A better weekend: pumpkin bread

Breakfast sunday morning was pumpkin bread, as below. The recipe is the recipe for pumpkin bread found in the King Arthur cookbook, which I recommend extremely highly. The only thing to note is that it is very forgiving (I could not find my scale, and just sort of winged the 13.5 ounces of flour) and really needs the entire hour to bake at the proscribed 375. Also, I omitted the chocolate chips as irrelevant.

A better weekend: butter poached radishes and brussels

I've been having a better weekend in terms of work, and as anyone who knows me might expect, I've filled it with food. First up is a side dish I cribbed from Keller's (excellent) Ad Hoc cookbook, radishes simmered in a mixture of butter and stock to glaze, along with brussel sprouts first shocked to preserve their color and then added to the radishes. This was really a surprisingly delicious dish, helped by the fact that we picked up the radishes at a farmer's market outside Lincoln Center yesterday afternoon. They were sweet and mild, with only a slight tang to remind us of what happens to radishes gone bad.

The wine you can see in the background I picked to go with our main dish, prime rib. I might write about this a little more, but I wonder why prime rib has fallen out of favor (or so I perceive) in favor of steak. Good prime rib (and the prime rib we bought was very good - Citarella does an excellent job here in New York with meat) tastes like marrow rubbed on protein - even more tender than the usually insipid filet mignon, but tasting of nothing but beef. In any case, the wine is a grand bordeaux, but of the second rank of grand bordeauxs. We detected what we called "citrus" (apparently, this is called "acidity" in wine speak) and various fruits. But what struck us both as more interesting was the extent to which the bordeaux reacted to beef, becoming milder, sweeter, and somehow more fragrant.

Fried Chicken

I have been brutally busy since my wedding three weeks ago, and have hardly cooked a lick. But this weekend I had a day to myself, and following Thomas Keller's advice in the excellent Ad Hoc cookbook, I've been concentrating on perfecting my range of chicken dishes.


The chicken below was brined in Keller's herb-lemon brine (brining appears to be one of those things restaurants do often, but home cooks neglect) for 8 hours, then dripped in flour, buttermilk and then flour again before being dropped into canola oil at 325 degrees. I had a mild temperature disaster when I realized my pan was too small, and had to transfer frying chicken into a larger pot (it's like transporting a living organ) but a quick adjustment of heat saved the day. The resulting chicken was crunchy and extremely flavorful - just a delight.


Still, I think I need an instant read thermometer for frying, candy, etc. Flying by the seat of my pants leaves too much to chance.

EDIT: As delightful as it was, I'm reminded by looking at the picture that the fleur de sel I added on top was overkill, given my generous salting of the batter. As I've heard before, if you can taste salt rather than the enhanced flavor of the food, you've gone too far.

Wedding food

My occasional wanders elsewhere notwithstanding, this is a food blog, and I can hardly imagine having blogged for so long and not blogging my own wedding feast. Below was our menu:

Amuses Bouches (during cocktails)

Crispy Parmesan Basket with Soft Goat Cheese and Fresh Herbs
Smoked Trout in a Cucumber Cup
Crab Cakes with Apricot and Ginger Chutney
Chicken and Fig Brochette
Lamb and Yogurt Salad in Baby Iceberg Cup
Lamb Tajine Cigar with Vadouvan Yogurt
Miniature Sausages in a Puff Pastry with Mustard (for the Children) (ed: children. Yeah, right. I'm still clearing puff pastry off my mouth).

Appetizer

Louisiana Shrimp with Légumes Confits au Basilic Shaved Fennel and an Heirloom Tomato Vinaigrette

Main Course

Baked Red Snapper Tajine
Potato, Tomato and Green Pepper
Chickpea Panisse

or

Roasted Rib Eye
Potato, Tomato and Green Pepper
Chickpea Panisse

Pre-Dessert

Sake Glazed Plums, Almond Biscuit, Orange Mousse, Mirabelle Sorbet

Wedding Cake

Opera Wedding Cake

Married!

Yes, I got married this past weekend!

On one hand, I can't say I feel much different. My wife and I were pretty inseperable already, and I don't know what the legal sanction of marriage does for us on a day-to-day level. On the other hand, I think the solemnity of the Armenian Apostolic ceremony (though during the ceremony I couldn't help think about the thin, wavy, line between solemnity and farce) does impress upon one that something of significance is happening.

Also, I get to wear this neat-o ring!

Iman bayadi

I made the well known near-eastern dish iman bayadi last night - it is one of my favorite dishes, and I pull it out of the bag when I am feeling ill or down or particularly tired (I feel both, currently). The rhythms and aromas of making iman bayadi remind me of being at home, when life was simpler and both less and more happy.

Slice firm eggplants, and roast in hot oven for about 20 minutes (of course, you can also fry, but I hate how much oil eggplants drink up). Add to a can of san marzano tomatoes, onions and lots of garlic, peeled but not sliced (the point is to get delicious pieces of garlic that can be used as a topping for the iman bayadi in your pita bread scoop). Bake, covered, for 45 minutes, and eat with fresh pita.

NB: Made with lamb, this is not a mezze but a main dish, and should be eaten with pilaf.

Salsa Verde and Steak

I think people have a tendency to forget that herb sauces make a great accompaniment for steaks, assuming one likes piquant flavors. Last weekend, I made a pseudo-salsa verde to liven up a fairly poor supermarket porterhouse, combining capers, parsley, lemon, garlic and olive oil into a thick paste.

Along with taboule, incidentally, salsa verde is a great way to use up parsley, if you are the sort of person who buys parsley in the full bloom of hope, and then glumly watches it wilt.

Brandeis

I am reading the new biography of Brandeis in the brief moments of time I can snatch when I am not preparing for trial. It is quite good, though a little lumbering. Certainly, though, Brandeis had a way with words. My favorite quip so far:

"The man who does not know intimately human affairs is apt to make of the law a bed of Procustes".

Polanski II

This is a truly depraved defense of Polanski by Robert Harris. The worst of it: "Mr. Polanski’s own young children, to whom he is a doting father, want him home . . .". As if we ought to care what his children want, when he showed such spectacular disregard for what someone else's child wanted.

Polanski

Without getting into details, I am extremely puzzled to hear that the arrest of Roman Polanski is a matter of controversy. It is, in fact, a positive thing that the law does not tire or flag in its pursuit of the wicked. And it is a matter beyond rational debate that what Polanski admitted to doing was wicked. As others have noted, the raped girl was a child, could not consent due to the drugs she was given, and in any case did not consent despite the fact that she was drugged.

If criminal law is even somewhat about retribution, then this arrest is just.

Striped Bass with Meyer Lemon aroncini

I'm posting this dish from our meal tonight at Restaurant Daniel not because the striped bass or the fava beans with barigoule sauce were so good (though, in fact, they were quite good) but because the meyer lemon aroncini were revelatory. What a good idea - to flavor risotto with meyer lemon, and pair it with fish. Wow.

I'm posting

this

In praise of (one) bureaucracy

We visited the City Clerk of New York City this morning to secure our marriage license. It was an extraordinarily smooth and well run affair, and we were out of there, despite a queue of about 25 couples ahead of us, in a mere half hour. Well done!

Beet tartare

I love beet tartare, and last night when I found ready steamed beets in a vacuum pack at the grocery store, I pounced. This is simply diced beets dressed with mustard, smoked paprika (which gave the dish a surprisingly deep and beefy flavor) olive oil, lemon, and salt, topped with a very ripe avocado.

Apple tart

Here's a somewhat failed apple tart from dinner last night. The topping is simply sliced apples with sugar and fleur de sel. It is failed for the crust, which was meant to be a puff pastry, that didn't puff.

Still delicious.

EDIT: Also, this is proof to me that you can make a pretty good tart in a toaster oven, issues with uneven heating aside.

Legislators reading bills

There's a fascinating debate happening at the Volokh conspiracy about whether or not legislators should read the bills they are voting on. (Here, for example, is Orin Kerr poking a little fun at those who say Congresspeople should read every word of their bills).

My tentative view is that reading each word isn't the point - it's understanding what the bill does. So long as the legislator is doing his or her due diligence on what they are voting for, I don't care whether they literally read every word.

Corton

To celebrate the momentous events of the last few days, which I am not to discuss, we visited the new restaurant Corton on Saturday night. I have some thoughts, but I am still sorting through them and will post later.

UPDATE: here are my thoughts:

The overwhelming impression I had upon leaving Corton was that the food looked better than it tasted. Aesthetically, the food turned out by the Corton kitchen is a striking achievement- a sort of series of alien landscapes, bright green slimes,'transluscent gels, things enrobed with other things. An evening at corton reminded me of nothing more than an evening at the Taco Bell depicted in the cult classic movie Demolution Man, a vision from a future I'm not sure I want to visit. Liebrandt would make a very good chef for the kind of people who dress in futuristic silver tights, I reckon.

But I'm not a futuristic person in silver tights, so the question is whether Corton's food is delicious for me, today. That's a close question. Certainly, everthing is tasty, some of it spectacular, and it is made abundantly clear that the tall, dominating chef one can glimpse through the window into the kitchen is capable, if he so chose, of producing new French cuisine of the highest possible caliber. Slot this guy into Per Se's kitchen, and nothing would skip the slightest beat.

But the food I experiencxed at Corton was not entirely of that quality. I think, for example, of my Dorade with chanterelles, which, cooked sous vide and presented with a limpid grey silver skin, tasted unaccountably fishy. Nor could I entirely understand why it was accompanied by what I took to be Cherry tomatoes enrobed like malt balls by mozzarella. Yes, the accompanying slick of tomato sorrell sauce was magnificent, but why could I not have fish that tasted subtler and skin that was a greater pleasure to eat? It was not a matter of execution, to be sure - one of two side dishes to the Dorade was (oddly) yet more Dorade, this crispy and covered in a thin seaweed gelatin. So Liebrandt knows precisely how to do what I was craving. He just chose not to, and I couldn't quite understand why.

Or let's consider the hamachi starter, tiny rolls of fish interspersed somewhat randomly amid a veritable hurricane of additional bits and bobs - kombu, avocado, flowers salsify, and who knows what else. Striking? Yes. Delicious? Well, not as much, and definitely not as delicious as the piece of unadorned hamachi we recently had during an omakase feast at Sushi of Gari. I'd rather a little less fuss and more flavor.

I suppose it is entirely possible that I did not understand what Liebrandt is doing, or that I am understating the quality of the food. There is no doubt, for example, that our lobster (blessed with a somewhat inexplicable $8 supplement) was glorious: a kellerian tail of sumptuous Maine lobster barely cooked, barely wet with a butter sauce that seemed almost superfluous and yet still welcome.

Nor can I do anything but give the highest praise for the starter of foie gras covered in corton's much ballyhooed cherry hibiscus gelee. Without doubt, this is one of the best foie gras's in the city. His chocolates are good, the service is almost seamless, the space a pleasant environment to eat a great meal.

In the end, though, based on only one visit, Corton feels a little empty to me. I looked for a while, during dinner, at the thin leaf of kombu on the hamachi plate. It was beautiful- intricate beeige and black patterns that seemed to change somewhat in the sort lights of the restaurant. When I put this miraculous piece of natural art in my mouth, though, the magic flitted away as I slowly chewed the dried seaweed, thinking of bygone days waiting for communion wafers to dissolve in my mouth in elementary school. That is my lasting impression of Corton, until I visit again. Feyly beautiful, and yet lacking just a little bit.

Movin' in ragu

Our apartment is slowly beginning to look like a home, but yesterday was another day full of boxes, screws, wooden planks, and the like, In the evening I finally curled up with this simple ragu of extremely poor italian wine (chateau bubble-yum, to steal Jacques Pepin's joke) san marzano tomatoes, and chicken thighs. I also added red pepper flakes and cracked black pepper along with the requisite onions and garlic, and then stewed everything for about twenty minutes.

If I had been doing this properly, there would have been carrots and herbs and maybe a simple green salad with it. But sometimes, all you need is dinner. So it was conchigle and ragu instead, buried under sharp pecorino romano.

Days

I have had an extraordinary few days, which have left me both exhausted and, unexpectedly*, extremely proud of my country. Those who know what I've been doing will, I suppose, be able to work out what I mean.

Back to cooking this weekend. It's time to celebrate!

* obviously, I mean unexpectedly proud in the sense that what I was doing isn't usually connected to feelings of spontaneous patriotism - not that I am surprised that I am proud of my country, which I always am.

Leadership personalities

In my other life as a fanatical (American) football fan, I've spent the last 15 years moping about the condition of my beloved Washington football team. They don't really look any better this year, and part of the reason might be their cool as ice head coach, Jim Zorn.

I'm not in the NFL, but I do work in highest pressure end of a high pressure industry. Though we're mostly flabby, white and balding, lawyers at my firm have some similarities in terms of competitiveness and drive to professional athletes, and the dynamics of a litigation team or deal team are not so different than a sports team. I can tell you that all my colleagues much prefer to work for straightforward people who will tell you what you did wrong and what they preferred rather than passive aggressive people who give half hearted praise. Yeah, the former are usually enormous jerks on a personal level, but this is business, and at least you know where you stand and how to improve.


I wonder if that's one of the problems in Washington.

Sushi of Gari Omakase

We recently enjoyed an omakase dinner at Sushi of Gari here in New York.  I cannot remember all the things that we had, as it was somewhat of a feast, but am sure that we had sushi of lobster, shrimp, black bass, snapper, tuna (o-toro), normal tuna, salmon, horse mackerel, eel and several other fish, and also a delicious cooked oyster.  Each sushi was topped with Gari's increasingly wild sauces - the salmon's signature tomato sauce, a tofu whip, dried seaweed, etc.  Magnificent.  Omakase is a bad (or at least, expensive) habit to acquire. 

I could have done with a little more informative jabber from the chef, but we are newbies, and I suppose don't rate that quite yet. 

Arepas?

I'm in the middle of settling down in my new apartment, so things are in a bit of an uproar here.  While sorting through my bags of flours (I never thought I'd say this, but I need those glass canisters one gets at places like Crate & Barrel) I found some cornmeal.  I combined that with a couple of ears of leftover corn to make pseudo-arepas: 1/2 cup of cornmeal mixed with warm milk and butter, with corn and chilis folded in.  I fried them in a pan with a little oil and topped them with omelette. 

Crescat Kitchen

My friend, Will B. is back blogging, this time about food. He asks and discusses the new-world question of whether cookbooks are dead in the world of internet recipe compendiums.

There is no doubt to me that cookbook are compendium of recipes are largely dead, or dying, at least outside baking. But technique books, although some of them are disguised as "food p$rn", are alive and well. For example, both the Alinea cookbook and Thomas Keller's Under Pressure, although both are stuffed full of highly airbrushed art, are also major contributions by pioneers of an important cooking style. They are studied, pored over and mimicked by professional cooks across the country. They are the avenues through which the cutting edge is transformed into the quotidian.

In other words, if you're eating sous vide short ribs in your local upscale restaurant in Oklahoma City, say, it's either because the cook there did a stage at Per Se (or the equivalent) or because they read and studied Under Pressure. That kind of cookbook simply isn't in competition with epicurious.

Creamed Corn and Lamb

I managed to escape the office early for the first time in a while, and ran home for some late summer feasting. I made creamed corn inspired by this post on Bitten, and added some lamb spiked heavily with smoked paprika on top (I just threw the lamb under our toaster oven broiler until a pink medium). I made the creamed corn with milk, as I had no cream, and enriched it further with a little lower fat soy spread (shame, I know, but that's what I had on hand - one cannot be too picky with the first dinner at home in a few weeks).

Life is rollin' over me

I am dealing with multiple mini-crises (moving to a new place, uncooperative landlord, wedding plans, work, and a short weekend vacation) and just haven't cooked very much. Last weekend, I did make turbot with wine sauce, and we ate a quite good epoisses cheese of which I have some good pictures, but I haven't had the mental energy to get them onto the blog.

So instead of food, let's post this excerpt from a New York Times article from the late 19th century, describing an armenian wedding. As I tell my friends, this really hasn't changed very much:

"There followed a distressingly long church services, during parts of which the bride and bridegroom, sometimes standing, sometimes kneeling, were tied together with a golden chain . . . facing one another, and so closely that their faces almost touched, both casting their eyes to the ground, the poor bridegroom looking exceedingly sheepish . . . All the time the two were yoked together the best man held between them very close to their faces a little silver crucifix . . . ."

Spendthrifts

I've seen this working paper on the attraction between spendthrifts and tightwads in the blogosphere today. I haven't read it yet, but thinking about my own life, my fiancee and I are actually pretty similar in terms of our spending habits. If I was forced to label ourselves, I would say we were either "selective spendthrifts" or "tightwads by reason of pickiness", which is to say that we are usually very thrifty, except that we will deploy very large sums of money for stuff we think highly valuable.

The trick is that the list of things we think are highly valuable is small, so, for example, I end up wearing a mix of dress shoes so expensive I'm ashamed to mention them and shoes I bought used off e-bay, whereas someone less odd would nix the former and just buy a bunch of new, reasonably priced, Allen Edmonds.

Trinidad Sour

We were recently at Dutch Kills here in Astoria to soak away some woes. We met bartender Guiseppe Gonzalez, who made me his own creation, the Trinidad Sour (I'll give you a hundred bucks if you can guess the base spirit in that, he said. The answer? Angostura bitters!) Just delicious, and entirely unexpected.

Odd interview

I only now noticed this odd interview by Ezra Klein, which Megan McCardle has dealt with. But I wanted to point out the underlined sentence below. Apparently, drug companies are bad because they have administrative costs and such. Unlike their chief competitors, universit . . . Oh. Wait. (see p. 33 for the punch line).


"You occasionally hear that a national health-care system would have a devastating impact on medical innovation -- and particularly on drug research. As the thinking goes, the system would save money, but in saving money, it would reduce profits for drug manufacturers, which would reduce the incentives for innovation. Is this worth worrying about?

No, it isn't. . . . There are a couple reasons that this is a specious argument. One is that according to their filings with the SEC, the drug companies only spend about 15 cents of every dollar on research and development. That's compared to more than 30 cents in administration and marketing and more than 20 cents on shareholder equity. As an investment in R&D, I think any venture capitalist would say a company spending 15 percent on research is not a robust innovation engine".

kidnapping

I don't know whether it is right to negotiate with the North Koreans or not, but didn't we just teach the world that if you want a visit from a very high level American emissary, you just need to kidnap a couple of Americans? I'm very puzzled.

Quick bites

We had some friends over this weekend. I made margaritas, and two kinds of quick bites, before we adjourned to Astoria favorite Agnanti for some killer greek food.

Mini Crab Cakes - I used some claw crab meat from Wholefoods, to which I added lemon zest, parsley, salt, pepper, a little lemon juice, and a few whole wheat bread crumbs from a leftover breakfast toast. I dipped them in egg and breaded them in panko bread crumbs I had put through the food processor. I fried in a little olive oil, and then warmed up at party time in the toaster oven. Each little cake was topped with tartare (store bought mayonnaise, cornichons, salt-cured capers, and lemon) and a little piece of chive.

Gougeres - This is so easy, though I prefer choux in an eclair. Put a cup of water in a pan. Melt 4 tb of butter in the water at the boil, and add a little salt. Pour 4-4.25 ounces of flour (a cup, in other words) into the water all at once, pull off the heat, and stir enthusiastically. Put back on the heat, and dry the resulting dough. What you're trying to achieve is a soft, pretty oily dough that doesn't stick to your hands when you squeeze it. Dry the dough until it leaves a film on the bottom of the pan. Then let cool a little, and beat in 4 eggs one at a time until you have something that looks like mayonnaise. At this point, at flavoring - I used a lot of cheese and dijon mustard. Pipe into little balls, top with egg wash, and cook at 375 until golden brown.

Allegretti

We had not been to a proper restaurant in some time, due mostly to the fact that I have been pretty busy. So on Saturday night, we visited Allegretti, the eponymous two star restaurant of Alain Allegretti, who immigrated to New York from Alain Ducasse's magisterial Louis XV in Monaco. We thought it was terrific - I could not have been reminded more of our meal at Hostellerie Berard last August in the South of France, just after we got engaged. The brief notes I posted on egullet follow:

We went last night as well, based on recommendations from here. A few observations before getting to food. The dining room was *empty*. So empty that I asked one of the staff what was going on. He said that they had only 14 reservations for last night (Saturday) but were expecting 70-80 on both Monday and Tuesday, an odd quirk of traffic he attributed to the fact that their core customer spends August weekends sunning themselves in the Hamptons. Take that for what you will. I also noticed that the tables no longer sported the "crisp white linens" Bruni half-mocked in his review. I wonder whether that is an intentional nod towards the mood.

In terms of what we ate, we intended to have the prix fixe, but it didn't really speak to me. I would have been happy with the striped bass that was on offer as a main course, but wanted neither a ricotta tart or either starter. So we went off into the carte. Happily this was a good choice.

First courses: We had the Taste of Nice and the Octopus a la plancha. While the Taste of Nice is perhaps a little overwrought in the sense that I'm not sure I want six different preparations on a plate, each item was delicious. I especially enjoyed the pissaladiere loaf, which I had never seen before, and the squash blossoms. As for the stuffed red pepper, my only comment is that Allegretti must keep a squadron of Armenian grandmothers imprisoned in the back, as it tasted exactly like my own grandmother's dolma.The octopus was presented as a single long tentacle, lightly dusted with pimenton and served with potatoes. There's not much to say about it, other than that I found it terrific. Tender, well seasoned. Just a very enjoyable dish.

Main Course: Black and White taglietelle with seafood: I had been wanting the seafood soup as a first course, but ended up with the octopus. But the black and white taglietelle with shellfish was a noble substitute, as it replicated much of the flavors one would expect in such a soup - certainly fennel and a little spice creeping around the edges. The shrimp dotting the pasta were perhaps the best cooked shrimp I have ever enjoyed - just this side of wobbly. Cod with Crispy mussels: This was seafood cookery every bit the equal of Le Bernardin. The cod was barely opaque, skin crisp, and the saffron sauce gave the whole thing some needed flavor. As for the crispy mussels, I am sure there was some sort of sweet spice in the breading (clove?), which imbued the whole thing with a sort of North African flair.

Dessert: We shared the peach frangipane. A classic dough, excellent peaches, and a delicious peach gelato. Yes, as others have said, perhaps not a $10 dessert, but I didn't care.We also had cocktails before the meal. Many thumbs up to the Cucumber sling, a refreshing summer drink involving muddled cucumbers, lime, cilantro (!) and mint with 2 oz of Hendrick's gin. Not quite what you'd get at one of the big cocktail lounges, but very nice nonetheless.

Buried

I am buried under a lot of work and other things, but what is the (food world) uproar about this study about? Organic food is no healthier than other food, supposedly. But the way I read it is that the study shows that organic food has no more nutrients than other food.

Did anyone ever think the point of organic food is that it has more nutrients? I thought the point was that the food was not layered with pesticides, and that occasionally it tasted better. But the way I see it, the study discussed neither of those issues.

Non-original thoughts on health-care

Reading through Ezra Klein's morning discussion on health-care raises what to me is the fundamental problem with the left-wing health-care argument. (See, I'm fair to Klein. He might know less than nothing about food, but health care he seems to understand something about, and I do not).

So Klein says that the goal is to reduce national health care expenditures - what I understand as the aggregate spending on health care in the entire country, public and private. And the way to do this, I understand him to believe, is to use so-called "public option" to reduce costs. Fine.

As others have observed, I assume that Klein does not think it is a good idea to organize other parts of our economy in this way. After all, you can make exactly the same arguments about car production, and yet no one would say that we should reduce our national expenditure on cars by having government produce standardized cars with lower, negotiated prices. I recognize that smart people have constructed arguments about why the health care market is different, but I confess I do not completely understand them. But the left argument is dependent on the truth of this proposition.

Even granting the proposition, the bottom line really is that I do not believe there is an appreciable surplus of real waste in private sector healthcare as opposed to the public sector. I suspect, though cannot prove, that the reason national health care expenditures are lower in other countries are a combination of much lower compensation for health care professionals, lower drug costs, much less extraordinary care, and lower creature comforts in hospitals. I would assume an honest liberal would say all those things are true and are the proper cost for ensuring health care for all. Beware anyone who does not grant the truth of those propositions.

I think the left has to face up to the fact that getting universality of coverage and lower aggregate costs means persuading people who already have insurance to accept worse service or higher costs for their current level of service. I don't think they have done this forthrightly.

Still busy

The topic of the U.S. Senate and its undemocratic nature (and more specifically, whether that undemocratic nature is a problem) is usually the bailiwich of Professor Levinson at Balkinization, but I wanted to flag a recent decision by the highest German court effectively delaying German ratification of the Lisbon treaty, a much maligned bit of legislation designed to further bind Europe together.

I haven't had the time to read the document entirely, and it is in a stilted translation of assuredly already stilted legal German. Nonetheless, I found the the following of some interest. The German court held that the Lisbon treaty as it was currently constituted violated the Basic Law. Why? Because a single German representative in the European parliament represented far more people than his or her colleague in Malta or Sweden or any smaller country:

"According to the Draft decision, a Member of the European Parliament elected in France would represent approximately 857,000 citizens of the Union and thus as many as a Member elected in Germany, who represents approximately 857,000 as well. In contrast, a Member of the European Parliament elected in Luxembourg would, however, only represent approximately 83,000 Luxembourg citizens of the Union, i.e. a tenth of them, in the case of Malta, it would be approximately 67,000, or only roughly a twelfth of them."

But is this always a violation of general democratic principles? No, said the German court. Just in a representative chamber of government:

"In federal states, such marked imbalances are, as a general rule, only tolerated for the second chamber existing beside Parliament; in Germany and Austria, the second chamber is the Bundesrat, in Australia, Belgium and the United States of America, it is the Senate".

The Court's decision implies all kinds of interesting things, but, alas, I must run. Perhaps later.

Taxes

Do people really think the proposed 45% tax rate on the wealthy will be the last tax increase? Hey, "middle" class (i.e., everyone else) - your turn is coming.

I am delaying things

In an effort to delay my weekend's food blogging (I made my version of Jean-George's caviar egg and turbot with Chateau Chalon sauce) I note today this article about the plight of adjunct professors at universities.

I note it because the situation perfectly illustrates my point about European social democracy, below. It is very pleasant, in some ways, for the winners of the system, to be either a tenured professor or an employed European. Both people are almost impossible to fire, have many benefits, etc.

But woe to those who aspire to one of those two classes.

Ok, you win

I am reading David Kessler's, The End of Overeating, which describes how the food industry exploits biological reality by relying on fat, salt and sugar to encourage overeating (or, at least, that is the message so far).

The odd thing is that I find the book impossible to read, because Kessler's descriptions of the fat, salt and sugar, even though his descriptions touch on things I don't eat (like mass produced snack cakes) cause my mouth to water so much that I find myself distracted and searching for a mass produced snack cake. This is a little startling. So, point taken, Mr. Kessler.

A note on social democracy

For some reason, my republican cohorts have decided that the way to oppose President Obama is to describe various parades of horribles that will occur if he gets his way, many of which have something to do with Europe. See this overwrought example.

The problem with these is that they are false. In fact, life in Europe is very pleasant. For many people, far more pleasant than here. You are taken care of in sickness. Holidays are long and leisour-ous. Children are valued by the state. Jobs, if you have them, are secure. Retirements are less plagued by worry. Obama clearly intends to import some of these ideas, and people are going to like them.

Not recognizing that second point is going to land us conservatives in trouble. People like the welfare state. They are wrong to do so, maybe, and I think America has the balance between individual autonomy and the state's leviathan more right than does Europe. But the idea that our people will revolt when given Obama's welfare state is just wrong. They are going to like it and ask for more, to our detriment. Our counterattack has to recognize the superficial attractions of that model.

A new book

I received a new book in the mail today (ironically at the same time as I start thinking about what to do with my hundreds of books prior to moving in the near future): Au Revoir to all That: Food, Wine and the End of France. It begins positively, and the writing is very good. I suspect I might conclude that the book is overly alarmist about the collapse of the French gourmet culture, but I am open to being convinced.

A thought

If my explanation to myself of why I am buying some thing or service is any longer than a few words, I'm going to make a mistake by buying that thing or service.

A late night boozy snack

My fiancee was out on her own last Sunday night, so I took the opportunity to prepare a snack for her return. The base for my effort was the bottle of blue Sapphire gin I had bought earlier in the day. But gin is the most versatile of liquors, and the range of cocktails one can make with gin is almost limitless. Still, I settled quickly on the Singapore Sling, which has been a sort of inside joke in my family for a long time. (The joke is that my father, who doesn't really drink cocktails, always orders it when it seems like one ought to order a cocktail, and the bartender invariably either doesn't know what it is or doesn't have one of the ingredients or, if he or she is of a certain age, does know what it is but makes a comment about no one having ordered a singapore sling unironically since the mid '60s).


Unfortunately, I didn't have Benedictine, one of the components of the traditional drink, but I decided to substitute cognac. Otherwise, the alcoholic ingredients were these (from left to right, Remy Martin VSOP cognac, Cointreau, grenadine (fake - boo!), Bombay Sapphire gin, and Heerings Cherry Liqueur.



Unfortunately, Singapore Slings also include at least 4 oz. of pineapple juice, and after all the effort to secure a small bottle of Heerings, I thought it was a shame to just pop open the usual tin. However, I also don't own a juicer, so I did the only thing I could think of - whizz up a pineapple in a food processor and pass it through a sieve. This worked fine, though it is a hassle.



Singapore Slings need to be poured into a collins glass full of crushed ice. I had neither, but approximated the crushed ice by putting my normal ice into two ziplocs as an impromptu Lewis Bag and smashing it with my heavy mortar. Voila - Singapore Slings.

This left the snack. But luckily, my cream puff pastry has gotten better over the past year, so I immediately thought of gougeres - roughly speaking, cream puffs with cheese in. I slightly undercooked these due to the hurry I was in, but I thought they were delicious.

In fact, I proudly claimed they were at least as good as the $8 appetizers at Death & Co. My fiancee scrunched up her nose and said, "Aren't they more like the $5 pretzel nuggets?".

Places I want to eat

So my list of places I want to eat is growing, and yet I am economizing to save my waistline and budget. After all (as to the latter) we have a wedding and then a moving-in together to fund in October!

So instead of actually dining, let me make lists of places I want to go:

Corton - Paul Liebrandt does some exciting cuisine.

The bar at Adour Alain Ducasse - Ducasse dishes for under $15 at the four person holographic wine bar in the St. Regis.

Eleven Madison Park - People keep talking about it.

Daniel - We have idiosyncratic reasons for wanting to go back to Daniel.

Tailor - Modern food with good drinks.

Wd-50 - even more modern food, also with good drinks.

Paris is know for its falafels

Amber points out that Ezra Klein has, unaccountably, been given a food column in the Washington Post. My views about Klein's food writing have been abundantly well aired on this blog, so I'll leave my reaction at this: ?!?!!. Also, ?!.

It had escaped my attention, though, that Klein's diabolically bad food blog, the Internet Food Association, also includes blogging by Matt Yglesias. In this post, he makes a reasonable point about a Slate column (i.e., the column is pointless and doesn't match its title) and then adds the equally reasonable observation that France is blessed by an "extremely high level of pedestrian food". Yes, certainly true. Pate, bread, cheese, hams, vegetables of very high quality, milk, butter, cheap bistros, surely. But no! Yglesias was actually referring to "Vietnamese restaurants and falafel shops that would be huge sensations in the United States".

What is Yglesias even talking about? First, the falafel and Vietnamese in Paris are fine, but pretty plain. This is what you eat in Paris when, after the sixth round of epoisse in three days washed down with pork rilettes, you realize that if you eat any more French food you might die. But in fact the great weakness of Paris as a food city, if a weakness it has, it that its ethnic offerings are far more narrow than some of its competitors, and mostly not as good. (See, New York, London). Putting aside the two supposed examples Yglesias gives, the Chinese food is execrable. There is little Indian. Little Thai. Little really good sushi, and the median of sushi is lower. I could probably write dozens of pages on this topic and not exhaust the point. But the real point is that all this is irrelevant. Paris is one of the greatest food cities in the world because of French food. As you might imagine.

Moreover, sensations in the United States? Yglesias, as far as I know, lives about half an hour from what is arguably the locus of Vietnamese cooking in America. Paris's Vietnamese restaurants would be sensations in that area in the sense that they would be flops, made sensational by the fact that they were flopped French vietnamese restaurants. And the idea that one gets exceptional falafel in Paris, so exceptional that those are the things you would mention as examples of good food in Paris - it's not really clear to me how to respond to that. He's wrong. It's as if I said one goes to DC for falafels. Put another way, wrong.

EDIT: Also, as to the substantive point of the Slate article, it is true that French food has declined in quality in the past decade. This has nothing, in my view, to do with Michelin, which after all could only concievably cause a decline in the highest of the high (the Michelin-is-hamstringing-France argument goes something like this - France can't have its own Momofuku because of the Michelin Guide's requirement that a 3-star restaurant be opulent, and therefore its higher end cuisine is staid and falling behind America and Spain) but with a decline in French taste.

Having said that, I do think now is not the time to be serving 130 euro main courses.

EDIT 2: I meant 198 euro main courses. In other words, a main course that costs more than an entire meal at Per Se.

Green Chartreuse

We had a midweek escapade at Death & Co. tonight. The drinks were as usual terrific, and we got face to face with Green Chartreuse, a deeply herbal French liqueur.

As our bartender noted, doing shots of chartreuse is known as being run over by the chartremoose. It is a startling drink, like sipping on a tree infused in greek fire.

Busy, busy

I haven't blogged because I am quite busy with about 5 different things, but I did want to note our visit last night to Company, Jim Lahey's pizza house (my previous visit is here). The pizzas are still good, and still inferior to Motorino's, though I have to say the meatball was extraordinarily flavorful. And I do not quite understand how Lahey gets away with charging $3 for literally one piece of toast with a spread as an appetizer.

Above all, this really is more a bakery than a pizzeria. Lahey's bread is masterful, without question. I wonder whether the right answer here might not be a pizza bianca, without toppings, and a salad. Our simple caprese was, unexpectedly given the season, magnificent.

The Passionate Epicure

I am in the middle of The Passionate Epicure, a 1924 food novel by Marcel Rouf concerning a gourmet by the name of Mr. Dodin-Bouffant.

The novel raises an interesting, cross-genre question for me. I don't have The Lord of the Rings in front of me, but I remember that Bilbo is renowned for having a particularly good table. Dodin-Bouffant, in the book, is thought to be one of the foremost gourmands in France, and that reputation is not for writing or speaking about food, but for the food at home, and his discerning taste in wine and produce.

But in neither case does the gourmand in question actually cook any food. Far from it - most of The Passionate Epicure is about the process of replacing Dodin-Bouffant's deceased chef, a process that goes so poorly that Dodin-Bouffant is almost left with what Rouf paints as a terrible choice between the great gourmand donning the whites and cooking himself, or going to the mediocre restaurant in town. So from what precisely does Dodin-Bouffant's culinary reputation emanate? Picking really good cooks? Making exorbitant criticisms of others chefs? Menu design? (as to this last, the only really famous chapter of The Passionate Epicure is an account of a meal served by Dodin-Bouffant to a travelling European prince).

Why am I writing about this? Because, of course, I would like to have a culinary reputation of Dodin-Bouffant's kind, in my own small way. But the modern model of that is of a highly skilled home cook - read, Richard Olney. It intrigues me that for a man, at least, that model is of fairly recent vintage, and it has replaced an odd form of food mastery.

Thoughts

The most interesting thing I read today was the offering memorandum from Milk Thistle Farms, LLC. Food savy New Yorkers will know Milk Thistle as the producer of that excellent but super expensive milk in glass jars at Whole Foods and the Union Square Market. Unable to get traditional bank financing, they are apparently trying to get bond financing from the general public. They have their own counsel, and of course I offer no opinion as to their documents, but I do think they need to be quite careful. When you hold yourself out to the public in this way, danger abounds, and bondholders are not powerless.

Weekend Eats

We had some excellent food at home over the weekend. Some details briefly follow:

- I made french fries with the traditional double frying technique, at 350 F followed by a full drying on a sheet pan followed by a second fry at 375. I think the results were terrific, and I found that the peanut oil I used gave them a great flavor.

- I made a quick hamburger bun for the accompanying burger, though I wish I had actually had eggs. On the other hand, cooking is not always about having all the right ingredients, so I substituted some whole fat milk.

- I tried Bittman's tofu chocolate pudding. It was good, but did not make me forget cream.

- We made margaritas on both Saturday and Sunday at home, with Patron Silver, cointreau* and fresh lime juice. We also played around with increasing and decreasing the lime and cointreau, to see how those changes unbalanced the drink. It was very interesting.

* Yes, margaritas are usually made with triple sec. Cointreau, which I suppose is a kind of triple sec, is better.

- Saturday night I decided to do a little "Chipotle/upscale pseudo-Mexican burrito joint" at home. I cooked pinto beans in water until soft and creamy, and brown rice. I brined chicken thighs for extra juiciness, and then marinated in a dry adobo rub. I made guacamole of good avocadoes, and a fresh salsa supplemented with tinned san marazanos to make up for the poor quality of the tomatoes. The last two items got jalepeno too.

The point to make about this meal is that it could be scaled up very easily for a party. It's no more effort to make half a pound of beans than it is to make five pounds of beans, I think.

Top Chef: Masters

A quick note to laud Top Chef: Masters - judging from the first episode only, won by Hubert Keller, it's a very pleasant, light hearted show. The challenge posed, to cook a three course meal off a hot plate, microwave and toaster oven in a Pomona College dorm room, put these top chefs (and they are top chefs, rather than pseudo top chefs - Christopher Lee especially, who finished in 2nd place, is a New York star) in interesting situations. Keller even ran for the bathroom to refresh his pasta.

All in all, a good laugh.

Weekday dinner - pasta with tuna and capers

I had the opportunity to rush out of my job a little earlier than usual last night, and was so delighted to be able to cook during the week for once. Still, even getting home "early" (i.e., 7 pm) doesn't leave much time too cook before it gets too late to eat a lot. So I opted for one of the fastest meals I know - pasta with tuna, onions and capers.

There's literally nothing to this. Slice onions and sautee on medium heat until golden brown. Add garlic. Add half a can of San Marzano tomatoes. Add good italian tuna (the kind in the jar packed in olive oil). Add good, salted capers. Cook your pasta, add to the sauce and cook until the pasta is done, and serve.

Can you make the same dish with normal stewed tomatoes, normal supermarket tuna, and the capers packed in that odd vinegar brine? Obviously. And it will taste really pretty good. I happen to live in Astoria, and there is an excellent Italian deli at the foot of the train station. So I go there rather than the supermarket when I can. But all of those premium ingredients are just the cherry on top of a dish that's always good.

Having said that, the premium italian tuna I'm talking about is exceptional. Dressed with a little lemon and quality olive oil, it's dinner for two with perhaps a tomato salad on the side.

A puzzle

Here's something I don't understand at all. Why does commercial peanut butter have the same nutritional values (calories and fat, primarily), as peanut butter made of only peanuts?)

I suppose the answer is that the commercial peanut butter producers add oil to equal the fat content of pure peanuts, but it still puzzles me.

Vegetable Stew

This is my version of Jacques Pepin's grandmother's vegetable stew, normally served as a side dish with roast chicken (as I served it) or fish, or with anything else. There really is no technique here whatever - cut up all the vegetables that are the freshest available, drop them into a pot with some olive oil, and cook for a minute. Add flour to make a sort of roux, cook the roux for a minute, and add water. As it cooks, the stew will thicken.

Pan roasted skate with Salad

There's really nothing difficult here. Extremely fresh skate, roasted briefly in a pan on medium heat. It is served with some very peppery watercress that I tamed with fingerling potatoes and olive oil vinaigrette.

Roast Chicken

This is a placeholder for roasted chicken with morels.

Blueberry Tart

This is a placeholder for blueberry tart with creme patissiere.

Birthday 2009

So, yesterday was my 30th birthday - the sort of a milestone best treated with food and drink.

Accordingly, we had lunch at Jean-Georges, not far from my firm at Columbus Circle, followed later by drinks at Death & Co.

Well versed through my reading of various boards in the mysteries of the $28 lunch menu (as everyone says, the best deal in New York), we each ordered a prix fixe, supplemented with a shared foie gras course and a shared dessert. I paired "tastes" (aka 3 oz. pours) of wine with each savoury course.

Before recapitulating the meal, though, I have a sort of mea culpa to make. The last time I visited Jean-Georges was five years ago. While my original post seems to have vanished into the ether, somehow, there is a link to it from another blog. The bottom line is that I didn't like Jean-Georges, and proceeded to badmouth it for the next five years.

It's unclear whether my tastes have changed or matured, or whether JG is somehow better, or what, but my experience yesterday was quite different. As someone at eGullet explained, it's the difference between an awkward summer associate lunch and lunch with your significant other on your birthday. The point, however, is that we thought our lunch was quite wonderful, and at a (for a 3 michelin star restaurant) gentle price.

Some notes follow:

Amuse Bouche: Fresh mozzarella topped with dehydrated pineapple (tasted almost like candy, that), a fritter of peekytoe crab, and a light soup of herbs. This last was refreshing and especially delicious, all fragrant aroma and light flavor.

1st course:

My soup of young garlic with frog's legs is the kind of thing I could eat every day and never tire of. It reeked, if one could possibly use that word of something so civilized, of garlic made elegant, dotted with micro greens. The frog's legs were perfect drumsticks, with the delicate flesh that characterizes frog entirely unobscured. Of course, one could just as easily eat this soup with snails, on a kebab perhaps (dip snail. Eat).

There's not quite as much to say about my fiancee's ribbons of tuna. This was thick ribbons of extremely fresh, raw, tuna, dressed with a cold, spicy, ginger sauce atop avocado puree. Preferable by far to some very expensive sushi we have had in New York in freshness and stridency of flavor. The ginger sauce was magnificent.

Wine: Trimbach Riesling. A dependable, affordable riesling I've had many times before (perhaps $15 a bottle at retail?), and it was as good as ever.

Second Course: We shared the famed foie gras brulee, as I was not in a mood to ingest a full foie gras course, and yet was still unwilling to forgoe it because the foie gras was the main source of my ire five years ago. It is a classic torchon of foie gras, whipped, forced into a cylinder, and poached, but then given sweetness with a crispy creme brulee top, and served with a sharp pineapple meyer lemon jam. On my previous visit, I had been overwhelmed by sweet and fat. This time, we were delighted, and whether it was the exceptional 2003 1er cru Chassagne-Montrachet white bordeaux we drank with it ($12.50 for the 3 oz. pour), which paired exceptionally well with the liver, or the fact that I was in a better mood, or whether simply because I only ate half, my impression of the course was completely different.

Third Course:

I like skate, the fish, very much, and indeed had cooked it at home just a day or two ago (pictures to come, eventually), and so I jumped on the opportunity to order skate with Jean-Georges justly famous chateau chalon sauce, a classic wine reduction lightened in the usual JG style to be almost refreshing. This is a great dish.

My fiancee had veal, cooked just au point, with a veal jus reduction. Nothing surprising here, but still extremely well executed and delicious.

Wine: I have forgotten the wine, other than the fact that it was from Bergerac. A strongly tannic red which softened under the dual sauces to soft deliciousness.

Dessert: We shared "chocolate", which paired a perfectly decent molten chocolate cake with exceptionally good vanilla ice cream and a peppermint broth, which was by far the most interesting part of the dessert. I would eat the broth alone, dotted perhaps with chocolate nibs, in far greater quantity than the other two components of the dessert. It tasted of mint ice cream, somehow, yet uncluttered with the flavors of cream and eggs.

We took a brief pit stop in my office at work, to digest and jabber, and then went off to our second stop for the evening, the ever fantastic Death & Co. on east 6th street. There, after suffering in between two tables of screaming banshees (the one talking in the loudest possible voices about a topic I could not understand, and the others comparing their experiences smoking hashish), we escaped to the bar for our second drinks. There, we met Greg Boehm of Mud Puddle Books, which certainly appears to be the premier republisher of old cocktilian books in America, whose dedication to cocktails is inspiring in the way that a devotee of anything is inspiring. Talking to Greg is like talking to a great baker or cobbler or someone of that sort, all combined with an adventuresome businessman. We also took the opportunity to jabber to the bartender as he made me an Oxacaca Old Fashioned, all peat and smoke, and my fiancee her new favorite drink, a City of Gold Sling. This all led to a discussion of my father's standby cocktail, the Singapore Sling, and how recipes for that drink have shifted and modulated over the years, with changes in taste and even changes in the recipes for gins.

Two terrific tips for ordering in a cocktail bar I gathered last night:

You ought to be able to order something interesting in any bar by specifying either "dark or light" and "shaken or stirred". The first indicates to the bartender whether you want rye or whiskey or light rum or dark, or whatever. The second indicates whether you want citrus or not, as citrus based drinks are shaken. I think I am usually a dark stirred person, though I love orange in my drinks (whether as bitters or as a twist or whatever).

Second, you can always ask a bar tender to make you something from the menu for which he is responsible. As it was explained to me, if the bartender's own drink is on the menu, you're likely to get his or her best effort.

Steak

"It smells a little like a dog"?

{Sniff}

"Yes, but a tasty dog".

That was our conversation on Sunday, as my meat-splurge of the week, a 24 ounce dry aged rib eye from Christos Steakhouse, came off my grill at home. It's true that real dry aging gives meat a bit of a funk, and if you do nothing but inhale, the aroma can be a little heady (like blue cheese or a mushroom, I'd say). But cooked, the flavor is absolutely worth it.

In fact, I'm now more and more convinced that eating a steak in a restaurant is a waste of time, if what you are after is food rather than simply a convivial place to sit. As long as you have a good butcher, or some availability of really good beef (or lamb, or whatever), there is literally nothing more to cooking it than putting it in a pan or a grill on medium heat*, leaving it there for some period, and then flipping for another period of cooking. Sure, if you want, you can get fancy and baste it with butter or whatever else. But when you're dealing with a prime dry aged rib eye, that seems like a waste of time to me. And I'll take my sides over a steakhouse's anyday.

We enjoyed our steak with a $7 bottle of Three Knights merlot from Trader Joe Wine Shop. A very pleasant, drinkable, wine.

* I have given up entirely on the "get the pan/grill piping hot and sear the steak to a crisp" school of cookery (as I foreshadowed here). First, juices do not "seal", no matter how much you char the exterior. The maillard reaction flavors you want, and the thick, crunchy, crust, can be achieved without all the smoke and to-do of a piping hot pan. A medium sizzle does just as well. Second, I can get perfect medium, medium-rare with this technique, with even cooking on both sides of the meat. That's a challenge with the flamethrower technique others recommend. Third, this gives me lots of time to make a salad, while the steak is pan roasting.

** Caveat: I suppose with a thin steak, you'd still want to apply a slightly higher heat, as it might cook before you get it crusty.

Excess

I think Michael White of new hype machine restaurant Marea ought to be a little embarrased to be selling four morels stuffed with shrimp for $21 as an antipasto. Come on.

Hamburgers

We were invited to a family barbecue this past weekend, and I knew that all the Armenian holiday food bases would be covered (i.e., kebabs). But given the nature of the holiday, I decided to take some burgers and a berry tart along as well.

I'll have pictures of both eventually. For now, I'll say that I ground the meat for the burger myself from a mix of choice chuck and hangar steak. I love hangar, and it gave the resulting burgers a deeper less purely fatty taste than chuck alone. They were cooked, obviously, over coals.

The tart was just as simple. I made a quick cookie dough (3 oz flour, 3 oz butter, 2 tB ice water) rolled it out in a square and baked until golden. While it was baking, I made a simple pastry cream, or creme patissiere (any recipe will do, except that I think whole milk is essential). Once everything had cooled, I spread the cookie crust with cream, and covered the whole with semi-tart blackberries. The perfect light dessert.

Pizza

There's little I enjoy more in the world of cookery than making either bread or neapolitan pizza at home.  On Thursday, I started some pizza dough following Jim Lahey's no knead recipe,which is here.   

To be honest, the only difference between his recipe and the one I've commonly used is the long, warm, rising time and the proportion (or ratio, if we're channeling Michael Ruhlman) of water to flour.  Of course, aside from that, how's the play, Mrs. Lincoln? Those are the building blocks of true breads and doughs (i.e., ones that aren't littered with seeds and grains and nuts and raisins). 

The resulting dough is extremely difficult to handle (as Lahey himself says).  It is wet, and shaggy, like a ciabatta left to soak in a light mist.   But it produces some amazing flavor - really amazing flavor.  And yes, as the menu as Co., Lahey's pizzeria, says, "our pies are not always round."

Now if I could only get my oven and stone above 550.  

UPDATE: Yes, the picture stinks.  Blackberry, and it's rotated.  I'll fix it later.

UPDATE 2: Cheese is buffalo mozzarella.  Sauce is canned italian cherry tomatoes, garlic, basil.  None of it cooked. 

Cooking method - on a baking stone in an oven cranked up to the max for an hour prior to baking.  You are trying to duplicate a 900 degree Italian pizza oven, or at least get as close as possible.

The debate

Beyond all the anti-Cheney fear mongering, the debate between the President and former Vice President Cheney is actually very good substantively. One wishes, perhaps, that it had happened earlier.

Per Se

I have a one sided feud with Ezra Klein as it relates to food (see here and here and here and here) which can be summed up with the observation that I think he understands nothing about food or cooking or agriculture or anything at all related to eating. Underneath it all, I suspect it is my jealousy that his (I'm sure deserved) platform in political writing lets him babble nonsensically about food.

Anyway, the latest episode is here, wherein I comment on Klein's ridiculous "review" of Per Se.

-----------

I think people’s problem with this review is not that Per Se can’t be criticized or that it can’t have an off night or whatever. Of course, a $275 meal is to be held to the highest standards, and you are free to dislike a Per Se meal.

The problem with this review is that its criticisms aren’t particularly credible. Sentences like the following, for example, do not build confidence: “My cheese course came with cold potatoes and haricot verts that tasted like something you pick up at Whole Foods and bring to a picnic”.
Well, no. There may well have been something to criticize about that dish, but that the garnishes tasted like something from Whole Foods is probably not it. It is no good to say in response that that’s how it tasted *to you*. If so, then you are either wrong, or someone had snuck me into Per Se to cook that night.

Or how about this sentence: “One of my tablemates complained that my dessert tasted like a car air freshener (I didn’t think it quite that bad — but I thought it bad)”. Again – really? That’s just not a plausible description of a Per Se dessert. It’s like someone writing that cutting taxing (sic) always produces more tax revenue and then being puzzled when people disagree.

Sietsema about Frank Bruni

I asked Tom Sietsema about Frank Bruni in a web chat. I think he's said this before, but here's the exchange in any case:

NYC: As we New Yorkers quiver gelatinously in anticipation of the new New York Times critic, do you have any valedictory words for or about Frank Bruni?

Tom Sietsema: I'm friends with Frank. He's just as funny/clever/smart in person as he is in print, and I'll miss reading his food prose. On the other hand, I can't wait to see what he has in store for us in the Times' Sunday Magazine.

Credit Card Woes

I noticed this article explaining that credit card companies may start squeezing good customers (good, meaning customers who don't use a lot of credit and who pay their bills) in order to recoup profits they're losing by being more fair to everyone else.

I understand the impulse, but this is an extremely stupid idea. Note to credit card company people - those good customers, who have cash for all their purchases but just use credit cards because it is in fact a good deal? Umm, they'll pay with a debit card.

Co.

I took a quick lunchtime trip to Company, Jim Lahey's (of Sullivan Street Bakery) pizza restaurant. I sat at the bar and had a sad little cup of water, as I am busy at work and could not afford to impair myself, and ordered the classic Margarita - tomatoes, basil, buffalo mozzarella.

The pizza is terrific, and like most people I liked the restaurant (Bruni, for example). Most important, the dough is fantastic. But if put to the question, I'd say that Motorino in Brooklyn is better, or at least I enjoyed the pizza more. What I can't tell is whether that's because Motorino has a more generous spirit (Co.'s pizzas are so small as to be a little off-putting) or because I prefered the puffier Williamsburg product, but that's my initial impression.

One pizza is not enough for lunch, although that is what I had. $14 with tax pushes the limits of acceptability.

The essential problem

This video bloggingheads discussion (between, I should note, a clear leftist and a center rightist) essentially sums up the distinction between Europe and the United States economically.

In short, in the position I am in now, I'd rather live in Europe and enjoy my leisure. But only in America would I have been given the opportunity to get where I am now.

I know that some parts of the left try to take issue with the second part of that equation by arguing that social mobility is better in Europe. I'm sure you can engineer some metric that shows what you want on social mobility. But whatever that metric shows is of little practical relevance to me. The question is simple - would a middle eastern immigrant of my skills rather compete to get into Harvard Law School or ENA, in France? Where would you rather open a jewelry store? Where would you rather be the first in your family to go to college? The answer is America, without doubt.

Yes, there is a group of people for whom France or Europe is always the answer. People in what I guess we can call the lower middle class, who have no ambition or ability or desire to do more. I'd rather be a middle manager in a French bureaucracy than a middle manager in an American corporation. But that doesn't a good society make.

Bruni leaves

The big news in the New York restaurant scene is that Frank Bruni, the current critic, is leaving soon.

Interestingly, the norm of anonymity has become so entrenched that most of the well established critics who could take his place are disqualified, because they are well known. It's almost like the Supreme Court nomination process - if a candidate is too notorious, they're passed over.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. Of course, I am available for the job. Heh.

Changing norms

It occurred to me yesterday as someone was raving in the subway that I was far more struck and offended when he used a slur for gays than when he used the f-word. I promise you that ten years ago, my reaction would have been completely differet.

This is a sort of pseudo-baguette I made the other day. I knew it wouldn't come out perfectly, because the dough was really too dry to give me a proper crumb, but it still tasted delicious.

This was made with some leftover (uncooked) dough from a pizza a week ago to add flavor, a mix of bread and all purpose flour (not a scientific mix at all), and lots of fermentation time. I did not knead.

Asparagus and Morels with Pommes Maxime

I realize that this doesn't look like much, but we enjoyed this last Saturday. It's an asparagus puree (asparagus with lemon and cream) with sauteed morels and pommes maxime.

Yogurt recipe

Part of the reason I've posted less recently is that I'm overwhelmed by the number of other food sites I read to keep up with the scene. One of my favorites is Tom Sietsema's "Table", since it's the closest I can get to a daily chat with a major food critic.

Anyway, I note that he recently mentioned my favorite comfort food, pasta with yogurt and garlic, on his discussion board. I, posting as my email address "imrit", had suggested it as a favorite solo meal.

Dinner last night

Dinner last night was a simple meal inspired by Jacques Pepin - poached salmon (poached in nothing more than water and lemon) with a sour cream and chive sauce.

Poaching truly is the simplest of all cooking - simply bring the water and slices of lemon to a boil, drop in the fish, and wait till it boils again. Keep at a simmer until it's cooked (there's no magic here - just pull apart the flesh and check if it's cooked).

The sauce is sour cream mixed with chopped chives. That's it.

Busy, busy

I've been busy with a number of projects recently, which has eaten up my blogging time. An example of one of these projects is illustrated by the following discussion with a mortgage broker (yes, yes, we're considering becoming home-owners):

Mortgage Broker: So, I have two options for you. $X payment per month, or $Y per months ($800 less than X).

Me: wow. Y sounds good. Why is it less?

MB: Oh, it's just broken out into two different loans, a jumbo, and another one.

Me: Neat. So what's this other one?

MB: It's just another loan. It lets me put together a package cheaper.

Me: Well, money doesn't magically cost less if you just package it in some other loan, right? How exactly does it work?

MB: Well, it's all pretty technical, but it's an interest only loan, basically.

Me: An interest only adjustable rate loan for a substantial sum, adjustable off the lowest rates in the history of man (almost?). Sounds stupid, no?

MB: No, no, it works fine.

Me: Let's see an amortization table.

Mb: (Reluctantly) ok.

Me: (15 minutes later). Soo. It turns out that this number next to "balance" keeps getting bigger on this supposedly innocuous second loan. Doesn't that sound like a massively bad plan to you?

MB: Well, it gets paid off eventually.

Me: {click}

Oprah and grilled chicken

I see that some people are complaining that Oprah's grilled chicken promotion (as I understand it, it involves getting free "Kentucky Grilled Chicken") is somehow hypcritical or wrong more generally because KFC feeds people industrially raised chickens.

Let's just get something totally clear here - whatever one thinks about eating KFC's chicken themselves, our agriculatural system will simply not work if, as the complainer says, KFC starts selling free range chickens (and by free range I mean actually free range, rather than industrial free range, whereby the chickens theoretically could go outside if only they knew how to get there through the small hole in their coop). Real free range chickens cost at least $12, and more like $20 a bird. As tasty and delicious as they are, as amazing the difference is between them and an industrial chicken, the existence of the industrially raised product is the only thing between us and a two tier world where the wealthy eat meat, and everyone else dreams about their once a week or month roast.

Maybe that's a good world, in a lot of ways. But it ain't going to fly today.

Beacon

We had a disappointing experience at Beacon yesterday, a normally very good American chophouse which both of us have enjoyed before. Yesterday, though, although the food was quite good (I had a well made tuna nicouse salad, with quail eggs and seared tuna), our service was very slow and badly paced. It really put us off.

Further, I am less happy about the value proposition the more I think about it. Beacon is doing 20% off everything on its menu, and yet main dishes are still more than $25. In fact, even my nicoise, just a plain old salad, was $23. That's a hefty toll when other very good restaurants indeed, with a little more ambition, are about the same price.

I think Beacon is a real value in its set meals, whether we're talking about the mammoth Sunday dinner for its prix fixe. I'm less sure now about just ordering a plate.

Pommes Maxime

I've been trying to figure out pommes maxime since my visit to per se in January. They're not that complicated, honestly - just thinly sliced, layered potatoes crisped perfectly. (here's a picture of pommes maximes made by per se). I loved them then, and I especially loved that they're a sneaky way of smuggling potato chips into haute cuisine.

I started by trying to bake the thin slices of potato just as is, but I quickly realized they needed to be weighted down to get the flat effect per se manages. So I baked the potatoes, after tossing in olive oil, with another sheet pan on top. That worked somewhat, but wasn't reproducing even close to the even browning I was hoping for. The oven is sort of the sledgehammer of cookery - not exactly the most delicate instrument, and what it yielded was unevenly cooked potatoes, blackened here, still soft there.

My latest attempt was over the fire. I sliced the potatoes thinly and layered them as usual, tossed them in oil, and added them to a non-stick pan. Then I covered them with a layer of oiled aluminium foil, and squashed them as hard as I could with a glass milk bottle, leaving them to cook on medium heat for about 5 minutes on each side.

They flattened and browned!

I drained them on towels, and then just before serving, gave them a last crisp in the pan. They got served in an asparagus puree with sauteed morels, and they were pretty darned good.

A picture will follow tomorrow.

Mayahuel - A Spanish speakeasy on E. 6th Street

These are some notes I just posted on e-gullet about Mayahuel, a terrific new bar opened on E. 6th Street by the former head bartender at Death & Co. 

-----------------------------

We visited Mayahuel last night. Didn't have too much trouble getting in - the fellow at the door led us to a small standing alcove near the umbrella depository first, but quickly got us over to the bar.

I'm probably the least knowledgeable person about cocktails in this thread, but I loved the drinks. The Italian Inquisition was fantastic - to be honest, it tasted a little like my favorite standard cocktail, the martinez. Laugh at me all you like. But I have to give my prize for the night to the Whoopsy Daisy, which is outrageously good, and the Division Bell(sp?), which I got when I asked the bartender for something with more pronounced mezcal. The DB reminds me of the Laphroiag based drinks I order sometimes at D&co - almost peaty. 

We were starving, so dug into a quesadilla - although small, it was darned tasty. A nice combination of spicy and sweet (it's topped with mango,I think, though by that time I was getting a little shaky). Makes me excited to consider a more full menu. 

So, one little complaint - if you could catch swine flu from air conditioning, I swear we would have caught it sitting at the bar right under the look through to the top floor. I think the seats at the bar nearest the door don't have this problem. 

8 shots?

If I'm reading this right, the Washington Post's food critic (Tom Sietsema) drinks eight shots of expresso a day. Yikes.

Sulking Salad

I was sulking about something or other this weekend when my fiancee suggested that we have a nice, light, salad and sit outside on my porch. A quick shopping trip and some half-hearted rooting around in my fridge yielded this salad - a sort of pseudo greek take on panzanella.

There's no reason whatever for there to be a recipe, since you can just put anything you want in such a salad, but for the record, I seared some Murray's chicken breasts dressed with smoked paprika, fried cubes of stale pain au levain and soaked them in a vinaigrette briefly, tossed some asparagus and zucchini in oil, and added some dodonis feta and giant kalamata olives from Astoria (the best feta we can get easily). Toss together and munch.

Pegu Club

Saturday night, we found ourselves in a bit of a yuppie conumdrum. We wanted nice cocktails. But it is flatly impossible to walk into our favorite cocktail bar/speakeasy, Death & Co., on Saturday night. So we went, for the first time, to Pegu Club, another in the 5 or 6 strong pantheon of bars that can plausibly claim the title of best cocktails in New York City.

(I think the consensus list of the top 4 is Pegu Club, Milk & Honey, Death, and Please Don't Tell. I haven't been to all of these).

Anyway, the vibe at Pegu Club is completely different than at Death & Co. Younger, I think. Less solely cocktail focused. The place is a lounge rather than a sort of pseudo speakeasy. But the drinks are indeed terrific and worthy of their comparison to the best cocktails I ever had. And, even better, Pegu Club is easier to get into, and in a better location than Death.

My martinez was delicious, but I have to say I was very impressed by the Pegu Club Cocktail, apparently revised from a 1930's drinks manual. It was extraordinarily potent, but tasty, balanced, and a pleasure to drink.