August, 2010 -

by BS

Finally, Pants Fit for a Food Blogger

We get a lot of pointless press releases here at ES, mostly for ridiculous unitaskers that we would never recommend. But once in a blue moon, we here about something that is just pure genius. This is one of those moments.

‘Tis a problem as old as the savage feast — you eat too much and your belly blasts the button right off your pants. In the past, gluttons safeguarded themselves by undoing their trousers before appetizers or by dining in elastic sweats, togas or mumus. At long last, there’s a stylish solution. San Francisco pantmaker betabrand.com teamed up with legendary chef Chris Cosentino, proprietor of Incanto (a restaurant where folks can dine on whole hogs’ heads), to create trousers for gluttons.

Yes, it’s a pair of pants that fits normally, but then allows you to expand your waist size to one of three different girths, depending on just how much of a glutton you’ve decided to be that night. I can’t tell you how many times I have wished this existed.

by gansie

Uniformly Different, Uniformly Delicious

So JoeHoya totally stole my Part II thunder.

With my extreme abundance of tomatoes over the weekend, I made two go-to tomato recipes simultaneously: tomato sauce and gazpacho. Of course it was an obvious way to turn almost rotting tomatoes into something edible, as Joe Hoya pointed out.

And he’s right. Gazpacho is uniformly delicious but not uniformly similar in ingredients. In fact, tomatoes aren’t even a constant in some recipes.

As I rummaged through the tomatoes I noticed that a good half were yellow and the rest were a mix of red, purple, orange and green. I reserved the yellow for the gazpacho while I used the other colors for my maroon colored sauce.

Yellow Gazpacho

Roughly chop about 3 pounds of yellow tomatoes, non-rotting parts only. Immersion blend the following: yellow tomatoes, peeled, de-seeded and sliced cucumber, chopped Hungarian Stuffing Peppers (carries a bit of heat, way more flavorful than a green bell pepper and they are in light in color to match the yellow tomatoes), oil, white wine vinegar, salt and white pepper.

Cracked black pepper, to me, is one of the most attractive finishes to a dish. But for some reason I became really interested in preserving the pale yellow color of the cold soup. Cue the white pepper.

For color, however, I sliced in half sugar baby tomatoes. At least that is what I think that variety of tomato is called: they are slightly larger than sun golds, have a red exterior with white zig zag lines on the skin.

Also for some texture there are a few croutons, half floating on the surface. I simply cubed left over bread, tossed it with kosher salt, freshly cracked pepper and oil and placed it in a 350 oven for about 20 minutes.

by BS

Fried Flower Power

Around this time of year, foodies start spying one of our favorite finds at the farmers markets: zucchini blossoms. These are the pretty yellow flowers that grow above the root of the zucchini plant, and can be harvested to eat before the main squash part is fully grown. Actually, I’m pretty sure that these are kind of like garlic scapes — a part of the plant farmers used to just throw away before they realized they could sell them to us sustainability saps at a premium.

I spotted these guys at my local far mar a few weeks back and loved that they still had the teeny tiny squash part attached. The flowers themselves have a pretty delicate flavor. I know this sounds obvious, but I’m gonna go ahead and say they taste a little bit like a zucchini, a little bit like a flower. After some exploring the Internet, I found that most people go the same route with these — stuffing, breading and frying. Hey, who am I to argue with that?

in Cheese / Recipe / Veggie 10 comments

by Maids

The Great Bagel Debate: Montreal v. NYC

A little over a month ago I ventured to the FAR NORTH with my new hubbie (Romeo). That’s right folks, I’m talking about Canada. We spent a little under a week in Montreal, an exceedingly charming city full of appealing, beautiful, smiling, amiable people who seemed to do almost everything better than their southern neighbors.

Our luggage arrived at baggage claim within mere seconds of us exiting the secure area and public transportation was far-advanced and gloriously easy to understand. The city was thoroughly walkable and every neighborhood left us gasping at its beauty. Nearly everyone was bilingual yet didn’t look down on us for our inability to speak French. The food courts were full of healthy food: fresh and delicious and diverse. The more upscale dining joints were completely comfortable with my food limitations and whipped up thoroughly decadent dishes.

Everything was beautiful, perfect and French Canadian. I was in love.

I was eager to try one particular morsel of Montreal cuisine that I had heard about from all the Canucks I’ve ever known: The Montreal bagel.

Every Canuck I’ve come across has sung the praises of the Montreal bagel, asserting its clear superiority over the New York bagel. As it was hard for me, the daughter of a New York Jew, to imagine any way of improving on a genuine New York bagel (far easier to improve on the piss-poor excuse for bagels we tend to encounter in DC), I couldn’t wait to try this mythic culinary invention.

Would the Montreal bagel stand up to my expectations? And what’s the difference between a Montreal bagel and a NYC bagel anyway? Answers after the jump….

in Breakfast / Food Travel / Personal / Restaurants 18 comments

by BS

Eating on the Edge: City Island

Endless Simmer’s NYC-based tasting team is bypassing the cutesy outer borough neighborhoods and taking the subway to the end of the line, then getting on a bus and taking that to the end of the line, then seeing what we can find to eat.

This week’s destination — City Island — is seriously the edge-edge-edge of New York City. It’s kind of like an adorable New England fishing village, except it’s actually in The Bronx, retains just a smidge of that New York City grime, and you can get there on the MTA bus. Take the 6 train all the way to the end of the line, then hop on the Bx29 bus, which takes you across a bridge onto this amazing little island where they’ll deep-fry anything that swims. Just hope this fish isn’t too local.

Since we came this far, we figured we might as well go all the way to the water’s edge, where Tony’s Pier offers lunch at picnic tables right on the sound. As you can see, inside NYC or not, they’ve got pretty much the whole nine yards when it comes to summer-y fried seafood. Yes, even frog’s legs, which I’m pretty sure I disapprove of eating anywhere outside of Paris, but definitely in The Bronx.

Instead I went with the pretty perfect fried clam strips meal. Most excitedly, it turns out Tony’s has pioneered a new form of serving a five-course meal. I call it the slow reveal. This looks like just a giant pile of fried clams, with a super-sad side salad thrown in for good measure, right? Wrong!

in Restaurants 3 comments

by gansie

The Charm of Sloppy Seconds

Waking up before 9am on Saturday has a few perks, most of them edible. Working at the farmers market, at least my gig there, isn’t strenuous. Eager shoppers, without cash, walk up to the Manager’s Table, pass me their debit card, I swipe while asking them to sign up for our newsletter and hand them the appropriate amount of tokens.

I tweet fruit observations and celebrity sightings, gobble up sun gold tomatoes and more or less banter with strangers about food for a few hours.

And then I get to take home the good stuff. Well, not exactly the good stuff. Really the free, almost rotting stuff. Ten pounds of bruised and battered tomatoes. Tomatoes slit apart and oozing juice and seeds. Tomatoes on just this side of rotten.

These seconds, as they’re dubbed at the market, need to be loved and loved quickly. I had less than 24 hours to make the most of out of them.

Part I

in Recipe / Veggie 8 comments

by Russell Warnick

Steamy Kitchen

Now that I’ve got your attention with that amazing looking chef sauce, I’d like to tell you about a recent trip I made, to Scottsdale, AZ. I was invited by Thermador to check out their test kitchen and in particular, the new Thermador Steam and Convection Oven.

Having not grown up in America I was never exposed to the Thermador line of appliances, and those of you who live in DC probably have GE in your cookie cutter apartments, so I haven’t yet come across it here either, although it was the kitchen of choice for The Brady Bunch and Julia Child.

Being in a test kitchen with a personal chef for the day (above: Chef Kyle) I knew I’d be treated to some five-star cooking — a perfectly uniform beef tenderloin, salmon wellington, tomato jam, creme brulee and pears in red wine were just a sampling of what was prepared using this new style of oven — but in true ES fashion, this is not what I wanted to know. I wanted to get down to the nitty gritty; what can this oven do for me in an everyday capacity? After all, at $3k I need to get my money’s worth.

Keep reading to see how I tested the oven the Endless Simmer way.

in Uncategorized 4 comments

« Previous

August 2010

Finally, Pants Fit for a Food Blogger

Uniformly Different, Uniformly Delicious

Fried Flower Power

The Great Bagel Debate: Montreal v. NYC

Eating on the Edge: City Island

The Charm of Sloppy Seconds

Steamy Kitchen