Fresh, wild sweet shrimp from Maine are back in season. They're sweet, of course, with no pesky vein to pull out. But be warned -- the flesh is so tender that removing the dainty shell requires a light touch. Many of the pretty peach shrimp are curled around little clumps of roe, though I was a little too squeamish to deal with it. Check out this Barbuto recipe from New York mag. Whole Foods has them, headless, for $5.99/lb.
I try to describe food in a way that a reader will taste in his mind's palate, though there is still a bit of a "dancing about architecture" element to it. I therefore hope I am doing a better job than the girl working behind the Jacques Torres counter who described the marron glace (candied chestnut) as having the texture of a "gummy bear."
I am sure Mr. Torres would be horrified to hear his chestnuts compared to fruity tooth gnashers. I would say that the starchy chestnut cells are heavy with crystallizing syrup, giving it more of the texture of marzipan; the outside has an crisp onionskin film of hardened sugar, like the coating of a glazed cake donut. It reminded me very much of a Thai dessert of yucca root drenched in sugar syrup -- not my favorite dessert, but not unpleasant. They're probably delicious to people who grew up with them.
But it was no gummy bear.
Marrons Glaces are available at Jacques Torres' Chocolate Haven
350 Hudson Street, 1 block South of Houston
212-414-2462
Who died and made champagne king? I mean, I love champagne, but I'm not sure that the low end champagnes are better value than the higher end sparklers of other varieties. For the holiday festivities, I'm perfect happy to have gotten a case of Prosecco Sorelle Bronca for $40 more than what I spent on one bottle of Krug last year.
And I just had a taste flashback of a lovely sparkler I got from the Hudson Wine Merchants when I took my little upstate outing in September. Hudson Wine Merchants is the kind of charming, not-intimidating place you'd love to have around the corner from your house. The adorable bespectacled proprietor suggested a fabulous Phillipe Foreau Sparkling Vouvray NV at about $25/bottle, which he was planning to serve at a party of his own. From France's Loire Valley, it had an elegant texture and a yummy tropical berry flavor, without the yeastiness that I (apparently) don't like. I haven't been able to forget it (especially because Doug accidentally left the second bottle in the rental's refrigerator.)
Not going to be in Hudson anytime soon? Me neither (sadly). You can also buy it at Smith and Vine (who have a very classy website).
Need a case of something? Hudson Wine Merchants has plenty of city-dweller patrons, and they're happy to deliver cases in NYC.
Read their newsletters (with a nice piece on a variety of sparklers) here.
Of the three* bottles of sparkling wine our dinner party shared chez nous Saturday night, the Prosecco Sorelle Bronca was the hands-down table favorite. Light and crisp, fleeting fruit, with a fine but not tiny bead, it's the kind of sparkler you can drink all night long. And at $12.99/bottle, you can afford to drink it all night long. I'll be stocking some for New Year's. Buy it at Astor Wines & Spirits. Read more about its provenance here.
In the fabulous Alcoholica Esoterica** (which is worth the money for the champagne chapter alone), Ian Lendler recommends keeping your opened bottle of champagne bubbly throughout the evening by dropping a metal spoon handle into the neck of the bottle.
I must disagree with him, though, when it comes to serving temp. He suggests 45 degrees Farenheit (and says that most fridges are 37 degrees) for best taste and bubble. Call me gauche, but I don't think there's anything more delicious than a glass of tickly, glacier-cold bubbly. I super-chilled the bottles in a big bucket of ice (also great because there wasn't any room in the fridge anyway).
Incidentally, Lendler also recommends not leaving your champagne in the refrigerator for more than a few days because vibrations from the motor will de-fizz your champs. (Who knew?)
*First runner-up was a Santa Margherita Prosecco di Valdobbiadene (Brut), $16.99 - light and mineral-y. Second runner-up (and most expensive) was Leclerc Briant Cuvee Extra Champagne (Brut), $27.99 - golden and fruity.
**Disclaimer: Yes, I got this book from work. But I'm not just shilling, it really is a fabulous book. Great gift for your boozer friends.
Our pungent seasoning workhorses -- onions, chives, leeks, scallions, garlic, etc. -- are part of the allium genus in the lily family. Sometimes you can find gorgeous lilac-colored chive flowers at the Greenmarket in the spring. These flowering chives, though, are the unopened bud stems of garlic chives, also known as Chinese chives. Aren't they gorgeous and kind of alien looking? Flowering chives have that lovely mild garlic chive flavor with a sweet gel core inside the long fibered green exterior. Saute 3" lengths on high heat for a few minutes with a bit of black bean garlic sauce (like they do at City Bakery) or just with salt and a touch of cornstarch. Add beaten eggs for a yummy flowering chive omelet you can enjoy in the morning with rice porridge. They can be found year-round at Chinatown veggie stands for about $2/bunch.
It's fall, and pomegranates are back in the market. Everyone loves the Pom juice these days -- a dash in a flute of champagne, with chai-infused vermouth and Courvoisier at Employees Only, or just floated on top of a tall glass of iced seltzer. But there's something kind of dangerous and sexual about the fruit -- a round red ball that splits open to reveal an overabundance of uniform blood red kernels and almost no pith. It's no wonder that Demeter's daughter Persephone couldn't resist the temptation of sucking on seven pomegranate seeds during her abduction and imprisonment in Hades' underworld. As my roommate said, "This must be what it's like to eat pussy. Not that I would know."
Look for heavy specimens that aren't too dry or pale. To open, score a hemicircle across the blossom end of the fruit just through the skin and break the fruit into two halves. The sacs are sweet, tart, crisp but full of juice with a little crunchy white nub in the middle. They're apparently also very high in antioxidants.
In Thai, the word for pomegranate is the same word for ruby, and the thin membranes of the best specimens should look encrusted with dark jewels. Throw the juicy seeds in salads, with dressings sweetened with Middle Eastern pomegranate molasses. Pomegranate seeds are sprinkled atop Chiles en Nogada (stuffed poblano chiles with walnut sauce). Garnish a carrot ginger soup with the garnet nuggets. I got mine at my local greengrocer for $2.49; FreshDirect has them for $2.99/each.
Don't forget end of the day specials at the Greenmarket. At 8 pm in Union Square tonight, I got two half-pints of sweet, obscenely voluptuous, positively gory blackberries for $5 (normally $3.50 per half-pint). Eat fruit while you still can, people! We've got a long, scurvy-licious winter right around the corner. I'm just sayin'...
For the first few years I lived here, I heralded a certain farm's peaches as the peach to beat at the Union Square Greenmarket. In recent years, though, I've had a number of mealies and, though I love the farmers, I can't condone their stone fruit.
But one day, I decided to give Ted Blew's "Revolutionary" yellow peaches a try. They looked fleshy, smelled fragrant, and were not picked over too vigorously by the pinching savages. After all, Ted Blew is better known for his pork products, pepper selection, and potted herbs than for his fruit.
Last year and this year, his peaches have stolen my heart. The skin slips off with a gentle tug and the clingstone's flesh is smooth, dappled with rose, perfectly sweet-tart with a multi-note perfume. Just to be sure, my roommate and I compared my old favorite with the new; Ted Blew's peaches came out on top, hands down.
Last year, I managed to make individual cobblers with those peaches, which, though totally ripe, miraculously make it back to Brooklyn with minimal bruising. But nothing beats peeled peach slices fresh off the stone. These babies are NOTHING like those green softballs airmailed from South America. More than almost any other fruit or vegetable, if you've never had a juicy peach picked ripe from a local tree, you've never really had a peach. This heat is a bitch, but I'm thankful for the peaches of summer, and I'll take my blessings where I can get them.
Ted Blew
Union Square Greenmarket
Saturdays (he might be there other days too, I forget)
North side, in front of Petco
I think they were $3/lb., and worth every penny
****
Best interview subject , from a NYTimes article on laser-printing on fruit:
Sticker-removal duty took Jean Lemeaux of Clarksville, Tex., half an hour one day last week.
"I was picking all the little stickers from the Piggly Wiggly off my plums and my avocado pears and my peaches," said Ms. Lemeaux, 76. "Then I had to make fruit salad out of the ones that got hurt when I took the stickers off, and then I had to wash the glue off the other ones before I put them in the fruit bowl."
"One time," she said, "I got up the next morning and looked in the mirror and there were two of them up in my hair."
Quick but important lesson here, folks. Last weekend I made a Thai style cucumber salad for a potluck birthday party, but I had just run out of Tiparos fish sauce. Since I wasn't about to go into Chinatown just to pick up fish sauce for my dish, I decided to go ahead and try the Kame fish sauce my roommate had in the cupboard, unopened. The faux-Asian font should have tipped me off to its quality, but I soldiered on anyway.
It tasted like...nothing. Like salt water. Fish sauce is supposed to have a pungency, an umami if you will, that lends complexity to Southeast Asian foods. The Kame had nothing. As you can see, I had to use half the little bottle for my salad, which in true fish sauce would be enough salt to cure whale meat. Kame lists the ingredients as: water, salt, high fructose corn syrup (que? quoi? wha?), and "fish extract". I had to compensate for the lack of flavor by grinding down extra dried shrimp.
Today I went to the excellent Thai grocery on Mosco St. and bought a squeeze bottle of trusty Squid fish sauce (which has no squid in it, by the way -- Squid is just the brand name.) Squid lists the ingredients as a whopping 60% fish, 38% salt, and 2% granulated white sugar. The label points out that there are no added preservatives. Alright, I know there's gotta be water somewhere in there too, but the point is, it's fishier, it's saltier, and it doesn't have any high fructose gobbledygook.
The 207 mL Kame, which was probably purchased at Garden of Eden, was $2.85 according to the still attached price tag. The 750 mL Squid fish sauce was $1.50. And the price printed on the bottle is 23 baht, which is about 55 cents. So even though the vastly inferior Kame is more than five times the price of the Squid, the fine folks at the Bangkok Center Grocery who sell the Squid can still turn a pretty profit.
The moral of the story? Don't ever buy anything with the faux Asian font on it. And you don't always get what you pay for. Don't be a sucka. I recommend Tiparos fish sauce and Squid fish sauce, the two brands I grew up with.
(Incidentally, Squid used to not add sugar to their fish sauce. But Tiparos became the #1 brand of fish sauce in Thailand, and their formula required a touch of sugar. So, interestingly enough, Squid now adds sugar too.)
The years I worked for the Paffenroths, they had limited success growing chervil, and year after year the chefs and customers requested it. The past few years, Farmer Alex has figured this finicky green out, and they have generous, sprightly bunches of chervil for only $1. Cooking it will destroy its delicate aroma, so chop the lacy, pinky-nail sized leaves and add at the last minute to fish dishes; sprinkle some over your buttered carrots or omelette; its anise-y flavor lends itself well to Asian foods too, as it did in my green salad with radishes and soy ginger garlic dressing. And if you've got lots leftover after you're done cooking (which wouldn't be a surprise considering the fistful you get for a dollar), you have a sophisticated, pretty garnish for EVERYTHING.
Paffenroth Gardens
Union Square Greenmarket
North Side of Union Square on Wednesdays, in front of Barnes & Noble
West Side of Union Square on Saturdays, in front of Union Square Cafe
