Little Bites from the Big Apple

Note Stunning Sterling Bracelet On Right Wrist

We just got back from a long weekend in New York City celebrating a milestone birthday for one of our dearest friends.   It was a weekend of sights and sounds and smells and food and high energy fun that is hard to duplicate in any other city in the country, or at least in the cities I've been to.  You never know, a weekend jaunt in Cleveland might just be an undiscovered romp, but my money is on the Big Apple as the premier destination for hedonistic pleasures.

We stayed in the trendy Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, which still astonishes me since when I first started traveling to New York it was smelly urban blight at its worst.  Boarded up tenements, syringe littered streets, discount hookers and countless possibilities of finding yourself on the business end of a Saturday night special were about all that could be discovered there.  Over time, the area gentrified as bulldozers scraped the ground, developers built posh apartments and hotels, and gays made everything look pretty.  Nowadays it is probably the hippest and liveliest slice of the Apple for shops and bars and restaurants and sidewalk cafes.  And the hookers now charge a premium.

A cute little Italian place on 9th Avenue at 44th Street has somehow survived since 1971.  Guido and his wife opened her eponymous Mamma Mia's there a year or so after immigrating to America from Naples, Italy.  I am sure it was a pretty scary location for the first 25 years or so, but they prevailed over the escalating drug traffic and street toughs with dirty fingernails, and once the area started migrating upscale, changed the name of the restaurant to 44SW in 1993.  (Not really sure this was an improvement.)  We had a couple of drinks, a salad, some spaghetti and meatballs, and a few other chianti-bottle-candle classics for something south of $65. Score! (We followed that up with a neighborhood bar that featured highballs for $2 until 10 PM and I was like "am I dreaming this?")

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Another heavenly find in the hood was KTCHN on 42nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.  It had a really cool vibe and the food was simply prepared and quite tasty.  In particular, my tagliatelle pasta with fresh tomatoes, white wine, basil, pine seeds and grilled chicken seemed like something you could easily throw together at home but just don't seem to get around to it.  They also serve delicious "sexy fries" although I for one couldn't find anything particularly come hither about them.



The standout of the trip was Sunday brunch at the recently reopened Tavern on the Green. Thankfully, the new operators removed all the grandma's attic floral everything (it used to look like what I imagine to be from whence  Laura Ashley's nightmares originate) and pared the decor back to evoke a well-appointed gentleman's country estate.  (You'd never guess it was originally designed and built in 1870 to house the 200 sheep that grazed in Central Park's Sheep Meadow.) We had fabulous breakfast pastries from the world famous Balthazar, and I ordered the Lobster Chowder with Lobster Roe Butter but wished I'd chosen something else when it came.  The little tiny piece of lobster swimming in the salty broth sort of hurt my feelings, especially since it cost $24.  (That's about $12 per forkful, and that's only if  you take tiny, civilized bites.)  It was still a great experience and I would definitely return because it feels so celebratory and timeless in there.

The one disappointing meal the entire weekend was one I should have known to avoid in the first place.  It is said you really can't get a decent Mexican meal in any restaurant north of the Mason Dixon line, an adage even truer in New York City.  I mean for Pete's sake they think salsa is Heinz Ketchup with dehydrated minced onions stirred into it.  We went to a place called Anejo after a three-hour tour orbiting Manhattan on the famous Circle Line ship drinking Irish Coffees so perhaps our judgment was a wee bit impaired.  We had chicken nachos (pretty sure it was pigeon meat) slopped with some kind of drab gravy and draped with a slice of American Cheese (still inside its single portion plastic wrapping.) For once the four Texans amongst our group got to to feel all superior to the dazzling NYC cognoscenti but then we went outside and saw the Chrysler Building and Times Square and a couple of Rockettes and we were rubes again.

Friendsgiving/The Day I Ate My Weight in Carbs

This Bird Was Made For Stuffin'

I read an article recently that talked about a new phenomenon called "Friendsgiving" wherein groups of friends eschew the madding crowds of holiday travelers rushing to their home towns to watch hours of football and bicker over turkey and ridged, cylindrical cranberry sauce. Instead, they spend Thanksgiving with a few chosen ones and drink good wine as they prepare timeless, cherished recipes out of Bon Appetit or from the backside of the Butterball label.  Heck, this is not a new thing at all as we've been doing this for years since my entire family remains in the Great Frozen North and the closest thing I have to a knitted cap and fuzzy mittens are days I don't comb my hair and snap on latex surgical gloves before blowing them up into turkey balloons. I love my family to death but I express it better when my teeth aren't chattering.

Our dearest friend P usually hosts Thanksgiving dinner, and we return the favor on Christmas Day. This year she had a rather unfortunate confrontation with her garage floor (the floor won round one) and although perfectly mended after several months of rehab and hard work, still remained a little too delicate to have people over.  So we hosted it at our house, enlisting the help of J, who is our good friend as well as an astonishingly good cook.  This is a man who leaves no detail to chance when it comes to ingredients and preparation.  (When he makes gumbo he calls a cajun named Jimbeaux in Bossier City and has him overnight fresh gulf shrimp so he can boil them and use their shells to start his fish stock.  He mills his own flour for pie crust and milks the baby black and white goats he keeps in his condo's spare bedroom for feta cheese.  Don't even show him a packet of  Betty Crocker Instant Idaho Reds or he'll twist your arm behind your back until you finish choking the whole thing down dry.)

Use Your Noodles

I got up early on Thanksgiving to start the lengthy process of making home-made noodles, which are a holiday tradition in the mid west like tamales in Mexico without the meat filling, banana leaves and serapes. They are basically eggs and white flour stirred until you develop a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome and rolled out and cut into OCD narrow strips with a long sharp knife.  Then they are left on newspapers all day to dry, before boiling them in sort of a turkey soup until they are tender and savory. (Never put them on colorful want ads or you risk dying your noodles red, which after stewing them in turkey stock with giblets for a few hours looks like someone has recently been disemboweled.)  A lot of people have never heard of noodles for Thanksgiving but once they try them fall deeply in love with their pure, turkey-flavored carbyness.  One guest long ago had never had them before and then ate nothing but noodles for dinner.  She asked for leftovers and I found out later she had them for both breakfast and lunch the next day.  I am quite certain this is a sure-fire recipe for strangers approaching you on the street and inquiring when the baby is due.

Brie Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow

For an appetizer, I made a fun and cholesterol killing baked brie in puffed pastry with tart raspberry jam and toasted pecans that everyone enjoyed immensely.  It's sort of my go to edible party trick.  There's a food snob in Milwaukee whom I used to like who sneers at this concoction as pedestrian and ridden with cheese cruelty but it was the only dish that had no leftovers.  So there, TW.

Meanwhile, our all-star chef was busy at the stove with all four gas burners going full blast.  He was making consomme with hand-made tortellini, a cauliflower and broccoli concoction that was molded into the shape of an inverted hub cap and presented on freshly baked bread crumbs which had been pulsed into submission by my trusty Kitchen-Aid blender.  (He still hasn't spoken to me in a civil tone since he discovered, to his abject horror, that I don't own a food processor.) He also had gravy going and three different kinds of stock plus the noodles and the turkey in the oven along with dinner rolls, potatoes dauphinoise and my green bean casserole (I had buried the empty tin cans out back by the workshop earlier in the day so he wouldn't know I hadn't grown the legumes in my own organic vegetable garden) so he was understandably in turbo chef mode and started barking out requests for arcane kitchen implements which he had to have in 4 seconds or less or else the entire meal would be totally ruined.

At first, it was kind of fun to be washing up dishes for the 43rd time that day and suddenly hear "David, I need a 4-inch strainer with an ivory, rune-inscribed handle" and I'd rush to my odd utensils drawer and toss it across the room to him, feeling triumphant and smug.  As he caught it he yelled "Parchment Paper!" which I giddily supplied. "Micro Planer!" Check. "Garlic Press!" Um, got it. "Virgin Twine!"  Okay, already.  By the time he screamed "Surgical Steel Pincers" I almost stabbed him with them.  I wondered if he was actually just punishing me since I'd so miserably failed the Cuisinart test, but quickly wiped it from my mind as an uncharitable thought unworthy of my loyalty and true friendship.  Sort of.

Finally, everything was done at the same time and extraordinarily delicious.  Of course the kitchen was a wreck and I was exhausted from the everlasting, supersonic scavenger hunt, but I suddenly knew the perfect thing to make for next Friendsgiving:

Reservations.