Food Blog

[suzilightning]

k

inspired by your post i made gimlets for the first time last night. they are really yum... thanks.

sam - i really liked the picture of issy guarding the laundry.

[jogoode]

Chicken browned and braised with small black olives (picholines?), a few whole cloves of garlic, a bundle of fresh thyme. Sam braised it on high heat with about an inch of liquid in the bottom, boiling furiously. He covered it, let the liquid boiled down, and repeated the process till the chicken was tender.

Sam,

This is the method you were telling me about at the whiskey dinner, right?

It looks incredible.

[slkinsey]

It's somewhat similar, yea. For those who weren't there (a.k.a. everyone else) I was telling JJ about one of my favorite simple dishes from Le Marche, pollo in fricò. To make this dish you need one cut up chicken (or a bunch of wings and thighs), a bottle of dry white wine, a few cloves of whole garlic, a few sprigs of fresh rosemary and a tablespoon or less of juniper berries. The chicken is browned in a saute pan over high heat, the fat drained off, the garlic, rosemary and juniper added along with just enough wine to cover the bottom of the pan at a furious boil. On goes a lid. Every so often, a little more wine is added piano a piano as we say, to keep a <1 inch layer of liquid boiling over high heat. When the bottle is empty, the chicken is done. Nothing to it.

Fairway didn't have any roesmary, so I employed the same technique using olives and thyme instead of rosemary and juniper.

[Suzanne F]

When the bottle is empty, the chicken is done. Nothing to it.

Are you saying that a chicken can cook completely with just one or two inches of wine in the pan?

No, seriously, that sounds like a great method, especially for those of us who can't just let a pot sit without feeling the need to, um DO SOMETHING.

[slkinsey]

I know! It must be cold fusion or something. Seriously, though, there is something different about cooking this dish with a thin layer of furiously boiling liquid over high heat as opposed to a thicker layer of barely simmering liquid as in a traditional braise. I've even noticed this using water instead of wine, so it's not just the reduction of the wine (although this does, of course, make a difference). The other nice thing about doing it this way is that it is a nice excuse to have a nip from the bottle every so often.

[Toasted]

IMO the ferret's are stealing this blog! I love them! Plus, the food looks good too.

[johnjohn]

Great Blog. What brand of Vodka is your favorite for making Gimlets.

johnjohn

[bergerka]

Hey all! Sorry my first post is so late today...I got up at 10, left the house for my lesson at 11, and only just got back about 1/2 hour ago (my lessons regularly go for 1.5-2 hours and then we sit around and catch up on the opera gossip. I study with an internationally working singer, and she always know who's doing what with whom, musically or otherwise).

Johnjohn (HI JohnJohn, where ya been?): we usually use Skyy or some other good mixing vodka for gimlets...not the expensive stuff.

For breakfast I had a café au lait with two sugars and a blueberry ginger muffin from the Silver Moon Bakery on 105th and Broadway. I cannot tell you how happy I am that the Silver Moon has stayed busy since the day it opened...it's a HUGE asset to the neighborhood. Here's a profile of the owner and head baker chick (as opposed to biker chick?), Judith Norell, who started out as a harpsichordist and baroque opera specialist at Juilliard!

The Silver Moon's owner

My teacher & her fiancé fed me a cappuccino after my lesson.

Upon returning home, I ate a little leftover mac & cheese.

More later - we're definitely going out for dinner!

[bergerka]

Last entry!

Sam, ewindels and I went to Celeste tonight, on Amsterdam between 84th and 85th Streets. as I understand it, it's owned by the same people as own Bianca? Is that right?

I got annoyed right off because we were told it would be a twenty-minute wait...and it was fifty-five . I mean, it was OBVIOUS the place was packed, and even my only semi-experienced eye (1.5 years waiting tables in Kansas City) could see the tables were nowhere near ready to leave...just freaking TELL me it's going to be an hour! I'm ok with that! I'll go get a martini and come back!

Speaking of which, Celeste could REALLY use the advantage of a bar next door, like Bianca has. We were all kind of packed into this little lobbyesque area, and this idiotic bimbo (about 22 years old going on 12) with a cell phone kept striding in and out, bumping into me. If she had done it just ONE MORE TIME, I was getting ready to say to her "Excuse me, but could you get STOP talking to your buddy and PAY ATTENTION to where you're walking, before I jam that phone up your skinny little ass?" Which probably wouldn't have been nice and might have ruined my good-girl reputation.

The main problem seemed to be that there was no real front-of-house person, just an overworked and utterly clueless bumped-up waiter. He was terrible at predicting how long the wait was (I heard him tell the same person "just five or ten minutes" at least three times) and eventually one of the busboys (men?) yelled at him for seating tables in the very small, very crowded room before the table was cleared, wiped and reset. It's NEVER good if you hear the busboy yell "JUST WAIT TILL THE TABLE'S READY" across a small, packed restaurant. I mean, I realize front-of-house is an art...but it's not THAT hard, people.

Anyway, we finally got seated and ordered. We had:

bread with olive oil: still good olive oil, but we quite obviously got two different kinds of bread (we ended up eating two basketsful plus one more with the cheese). One basketful was obviously Sullivan Street Bakery, as ewindels pointed out, but it was slightly stale, and the other basketful was something lower in quality.

Antipasti:

fried ricotta di bufalo: two relatively small pieces of ricotta, delicately fried, with a huge mass of salad. This was pretty tasty, the cheese was nice and delicately flavored. There just wasn't ENOUGH of it.

carciofi fritti: this was SUPPOSED to be a plate of fried artichokes...but what appeared was a plate with one or two little fried artichokes and a SHITLOAD of fried parsley. Now...don't get me wrong, both the artichokes and the parsley were perfectly yummy, but there was NOT much artichoke there.

chicken livers with balsamic reduction, on toast: this is the same as we had at Bianca, last Saturday night, but what a difference! Bianca's version was totally sublime...this one was ok, but the livers were overdone. As I said to Sam, if I'd had this version first, I'd have been disinclined to try Bianca's, because Celeste's rendition was a letdown.

Things improved markedly with the appearance of a delightful Primitivo and the main courses. We had:

Sam: tagliatelle with shrimp, cabbage and sheep's milk cheese. NOT three flavors you'd think would taste great together...but they did. I was really impressed.

Ewindels: lamb chops, medium rare, with roasted potatoes and sautéed spinach (the main dish special). Delicious. Perfectly cooked, very flavorful with just a hint of rosemary, the potatoes were beautifully done and the spinach complemented both really well.

Me: Tagliatelle bolognese (the pasta special). This was second only to Sam's bolognese (yes, I say that a lot...if you haven't tried his cooking yet, you're just going to have to trust me that he REALLY IS THAT GOOD), very rich and meaty and creamy-textured, and the pasta (made onsite) was beautiful, presenting just the right amount of resistance to my teeth. AND they avoided the temptation to drown the pasta in the bolognese.

For dessert, we shared the medium-size cheese plate with the rest of the wine. Unfortunately, the place was too busy for the waiter to really describe the various cheeses, honeys and compotes for us (other than to point out the order in which we should eat them...and he was exactly right), but it was absolutely fucking sublime. Each cheese got progressively more complex, they were perfectly paired with the condiments, and the last pairing, a gorgonzola dolce with a bitter orange marmalade, was practically orgasmic.

Between the pasta and the cheese course, my mood improved considerably. I would definitely go back (although not on a weekend, that was an insane rush and it seemed to be all college kids of the obnoxious type. I KNOW there must be nice college kids somewhere in New York City), just for the pasta and the cheese course, and I'd like to try the sponge cake with ricotta and limoncello sorbet, even though it has candied fruit.

But my god, they need a better front of house person. I was ready to kill that kid (or hold him while the obviously frustrated waitstaff beat him to death).

Well, folks, that's my blog! Thanks for the opportunity to do this, I've had a wonderful week and enjoyed this much more than I expected to, even.

Since I've had NO volunteers for next week, I hereby pass the torch to...*drumroll please*

ALACARTE!

ALL ALACARTE, ALL THE TIME!

And with that...they all lived happily ever after.

THE END.

[Pan]

Thanks for a most enjoyable week of blog-reading, K.

[ludja]

So... what is everybody's favorite ferret picture?  I'm stuck between the picture of Issachar asleep and the picture of Asher and Zebulun in the House of Bites.

All the pix are very cute. I've always had cats and am also struck on the similarity of a lot of the poses. I really liked the "house of bites" and also issacher in the bathtub. He reminded me of a little sea otter...

Thanks K for a great blog and for sharing so many nice things.

You indirectly helped me to cap off a wonderful day yesterday. It was a beautiful unseasonably warm spring day yesterday in SF. We went for a great 9 mile hike on San Bruno mountain outside the city among the spring wildflowers , had some great pizza afterward and then stopped in a bar for some nice icey gimlets (gin for me)! Gimlets had fallen off my radar screen for some reason until I saw your blog. Thanks!