Sometimes Home Cooking Doesn't Cut It

Loving food is something that happens to a lot of people in a lot of different ways. My mom married into a food family and has since developed a love for fine flavors. My dad, brother, and I were born into food as were a lot of my friends, while other friends decided good food equals a good life and began nurturing their cooking skills.

When I went to college I loved good food thanks to my family, I also thought I knew how to cook. Once I moved to Whitesburg where there were no restaurants to speak of I realized I was mistaken about my cooking abilities. After five years and many, many potlucks later I can cook now. Whitesburg is the kind of town where if you want it you have to make it. The only take out is fast food and the grocery store will provide most of the ingredients you need but it certainly doesn’t have a fancy olive bar and the only prepared salads are either starch based or mayonnaise based or both.

I am happy and lucky to have found myself among friends who thrive in situations where you have to make things happen. It’s a different kind of world when you don’t have everything at your fingertips. The only caveat to all this is even if we could get all the ingredients we wanted at the store, you simply can’t cook everything at home.

This weekend my family of four plus Brian’s girlfriend was in New York doing what we do best together, eating and deciding where to eat next. For the most part we had food you can’t make at home either because of special equipment or ingredients or know-how. Know-how isn’t as hard to come by as I once thought thanks to the internet and the world’s obsession with global flavors, but equipment and ingredients are often more scarce in my world.

The first meal we couldn’t recreate at home the same way they made at Lechonera Sandy a Dominican place on 116th in east Harlem, was roasted pork, cuchifritos, and mofongo with pork. Cuchifrito seems to be the Dominican word for fried or not fried delicious treats. We had tongue, which was nothing like the disgusting piece of meat I remember my parents serving. It was tender and flavorful with a sauce. We had a whole sweet plantain fried and stuffed with vegetables and ground beef. The third cuchifrito was mashed yucca in the shape of a football as my dad said, stuffed with meat and fried. I feel like there was something added to the yucca mash because it was yellow and all two of the yuccas I’ve seen this week have been white. (the pictures are in order below.)





Next came the mofongo with pork and garlic sauce. The mofongo was turned out from a mold. There was a crisp outside, which I think came from baking, and crunchy bits that we thought were cracklins mixed in with the soft plantains.



Finally was the roasted pork with rice and beans. The rice was fluffy the beans were brown and soupy. The pork was roasted to perfection with a crispy skin. This pork was tasty and tender. My dad got a great picture of the roaster.





After a few hours of shopping and walking and napping it was on to our next dining experience. I’ve been anticipating this meal at Sushi of Gari for months now. I felt okay about the anticipation because I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed. My dad first took me here a few years ago because it was close to our apartment and had a high rating in his bible, more commonly known as Zagat’s. What I didn’t know until recently is that while Masa, another top sushi spot, is all about tradition, Gari is all about innovation. He came to America so he could make sashimi with foi gras. We ordered the chef’s choice and the platters of sushi just kept coming until we were full.



It was sashimi, fish over rice, with the most amazing sauces and toppins: bean curd sauce, miso vinaigrette, garlic mayonnaise, ponzu, and baked tomato. This meal did not disappoint. I felt so euphoric afterwards I had trouble talking. These are items that you could make at home if you had access to fresh fish, but this fish was so fresh and the sauces so creative that it would be hard to capture all the flavors.

The next morning we reconvened for brunch, my favorite meal. We went to another Nathan approved spot, Barney Greengrass. The food speaks for itself, house cured grav lox, homemade chopped chicken liver pate, bialys, bagels, lox, a pastrami omelet, pickles, and potato pancakes. The atmosphere is very diner-like but all Jewish male waiters, crowded, and delicious smelling. They don’t take reservations (I heard one teenage girl whine to her dad “why don’t they take bookings”) and there are certain requirements to getting a table quickly. The main one is your entire party has to be there. We saw a lot of crossed arms and rolled eyes because people meeting other people there were late. Also the family with a stroller had to wait a lot longer than if they had been stroller-free. It was quite the brunch scene. A lot of what we ate you could make at home, like the potato pancakes and even chopped liver pate, but it was better not to have to have been over the stove frying or searching out good chicken livers.




Despite the cooking ability present at our table, none of these meals would be nearly as tasty if we tried to make them at home. Even so, after so many dining experiences like these I’m ready to have at it again in my own kitchen. I won’t try to copy anything, but I may try to experiment with some new flavors.

Lechonera Sandy
2261 Second Ave at 116th St.

Sushi of Gari
402 E. 78th Between York and 1st Ave

Barney Greengrass
541 Amsterdam Ave Between 86 and 87

Holes in the Wall

My friend Nathan knows all the authentically good holes in the wall to eat at in the City. On Saturday he took a bunch of us to the most fabulous Burmese restaurant, Village Mingala, in the East Village. We ordered about 8 different dishes including appetizers and every single one was delicious. Shawn described the food as a cross between Chinese and Indian flavors, which is fitting since the country is in the middle of China and India. There was a lot of ginger and mango and curries. I had ginger duck, my friend Susanne had curry pork, Nathan had some crazy rice/tofu/noodle dish that was the best thing on the table.

Today he took me Tulcingo del Valle Restaurant, a small Mexican hole in the wall in Hells Kitchen. The menu is extensive like most Mexican places, from tortas (a Mexican style sandwich) to fajitas to enchiladas to burritos making it hard to decide what to order. I finally decided to get a burrito al pastor, a roasted pork burrito. Nathan had a vegetarian torta and we both got a glass of horchata.


After we ordered at the counter we sat down and a waitress brought out our food. The burrito was huge, somewhere near 4 inches in diameter and about 6 inches long. The tortilla was filled with fluffy rice, corn, onions, carrots, and pork. The pork was crisp and sweet and delicious. The whole thing was topped with Mexican crema a runny sour cream. The burrito had all the flavors I love in Mexican food but without the dousing of cheese sauce and grease that I’m used to at El Azul Grande.

Good food is surprisingly hard to come by in New York, but not if you know where to go and who to ask. Nathan is one of those people to ask.

Village Mingala
21 E. 7th St.
Between 2nd Ave. and 3rd Ave

Tulcingo del Valle Restaurant
665 10th Ave
Between 46th and 47th Street

Lexington Candy Shop

A day in the city takes a lot more work than a day at home. It is a big effort just to get out the door. Once you’re out the door there’s the walking, the dodging of people, and the carrying of multiple bags in case of rain/sun/boredom/dehydration/orientation. I have a system down pat that makes my day easier, but I still require the requisite break to recharge in the afternoon.

Generally I grab a quick juice or coffee, but when Shawn was here over the weekend we went for some sugar after a long day of going to the Guggenheim, a doctors appointment, and a lot of walking. I spotted the Lexington Candy Shop across the street, it had Shawn’s name written all over it and I have seen it for years but never ventured in.



The inside looked like any diner you’ve ever seen. It wasn’t fixed up to seem kitschy, the décor looks as though it has been that way for decades. The menu was your standard diner/grill items plus a page of sundaes, sodas, and malts. I went straight for a vanilla coke, my favorite. There was also a chocolate coke, which is something I’ve never seen. Who can guess what Shawn ordered between the two? Shawn also asked the waitress which sundae was the best and she said the black and white.

The cokes came out quickly. The vanilla coke was perfect. I don’t know what it is about the combination of vanilla and coke, but when it comes to having a cold refreshing beverage it doesn’t get much better than this. The caramel of the coke and the imitation vanilla syrup and sweetness of both just fit together like a puzzle.


The chocolate coke was also surprisingly perfect. We think they used cocoa powder because the fizz of the soda had an almost float like quality. The chocolate also complimented the coke flavor although in a much richer way. In a way that would make this drink good on a cold day even though it is cold. The sundae came out shortly after the cokes and was made with real vanilla ice cream and topped with chocolate sauce and whipped cream. It was the perfect break for a warm fall day.

Lexington Candy Shop
Southeast corner of Lexington Ave. and 83rd St.

A Taste of Chinatown

Saturday the storm system that had been stuck over New York for 8 days finally broke up and the sun came out. The sky was blue and the air crisp as I left the apartment and headed downtown to a little slice of heaven—A Taste of Chinatown. About 30 Chinatown restaurants were setting up tables and serving $1 tasting plates of their specialties. Mott Street was closed to cars and packed with people happy to be out and dry.

For the most part I’m not sure what I ate yesterday. Most of it was pretty standard as far as flavors, nothing compared to the Vietnamese food on Friday, but the atmosphere cinched the deal. There wasn’t a lot of English and a lot of the signs were written in other languages. The best spots had lines that literally stretched around the block. Below are pictures from the day with what little information I had.



This was a flaky, almost phyllo dough, egg roll with vegetables.





I have no idea what this was, but I didn't like it. It was a solid fried meat ball but it tasted like shrimp and had a weird texture. When I first saw it I thought it would be a skewer of mini-buns.



Two little dim sum bites packed with flavor, one was pork with shiitake mushroom and the other just pork. I had a cup of ginger-lemon cider that was amazing, spicy and sweet and tart all at the same time.



There was a delicious scallion pancake in this bag.



Malaysian fried nooldes with chicken. This is the first noodle dish I've had in long time that wasn't greasy. The noodles were light and airy.

Good Food Day

Friday morning I got up early to go for a run in Central Park, the only way I was letting myself out of it was if it was poring, since I love any excuse not to run, my chances were good. Much to my surprise it was barely drizzling, so off I went. After the week of rain I took this as a good sign for the rest of the day and started thinking about what I might want to do. However, by about 10:00 a.m. the rain was back and for the rest of the day the City was inundated with rain and low clouds.

I was pretty well over schlepping around in the rain so I headed to our favorite neighborhood pizza spot for a slice to take back to the apartment. New York pizza has been written about extensively (check out Peter Reinhart and Ed Levine’s latest books) and as far as I can tell each New Yorker has an opinion about what makes a good pie and where to get said pie. Earlier in the week I passed by Lombardi’s in Little Italy, they claim to be the first pizza joint in America. It is still a lot of New Yorker’s favorite pizza.

It doesn’t take much to make me happy in the way of pizza since my normal choice is between Pizza Hut, a doctored frozen pizza, or homemade. Homemade is fine if you want a think crust or have an oven that gets up to 500 degrees, but I love a good thin crust. The spot I usually head to when I want a slice here in the city is Famous Ray Bono Pizza. It is right around the corner from the apartment and they always have my favorite kind of pie—roasted garlic, fresh tomato slices, and parsley. I may need to go out and get a slice to make sure my research is accurate…I’m sure my New York friends will write with their opine about Famous Ray’s.



Once home, I devoured the pizza and washed it down with a cherry soda. After a nap I left to meet my friend Mckendree at Wollman Rink in Central Park. Just a short weather update, it was still raining steadily the clouds were circling around the skyscrapers. We were headed to a performance art piece called “A Journey that Wasn’t”. There are three parts to the piece, first, the artist Pierre Huyghe took a trip to Antarctica in February in search of the elusive albino penguin. Second, he recreated the Antarctica landscape at Wollman Rink with a 42-piece orchestra playing music inspired by the journey. The third will be a movie about the whole experience and is part of the Whitney Biennial. The New York Times has a great article about it all: An Antarctica Sighting in Central Park



We sat on bleachers in provided ponchos made for people with much smaller heads than mine. It was so fun though, there was a lot of dry ice blowing which mixed in with the actual clouds. The artist must have been excited about this because he explores the line between reality and reconstruction. Afterwards I was pretty well soaked to the bone, but happy. By the time I got back up to the Upper East Side the rain seemed to have stopped so instead of my original take out plan I sat myself down at a table at Miss Saigon, the neighborhood Vietnamese place.







The food was superb. I had duck spring rolls with a spicy peanut sauce and mustard greens with three mushrooms. What stuck in my mind were the intricacy of the sauces. In the manner of bringing out chips and salsa at the start of a Mexican meal, at Miss Saigon they brought out puffy rice chips and a sweet peanut sauce. It was so delicious I wanted to try it on everything. It didn’t work though. The flavors weren’t as neutral as salsa, but also the other food had more nuanced flavors. When I put it on the duck roll it just didn’t fit. The spicy sauce was exactly what the spring rolls needed to make the flavors of the roll stand out. When I dipped the mushrooms in the sweet peanut sauce the garlic flavors dominated and you could barely taste the peanut sauce.

One of my favorite elements of Asian food are the sauces. I tend to think more along the lines of one sauce fits all but now I want to go back and experiment and research these different flavors.

Famous Ray Bono Pizza
1215 Lexington Ave
Between 82 and 83

Miss Saigon
1425 3rd Ave
Between 80 and 81

Yummy Noodle

After a mere 13 days, October is New York City’s wettest month since April 1983. This is the 3 wettest October and it isn’t going to take much to move up that list according to the fear-inducing weatherman. It is still raining as I write this. Before experiencing torrential downpours in a city I wondered who, besides British farmers ever really wore galoshes. Now I know and now I wish I had a pair.

Wet and cold doesn’t really begin to describe the weather this week, but after drying my pants in the dryer twice yesterday and a hearty dinner of chicken parmesan, I decided it was time to look on the bright side. It’s great weather for movie watching and museum going. There is a sense of camaraderie among people passing each other on the sidewalk because we’re all in this together. Most importantly, with weather like this soup, coffee, and hot chocolate are necessary for survival, or at least warming up.

For me, yesterday was the wettest; I left the apartment in khakis that were soaked through by the time I got to Spanish class. After class the rain was coming down horizontally due to the gusts of wind, I looked at each pair of galoshes with palpable envy from my umbrella that wasn’t keeping much dry.

It was a rough start to recover from, in a faint effort to revive myself I went to Eli’s, a branch of Zabar’s. I picked up a cream of asparagus soup to reheat and some roasted vegetables. Passing through the deli section I noticed a bank of hot soups. I practically dropped the asparagus soup and went straight to the Jewish chicken soup, which was essentially chicken noodle soup sans noodles and with potatos. It did the job on warmth, but lacked in flavor.

Today it was still raining, but I was better prepared. Word of advice to those who don’t know any better (me): don’t wear cotton in the rain. It is cold when it gets wet and it doesn’t dry. After talking to my brother who has an infinite amount of knowledge on what fabrics to wear in what weather situations, turns out wool is better. So today I left in wool pants and a wool shirt. I was ready.

In an effort to remedy the not so great, yet expensive soup from Eli’s I headed to Yummy Noodle. I needed my noodle soup fix (see Paris post on comfort food) and how can you pass up a place with that name. Yummy Noodle is a part of a “mall” that isn’t really a mall. It is hard to describe, but it is like someone cut a walkway through the first floor of a building. There are 3 restaurants on one side and a beauty supply store on the other. Yummy Noodle is first when entering from Bowery, then a Malaysian place, then another Chinese place.

Yummy Noodle, like many restaurants in Chinatown has beautiful roast duck, pork and other meats hanging in the window. There were quite a few tables and an open kitchen with many clay pots going. Instead of contemplating the menu I decided to ask my waiter what to order. The cynics reading this are thinking she’s crazy, he’s going to suggest an expensive Americanized dish. I was willing to take my chances. He suggested Roast Duck Noodles Soup. It was $3.75 and a specialty of the house. Some others: Pig’s Blood with Chive, Sweet and Sour Chicken Feet, and Beef Tripe with Ginger and Scallion.



I love duck and I love noodles. What’s not to love? Throw them together in a rich soup and you’ve got a winner. The soup was served with a duck breast, bone on, cut in half. It was roasted to perfection, falling off the bone with chopsticks. The soup broth had a ginger flavor mixed with other unidentifiable flavors. There were scallions and cabbage floating amongst the duck and noodles. The noodles were thinner and somehow tougher than angel hair pasta. I didn’t love these noodles because I’m used to a soft udon or ramen noodle. It didn’t matter because the broth and duck had so much flavor they were pretty close to perfect. (apologies for the not so great photo of this soup...)

This place is a keeper, I want to go back with a group of people to sample the other 100 dishes on the menu that look like they too would be pretty close to perfect.

Yummy Noodle
44 Bowery (just south of Canal)
Minimum delivery: $10 (you’d have to be feeding about 20 people to reach this minimum)

$2

Fall is not usually a time I like to leave the mountains. When I worked I tried to limit my travel during the month in order to watch the trees change bit by bit every day. Early on in the summer I started thinking about spending some time in New York City. It didn’t take long to realize better to be hot with a swimming hole nearby than hot with miles of asphalt and concrete all around you. So here I am spending most of the month of October in New York.

There is a traffic jam outside my building as we speak and no trees in sight. This is okay though because of the perks all rural dwellers know come with city visits. I won’t torture you with the list, this much I know too. The guise I used to get here: brushing up on my Spanish. My class however is done at noon on the dot. Afterwards the city is my oyster.

Much like my other trips it is taking a few days to figure out how I want my days to go. In some ways it is harder because of my familiarity with the city and my love of habit. I tend to always go the same places when I’m here, but that’s also because I don’t usually have time to explore. In order to bust myself out of the box I bought a couple books about New York food. One, Nosh New York, is a series of walks in the boroughs and another, Slow Food New York, highlights different slow food spots.

The Nosh New York book has already done its job. Yesterday after speaking Spanish for 3 hours, I took the International Express, otherwise known as the 7 train to Flushing, Queens. From Grand Central you go under the water and come out in another world. The train is elevated almost the entire time, so I was able to see beautiful graffiti and signs for neighborhood businesses in any language imaginable.

This other world is right in front of me as I leave the subway, the signs are in Korean and Chinese and English. I saw about 5 white people the whole time I was strolling around and there is no English being spoken except to me. I’m amazed only took 30 minutes to get here.

I started walking towards one of the Nosh New York recommendations. Unfortunately, the book was published in 2003, which means it was written well before that. Once I get to where I wanted to go, it is a different place. I go in anyway and have some pork buns and scallion pancakes, which are delicious albeit a bit greasy. The lovely texture of the yeast pork buns is new to me and these don’t disappoint. After lunch I strolled around gawking at the herb shops, markets, and bookstores. While the food didn’t blow me away the neighborhood did—I’ve never been to an immigrant community like this. It is amazing to think about New York when each neighborhood was like this.

Now we get to the $2, which gave me the food I was hoping for but not so much the impressive locale. Yesterdays lunch with tip was about $6, which is what a craptastic lunch costs in Whitesburg. I felt pretty good. Today though, I headed to Fried Dumpling, one of the many places in Manhattan’s Chinatown that sells 5 dumplings for $1 (there are others throughout the city.) I was too nervous to get a picture of the menu, but nothing you could eat in the restaurant (and I use this word loosely as there were 3 itty bitty tables and a 6” wide, 3’ long counter to stand at) was over $2. If you want to splurge, $5 will get you a bag of 30 frozen dumplings to take home.



Anyone who says a dollar isn’t worth anything anymore has never been to Fried Dumpling. The dumplings were fried to dumpling-perfection and the pork filling was loaded with scallions. Dumplings are a simple food item, flour and water for the dough; pork, scallions and some seasoning for the inside. As we all know simple items are often the hardest to master.



In addition to dumplings I had a complex wonton soup for $1. The lady behind the counter spooned out the stock from a big bowl and then someone in the back put the wontons in the stock. The beef stock was rich with flavors of ginger and garlic, scallions and seaweed were floating around with 4 or 5 meat filled wontons. The wontons were made with a soft noodle wrapper around what I think was pork.

In 2 days I had 2 very different experiences, I expect nothing less from the city.

Chen and Chan Restaurant
135-20 40 Road
Flushing

Fried Dumpling Shan Dong
99 Allen St.(Between Broome and Delancy)
Manhattan