Eden of the Empire State

I didn't grow up visiting orchards in the fall, but I see why New Yorkers feel so strongly about it, and I'm catching up. They are the most romantic of places, a low-slung mysterious maze of short, strong trees. The silvery leaves are hung with ornaments the brilliant colors of perfect and marred fruit. The ground is rolling with apples and long grass. Walking only a few steps, you can disappear entirely.

Man, what a drawing.

Apple in Halloween costume as plum.

This Week On eBay...

Produced for MoMA (NYC) but shipped from seller in New Mexico..I love it. I knew it was old because these wouldn't be the iconic building silhouettes chosen for this product today. Also the faint windowpane grid background is an eighties contemporary look. I do wonder about those "Fake Architectural Cookie Cutters" that must be out there...this is a terrific find for Sugarbuilt.

West Indian Day Parade

I spent Monday with other New Yorkers (almost all of them, I think) at the parade and carnival on Eastern Parkway. It was an incredible cultural mash-up that included noise, color, food, and togetherness...no wonder I had such a good time!














Pholourie. Fried spiced dough balls with a thin sweet chutney.

Delicious goat roti...

Jerk chicken...

Some alcoholic thing from Barbados...



Fab earrings!

Girl vs. The Branzino

Wherein Amelia Goes to the Hamptons and Cooks as a Private Chef

Here are some of the photos I took this past weekend, when I cooked eight meals in four days for a private household.


Whole Roasted Branzino

Here is the cherry chutney I made to have with roast pork, corn, roast potatoes, and sauteed red chard with pecans. It was deliciously dark, sour, spicy and sweet.

Moroccan Spiced Roasted Chicken

Summer Squash Corn and Poblano Soup

Chilling watercress vichyssoise.

Green beans and carrots, duh.

Roasted Curry Cauliflower

Wild Rice Salad

Fennel Watermelon Mint Salad

Different day, different fennel salad...

Tabouli

Turkish breakfast with poached eggs in toast cups and ginger scones.

Pear Sorbet, Poached Pears, and Ginger Meringue Cookie

Strawbrerry Rhubarb Tart (for the recipe, see the post I did on Saucy Little Dish here)

Lemon Cake Pudding with Lemon Ginger Caramel

Plum Sorbet with Cherry Tuille and Fig

Love Badge

I Love Lettuce

I just realized that I have taken too many pictures of lettuce this week to not acknowledge it here. It's fresh at the store, it takes up yards of table at the farmers market, it's overflowing CSA shares. To see all those lacy green piles... I am so taken with how beautiful they are. Sure I make salads, and I've made an intricate lettuce soup with a savory custard on two occasions, but no portrait series or Ode to Lettuce. Until today- I declare my love!

Growing up we had "real" lettuce, or green leaf lettuce. This was because my mom grew up on white bread and iceberg (among other things) and so she bought dry, dense wheat bread (boy has that come a long way) and real lettuce and did not stock soda or cereal more sugary than Honey Nut Cheerios. As soon as I was at other houses or comparing lunchboxes I yearned for the exotic crunch of iceberg and remember begging for it (she must have been so horrified). I was rejected with "there is nothing IN iceberg lettuce". I have forgiven her for that and am in fact totally grateful that she made the choices she did in feeding me. I actually still love iceberg, particularly involved in a red onion-blue cheese dressing situation, but now I love all the other lettuces too...

This varietal is called Salad Bowl! It truly fills a huge bowl...at least briefly.

Relate to Horseradish

How do we learn what is appropriate for ourselves and those we share our lives with? It seems obvious how much horseradish is too much, when eyes water and the nose hurts, but how much horseradish is just enough or too little, how much will enhance and delight the right way when feeding yourself or someone else? At what point do we start to know the flavor enough to recognize its complement, and not be overwhelmed by it? Everyone’s taste is different and every mouth understands a different bite. If you overdo it, you risk losing the flavor or texture of the food. At the least, what measure makes it not even worth it, hardly a taste? We start to guess by seeing what everyone else does, and we learn by experimenting to find what feels right for us. If all goes well, you know what you like but are still willing to bumble through more trials to discover something new, or even the same thing over again.

It was a private moment of excitement years ago when I stood in my kitchen alone and put horseradish on a hard-boiled egg for the first time. I learned how much was appropriate for each bite, and was thrilled to experience this new combination (and discover a new vehicle for horse radish!). I wondered if this would satisfy anyone in the same way as it did me. I imagined standing in the kitchen with someone else, sharing horseradish in our own proportion, but remaking the discovery together.

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 which 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 that 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.