I try not to get FN icky and personal here, because...well, there are enough people feeling loudly on blogs. Blech. Suffice it to say, large momentous life changes have made sitting down and feeding the interwebs a little more challenging.
But rest assured, gentle and hungry readers, I still think too much about eating, and have lately been fixating mostly on eggs. And more eggs.
Pour Some Sugar On Me kidnapped me to her family's lakeside cabin in PA, where drunken bees were gorging themselves on flowering chives. I perry and dodged for my breakfast share; chive blossoms make scrambled eggs taste like they were kissed by garlic-y magic angel babies.
Clip and wash the poofy bloom clusters, pluck to separate the lil blossoms, and sprinkle at will for purple bursts of allium spunk. (Rosemary flowers are great with eggs, too!)
Elsewhere in eggland: For Effing BroBro's birthday, our family was lucky enough to sojourn to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where I had my very first encounter with unlaid eggs.
Being Blue Hill, these embryonic eggs came from prideful hens raised on the estate, and were cured in salt until they took on the consistency of hard cheese.
For double-your-unlaid-pleasure, said salty cured yolks were shaved atop pasta made from fresh unlaid yolks. Sunny and reeking of procreative richness, 'twas lucky indeed that Blue Hill provided me this particular first.
And in my much-less-fancy-farmless kitchen, I revisited recession recipes:
I'd heard fables of calçotada via Anthony Bourdain and similar globe-hopping eaters; much as foodies stateside go apesh*t over ramps, Catalans eagerly anticipate the arrival of calçots:
[C]alçotada, a party centered around eating piles of messy calçots,
or green onions, that are blackened over open fires and served with a
garlicky romesco sauce of toasted almonds, toasted bread, and smoky ñora
peppers.
Calçots are a Catalonian specialty grown in a unique way:
harvested in early summer, they're replanted and then repeatedly covered
with dirt so that the white part of the root elongates, producing a
sweet and tender vegetable. (Calçots take their name from the
Catalan calçar, which means to put shoes on, a reference to the
process of covering the roots. [Saveur]
It was on the castle-in-the-sky To Do List, as I've no earthly idea what spring I'd be able to trot around Spain.
Bless Peter Hoffman for cheerily provoking New Yorkers to eat with their
hands and cavort with strangers!
The elder of the 2 Effing BroBros joined me for this soiree of charred carousing; we knew we were in for a treat as we saw clouds of onion-and-lamb affected smoke wafting down Prince St.
Dinner included dangerously drinkable bottomless rosé, both in-glass and arced directly into mouths by a porron-wielding Peter Hoffman himself.
"It's all in the arms!" Hoffman happily demonstrated, the blush-colored wine catching light as it streamed neatly into his open mouth.
Family Effing threw down, but not nearly to as impressive effect. (My lips touched glass as I tapered off--FAIL!) Cheers to our table, where every single diner gave the porron a go.
After sliding off the onions' scorched outer layers, all present, from
children to grandmothers, dunk the calçots in romesco (see
Grilled
Green Onions with Romesco), tip back their heads, and lower the
long, white stalks into their mouths, leaving behind sooty fingers and a
mound of carbonized leaves. [Saveur]
Our green onions were not as hefty or sooty as the Catalonian ones described, so no stripping was necessary; the helpful grill-master's mate showed us how to coil the onions and scoop up romesco from the large shared bowl. Big, greasy smiles and blackened fingers followed.
The romesco was rich, coarse and thick, like a red-hued pesto, chunky with mortared almonds. The brazen garlicky-fattiness of it mingled beautifully with the sweet-n-bitter grilled green onions, flame-cripsed at the ends and tender within.
EF and Effing BroBro: HUMuhgwd. Eesh go good.
I wish I'd thought to scoop out a big blob of it to eat with my lamb, greens, sausage and beans...but I was too busy eating lamb, greens, sausage and beans.
Everything was that stripped-down stripe of satisfaction. The grilled lamb was a lovely medium-rare, with a good sprinkle of flaky sea salt; the kale with maybe a little lemon and olive oil; the botifarrasausages were plump, generous, and totally unadorned; and the beans tasted...like beans, not sugar or pork, tooth-tender and creamy.
Crispy-topped crema catalana capped off the bloat:
Catalans claim that their custard is primordial creme brulee, but when you've got a trap full of heavy cream and burnt brittled sugar, you're unlikely to quibble over chicken-or-the-egg.
Spoons plonked to pause down our long table of good-humored, rosé-glowy company, live flamenco tumbling the whole restaurant along. 'Twas a mighty fine way to spend a spring night.
Good 'ol EST jetlag made snapping up in bed at an ungodly wee hour relatively easy--not that it would have been hard anyway, since Soft-Spoken Feisty Lady and I were about to embark on one of my long-coveted foodie dreams. We strapped on knee-high combat boots and wellies respectively, and padded out into a barely stirring Tokyo.
Some foodies dream of El Bulli and The French Laundry, of vintage wines and caviar, of green-chile cheeseburger trails, cross-country pie conquests, and sniffing out the most authentic Maine lobster roll. And while I'm game for any of the above, I wouldn't trade any of them for the 2 mornings that I had at the Tsukiji Fish Market.
Cremebruleed, a dearly trusted foodie who I'd not been in touch with for YEARS, had just moved back to Tokyo, and was all too happy to meet us for our first tryst into the edible aquatic wonderland. It was her birthday, after all--what better birthday breakfast than the freshest sushi in the world?
Even though it was early, cold and rainy, we 3 were in great spirits, and Cremebruleed laughed aloud as I danced in little circle of fishy anticipation. Without ado, she yanked us into the bustling, living hive of commerce.
As with much of Tokyo, my noggin was flatly unprepared for the intensity and scale of Tsukiji. The infamous international tuna auction has been closed to tourists, so we were making a beeline to the heart of the market (rows and rows of seafood and Japanese longshoremen), and working our way to the outer rings (produce markets, pickle stands, kitchen hardware stores, street foods, and minuscule restaurants favored by the longshoremen once they were done with work).
Basically, if you needed live cuttlefish, a sharkskin wasabi grater, a fresh root of wasabi to go with it, and a giant bowl of spaghetti with fresh Hokkaido crabs, this little city within a city is where you'd go to get it all.
BTW, some haters would scowl at the closing of certain areas of the markets to tourists, but let me tell ya: The market-proper is a full-powered, dangerous place, and if you don't have your wits about you, you'll probably be mowed down by one of a thousand forklifts pinging in a million directions at worst, or catch a face-full of fishy hosewater at best.
NYer walking/dodging/perrying skills definitely helped us from dying or stopping vital business, and even we got annoyed at the congestion-causing telephoto-lensed momos wandering haplessly into certain disaster.
Cremebruleed led our little duckling line through the damp, endless rows of piscine jewels and treasures--crabs of every imaginable size, shape and feistyness:
Bitty rock crabs, alien Hokkaido crabs, Alaskan King--every one alive and kickin'. If it can't poke your eye out, it ain't fresh.
But you're here for the food, and so were we. By 9 AM, we'd worked up a hearty appetite sidestepping splatter and gawking at swimmy critters, so Cremebruleed inched us toward the outer ring of the market. She strolled down a row of tiny sushi places, past all the tourists and nationals waiting in hour-long lines at Daiwa and Sushi Dai, and stopped at the last sliding glass door.
The sushi master greeted us warmly as we inched our way into the clean, lilliputian space; bags went in a rack directly over our heads, bottoms on stools, backs against the wall, knees under the sushi bar. Scale: Subway car, if that.
With a hot towel and a quick flip of the picture-oriented menu, the 3 of us each chose the 14-piece, 1 roll omakase (3,700 yen, I think...definitely under 4,000, or $40 USD), in which we would choose the last two pieces of nigiri. SSFL and I were grinning and bobbing like kids on Christmas, and Cremebruleed was smiling like...well, a lady in-the-know at a fab birthday breakfast.
First four pieces of nigiri--(L to R) maguro (lean tuna), toro (fatty tuna), hata (grouper) and tai (red snapper).
Each tuna cut was rich, fatty, and distinct; the grouper was meaty and almost creamy, and the snapper sparklingly saline; all were so clean and fresh that you could practically hear their offers for three wishes melting in the slightly warm rice.
I didn't fully realize where I was in the world until the moment that
1st piece--maguro--broke apart on my tongue. It was the reverse of Proust's madeleines,
the distillation of the immediate and fleeting, a pulse that slows and
gives one rare focus--this tuna, on this birthday morning, could not
have happened anywhere as it has happened here.
It was about now that the lovely man handed us bowls of the best miso soup I've ever had. Maybe it was just nice to be sipping something savory and steaming on a cold day. Or maybe it was because it was stare-back soup.
But seriously, the amaebi (deep sea shrimp) heads impart a subtle sweetness and tomalley oomph that ups the unami ante to near-infinity. Cremebruleed translated that we could have as much soup as we wanted, but we practiced restraint and saved room for the arriving feast.
I've always wanted to go to Tokyo...and in a fit of luck and fancy, Soft-Spoken Feisty Lady and I fell face-first into an incredible last-minute deal.
Could we? Could we?
Of course we could.
So before good sense and practicality could kick in, we found ourselves on a plane to Narita, digging through English-language Tokyo food blogs and guide printouts.
I should be able to find a more elegant phrase for this, but...Tokyo is awesome. Jaw-droppingly, mind-bogglingly grand. There is just no way to encompass the scale, the vastness, the juxtaposition of the modern and the sacred, of blazing pop culture and well-ingrained gentility. I am floored, and only sad SSFL and I couldn't afford to stay longer.
And the food...oooooh...the food. It's everywhere, in pristine markets and side-street stalls, French bakeries and single-dish mom-and-pop counters, ramen joints and Michelin-starred giants. New Yorkers fancy themselves foodies, but for the peeps in Tokyo, the phrase is meaningless, because everyone is a foodie.
The only thing they like better than good eats is waiting for niche good eats in long lines. (And warm toilet seats. Tokyoites have decided that it's their God-given right that every john be electrically heated. Bless them.)
There are department store basement food courts/markets (depachika) that span entire city blocks; The Food Show in Shibuya makes Bowery Whole Foods look like the Circle K. (And speaking of Circle K, their convenience stores kick the crap out of ours, too!) Never in my life have I experienced food overwhelm, but let me tell ya, I did in Shibuya. ("OMG! We CAN'T GET OUT! I CAN'T EAT EVERYTHING! Heeeeeeeeeelp!!!") More on that later.
Sooo...let's start at the beginning. We stumbled off the plane and into our modest lil hotel in Ginza, and went sniffing the streets to fill our jet-addled bellies.
We didn't have to go far. Not even half a block from us, a friendly young man greeted us warmly, and slid the door open to an empty little ramen-ya. We let him and the incredible umami fumes wave us in.
Sorry I didn't get a pic of this, but for a lot of these ramen places, you do your ordering/paying right up front on a push-button machine that gives you change and generates your ticket for the kitchen.
Luckily, this one had pictures, so it was a little bit less of a crap shoot than it would have been with straight-up characters. We chose 2 bowls and a side of gyoza, and sat at the counter in drooling anticipation.
We looked at a few ramen blogs to vaguely acclimate ourselves with this city's noodle-soup fetish, but honestly, I don't think either of us have a practiced enough palate to distinguish between good Tokyo ramen and bad.
But I can easily say I've never had any noodles this good in any fancypants ramen place in NYC. SSFL and I were stunned as we seeped in the steam from our bowls.
Meet Hakata/Tonkotsu ramen: Thin, perfectly al dente noodles, milky pork-bone broth, pork belly, charsiu, menma (braised bamboo shoots), and a custardy slow-poached egg. Seems simple, but deadly rich, and absolutely savory and comforting.
She had a lighter-looking broth, but it was tricky--there was a good 1/4-inch of pork fat/garlic oil on top of that lovely soup. Topped with raw cabbage, charsiu, more pork belly and menma, soft egg and a few wonton skins, this blonder bowl was a force to be reckoned with.
Each bowl was (I think) about 700-800 yen, so just about $7-8 USD. HELL yes.
To our shame, neither of us finished, but not from lack of desire. We looked mournfully at the remaining noodles, conceded defeat, thanked the sweet ramen-men profusely, and made our way down the street.
A most fortuitous beginning to our trip!
Being gaijin, I'm not sure of the name, but here's 'tis on a map:
In starving grad student times, dirt-cheap Indian dinners on East 6th St were a welcome break in a routine of ramen and grilled cheese. For $8-10 a head, my comrades and I basked in the nuclear glow of a bazillion Christmas lights and winking Mylar garlands, sharing lamb korma, palak paneer, steamy basmati biryani, and mounds of naan. Nothing like a caddy of chutney to make a lady feel festive and fed.
In the course of these budget feasts, the little aluminum dishes of complimentary turmeric-touched cabbage and lentils inevitably fell by the wayside. But I've always loved them, and consistently ended each dinner with a portion of rice draped in canary-yellow lentil gravy.
I've discovered embarrassingly recently (like, last week) that the ubiquitous dal is dead-easy to replicate at home. Thrifty-and-filling, delicious-and-nutritious, simultaneously bone-sticking and sunny, dal's an ideal balm on a rainy spring day.
And unlike their pulse/legume cousin, the bean, lentils/dal need no
soaking or long-minded prep, and can be ready in 30 minutes. Procrastinators, gather ye lentils while ye may!
This bowl of saffron feel-goods has little to do with anything traditionally Indian; it's a grab-bag of things I happened to have in the pantry, and it produced a generous pot that ensured a week of dal-on-rice, dal-as-soup, dal-with-random kale, with even enough for a quart of frozen emergency dal.
(Just in case there is an immediate and overwhelming need for something creamy, spicy-savory, and punchy carmine.)
I'm a proponent of the Rocketship Underpants philosophy. One may have to acquiesce to adult responsibilities--work-casual doldrums, eating fiber, going to the gym, commuting with the desperate undead.
But no one can control your underpants. Your pink and yellow polka-dot bra? That's YOURS, and nary a soul knows you're wearin' it. It's not for seduction, or exhibitionism; it's just there to remind you that there is private joy in the world.
I feel much the same way about rainbow chard.
There are fewer vegetal images as effusive as chard in its multi-hued, full-frondal form, and it's hard not to do a little dance when encountering its deeply dappled, water-beaded glory in the produce section.
But like the rocketship underwear, it's a strangely private pleasure.
When I'm at the market, or doing prep in kitchen, more often than not I'm alone. And once it's cooked, the pebbly emerald leaves, ruby veins, and crisp, canary stalks subdue into Depression Era sepia tones.
By the time you've set down a tasty and nutritious meal, you're the only one who knows how much prettier it was raw.
No matter! Slurp up that chiffonade beauty, and rock them neon knickers. Some things you owe to yourself.
...more precisely, Roasted Red Beets with House-Smoked Ricotta, Blood Orange Supremes, Shaved Fennel and Sunchoke Chips.
<crunch, crunch> SSFL: Sunchoke chips taste like taro chips. EF: My mom loves those! SSFL: I do, too! I pick 'em out of the bag of mixed Terra Chips. EF: (crying laughing) It's the first thing my mom does.
I'm a late-blooming beet-eater, but this salad/app provided sorely-needed sunshine to the eyeballs and winter-weary taste buds; sweet, fork-tender ruby roots with spikes of citrus, anise, crispy-salty-earth kicks from the chips and wisps of smoke from that creamy ricotta.
Brunch is one of those great love-hate relationships in New York. On the one hand, what's not to love about eggs and booze?
On the other hand, what's to love about long waits, no space to sneeze or seize, and dead-inside, hungover servers who drew the short straw?
Tricky, tricky. But this last Sunday, Soft-Spoken Feisty Lady and myself were wandering about Williamsburg (destination: Artists & Fleas), and we did a lap around egg (diminutive case theirs), debating if we wanted to deal with the coiling line of people waiting to be nourished.
Well...why not? When in Rome...wait as the Romans wait. We put our name on the list and tuckered into the garage-ish waiting alcove.
The round of people we were waiting with were a well-coiffed bunch of quitters, so in 30 minutes, SSFL and I found ourselves seated on an aisle cafe table, sipping Mimosas ($7, the grapefruit one's a great change of pace) and eagerly awaiting eggs.
egg's Country Ham Biscuit ($8) has been on my to-do list of eating for years now, but never, ever finding myself in 'billysburg, it had become something like a bruncher's White Whale. I may have danced a little dance when said whale hit the table:
Well, hullooooo.
That's a two-handed, feather-light work of fall-apart biscuit magic, layered with deeply savory (read: salty, but not too salty) Kentucky country ham, sharply creamy Grafton Cheddar and housemade fig preserves.
Feisty Lady and I were hard-pressed to choose a second candidate for a plate-swap, but we ran with the Eggs Rothko ($8.50), AKA Eggs-in-a-Frame of Amy's flaky brioche, blanketed with more Grafton Cheddar and paired with broiled tomatoes and candied bacon ($3.50):
Yep, you heard me right. Bacon candy, baby. It's less baroque than it sounds; a couple of the softer strips were not unlike mapled pancake neighbors, but there were one or two bronzed crispy critters that hit the candied mark.
I usually don't see what the big deal is with brioche, but this slice ate like a croissant, an ideal candidate for egg-and-cheese impregnation (made only better by spicy green sauce). We liked the cheesy grits, but felt like they would have been better with the addition of a side of sauteed kale, broiled tomatoes, or a soft-cooked egg.
Funny, the difference a minute makes; like most bloggers, I tend to take pics as soon as the server walks away, without a flash and as quickly as possible, so the food doesn't get cold. No sooner did I plop the camera back in my purse and raise knife and fork, a minor disaster struck.
There is a time and temperature in which bodies will dictate needs. And grossly precipitating February dictates that right-thinking peeps should drink deeply of salt and spicy pork.
The Effing BroBros answer the Ramen Siren song far more often than I do; I haven't their cravings or patience for Ippudo.
(Tangent: HOW strange is that place, that you have to endure being crammed into a slaughterhouse pen of a bar for an hour +, to finally be set loose in a ginormous circus tent of a ramen house? My theory: The food is just okay, and it's just starvation-amplified gratitude for space that makes everything taste AMAZING!)
When the fancy does strike me, I prefer a nook or cranny that's a little steamy, laid-back, where the service is endearingly perfunctory. And when I find myself shoved in the Alphabet reaches of the East Village, primed with hunger and a couple of cocktails, Minca's foggy windows winnow to the top of my sodium-consciousness.
I did invite the Effing BroBros to accompany me, but their answers were the same: Ooooh, that sounds good! But I don't think my stomach can take it.
My reply to both: What? It's just RAMEN! Since when can you not handle ramen?
So 'twas with this brassy hubris that I perched on one of Minca's tall stools with Chocolate Bear, inches away from simmering stock and boiling baskets of stretchy-fresh ramen.
We shared an order of crisp-bottomed gyoza ($4.85):
Juicy, thin-skinned, loosely packed with veggies and pork (no lead-meatball dumplings here, thank you!) there is no more natural companion for Sapporo ($4.75)-- Greasy-savory/swallow, bitter-bubbly/swallow, repeat until depleted.
They held us over nicely until the main event--Chocolate Bear went for the Big Daddy pork broth item on the menu, the Toroniku Ramen ($14):
It may seem odd to some that there's raw vegetal matter sitting on top, but that cabbage = life raft in a sea of pork distillate. The soup is viscous, just short of a thin gravy that veils the katame(al dente), wavy noodles and hunks of sweet-tender braised pork. I'm fairly certain that if one were to set this bowl out on the cold sidewalk, it would turn into a bowl of piggy jello within minutes.
Being a sharper creature than myself, Chocolate Bear enjoyed his ramen, but didn't attempt to drain all of this mythical soup. I, like a gluttonous moron, lapped up every bit of mine:
She was a thing of salty beauty, the Spicy Basic Ramen ($11); let's break it down, shall we? Clockwise, starting at the pork at 6 o'clock, we've got:
charsiu (shoyu-braised sliced pork)
half a shoyu-braised egg
shredded kombu (reconstituted cured kelp)
nori (dried, pressed seaweed)
menma (shoyu-braised bamboo shoots)
chopped scallions
In a breath, it's land-animal-as-salt (embryonic and fully developed), sea-plants-as-salt (2 kinds), mountain-plant-as-salt. And scallions. Oh, and noodles, to soak up this devastating primordial RAINBOW of umami, winking red chili oil, and pork broth that was not quite so collagen-heavy as the Chocolate Bear's Toroniku, but still heavy enough where drinking the whole bowl is inadvisable.
...yet inevitable. I couldn't stop myself, even though I could feel my insides being embalmed with serious savor and spice, fermented soy and pork fat. Phuck pearl cream--the Japanese secret to dewy youth is that they're positively lined with salt on an atomic level.
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