Fresh cranberries.
Carrots.
Sweet potatoes.
And whether you roast a duck …
… or steam a turkey down-side up:
Be thankful.
Happy Thanksgiving
28 Thursday Nov 2013
Tag Archives: Food
It’s Thanksgiving. And We’re Not Talking Turkey
27 Wednesday Nov 2013
Tags
Brunello di Montalcino, Elizabeth Perwin, Food, Joseph Gilday, Mushrooms, Thanksgiving, The Write Side of 50
Brunello in a bay of funghi.
BY ELIZABETH PERWIN and JOSEPH GILDAY
It started with a bottle of great wine.
I used to think that $12 at a wine shop buys a good bottle, and $18 something really great. My unsophisticated palate didn’t warrant further investment. Then we went to Rome and Florence. There I discovered (among other morsels of the sensually-sublime feast that is Italy), the renowned Brunello di Montalcino, the perfect red wine – complex, intense, full-bodied, smoky and ancient. Upon returning to the States, I visited Alex, my favorite wine guy, and said, “I have three words for you: Brunello di Montalcino!”
“You’ve made quite a leap there!” He said with amusement. “The esteemed bottle here starts at $60.”
Uh … I know, right?
So when my generous and loving partner, Joe, came upon a Brunello sale-priced at $39, he snatched it up for us for some unknown future occasion.
Now we are upon it – Thanksgiving 2013! An inspiration for a fall feast that Joe and I are sacredly guarding for ourselves. And not just because we don’t want to share the wine.
Back story: A few years ago Joe and I started spending the holiday away with another couple we enjoy. We’d pick a destination somewhere within a two-hour radius of Washington. One year, it was a modern cabin near Lost River, West Virginia; next a beach shack near Broadkill Beach, Delaware; last time, an A-frame with hot tub overlooking the Shenandoah River.
We all wanted to escape the familial expectations of Thanksgiving, and this was clearly a legitimate out. Then they broke up, and we haven’t found that particular chemistry (and intention) with other friends. In spite of lovely invitations from friends and family, Joe and I decided that what we really want is to retreat by ourselves. Because we are on the “right side of 50,” and we can. We can do whatever the hell we want!
Joe and I have been together since 2004, but we live apart. Exactly one mile apart. It’s perfect for us – at least for now. So the idea of four days together without our usual social schedule is very appealing. And we love to cook together so … what should we make to compliment the Brunello?
Although we both like traditional Thanksgiving dishes, we decided instead to cultivate the Italian theme and create an autumnal Roman-repast. I adore the earthy, fetid wonder of wild mushrooms. So we will make a wild mushroom pasta with the last few ounces of olio di oliva organico we got in a cobbled corner of Florence. A dash of fresh butter, a splash of Marsala wine, and lots of freshly-grated parmesan reggiano. Molto bene!
For the secondi piatti, we will saute fillets of branzino (a wonderful Mediterranean fish) in olive oil, lemon and garlic. Charred brussel sprouts tossed in a light Dijon aioli will round out the main course. Dessert is yet to be determined!
As we’re preparing and cooking to the tunes of John Coltrane or Bobby Blue Bland or Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (what will be my mood??), we’ll be sipping a glass of Prosecco, and whetting our appetites on plump, juicy smoked mussels. Buon Appetito!
A Trek to Wilmington for Lunch with an Old Friend
18 Monday Nov 2013
Downtown Wilmington, Delaware, 2013.
I do not know anyone who would describe Wilmington, Delaware as a knock-out city one should visit before one passes away. It is depressing and drab – albeit perhaps poised to be revived:
But once a year, I make a point of getting to Wilmington. It is halfway between New York City, where I live, and the environs of the District of Columbia, and therefore is the ideal place to meet for lunch with my friend, Liz, whom I met 31 years ago when we both lived in the District, and swam laps at the YMCA on 17th Street. We engaged in enough lightweight locker room chit-chat that when she ran into me around Dupont Circle one night, she spontaneously invited me to a party. She mentioned there would be a guy there I might like. The guy didn’t work out, but Liz and I struck up a conversation that hasn’t stopped. On Fridays we would meet for a glass of wine on the front stoop of my apartment on U Street; we had countless dinners at Lauriol Plaza, a favorite because it was sooo good and cheap; and made sure we had at least one weekend every summer in Chincoteaque at the Harbor Light Motel – long since demolished:
We took a three-week trip to Italy, where we hiked along the Cinque Terre, climbed the Tower of Pisa and took the night ferry to Sardinia. Wilmington is a perfect place to rehash and renew.
Usually we meet at Harry’s Seafood Grill. This year, to break up the routine, I did research and found Vinoteca 902 at 902 N. Market Street. The website menu appealed to both of us and we planned to meet there at 12:00. The game plan went awry at 11:42 when Liz called to tell me Vinoteca 902 was no more. Given that midday restaurant choices in Wilmington are limited, we ended up back at Harry’s, which was perfectly fine. At 12:15, we were seated in a booth, and started to talk. And then it was 3:30 and time to go. We’ll be back next year to pick up where we left off this year.
Same time, same place – next year.
The Stuff of Mike Kelley; The Fare at M. Wells Dinette
13 Wednesday Nov 2013
Blackboard of wines.
I milked a lot of blog mileage out of 17 days in Indonesia, but it’s time to move on. A couple of Saturdays ago, I made plans with a friend to see the Mike Kelley exhibition at PS 1, the public school converted into an extension of the Museum of Modern Art located in Queens. I was familiar with his stuffed animal sculptures, and was interested in seeing the full spectrum of his work.
The subway ride out there is not fully subterranean:
Emerging from Hunts. Pt. Av. on 7 train.
There is art to be seen as you emerge from the nether-regions of the underground to the rooftops of Queens. If you appreciate the grit of urban beauty expressed in colorfully decorated graffitied buildings and boxy industrial complexes, it’s nice to take it all in.
While the purpose of the excursion was to see “art,” we also wanted a meal at M Wells Dinette. I had heard about this restaurant when it opened in Long Island City about three years ago, and received over-the-top reviews for its celebration of the fattiest, lardiest parts of the pig. Then it closed. When I read that it had reopened as the cafe at PS1, I really wanted to go there, and see if it was as intriguing as the reviews had indicated.
In keeping with the whole public school theme, the dinette is a classroom. The students, i.e. us eaters, are seated at long tables facing the kitchen. The menu is printed on a page from a lined composition book, and the wine list is written in chalk on the blackboard. The selection that day included cavatelli with goat meatballs, blood pudding, oysters and tete de cochon. We opted for the rabbit and foie gras terrine, and the tart with escargots and bone marrow: 
Paired with a glass of petit Chablis, the ensemble was the perfect meal to have in your stomach before wandering through a terrain of 40,000 square feet to view art. And great art at that:
The show was fabulous, albeit raw and sometimes too vulgar for my tastes, but absolutely honest. I stand in awe of someone whose width and depth of imagination, not to mention curiosity, led him to explore and master materials in every shape, size and texture to create sculptures, paintings, videos, performance, and installations that ranged from small to large. Each piece was infused with originality, intelligence and wit – wit that could be sardonic, sarcastic, skewering and tender. His work is both compassionate and enraged. There was a lot to take in, but the mad vividness and unique perception of the way this particular man expressed his ideas remains unforgettable.
From the Kandor Project.
There were stuffed animals, stuffed together and stuffing each other, and stuffed animals that gave the fleeting impression of being hung as disco balls, scatological posters and a classroom sized table top rendering of every school that Mike Kelley attended. There was a multi-room installation devoted to Superman’s hometown, Kandor, and this does not take in all the videos and paintings and and other pieces that filled the three floors of the museum.
Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites.” (1991-99).
Mike Kelley committed suicide in 2012. The only reference I read for an explanation was from The New York Times obituary, which indicated severe heartache. We will never know. He was only 57. He is immortal through his work.
Goodbye Bay Leaf
16 Wednesday Oct 2013
Posted in Food
Gone and forgotten.
Recently, I decided to mom-up and make something nostalgic and yummy for my two sons, who were both expected over for dinner. Bon Appetit’s Chicken Spaghetti from a 1990-something, free little recipe book, was their very, very, most-favorite, spicy, noodley meal since .. forever.
But what evolved into a mini-mishap wasn’t that neither one of them remembered that Chicken Spaghetti was their very, very, most-favorite, spicy, noodley meal since forever. It was that I was out of ingredient number nine – one bay leaf. While part of the fun of cooking for me is putting my own twisted spin and spice on recipes – I tweak and jiggle them as a rule (pretzels for bread crumbs, potatoes for flour, sherry for chicken broth), I’ve never messed with a bay leaf.
Even though there is no discernible flavor, that it hurts to bite it, and all recipes demand that it be removed before serving (I have secretly pummeled a bunch of them and tried to pass them off as oregano, only to spit them out throughout the meal), I figure its inclusion in so many recipes means that it must offer something so subtle, so mysterious, so necessary! that I, as a human, wouldn’t know what the recipe was missing until a bay leaf was missing.
The other ingredients in the recipe must somehow play off the fragrant and floating bay leaf, in a way that is transcendental, mystical, and divine – like God. (There is no substitute.) And to leave out the one bay leaf from Chicken Spaghetti felt shiftless. Indolent. And far, far worse than if I leave out the chicken. Or the spaghetti.
But I took an about-face that night. I didn’t want to run out to the store just because I ran out of bay leaves, as I’ve done in the past. After all, if they are so subtle, why doesn’t its cryptic force amp-up if I throw in seven – or ten? Yes, they smell good, but the smell is immediately usurped by the other stuff in the pot – like tomatoes, meat – lemon! Own up, bay leaf. What’s your point? And why do I need you?
You don’t sweeten, spice or thicken. Are you just a team player? Do you bring out the best in a sprig of thyme? Or a sage leaf? You are a “classic” in a bouquet garni, alongside other fragrant and flavorful herbs, and, I’m guessing, it’s because they are tied and netted to you, that they must also be tossed from the finished sauce.
So in the spirit of being a middle-aged free-to-be, I had decided that night to no longer buckle to the bay leaf. That night, I substituted it with mounds of frozen kale, of which I had pounds stored for weeks in my freezer. I’ve learned that kale can be cooked to death, and those mounds all ultimately boiled down to the size of about three stacked bay leaves. And you can eat it.
So even though my kids had no memory of the Chicken Spaghetti of the past. There were no complaints about no bay leaf.
You Can Dress Me Up Like a Lobster Timbale (or a Sea Urchin on Pedigreed Pea) …
09 Wednesday Oct 2013
Posted in Food
Lobster timbale at Le Bernardin.
… but you should not take someone like me, whose favorite food is sourdough pretzels with aged cheddar cheese, to haute cuisine restaurants. The appreciation factor for sea urchin on a pedigreed pea with lemon zest is not going to fly high. Nonetheless, for years I have tried to be more of a gourmand rather than someone who is a repetitive orderer of spaghetti with tomatoes and basil. I am, by my own admission, boring to dine with. Plus I think people with refined palettes are more sensual than the plebe that goes for sirloin. On the other hand, one could make a good argument that nothing is sexier than a rare steak.
Steak, albeit not rare enough for some.
Anyway, this summer I had a chance to dine at Le Bernardin, one of the premier restaurants in Manhattan – or so say the pundits of the food world: Le Bernardin. To a great degree, the dishes live up to their reputation (charred octopus, Alaskan King Crab “Crabouillabaisse,” and lobster timbale appetizers), but to me, a reveler of simple grilled fish, I was slightly underwhelmed by my Dover Sole, where the restaurant tagged on an $18 supplement to the $130 prix fixe. It arrived seared and tough – as in dried out – although the “Brown-Butter Tamarind Vinaigrette,” as it was described, sang rapturously. Nonetheless, the balance of the experience left me more convinced than ever that the best restaurants are not on any media lists.
Farewell to Summer, and Its Tomatoes
24 Tuesday Sep 2013
In our garden, we have about a dozen grape and cherry tomato plants. It takes more work to pick them than with Big Boy or other large tomato varieties because you have to pluck fifteen or more of these little gems to equal one of the others. But we prefer them because the fruit is so much sweeter. We inadvertently planted them too close together, so they grew into an impenetrable tangle of interlaced green tendrils – a dozen plants became one, and happily have been giving us sweet, red beads of fruit since mid-July.
Now it’s September, and the season is dwindling. We’ve already seen a couple of nights with temperatures in the low 50s – threatening to go lower. So before fall officially arrived Sunday at 4:44 p.m., I went out to pick the last tomatoes of the season. The sky was pure blue, with the temperature around 70, and a light breeze – the kind of afternoon where you knew that if the sun wasn’t beating down on you, it would feel chilly. But when the breeze died down, and I turned my face to the sky, I could pretend for a moment it was still full summer.
From ten feet away, the green tangle was generously sprinkled with dots of red – meaning lots of tiny ripe tomatoes waited to be harvested. I grabbed a big bowl and set to work – working my way along the length of the garden, one arm’s width section at a time. I took the blood red ones, and even slightly yellow ones too, knowing those won’t ripen anyway in the last warm days and cooler nights ahead. And I left behind hundreds of hard green nuggets that will never see the table. But nothing’s wasted – in late October, after the first hard frosts, we’ll chop those up along with the spent vines, and throw them into the compost pile to make fertilizer for next year.
At each stop, I picked in a vertical column, top to bottom – first those nearest the top of the canopy that I could reach standing up. Before depositing each one in the bowl, I pinched off its top, littering the ground around the plants with green caps and stems. Then I kneeled and reached under the plants, ducking my head between them and reaching upward into the crowded green canopy, pushing aside, and untangling the ropy threads to find the pink pearls hiding beneath the leaves. I heard the high-pitched kamikaze-whine of mosquitoes, roused from their midday torpor, buzzing at my ears. My hands were full, and I couldn’t swat – I’d deal with the itching later.
After combing through the middle of the canopy looking upward, I turned to the lower branches and the ground, where tomatoes I had dropped or jostled from their stems lay waiting in the cool shade to be gathered up. By the time I stood up 45 minutes later with a slightly sore back and sandy knees, my bowl was full. To top things off, I moved to the fig tree, and plucked five figs – plump and brown – still warm from the sun.
Despite all their vibrant flavor and color, taking the last tomatoes of summer from the vine is bittersweet. In a few brief days there will be no more. For all plants and creatures and seasons, time runs its course.
But for now, we celebrate. I brought the bowl inside, discarded those that had hidden wormholes or other defects, and counted the take: three one-quart containers full, 300 or more succulent red berries in all.
Time to make tomato salad:
- 2 to 3 cups grape or cherry tomatoes (probably one of those quart containers full), sliced in half. This takes time, but it’s worth it, releasing all the sweet juices and tender seeds.
- 3/4 cup chopped scallions.
- 1 – 2 tablespoons chopped basil (or a few teaspoons of dried basil, if that’s
- all you have).
- 1 – 2 tablespoons dried rosemary, crushing the stems in your hands.
- 1/4 cup each of extra-virgin olive oil, white vinegar, and sherry.
Play with the proportions of the spices and liquid ingredients to suit your palate. Toss all ingredients and season to taste with kosher salt. Let it sit for an hour or more to let the flavors mingle. Serve with warm crusty Italian bread, sweet butter, and a glass of red wine. Repeat red wine as needed.
Ti saluto, another fine summer.
Someone Left a Garden in My New Backyard (Help)
03 Tuesday Sep 2013
Posted in Food
On Sunday, August 25, at around 6:30 a.m., the moon was still luminous. I went outside and surveyed the land in the backyard.
You see, I, through Steve, have inherited an estate – or shall we say Steve is now the proprietor of a three-story house with a deck, set upon a corner lot with a detached two-car garage. It is hardly perfect, but it is adorable. And until we walked inside with keys in hand, we had not a clue that the prior owner was an ardent and passionate gardener.
She left us ripening tomatoes and budding peppers, sprouting lettuce and a few cucumber shoots. And boundless flowers of every color, shape and form:
I figure the whole garden gig is a gift. If one side of the “getting old” seesaw is dealing with illness and reading obituaries, the other side is knowing to BE HERE NOW. We are wise that this moment will be gone one day, and not easily recapturable. It is also a sign- I am supposed to develop a green thumb. After 38 years of apartment living sans a plant, it is time to start digging. I so love going to the Farmer’s Market, but now there is a mini-farm in our backyard. (Of course, the irony of it all will be that I won’t dig gardening at all.) In the meantime, Steve hooked up a sprinkler timed to go off every day at 11:00 so that the vegetables get water. What else do we do? Tips appreciated.
A Keg Tale
16 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Food
Tags
Sun-blocked.
Yesterday, Julie wrote of a short supply of non-alcoholic beer in bars. I have a beer story, too. No shortage here, though. A party in my backyard last weekend left half a keg of un-drunk beer. It’s been hanging out for almost a week now. And as one who hates to waste food, and even more – alcohol – I’ve been at a loss as to what to do with all that beer. There’s another party lying in wait right outside my back door! But can the beer hold out?
So for the past six days I’ve coddled my keg. I untapped it, iced it, kept it out of the sun, and taste-tested it every morning for, as Julie describes ” … the nice malty carbonated taste of hops.”
“Have a beer!,” I’ve pleaded to everyone who has stepped so much as a foot on my property.
So while the morning taste-testing yesterday passed my muster (I am also someone who enjoys stale Cheez Doodles, and will eat fish that smells fishy), I was sitting on a potential powder keg. The situation was becoming tense. I had to do something with the beer. A lot of beer. And apparently, despite my pampering – flat beer:
Low carb(ination).
I found good use for a good portion:
Beer Garden.
And then I bought 15 pounds of chicken, pulled out my huge container of oil that I never use:
And battered the bird with beer:
Fried it up:
And sent out a come-eat-chicken-with-me text to some friends known for their spontaneity. I managed to lure three. So, with enough beer-battered chicken left over to fill a keg, another party just might be looming. Just bring your own beer.
Hey Bartender, Where’s My O’Doul’s?
15 Thursday Aug 2013
I have a friend who, for one reason or another, and many in between reasons, has given up alcohol. She has no complaints but one. When going out to eat, she would love to participate in the cocktail hour with a delicious non-alcoholic beer, and no, she does not want a virgin Bloody Mary. She wants a beer – the nice malty carbonated taste of hops, sans the alcohol.
She’s on the West Coast and I’m on the East Coast. We got together recently for a mini-reunion. We stayed at a great hotel in a resort town on the beach. We went out to dinner every night, but it didn’t matter if it was upscale, or downscale, she could not score the drink of her choice. Not one restaurant stocked non-alcoholic beer. One proprietor explained because there is so little demand, he simply does not bother. We refused to drop the topic, and asked would it be that big a deal to keep one case of O’Doul’s or St. Pauli Girl on hand? He said he would consider it.
I promised her that when I got back to New York City, I would start a campaign to raise restaurant awareness that non-alcoholic beers should be included on the drinks menu.
So now whenever I go out, I ask for a non-alcoholic beer. If they do not have any, I go through my spiel about how there are non-drinkers in the world who still want the option of having an alternative to a Coca-Cola or a virgin Bloody when they dine out, and restaurants should accommodate them.
On behalf of my buddy in LA, please spread the word.
The Write Side of 59 