Category: Tidbits

Blue Hill at Stone Barns.  Seventh or ninth or twelfth taste of the night, after the baby crudité, after the Veta la Palma red mullet, after the 18-hour ash-buried onion.  Tall cups of grains tinted blue-green with phytoplankton await on the ends of two long white dishes.  The concoction looks righteous and cleansing, like spirulina-spiked fruit juice.  Beside each plate sits a flat ceramic round pedestal for a pair of wooden chopsticks.  Winnie's eyes drift to the movement over my shoulder.

WINNIE: What's that?  Looks like some kind of animal.

A blond wooden plank is placed on the white tablecloth. One end carries a groove with a large serving spoon.  The other end carries the animal...what is it?  The gray, mottled skin is smooth, shiny, elastic.  Unkosher.  A stingray?  A Picasso-eyed turbot?

No, wait -- it's upside down.  It's a fish head, a cod's to be exact.  With big old fish lips and spiky little teeth.  And it's looking at Winnie.  Or it would be, except the place where the eye would be has been meticulously carved out like a jack-o-lantern.  Visage sans les yeux...

Our neighbors crane their necks with curiosity.  I pick up the plank and tilt it towards them so they can get a good eyeful.  And then we dig in.  The excess of clear collagen in the unctuous collar would make Megan Fox's lips blush. A flap of gelatinous skin reveals a succulent cheek, larger and silkier than a scallop.  The meat along the forehead falls away from the curved skull, sweet and soft.  We pluck translucent, flexible bones from the flesh, deconstructing the cod's face until all that's left is a pile of deflated derma and the fish's puffy pout.

Of course the two Asian ladies would devour a fish head. How did Chef know we would happily accept this double dare?  And who else could they possibly have been saving it for?

NEIGHBORS: What did it taste like?

ME: Unctuous.  Gelatinous.  Fatty.

NEIGHBORS: Like the veal marrow?

ME: Yes, like the veal marrow.

That veal marrow melted in its own trough, a limb bone sawed in half lengthwise and topped with black bubbles of American caviar.  Graphic, sure, but also conscious.  Gustatorial decadence in the summer sometimes means infanticide, said Winnie -- the baby cow, the unborn sturgeon eggs, the embryonic zucchini with the blossom caul.  If we're going to take life for hedonistic pleasure, we should exalt it by recognizing it for what it once was, or maybe what it could have been.

There's probably no better way to face the creature you eat than by eating its face.

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*Disclosure: We both know the chef and though we didn't tell him we were coming, we ran into him when we arrived at the restaurant.  Though we've never revealed any affinity for fish face to him before.

"My friends were poor, but honest; So's my love."
-- Helena, All's Well that Ends Well

We had an impromptu dinner party for 12 of our best friends at Sarah and Alex's palatial new flat in Fort Greene.  Sarah and Shannon's cinnamon-hued hound puppy made a few social appearances between naps while the rest of us pulled our chairs up around a rough-edged marble kitchen table, sipping prosecco from wide-mouthed champagne glasses, picking at a hunk of pecorino and peppery water crackers. 

Newcomers toured their epic backyard garden -- wet burgundy Japanese maple, slick pebble and white-painted wood, pre-blossom wisteria enveloping the walls, the dual hammocks dripping cool spring rain.  Even the indoor cacti were looking as succulent and lush as I've ever seen cacti look.

Really, it is heaven to be there with all of my beloveds.  My friends don't have a lot of money, and we're in varying states of employment, but many of us have lucked out on good New York apartments; on days like these, surrounded by my crew, I feel like a contessa. 

La Doug chose this recipe for the dinner party because it was easily doubled and can be made in one pot.  We all loved it. The ground cashews add a bit of texture, giving the curry zaftig body and meatiness, rounded out by the mellowing yogurt.

It went over like gangbusters with some sauteed spinach and rice cooker-prepped jasmine rice.  You absolutely MUST use a good curry powder -- we love S&B Oriental curry powder,
the blend of choice for Japanese curry.  It can be found at any Asian grocery store and a surprising number of delis in Manhattan.

Chicken Curry with Cashews

This recipe is from Epicurious. 

Heat 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter in a 7-quart heavy pot over moderately low heat until foam subsides.

Fry 3 chopped onions, 4 chopped garlic cloves, and 2 tbsp. minced ginger until softened, about 5 minutes.

Add 6 tbsp. S&B curry powder, 1 tbsp. salt, 2 tsp. ground cumin, and 1 tsp. cayenne and sauté for 2 minutes.

Add 6 lbs. chicken parts and cook, stirring to coat, 3 minutes.

Add 2 (14.5-oz.) cans tomatoes with juice and simmer gently, covered, stirring occasionally, until chicken is cooked through, about 40 minutes.

Grind 1 1/2 cups cashews until very fine, then add to curry along with 1 1/2 cups whole milk yogurt . Simmer gently, uncovered, stirring, until sauce is thickened, about 5 minutes.

Serves about 8 on a rainy Sunday.

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After we got home from Sarah and Alex's:

DOUG: I really feel like the kitchen's not that bad at all.

[pause]

DOUG: That's why I'm going to wait 'til tomorrow to clean up.

From the New York Times' Green Issue:

Dashka Slater:

"Pork, lamb and poultry all have their impacts, but beef is undoubtedly the Hummer of the dinner plate."

Michael Pollan:

"Which brings us back to the 'why bother [going green]' question and how we might better answer it. The reasons not to bother are many and compelling, at least to the cheap-energy mind. But let me offer a few admittedly tentative reasons that we might put on the other side of the scale:

If you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others -- from other people, other corporations, even other countries."

****

Over Meet the Press this morning, La Doug and I were discussing the awful but not impossible scenario where McCain wins the White House over a fractured Democratic party. 

LA DOUG: I talked to Mark, who was in D.C. when we went from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration.  It went from a sushi town to a steakhouse town overnight.

Next time you visit a friend with a baby, ask them to save you some baby food jars. They're the perfect size for taking homemade vinaigrette to work. Just toss your ingredients in and shake them up when you're ready for lunch. The twist top means no spills. Best of all, smells don't carry over in glass, so I can make basil ginger soy dressing today (pictured here) and mix up a lime mint honey vinaigrette tomorrow.

If I had to use two words to describe the tasting menu we had at Aquavit, they'd be "fruity fish".

Not exactly my cup of glogg, but I wouldn't mind downing another dram of the pear vanilla black pepper aquavit.

Salma at Food & Wine shouts me out on the Food & Wine blog! I had the privilege of ordering at Sripraphai for a table of lady writer/editors on Monday, most of whom I'd never met before, all of whom could throw down at the dinner table. I love New York women.

• BBC reports that Bronx council member Joel Rivera wants to limit the number of fast food restaurants within close proximity of each other. Which is totally going to make those fat kids in fast food infested neighborhoods like Sunset Park lose weight because they'll have to walk an extra 10 paces every time they want to wash down their KFC 12-piece with a 7-Layer Burrito and a Coolatta.

• More reason to get to know your local poultry farmer—frozen Chinese chickens, ducks, and pigeons, entrails and all, were being illegally smuggled in through NY and NJ. I'm sure they're TOTALLY sending the happiest, healthiest, least suspicious chickens they have off to the U.S. in crates labeled "tilapia".

• The Times' reports that today's average actual pasta serving is 480% the recommended one cup serving size; cookies are up to 700% larger than recommended serving size. So if I'm not yet 700% larger than my ideal body weight, does that mean I can keep eating 4 cups of pasta for dinner?

  

• An Amish farmer in Ohio loses his dairy license for taking $2 from an undercover agent for a gallon of raw milk. Isn't there anything better to do in Ohio than entrapping Amish farmers over $2 gallons of milk? Don't they have meth labs to take down or something?

• Best thing I've seen all week -- Sunday, 11:00 a.m. dim sum at World Tong in Bensonhurst, two fuzzy-eyed old Chinese ladies dressed in floral polyester practically wrestling each other to the ground over the check, $100 bill in hand. For those of you not well-versed in the martial art of check-fighting, fight clean, but remember, elder trumps younger, grasshopper.
• Seen at Sunrise Mart in Soho -- a handwritten sign for special konnyaku that says, "GOOD FOR ASSIMILATION".
• Strict parents produce overweight kids. Is there anything that ISN'T yo mama's fault?
• Speaking of mamas, tell yo baby mama -- just two drinks a week can lower an unborn child's IQ. Test subjects also being sought for study on possible adverse effects of dropping a baby on its head more than once a week.
• We're still talkin bout yo mama -- pregnant ladies shouldn't eat tuna. Young children should eat no more than 1/2 a can chunk-light tuna per week. Women of child-bearing age should eat no more than 3 cans of chunk-light tuna per week. Tuna chart does not mention how much tuna single women of child-bearing age who could only get pregnant by immaculate conception should eat. Please advise.