Live It Up

OK, now that I've gotten some work done, back to the food. I was really, really glad that I started my pasta sauce the night before, because I was ravenously hungry when I got home from the gym last night. All I had to do was chop an onion and saute it with the veal and add peeled (with a peeler) chopped tomatoes. That's what I have here. I let this cook for a few minutes and then added the peppers that I had already cooked. That's it! It was done by the time the pasta was done cooking. I always make this dish with percatelli, but I think Marcella recommends a fresh pasta with this. We had some salad, but I didn't take a picture of that. Here's the pasta with some cheese on top. One thing that makes this pasta so delicious is the use of butter. I had never made a meat based sauce with butter before this one, and it really adds a great flavor. Mmmm, wish I had some right now. After dinner we went out to Lakeside, as we usually do on thursdays. My friend Lara who works there got me hooked on Campari recently, so that's what I had--campari and soda. These are way too easy to drink, and I had a lot of them. Josh had a widmer hefeweizen. and when I say "a" I mean 6 or 7. Yeah, not sophisticated drinking, but fun anyway. I usually choose either monday or friday to skip kickboxing, and since I went on monday, that means I'm not going tonight. I prefer it this way because I go on saturday morning, so it's good to have a little break. That means that I get to devote a little bit more time to dinner tonight, and I might even get to take some pictures around the neighborhood. And tomorrow....I'm not working at all!!!! My youngest sister is going to fill in for me at the store, and I am going to grill in bushwick (brooklyn) with some friends. So, lots of exciting stuff to look forward to. I am a little nervous, though, because I have never used a charcoal grill. Being confined to the city most of the time, I haven't grilled very much at all in my life, so hopefully I won't humiliate myself in front of all the veteran grillers out there.

I actually have work I am supposed to be doing, for a change, so I'm not going to put up my pics from last night yet. But here's a photo of breakfast: toast with avocado and coffee. That is a mountain of baby clothes behind my breakfast that I'm supposed to be sorting and pricing. I really like this brand of bread--it's pretty much the only brand I will buy. Normally I like their seeded bread, but it seems to be harder to find. This is the first time I've tried the sunflower rye, and it was pretty good. The problem with this bread is that because it doesn't have any preservatives in it, it goes moldy pretty fast, especially in the summer. Seems like I can only find the bread in the stores here a day before the expiration date. So, I'm going to try to get some actual work done. Be back later.

This is actually the biggest kitchen I've ever had, so it doesn't really feel like I have to compensate for the lack of counter space. I do try to minimize the dishes that I dirty, but that doesn't always work out. Lately I have been trying to be better about cleaning as I go, but I used to just always do a big washing-up, usually the next day. The major problem I have is that my sink is really shallow, so if you put one pot in it it's completely full. So, I often wind up stashing dirty pots and pans in the oven or on the kitchen table. There's also a lot of cooking equipment I rarely use because it's such a pain to wash in my useless sink. About the garden--I did some investigating (ie, looking at signs) and it is a community garden. It's called "relaxation garden" and it is supposedly open every weekend. Here's the sign. I have no idea who is responsible for decorating the garden, but I've never seen anyone in it. If I ever manage to get a picture of some of the neighborhood bikes, though you might see some similarities.

I heard about a place here in NYC called Pinch that had fried chicken skins on the menu as a topping for pizza. I went there specifically to try them, but they don't do it anymore. Regardless, I think that sounds like the greatest idea ever.

Have you found any of the supermarkets on Av. C useful at all? I go to Key Food only late at night (2, 3 in the morning), because the lines or horrible at peak hours, and I usually get only a few items. I often go to Met Food on 2nd Av. between 6th and 7th, because it's around the corner from me, but their hours are shorter, their prices are higher, and I caught them putting price tags over several containers of yogurt with expired sell-by dates, complained to the manager, and considered trying to find out where to report them. They do carry some decent yogurt, though: Fage, which I find almost overly rich and which is very expensive, and Omur Yogurt, a Turkish-style yogurt that I like a lot but they don't always have. I like to get the full-fat version with cream on top. ← Honestly, I rarely go to any of the supermarkets in the neighborhood anymore. I used to always shop at key food after midnight, but now, if I do go, I usually go when it's most annoying. My schedule is so tight that I hardly ever have time for detours--I leave the store, get right on the bus, get off by my gym, and then I walk home. So, I do my shopping on the way home from the gym, mostly at this one market on clinton. It's pretty new and it's open til 9:30, which means I can actually get there. I would love to shop at essex street market, but they close too early for me to get there.

Josh and I chose most of the colors. We painted the yellow walls in the kitchen, but the green wall behind the red and white hutch was already there. I have a problem with white walls. I grew up in an apartment and I was never allowed to paint my walls, so now it's my mission to never have white walls again. So far it hasn't been a problem with landlords.

Thanks! Yup, I've lived in manhattan my whole life. I don't understand. Did you wash your clothes and shampoo with the coffee before you bought this tin? ← No, I was referring to when I worked in a coffee shop. I didn't have to carry coffee back and forth from home when I worked there, but I worked with coffee all day, so my hair and clothes smelled.

So, here are some more pictures of stuff around my house in case anyone is interested. Sorry there haven't been more pictures of markets and restaurants and things, but as I said in my first post, my life is a little claustrophobic. This is my wine/stemware rack. My lovely mother, as mentioned before, brings me stuff from the places she travels. Lately a lot of that stuff has been wine, which is really great, but I'm running out of room. She just called and told me she's on her way back from Buenos Aires with 8 bottles of wine for me. Conversely, I have barely any wine glasses. We're working on breaking the 2 remaining glasses from a batch of 8 or 9 we got 2 years ago. The blue glasses (not the flutes) are 3 left from a set of 6 I got in France. It's pathetic, I sell stemware, but I can't find any that I like for myself. Here's one of the bookshelves where I keep my cookbooks. The bottom 2 shelves were the only storage I had for them for a while, but now they're multiplying at an alarming rate. We found this shelf on the street. I gave away a few cookbooks this year, but I have a very hard time parting with any of them. And I want more. Gotta go to kickboxing in a bit, then Lakeside. Later.

Thanks again to everyone for your kind words about my store. I put my whole life into this enterprise, so it's really nice to get the encouragement Lunch today was takoyaki! Takoyaki are fried dough balls with octopus inside. Then they're covered with some sort of brown sauce, bonito flakes, and mayo (we got it with no mayo). It's been at least 3 years since I last had these, and they were really good. I wanted to mention the topic of beverages. If I'm not drinking coffee (always hot), or something alcoholic then it's pretty much water for me. I've always been a tap water drinker in NYC 'cause our tap water is some of the best in the world. But the water from our tap here at the store is disgusting--I can't even stand to smell it. To top it off, the sink it really tiny, so we can't fill from the sink into a brita or something. So we buy bottled water. It seems to wasteful to me, especially because Josh and I go through about 4 1.5 liter bottles a day. At home we recently got a pur filter because I wanted to use filtered water in my espresso machine, but it's so damn slow I have basically given up on it.

That is exactly what was going through my mind as I was reading that post. I always assumed it was a much more complicated process. I think I might be giving this a try. (After the summer.) Great blog. ← With the pan roasting method, it's not complicated, it's just that you have to get used to controlling the temperature and judging when the beans are done. The first few batches I roasted were pretty bad. Even for months into my roasting I was still having pretty inconsistent results. Now I'm very happy with the coffee I roast, even if it might not be up to snuff for the snobbiest coffee people. I have to admit, I have a bit of a complex about my coffee. I'm completely embarrassed of my espresso machine because it was so badly taken care of before I got it. If I was a true coffee geek, I feel, I should have completely taken the thing apart and descaled the boiler, replaced all the gaskets, added as pressurestat, etc. I should be recording temperatures and times in the quest for the perfect bean. But that's just not my style.

On to today's breakfast--coconut tea cake. I would have liked some fruit with it, but I didn't buy any so, no dice. Here's a pic with my coffee, so you can see where I eat my breakfast. Just insert me right behind the desk. On days that I open I drink my 2 cups of coffee in the morning. I grind my coffee at home and bring it with me to the store in this tin. My purse(s) always smell like coffee from bringing the tin back and forth. It's better than all my clothes and hair smelling like coffee, like they used to though.

Yesterday was a pretty boring food day. Here's the pad thai I had for lunch after I got to the store. It's from Tara Thai on first avenue. I really like their pad thai, and their lunch special is basically the same size order you get for dinner, but a few dollars cheaper. They also have really good fried bananas for dessert, but I only get those when I eat in there, and I never do that anymore. I rarely eat out anywhere anymore. Josh had some sort of pork and stringbean thing, but he was basically done eating it by the time I was done taking a picture of mine. I closed the store last night and walked home down Avenue A--a significant detour for me. Popped into my old place of work, which has just re-opened as a baby friendly cafe. Here's an article about it. This was the first time I've been in since they opened, and it was really depressing. I won't get into why, but if you know anything about the old place you might be able to guess. I love my neighborhood, but there are some serious annoyances here. The biggest one for me is the total lack of any good supermarkets. Avenue A is completely gentrified at this point, but the key food (which is the only real supermarket on A) is truly pathetic. There's one gourmet market called Gracefully a few blocks down that is disgustingly over priced, but it's the only option if you want to buy something like carnaroli rice, or sherry vinegar, or non-packaged bread. I stopped in and bought a some vinegar, olives and bread on my way home. Since Josh was at band practice, I had a salad for dinner. Josh isn't a huge fan of cold or raw foods. He will eat salad, but he doesn't really like it, so I eat salads a lot when I'm eating alone. I made him a meatball sandwich with leftovers from last week when he got home from band practice. TOD for me was 10:30, for Josh 12:30am. After I had dinner I did some prep for tonight. I'm making another one of Josh's favorites--Marcella Hazan's pasta sauce with veal and peppers. If you have read any of her books, you probably know that she is adamant about peeling peppers raw with a peeler. I didn't exactly doubt her, but once I tried this recipe I was certainly convinced. For this recipe, you peel the peppers, then cook them down slowly. She calls for red, yellow and green peppers, but I don't like green peppers, so I always sub cubanelles. I usually throw all the peppers in together, but the cubanelles are thin and they cook faster than the others, so I started the red and yellow peppers first this time. Here are the peppers after I added the cubanelles. And here they are after they've cooked down. yummy peppery goodness. The rest of the recipe in pretty simple: saute some onions, brown some ground veal, add some peeled tomatoes, combine with peppers. I would have made the whole sauce last night, but I forgot to buy tomatoes on my way home. Oh well, I'll do it tonight. The only part of the recipe that takes while is peeling and cooking the peppers. Thursday is my favorite day of the week. Tonight we'll go out to Lakeside Lounge where my friend Lara works. It's not a fabulous cocktail destination, but we always have a good time there. If anyone reading this wants to stop by, please do. We don't usually get there til 11:30 or so. Just ask the bartender to point me out.

You should see the ladder that connects the landings. Some of the rungs are barely attached --truly terrifying. Also, I can't keep anything on the fire escape. I once had a plant out there and it got stolen. This was after I had had it for 2 years on the fire escape in my last apartment. Maybe one of these days I'll live someplace with a balcony.

Actually, despite what you might think, roasting coffee doesn't really smell like coffee. It's hard to describe how it smells, but it's not exactly great. The beans don't start to smell like coffee until they've rested a day or 2.

My roasting method is a little messier and smokier than most, but it works for me. It's no more smoky than using my cast iron grill pan. I still make coffee at home with a melitta cone most often, but I also have an aeropress, a press pot, and an espresso machine. My espresso machine is actually a really great machine that was beat to shit when I got it. It is currently not working at all, but Josh and I are working on rewiring it. We replaced one of the connectors last night, but we need to get another size part. Hopefully it will be fixed before the end of the blog. Here's the coffee I had today for breakfast with my leek pie. No picture of the pie as it looked the same as last night. I also baked the coconut tea cake from Baking: from my home to yours (great thread here). I got the book and a bundt pan for my birthday, so I was very excited to use both. Here's the book in my wonderful cookbook holder. The cake was super easy and quick to put together. However, I checked it 5 minutes before it was supposed to be done and it was pretty brown. I have read the whole thread on this book, and most people complained that the recipes took longer to bake than the stated times. I'm glad I checked when I did because it would have been burnt in another 5 minutes. I took this picture of the cake cooling to show the awkward position of my kitchen table in relation to the fridge. As you can see from this picture of the cake unmolded, it got very brown. I don't know if this is how it's supposed to look or not, but it is really delicious. I'm not a fan of cake, but this is good. I don't think I can eat too much of it though. And next time I would definitely make one of the variations with citrus zest, just to give it that extra freshness. It was a little too vanilla-y for me this way.

Ok, finally time to talk about coffee. As I mentioned before, I worked at a coffee shop for 7 years, starting when I was 18. So, for that time I rarely made coffee at home, and when I did it was a melitta cone or a press pot. Now, Alt.coffee may not be considered the greatest coffee shop in the world--it's certainly not "third wave"--but the drip coffee there is/was pretty good. When we opened the store I got an automatic drip coffee maker --this model--and all of a sudden I was drinking crappy coffee. I couldn't figure out why. Then I was looking around online for coffee equipment to sell in the store, and I came across coffeegeek.com. I had never really put that much thought into coffee before because I always had good coffee available. I didn't realize that most automatic drip coffee makers don't brew at the correct temperature so you get weak, flavorless coffee. I replaced my store coffee maker with the Presto Scandinavian coffee maker, which is great, but unfortunately discontinued. But coffeegeek also got me curious about roasting my own beans. I was really nervous about roasting at home at first because I live in a pretty small apartment with no outdoor space, no hood on my stove, etc. But, despite these worries I decided to go with the cast iron pan roasting method, mostly because it requires very little financial investment. Here's my roasting equipment. The only items that I bought specifically for roasting were the pan, the whisk and the thermometer--total cost of about $40. Plus, I figured if I hated roasting I could always use those items for other cooking tasks, so no risk. As it is, I don't use the pan for anything else, and I never wash it. Now, a lot of the people who post on coffeegeek are super geeky and scientific about their roasting and brewing, but not me. Roasting in a dedicated roaster or popcorn popper seems more like programming to me than cooking. I really love being able to use all my senses to determine when the beans are ready. In addition, I can roast a pound at a time in my pan, whereas most roasters only do a few ounces. Here's my stash of beans. I usually buy 25 or 30 lbs at a time. Supplies are dwindling. I really like this place I bought my last batch of beans from the unroasted coffee company. Today I'm roasting Bolivian Cenaproc. I start by heating my pan on high heat til the thermometer reads 500 degrees, about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, I weigh out a pound of beans (or a little more). When the pan is up to heat, remove the thermometer and turn the heat down to medium-high ish. This was one of the hardest things to figure out for me as I started roasting is how high to have the flame. A lot of people who pan roast seem to do it on a low heat. I tried it that way and it just didn't work--the coffee was always sour. When you roast at a higher temp you do have to be careful of scorching, but I stir constantly anyway. Keep stirring. They'll start to change color, usually getting lighter before they turn brown. After about 12-15 minutes they'll start to crack. This is what they look like at this stage. I think when you roast in a popper or other fluid bed method the first crack happens kind of all at once. With pan roasting it definitely takes a while for all the beans to go through first crack. I usually stop roasting a little bit before or into second crack. Mostly I go by the appearance of the beans and the chaff. If there's still a lot of chaff clinging to the beans I know that they need more roasting. These are almost done. When they get to this point, I like to turn the heat off and stir until they're done. Then I dump them back into the bowl, and run to the living room, lean out the window and pour them back and forth from the bowl to the colander. This is to cool them, but mostly so the chaff blows off. When it's really hot out like it has been, I then set the bowl on top of an ice pack to cool some more. All done! Wow, that was a really long post.

Here's what's going on outside my store right now. yup, torrential rain. I like working when it's raining outside. It's boring, but cozy.

I forgot to post the picture of the wine we had last night. Lambrusco! I love lambrusco, and it was perfect on such a hot, sticky night. Yes, those are dead roses behind it. The roses and the cactus were both birthday presents and I kinda like how they look together, so I haven't thrown the roses out.

Its the Bunnykins bowl for grown-up cat lovers! (the infamous Royal Dalton bowl for kids who are rewarded by seeing the bunnies on the bottom of the bowl if they eat all their food) That's a delicious looking leek pie. I'm very much looking forward to your coffee roasting segment. I'm sorry but I couldn't wait and roasted 100 grams last night in the aluminum popcorn maker. I seem to have quite a blend of beans ranging from "still slightly green" to "black like a space shuttle tile". ← I was wondering if anyone would notice that my plates have cats on them. I have a thing about cute cartoon animals with buttholes. My mom saw these plates in France and some of them show the cats' buttholes, so she bought a few for me. Well, she just kept buying them and now I have 6 place settings including glasses, place mats, coasters, mugs and a couple of serving pieces. Here's a sampling for you. I'm sorry to say that I know nothing about roasting with a popcorn popper, but there's tons of info on coffeegeek, as you probably already know.

Here's the leek pie recipe: 1 onion sliced 1/4 cup butter 4 tbsp olive oil 2 large leeks, chopped (I used 3) 1 cup flour 1/2 tsp baking soda 3 large eggs 7 oz greek yogurt (I used 2%) 11 oz feta cheese cubed 4 oz gruyere or parmesan (I used greek graviera cheese) grated 3-4 tbsp fresh dill (I used 1 tbsp fresh oregano) salt and pepper saute onions in butter and oil until lightly browned. Add leeks and cook, covered until soft. (I also added a chopped garlic clove at this point). Cool mixture slightly. Sift flour and b.s. into a bowl. Add eggs, then yogurt, feta, and then leek and onions. Reserve 2 tbsp grated cheese, and then mix in the rest of it and herbs. Bake in a buttered 10 inch springform pan. 350 degrees for 40-45 minutes. Cool a bit before unmolding. Gotta go to work--will be back in a little while with coffee roasting pics.

Tomorrow Josh opens the store, so I won't be checking in until a little later. Gotta bake a cake and roast coffee, so I'll report on those in the afternoon. For now I have dinner pics. The leek pie was amazing! Here it is after I unmolded it. And plated with salad. TOD was 10:45--I didn't have to do any work, but the baking took a while. I know what I'm having for breakfast! Ok, goodnight.

Ah, I had no idea my map link wasn't working (when I'm logged into my email it automatically goes to my maps) try this

Wow, pizzas in New York are huge! Are they usually that big there? Thanks for blogging Hubby (and I) will be going to NYC for his job training for 2-3 months in a few weeks' time, and this blog gives an interesting introduction to New York. ← This is one unique thing about NY pizza--that you can buy a slice just about any where. If you're getting a whole pie, the pizza is not usually that big. But, yeah, slices are huge. I ate 1 slice for lunch, Josh had 2. edited to note that the plate that the pizza is on is actually tiny--probably 6 inches across, so the pizza may not be as big as it appears.

Well, deciding what to carry in the store is the best part of the job--if you like shopping, that is. There are a few guidelines--we try to keep the stuff in the store pretty affordable, or at least a good value for what it is. We also try to keep the items on the useful side, not too knick-knacky. Other than that it's really just what we like and what our customer ask us for. I do wind up carrying a lot of stuff that I want for myself, so a lot of the items from the store end up in my home. But, hey, that's the number one benefit of having your own store.

Thanks Mukki! I will look into the wellness food. For lunch we had pizza from two boots. A lot of people don't like two boots, but I think it's great when you're in the mood. However, if you want typical tomato sauce and cheese pizza, it's not what you're looking for. I had the night tripper. It's sundried tomatoes, roasted garlic, jalepeno pesto, white pie on a spinach crust. It's pretty good, but what I really wanted was the mrs. peel which is a bunch of veggies w/ bread crumbs on a sicilian crust--no cheese. Josh had the tony clifton. It's mushrooms, onions and red pepper pesto. On another note--I was thinking about this the other day because I bought a case of yuengling beer for a party. I am curious what is the basic, cheap local-ish beer in other parts of the country. Yuengling is from PA and it's only been available in NY for a few years, but it seems so have taken over. Costco always has it for about $17 a case and my chinese market carries it for $6.5 a 6 pack. So, what's the fall back beer where you are?