their charm is especially apparent when paired with beer. Next time you are visiting the Motor City be sure to swing by their roasting plant and pick up a five pound bag. Or a ten pound one. You won't be disappointed.
A graduated 4 week/4 fork program
Week 1: the four tine introduces a new fork to the user to think of the purpose of the program
Weeks 2, 3, 4: step down efficiency of the fork - smaller bites, smaller meals.
Meals that take longer to eat help with the digestion and promote conversation.
Here is my project for the Bring it to the table exhibition. I have had a lot of fun playing with sugar in all it's forms! See below for the outcome. Hope to see you on Sunday at the opening – spring, 126a Front Street, Brooklyn, New York, 11am-2pm.
Sugar is a food product that teeters somewhere between good and bad. Like salt, it is a product that is used by most of the world, regardless of development, infrastructure or GNP. However, its production has led to exploitation and clearing of forests to make way for planting more sugar cane in developing countries and its growth in popularity has led to the onslaught of obesity in both children and adults in developed countries. Conversely, sugar cane has also been developed as a feasible alternative energy source, making its very existence something we may depend upon more heavily in the future.
Considering the many faces that sugar takes, Natasha Chetiyawardana has explored sugar in its many forms for Spring gallery’s Bring it to the table project. Taking sugar in its original form, a pen was whittled from a piece of sugar cane, ready to chew on in that moment of thought and contemplation, hopefully there to provoke thought itself. Secondly, a sugar bowl was made from the by-product of sugar production, bagasse, the fibre that is left when the juice is extracted from the cane. The fibers were mixed with soy resin to create a new life for a waste product that is usually just burned. The third exploration was looking at sugar in its usually-consumed form, the sugar cube. As a nod to the ships that haul sugar across rivers and over oceans, a small boat made of sugar floats momentarily on the foam seas of a cappuccino and eventually sinks. A sugar man sits on the precipice that is the edge of a cup, dipping his feet into the drink to test the waters. A little poke from a sugar-hungry finger pushes him over the edge.
The first of a few of the pieces we are exhibiting on Sunday at spring that I thought you foodies would be interested in.
CHOW CHART by Brett Snyder, Designer, Visiting Assistant Professor, Pratt School of Architecture and The University of the Arts, www.chengsnyder.com
The food we eat is part of a vast network of global production and consumption. On Chow Chart, a placemat, adjacent maps trace the path, from farm to table, of the ingredients in a typical home-cooked dinner. Total mileage that ingredients have travelled are represented by the color coded ‘spokes.’ These distances comprise only a portion of the whole story. Once food is consumed, the by-products continue on various trajectories, from the network of sewage pipes, to water treatment facilities, to landfills, and to recycling centers where discarded food packaging material is transformed once again. Chow-Chart suggests that in addition to measuring food by cost and calories, we may also begin to think about food in terms of its global impact.
spring is a gallery in DUMBO, Brooklyn whose next show stems from the table as a place where we sit, eat, discuss. The need to readjust and focus towards a more enjoyable, clean and responsible way of living is best represented by the philosophy behind projects as such as slow food and how it reflects a collective, contemporary thinking that can be applied to other disciplines; the slow revolution! Through curation, Anna Cosentino and Steve Butcher of spring would like to 'bring to the table' results of successful collaborations, examples of design that gives back, show the importance of artisanal skills and their application in design and art; and ultimately the new interpretation of luxury. Featured in this selling exhibition are the brilliant paintings by Justin Richel (see images above) and the much-lauded Sorapot (images below) by Joey Roth.
Alongside this show is an exhibition co-curated by Michael and I with spring. Reserving a space at the table for a group of designers, artists, art directors and thinkers we have asked them to bring something to the table to provoke thought/discussion/action. We are very lucky to have the following people participating (and more may be added to this list): Ralph Ball; Davide Cantoni; Will Carey; Peter Cole; Heather Cox; Otis Kriegel; Michael McGinn; Maxine Naylor; Stijn Ossevoort; Brett Snyder; Cecilie F. Egeberg; Jessica Peterson; Rob Price; Douglas Riccardi; Charlie W. D. Marshall; Rich Brilliant Willing; Zoe Sheehan Saldana. This exhibition explores creative thinkers' approaches to the table environment and their work will be exhibited along a dining table. I'll post some of the pieces involved tomorrow. If you are in the new York area, come and join us this Sunday, May 18th from 11am-2pm for some bloody marys and see what we have at our table!
I'm not one for 90s style stripes on plates with a tiny cluster of edibles that is supposed to be a meal. And that's what people think they are going to get when they go to WD-50, although a fantastic meal of decent proportions is what you actually get. And if you expect either one of these things, you will still think you have walked into the wrong place when you enter the dimly lit room in which a local interior design student has obviously experimented with. Picture a flashy bar in a small town ten years ago. That's the décor.
But forget it, that's not why you're here. We were there for my birthday a few weeks ago with my lovely, lovely neighbors Darren and Lizz. Michael and I had been to WD-50 a few years ago and had dinner in what they call their private dining cellar, which is really someone's genius stroke of getting people to pay way over the odds in the cold room where they store the wine and hang their coats. My only memory of that night was not of the food, but of a hirsute Frenchman removing all of his clothes and sitting at the table entirely naked. The waiters didn't bat an eyelid.
This dinner was basically a blank slate thanks to the former experience. We started with some fantastic cocktails – a strong rye cocktail, a pumpernickel stout cocktail, a pronounced beet cocktail. And then we ordered and shared the food, pairing with it with a fantastic Châteauneuf du Pape. I won't give you a blow-by-blow of every single dish like I did to everyone else in sight over the following week, but I will give you a synopsis. It was fantastic. In New York we are spoiled with good food all the time. We are over-promised, pampered, whiny children when it comes to good meals. I realize this when I go back to London and have to pay Gramercy Tavern prices for mediocre food. But this meal was fantastic even by New York standards.
My foie gras looked like it had been freeze-dried and smashed all over the plate. It was served with miniscule meringues, which gave the right amount of sweetness and a fantastic textural contrast. I just sighed heavily at my computer remembering it. The popcorn soup was the embodiment of all that is popcorn, without the crunch.
When Michael asked if he should get the scallops or the monkfish, the answer was the lamb. Which was so amazing it could have been entirely unadorned and would have still knocked us over. But Dufresne's take on ball field fare mixed barely cooked "noodles" made of strings of potato, crunchy mustard crumbs and a bold pretzel consommé. Wagyu beef with coconut cream and coffee gnocchi was stupendous and balanced, and a turbot with wafer thin cauliflower and barbecued lentils flawless. The pork belly with a mind-blowing caper emulsion led me to pick the pieces of fat off the plate that the waist-watching boys left. I know, but it was worth it.
I thought I would post some pink food for such a grey day. I'm really convinced it's a Sunday and not a Monday and am therefore tempted to pick up my unread New York Times and nurse my two day old hangover. But I'm not going to. I'm going to do this quick post and carry on working. Maybe.
I saw this recipe and was entranced by the color. It's very easy to make, it just requires time actually forming the gnocchi. I've made it several times since then and I haven't quite worked out how to stop the gnocchi from sticking to the plate before cooking. I've tried the fridge, I've tried flour...
Stickiness aside, this gnocchi looks better raw than cooked as the vibrancy gets a little dulled. But the beet flavor is quite pronounced. Add all that silky ricotta and sharp parmesan into the mix and you've got a winner here. This recipe is really, really good! And the perfect thing to perk up a dull, rainy day in New York.
I saw this done in Brazil last year and, cheap as I am, only bought plantains on Fresh Direct the other day because they were on offer. Hey, we British maintain a wartime attitude at all times, even when there isn't a war on. I haven't reverted back to canned milk and powdered eggs. Yet.
These were really easy; I split them in two, scored them like mangoes and set them face down on a very hot skillet for about 3 minutes. They then went into the oven for another 10 minutes at 350°F and we ate them with Bhutanese red rice and a Khmer fish curry. I'll have to make the curry again and take pictures, as we ate it too quickly.
More presents! We're so spoiled. Our dear friends Jenn and Tom got us two brilliant presents from their recent trip to Paris. Here's the first.
À la Mère de famille was founded in 1761 and is the oldest confectioner's in France. It sounds like the ultimate candy store, complete with old world sweet shop magic. There's something so evocative about that moment when Charlie Bucket steps into the candy store, his eyes raised to the ceiling filled with jars upon jars of cavity-inducing goodness. I can just imagine Jenn's little girl's reaction when she walked in, and I'm sure that is what mine would have been too.
Even though we didn't go, we were lucky to have this amazing box of chocolates brought back for us. Dusted in just the right amount of cocoa, these surprising little logs are filled with a slightly wafer-like noisette filling that we cannot stop eating. Contrary to the fact that I have an interminable sweet tooth, I don't normally eat chocolates like this. The empty box is testament to the fact that these are no ordinary chocolates.
La Mère de Famille has five locations around Paris. Store image from La Mère de Famille.
