Beet this

Every week in my CSA, they're giving me beets. Big, small, red, yellow, white--they are delicious, and also beautiful, and I have been eating them the same way every day for a week.

Beet/Ricotta/Baguette
(In my head, this is tres francais. je ne sai pas si c'est vrai, mais....)

Scrub your beets, then wrap them tightly, one at a time, in foil
Roast them at 45o for an hour or more, depending on their size, until a knife slides in easily Once they've cooled, peel off them skins
Chop them into cubes (I believe the professionals call this a dice)
drizzle with olive oil, red wine vinegar pop 'em in the fridge

Next day, at lunch: Take a hunk of your favorite, freshest baguette
Rip it open into a sandwich
Smear fresh, amazing ricotta onto each half of the bread
Spoon beet mixture onto each side
sprinkle with sea salt or kosher salt grind some black pepper on top
you've got 2 open faced sandwiches

Spooey

Last weekend, in honor of the engagement of Joan and Andrew, I made a chocolate layer cake, one that I blogged about here, years ago (it's been years, people!).

There was an awful lot of frosting left over, as there often is, and as it sat in a bowl in my fridge I wondered what to do with it. My office mate suggested that I bring it in and that we dip pretzels in it. This she calls "spooey," and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out it's gonna rock(et).

So today I brought in said bowl of frosting (cream, chocolate, sugar, butter and vanilla), and we have been dipping pretzels in it all day long. Say it together: spooey.

(another chocolate pretzel thing to go nuts over: Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby, FYI).

What's Real

I always knew there was a reason I didn't like Pringles potato chips and apparently it's because they're not even potato.  Last weekend everyone was reporting the news that a British court ruled Pringles "not potato," and therefore exempt from the tax on potato snacks (or, snax, heh).

It really raises the question: why eat imitation potato chips when you can eat really freaking good real potato chips?  

or

Why eat anything else BUT the dinner I made for myself last week? It's made from real stuff.

Orzo with Lemon, Mint and Peas

a large handful of shell peas from the farmers' market

one lemon

6 leaves of mint

fresh parmiagianno reggiano cheese

Vermont Butter & Cheese Co.'s Sea Salt butter, one knob

Shell the peas

Cook orzo according to instructions on box

for the last three minutes of the cooking, throw in raw peas and the mint

Strain, saving a tsp or so of cooking water

Put orzo, peas, mint mixture into a bowl, with the 1 tsp cooking water

Grate lemon zest into it, and the juice of half of the lemon

toss in the butter

sprinkle cheese on top

I swear, you will never eat snax again.

If I don't get my butt to a ball game this summer I will be very sad. Last summer I was all itching to go and it never happened so I really need to motivate this time around.

One thing that also makes me sad is the really awful food at ball parks. This hilarious (and potentially useful) interactive graphic from the NY Times is a peach, though.

Me and Meat

I am a city girl born and bred, with city needs and city habits. I have a strong memory of being six or so years old and wearing a puffy winter coat with a hood on a hot summer day in the backyard of our weekend house, so the bugs wouldn’t fly in my ears. There is a picture of me at camp riding a horse in jazz shoes. You get the picture.

My junior year of college, in the suburbs of Philadelphia (practically the country!) as part of my Religion studies, I took a course called “Religion and Ecology,” in which we read everything from the Jewish laws of kashruth to Heidegger’s “Technology;” from Buddhist texts about the distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings, to the eco-terrorist tract “The Monkey-Wrench Gang.” At the end of the course I vowed to spend time on a farm, to look a chicken in the eye as it died, to bear witness to the slaughter of a cow, something that would earn me the right to eat one of these creatures, one of these sentient beings-- a creature of this earth, like me.

When I graduated from college I moved back to NYC and hit the pavement running, my farm dreams something quaint and faraway (like my desire to have cats of my own someday). I became a vegetarian, thinking that if I could not come to terms with animal slaughter, if I could not find the time to go to the farm, between auditions and acting classes and the like, then I would refrain, altogether, from eating meat.

But what a terrible vegetarian I was, making exceptions for street food in Mexico, and sausage bites in Barcelona. Not to mention the annual NYC burger. This lasted for five years, on and off, until I gave up, gasping for meat like a drowning woman for water. And hadn’t my vegetarianism been the coward’s choice?, I asked myself. I had found a way out of my vow since it was, in a sense, a helluva lot easier than finding my way to a farm. I did not know any farmers. I barely ever saw a tree, let alone something edible growing out of the ground.

So imagine my sense of wonder, when four years after giving up on vegetarianism, and twelve years after graduating from college, I found myself on the farm, present for the slaughter of two sheep. I had traveled to Lopez Island, off the coast of Washington State, in order to visit the community of farmers who make up the Island Grown Farmers Cooperative. This collaborative is in possession of the first ever USDA certified mobile slaughter facility. The reasons for building a mobile unit on Lopez were very particular to their island status: farmers had to go off island to slaughter and then bring the meat back to the island. This wasn’t cost-effective, so most people just brought their meat to the mainland and then sold it there. The ironic result was that the island was having a food access issue; the meat was being raised there but not eaten there.

There is a need for mobile slaughter facilities all over this country because everything is being geared more and more towards the large-scale producers—this is both with grains and livestock of course—so that there are very few processing facilities for small farmers, making the market increasingly favorable to large industrial operations and less and less favorable to the little guy. All the little ones are gone, and in their wake? Large facilities that are geared for huge numbers of animals. Also, similarly to all the neighborhood Mom and Pop shops giving way to big box stores, this means you have to travel farther to get to them, sometimes prohibitively so.

In the wake of health scares and disturbing meat recalls, we are seeing an increasing demand for sustainably raised, grass fed meat, but if there isn’t an infrastructure to support these small farmers—i.e. if there aren’t processing facilities for them to use—then how will the demand ever be met? How will people, on a large scale, ever have a viable alternative to industrially-produced meat? In order to get product to the people, you have to have infrastructure to scale, and the mobile unit does just that.

Before I headed out to Lopez, I spoke to Holly Freishtat, who was hired early on to do a needs assessment of the island. I asked her what she learned as a result of this assessment and she said that “the issues this island community is facing, of farmers not having access to local infrastructure, and consumers not having access to the local foods they demand, is no different from what rural and urban communities are facing around the country. I thought they were unique because they were surrounded by water and now I have realized that it is a result of a centralized global food system. We have to build the capacity and infrastructure for our farmers and consumers to have local foods.”

Back to the farm: most people I know don’t want to hear exactly what I saw that morning, so I’ll keep it simple. I approached the farm (not the first farm I’ve been on in the past two years at my job, by the way, not by a long shot) with the jitters, and in the first moments I had to suppress tears. But those tears, those were the tears of a city girl who is so soft-hearted she cannot even train her cats to stay off the kitchen counter. Those were not the tears of a woman who tore into a burger the night before; I would not let them be.

Watching the farmer next to me, I was humbled by the fluid grace with which she understands the cycle of life. She raised these sheep, with tenderness, and she watched them die with tenderness. The parts of the animal that are cut away (the head, the hooves, the skin, the innards) are composted on the farm, eventually enriching the very soil that grows next year’s crop of vegetables. To see this is to learn more in 30 minutes than I could have hoped to learn in my semester-long “Religion and Ecology” class.

To see the IGFC mobile slaughter facility in action is to understand, in the deepest sense, what a successful venture this has been–for business, yes, in the ways that I described above–but even more, for the health and well being of the animals. The animals live quietly and well in the fields, then enter the barn they’ve known all their lives. They are processed humanely and the work is slow, careful, and meticulously clean. I watched it from inches away, and though it was challenging, especially at first, I watched it eyes open.

I left the island utterly convinced of mobile facilities as the next wave–to step in where small/mid-size infrastructure has crumbled away. It works for the farmers, and it works for the residents of the islands, who are able to eat meat that their neighbors have raised. It’s an amazing sensation to drive around the island and see the animals, and then to know–not just because someone told you, but because you’ve seen it with your own eyes–exactly where your food has come from.

i'm back (or: father's day 2008)

Father's Day and summer solstice often line up, if not always exactly. Summer solstice means longer days, a summer break from my second job, more fresh food available, and therefore...drumroll please....me, back at my blog, up to my old tricks.

where i've been

It's been a while. And not because I haven't had food adventures or things i've wanted to record and share. I ate my way through Puebla (ohhhh Mexico, I just don't know how to quit you). I explored the porky wilds of Brooklyn. I ate bison in Montana. I made chicken pot pie for 120 people--I mean, there was fodder, there was definitely fodder.

But what a busy fall it was, and in the meantime I started blogging for Slow Food USA.

I may come back, when things simmer down, but in the meantime, check out my less personal but still food and farm related posts at www.slowfoodblog.org

Happy New Year--here's to a delicious and sustainable 2008.

variety is the spice of life

Here in NYC, I can eat pasta on Monday, Sushi on Tuesday, Thai food on Wednesday....but nothing is better than eating those foods in their original habitats. For me, a large part of travel is to learn the place with my taste buds.

But then sometimes a funny thing happens: sometimes I go to a place and the monotony of the food starts to get to me. And then I feel silly! After 10 days in Greece, I was craving something besides feta cheese. Last weekend, after four days of New Mexican food, in Santa Fe, I was tired of chiles and tortillas (a thing I never thought I'd say!).

New Mexican food is not quite Mexican and not quite Tex Mex, it's somewhere in between. There is a lot of ground beef--something you'd never see in Mexico--and of course, a lot of the native green chile.



Walking through the wonderful Santa Fe farmers' market, one is hit by the complex, spicy and smoky smell of the roasting of green chiles in large spinning drums, being turned by famers' hands. The roasted chiles are then chopped and sold in ziploc baggies, and the smell is intoxicating. The market has a warm, lively vibe that probably can only be created by a community of people eating that level of spice day and day out (at the dinner the night after the wedding I attended, I watched a small boy ask of his mother, before every bite of chips and salsa, "spicy?").

We ate a lot and we ate pretty well, the highlights being huevos divorciados at The Plaza Cafe, and an excellent breakfast burrito with chorizo and tomatillo salsa at Pasqual's.



But in the end, I was happy to come home to variety, the thing I know.

i left my heart in south kakalakee

This post is long overdue, but chronicles the weekend I spent observing what's so great that it could draw my two friends away from NYC, possibly for good. It turns out that life in Columbia, South Carolina is full of lovely surprises, and it's hard to begrudge anyone's decision to leave the grit and grim and trade it for smiles and sunshine--I mean, if you're INTO that kind of thing.

Some food and farm (and other) notes from my travel:

1. Free refills of seet tea. it turns out they aren't kidding around with the "sweet" part (yowza!), but isn't that kind and generous? Eternal free refills offered with a big ol' grin?

2. Coca cola with ice, sitting by/in the pool. The pool right outside your apartment. Your big apartment, the one with a guestroom and room for your surfboard. The one with parking spaces out front for both of your cars. In South Carolina, no diet Coke, only regular coke will do.

3. Lizard's Thicket. A local breakfast chain that you cannot visit for brunch at 1 pm, because they stopped serving breakfast ages ago. And all the well-dressed church ladies, eating a late lunch will look at you sweetly, shaking their grey heads. But a bright and early brekkie of sausage, cheese grits, giant biscuit and eggs is a really marvelous thing. Cheap, too, i bet, but I have friends who are too generous to let me know what a "bill" in South Carolina looks like.

4. Chicken Salad. Apparently cafes around here are competing for the best chicken salad. Embrace the mayonnaise--you're in South Carolina now--and you might not regret it, 'cause this stuff is pretty tasty.

5.The farm. My hostess had the brilliant idea that Labor Day could best be spent visiting her new CSA farm outside the city. We drove to Five Leaves Farm, a very small and lovely operation run by a husband and wife named Kristen and Ben Dubard. Ben took time out of his day to give us the tour, ripping japanese cucumbers off the vine and breaking into crisp green chunks for us to eat, nipping basil leaves for us to smell, and grabbing one of the last of summer's melons for us to take with us. it's amazing to see how much food can be produced from a small plot of land, and it was cool to see the very soil that Cerry and Ethan's fall food will come from.

Come fall, they'll be all settled in, and here in NYC it will become gray and cold, and there, in South Kakalakee it will be bright and sunny. It might just be heaven on earth...

do any of us even know where we are?

My friend directed me to a bar I hadn't heard of, on Leroy and 7th ave, friend said. Leroy, yeah, I thought to myself, I think I know where that is. After all, I have lived in NYC since the first minute of my life. I know every inch of it like the back of my hand. Leroy, right.

I took the train from work to West 4th, planning to head downtown on foot. A flash of doubt: maybe Leroy is over there with Horatio and Jane, having a wacky name party up there in funkytown. I'll head uptown. Or not? I'll stop and ask someone.

"Hi, which way is Leroy?" I ask a young man smoking a cigarette.

"Who?"

I cross the street and hit the ATM. Inside, a cute, likely gay for crying out loud, guy.

"Hi, is Leroy uptown or downtown?"

"To be honest...I'm not sure."

I leave the bank, tentatively head downtown. I see a couple standing and waiting for the light.

"Hi, I'm looking for Leroy--is it uptown or downtown?" They look up and down, then down then up.

"Uhhhh...."

What the fuck? Why do none of these people know where the heck they are??? Why don't I??? My last hope, a middle aged guy and his daughter. They look like they live here, right here in ye old West Village. They are not tourists, not NYU students fresh off the bus.

"Hi, I'm looking for Leroy. Is it up, or down?" The father points downtown, and I walk about 4 or 5 blocks, just enough to find myself about THREE BLOCKS FROM MY NEW APARTMENT. A humbling moment for the native New Yorker, mitigated only by the discovery of a new, wonderful little bar, Little Branch, hidden behind a small, unassuming door at the corner of Leroy and 7th Avenue South.

je ne sais quoi

It's hard not to sound snobbish when you talk about "terroir." First of all, it's French-y sounding, and second of all, a lot of people don't know what it means. "Terroir" is a bit like "je ne sais quoi:"

I love this cheese, it has a certain je ne sais quoi.

Get a load of this honey, what is that I am tasting? A little...je ne sais quoi?

That sort of thing. Only, in truth, terroir is a way of discovering what exactly that "I don't know what" is. Terroir is the geography of a food, its location and environment that gets expressed through its taste. The je ne sais quoi in that cheese, is in fact the diet of the goat/sheep/cow that produced the milk for it. The je ne sais quoi in that honey are the flowers that the bees pollinated before going back to the hive. How cool is that?

Last Monday I attended a honey tasting at Jimmy's, an adorable basement bar on 7th street, that was hosted by Cecily and Amy. I had the pleasure of tasting an assortment of local honeys--the most interesting to me was to taste three batches of Roger Repohl's honey, harvested in a community garden in the South Bronx. Now you might think that the je ne sais quoi in South Bronx honey would be guns and grime, but noooooo, it's elder flowers and linden and all kinds of things, depending on what month it is. I tasted a honey from October 2006, from July 2007 and August 2007 and they were three distinctly different colors and three distinctly different tastes. Same bees, same location, diferent flowers. Terroir!

hello again, after all this time

There were so many things I meant to write about this summer.

Like the weekend that L and I went strawberry picking and then made jam, jam, jam up to our eyeballs. I was going to warn you, my reader(s?), that if you don't cook it long enough it will be strawberry sauce, not jam, and though it will still taste fabulous, and although it won't negate that you had a wonderful time picking out there in the field with your friend, it won't really be "jam," per se.

Or my trip to Greece with A, and our favorite dishes there. Highlights that included zucchini fritters, marvelous yogurt, tremendously rich and creamy feta, and more karpouzie than I could possibly eat. If still giving warnings, I would warn that those nescafe frappes can be surprisingly strong.

Instead, I write finally tonight to share the dish I created this evening with the ingredients I have here in my new refrigerator in my new house. Let's call it "heirloom tomato surprise." It is unbelievably, amazingly, summery good. This is the kind of cooking I love because:

a) it involves making do with whatever's on hand

b) it isn't something I can eat a month from now or 6 months from now. I'll next be able to have it tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and then not again for about 11 months.

Heirloom Tomato Surprise

Orecchiete pasta
fresh ricotta cheese
toasted pine nuts
various heirloom tomatoes, cut into small chunks
baby basil, chopped
salt
pepper

Cook pasta
toss with large dollop of cheese, salt and pepper
throw on tomatoes and basil
shake toasted pine nuts on top
(good with a spoon)

god bless america

Some of you may have spent your July 4th swimming or surfing, biking or hiking. Me, I spent mine doing the most American thing I could think of, by which I mean the most passive, sedentary, voyeuristic thing I have ever done: I watched a guy competitively eat 28.5 hot dogs in 12 minutes. I mean, it’s not even like I did the eating myself.

On second thought, let’s not call it eating, let us call it something else. To me, eating is an act of pleasure, and an act of nourishment, and competitively scarfing down 28.5 hotdogs and buns in the presence of thousands of fans, and a few vegetarian protesters is not really pleasureful, nor is it nourishing. Hell, I am pretty sure these guys are throwing up a little, if not a lot, as soon as it’s over. Well, if they’re Kobayashi, five time world champion, then they threw up (“reversed”) during the contest itself—bummer! That’s two fewer dogs for you, my Japanese friend.

Yes, it’s true, on July 4th, 2007, through the good connections of my friend Julie, I was a judge for the Nathan’s hotdog eating contest on Coney Island. As I counted (and grimaced, and giggled, and groaned), it was Slow Food meets fast food, head to head at a vinyl covered table. I was nose level with five plates of freshly cooked franks, and at first, they smelled realllly good. After all, I hadn’t had lunch yet when the contest began, only half of a crushed-peanut-covered caramel apple.

When my contestant Hall Hunt ran out, I was charmed and surprised to see how young and cute he was. He had an ironic handle bar mustache, and a pair of aviators, and his slouchy shorts revealed a taut, muscle-y stomach. When he put his hands together for a pre-contest prayer, I noticed the two canvas bracelets he wore, one that read “Jesus,” the other, “WWJD?” Now, I am not particularly intimate with the thoughts and actions of Jesus, except in the most academic sense, but I feel fairly confident that Jesus would not inhale 28.5 hotdogs (and buns) in 12 minutes. He would turn the hotdogs into wine, or use them to build a beefy stairway to heaven, or something much more useful, and much less wasteful. Perhaps, in a very Christ-like move, he’d distribute them to the poor.

Which is exactly what Nathan’s did: a rep from City Harvest—after the “Save Coney Island” folk singer, but before the Clogtastic! Tap dancers—told us that Nathan’s had thoughtfully donated 15,000 hot dogs to shelters around the city. Let’s just hope that they were distributed evenly, one or two to a person, say, rather than 28.5 per homeless fella.

My partner judge was Ken, lovely, sweet Ken, who happens to be the sports commissioner for NYC. We made a mighty team, me counting dogs, and him flipping the pages on our counter so the official counting girl could record it. He even valiantly shielded me when Hall burped and spewed moist bun splatter. My job was no easy one, and the concentration it required kept me from watching the true spectacle further down the table—Kobayashi and Chestnut having an intense head to head.

But that’s the stuff you see on the teevee; what you don’t see is Hall Hunt cramming his once-cute mouth full of food, and doing a weird wriggly dance to help it slide down his throat. And you don’t see Julie’s contestant chugging Kool Aid with his dogs and then getting a mean case of the hiccups (he nearly reversed his pinkish red mush all over poor Julie, had to stop after 21 dogs, but still walked away with Rookie of the Year). Nor do you see the 63 year-old contender head back to the VIP section and eat an additional three dogs because he “wasn’t hungry per se, but he wasn’t FULL.” What you don’t see is how I simply could not look Hall Hunt in the face, because I was so repulsed by him, I feared I might have a reversal. Maybe the camera did show you the tiny Sonya Thomas, referred to as “The Black Widow?” She was a few people down the table from me, and while she may have looked pretty and dainty before the show, after the throw-down, her careful makeup was shmeared and she had the bleary-eyed, greenish look that all the contestants shared.

Is this our American food heritage? We created a nitrate-filled mystery meat capsule, with a refined flour and sugar bun, and we may not be able to win a Men’s semifinal at Wimbledon, but dammit! Americans are really, really good at stuffing this nasty food in our traps! And what did I do when the contest was over? I headed back to the VIP section with the 63 year old, and the burper, with the woman who was inside the giant frankfurter suit last year (too pregnant this year), and with Julie, and what did I do? I ate a Nathan’s hotdog of course (with fries).

God Bless America!

sustainable, fish?

For many years, eating fish has seemed like a no brainer: it's "healthy" and abundant. It turns out that factory raised fish is unhealthy (ever seen photos? they are as ghoulish as the photos of factory farm chickens and beef), and that many wild fish are being overharvested. It's hard to know which fish are sustainable and which are not. A few quick fixes for lack of knowledge/understanding include:

1. Go to the Monterey Aquarium's Seafood Watch site. I myself picked up a nifty wallet-sized guide to carry around with me as I shop and eat out.
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp

2. Check out Slow Food USA's most recent issue of the Snail, all about this topic. www.slowfoodusa.org

3. Read the book "The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What we Eat," by Charles Clover.

4. Read this recent NY Time Editorial: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/opinion/27weds4.html and think twice about how and how much sushi you are eating. Fashionable, yes. Sustainable, no.

red hook ballfields follow-up

In response to my panicked message to the city about opening up the food contracts at the ballfields to bidding, I received the following (a somewhat reassuring response):

Dear Constituent:

Thank you for your email regarding the food vendors at Red Hook Park in Brooklyn.

The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation has been issuing "Temporary Use Authorizations" to two separate groups to operate a food market at the ballfields in Red Hook Park. We began the process a few years ago in an effort to legalize the vendors at Red Hook, helping them become a permanent fixture in the neighborhood, and the park users have benefited from their presence. They enhance and diversify the Red Hook neighborhood, and particularly our ballfields, by serving great food at reasonable prices. Unfortunately, once it became clear that the Red Hook markets would regularly be open for more than 29 days a year, we could no longer legally renew their temporary permits without opening up the concession to the public solicitation process.

I would, however, like to correct a common misperception that we are offering the site to the "highest bidder." In order to comply with the concession regulations in the New York City Charter, we will issue a Request for Proposals (RFP). This will allow Parks to evaluate proposals based on qualitative criteria such as operating experience and planned operations. We plan on releasing a RFP shortly for the operation of vending markets at the various ballfields at Red Hook Park; the term of the license will be six years. This process will give the selected vendors the permanence and regularity that they deserve.

We have received positive feedback regarding the Red Hook vending markets and we look forward to the active participation of the existing vending groups at Red Hook in the proposal process.

I appreciate your taking the time to write.

Sincerely,

Adrian Benepe
Commissioner

recipe

It's been a long while since I've posted a recipe--a sure sign that it's been a long while since I've cooked a meal. This past weekend I finally got around to entertaining and made use of several recipes torn out from magazines, and recipes stored in the nooks of my brain. From start to finish the meal was full of brand new things, including this cous cous salad which I made up based on a delicious version I had in North Carolina:

Lemony Green Cous Cous

1 cup cous cous
1 1/4 cups water
3 lemons
olive oil
salt
pepper
whatever greens you have handy (I had green garlic, spinach and arugula)

Finely chop green garlic and cut arugula and spinach into ribbons (we call this "chiffonade")
Put cous cous in a bowl
Boil water and pur it over cous cous
Cover the cous cous and let sit for five minutes
Remove cover and fluff with fork
Add a few glugs olve oil, the juice of all your lemons, salt and pepper to taste
Toss in all chopped greens

So easy, and so good!

chapel hill, duma!

The best way, to learn a language, they say, is to immerse yourself in it. I spent the past few weeks learning Italian by traveling with a few, and sitting at dinners, and riding in cars, when the only words being tossed about were in a language other than my own. And it really works! I experienced the local, beautiful, delicious food of the Research Triangle (North Carolina) with una banda dei Italiani, and it was bene, molto bene.

In Chapel Hill, there is una piccolo piazza where all the food is terrific, "the corner of yum and delish," I like to call it. For breakfast, you hit 3 cups, local coffee haven, where coffee is shade grown, locally roasted and seriously good. For lunch, you can head next door to Sandwhich, where a sign prooudly announces that SLOW FOOD = GOOD FOOD. As you are sitting there eating your pancetta, mozarella and arugula sandwich, you can see one of the owners of the local Chapel Hill Creamery arrive with the day's delivery of fresh handmade cheese. Sit outside and enjoy the ridiculously good weather, then head around the plaza to Locopops, where they make a multitude of popsicles using local ingredients, with such flavors as Mexican Chocolate and Honeydew Balsamic Mint.

By now you'll be ready for dinner, and you'll head into Lantern Restaurant. Really, you are not allowed to eat dinner anywhere else, go to Lantern, go directly to Lantern (Do not pass go, do not collect $200). Chef/owner Andrea Reusing is creating completely local, seasonal, Asian infused American food. Every single thing on the menu is a homerun. I recommend everything, and since it's seasonal, the things I had won't be there when you go, but whatever is there will wow you. Start with a Junebug (it's a cocktail), and if you can, do like we did and share all of your appetizers. Don't be shy about taking the last boccone (bite) of the pig's head terrine shmeared on hot pane (bread) served wrapped in a banana leaf. And don't be scared of the sea urchin sauce on the scallops sashimi--I promise it's wonderful (taste the crack of sea salt as you bite in).

If anyone, Italian or otherwise, invites me back to this neck of the woods (I didn't even mention the pickled pig's ear salad I had at the BBQ, or the emu in balsamic and fregole (strawberry) sauce I had in Raleigh), I will say without hesitation: Si! Andiamo! Or as the Piedmontese say, Duma!

le pigeon

Going to a new city is a chance for reinvention. In NYC I often think it would be nice to go to a restaurant and sit at the bar by myself. To treat myself to a nice meal and a nice wine, and maybe eat in silence, and maybe become BFFs with the bartender, and maybe make a new friend. The reality is that if I am not out with friends, I try to eat at home--it's the thrifty thing to do, and it insures that I cook at least now and again.

With a few hours to kill in Portland, OR, I had the opportunity to be the eater I always mean to be but never get to be. I did some reconnaissance and scoped out a hot new culinary mecca called Le Pigeon. I sat at the bar, and watched the two chefs work their magic. Barely breaking a sweat as they danced around the hot grill, they flipped and salted and toasted and sprinkled with panache.

It was a terrific meal--innovative and delicious, both simple and new. I started with a raddichio salad dressed with a mustardy vinaigrette, follwed by a delicate and pink rabbit on a bed of wild mushrooms, and polished it all off with--get this--honey apricot BACON cornbread with maple ice cream and BACON. Dessert + BACON = : )

And I drank my Riesling and I had good conversation with the patron next to me (another local chef, a hoster of supper clubs, and a maker of his own salami), and I was fabulous. And then the cab took me straight to the airport and I arrived back in NYC rumpled and stiff-necked, and back to my old tricks.

eggstravaganza

Ever the symbol of spring, regeneration and new possibility, the egg is also delicious and versatile. You may not know, unless you attended the eggstravaganza at my office last week, that more than about 5 eggs in one sitting isn't a great idea. In an effort to showcase the turkey eggs my colleague got her hands on, we designed a potluck lunch centered on the theme of eggs. We had frittata, caprese with hard boiled eggs, deviled turkey eggs, egg salad tea sandwiches, bread pudding, meringues, key lime pie, homemade cinnamon ice cream, and flan made with turkey eggs. This induced a coma-like state in nearly everyone present; the office was very quiet that afternoon, and none of us have touched eggs since.

The egg salad sandwiches were mine, and they were made special (and tasty) by the addition of fresh lovage from the farmer's market. Lovage is an herb that smells a bit like celery, looks a bit like flat leaf parsley and tastes not quite like anything else I know.

Egg Salad Sandwiches

Hard boil 10 fresh chicken eggs
Peel off shells and chop eggs in coarse chunks
Spoon in several tablespoons of mayo, to desired consistency
Stir in minced red onion
Stir in one tbsp of coarse grain dijon mustard
Stir in chopped lovage, about a handful
Salt and pepper to taste

Use a whole grain pumpernickel type bread (something dark and nutty)
Watercress is a nice addition
Cut into rectangle or small square shapes
Eat with your pinky out, all fancy-like

roundup

There have been some new finds of late, and although one or two were in Chicago (props to Chef John Bubala at Timo!) there are some in NYC as well.

1. Takashimaya: When C suggested we go there for tea, followed by a visit to MOMA, I was suprised and delighted. Usually our weekend plans involve an EV or LES brunch and some good old fashioned retail. Nestled in the windowless basement corner of this jewel-box Japanese department store, Takshimaya's cafe has many charms. The first is that it brings you to this beautiful store. Not that I or anyone I know could afford a sock in this place, but it is one of those places that just knowing it exists and taking it in, makes your world a more beautiful place. I imagine I'll be 60 and dreaming: "when I grow up and become a millionaire...I'll buy this frock...." Anyway, it is quiet and serene down there and the bento box is terrific and I am happy to report that it goes well with champagne. The meal was so good, it comforted me through the sad surprise of hearing that my dear friend C is moving away from NYC.

2. Grand Central Oyster Bar: Do you have a friend who lives in Westchester? Do you struggle to find a place to eat together when she comes in to Grand Central Station? Does the thought of eating oysters in said station give you the giggles? or, the heebyjeebies? Well, get over it, because it turns out that this strange place, caught in time, is a really good place to get--yup, you guessed it, oysters. Crazy, right? Make sure to use the bathroom, because it affords you the opportunity to pass by the old school countertops and then through the saloon. Wacky.

3. Palo Santo: It's all well and good to drag my old friends on my food quests; they are mostly a game bunch, humoring me, and eating well along the way. But it is also fun to make new friends, people whose priorities line up more clearly with my own (1. food 2. wine 3. everything else). One of these friends brought me to Park Slope new-ishcomer Palo Santo, on a strange stretch of Union Street, just east of Fourth Ave. It's Latin-Mediterranean fusion, nestled in the ground floor of a refurbished brownstone. Counter-seating with a view of the kitchen is fun, but so is the back room with three communal tables and windows looking out on what appears to be a Zen garden. Go for appetizers and wine--the food changes almost daily but there are, according to my friend, a few repeat appearances. I loved everything, especially the pork belly with fennel grapefruit salad and the octopus with cilantro and jalapeno. Damn!