Grifone (New York, Midtown East)

Grifone is proof, if any was needed, that spending a lot of money doesn’t mean you’re going to get a good meal. I’ve got to say; I’ve never gotten so little for a $60 lunch before in my life.

Having said that, lovers of stodgy un-inventiveness will be richly rewarded by Grifone. Most of the menu is packed with old style veal parmesan like dishes; I think I counted at least 8 breaded veal chops, another 8 breaded chicken, and a whole host of lamb cutlets, all differentiated only by their overenthusiastic smothering in different poorly executed sauces. The pasta dishes were no more enlightening. I don’t think I’ve ever been told that a $25 entrée was “pasta with meat sauce” before, but the vagueness of the mumbling quasi-Italian waiter’s description was almost Scottish in its incomprehensibility. I wish I could say that the appetizers or desserts saved the show, because I’ve bought better stuff from one of those German discount supermarkets where they don’t have scanners and make you buy your own plastic bags. Still, the opening and ending of the meal (parma ham & figs, and a vaguely interesting pistachio/hazelnut cake) were at least presentable, in marked contrast to the 1950’s era debacle that was the main course.

I suppose there are some people who like this kind of place, what with its mahogany paneling and “grazie-ing” waiters. It’s not for me, though. Nor for anyone who’s eaten Italian food elsewhere in the last three decades. And don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to say that all traditional Italian-American food is bad. It’s not. I like breaded veal cutlets as much as the next food obsessive. But that point of food particularly needs to be done well, and this just was not. Ah, well, though. It makes for a good story.

White’s (London, The City)

In marked contrast to Grifone, White’s is actually quite a good restaurant. The brainchild of oft-berated super-chef Marco Pierre White, it lives up to its promise of pricey French sophistication. It really isn’t hard to see the differences in quality between this place and some of the other places I visited on my trip, honestly. Makes you wonder how hard the professional reviewer’s job actually is.

For example, I’m a complete sucker for amuses bouches, those little snacks you get before you order at more enterprising restaurants. They remind me of the tasting menus I can’t afford in both scale and surprise. What better way to eat then to be left in the hands of the kitchen? Anyway, White’s amuse bouche was perfect for the restaurant and the season, as exemplified by the mild chill outside. Served in a small expresso glass, I’ve seldom had a pumpkin soup of that depth or interest. Of course, I’ve rarely had a pumpkin soup made predominantly of cream and butter either, but that’s besides the point. You can’t just dump butter into a pan with pumpkin puree and expect it to taste good automatically. Cooking is about balance and artistry, and you can see it most clearly in the simplest dishes.

This isn’t to say that the other dishes lacked skill. Far from it. The starter I chose, a tarte tatin layered with delicate slices of sea scallop, was simply brilliant, featuring delicately charred pastry and yet still quivering mollusk lying over a mound of thinly sliced and sautéed leek. Nor did my main course disappoint, despite ample opportunity. You see, one of my other obsessions is coq au vin, that is to say, chicken stew with wine. I like both the red and the white kind, with cream and without. Actually, my only requirement is that the chicken be good and the stew include interesting (preferably wild) mushrooms. White’s poulet noir stew with freshly picked wild morels in a white wine and cream sauce, then, really had a head start with me, but even so, I doubt it would have disappointed anyone. The only negative I can imagine, actually, is that every bite was a reminder of the kind of chicken you can’t get over here in the US, except by occasionally paying some extortionate price for a top of the line free range monstrosity.

If left to my own devices, I would probably say that dessert was the weakest part of White’s efforts on my visit. Lemon tart is certainly a favorite dessert of mine, and this one was quite good, but I actually expected the traditional kind of lemon tart (that is to say, a circular sweet shortcrust filled with uncreamed lemon filling) rather then the slice of a larger tart filled with creamy curd that I did get. I’m not complaining, though. It was still excellent, and finishing off my slice the rapt gazes of my co-diners probably changed my mind about the tart.

In any case, White’s is a definite go in my book. I’d even pay for it myself.

Wagamama (London, Canary Wharf and elsewhere)

Not quite in the august category, either in price or quality, of the restaurants above, Wagamama is actually a chain operating throughout London, purporting to serve noodles in a relaxed and efficient atmosphere suitable for the lunchtime business diner. This commitment is well demonstrated by the super modern service, which included the relaying of your order back to the kitchen via palm pilot.

Just as an interlude, I’m still a little baffled why I was taken to this restaurant during a job interview, for one rather obvious reason. Asian noodles bars are not the best places for an incompetent eater wearing a suit. I mean, no kind of noodle is great for the clumsy suit wearer, but the multicoloured efforts of the East make it particularly embarrassing, especially when the final interview happens to be the hiring partner of the entire firm.

Anyway, giant splotches of yellow on my shirt aside, Wagamama is actually a great example of what it purports to be. My dumpling like gyoza (or in fact, my gyoza dumplings) were hot, fresh and each stuffed with a formidable prawn, while the aforementioned noodles, floating in a sharply flavoured curry amid grilled chicken managed to be both original and tasty at the same time. I wouldn’t particularly recommend Wagamama for a formal business meeting then, especially given the slightly brusqye service and almost shared benches/tables, but I rather appreciated the complete lack of pretension displayed by both the restaurant and the firm taking me there. This place is a go for me too, and paying my own way wouldn’t even be that painful.

Angelo’s (New York, Midtown East)

I don’t think it’s right to leave New York without having pizza at least once, so I stopped at the Barnes & Noble closest my hotel to leaf through the the restaurant guides for a pizza place in proximity. What I found was Angelo’s, not at all an outrageous hoof from my place over on Second Avenue.

There isn’t much to say about pizza, is there? Especially when you insist, as I tend to do, on the most basic of pizzas, topped with only tomato sauce, basil, and cheese. (don’t you hate people who call pizzas “pies”? Drives me nuts for some reason). But Angelo’s is good. Really good. Aside from what I thought was a slight oversweetness in the sauce , in fact, I thought it was almost perfect. A crunchy and chewy thin crust, that doesn’t get soggy after fifteen seconds? Check. Judiciously spread sweet globs of delicious mozzarella? Check. Large blatantly fresh leaves of basil? Check also. All in all, a great place to eat. I’ve got envy New York that one, at least.


Buttercup Bakery & Ess-a-Bagel (New York, Mid-town East)

I’m dealing with these two together because they demonstrate precisely the problems and glories of American baking. First, as I keep saying, no one in this country can bake cakes of any real sophistication. Sure, the brownies at Buttercup tasted good. So what? I can bake perfectly nice brownies at home. What I want at a bakery is something beyond what I can do at home, something that only training and skill (neither of which I have) can produce. So by all means, eat their 7 dollars lime pies or equally banal chocolate frosted cupcakes. I’ll save my money from now on.

But Ess-a-bagel presents exactly the opposite impression. Bagels, obviously, are something Americans can do very well, with years of tradition and authenticity behind them. Nor can I really make them at home. I mean, sure I could make my usual bread dough, converted to whatever dough it is that bagels need, and then I could boil the yeasty rings and then throw them in an oven to firm up, but it’s really a bother I don’t have much time for. This is especially true when you can get such astonishing bagels for just $.75 over at Ess-a-bagel: crunchy outside, and in fact almost recalcitrant in their toughness, but moist and airy within. I’ve now had multiple bagels from the famed H+H (at their Upper West Side location) and from Ess-a-bagel. I’m hard pressed to say which is better, other then to note that they certainly are different in both texture and taste.

La Fromagerie

I can't say enough about this little shop in Highbury/Islington, just north of city centre london. I went in today and just put myself in what I assume was the owner's hands. I'm a student, I said. I live in America. We don't have decent cheese, and I've had nothing but over expensive Roquefort and refrigerated cream cheese impersonating brie for almost two years. Help me.

Help me he did, with a completely astonishing round of St. Felicia, a cheese whose origin I haven't yet worked out, but was so runny, so perfectly ripe, so exceptional, that he had to tip the whole thing into a small plate for me to take home. Balanced delicately on a crunchy, crusty slab of bread (made by the newly arrived in Britain Poulaine bakery of Paris), I ran it to my hotel through three changes of the underground before devouring it completely. Yeah, I'm greedy, but when the cheese is this good, what else can you do?

Funnily enough, La Fromgerie supplies the cheese for the restaurant of the hotel I'm staying at. More funnily, a small piece of the same cheese I bought for 4.10 pounds sells for 11 as a dessert. I'll take the shop, thank you.

On my other blog I’ve recently written about the brewing litigation over Fresh Del Monte’s mythical “Gold” pineapple. To those who missed it, the Del Monte Gold is supposed to be the very epitome of all pineappleness; extra sweet, extra gold, and extra expensive. All these attributes have made its genetic makeup a closely guarded and extremely valuable secret for the fruit giant, but now it seems that other companies are very close to replication. In any case, I’m not interested in the legal aspects just now- nope, I’m more interested in how it tastes. Is it worth $5-6 to buy in the store, or millions to litigate?

So I picked one up in the local Star market, for a relatively svelte $4.99. Its colour is striking, as promised by Del Monte. It’s not yellow, like most pineapples, or that yellowish green you see so often, but a deep almost burnished gold, with slivers of green nestled in between neat diamonds of proud metallic. The aroma is almost as surprising. Even in the cold supermarket, stacked among great mounds of antiseptic “fruit”, the pile of Golds gave off a terrific penetrating tang. As I took it home, stuffed unceremoniously among my other shopping in my well worn book bag, I really was looking forward to indulging.

I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed, if predictably so. I can’t say it didn’t taste good. It was the best pineapple I’ve had in a long time. But the impression I got, and perhaps this was because of its long trip to my pathetic little supermarket here in Cambridge, is that the Del Monte Gold is essentially an urban Scot’s impression of what a good pineapple might taste like. It didn’t have any of the subtlety I assume a good pineapple has- just an overpowering impression of dense sugar. Note that I don’t mind sugar. In fact, I’ve got an appalling sweet tooth, along with a fat tooth, starch tooth, and anything else you can think of. But this was almost like eating a fat cylindrical sugar cane. I also thought, though I could be wrong, that the pineapple’s texture suffered just a little bit from whatever mutation caused its colour, aroma, and sweetness.

But, one has to admire Del Monte for getting such an apparently consistently sweet pineapple from wherever it was farmed to the east coast. The Gold is certainly an improvement over what we usually have. Is it the spiny messiah of the pineapple world? No. But is it worth a gigantic law suit with huge attorneys fees? The bottom line and the Wall Street journal say yes. I, and the Waddling Kitchen in its corporate persona, will be looking forward to its competitors.

Elephant Walk

Elephant Walk is an odd sort of creature – a Cambodian restaurant in the middle of Boston, and now, it seems, in Cambridge. I’d never had Cambodian before, actually. Indian, certainly. One can hardly survive more than a month or so in Britain without becoming acquainted with the multitudinous pleasure that is the bog standard British curry. The usual kinds of Chinese I know well enough. Thai and Vietnamese, furthermore, have thankfully become more popular in the last few years, and I’ve been merrily plowing that particular furrow of culinary innovation. I’ve even had a good go at Ethiopian, folding the sponge like flat bread messily around the spicy African conglomeration. But Cambodian I’ve never done, so Elephant Walk represented an interested culinary diversion for me.

I don’t really know how to describe the cuisine, having tested it once now. The best I can do, I think, is to command the reader to imagine a mix of Thai, Indian, and Vietnamese, all lightened with French sophistication, rather like you lighten a cake mix with egg whites or tomato sauce with cream. Or perhaps the cuisine is actually French, exotified by Asian influences? You can’t really tell at Elephant Walk, a fact which adds to the restaurant’s considerable charm. This sophisticated conundrum was made particularly evident by the dessert JCA and I shared, which turned out to be a crème caramel made exceptional by its completely unexpected (and equally unfamiliar) pandan leaf flavouring, which managed to be both sweet and yet slightly radicchio bitter in the end.

The starters and main courses were perhaps more exotic in their conception, but still retained a subtlety sometimes missing from their East Asian counterparts. JCA had an interesting looking chicken curry, for example, which I was able moderately pilfer. What made it different, I thought, since the Indians do a good job with tomato based curries as well, was the sharp tang of lime and lively spice softened by rather unexpected shards of pineapple. It’s that kind of light touch that differentiates EW from Vietnamese cuisine, under which Fodor’s Boston had erroneously listed the restaurant. As for my dish, I think a lot can be said for a restaurant on the basis of its basic meat dishes, and my evocatively named Loc Lac, seared “lightly” in a soy and black pepper mixture, did the restaurant proud.

Oh, and a final note- get Naiting , the ground pork stew simmered with garlic and coconut milk, as a starter, and save the quite good French bread they bring you to sop the last dregs of it up with. There just isn’t enough of the accompanying crispy jasmine rice, and in any case, why feel any compulsion to use a tiny bit of rice to mop up mounds of stew, or even to leave some of the sweet concoction in the bowl? Spare yourself the heartache- hoard the bread.

Tanjore

Harvard Square

Tanjore doesn't really look like much from outside, tucked underneath the advertisement for an unfindable Thai restaurant and not far from the culinary Mecca that is Dunkin' Donuts. Yet, I had been eyeing it speculatively for a while. It just sort of looked like it might be good.

Having now visited it, I can certainly vouch for at least their curries. I wasn't hungry enough to get a naan as well, so I only nosed suspiciously at my companion's competent looking loaf, but the chicken saagwalla was excellent, a creamy combination of spinach and fenugreek that tingled with a suggestion of spice. But what I thought was distinctive about the dish was the use of juicy and tender chicken thighs instead of the usual chunks of dry and uninteresting chicken breast I see so often. Sure sure, breast is more expensive- using the thighs helps the restaurant's bottom line. But thighs are also much tastier, having a deep chickeny flavour of their own instead of relying desultorily on the seasonings in the curry. If I wanted bits of syrofoamy chunks in sauce I would get tofu, or just skip the whole going to restaurant business and buy some styrofoam to swathe in a-1 sauce at home. What I want at a restaurant is flavour from every ingredient, and it just seemed to me that Tanjore understood that too.

Red Sage

Red Sage is a popular restaurant in DC, both much praised and maligned, the latter by people who think it overexposed and overhyped. I was excited to give it a whirl though. It's no fair for everyone else to get a chance to pontificate while I stay on the sidelines.

I can't say I was blown away by the cuisine. I equally can't say I was entirely dissapointed, though. Buffalo style shrimp was an unexpected sort of appetizer, exactly the sort of nosh I like; I wonder though about the bed of aioli they were sitting on, since all that seemed to do was turn the once crispy shrimp throughly soggy. One of my dining partners was right, though - the mussels we shared as an appetizer weren't only cooked in an entirely insipid sauce (and in any case, mussels are an inappropriate appetizer to share, given the need for bread sopping) but the shellfish themselves were less fresh then they could have been. Nor was the air of insipidity entirely dispelled by the main courses. My tuna was throughly fresh, and quivering red as I like it, but I was surprised to hear the waiter steer one of my friends away from the daily swordfish special and towards pecan crusted chicken breast, which not only sounded and tasted banal but was apparently cut from a chicken of truly monstrous proportions. Surely swordfish would have been better?

The dessert did manage to redeem the kitchen quite a bit. Indeed, I've been building up quite a library of sticky toffee puddings, and Red Sage's offering, topped with a quality caramel ice cream and chocolate shavings wouldn't be out of place in the upper reaches of my internal league table. On the whole, I see Red Sage as a perfectly acceptable place for a business lunch that's unlikely to go wrong- but not much more.

Butter beans, leeks, and parmesan bake

I made this in hurry last night, and it turned out really nice, except for the fact that I spilled quite a lot of it when I got a phone call.

Just take some butter beans, and if dried, soak them in water overnight and boil them for an hour or two. i don't really see any problem with tinned beans in this case- in my opinion, butter beans do reasonably well in the tin.

Take the cooked beans and throw them in a shallow dish. Bathe them in some cream; just enough, I should think,so that they're almost sumurged, but not entirely so. Throw in garlic, which you can sautee beforehand if you want a little more subtlety, some (preferably baby) leeks sliced delicately in diagonals, and the inevitable salt and pepper. Mix this all up perfunctorily, and then layer with some freshly grated parmesan. Throw into the hottest oven you can manage for 10-15 minutes, and serve with some white rice. Delicious.

Ribs

I had always been entirely terrified of Ribs. Not of eating the ribs, of course. I'm not terrified of eating any food, bar perhaps brains. (I just don't get brains. The Texture- oh, the Texture). The problem with ribs is that I simply didn't know how to properly cook them. It all seemed so arcane. Mop rags, boiling or not, indirect heat, basting, removing membranes. It was one of these terrible morasses I had no desire to go, however much I liked to slather the rib and thereby myself in sweet musky sauce.

But in honor of my friend Lewis, I decided to try ribs. So I cleaned out my barbecue, put some bricks over one side so as to coral the fire, and then let it go. I had previously, of course, made a rub for the formidable strip of meat, though I rather suspect in retrospect it had too much sugar in it and too little spice (and it definitely needed a little of the acridness donated by a dose of cumin.)

I also decided to try to simplify the whole thing by not basting the ribs during cooking except with sauce right at the end. Yes, I'm sure this makes me terribly gauche, but I just didn't want to get into the whole basting liquid debate.

So anyway, I put the rubbed rib right on the grill, fired by an indirect heat. I shut the cover of the ribs, ran upstairs to continue watching TV, and grabbed the chair I was sitting on furiously to avoid checking on the smoldering delicacies. About forty five minutes later, I went outside to take a look; and lo! They were cooking!

So I let them finish, basted them all with sauce, and munched. They were actually good. How amazing is that.

So I've got over my rib problems. Now just to "ameliorate" the style, so to speak.

Banana Pecan Strudel

Take some filo dough, and lay out half a sheet. Sprinkle it with confectioner's (powdered) sugar, and then sprinkle ground pecans on top of that. Put a quarter of a banana in one end of the dough, and roll up. Seal this all with a little honey, and what you end up with is a fat cigar looking thing. Brush with butter, and bake in an oven until golden brown.

Poached salmon in oil

This looks good, stolen from today's Washington Post. You throw some top quality olive oil in a saucepan- quite a lot of it, say two cups for two fillets. Heat the oil very slowly to about 120 degrees- the recipe notes that if you don't have a thermometer (as I don't) what you're looking for is an occasional bubble and bread that doesn't darken when you throw it in. Once the fish gets up to this level, slip the fish in gently, after salting and peppering it generously. Cook for about 9 minutes. Of course, you want a slightly rare finish on the thicker side.

I've been mildly depressed ever since Ben & Jerry's got rid of their low fat chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I know I normally spend enormous amounts of time complaining about the use of law fat when a smaller quantity of the proper stuff would do ten times better, but in this case I think 90% of the appeal from this ice cream is texture- the chewiness of the cookie dough playing against the cold vanilla of the ice cream.

But I've discovered a substitute! The cookie dough in the fridge section of the supermarket combined with no fat frozen yogurt works almost perfectly together. Yes, it's not completely low fat, of course- the dough is heavy duty. But you can eat a large quantity of it for a lot less damage then one might incur from a pint of the real stuff, and I don't think the taste difference in the real ice cream is enough to go for it.

But hey, do what you want. I'm going with this solution.

Toasted Ravioli?

Food blog Butterpig has a recipe for something called Toasted Ravioli. Have to say, I've never seen that before.

Hi Rent Grocery Stores

I'm completely of two minds about the kind of upscale grocery stores that have popped up all over suburbia in the last five or ten years. On one hand, they're a great leap forward in terms of food. Sure, the stuff is way too expensive, but when no one else stocks puy lentils, it's off to Fresh Fields or Whole Foods you go. So they're certainly a good thing.

But some of the people who inhabit these places are just too much for me. They're people who mistake shopping at this supermarket for social worth, or intelligence. Take, for example, my visit to my local Fresh fields supermarket this weekend.

This place, to their credit, invites local merchants on the weekends to sell their product in store. Sometimes there will be some homemade tapenade (priced at a completely ludicrous 8 dollars a pound), perhaps some bread, or maybe an organic lemonade. This weekend there was a guy outside manning a grill. I watched a woman with two children walk up to him, say hello, and then ask if her children (pronounced in much the same tone as "The Imperial Majesties of the Universe", or "God Himself") could have ribs without sauce. "They don't eat sauce", she explained. The look on her face when she was refused was one of complete incredulity- as if someone has just offered to trade her a hyundai for one of her children.

Now, let me explain the set up. The guy behind the grill was surrounded by a bevy of signs advertising his super special rib sauce. He was wearing a hat that said "sauce" in big fiery letters. He was surrounded by multiple bottles of sauce, his t-shirt encouraged people to have some of his sauce, and even his nearby truck proclaimed the excellence of his rib sucking sauce. As if all this wasn't enough, his entire picnic table was full of bits of rib slathered in a bright red (and deliciously tangy, I later discovered) barbecue sauce. There was no way anyway with even an ounce of brain in his head could even begin to imagine that this guy was there to sell anything but sauce.

So why did this idiot and her two miniature cretins still think they could get ribs without sauce? Entitlement, maybe? Did they expect the sauce master to hand lick a rib clean of sauce for them? I just don't get it. The man sells SAUCE you idiots! You either get a rib with sauce, or you don't ask for a rib from him. How bloody hard is this to understand?!

The second episode occurred shortly thereafter, inside. An older lady with a prominantly displayed "Dean for President" button on her shirt was holding a very odd shaped tomato, full of bumps and discolorations. She found a clerk, or whatever one calls the folks at a supermarket, and began to berate him in bitter tones- "why do you have stuff like this here? Can't you see what the republicans and corporations have done to this, with all their genetic engineering? I can't believe it".

I have no problem with getting very angry about food. I do it all the time. But she was holding a damned heirloom tomato- it's supposed to look like that. It's looked like that for hundreds of years. It's the most unmucked around with tomato anyone can get hold of, resurrected from carefully horded seeds, saved from the machine of modern farming by a few conscientous holdouts. It's the very example of what we want more of in supermarkets. Does this kind of person walk around looking for ways to attack private industry? Is the supermarket itself not safe?

Anyway, I know I sound sanctimonious. Heh.

Italianish Pork Cutlets

I wanted something fried this weekend, and was about to end up at Popeye's for some chicken. But then I remembered that I hadn't had any cutlet sort of things recently, so I made these. I think they're better with lamb, but I couldn't find any appropriate cutlets.

So, get some pork cutlets or quick fry steaks, and pound them relatively thin. Meanwhile, make some fresh bread crumbs from either stale bread or some pita bread, which will dry out sufficiently if left out for just a few minutes. Just whiz them up in a food processor, add salt, pepper, and parmesan. If you like, some hot pepper might be good too.

Dip the pork or lamb in some beaten egg, throughly immersing. Then coat both sides of the meat in bread crumbs.

Fill a pan about half an inch up with oil, possibly non extra virgin olive, unless you live somewhere where good olive oil is cheap. Fry in moderate heat until crunchy, about three minutes on each side. I didn't know what to accompany this with, but I ended up with a little "reverse tabouleh" - that is, lots of bulghur wheat with specks of powerful cilantra, lemon, and olive oil. Yum.

Croissants

The important thing to understand about croissants is that they're fundamentally breads, not pastries. They're made with yeast or some other natural leaven, like breads. The dough is a fermented one, like a baguette. They're kneaded, not beaten. They're the work of a boulanger, a baker, and not a patissier, a pastry chef.

What all this means is that a good croissant tastes like bread as well. Of course, it's buttery (and the taste of the butter is so important). But it is also chewy, substantial. It is bread with butter, not filo dough in crescent shape.

Having said all that, I'm writing to praise DC baker Breadline's pain au chocolat. I had always thought they were the only baker anywhere in this area to capture something of the essence of french bread. Their potent chocolatey croissant, however, is a very close imposter indeed, resplendent with both all the bready qualities I mentioned above as well as with the taste of a rich french butter. I think it's the best $1.97 purchase in the entire city.

Man, I feel better after having eaten something like that. Wow.

The Washington Post is reporting that restaurants are finally beginning to scale back their ridiculous portions. This is undoubtedly good news. I like to eat as much as possible, like most people. This doe snot mean, however, that my steak has to be two pounds, my burder almost half that, or my salad approximately the size of a punch bowl.

The beauty of eating, the beauty of food, is to be found in the excellence of what you cook or what gets placed in front of you at restaurants. The people who say they need all this food to feel full are wrong; the reason they think they need these giant quantities of food is because the food tastes of nothing, and so they are compelled to compensate with way too much of it.

That, at least, is what I think. I know others disagree.

I'm going to try to move this blog forward very soon. Links, more posting, etc. It should move beyond being a personal journal.

M & S Grill

Almost everything I have to say about this restaurant can be summed up in my general comments about Americans and Sandwiches below. Apart from that, let me just say that M & S does a great job of what it tries, despite some sluggish service. Incidentally, this also applies to Pot Belly Sandwich Works, the franchise spreading throughout DC.

Rules of Sandwich Making, to be adopted by all American restaurants trying to make a sandwich.

1. Frying seventy second rate bread in butter does not fix the seventy second rate bread.

2. Piling three pounds of meat on a sandwich does not make uninteresting meat interesting.

3. Trying to disguise bad bread or uninteresting meat with powerful sauces, inhuman mounds of cheese, giant hot peppers, oil, vinegar, mustards, mayo, or any other condiment is not the answer.

Fancy Pants Chips and Dip

In honour of the football season restarting, I decided that I wanted something manly. However, buffalo wings were out of the question given my focus on veggies this week, so I decided to eat some chips. Luckily, Emeril (I can't believe I'm using an Emeril recipe) had this to say to say on the subject just a few days ago.

Get some white russet potatoes. Peel (obviously) and then slice very thinly (again obviously, slicing them with a mandolin is best. But if you have no money, like me, then just get a sharp knife and have at it.) Toss the potato slices in olive oil, sprinkle with salt and black pepper, and then layer them on an oiled sheet of parchment paper, which you've put in a baking tray. Then oil another sheet, put it on top of the potatoes, and crush the chips with another tray on top. (of course, this works best if you've got two identical trays.).

Bake in the oven for 15-30 minutes, until crisp and as brown as you might like. While that's happened, throw some goat cheese in a food processsor with some sour cream, salt, pepper, basil, and lemon juice. Pulse until smooth.

Serve, dipping chips in cheese like substance. Very simple and excellent.

Salad Nicoise


There are as many ways to make salad nicoise as to get into trouble with the federal government, but the follwoing is what I made last week end. Like other summery recipes, this is definitely meant to be eaten outside, preferably on a french beach with cheap beach french fries, but otherwise, outside at least.

Lettuce, hopefully an interesting mix
green beans
1 egg
tomato
tuna (tinned, though real tuna works as well, fiercely seared)
small nicoise olives (available, these days, at most supermarkets)
mustard, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper
perhaps a red onion, though this isn't necessary.


Simmer the egg until done (you're looking hard boiled, of course). Get an ice bath ready, and then throw the green beans in some more boiling water for just a minute or two. You're looking basically to blanch them. Then put them in the ice bath to maintain color and crispness as soon as possible.

Put the lettuce on the place. Then layer other ingredients on. I usually stick the green beans on one corner, some slices of tomato on another quarter, slices of eggs in the two remaining corners, then tuna on top, olives on top of them, and a few slices of red onion on top of that.

Then make a sauce with a little mustard, olive oil, and vinegar. Remember to dissolve the salt in the mustard and vinegar, then add the oil. Douse the dry salad with this sauce, heavily. You need some left over for bread mopping, if you're looking for actual authenticity.

Enjoy.