I’ve always been a little wary of baking. You usually need special ingredients and equipment, and you need to use precise measurements. This doesn’t match up with my normal use-whatever-I’ve-got style of cooking. And yet there’s also an allure to baking, especially the baking of bread. There’s something primal, almost magical, about creating what has been a staple food for centuries in your kitchen at home.
One of the reasons I had been thinking so much about making bread at home was Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread (it requires a minimum of ingredients, equipment, and effort (which makes it perfect for me)), and I was planning to make it eventually. Then I saw an episode of “Jacques Pepin’s More Fast Food My Way” in which he made a version of no-knead bread with an interesting twist: you mix the dough in the pot that you cook it in, so there’s almost no clean-up necessary. On a side note, Jacques Pepin has quickly become one of my favorite food personalities, but that can wait for another post.
Click to continue…
9 com
banana french toast
Before shopping for his hot pot party (more about that in another post), Donny wanted to try out Ming’s Caffe. I always take Donny’s advice when it comes to Chinatown, so I followed his lead when ordering brunch and got a breakfast-y item and a “typical” Chinese food item. Banana french toast (Hong Kong-style) and vegetable mai fun may not sound like a winning combination, but… well, honestly there is no good reason to eat the two of them together. Not that they clashed or anything, but they weren’t that great as a pair either.
Click to continue…
none
In Vietnam, as in most developing nations, you are cautioned against drinking the tap water. This extended to fruits that might be washed in tap water, so for the first few days I was there we avoided much of the vibrant looking exotic fruit that we saw. Then my friend Jeff pointed out that we didn’t have to avoid fruit that you could peel, and I’m so glad he did; one of the best foods I had in Vietnam was the longan fruit. I’ll never forget the sight of the hundreds of longan trees growing along the banks of the Mekong river, ready to be harvested. Luckily (for me), longans are available at fruit stands all over Chinatown here in NYC, complete with branches and leaves.
Once you pop open the brown shell you reveal the translucent flesh of the longan (similar to ganepas but with a higher ratio of fruit to seed). Longans have a high water content, and a taste and texture like an unpeeled grape, only chewier. More than that, they provide me with a taste of Vietnam.
3 com
regular slice and vodka slice
When it comes to pizza in New York City, I have two classifications. There’s the regular slice place, which I sometimes think of as the corner pizza places, because a large number of these are located at the corner of busy intersections. Then there are the “nice” pizza places, which usually have much better pizza and are also much more expensive. Both have their place; it’s easy to say that the nice places are better, but it’s the corner places that are there for a quick lunch, or when you’re drunk at two in the morning.
I was sitting at home innocently when Donny alerted me to this post over at Blondie & Brownie about the vodka slice at Bene Pizza, a slice place just a few blocks away from my apartment here in Windsor Terrace. I’d never been there, but the seed was planted. And on a snowy day not long after, I headed over to Bene Pizza for lunch.
Click to continue…
one
Like Howard said on his post about Al Di La, the entire dinner could be summed up as “good, not great.” I had high hopes for this place and that was probably what killed it. It was hard to not have high hopes when most of the reviews were positive.
Click to continue the adventure…
4 com
