ice cream


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Top 10 Things to Eat Before the End of the World

It’s no secret that May 21, 2011 is Judgment Day—the end of the world—as so eloquently articulated (or do we mean ridiculously predicted?) by Family Radio Worldwide’s Harold Camping. Here at ES, we think the best solution to eminent annihilation is to indulge at one of our favorite foodie destinations. And if some of us survive, at least it’ll be easier to get a reservation.

10. English Pudding All Night

The stickiest way to finish up your time on Earth is at the  Three Ways House Hotel in Gloucestershire, England, where they have created the Pudding Club, an “end of the world” experience where you can indulge in a tasting of no less than seven puddings, from oriental ginger to jam roly-poly, and even stay the night in a pudding-themed bedroom. Talk about going out with a bang.

9. Salt-Baked Fingerling Potatoes with Bacon Butter and Anchovy Mayo

Chef Megan Johnson at Elsewhere Restaurant in New York City has created a deceptively simple dish combining the best of all things fatty, starchy, salty and creamy—all the palette pleasers you’ll miss when forced to live on dirt and ants if you’re lucky enough to survive.

8. Mexican-Style Street Corn with Cotija Cheese and Ancho Chile Powder

Austin’s La Condesa restaurant not only serves up more than 100 varieties of blue agave tequila (an essential for pre-Judgment Day partying), but also offers this signature south-of-the-border street corn side dish. If the world really were ending soon, we’d start covering every vegetable we eat in cotija cheese and chili. (Photo: Shelly Roche)

7. East Mountain Pork Live Paté

A beautifully decadent house-made paté is accompanied by onion confit and rye toast at Mezze, a classic bistro and bar nestled in the Berkshires with views straight to heaven. (Photo: Gregory Nesbit)

6. 1949 Chevalier-Montrachet Maison Leroy

Our bomb shelter of choice would have to be the St. Regis Deer Valley’s wine vault, stocked with more than 1,000 different rare labels. Acclaimed sommelier Mark Eberwein recommends popping one of these 60-year-old whites for your last night on earth. (Photo: My Wines and More)

Next: Top 5 Things to Eat Before the End of the World

in Bacon / Cheese / Desserts / Drinks / Featured / Holiday / Lists / Pig / Restaurants / Top 10 Lists 1 comments
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A Fruit Unlike Any Other: Avocado Milkshake

The longer you think about the avocado, the stranger it becomes.  What is it, exactly, and how did we become so accustomed to its buttery moon-face mashed up into everything from dip to ice cream?  The Oxford Companion to Food begins its definition of avocado as “Persea americana, a fruit unlike any other.”  Almost as if the dictionary writer could find no better words of description.

Visually, it’s a puzzle:  the exterior as lumpy and black as a dinosaur egg, with an inner chamber of pale green grading towards yellow.  Its pit is like polished wood, or as Fernandez de Oviedo described in 1526, “like a peeled chestnut,” resting in a hollow more perfect than any spoon could scoop out.

Before we go any further, let me discuss the real reason why I so recently became interested in avocados.  Do you ever find yourself thinking about words?  “Avocado” is a rather beautiful word — the regularly spaced consonants and internal assonance give it a vague symmetry — and I began wondering where the name comes from.  The Jamaicans call it alligator pear, English sailors called it “midshipman’s butter,” but in which language is such a pleasant name found indigenously?  As it turns, out, avocado is a derivative of ahuacatl, which happens to be the Aztec word for testicle.  The avocado grows in pairs, dangling from the tree so suggestively that even the Aztecs noticed, pausing long enough from their daily blood sacrifice to chuckle to themselves and bestow the avocado with its legacy.   With that in mind, the Oxford’s definition “a fruit unlike any other” develops an entirely new meaning.

In the seventeenth century, W. Hughes, physician to King Charles II of England wrote home from Jamaica about the avocado, “It nourisheth and strengtheneth the body, corroborating the spirits and procuring lust exceedingly.”  In the puritan colonies, to eat an avocado in public was to be labeled as a slut.  Naturally, when American farmers in the early 1900s were looking to boost their avocado sales, they decided upon an ad campaign specifically denying its aphrodisiac qualities.

These days, the avocado is hardly provocative.  In my mind it conjures up Mad Men era housewives and jello molds: tidy cold slices fanned atop iceberg lettuce like a slimy flower.  I wanted to liberate the avocado, find a recipe to showcase the fruit in all its delicate, voluptuous glory.  Milkshakes seemed like the way to go.

 

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in Desserts / Drinks / Featured / Recipe / Veggie 12 comments
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Top Chef All-Stars Exit Interview: The Winner

Poor Padma & Co. could barely make up their minds in this squeaker of a Top Chef All-Stars finale. The judges insisted that both of our finalists were deserving of the TCAS crown, but of course only one of them could take it home. We talk with the chef-testant who topped all the other All-Stars, after the jump.

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in Celebs / TV 3 comments
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Feed Us Back: Comments of the Week

– dan adds to our list of the top 10 food tattos:

you forgot about Gucci Mane’s sick face tattoo of ice cream shooting lightning bolts

BURR! http://www.rap-up.com/2011/01/13/gucci-mane-scoops-ice-cream-tattoo/

– And Alison Murray expands the top 10 australian foods:

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Top 10 New Foods We Ate in 2010

With another year gone it’s time to look back and reflect on all the deliciousness that was. Here are the top ten new dishes the Endless Simmer team was lucky enough to stuff in our mouths over the past 12 months.

10. Fried Peanut Butter, Banana and Bourbon Sandwich

breslin peanut butter and banana

Breakfast at The Breslin in New York is about as ridiculously delectable as it gets. In their modern update on The Elvis sandwich, peanut butter, banana, bourbon and vanilla are all goo-ily encased in a fried-til-crispy puffed skin. (Photo: gsz)

9. Sustainable Sushi

sustainable sushi

Sushi is the modern foodie’s last major guilt trip — a dish that just can’t be done locally, sustainably, or ethically. Or is it? At Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Connecticut chef Bun Lai is turning the sushi CW on its head, proving it can be just as tasty and exciting when overfished species like unagi and bluefin are replaced with sustainable, North American fish. If there’s one new food idea that turns into a 2011 trend, we hope it’s this.

8. Burrata Everywhere

burrata

This revelatory cheese wasn’t invented in 2010 (try 1920) but this was the year we saw the Italian delicacy pop up on menus all across America. Fresh curds of buffalo milk mozzarella are stirred into salted cream and kneaded and pulled until they take on a gloriously goopy texture that makes all other mozz look like lifeless balls of nothing. Burrata is such a perfect cheese that only a sliver of bread and a touch of olive oil are needed to make it a meal. The quality varies place to place, but we sampled particularly tasty versions at Roman’s in Brooklyn and The Lake Chalet in Oakland. You? (Photo: Chiara Lorè)

7. The Mighty Cone

the mighty cone

The Austin, Texas food truck scene is one of the most heralded in the nation, and this local ready-to-eat-on-the-street treat is the one we’re most hoping to see go national. At this year-old trailer, a tortilla cone is filled with cornflake-almond-chili-crusted chicken tenders, fried avocado, mango-jalapeno slaw and ancho sauce. The ice cream cone is dead. Long live the chicken cone.
(Photo: The Mighty Cone)

6. Malaysian BBQ

fatty cue

Usually by the time a budding chef-lebrity opens their third restaurant, they’re churning out a watered down, assembly line version of what made them famous. Not so for Zak Pelaccio, who branched out this year with Fatty Cue, a Brooklyn restaurant that ingeniously fuses traditional southeast Asian flavors into classic BBQ dishes. The never gimmicky menu ranges from heritage pork ribs in smoked fish-palm syrup and Indonesian long pepper to Manila claims swimming in bone broth with barbecued bacon and chili. (Photo: Fatty Cue)

Next: Top 5 New Foods We Ate in 2010

in Bacon / Cheese / Fowl / Lists / Sandwich 2 comments

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A San Francisco Sugar Crawl with Top Chef Just Dessert’s Tim Nugent

Tim Nugent

SF pastry chef Tim Nugent may have been asked to pack his knives stack his measuring cups and leave Top Chef: Just Desserts last week, but it was just in time for him to take ES on a tour of all his favorite local desserts. From the classics to the craziest, here are Tim Nugent’s favorite San Francisco treats.

TCHO Pot de Creme at Absinthe

chocolate

“This is done the right way, the French way,” says Tim — just eggs, sugar, and super-rich chocolate from SF-based TCHO. “I get all that other stuff out of the way and just go right to the chocolate.” (Photo: Alex)

Crazy donuts, crazier ice cream and the one dish that strikes fear in the heart of all Top Chef-testants. Keep reading for more of Tim’s favs…

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in Bacon / Desserts / Endless Bacon / Restaurants / TV 0 comments
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Top 10 New Foods at the 2010 State Fairs

With all due respect to George Washington Carver, America’s greatest food inventions have all originated in one place — the state fair. From cotton candy to corn dogs to deep-fried Coke, the enterprising folks at America’s state and county fairs top themselves year after year. Some observers thought state fair cooks had hit their peak last year, when the Texas State Fair debuted Deep Fried Butter. But in 2010, they outdid themselves once again, proving that if it’s edible, it’s even better battered and fried. From coast to coast (but mostly in the middle) here are our top ten favorite finds:

10. Hash Brown Hot Dog  – San Diego County Fair

hash brown dog

Hot dogs with french fries is a pretty fantastic lunch, but boy it takes a lot of effort to transport all those individual fries from the plate to your mouth. If only we could get the hot dog and the potato to be one cohesive unit, preferably arranged on a stick. Thank you, San Diego. Thank you. (Photo: It’s Holly)

9. Deep-Fried Cheddar-Bacon Mashed Potatoes…On a Stick  – Minnesota State Fair

potatoes

Sorry, San Diego — did you really think you could best the Midwest at spuds-on-a-stick? Here, Minnesota achieves the state fair trifecta — potatoes, pork and cheese — all deep fried, all on a stick. For more of Minnesota’s many, many state fair foods, check out Baking Junkie’s heart-stopping food crawl through the MN State Fair. (Photo: Baking Junkie)

8. Garbage Burger – Indiana State Fair

garbage burger

It’s the great state fair dilemma. Should pork be the basis of your dish — or a topping? In Indiana, this is not a problem. Behold the garbage burger — a deep-fried pork patty topped with a healthy serving of pulled pork. Why settle for one pig when you can have two? See more at The Hot Cookie. (Photo: Sarah Richcreek)

7.  Deep-Fried Frito Pie – Texas State Fair

frito pie

No other state takes this season as seriously as Texas, the good people who started the deep-fried everything movement with their corn dog in 1942 and haven’t looked back since. Earlier this week, ES told you about frito pies — those delicious piles of chili-topped corn chips. One guess what Texas has gone and done to ’em. (Photo: Texas Fried Frito Pie)

6. Deep Fried Klondike Bar – San Diego State Fair

deep fried klondike bar

California continues its surprisingly strong showing by having the cojones to throw a chocolate-covered ice cream bar in the deep fryer. This one’s more concept than execution, because not so surprisingly, it’s a total disaster to eat. My Burning Kitchen has more. (Photo: My Burning Kitchen)

Next: Top 5 New Foods at the 2010 State Fairs

in Cheese / Desserts / Featured / Food Travel / Lists / Pig 42 comments
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