During the days of living in East Harlem, my friend and I would always walk from the east side, through Central Park and over to the west side for Flor De Mayo. I never had Peruvian food before and Flor De Mayo was Chinese and Peruvian cuisine, awesome! Seems like all the Peruvian restaurants I have been to serve chicken as their specialty. Why is that? Anyways, now that I have moved out of East Harlem and into Brooklyn, I’m glad I live right by Coco Roco.

Last night I really wanted some Peruvian food and I was meeting up with my friend, Anh, for dinner. Luckily I found La Cuarta in Sunset Park that was close to Park Slope. So what brought this crave for Peruvian food? Mr. Zach Brooks of Midtown Lunch! Yesterday I read his post on a new hidden gem he found in a freight elevator hallway and saw the link for another hidden gem, El Sabroso. There in that post I saw the picture of a plate of yummy looking spaghetti! Peruvian and spaghetti? Never thought of those 2 together before but damn those looked good! After that I was on a mission to find a Peruvian restaurant around 5th Ave and 20th St and spaghetti. And that was how Anh and I ended up at La Cuarta.
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Note: Last year I wrote a detailed post about how I cook Kosher for Passover, or K for P as I call it. Click here if you care about such things.

Even before Passover began, I was thinking about how I hadn’t cooked anything elaborate in a while. A few months ago I started saving the stems from shitakes I had cooked with — I was keeping them in a plastic sandwich bag in my freezer. I had always heard that you could make a good stock with them, though I was a little skeptical about using them. So when it came time to make a soup for my gussied up matzah balls, I pulled the stems out and set to work.

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Jose Andres is a chef I admire a lot, even though I’ve never eaten at any of his restaurants. He worked with Ferran Adria at El Bulli, and his cooking reflects that level of playfulness and sophistication.

I recently came across this video on Gourmet.com in which Andres demonstrates an easy white asparagus soup. I saw some white asparagus at my local bodega, and so I decided to go for it.

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