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
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:
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.
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.
It's that tricksy, thieving kind of East Coast bright outside. The sort indicative of clear, freezing air that makes snotmonkeys of the lot of us.
So I'm trying to combat the sunshiney-freezing mindphuck with bright-tasting food. The Man and I always keep Twinings Black Peach Tea around as a winter balm; he was steeping himself a cup as I was prepping pork chop brine. I got the unmistakable whiff of peaches and thought...why the hell not?
So I subbed the 2 bottles of Magners (which we didn't have around, anyway) with 24 ounces/3 cups of strongly brewed peach tea. Instead of the apple-sage butter, I went with sliced fennel and onion sauteed in the chop searing pan (yep, my fennel fascination continues) deglazed with a bit of sherry, so that the natural sweetness of the veggies picked up caramelized meat mojo.
I had a couple of sweet potatoes lingering from Momma Foodie's visit (she loves unadorned, whole roasted sweet potatoes); I cubed them for faster roasting (skin-on) and tossed them with some kosher salt, chili powder, olive oil and a couple of sprigs thyme. About 20 minutes in a 400 degree F oven and boom--toothsome, comforting, crispy-candy-spicy, and a nutritional juggernaut as well, with copious vitamin A, C, fiber and manganese.
The chops picked up a subtle suggestion of summertime fruit and tea, and it foiled well with the softened licorice of the fennel and spicy sweet potatoes. Look how defiantly stinkin' cheerful that plate looks! Take THAT, January.
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