donbert

That's awesome SE! What was the article being corrected? And did Mimi Sheraton find bialys on other continents? edit: Woah! She wrote a whole book about it: The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World (ISBN: 0767905024)

Breakfast this morning was a toasted bialy with butter and a cup of coffee. Everyone knows of the bagels in New York but for some reason the the bialy doesn't seem to get as much attention. They're like a cross between a bagel and an english muffin.

Only $7. The picture makes it look huge but it's only 2 sausages cut up under the kraut. I blame my enabler, who shall go unnamed, for the liquid meals. Overall I eat out more often than I cook since I almost never bring food to work. For dinners it's a 50/50 split at the moment. In this neighborhood I go to Skyway most often. Congee Village and Great NY Noodletown are my standbys for late night meals. On weekends I usually end up at either New Yeah Shanghai Deluxe for soup dumplings or Dim Sum Go Go. The couple of times I've been to Little Giant or Freeman's I haven't been disappointed but I don't go to either regularly. My favorite $1 dumpling place is the one on Essex just north of Hester, they have the thinnest dumpling skins. The best coffee I've found so far is Brown. Their sister store next door Orange is a little over priced but the only option in the area for the kinds of foods they carry. The various Banh Mi places in chinatown also deserve mention.

Did your friend boil all the water off leaving the can to heat directly or did it explode even when partially submerged?? All 28 cans fit in my big stock pot but I'm definitely going to break it up into two pots to make sure there will be enough water to cover. Thanks for the tip!

Dinner tonight was arugula salad and a mustard crouton frittata. Also I have say that if you haven't tried the no-knead bread you you really have to. It really is as simple and as good as they make it look in the article and video.

The dough from this morning is in the oven and I'm going to be making a very simple dinner for myself tonight. On my way home from Pegu I went through 3 grocery stores and 6 bodegas to amass the following: 8 different kinds of sweetened condensed milk and 2 quarts of goats milk. Who knew there were so many different brands of scm? With three cans of each brand I'll randomly number the cans and boil each brand for 4, 12, and 24 hours with the label removed. Then later this week I'll have someone else open and label the cans with letters for a double blind tasting. Any suggestions for what to taste the dulce de leche on?

Met Johnder and eG lurker Butler for a couple drinks at Pegu on the way home from work. Here's one of the drinks that Jim Meehan made for me. The Red Breast:

It was cajeta. I've always though that to be a blanket term for dulce de leche in Mexico though and that in the US we use "dulce de leche" because it was more PC. ("Cajeta" means something very different in Argentina .) Now I have to go find some goats milk to compare. edit: caps and grammar

The hole I imagine is for if you're baking it and are afraid it will get hot enough to burst. You definitely wouldn't want to put a hole in it if you're going to submerge it in water. But that seems to me like a legitimate concern if only for the potential cleaning effort involved should things go wrong. Imagine a hot oven covered with partially cook scm vs a pot of water full of scm. I've only boiled unpunctured cans, there may be better methods and I'd be up for trying them if anyone knows of one. In theory I suppose that the pressure could help but I doubt I'm getting the can hot enough to make a difference. In a pressure cooker you achieve higher temperatures because as the liquid inside steams the pressure inside increases. But since I'm only simmering the can I don't think it's getting so hot that any steam would be generated inside. The best dulce de leche I ever had was in Mexico and the only information we could get out of the waiter was that it was made from goats milk. Anyone ever see a can of sweetened condensed goat milk (scgm)? edited to add: If you were to simmer scm in a pot some of it would evaporate over 4 hours so in that sense I guess the pressure is helping. Even so I still think it's negligible much like atmospheric pressure for most people (unless you're a Sherpa).

Thanks for reading KA. I take a can of sweetened condensed milk and just boil it at a simmer for about 3 or 4 hours. I usually just put it on the stove before starting to cook and forget about it till after dinner. I can't say I've noticed a difference between brands. Last time I think I used Eagle Brand, but I've used Carnation (aka Nestlé) in the past as well. Looks like I'll have to try boiling a few different brands for different amounts of time. Anything I'll try just about anything in the name of science.

I tried to convice dining services half way though the first semester that I was converting and needed to eat at the kosher section of the Barnard dining hall but they wouldn't believe me. UFM isnt there anymore but there is some other market there in the same spot, Morton Williams I believe. Mama Joy's is also now a more upscale deli. They don't sell kegs like Mama Joy's did, though they do still sell 40s of Crazy Horse. West Side Market moved further down Broadway but definitely out of the Columbia bubble. There is are two asian groceries in the neighborhood now (Jas Mart and M2M). The thing that shocked me though was the fact that so many students didn't seem to mind the food and ate there every day. ::shudder::

Who said I ate it? (I do eat fruits and veggies. Juices in cocktails count right? )

Here are some obligatory fridge shots I took this morning:

I do love the swine aka the "magic animal". Speaking of which anyone want to go for the Momofuku Ssam bar whole berkshire pork butt on Friday after cocktails? So far I think there are 5 people interested. That means we still could use 3-5 more people.

Not sure and they're not picking up their phone. I try to avoid midtown during the weekends. Given that they're only there for lunch on weekdays I doubt it. I'll walk by tomorrow and ask though.

When I'm at work I usually grab lunch near my office in midtown. Today I went to the Hallo Berlin "Juicy Food Stand" on 53rd St and 5th Ave. This cart is an offshoot of the Halo Berlin beer garden on (44th St and 10th Ave) and won the Vendy Award last year. They have 9 kinds of sausages and goulash every week day for lunch. Usually a line starts to form before noon and it's a 1/2 hour wait. Thankfully today there was no line at 1pm. I got the Double Soul Food Mix which is Bratwurst and Berliner Currywurst with red cabbage, sauerkraut, onions, german fries and a roll.

My apartment has a weird layout and was clearly not a single person's design. It seems that different people have added to it over time to what it is now. I'm not sure if that painted mural behind the counter is an out of the box design or some previous resident's art project. I'll take a closer picture of it later tonight but the flowers aren't just painted on, they actually stick out of the wall. That was the no-knead bread dough under the sheet pan.

That picture is from March when I stocked up on the Baby Saz because we didn't know if/when it would be coming back. Now might be a good time to do so again thanks to the NYTimes spilling the beans last week. I use it almost exclusively for making Sazerac cocktails because for everything else I've gotten used to Rittenhouse as my well whiskey. For Manhattans I usually go 2.5 parts whiskey to 1 part vermouth, a dash of bitters, and a flamed orange twist (also a Luxardo cherry garnish if you're so inclined). Since my Manhattan binge last year I don't really make them for myself anymore. When I make them for friends though I tailor it to their tastes so if 4 people asked me for a Manhattan they'd all get a different drink. There are so many variation you can have even with this recipe by blending different whiskeys and vermouths. Here are three examples: Bitter 2.5 oz Rye (Rittenhouse Bonded) .5 oz Punt e Mes .5 oz Antica 1 dash Regan's Orange Sweet 2.5 oz Irish (Tyrconnell) 1 oz Vya Sweet 1 dash Fee's Orange 1 dash Angostura Smokey 1 oz Irish (Tyrconnell) 1.5 oz Islay Scotch 1 oz Antica 1 dash Hermes Orange

Party on johnder.

Sure what do you want? I'll be going through Astor and LeNell's this week to pick up the usual supplies. You'll have to come pick it up in Cambridge though. The Everclear is for making tinctures and bitters. I've been working on a blood orange and szechuan peppercorn bitters. Just waiting for blood oranges to come back in season to make another batch. (PM me if you're serious.)

If I had to draw a food pyramid today it would be closer to 30% bread/rice/pasta, 30% meat/cheese, and 40% alcohol. I don't have a favorite cocktail per se but a proper Sazerac always hits the spot. I suppose you could say these days my favorite cocktail is what ever the bartenders at Pegu put in front of me.

Sorry for the delay, had some work issues to deal with early this morning. I've been playing with the minimalist no-knead bread from the NYTimes for the last week. So first thing this morning is to take the dough that's been self kneading for the last 18 hours out of the bowl and shape into a small loaf that I'll store in the fridge till this evening: Breakfast this morning is a cider donut from the farmer's market, toasted with a teaspoon of dulce de leche. I made the dulce de leche last week to use it in egg nog this week but it's so good that I've just been putting it on everything. I'll have to make some more tonight.

Good morning folks! The teaser photos were of my freezer full of big ice in preparation for shaking cocktails and the door to my building which seems to become more sketchy with graffiti every week. The door belies the spacious top floor, which is perfect for entertaining. Since I don't post as often as many of the previous blogers you probably don't know as much about me. I'm second generation Korean from originally from Los Angeles but I've been residing in New York for past 8 years now. I never considered myself a foodie or even into food while I lived in Los Angeles because almost all the food I ate growing up were traditional Korean meals. Between my parents they both managed to juggle their careers while raising 2 boys and cooking practically everything from scratch. Even the simplest meal of left overs consisted of at least 3 ban-chan (sides), a soup and a protein. Moving to the east coast I was hit with the double blow of moving away from the fresh local produce of Southern California and the horror of institutional dorm food. For the first time I really began to think about not only the quality of what I was eating but also the economics behind it. How could my school charge between $9-$14 for each meal yet provide such sub-standard food when I can get Chinese delivered to my door for under $5? What can I salvage from the salad bar to bring back to the communal kitchen to cook? (cartoon food pyramid my dormmates and I made our freshman year, John Jay was the dining hall) Now I live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan with two roommates. My day job is computer systems administration for a financial services company, which is sometimes too reminiscent of Office Space and Dilbert (hence don-bert). In my spare time I do a lot of cooking and eating out, but for the last year I have been most deeply into the "fine art of mixing drinks". I discovered cocktails through the bars Pegu Club and Milk and Honey. I was instantly hooked. I needed to know why I never had a drink that good before and how I could make them myself. After drinking too many Manhattan variations with eGullet lurker TheManInWhite we decided that to truly learn all the classics and experiment new recipes we needed to spread out the liver damage and invite some victims... I mean friends... over to try some real cocktails. What started out as 3 whiskeys, 2 vermouths, and 3 kinds of bitters has snowballed to over 200 bottles of alcohol and a bi-weekly underground cocktail party at my place. (old photo, the alcohol has since outgrown the cabinet) This week I have a few interesting things happening for your viewing pleasure without straying from my average life: Tuesday: Repeal Day! Going to celebrate the repeal of prohibition in style at Pegu. Wednesday: A trip to NJ in search of the perfect ice cube tray. Friday: Cocktails at my place. Saturday: Bootlegging alcohol up to Boston to throw a cocktail party at a friend's place.

Liverot is also a washed rind and can have an orange rind as well. I thought this was an upscale place though, isnt it Vacheron Mont d'Or season?

It wouldn't hurt, especially if you do go on Friday night. They're taking reservations through the end of the year. FYI they require a credit card and there's a $10 fee per person if you don't cancel more than 24 hours in advance, should you not make it. (The number is 212.941.5405)