Writing With My Mouth Full

Unsweetened Peach Cobbler

Shauna introduced me to this Paula Deen recipe last year. I had invited her to come down for dinner and she brought a ceramic pot filled with batter and peaches. Because I’m not a baker, I always welcome guests bearing desserts. It was delicious with vanilla ice cream as soon as it came out of the oven, but the bread was even better the next day. It had sucked all the peach juice and made it less sweet. I was even skipping the fruit and just going for the starch.

When it was my turn to make dessert, I asked Shauna for the link to the original recipe and was completely turned off at how much sugar and butter was used. No wonder it had to be baked in a deep pot. I made my version in a shallow pie pan, cut the ingredients in half and–gasp–cut the sugar altogether. I added a tad of sweetness by drizzling in some of the peach syrup from the can just before serving. It might not satisfy your sweet tooth, but it probably won’t make you sick of it either. (If you must, use 1/4 cup of sugar and that should be enough.)

Ingredients:
1 cup of flour
1 1/2 tsps of baking powder
1/2 tsp of salt
1 cup of milk
a small knob of butter, melted in the microwave
canola oil baking spray
1 small can of sliced peaches in heavy syrup
cinnamon powder

1. Preheat oven to 350º. In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and milk using a spatula. Add the butter and mix well.
2. Coat pie pan with a spray or two of canola oil. Pour in batter. Top with slices of peaches and spoon in some of the heavy syrup. Sprinkle with cinnamon powder.
3. Bake in the oven for 35 minutes or until the edges are browned. Serve warm with vanilla bean ice cream.

M. Wells

21-17 49th Avenue off 21st Street, Long Island City, Queens
718/425.6917
$330 for five, with drinks, without tip
♥ ♥ ♥

It’s rare that I eat out these days mostly because there’s something in my life now called “mortgage”, but when I do go, I make sure that I’m with a good group of people who appreciate food as much as I do. I was at the Breslin a few months ago with more or less the same group of people and we talked about what and where we were going to eat next while we were eating. We jokingly called ourselves the EatingAnimal Club because we realized how much we liked our red meat and pork. I wanted the rest of them to love sashimi and offal as much as I do, so the premise of eating nose-to-tail came up as one of the unofficial foundations of the club. (The “club” in the name made it sound so pretentious and exclusive–two adjectives we all aspire to be.)

M. Wells was the club’s third meeting. I was glad that everyone was willing to take the 7 train to Long Island City, Queens on a weeknight. When we were planning it, all we could find online was their brunch menu, but it didn’t take a lot of convincing to tell them to get adventurous for dinner–Québécois adventurous.

We all looked at the small dishes on the menu but I was pretty much handed the baton to order for the table. They were out of the “porterhouse pork” and the headcheese sandwich by the time we sat down at 8pm, so we picked eleven other dishes while skipping out on the three salads and a blini. Here’s the line-up of what went in our tummies:

Oyster in sabayon – We all met up at Grand Central Oyster Bar beforehand, so I wasn’t a big fan of this. It was also coffee sabayon! I love coffee-flavored anything, but I prefer my oysters unadulterated.

Whelks and blood sausage – I love me some snails and blood sausage, but I never thought I can eat them together. That said, this was one of the strongest dishes on the menu for me. Both ingredients were doused in dill-garlic butter while the soda crackers kept the strong flavors at bay.

They didn’t have sweetbreads on the menu but the veal brains made up for that. It was soft and smooth like homemade ricotta, rich like creamy butter.

Escargots and bone marrow – Another combination that perhaps only Canadians with French thinking would come up with. The textures were odd: chewy escargots with slushy marrow fat but I couldn’t stop scooping them up. I would have loved it even more topped with finely chopped parsley and red onion.

Beef tartare – Tartare is tartare and I wasn’t a fan of how saucy their version was. Like my oysters, I prefer my raw meat clean and immaculate. The poached egg was a nice touch, though–much heftier than a quail egg.

The snow crab salad with celeriac was also delicious and, if I remember correctly, went faster than any other dish on our table. The shaved Brussel sprouts was also a nice break from all the fatty dishes. It was served with dry venison jerky instead of perhaps bacon bits.

My favorite dish of the night was the tripe. It was called tripe “pasta” on the menu because I think they looked like cavatellis, but instead of a sauce, they were tossed with crushed smoked herring. The saltiness of the fish was oddly perfect with the blandness of the tripe. I would have this for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The Canuck breakfast reminded me not of Canada but of my breakfasts in Ireland sans the grilled tomato. I ate fried eggs, ham (bacon to us Americans) and blood sausage everyday for a week before I hiked or biked and the dish brought so many memories of that trip.

The tuna was pretty amazing with capers and egg yolk sauce, but I barely remember the butter chicken that my eating mates loved.

If those weren’t enough, somehow a cheese plate made it onto our table. (Good upsell from the staff there!) We were expecting small wedges of cheese but it came as a sticky mess of Winnimere, hazelnuts and candied fruit in maple syrup. I think if I wasn’t full, I would have appreciated the earthiness and saltiness of the dish. It certainly falls under the “weird” category for me and I didn’t need a platter for four of it.

We were pretty bummed when we found out that they had ran out of the banana cream pie, so we opted for the cheesecake, and man, what a cheesecake! Were those Ladyfingers in there? The cake wasn’t ridiculously sweet and we practically fought over it. The solution: take a slice to go!

Put the EatingClub in one room with food and drinks and we get pretty boisterous. The three ladies who shared our long wooden table weren’t too pleased with our behavior, but our servers seemed to like us, offering us a complementary bottle of bubbly for keeping us waiting in between courses and shots of some type of anise-flavored digestifs. We had to cancel a couple of dessert items after the gigantic cheese course and we felt bad that we requested to remove $17 worth of extra charges from our first bill, but we were also good diners and left them a hefty tip for putting up with us. I hope the staff had a good time with us as much as we had eating at their diner-cum-restaurant. We walked out of there, happy and drunk well past midnight, and into the cold Queens night.

Related post/s:
The Spotted Pig back in 2005

Beef Stew Both Ways

It’s spring. No, it’s not; it’s still winter. It’s warm and I’m wearing a light jacket. Oh, it’s going to be cold this week, let me unpack my winter coat again.

Mother Nature has been playing with us here in New York City. One day, it’s warm enough to walk around without a jacket, the next day my neck is so cold because I didn’t carry my scarf with me. The good thing about this beef stew is that for warmer weather, you can lighten it up by skipping the potatoes and adding more broth so it’s more liquid than sauce-y. If it’s cold outside and you want something heartier, serve this with potatoes, pasta, bread or rice and you got yourself a heavy meal.

I prefer the lighter version served with a few jigs of Tabasco sauce for a little kick. In either version, you mix all the ingredients together and simmer. You don’t even need your silly crockpot to replicate them.

Ingredients:
oil
1 pound of stewing beef, cubed
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 white onion, chopped
3 sprigs of thyme
1 large carrot, chopped
1 large can of whole tomatoes
vegetable broth
salt, pepper
1 can of corn kernels, drained
a handful of parsley, roughly chopped

1. In a large heated Dutch oven, add some oil. When hot enough, brown beef cubes by cooking and stirring occasionally until most of it has changed color.
2. Add garlic, onions and thyme and sauté with the beef. Add carrots, plus the whole tomatoes with its juice and enough vegetable broth for most of the beef to be submerged. Season with salt and pepper. Cook in low fire for 30 minutes.
3. When beef cubes are tender enough that the meat gives with a soft prod of a fork, add corn kernels and parsley. Cook for another 10 minutes just to make sure corn is well-combined with the rest of the stew. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Related post/s:
Skirt steak salad with endives recipe

Farro Salad with Mushrooms and Pecorino Cheese

Almost three months after my trip to Dominica, I invited the ladies I met at Jungle Bay Resort to my apartment for a reunion. Six of us ate, drank, talked and hung out for eights hours! I was pretty tired the next morning, but was grateful for the new friends I met during a pretty tough holiday. Jai was the only vegetarian in the group, so while I served everyone else pulled pork-style center loin, I put this salad together as her main course so she could have the bite of the farro grain and the earthiness of the mushrooms while we devoured our meat.

This dish was also inspired by my last trip to San Francisco because the mushrooms for sale in the farmers’ market were less expensive. I saw plenty of them in the Ferry Terminal and that made me wish I had access to a kitchen. So now back at home, I bought a combination of hen of the woods, shiitake and oyster mushrooms for twice the price. Farro to me is so California: I saw it several times on different menus while I was there; I rarely see it here in New York. When you make this on your own, try some chanterelles if you can add a few more bucks to your grocery budget and buy crimini and whites to add to the quantity without breaking the bank. A good Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese will do, but I like Pecorino better for this. Use a vegetable peeler to shave the cheese. Everything is quite pretty but you’d be even happier with the smell.

Ingredients:
1 cup uncooked farro
1/2 pound mix of wild mushrooms
salt
pepper
olive oil
lemon juice
Pecorino cheese, shaved
a handful of parsley, roughly chopped

1. Heat the oven to 350º. In a medium saucepan, combine the farro and enough cold water to cover it by about an inch. Soak for 20 minutes. Drain well and return the farro to the pan, again covering it with cold water. Bring to a boil over high heat to cook. Lower the heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes, until the farro is tender but still has some bite.
2. While the farro is cooking, toss the mushrooms with salt, pepper and olive oil in a large bowl. Spread the seasoned mushrooms out evenly on a lined baking sheet and put in the oven for 20 minutes.
3. When the farro is cooked, drain well and spread it on another baking sheet to cool. Do the same with the mushrooms once they are cooked. When both farro and mushrooms are close to room temperature, combine them in a serving bowl. Drizzle with some lemon juice and toss gently with Pecorino cheese and parsley.

Where to eat in San Francisco, California: flour + water

I will never understand why San Franciscans stand in line to eat at any restaurant, but it seemed to me that if you wanted to eat at a highly-regarded place in the Bay area, waiting for a seat was just a given. Everywhere I went, there was always at least ten people ahead of me and another twenty behind. In New York, we have a lot of dining options; a lot of them are mediocre, sure, but we also boast a lot of good eatings that there’s always another option if you can’t get in your first choice. Call me impatient but I found all the queues unacceptable in San Francisco. It didn’t matter if we woke up extra early for Tartine Bakery’s morning buns or opted to eat a later Vietnamese lunch at Turtle Tower–we waited in line.

We arrived at flour + water around 7pm and we were told by the maître d’ that the next spot for two would open up in the next two hours. We left and drove around looking for alternatives but of course, all our other options required the same kind of waiting. We ended up driving back to the same neighborhood where flour + water was. By 8pm, I walked in again and asked if the wait time has changed–we were seated at the bar in less than 10 minutes. Just like that! Now, I don’t know if it was because those ahead of us dropped off or if it was because of the holiday weekend, but trying for prime time worked at flour + water rather than at 7pm.

For appetizers, we started with the steelhead crudo with roe, pickled beets, lemon aioli and potato cracklings. It was an impressive combination of textures and tastes: the fish melted in my mouth like butter and the pickled beets had that perfect touch of tartiness.

The sardines salad had a lot to say with mÃ¢chÃ©, leeks, baby fennel, cauliflower, pine nuts and capers. I kept finding baby vegetables at every bite. I thought it was beautifully crafted.

We loved the crispy trotters shaped like chicken nuggets. The bitterness of the chicory and radicchio offset the richness of the trotters. I thought the squid ink corzetti was subtle in taste. It was definitely a notch down from the saltiness of the trotters with squid, fennel and some chili.

It was also the tail end of San Francisco Beer Week, so we opted for the beer ice cream from Humphry Slocombe which, thankfully, didn’t taste like beer. The honey was stronger than the beer flavor that it almost tasted like vanilla with a touch of lavender.

One thing that I will give San Francisco, though, is that none of the servers I dealt with were in any way sour or bitchy. It was always like: The wait is looking like two hours (smile). Yes, we can make sure that dish is gluten-free and we can substitute the scrambled egg with fried (smile). I never felt bad about asking for anything because I knew that they would be very accommodating. To me, that level of service was refreshing, even if I had to wait for it.

flour + water is at 2401 on the corner of 20th and Harrison Streets. There’s Homestead on Folsom Street for drinks while you wait for a table.