Have You Been To Brighton Beach?

These are huge sheet cakes from a grocery store in the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach, just a ways down from Coney Island, in Brooklyn. The one on the right is covered in poppy seeds and golden raisins. I had a cold red borscht at Gina's with was perfect with beets, dill, and a crunch of cucumber.

Pickled watermelon.

Pastries were for sale all around the store. There were savory ones by the hot bar of Stroganoff and cabbage, cherry turnovers by the salads, and enormous slabs of cake and piles of cookies filled a case as long as my apartment.

The actual beach.

What The Hell Is That?

Sometimes I am moved to make things for many reasons...

See more pics and how at saucylittledish.wordpress.com

The Tapestry Dinner

Here are some pictures from the Tapestry Dinner, a supperclub-style evening I worked on with a crew of talented peeps in a wonderful loft in Brooklyn. Above is the salad course: watermelon, avocado, mango and cucumber with pea shoots and a spicy dressing. Below is the main: orange marinated grilled steak and cous cous.

Prep and plating was spacious and efficient atop the temporarily converted pool table.











Tea macerated oranges with pistachio creme anglaise and pistachio tuille. This was the best part! Well, and there was dancing...

Springtime in the Rustbelt

Observations From a Recent Trip to Southeastern Michigan and Toledo, Ohio.

As the trees were bursting forth and the flat expanses of grass appeared, I found myself absolutely fascinated by this region. I felt a driving tug that propelled me into junk stores to spend hours looking through things. I combed the internet and grocery store aisles and read road signs, looking and listening for the layers, the identities, the truth. I wanted to see beyond the franchised landscape. Where are the pieces of people's homes, lives, histories- in this area as they once were in boom times and as they are now? The place is steeped in car culture, manufacturing, chain stores, politeness and heartache. The effects of corporate culture, lost jobs and bland heavy food is everywhere, but I found an original and complex garden.



In Monroe, a town south of Detroit and north of Toledo, there is more than one locally-owned seasonal drive-in chili dog and root beer place. At both, young female carhops deliver trays that rest on your windows, ponytails swinging as they log another mile of their summer jobs. Both drive-ins are orange, and neither are plastered with a big A&W sign, apparently the root beer is homemade. I tried to ask about that-how do they make it? The girls just shrugged and said they made they're own. I would love to believe that someone is brewing their own herbacious syrup every week for the thousands of frosty mugs of root beer sold in the summer, and not dispensing a generic corn syrup concentrate into the machine, but I haven't talked to that person yet, so it will for now remain a mystery.













There was rhubarb growing in the back yard of a friend's house. I pulled up a stalk and washed it and cut it and ate it raw with sugar. The big leaves are poisonous, but I heard you can eat the stalk raw, in small quantities, which appears to be true and delicious.





One afternoon I went for an outing at a state park on Lake Erie. It was perfectly sunny, and grass and trees grew almost to the edge of the water. I walked on the beach as such with my cowboy boots on. The sound was like walking through the burned rubble of a porcelain factory, hundreds of Zebra Mussel shells crushing under each step. This lake was incredibly polluted at midcentury and though there have been years of regulation it still has plenty of problems, the plague of zebra mussels among them. The breeze blows and I squint at a pair of cooling towers on a far shore.







I found this in an antique mall alongside tiny sparkling glass salt cellars.

I saw remarkable architecture like the Greek-revival Toledo Art Museum and its smart looking new glass wing. Toledo is the "Glass City" because of the work of Libbey Glass, Owens-Corning, and other auto and object glass manufacturers that developed the area. There are blocks and blocks of amazing houses in the Old West End neighborhood, house after hulking house in Tudor, Late Victorian, and Arts and Crafts styles, to name a few.

As I meet the Midwest, the Midwest greets me in a surprising way. I was stunned to see this menu item available at a sports bar in Toledo. No fanfare, no bungled novelty, just an honest to god New Mexican green chile cheeseburger.

Saucy Little Dish

Sandia (watermelon) agua fresca from a truck from the ball fields in Red Hook, Brooklyn. This drink defines the term glow.

I will be contributing to a new blog called Saucy Little Dish with seven other lovely ladies. My first post goes up today! Check it out here..

From the Company That Perfected the Dream of Controlled Nature

...part of a complete breakfast with juice and toast by...Mattel?

Brooklyn April 2009

Chocolate Vodka

The second attempt went better. This time I used vodka, cocoa nibs and vanilla beans and sweetened it with a simple syrup made with vanilla sugar. I recently tasted some chocolate vodka made by a guy in Red Hook, Brooklyn which had a remarkable flavor; the effect was the moment of biting into a perfect bar of chocolate. I don't think mine is as complex as that one, but it is certainly interesting and tasty.

As for the first round "disaster" liqueur, I didn't toss it. My friend Anne suggested I could make a sort of bitters out of it so I added orange peel, star anise, cardamom, and cinnamon bark. After adding a deep caramel to it, it should be usable, I hope. We'll see.

Fat Mardi From Brooklyn

Oh my, are those the sweet lumps of a bead-hungry parade-goer? No, they are Paczki (PUNCH-key), the plump Polish donuts that will magically turn you into one if you eat too many of them. They are eaten year round but are scarfed up especially on Fat Tuesday as the decadent parcels they are before the days of Lent. They are filled with jam, and the ones seen here are filled with cherry and plum (the real stuff, not a matte-finish polymer goo).

I researched king cakes again this year, an oval braided ring-shaped cake with garishly bright decorations in the Mardi Gras colors green, gold, and purple. I and am interested in the community spirit of it. King cakes are shared in groups like most cakes and there is a trinket hidden in its crumb, usually a baby (representing the baby Jesus). Whoever gets this piece assumes responsibility for the next gathering and cake. It used to be that the trinkets were baked-in porcelain figures or penny-dolls, but these days liability requires most to have a plastic baby inserted after baking. I would love to see some of those old ceramic ones.

Perhaps there are king cakes to be had somewhere in New York, but there are definitly paczki. I found these at the tiny Polish bakery Rzeszowska on Manhattan Ave. in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Watch out for these hard sugar figurine-weapons that are starting to be prominently displayed. Come Easter, they can be unwrapped and flung to inflict pointy, adorable springtime traditionalism.

Infused and Furious

Weeks after I closed up my attempt at homemade chocolate liqueur, I opened it to discover a cocoa-scented elixir that will work nicely for stripping furniture and cleaning cuts. It was a disaster! The cocoa nibs and vanilla beans had done their part and given all their essence over to the base, which as the recipe specified- was 151 rum. I have never heard of including such a spirit in a cocktail, and the idea of this being "showcased" in one seems impossible, since a drop is face melting. I should have recalled the high school moment watching boys blow fireballs by spitting 151 over lighters. I am still tempted to try it again since I've tasted divine chocolate liqueurs (including a homemade one). Should I give it a go with regular rum? Please let me know if you have any ideas (that don't include blinding moonshine).

Happy New Year Some More

Is this the third New Year-type post this year? Yes! This time it is for Chinese New Year, which is a vibrant experience in New York City. I started in Flushing, Queens for dim sum with friends on New Year's eve (1/25), watched fireworks over Manhattan from my fire escape during the week, and went to the parade in Chinatown this past Saturday. I am just now learning about this celebration, and it is easy for me to love. Dim sum is thankfully around all year, and is so appealing with its seemingly endless rounds of small different bites. Combine this feasting with copious amounts of joyful red, fireworks, and drums, and I am a giddy mess.

We started with shumai, and went on to a fried shrimp-stuffed chili, stuffed eggplants, pork shortribs, a bland congee (rice porridge), and lots of tea. I had chicken feet (above) for the first time, which were covered in a lovely sauce, and that is all I'll say about that...

I was impressed with the steamed pork buns, which were sweet and smoky and parceled in a heavenly dough that I wouldn't mind being wrapped up and steamed in myself. The perfectly spherical ones were filled with a thick sweet bean paste that tasted of peanuts. My favorites were these pork folded dumplings that slipped wonderfully, and delicate curried beef turnovers. All of the pastry-making was a marvel of texture and craftsmanship.

I insisted we order a gelatin dessert because it just looked so amazing, and reminded me of the fish tanks behind our heads. It was very firm and flavored with tea and goji berries and was interesting but so aromatic and strong that I couldn't eat more than a bite. After all this the bill was delightfully puny and we strolled through the busy streets and unusual markets.

On Saturday, the parade came down Mott street stopping and starting, with confetti shooting in the air, loud bangs, and tacky, traditional and exuberant everything. Afterward, we walked with every other person in the city down to eat soup dumplings on Pell street, which were perfect and simple and cheap. I felt lucky to be in such a city and especially to eat these wonderful things in the year of the ox. Here is to each bite taking us closer to our fortune, and not missing the opportunities on our plate.

Obamarama

It feels like New Year's day all over again, but I didn't make black-eyed peas...I made cookies! Today the new President is sworn into office and I'll be checking out an interesting blog called Obama Foodorama, which will be posting when possible from the crush of humanity in Washington D.C.. This blog is a chronicle of Barack Obama and food. At first I wasn't sure what that even meant, but getting into it is well worth it. You will find recipes, food-political commentary, informative links, goofy pictures, ag policy and cupcakes. The variety of items is intriguing and the blog paints a wide and complex picture of an interesting subject and our culture at this moment. These are attributes that Marinationwide can happily endorse. Let the inaugurating begin!!!

Winter Chocolate Liqueur

My friend Eric recently returned form Peru and brought me some cocoa beans. Thank you Eric! Opening the jar releases a complex and unmistakable smell. I spent a long time cracking them open by hand and picking out the dark shiny, jagged meat. There are quicker ways to do this, but I wanted to inspect them meditatively while listening to the radio on a snowy night.

Some of the beans really do have a purple color and remind me of Kalamatas. What to do with them? I followed a recipe for homemade chocolate liqueur from Epicurious that includes nibs, vanilla beans and the very flammable 151. I have to shake it every day for 21 days-away from heat and flame. Hopefully when I open the jar in three weeks I will be met with an intoxicating chocolate aroma (as one would imagine). I'll let you know.

Fine in '09

How many will she eat this year?

Happy New Year! Its time again to eat blackeyed peas for luck and fortune, a superstitious and delicious tradition. Usually I've used canned which works great but I happen to be in New Mexico where the options are broader! Frozen, fresh, dry AND organic? Alright!

Blackeyed Peas For New Years

-Blackeyed Peas, in some form, say two cans, drained (in my case this year, the fresh and frozens needed a lot of liquid to cook in to get done, so the green chile sort of dissolved into a stewy surrounding. There were also some cubes of pork involved.)
-Bacon, a few strips of thick cut, cut crosswise
-1 onion, diced
-1 bell pepper, diced
-3 cloves of garlic, minced
-1 bay leaf
-5 roasted, peeled, seeded, chopped green chiles
-Crushed red pepper flakes
-Shake of Sherry
-Chicken stock and/or water
-Lots of S&P

Cook the Bacon, and take it out before it gets crispy. Brown the pork cubes and take them out before they're too done. Saute the onion, garlic, bay leaf and green pepper in the bacon fat till soft and add the peas, chile, stock, sherry and red pepper flakes. Season as you go along, but mostly at the end. Let cook for about 45 minutes, till tender and spicy and come together. Eat each bite knowing that it can only improve your chances this year. Salud!

Feliz Navidad 2008