eG Foodblog: Fat Guy (2010) - Goin' Mobile

[Fat Guy]

It finally happened: I got my barbecue.

Those of you who have been following along since the beginning of this adventure may recall that, on account of my departure delay at LaGuardia, I was robbed of my opportunity to eat barbecue in the Memphis airport. I thought that would be a permanent state of affairs because my return connection allowed only 25 minutes for the transfer and, to make matters worse, was to happen at 7:45 in the morning.

But my flight got in about 15 minutes early -- an eternity in flight-connection time -- and to my great surprise and delight Jim Neely's Interstate Barbecue was open for business. Nobody there thought it the least bit strange when I ordered a large chopped pork sandwich at dawn. (They call it chopped; I'd call it pulled.)

On account of my equipment restrictions in transit I won't be able to offer you a photo of this glorious work of sandwich art until I return to headquarters this evening. That's right after I spend a couple of hours of quality time at a kids' birthday party at the Build-a-Bear store on Fifth Avenue and then have dinner with my wife, son, mother, mother's friend and mother's other friend.

[Fat Guy]

On my way out of LaGuardia airport I took the opportunity to right another  airline-generated wrong from earlier in the trip: I grabbed a burger at the Pat LaFreida burger place.

I came with a chip on my shoulder because I have never bought into all the hype surrounding Pat LaFreida's ground beef. I also had several immediate negative reactions to the place. First, there is no human to take your order. You key it in to a touch screen. The computer is unwieldy and, worse, relentlessly tries to upsell you on wildly overpriced sides and shakes. Then you wait in another line for your food. Then you wait in line, managing your food and your carry-on bags, to pay at the food court's central cashier where they again try to upsell you on drinks and such. There is inadequate seating and everywhere you try to sit a TSA officer shoos you away.

But the burger was fantastic: salty, beefy, juicy -- as good a burger as I've ever had in the thin-griddled style.

The single cheeseburger like I had costs US$4.75 plus tax. At first I thought it was a lot but then I thought about something Ferran Adria said the other night. He said "A good hamburger costs seven dollars." (Given the audience I took that to mean that a restaurant needs to charge $7 in order to serve an economically viable, high-quality burger.) "But people won't pay that much for a burger, even though they'll pay more than that for packs of cigarettes that kill them." So all things considered I should have ordered two.

[Pam R]

Still great flavor; still not crispy enough. There was some debate at the table as to why. I personally think the duck fat just doesn't get the fries crispy enough. Other theories ranged from "temperature too low" to "needs more time."

Again, great flavor, but limp texture.

Somebody mentioned that they had duck-fat fried fries last night and I asked if they were crispy or limp. I was told they were very crisp - it could be the temp, time or maybe even the type of potato used. I think you should experiment.

[Fat Guy]

The last time I did serious experimentation with duck fat frying, I was working on latkes. What I found was that with 100% duck fat it was impossible to get good crispness and golden brownness without burning the oil, so of necessity the end product was limp. The same held for 90% duck fat, 80% duck fat ... it wasn't until we did a 50/50 mix of duck fat and corn oil that we got the right outcome. I don't know if that holds for french fries or not. By the way the fry cook told one of our group that they don't use 100% duck fat -- they cut it with some standard frying oil or shortening. But I guess they're not getting the right ratio. Or they're doing something wrong, unrelated to oil composition. Or they prefer limp fries. Some people do. Not me.

Here are the promised photos from Jim Neely's in the Memphis airport.

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

And of Pat LaFreida's place at LaGuardia.

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

[Fat Guy]

How do you make those checkerboard sandwiches???

It requires no skill but a lot of patience. I'll try to make some soon so I can post a little photo tutorial.

[Fat Guy]

Note: the Sarabeth's house bread recipe is now corrected. The missing lines occurred on converting PDF to text.

[Fat Guy]

Dinner tonight was routine. We went as a family (including my mother and two of her friends) to Empire Szechuan on Columbus Avenue. I've been going there since they opened in the early 1980s and, without question, it's the restaurant I've eaten more meals at over time than at any other restaurant, most likely more than at the next 9 in my top 10 combined. If you include takeout, we're probably talking about an average of once a week for nearly 30 years, minus some years for college and such. Call it a thousand times I've eaten there. I didn't take any photos. The food is better-than-average Americanized Chinese. The restaurant works because there's something for everyone in the family, they make some things very well, they treat us like royalty, and on account of decades of experience I'm really good at ordering (nobody has ever said to me, "Gee, Steven, I'm really glad I ignored your ordering advice and got dish X instead -- it was awesome.").

We had cold noodles with sesame sauce. I think they do this dish better than most anybody. It's a minimalist version, without a million ingredients in the sauce. I like to order it with the sauce separate and mix it myself at the table. We had two kinds of dumplings: pork and vegetable. There are a lot of places that make better dumplings than Empire Szechuan (the skins are indelicate) but Empire Szechuan makes ones that are plenty good enough. There were some takers for soup (their hot & sour soup is noteworthy for being vegetarian yet quite good) and a little sushi (like many Chinese restaurants these days, Empire has a sushi counter so you can mix and match Chinese and Japanese stuff). We had chicken with basil and black bean sauce, chicken with string beans. jumbo shrimp with walnuts, chicken fried rice, and vegetable moo shu.

For dessert at home I had an apple and a banana -- I'm in fruit-and-vegetable withdrawal after a few days in Alabama.

[Fat Guy]

Here's the lunch I packed for PJ this morning:

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

I'm off to make breakfast for the family, then take our son to school. I'm not sure what the day will bring after that. I have no formally planned activities until a luncheon I'm supposed to attend tomorrow. So we'll see if anything transpires. I'm sort of hoping nothing does.

[Fat Guy]

Breakfast for the rest of the family was poached eggs, again using the bowl method.

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

After school dropoff, I made my breakfast: a smoothie. This week has been abnormal in that my travel schedule kept smoothies mostly out of reach. But in a normal week I make a large smoothie almost every day for breakfast, which on a good day keeps me satiated through a light lunch and the afternoon. For the past few months I've had a Blendtec Total Blender to help power through this task. Before that I had a Vita-Mix, which I ruined, and before the I labored with a Waring bar blender that was just barely adequate for smoothie making.

Today I used flax seed, carrot, apple, celery, banana and frozen strawberries.

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

[Chris Hennes]

Man, when you say "large smoothie" you aren't kidding. I'm not sure I could eat that much for breakfast.

[Fat Guy]

I fill the pitcher to the bend, which I think comes out at just under 1.5 quarts, enough for 3 x almost-16-ounce glasses. That's the quantity I need to curb my appetite for the day.

A couple of years ago, I met this guy Kevin J. Leville, CEO of Eat Right America. I speak all the time to people in the nutrition field as well as people with big ideas about obesity and public health. Most of them are well-meaning but their ideas can't withstand even basic scrutiny. Kevin was the first person of this type I'd ever spoken to who I thought had it all figured out, where I couldn't just poke holes in everything he said. The smoothie strategy comes from him and his partner, Dr. Joel Fuhrman. Their emphasis is on nutrition, not weight loss, but better weight management is a pretty much inevitable byproduct of their approach to nutrition. Well, not inevitable, but even I've lost a few pounds. More importantly, I think having that big hit of fruits and vegetables (and flax) in the morning has helped me feel more vital overall.

[Chris Hennes]

Have you had any luck with commercial brands of frozen fruit? I tried a few bags of the local store brand and it was terrible: nearly tasteless, compared to fresh. I don't see why that should be, I would have thought frozen fruit would be one of those things that could be packed at it's flavor peak.

[Fat Guy]

I think the Dole frozen fruits are excellent -- better on average than fresh, once you use them in a recipe (as opposed to eating them straight). The Dole products are not very cost effective, though. I get that 5-pound bag of strawberries at Fairway for cheap and they're pretty good. I think the best compromise in terms of price and quality is the Richfood brand. Cheaper than Dole, almost as good. If money is no object, Cascadian is good but you're paying for the dubious benefits of organic. Trader Joe's frozen fruit is also pretty good, and well priced.

[Chris Hennes]

My wife points out that the advantage of brands like Dole is that there are coupons to be found: so it may be more cost effective if you have that option. I'm willing to pay extra for the convenience of pre-sliced, pre-frozen fruit, when the "fresh" stuff on the shelves during the winter here isn't that good anyway. Now, when peaches are in season here in OK it's a different story altogether...

[Fat Guy]

It also varies by fruit. But Dole is solid across the board. I see the Dole packages in kitchens of places like fancy hotels, where they need to provide quality fruit year-round. (Dole advertises those frozen fruits relentlessly in Food Arts magazine, which is a good sign -- the advertisers in Food Arts tend to be pursuing serious chefs who care about quality.) Myself, I usually do a mixture of frozen and fresh. Like, I can't imagine ever needing to buy a frozen banana. Bananas are cheap and, even if you get them at the world's worst store, they ripen into something pretty edible. Same with apples. The apples that suck for eating out of hand, like red delicious, are just fine for smoothies. This time of year I have the benefit of great local apples -- the one I used today was a Braeburn I picked in Connecticut -- but I'd be lying if I said I could tell the difference in a smoothie. This big category that's almost always better frozen, if you use a quality brand, is berries. Unless it happens to be the local season for a particular kind of berry, and your market actually carries the local product, you're better off with Dole.

[Fat Guy]

Lunch today was a Chobani Greek-style pomegranate yogurt (I'm not sure how the nation survived 200+ years without Chobani and Fage yogurt) and one of my dwindling inventory of Connecticut apples.

[Anna N]

Note: the Sarabeth's house bread recipe is now corrected. The missing lines occurred on converting PDF to text.

I brought down some Red Fife flour from my recent trip to Manitoulin Island and I thought this recipe might be the perfect showcase for it. I was right. I would post a photo except my daughter arrived as I pulled the bread from the oven and she hijacked it! I halved the recipe so I could do it in my Thermomix and it made a 1 1lb loaf and two tiny loaves. I got to taste one of the tiny loaves and this bread will be in my regular rotation from now on. It is amazingly light for a bread with such a high ratio of whole wheat flour. Thanks for blogging and thanks for sharing this recipe.

[Pam R]

That's right after I spend a couple of hours of quality time at a kids' birthday party

Any good food at the birthday?

[Fat Guy]

Anna: So glad the recipe worked out for you.

Pam: I had high hopes that the birthday party would offer some photo-worthy, awful, birthday-party food. Alas, because it was a mid-afternoon party, there wasn't much served in the way of food. Just some perfectly acceptable cupcakes. The party was at the Build-a-Bear Workshop. Each kid got to choose a teddy bear, stuff it, select clothes, fill out a birth certificate, etc. It was pretty cute, though I think I'll be fine if I never set foot in that place again as long as I live.

I never really had dinner tonight. I was considering a press preview at a restaurant downtown but didn't have the strength and wasn't convinced it would have any value. We were low on groceries in the house, so I went shopping at Fairway and wound up getting about six big bags of groceries. Dinner consisted of grazing on everything from Trader Joe's dark chocolate, to Stacy's pita chips, to some of those Virginia Redskin peanuts from Mobile, Alabama.

After everybody else went to bed, I embarked upon a cooking project. I typically would do this sort of thing on Sunday -- both the shopping and the cooking -- but the travel schedule shifted everything around. The request from Ellen and PJ was for vegetarian chili. I allowed a number of the ingredient decisions to be dictated by what was on hand in the refrigerator and freezer, and I bought some ingredients to supplement.

First I cooked 2 pounds of red beans using the 90-minute no-soak method that has become my standard procedure. Although, I did it on the stovetop not in the oven -- it doesn't make much difference and the stovetop was more convenient today.

Photo: Steven Shaw

Photo: Steven Shaw

Photo: Steven Shaw

I had several mismatched onions kicking around, so I decided this was a good opportunity to use them all.

Photo: Steven Shaw

Because I knew I'd be sharing with you all, I did a proper mise-en-place.

Photo: Steven Shaw

Then I built the chili, ingredient by ingredient, doing my best to make an edible vegetarian (vegan, actually) chili.

Photo: Steven Shaw

Photo: Steven Shaw

Photo: Steven Shaw

Photo: Steven Shaw

Photo: Steven Shaw

Photo: Steven Shaw

It needs a little more time on the stove, then I'll cool it and pack it up for use throughout the remainder of the week.

Tomorrow: Lunch at the James Beard House with Tom Colicchio. Maybe.

[Fat Guy]

Here's PJ's lunch for today:

Photo: Ellen R. Shapiro

[Jenni]

Cookies look good. I think I've spotted various cookies in PJ's other packed lunches - they have that chunky home-made look about them, so I'm guessing you make them?

[Fat Guy]

The cookies pictured above are from a batch my mother made last week. I actually sent him with three yesterday and two came back uneaten, so I sent those two today. When reusable, non-perishable stuff comes back uneaten I usually re-pack it the following day. Most of the time it gets eaten the second time around. If it doesn't, it goes in the trash.

Other cookies in the lunches I've packed over time and logged on the Bentos topic are, in many cases, made by my wife or, on occasion, by various professional producers such as the nearby Levain bakery where they make the best cookies I've ever had. The cookies are never made by me. That's not my department. Once in a while I use a packaged cookie, like a Mallomar, but that's pretty rare -- I prefer not to do it but am not doctrinaire in my opposition. I do try to include cookies when possible, though. In general I try to pack a fruit item, a vegetable item and a sweet item in addition to the main item (which usually involves starch and protein). It doesn't always work out that way but that's the goal.

[Fat Guy]

Fresh roasted nuts are incomparably better to the jarred kind. There's a nut roaster on my street that's doing land-office business now that the weather has cooled. People are queuing up for a half hour down the sidewalk for a chance at fresh roasted chestnuts, pecans, and chili peanuts. I don't think I could name a place in my hometown in Canada that offers fresh roasted nuts. Have they gone out of fashion in other places, too?

I know that back in the day there were thousands of nut-roasting operations all across the USA -- kind of like Starbucks today or cookie stores a couple of decades ago -- but today a shop that roasts nuts on premises is a novelty. There are some here and there -- many used to be part of the Planter's chain and are now independently operated -- but not a lot. The place is Mobile, however, seemed to be a cut above. I don't think they have a mail-order operation, unfortunately, otherwise I'd be all over ordering many pounds of those Virginia Redskin peanuts for the holidays.

[nakji]

It's a shame, because fresh roasted nuts are comparable to fresh roasted coffee. There's just no comparison to the non-fresh roasted kind, if you have them available.

Are similar results achievable through oven toasting, I wonder, or is something lost once the shells are gone?

[heidih]

Here in the Los Angeles area there is usually a peanut roasting vendor at every farmer's market. I love that they offer unsalted as well as salted. Freshly roasted unsalted peanuts have an appealing sweetness. I love it when the batch has gotten a little darker than usual.