Morning Flight Scones

I am flying to Washington D.C. in about two hours, and decided to make some scones for the morning's fun. For someone who is so good at bread, I have a surprising amount of trouble with pie crust and its brothers, scones and biscuits. Where is the lift of other scones here? On the other hand, these taste and feel like scones as I've had them in England, so maybe it's everyone else who is screwing them up. I can't shake the feeling, though, that they should have risen higher and more evenly.

Still delicious. The recipe is from the King Arthur book.

Real Fast Food

Here is my comment over at Bittman's place recommending Nigel Slater's "Real Fast Food" (one of the great, underappreciated cookbooks of the last twenty years, in my view):

I think of Nigel Slater’s “Real Fast Food” as a sort of a minimalist for the British taste. Mustardy sardines and kippers on toast, rarebit, potatoes baked and scooped out, and then stuffed again with cream and cheese, pages of sauces for simple, poached, salmon. It’s the food that helped me learn to cook, that fed me in college, and that I turned to as a graduate student. “Real Fast Food” is what I would take with me into a nuclear shelter, faced with cooking tuna forever, but my copy is also dog eared and circled and wrinkled with stray splashes of soy here in the real world too. Slater’s other books are good, but other people take nice pictures too. “Real Fast Food” is a lifesaver.

Starbucks Sandwiches

I said more than a year ago now that "Starbucks' effort to corner some of the breakfast market [through warmed breakfast sandwiches] will fail utterly".

I realize I'm bragging, but it has proceeded to fail utterly.

Schultz already has said he's killing the ballyhooed breakfast sandwiches and says he hasn't ruled out dropping more foods.

UPDATE: I now realize there is a "Save the Starbucks Breakfast Sandwich" website. I should say, amid all this gloating, that they were actually very good sandwiches. Just completely inconsistent with the chain, with no connection to the market, etc, etc.

UPDATE 2: And here is the discussion I had with PG on the comments at Crescat Sententia. Pretty good stuff, I think. We should be hired.

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I had the impression that the pastries at Starbucks were reasonably popular, actually -- at least I've had them several times, whereas I think I've ventured upon a sandwich once and never again. Pastries go with a Starbucks drink, or can be an alternative when you're meeting a coffee addict there and feeding your own sugar jones. I'm not sure whether meatier breakfast food goes with Starbucks coffee; eggs and bacon seem vaguely downmarket. I wouldn't bother making coffee at home, and pastries really are a lot of trouble, but I can fry eggs and bacon with little effort.

Posted by PG at January 11, 2007 04:31 AM
PG - I think the pastries are indeed reasonably popular, but not at breakfast, perhaps. Or not popular enough. As a matter of taste, I think they vary wildly from decent to bad.

As to the second point, I agree with you, but clearly there is a market out there for egg frying with coffee. i.e, Mcdonald's. Where I think Starbucks is going wrong is that they're fiddling with the "do one clean, simple , high margin thing well" model. (let's leave for another day the debate over whether they do that thing well or not). Now they have 5,000 super speed cooking machines eating into their margins. I think that way live starbucks frozen pizzas, and trouble.

Posted by Raffi at January 11, 2007 08:32 AM
Yes, I think the egg/bacon/cheese frying with coffee market is essentially a low margin one, and it doesn't sound like McD's is raising the price of coffee even as it raises the level of quality. So people who are shopping based on price will continue to go to McD's for breakfast. Starbucks essentially is just trying to get the customers it already has for coffee to buy more. The main problem I see is trying to train staff to do more than one thing well. My friends who like coffee claim that at Dunkin Donuts is actually very good, but that it's more trouble than Starbucks because DD doesn't train its staff to focus on coffee, but on serving up donuts.

Posted by PG at January 12, 2007 01:48 AM

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Just a (honest) question about Mark Bittman's "Sticky Toffee Pudding". Aren't most puddings, in the British sense, a) steamed and b) made with suet? I realize that the answer may be that people don't eat suet anymore, and steaming is a waste of time, but I'm just wondering whether we aren't losing something. Or, perhaps, sticky toffee pudding is just named that, and was always baked like a cake.

Yogurt Cake

Meg of Too Many Chefs makes a chocolatey yogurt cake, based on a yogurt cake which both she and I got from Clotilde of Chocolate & Zucchini. It is a delicate, simple cake, and to the overstimulated American palate is really almost a quickbread. But it is delicious nonetheless.

And the best part is that it is especially easy, and fast - just the thing to whip up for colleagues on Friday afternoon. Contrary to Clotilde, I like it especially after a day in foil, when it gets less crusty (which I normally crave), and the moisture from the yogurt distributes, leaving what I would almost describe as the texture of the syrup soaked semolina desserts that so characterize lebanese (and Greek, and Turkish, and Syrian) cooking. Delightful.

Pet Peeves

Frank Bruni asks about our restaurant pet peeves. I agree with many of those already mentioned, and especially with waiters who take away one person's food without waiting for everyone at the table to finish. When I'm paying so much money, I don't expect to be treated as if I'm in a cafeteria.

Having said that, why do waiters ever ask if everything is ok? What exactly, is this supposed to accomplish? If the food is good, then I'd like to be left alone to enjoy it. If the food is bad, but not bad enough to send back, I'll tell everyone I can about the bad food. but there's nothing you can do. And, of course, if the food is so bad I need to send it back, you'll know. So what does asking me accomplish? In reality, the waiter's question is more of an ultimatum than anything else - speak now, or forever hold your peace. I disagree.

Naples 45

Naples 45

An excellent pizzeria for slices on Park Avenue and 45th. But forget all the flavored pizzas - the only thing worth eating is the margherita. Dough made with flour, water and salt, and good fresh cheese and tomatoes. $2.50, but $1.50 after 2 p.m.

A great lunch.

Some notes on Hawaii I posted on Chowhound

Tokkuri-tei - For us, this was a highlight of the trip. A cozy, eclectic Japanese restaurant with startling sushi, a wide and challenging menu of sochu and sake, and great service. On our two visits, I tried most of the sushi on the menu, and found it all of extremely high quality, with wonderful rice and fresh fish tasting of not much more than the ocean. I was especially pleased with the uni (sea urchin), which I normally find a little difficult to eat, and was blown away by the Mu, a great sweetish sake suggested by the attentive staff. The place is cool too - tiles signed by various semi-prominent visitors are posted up all over the walls, and the crowd is clearly local, regular, and enthusiastic.

Leonard's Bakery - Warm, crispy, malasadas (doughnuts) filled with banana, coconut, and chocolate. One of the best fried doughs I've ever had, and the fact that the staff runs around in a panic at the idea that you might get your malasadas cold makes the whole experience even more fun. Also, I got a cool t-shirt, with smiling malasadas trying to get out of a box.

Side Street Inn - Well, the back alley location isn't all that promising. Nor is the bleak sports bar you find when you go inside. But then you notice that a lot of tables are reserved, and the menu includes some surprising stuff, and people are eating hungrily. After gobbling two kinds of ahi and smoked organic salmon, I'm a convert. I would have liked to explore more of the menu, but we ran out of time.

The Surf Room at the Royal Hawaiian - So, this is were we were staying, and it's just a hotel restaurant, but the view is spectacular, and the taro pancakes with lilikoi syrup were actually very very good. I wouldn't bother with the buffet, though - it looked fine (probably better, objectively, than the House with a Key), but I wouldn't (and didn't) pass up the pancakes on my two visits.

Mai Tai Bar - Also at our hotel, and not known for food, and expensive, but I got some pleasant coconut crusted shrimp here while listening to some very nice music and sitting outside. I wouldn't completely discount this place if what you want to do is hang out and talk.

Pineapple on Pupukea beach - ok, so not a restaurant, but an actual pineapple I bought from Foodlands supermarket (I also bought a cool-looking fruit knife) that we ate on the North Shore beach of Pupukea. Pineapples in Hawaii are complex fruits, completely unlike what we get in New York, and this was one of the best lunches we had on our trip.

House without a Key - we had a terrific breakfast here, based on chowhound recommendations. The food was good (a full buffet with great fruit, and surprisingly good macadamia pancakes, of which I consumed a large number), but the view and the setting (overlooking the beach and an obviously ancient tree) were the real treats. We loved it.

Keo's - Perfectly adequate thai food in a beautiful room festooned with flowers. Not as good as its reputation (but we're from New York, and a lot of the Thai here is excellent), but we certainly didn't regret the meal.

Burke!

I'm working my way through a short collection of Burke - he would not sound out of place today, and I would be on his side. His economic instincts particularly are wonderful, as we see here in his "Thoughts on Scarcity", though the same sentiments apply to everything else, I think:

"To provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of government. It would be a vain presumption in statesmen to think they can do it. The people maintain them, and not they the people. It is in the power of government to prevent mch evil; it can do very little positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else".

2007 Restaurants

I have done a quick back of the envelope calculation of how many restaurants I ate at in 2007, based on credit card records and records on Seamless Web, the delivery manager for my firm (and for most financial and law firms in New York city). Total? 70 personal restaurants, with my girlfriend, family, or friends. And a staggering 204 restaurants at the firm, not including those nights where I went out to grab a burger at McDonald's out of sheer desperation at staying in my office.

This all connects, because I have recently read Michael Pollan's "In Defence of Food", which lists various rules for healthy eating in the back. I was startled to see him basically ignore restaurants, which really are at the root of much of the problem with their extreme portions, salt, fat, and unknown chemicals. Eating actual food mostly at home is a huge lifestyle improvement, and during my vacation thus far have felt it to be one of the biggest differences in my health.

Ciabatta

I made this Ciabatta for the minestroni I will post about later. It is a standard bread, with a little olive oil: flour, yeast, and salt. The secret to its extraordinary tenderness, however, is to knead the dough on the paddle setting of a mixer for a full twenty minutes. You get an astonishing, plastic, shiny, dough, which is hard to work with because it is so moist, but yields a great result if you can just push through the difficulty.





The recipe is from "The Bread Bible", just for reference.

Frivol

I'm not sure there could possibly be a better explanation of what I find wrong with Ezra Klein's writing, public personality, politics, etc, etc, than this post about bookshelves. No, it's not about politics, but, well, read it and see.

I especially love how someone who writes what Ezra wrote could possibly claim to be a "wonk". Hey, ignorance is bliss.

Shrimp and Cheesy Polenta

This simple dish was inspired by a romanian restaurant here in queens. A few shrimp marinated in garlic, ginger and lemon (which had nothing to do with the Romanian restaurant), and polenta served with grated Romanian feta (which did). A delicious combination, although I recognize that polenta is better (though less authentic) when made with milk rather than water.

Risotto Cake

I made risotto the other day, and inevitably had some leftover. I'll post pictures of the risotto tomorrow, I think, if I can them. The usual answer with leftover risotto is to push it together, dip in flour, and to sautee in olive oil to make a delicious snack. It is accompanied by kale, first fried in olive oil, and then drained, squeezed, and sauteed again.

Hugh Hewitt?

Hugh Hewitt wasn't on my radar screen until I reengaged with politics earlier this year. I certainly didn't know of his abominable record on pushing conservatives around with his own view of what makes up conservatism, most spectacularly on the blundered Harriet Miers nomination, which he defended with considerable vitriol. (Professor Bainbridge particularly turned me on to Hugh's seemingly wilful blindness) Now, as everyone but me knew, he's in the tank for Mitt Romney, of which this post is indicative. His theory, apparently, is that Romney is the only plausible choice for a good conservative, and that Mccain is some sort of liberal trojan horse.

I'll go into this a little more deeply over the next couple of weeks, I guess, but it really needs to be said - a moderate governor from Massachusetts who created government health care is a more authentic conservative than John McCain, who has fought the good fight for decades? How is this meme passing the smell test? And no, a willingness to defend waterboarding isn't the litmus test of conservatism.

It seems clear to me that Republicans, and especially the Republican money men, needs to start coalescing around Mccain. Bizarre stories about a conservative icon being liberal aren't going to get us there.

Melanzana Sirenuse

This is a meal that Mario Batali says he used to eat at Le Sirenuse, a luxury hotel in Italy, near Lake Garda. I love eggplant*, and sandwiching mozzarella di buffalo and fried, it's one of my favorite foods. What's more, the technique is straightforward. Just bake sliced eggplants for about 10 minutes in a little olive oil, make sandwiches out with the cheese, and then dip in egg and flour before frying in the best extra virgin olive oil (eggplants suck up oil, and you'll pay for scrimping on the oil with poor taste).

* Why do we call it eggplant? Melanzana (italian) or aubergine (French) are much better. I wonder if the Germans manage anything less palatable.

How we find ourselves here

Probably the chief reason for this vacation from my law firm (which I've been calling a sabbatical, as it is very long) is that I have gained weight. Those who used to read me on Crescat might remember that one of things I'm proudest of is of having lost eighty pounds, mostly by learning to cook, and eating clean, honest food made by my own hands. My job has robbed me of what I thought was a luxury, and the results were far worse than I anticipated. It turns out that restaurant food combined with tremendous stress makes me fat, and though the situation isn't irretrievable, it has turned grave, at least to me. So I decided to spend this time digging back towards the roots of the original weight loss, back to my hands and kitchen, to the food that brought me here, so to speak.

There is a profound peace in being in one's own kitchen, music in the background, hands deep in flour, or listening to the rhythmic chop of one's own knife slicing through garlic, its aroma slowly reaching one's nose. It is a peace which makes me think of pasta. Here, below is my own pasta, rolled out. You don't need a pasta machine to get thin pasta, as you can see

Those who have not made pasta before are daunted, I realize, but the concern is unjustified. All you need is about a pound of flour, and four full eggs. Pile the flour in a bowl, empty out a well in the middle of the flour, and add the eggs. Mix slowly, and then knead for ten minutes (or a little less with a good mixer, which is what I used). That's it. Afterwards, just cook in plenty of salted boiling water, and drain. It'll look like this.

























Of course, you can dress pasta however you want. Perhaps the nicest thing to do is to sautee some bacon, and then add raw egg off the heat, which, of course, is carbonara. But instead I made a beef sauce with plenty of excellent french wine, and drank more with dinner. The road back to a healthy life may turn out to be long, though I am doing by best. But it will be delicious, no matter what.

Hi! I'm back!!!

Hi. This is actually Raffi, back after a long, long, hiatus. For anyone who doesn't know me, I used to write on the fairly popular blog Crescat Sententia, as the resident food blogger, but also delved into things other than food on occasion. I graduated from law school and then clerked on the Delaware Court of Chancery, after which I took a job as a corporate lawyer in New York. I had a tough year, which people will learn about as a I write. And now, finally, I'm on vacation, for the next several weeks. And I intend to write again. I don't really expect anyone to read this. I've been out of the blogging loop for so long. But more than anything else, I want a record of this vacation, of how I felt, of what I was thinking. And, of course, we are in the middle of the most exciting political season in perhaps a generation. I have lots to say about it. So I don't care if anyone reads this or not. I'm going to write regardless.

A number of friends around DC had told me that I ought to visit a specific restaurant in Vienna, Virginia - it had a good, inexpensive, French country lunch menu, they said. So I went, and was completely taken aback when the first course salad arrived - a few leaves of iceberg lettuce, topped with a couple of grated carrots and what seemed an awful lot like a sauce that had once seen the inside of a bottle.

There's plainly no sense in which my reaction to this salad was simply a matter of taste. Iceberg lettuce in a restaurant pretending to French country cuisine is objectively wrong, whatever someone like the often confused James Beard might have had to say. Nonetheless, my instinct in the restaurant was to say nothing. If they can't be bothered to notice that they just served an actual customer iceberg lettuce with insipid dressing, to me it makes no sense to help them realize their mistake

My dining companion, on the other hand, was pretty irate - they're taking their customers for idiots, she said. You can't let them just hand out iceberg lettuce salads with no consequences. You and I know this is wrong - we should take them to task. And, she added, we should specifically take them to task the more expensive the restaurant gets. Sure, maybe you can let them escape at $14.95 for three courses as here, but cowards like you say nothing even when a $40 plate is objectively wrong. Why?

In the end, I did nothing, and the meal somewhat redeemed itself with a passable duck confit, though the accompanying potatoes had obviously been hanging around since the night before, and the dried plantain adorning the creme caramele (after I had ordered creme brulee anyway) ill placed. But I'm left wondering whether my approach is wrong. My sense is that if they want my advice, they're welcome to pay me, or suffer when an actual critic shows up and is served the same desultory nonsense. But maybe, and especially since this restaurant has survived unscathed for a while, people should speak out during dinner. I wonder - please email me with your opinions.

Hell's Kitchen
Raffi Melkonian at 10:48 PM
I'm just watching Gordon Ramsay's restaurant reality show, Hell's Kitchen. The show began with each contestant being asked to prepare a "signature dish" in just 45 minutes for the chef. I was left wondering what I would do in that situation.

Obviously, my stews are out of the question. Roasts wouldn't work either, and my favorite spaghetti carbonara would collapse completely if left for even a minute or two. There's nothing so nasty as slowly congealing eggy pasta.

Frankly, my first idea would be to simply make Ramsay a fried egg, or scrambled eggs, or an omelet, the best way I know how. For the first, by cooking the egg slowly in butter, and then dripping warm butter over the still raw yolk, and then salting only the white to avoid disturbing the yolk's color. The second over a double boiler, with cream at the end. And the last by rolling the omelet around the pan in that way I've never been able to manage.

But he'd probably have thrown those back in my face for being too unambitious. So after thinking about it a bit more, I hit on risotto with morels - and was gratified to see the chef serve a similar dish in the first night of the restaurant's "opening" later in the show.

Of course, by then I would have run out of time to make the risotto properly. Sweating the vegetables at the beginning takes time, as does the rice itself.

Well, better them than me. The difficulty of satisfying a real chef, even one putting on a bit of an act like Ramsay is, is too much for me. I'll stick to what I'm actually good at.