Paris and Amsterdam – A Preliminary Taste

Posted on by

Preliminary taste?  Yes, because unfortunately this was a whirl wind tour (see photos).  We had only two and a half days in each of these wonderful cities which is totally inadequate to really suss out the delicious food and develop an overall sense of the culinary ethos.  For that you need at least five days.  I mean, obviously I nailed it when I summed up my  five days in Tokyo, right? But seriously, you do need more than a few days to get a proper taste of a place and it does help to have a local guide to steer you in the right direction.  For a city like Paris which has such a rich history and tradition of delicious food, I think you could spend weeks, if not months or even years exploring and discovering the great eats that the City of Lights has to offer.

Click on the photo for the full story…

A view of the Eiffel Tower from Sacre Coeur

Share

Pasties!

Posted on by

First things first: the “pasties” I’m referring to in this post are not the ones you’ll find in a fine gentlemen’s club – well unless that gentlemen’s club happens to be in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) and serves local food.  You see the pasties (pronounced with a short “a” like “nasty”) I’m talking about are a culinary holdover of the Cornish miners who worked the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula when it was booming industry from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s.

Not so pretty, but pretty damn delicious.

A pasty is basically a meat pie or empanada – crusty dough filled with meat, potatoes, carrots and turnips. I guess the pasty is like the working class Anglo Saxon version of the San Francisco style burrito which hailed from another working class population in California, Mexican farmworkers.  It’s an entire meal that travels well and can be eaten with one hand. But while the burrito has been a smash cross- over success -indeed spawning such food monstrosities like the whole wrap movement – the pasty remains a regional specialty.  It’s really easy to find pasties in the old mining towns of the UP, but as of yet there are no pasty chops or pasty trucks hanging on the corners of major metropolitan areas.  So thank the gods I married a small town girl from Michigan who introduced me to this Yooper culinary gem.  When Shef’s mom visits, she’ll bring frozen pasties for us in her luggage.  Now that is love.  But she can only carry so many and we’ve long since eaten our reserve pasties, so a couple weeks ago because we were feeling the urge and we had the requisite ingredients (or most of them) on hand, in our kitchen I decided to make pasties of our own.  The kitchen stars aligned, as it were. This was the my second time cooking pasties. The first time, I got a little too fancy pants – and way too labor intensive, roasting all the ingredients before hand.  So this time I elected to go the more traditional route and it totally paid off.  I consulted a number of recipes online, soaked them in and then basically did what I’ve described below. There’s a lot of prep work involved in these so give yourself a few hours to make them and make it worth your while by making enough for several meals.

Pasty Recipe (makes about 12)

dough:
Basically it’s a pie dough.
3 cups AP flour
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 sticks of butter
1 tbsp vinegar
1/8- 1/4 cup ice water – or just enough for dough to set

Add salt to flour and mix. Cut butter into the flour (pulsing a food processor works best) until you get a pebbly consistency. Add ice water by tbsp an mix by hand or in mixer. Work until the dough forms and holds but don’t overwork (you don’t want it to get to glutinous and elastic because then it’s harder to work later). Wrap the dough in plastic and let it set in the fridge for an hour or two.

Fillings (quantities are approximate)
1/2 lb of ground beef
1/2 lb of ground pork
2 hot Italian sausages (casings removed)
2 medium (or 1 large) onions – diced or chopped
4-6 carrots -finely diced or chopped
1 large rutabaga or 3 turnips (or any similar root vegetable in the turnip or even radish family. We actually used a daikon radish – thanks to our CSA – and it worked fine) – finely diced or chopped
2 lbs of potatoes (yukon gold) – finely chopped.
salt to taste
pepper to taste

Mix:
This is the easy part. Once everything is prepped and chopped just mix everything in a large bowl and add an ample amount of salt and pepper. These are your only seasonings so you can be generous (but don’t give yourself a heart attack). Mix everything together until the meat forms a paste over all the vegetables.

Making:
Now is the labor intensive part. Take your chilled dough and form small balls about 2- 2 1/2 inches in diameter. Flatten these balls our with a rolling pin taking care to roll them evenly so you end up with a dough circle about 7-8 inches in diameter. Put a good couple big spoonfuls of the filling on one side of the, but sure you leave enough space on the edge free of filling. Take the other side and fold it over so the top edge lines up with the bottom edge. Now use moisten the edges with water and seal them. Then, fold up the joined lip of crust and crimp it with your fingers so you end up with a semi circle with pie crust type seal along the curved side. Poke some holes in the top of the pasty so steam can escape.

Cooking:
Bake the pasty in a preheated 375? oven for about an hour and boom!

Post baking - they were delicious. We froze bunch so we'd have some for later.

Eating:
Use whatever utensils you want and whatever condiments you want (I prefer a mixture of ketchup and sriracha) and commence to put into you mouth and chew.  Savor the blend of meaty and earthy flavors … and swallow.  Now you know.  Pasties taste good and they’re not just for covering nipples.

Late night pasty eating. By the time I finished cooking these it was past midnight.

Share

Lahmacun and Sarmale

Posted on by

This past weekend found us taking a culinary trip from Turkey to Romania all from the comfort of our own kitchen.

Saturday Night = Turkey Night

As is often the case, Shefali suggested and I executed.  In this case, she suggested that  I make lahmacun, a flat bread “pizza” with a topping of ground meat  and spices for a potluck party we were attending on Saturday night,.  Now depending on whom you talk to, lahmacun (pronounced: lah-ma-joon) is either of Turkish or Armenian origins.  I don’t  want to get into the particular complications of the conflicted relationship between Turkey and it’s Armenian citizens, but one thing they do share in common is this delicious savory snack/meal (I say “meal” because because once you try it, you might not be able to refrain from eating just a snack like portion).  You can also find lahmacun in Lebanese and Syrian restaurants and bakeries.  I consulted a couple recipes for inspiration: a Saveur Magazine recipe and a recipe from a Turkish cook book by Özcan Ozan, the chef owner of The Sultan’s Kitchen, a Turkish restaurant in Boston.  Then I just kind of did my own thing.  Again proving the versatility of the sourdough starter, I used the sourdough for which I was originally intending to make baguettes and then re-purposed for the flat bread.  It added a nice extra tang and chewiness. Here’s what the lahmacun looked like:

uncooked lahamcun - basically spicy meat paste spread over dough

after baking for about 10 minutes at 475 degrees F. Smelled just like Turkey! In other words, it smelled deliciously of spiced savory lamb

Lamahcun waiting station. Packing them up for the poluck.

Sunday Night = Romania Night

A fun game that we often play in our house is naked twister. But when we get bored of that we play another game called “what the hell should we do with all this cabbage in our fridge?” And fortunately our CSA gives us ample opportunity to play this game.  Case in point, our last pick up we got three different types of cabbage: a red cabbage with which I made my patented cole slaw, a napa cabbage for which I already assigned supporting role duty in Shanghai chow mein.  That left me with one more head of cabbage, an arrowhead cabbage (?) that I had to figure out how to cook.  Solution: sarmale, or Romanian style stuffed cabbage.  I’m dating myself here, but I first sampled sarmale in Romania when I was shooting a “documentary” about the origins of Dracula and vampires,  which served as bonus material  on the DVD release of one of the finest movies ever made: Underworld – yeah that vampires v. werewolves movie staring Kate Beckinsale. Well, at least it got me to Romania where I remember the food being really, hearty, rustic (raw bacon? yes please) and delicious.   Case in point: the stuffed cabbage dish called sarmale.  Stuffing cabbage with meat and other ingredients is not unique to Romania.   According to Wikipedia, sarma as it is also called has it’s origins in the Ottoman Empire which makes complete sense if you consider all the the countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that have stuffed cabbage.  They were all under the influence directly or indirectly (or just by proximity) to the Ottoman Empire.  Isn’t history cool?  Anyway, I consulted a number of recipes on the web and basically incorporated a bunch of them to suit my needs and capabilities.  Some recipes called for using sauerkraut which I didn’t have, so I blanched the cabbage leaves in water and vinegar before using them to wrap the meat mixture ( a combination of ground pork, lamb and beef mixed with rice, spices, onions, garlic and celery).  The end result? Delicios! (uh, that’s Romanian for “delicious”)

Sarmale - cabbage is stuffed and ready to be cooked

Sarmale in the pot and simmered slowly in broth and a bit of tomato paste

The sarmale after cooking in the oven for about an hour at about 350?.

We cooked for our friends Ben and Maria visiting from out of town. Ben, who's Jewish said the sarmale reminde him of food his mom cooks. Mission accomplished. I always knew I'd make a great Jewish mother.

Share

PK’s Yeast Infection…

Posted on by

… fortunately it’s of the sourdough variety – as in Matt’s sourdough starter.  Sure, PK’s been in possession of the starter for a while and indeed has become quite the waffle master, but until this past week, PK had yet to make a loaf of bread. That changed this past weekend when PK attempted his first loaf. Now he’s got the bread bug, and  bad. For the first loaf, perhaps he bit off a bit more than he could chew, attempting a full wheat loaf which came out super dense owing to the fact that he used too much wheat flour (I think two cups). Here’s a picture.

PK's very first loaf: dense wheat (with a shape only a mother could love)

PK says he got through about half of this loaf before he realized he just couldn’t eat something more dense than several of the heavy metals on the periodic table combined.  But not to be deterred, he quickly got back on his horse and baked another loaf which according to all accounts -namely PK’s – he nailed.  Here’s his spin on the recipe:

1/4 c starter
1 5/8 c water
3 1/4 c flour
1/4 c wheat flour
3 tsp kosher salt
Sprinkled with cornmeal
Oven 475-480
20 mins with lid

15-20 mins without lid

Behold...PK's second (perfect - according to PK) loaf.

PK's second loaf has a nice airy quality

And as an added bonus, here’s a short vid of PK thoroughly enjoying his bread. Here’s to many more perfect loaves in the future, PK.  Welcome to the club.

Share

Nov. 1- Nov. 7 = Good week in food

Posted on by

As usual we ate well this week but there were definitely a few culinary standouts this past week:

1.  Totto Ramen – I went to this new ramen spot last Wednesday for lunch with Minori of katsu curry fame.  She read about it in a Japanese language newspaper and said it was along the lines of Ippudo in terms of quality.  Well, it wasn’t.  It was way better in my opinion and had a way better vibe.  Don’t get me wrong, I thought Ippudo was good, but it was too much of a scene.  In contrast, the scene at Totto was more about people hungrily slurping up noodles at the counter as the two cooks ladled the steaming broth on the springy noodles and periodically flashed pork belly with a blow torch to give it a smokey flavor.  Minori and I both got the spicy pork ramen (regular spicy with a hard-boiled egg for Minori and extreme spicy with no egg for me).   According to Minori (Totto’s logo with its stylized chicken in a bowl design is also a tip off) the broth at Totto is chicken based. And when I first tasted it it had a very clean but intense chicken-ness.  I don’t know how many chickens went into it but their collective sacrifice was well worth it as far as I’m concerned.  But after stirring the bowl of ramen with it’s pork belly and scallions and a healthy dose of the chilis and chili oil, the broth became richer and deeper in color and flavor and … well was just completely satisfying.  The noodles had a nice snap and the pork belly char siu was sumptuous in its fattiness. The only regret I had was not bringing a breath mint for afterwards as chili/ garlic/ pork is not the most pleasant flavor to have lingering in your mouth when you’re checking out the pillars of abstract expressionism at MOMA.  So my verdict: a resounding thumbs up.

2.  Diwali Dinner – To commemorate the Hindu festival of lights and ring in the new year, Shefali and I hosted a Diwali potluck.  Shef cooked up some of her specialties: chicken curry and an egg curry (for the vegetarians – good thing they ate eggs) and her always delicious palak paneer (my personal favorite).  I took the opportunity to cook up some lamb vindaloo.  I like any excuse to do a lamb stew with ample chiles, spice and the added acidity of a little vinegar.  Those flavors meld so well with slow cooked lamb.  And our wonderful friends brought other delicious dishes.  Minori and Kei, again displaying their panko frying prowess brought croquettes (sweet potato and cream cheese as well as potato and carrot).  Roompa and Dildar brought a rich and complex Indian style butternut squash soup. Hetal brought baigan burtha.  Shikha made raita and fried up miniature samosas.  Alka brought ice cream that she made: the best chai ice cream I’ve had in my life.  All in all, a wonderful way to eat our way into the new year.

frying up samosa

Croquettes: potatoes breaded and then fried. What's not to like?

a new years bounty

Alka and her awesome chai ice cream

3.  Tanoreen Restaurant – To celebrate Shef’s birthday I decided to go big and treat her to a nice dinner. We didn’t go to PerSe, or Babbo, or Momofuku Ko.  Instead, we took the R train deeper into Brooklyn to a neighborhood called Bay Ridge to a reasonable Middle Eastern Restaurant called Tanoreen.  Yeah, I guess I’m a really great husband. We’d read about it in the New Yorker several months ago so we were interested in trying it for a while.  As we walked up to the entrance, we passed several people who had just left the restaurant toting take out bags.  A good sign.  Upon entering we saw a bunch of reviews from the Village Voice, to Zagats to Time Out New York.  Perhaps we were a bit late in the game in “discovering” this place.  Oh well.  From the boisterous crowd inside laughing and drinking as they waited for the massive entrees it was evident that mainstream recognition had not ruined this place.  Remembering the doggy bags that the other patrons were carrying, we ordered consertatively (I thought at the time).  We got three appetizers and one entree to share.  The apps were huge: mosakhan – a large flat bread heaped with caramelized onions and spicy savory chicken, sujok – tart and smokey sausage in a tangy red chile sauce (my mouth is watering as I write this), and lamb kibbi – basically lamb and wheat bulgar mixed together and than stuffed with more ground lamb!  What is not to love about this food? By the time our entree of roasted eggplant with potatoes, tomatoes and more ground lamb arrived  we were so stuffed that we each took a bite (ok, in my case two) and then asked the waiter to pack the rest of it to take home.  But even on a full stomach the entree was delicious, at once comforting because of it’s slow cooked, roasted flavor, but enlivening because of the intensity of the blended flavors.  The only thing that didn’t quite appeal to my palate was the dessert: knafeh. According to the waiter, this dessert had just been profiled on some Food Network show about some of the best dishes people have ever eaten.  It consists of layers of shredded wheat toasted to crispness and drizzled with sugary syrup and covered with pistachios.  That sounds delicious right there.  But in between the layers of the shredded wheat was a layer of thick melted cheese.  We had read the description of the dessert and knew there would be cheese, but we thought it would be more like the texture of ricotta as in a cannoli or cheesecake.  This cheese had the texture of melted mozzarella as well as the greasiness.  Now don’t get me wrong.  The first bite was absolutely delicious and decadent, the hot cheese, mingling well with the sweet toasted wheat.  But after that, as the dessert cooled… well, it was just too cheesy.  It was like eating a slice of pizza with syrup on it.  Also did I mention? We were full to the brim, which might have influenced our desire and ability to eat dessert.  But all in all, I highly recommend Tanoreen and will definitely go back.  And I’m probably not the only one.  Our waiter informed us that Tanoreen was just awarded it’s first Michelin star.  Looks like more folks will be making the trek to Bay Ridge.

Share