My kitchen is relatively large by Parisian standards (which really only means that two people can stand in it (but not really work simultaneously in it)), but it is typical in that it doesn’t have a built-in oven, or much counter space. I don’t even have a microwave. I do think, however, that I would be able to find room for this vital cuisine enhancement:
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I’ve spent a bit of time changing around how things look, to reflect the fact that I’m now in Paris. I have so much to write about, but for now, I leave you with CHEESE. That is all.
A friend of mine works at a wine shop in Chelsea called “Appellation” which carries mostly organic and biodynamic wine. Because I’m frequently in the area, I often drop in to see her and pick up a bottle. I end up getting whatever she recommends because I trust her taste, and it gets me to try things I might not otherwise. A few days ago she told me she wanted me to try something which it turns out I’ve never had before: sparkling red wine! It’s called Solo Reggiano and it’s from the Medici Ermete winery in Italy. Apparently the winemaker himself is from that Medici family, and had been in the shop earlier to show them his stuff. I asked if he had been wearing a codpiece and tights — sadly he hadn’t. But the wine was nice, strange, but fun to try. She told me to chill it and serve it with anything. We had it with a broccoli rabe orecchiette dish, but I could imagine it with a wide variety of things, actually.
Read MoreSo it seems that when you drive north of here along the coast, you run into people who substitute some kind of long [a] for the syllabic [r] in word final position. And these people are up in arms about the “langostino lobster” which is starting to appear on menus, often just called “lobster” — the nerve! Senator Olympia Snowe, of my summerhome-state of Maine, is apparently “hot” about the issue (CNN’s word, not mine), and the Maine Lobster Promotion Council contends that these upstart langostinos “cost Maine fishermen $44 million in lost sales to restaurant chains since April.” I tend to think it’s global warming that’s the lobster fisherman’s real enemy, but whatever.
So much depends upon a name. It turns out that the langostino lobster is not really a lobster so much as a crab. The FDA, ever vigilant about market forces, approves “langostino” as a market name for two species: Cervimunida johni and Pleuroncodes monodon. Good thing, too, for those who would sell these insects of the sea, as the “common name” of this creature is the squat lobster. Somehow people don’t want to eat something called the squat lobster, but they’ll gobble up “langostino” lobster. At some point you must have tried the trendy Chilean Sea Bass, but probably only after its redesignation as such. Would you have ordered it back when it was called Patagonian toothfish? Or perhaps you fancy a plate of blackened wartynosed mullet? This last one is an actual type of fish recognized by the FDA’s list of market names for seafood. Is there any question why this fish hasn’t made it to the lofty heights of episode ingredient on Iron Chef?
To sum up, here’s the langostino lobster:
and here’s a real lobster:
As for me, I prefer crab.
A few nights ago I was eating dinner in an Uzbeki restaurant in Forest Hills, Queens. Although I standardly do not eat meat other than what comes out of the sea, I’m preparing for a trip to Argentina in January where I won’t be able to resist asado. So anyway, the plan was to re-acclimate to the reddest of the red meats.
One thing I don’t mind admitting to the world is that I have a huge crush on Robert Sietsema. I don’t know anything about him other than what I read in his column, Counter Culture, in the Village Voice. But that man speaks to my soul. My many years in the NYC area are better for his presence. I am at the point where I will follow him into a McDonald’s to eat if he writes about it in that glowing way that is his wont.
Anyway, I always have at the ready a set of small laminated cards with many of his reviews (the condensed versions, taken from the top 100 lists (which also are his wont)) broken down by neighborhood and ethnicity so that I might be prepared under any circumstances to locate dining pleasure. Having spent the day at the Queens College library, I consulted the cards (heh heh) and decided to try Salut. It comes down on the “tahini” side of the tahini/mayonnaise divide which breaks up baba ghanoush space into two parts. But, of course, the draw is the meat. It only took a few lamb cubes in the lagman soup plus one small skewer of kebab for me to reach my meat tolerance point, but it felt well worth it. The dining room is not large, and two large parties took up most of it. Although they did not seem to be connected, arriving as they did at different times, they ended up engaging in an ad hoc singing competition, which was not in English, but which seemed to be based on a kind of composed-on-the-fly sung limerick, but with four instead of five anapestic lines. At the end of every fourth line (generally sung by the oldest man at the table), the rest of the people would burst into laughter in a way that implied the content was somewhat bawdy. Sadly I do not speak Uzbek so I can’t report on this definitively. Yet I can say that lagman is a fine fine soup. Also, barcha odamlar erkin, qadr-qimmat va huquqlarda teng bo’lib tug’iladilar. Ular aql va vijdon sohibidirlar va bir-birlari ila birodarlarcha muomala qilishlari zarur (thanks, wikipedia.org).
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I had some littlenecks, raw on the halfshell, with lemon juice and cocktail sauce, standing on the boardwalk at Coney Island, and NOTHING BAD HAPPENED. This could be a whole new world.