I'm a sucker for a good terrine, because in my heart of hearts, I know I'll never be the kind of gal who will take the time to press meaty off-bits into a sliceable miracle of natural gelatins and tender shreds.
So this item was a Quadruple Threat for me as I skimmed the menu at Franny's on a fine spring day: Pork Cheek? Beef Tongue? Terrine? AND a pun?
Yes, please!
And, dear readers, I had the same thought that you did upon spying this for the first time. This looks like...Spam. Fancypants Spam. Spam with spats and a pedigree.
Which is exactly what it tasted like. Being from the Spamtacular State of Hawaii, this is by no means a negative association. It was a luscious mosaic of faces, meaty and savory, the lean muscle of the beef tongue gelled together by the richness of the pork cheek.
[In a perfect world: Tongue and Cheek and Egg breakfast sandwiches. 'Twould be a heady glut of calories and sexy metaphors to face in the morning.]
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franny's 295 Flatbush Avenue Brooklyn NY 11217 718 230 0221
Nadeshico Sushi restaurant in Tokyo is filling a long-standing gender gap with panda bear and frog face maki, crafted by the first-ever all female sushi chef lineup (WSJ, via VV).
Kazuya Nishikiori, the middle-aged owner of Nadeshico, says he wanted to create a new model for working women in Japan. But he later explains he'll only hire women who are between the ages of 18 and 25 to work behind the counter. "After all, our slogan is 'fresh and kawaii,"' he explains, invoking the ubiquitous word for "cute." "If someone wanted to work here and was 30, I'd put her in the back." [WSJ]
This culinary tour de force is "one floor below the massage parlor that promises 'total relaxation'" in the Akihabara district, the tech geek wonderland rife with maid cafes and pillow girlfriends.
Many thanks to the ever-loving Max, Alex and Edna for the blood, sweat and tears; shout-out to Effing Brobro the Elder for stepping up as primary prep and all-round sous chef extraordinaire; thanks too to all the peeps from near and far whose contributions and sparkling company made this a memorable feast, even months later.
Not pictured: Sweet Potatoes with Pecans (Joanna), Cream Biscuits (Edna), Artichoke Dip (Max and Edna), Two-Pesto Terrine (Max and Edna), Cauliflower and Broccoli Gratin (moi), Cream Gravy (moi).
Lap-perched caloric load...huzzah!
Pumpkin pie a la Max, and Pumpkin Cheesecake, 2 ways, a la Joanna; hand whipped cream by Edna.
Thank you too, gentle readers, for your patience and loyalty, in this the 3rd year of the blog! The posts are slow but the appetite runs high, and without you, I'm just flotsam in the tide of gluttonous, sanctimonious know-it-all morons. *MUAH!*
I like that they're so distinctively waxy, crisp and bitter--when an endive snaps in your teeth, it can be mistaken for little else. The separated curls of each leaf are sharp little gondolas for all manner of things runny and rich: Soft cheeses, fondue, crab or artichoke dip.
Think celery but more fay, and meaner. Or if bok choy had light-deprived, bitterly-ankle-biting midget cousins.
I tend to slice them into 1/2-inch cuticles and toss them with crumbled blue cheese (hullo, Cabrales!), chunks of green apple or pear, honey, and black pepper. Pungent, sweet, crunchy and spicy, there's nothing chaste or clerical about it.
Cooking endives is something I've never done, but am muy curious about; the French tend to make them into gratin, which sounds silky-sexy-comforting.
I think that even Thomas Lux may concede in this case: Nothing is so irritatingly twee that it can't be made delicious by covering it in rustic pig and cream. Some time ago, the effervescent Matt Armendariz posted a simple but gorgeous recipe for Braised Endive that has lingered in the recesses of must-try: Winter project? NodNODnod.
If I mix a vegetable and moral metaphor then this pale, arrogant little leaf—its juices spare, its taste pinched and numbing—is equivalent to a rich child pulling legs off a bug, to a swaggering walk through a TB ward by a pulmonary giant. Not to mention a pathetic excuse for salad: four, five spiked shards arranged like spokes around its hub: a radish delicately carved. The white plate upon which it sits so bare it blinds me. Who, forced to wear white butler's gloves, bends over a row all day to pick this for a lousy wage and can't afford or, I'd prefer, refuses to eat it? It's so pallid turning to yellow I feel stabbing it with my fork would hurt it or at least be impolite so I slide the shiny tines beneath a piece and lift it to my lips and it's as if I'm eating air but with a slight afterburn: dust and bone, privilege and toe-dancing. So delicate, curling in on itself in an ultimate self-embrace: fussy, bitter, chaste, clerical little leaf.
This frankensandwich is the end result of grabbiness in the Union Square Greenmarket.
Nope, I didn't go mental and make the bread, but I did enjoy the earthy-nutty smell of gorgeous rainbow kale toasting in a skillet with a bit of sesame oil and black garlic.
And how much fun is halloumi? Firm, a little tangy from goat's milk, with a pleasing squeak to the teeth, this grilled/browned halloumi had all the allure of string cheese, Wisconsin cheese curds, and a breadless grilled cheese in one sliceable unit. (Chuckle, unit.)
Next round, I'd add another semi-wet element to balance this vegetal bounty: Maybe soft-cooked eggs, tomato or pepper jelly, or anchovies. (Or match it up with some soup for dipping. Helloooo, escarole and bean!)
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.
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