Archive for February, 2010
Fried Rice with Crispy Ginger and Garlic
I’ll admit it. Fried rice isn’t fancy, and it isn’t, for the most part, inspiring. When you think of fried rice, you are usually thinking of cheap Chinese takeout, laced with pork and oil, served alongside your General Tso’s chicken. Granted, it’s usually delicious, but it always seems like an afterthought. This recipe for fried rice comes from one of the masters of French Asian cooking, can be made easily at home, and is going to be the best fried rice you have ever tasted. Seriously.
Buffalo Teriyaki and Bacon Wings Recipe
Ok, I know that this is my second posting on wings this week, but I had extra wings left over from the Superbowl party, and the temptation to come up with a sauce proved to be too great to resist. The most traditional Buffalo wing recipe is 1 part Franks Red Hot, 1 part melted butter, tossed with fried wings. Very easy, slightly spicy, very tasty. There are an infinite number of variations to this sauce, just as with barbecue sauces, and every wing enthusiast has their own.
Taste Test: Ugli Fruit
As I’ve mentioned in some of my previous entries, I have an affinity for strange produce. Strange food in general, really. If I run across something new at the store that I’ve never seen before I am powerless to resist the temptation to buy it. And so you, my lucky readers, will get to hear all about the new and exciting foodstuffs that find their way into my kitchen.
Thus, I found myself in possession of an Ugli fruit. The sticker on the fruit said “Uniq” fruit, which I came to find out is the commercially trademarked name under which this fruit is sold in the United States. Native to Jamaica, this fruit is a hybrid of the Tangerine and the Grapefruit. It really isn’t all that ugly, but when the tangerine and grapefruit trees woke up after that fateful night when they both had far too much Jamaican rum to drink, I think there may have been a bit of a moral hangover when they saw what they had done:
The Ugli, Ugly, Uniq fruit
Triple Ginger Cocktail
I’m a big fan of ginger, in all of its forms. One of my favorite cocktails ever, for almost any occasion, is the original Dark ‘N Stormy (which can only be made 100% authentically using Barritt’s Bermuda stone ginger beer and Gosling’s black seal rum). It screams “I’d rather be out sailing!”, and if you are actually out sailing, it says “I am the perfect drink!”. The spicier the ginger beer, the better. Though it wouldn’t be considered “authentic”, I prefer Goya brand ginger beer to Barritt’s. It’s spicier and richer, and I think it’s superior. But I digress…
Ginger has a way of going well in cocktails. It is good for the stomach and digestion, as well as being tasty. This cocktail uses fresh ginger, candied ginger, and Stone’s Original Ginger, an English currant wine flavored with, well, ginger. You could very well convert it to a quadruple ginger cocktail by adding a splash of ginger beer, but I think “triple ginger” sounds better than “quadruple ginger”, personally.
Fatty Crab’s Malaysian Chicken Wings: Jalan Alor
About a year ago, Fatty Crab opened an Upper West Side branch on Broadway between 76th and 77th (Warning: their website has sound effects). I’d never been to the Village location, so this made it very convenient for me to check them out. And believe me: I’m glad that I did. The fatty duck is a crispy, spicy taste explosion; the pork belly buns are baconly succulent (only outdone by Momofuku in my opinion, and yes, I made up the word “baconly”) and the wings are lick-your-fingers-and-dip-anything-you-can-find-in-the-sauce good. Sweet, sticky, and spicy. I decided that I had to make them for the Superbowl party I was attending, and was determined to find a recipe that was somewhat close to the Fatty Crab original. They are apparently inspired by Malaysian street food, the “Jalan Alor” wing. Imagine my surprise and delight when a quick Google search pulled up Chef Zak Pelaccio’s own Fatty Crab Malaysian wing recipe, on FoodandWine.com. Unbelievable. I love the interwebs.
These didn't last long at the party...
Garlic Bread Eggs
Over the weekend I cooked up some garlicky eggs with rosemary, thyme, tomato and baguette. They turned out well, considering that I threw the dish together using the ingredients I had on hand, so I’ll share the recipe with you and you can give it a shot. They were inspired by an article I read on Serious Eats about Shopsin’s restaurant down on the Lower East Side, here in New York, and by a dish called “Fellini Eggs”. Mine wound up differing quite a bit because I didn’t have all of the ingredients that they called for, so I just made it up as I went. You can do the same (i.e., substitute what you have on hand), but the main thing that makes this dish interesting is the garlic bread croutons.
Balthazar Cookbook: Fettuccine with Wild Mushrooms
A couple years ago I bought a copy of the Balthazar cookbook
For the uninitiated, Balthazar is the crown jewel of Keith McNally’s New York restaurant empire, and quickly became a SoHo institution after opening in 1997. I’ve eaten there a handful of times, and there are few dining experiences that match the unbridled seafood extravaganza of the “Le Balthazar” tower. 3 tiers of raw (and some cooked) piscatorial delights; about 4 feet worth of oceanic ecstasy. Clams, oysters, shrimp, lobster, scallop ceviche, periwinkles, scungilli, crab…and more. It’s making me hungry just thinking about it. Since I wasn’t going to run out and buy $100 worth of seafood, I opted for a pasta dish instead.
For Christmas I received a pasta maker, which I have used a few times with great results. I figured that fresh pasta with a wild mushroom cream sauce from the Balthazar cookbook would be a delicious dinner. If you’re not making your own pasta try to get it fresh. If you have the right tools, however, it’s pretty easy (and satisfying) to make your own (and you can read about it here).
Making Fresh Pasta
There is nothing quite like a really good fresh pasta. I can’t pretend to be as good as the guys at Frank’s or Roberto’s, but I can make a pretty decent noodle that is much better than store bought. Making pasta is a labor of love, and you do it for the satisfaction that it brings to have made your pasta from scratch, rather than having bought it at the store. It takes time, it can be messy, but it’s fun.
First off, if you are going to be at all serious about making pasta, you should invest in a decent pasta maker
Sourdough Bread: A Starter
Today I decided that I wanted to make my own sourdough bread. From scratch. Which means no cheating and using yeast, or ordering a starter kit. Sourdough breads are made from a live yeast culture that leavens the loaf, just as a packet of active yeast will do, but it adds that “tang” that sourdough breads are famous for. A little internet research provided a straightforward approach to making a starter, using just water and flour (1 cup of each) mixed together, and left at room temperature for about a week. The catch is that you have to “feed” your starter (the colony of bacteria that will eventually become your leavening agent) every day while it is at room temperature, to get the little guys going to produce the C02 required to leaven your bread. The process is to 1) empty out half of the starter, and 2) to mix 1/2 cup of flour and 1/2 cup of water into the remainder of the starter. Here is a day-by-day report of what happened! Prepare to be…bored!
Day 1: Mixed 1 cup of warm water and 1 cup of unbleached flour into a container. Left it on the counter, uncovered, at room temperature. Looks like wallpaper paste.
Day 2: Some dried crusties on the side of the container. A couple air bubbles. Nothing exciting. Emptied out 1/2 of the starter, and added 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water to “feed” it. Stirred it up, and placed it back above the stove.
Day 3: There is something happening here! Definite patches of bubbles gurgling up through the flour-water skin, and a smell not unlike sour beer. This might be working! Drained half, fed with 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water. The idea that I am growing a colony of yeast is fun, but slightly disconcerting. I am waiting for them to try to escape and take over the kitchen.
Sourdough on the horizon?
New York Pizza Institution: Grimaldi’s
On Thursday I took a trip out to Brooklyn to see Malcolm Gladwell and Chuck Klosterman speak at a small gallery under the Manhattan bridge with a couple of friends. The plan was to meet for a beer, check out the speaking gig, and finish off the night with a trip to what is arguably New York’s best pizza shop: Grimaldi’s. Nestled under the Brooklyn bridge, Grimaldi’s has been a New York institution since the first pizza joints opened up in 1905. It boasts one of the city’s oldest coal fired pizza ovens, and one of only a handful still in existence today. For pizza nerds, there is really no alternative to the coal fired oven. The smokiness and crispiness that the ovens impart to the pizza cannot be recreated by any other means, apparently. The older the oven, some say, the more the flavors of generations of history are baked into the pizza. I have heard that New York City (for good reason) no longer allows new coal-fired ovens to be built (and hasn’t for quite some time), so they are relatively rare, and worth seeking out.
While we were eating the conversation inevitably turned to the subject of what the “best” pizza in New York is. Grimaldi’s topped everyone’s list, for sure, but the more remarkable thing was that everyone agreed that it’s much harder to even find a decent slice of pizza in the city than it is to determine what’s the best. For a city that purportedly invented the thing, there sure are a lot of hideously crappy pizza places out there. Just off the top of my head I can think of at least 6 places within a 4 block radius of my apartment that are just terrible. Only one stood out as even decent. You’d think by now people would be able to get it right, or at least palatable. Needless to say, having Grimaldi’s pizza is a treat for me.
I had planned to take lots of photos, and post a photo essay on Grimaldi’s, but as I lined up to take a photo of the coal fired oven I was told in no uncertain terms that there was NO PHOTOGRAPHY ALLOWED. So you, my dear readers, are looking at ILLEGAL PHOTOS. These are the lengths to which I am willing to go to bring you the real stories, the real truths, and the really poor quality iPhone snaps:
Inside the proprietary pizza-making machine
