June 2006 Archives

photo by Brigitte LacombeName: Ruth Reichl

Occupation: Editor-in-chief, Gourmet Magazine

Borough: Manhattan

Relationship status: Married

What did you eat today?

Breakfast: roasted apricots (leftover from dessert last night) with sliced organic strawberries and heavy cream

All Day (in the Gourmet Test Kitchens):
Grilled grass-fed beef from a new producer (for an article that Deborah Madison is doing for us).
Oysters in artichoke hearts with spinach in a champagne-cream sauce (for a winter issue)
Cheese-potato crepes with red cabbage and apple salad (another winter issue)
Steak with anchovy butter (late fall)
Almond cake with blackberries (next Spring)
Beef stew (a reader recipe)
Hamburgers (more of that grass fed beef)
Bitter greens salad with feta (next summer)
Chocolate truffles (sent into the magazine by the producer)
A handful of cherries (brought from home)

Dinner at home with the family:
Roast chicken (organic, free-range, from a local farmer) with roasted potatoes, onions and garlic
Local Asparagus with balsamic vinegar
Sautéed mushrooms with sherry
Sautéed lacinata kale with onions
Vanilla ice cream with sliced strawberries

What do you never eat?

Honey. Loathe the stuff. Don’t have much love for sweet wines either.

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

Butter
Free-range eggs
Parmesan cheese
Lemons
Sriracha sauce
3 or 4 other kinds of hot sauce
Hoisin sauce
Oyster sauce
Good maple syrup
Tortillas
Cold water
Tiptree’s Little Scarlet jam
Milk
Sour cream
White wine

And in the freezer:
Homemade chicken stock
Vanilla ice cream
Spicy pork sausages
Wild blueberries
Frozen dumplings from the 5 for $1 dumpling place in Chinatown
Schapira’s Viennese roast coffee

What is your favorite kitchen item?

My new black granite mortar and pestle – perfect for making salad dressing (among other things).

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Pearl Oyster Bar. I could happily eat steamed clams every day. And their little boiled lobsters are perfect. And I love the way it feels in there.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

A loaf of great crusty bread with cold sweet butter
2 dozen little neck clams on the half shell
a well-aged, rare Porterhouse steak bone to gnaw on
just-picked Silver Queen corn on the cob
sliced home-grown tomatoes with great olive oil and good sherry vinegar
a bottle of 1982 Petrus
1 perfectly ripe peach

[Let's hope the world ends during the month of August. -- Ed.]

My Pau always got the L.A. Times on Thursdays and Sundays because that was when it came with the food sections -- and all of his precious coupons and flyers. Often, the food articles that really made my mouth water had Ruth Reichl's byline. Then I'd read the Sunday magazine and in the back, there'd be a great recipe article, again with Ruth Reichl's byline. She was the first journalist I ever learned to look for by name. Who is this Ruth Reichl, and how does she know so much about food? I thought. I imagined she looked like Dr. Ruth, because Dr. Ruth was the only other Ruth I'd ever heard of, and I wasn't very imaginative.

I love her books (the most recent being Garlic and Sapphires, again published by my employer) and I'm totally in awe of her body of work. Honest to goodness, she's one of my rock stars. To quote my friend Robert, "You don't understand! I'm like a 50 year-old gay man meeting Liza Minnelli!"

Welcome to my newly reconditioned and refurbished home! Some new things for you to check out:

• My new look, created with help from Jenny Feddersen. Don't I look good in pink?
  
• The Eat Map -- All my reviews in a convenient, chic interactive map.
  
• My ink and paper articles from real glossy magazines.
  
• Special guest Ruth Reichl (!!) is what she eats.
  

Special thanks to Vanessa Von Hessert for designing the cherries in the banner! Back to the business of eating and complaining, mi amor. A piece of advice from my friend Lynn's dad: Don't forget to buy a fifth on the third for the 4th!

xoxo,
Ganda

Tired of drinking plain water, but don't want the sugar fix from sodas and juices? Try mugicha, Japanese barley tea. I buy the pre-bagged barley tea -- just stick a few bags into your pitcher of water, let it cold steep in the refrigerator for at least an hour, and pour. It brews up the color of iced tea but has a refreshing roasty, savory flavor. And it's caffeine free. You can get mugicha from Sunrise Mart, JAS Mart, or any other Japanese grocery store.

Frank Bruni's review of Mr. Chow:

"For crab meat soup, $13. Were there discernible crab in it, you'd understand. But there wasn't, so my companions and I didn't."

"The cubes of bland flesh could have come from any number of beasts or birds. And for $31.50, there weren't many cubes. If I'm going to get a main course this mediocre, I'd at least like more of it."

"If I learned that it had been plucked from a freezer after the better part of a decade and then nuked in a microwave for the better part of a day, I'd be shocked. It didn't taste nearly that tender or flavorful."

"At the start of each meal, servers push expensive Champagne. ("For a toast! How about a toast? Don't you want to make a toast?") They do it even if you have a full martini in front of you. Even if you have already said no."

"On a slightly busier night, it took repeated pleas and 25 minutes to get a check. Once we were done with spending, our servers were done with us."

And yet, Bruni falls one ball short of giving the place a Poor rating. Come on, man! Feed our bloodlust!

I had a Shack Stack (hamburger, Shack burger, and Shroom burger), cheese fries, half a Second City wurst, an Arnold Palmer, and a Concrete Jungle from the Shake Shack today. For research purposes. It is 1:30 a.m. and I am still filled to the gills. I wish I could boot and rally right now. I feel like Violet Beauregarde, in desperate need of an Oompa Loompa with a big needle and a juicer.

Doug thinks I should give myself an award for eating that much food. If I keep this up, I'll be a shoe-in for a Darwin award.

1. Bad website music -- Hello, I am trying to secretly surf the web while I am at work and your bad website music is totally blowing my cover. Okay, I get it, you're multi-culti, you're brown (but not too brown), you're exotic, your place is swingin', baby. It's bad enough I have to listen to whatever pap you decide to throw down on your turf. Turn off the assault on my computer speakers. You're drowning my Mariah out and that's not okay.

2. Small plates -- To hell with you and your so-called tapas! I am so tired of spending exorbitant amounts of money only to go home hungry because I am supposed to share my little serving of finger food with everyone at the table. I want to eat a meal and not have to grab a slice five minutes later. I want my protein entree to come with both a vegetable AND a carb-filled starch. Yes, I mean included in the price.

3. Waiters who ask if I want the bread -- Yes I want the bread and yes I want two pieces and don't make me feel guilty for asking for it. All those fools who have vilified the west's greatest starch contribution will cry when they realize that the decade they spent avoiding carbs didn't help them avoid their fat fate. What, people have been eating bread for centuries and NOW all of a sudden it's making them fat?

4. How would you like that cooked? -- I am of the opinion that there is only one way to cook a steak (rare) and one way to cook salmon (cooked through, no raw center). But when I'm at a restaurant, I want to know how the chef likes it. If s/he thinks it's better another way, I want to try it the chef's way. So, steak I understand -- there is a long tradition of asking for steak to be cooked your way. But duck breast? Fish? Pork chop? Dazzle me with your way, chef.

5. Disposable chopsticks in sit-down Asian restaurants -- Deforestation is real, and there's no reason to be throwing out wooden chopsticks every day when you have to wash the plates and silverware anyway. I keep a normal pair at work and refuse the chopsticks whenever I remember to.

Eat drink one woman version 10.5.1 (or whatever) will launch this Friday! All of these features that previously only existed in my head have actually formed molecules and cells. I'm very excited to share them with you. Funny to launch on a Friday, I know, but that's because I have a VIP You Are What You Eat lined up. I can't tell you more without spoiling your dinner.

Name: Ricardo Bracho

Occupation: Playwright, grantwriter, manny

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status: In a relationship

What did you eat today?

For breakfast/lunch: Chilaquiles in a lime-tomatillo-jalapeno-cilantro salsa verde I blended up yesterday. And a large coffee from Dunkin' Donuts, half n half no sugar. For dinner, three courses: 1) Mussels, octopus and venison pate from contraband conserva my bro smuggled in from Basque Country; 2) Wild red snapper fillets and a green on green salad (green leaf lettuce, watercress, cilantro and mint) and cucumber slaw (cucumber, onion, celery); 3) guava paste and fresh mexican cheese on french bread

What do you never eat?

Broccoli, mayonnaise, fast food

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

Leftovers from last night's meal, jalapenos, nopales, tortillas (flour, corn and these days blue corn as well)

What is your favorite kitchen item?

The oven - I'm a roaster and a baker. I covet a hand mixer.

Where do you eat out most frequently?

La Orquidea (the carniceria where I buy my meat daily) on Knickerbocker in Bushwick with great Oaxacan tamales, carne enchilada and tostadas y sopes de pollo de tinga.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

A combo of Carib n Mexican delights that I made: Pernil, mole, arroz, frijoles, platanos y tembleque.

I rediscovered Vitamilk today at Chelsea Thai in the Chelsea Market. Vitamilk is a popular cold soy milk beverage in Thailand that you drink straight up from a glass bottle. It's definitely not for everyone. It doesn't masquerade behind a vanilla front. It's thick and creamy and has that lightly sweet traditional Chinese soy milk flavor that may be bit of an acquired taste. I only acquired a taste for it a few years ago. Vegans take warning -- Vitamilk is pumped up with milk powder. It's also super filling and nice as a meal replacement on a hot summer day. They're $1.50/bottle at Chelsea Thai.

Next time, just shove a tortilla chip in my mouth and mug me. Damn the Times. Those summer drinking articles just made me thirsty for margaritas in the sun. Six of us headed to Mercadito Grove for after work refreshments.

But I'm sorry, was my shirt so dirty that I needed to be taken to the cleaners? Did I look like I wanted to be bent over a table and banged with a tejolote? To quote Pulp Fiction, DO...I...LOOK...LIKE...A BITCH? My snack-sized beer-battered tilapia tacos with fussy chipotle napa cabbage slaw ($13.50) could have used more lime, more onion, more chili, more anything. Shrimp tacos in a spicy red sauce with slivers of avocado ($13.50) were more flavorful, though there were probably about five shrimp total in the four teeny tacos. A scant cup of mashed avocado masquerading as guacamole was salt free, lime free, onion free, pretty much flavor free -- and at $9.50, far from free (and so very inferior to the one I made in Hudson). The $32.50 small pitcher of white sangria could have been pruno for all the sugary fruit cocktail in it.

Okay, the margaritas weren't bad, but again, they weren't as good as the ones we were making this past weekend. I did like the tres cítricos with fresh grapefruit, lemon, orange and sprinkling of chili powder ($9.50) -- I'm stealing the idea for a cocktail party.

But the bill came out to a whopping $270 for six (only four actually ate dinner) with tax and tip. $270, and I was still hungry and completely sober! Even by insane New York standards, that is way too rich. We paid $270 for the luxury of breathing in exhaust fumes from 7th Ave., noshing on a bland cabbage patch doll's meal and fending off a sleepwalking junkie repeatedly trying to hock $1 roses. (His brilliant sales pitch: "Uno, uno," even though Spanish was clearly neither his first language nor ours.)

We could have gotten 100 larger and infinitely more delicious tacos at Tacos Matamoros, and we still would have had enough money leftover to buy TWO bottles of Don Julio tequila Anejo. I work way too hard for my money to be throwing it away on such utterly forgettable food.

When I was in Mexico City, we went to a mercadito at the edge of town to eat the best $2 octopus tostadas on god's great earth, the tentacles pounded and boiled into tender submission, seasoned brightly with vinegar and herbs, and piled high on a thick, crunchy fried corn tortilla.

"Do you think this kind of food would sell well in America?" the vendor asked me.

I told him it would. I told him we needed him. People would line up to sponsor his visa once they'd tasted his tinga. But a town that allows the mediocre Mercadito to thrive and expand doesn't yet deserve his pulpo.

Mercadito Grove
100 7th Ave. South at Grove
1 9 to Christopher St.