A personal weblog of my experiences with fresh ingredients, home cooking, standout meals and the occasional bout with food poisoning from Brooklyn to Belize and beyond…
While my recent “Mission to Merida” was not primarily for food research, I did take the opportunity to sample some local Yucatecan favorites, visit grocery stores, and try the pizza at Vito Corleone’s. (Is the old man slipping?) Here’s a slideshow after the link, with more culinary tales from Merida and other parts of Mexico coming soon.
There’s nothing like visiting a Native American festival in New Mexico around 10am on a Fall weekend morning. With a chill in the air, artists are laying out their wares, costumes are adjusted, stages are readied for performances, grills are lit, kids are goofing off, everyone hopes for sun and I have one thing on my mind – Navajo fry bread. Fortunately, I only attend these festivals about once a year. Otherwise, I’d succumb more often to the 900 calorie deep-fried, honey-laced, 12-inch glorified doughnut known as Navajo fry bread.
Clam cakes, stuffed quahogs, fried oysters and selecting live lobsters for dinner are culinary high spots from my childhood. At oceanside picnic tables on sandy, weatherbeaten decks, eating fried seafood made me almost forget my sunburn. I got to missing men in tank tops and bibs drowning lobster chunks in butter with their hands. So Saturday evening at sunset, I and the rest of eastern Brooklyn chowed down at Randazzo’s Clam Bar, a Sheepshead Bay institution. Although its Emmons Avenue neighbor Lundy’s, seafood giant and once-rival to the ninety-year old Randazzo’s is no longer, they still receive the summer’s scores with a fluorescent lobster sign and clam bar favorites, deliciously rough around the edges.
Yuppies, gym bunnies and jujitsu masters alike have been drinking in the juice of the Brazilian superfruit acai. Like surveillance cameras silently moving into our downtowns, I’ve noticed an increased presence of acai drinks not only in health food stores but pharmacies, corner delis, and even a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway. And it doesn’t end with beverages. Acai now finds its way into energy bars, sorbets, ice creams, smoothies and nutritional supplements, promising health benefits from antioxidants and anthocyanins, which help prevent pretty much any condition from cataracts to heart disease.
Popular at this week’s Union Square farmer’s market, cousa squash originated in the Middle East. This summer squash is similar to standard zucchini (and interchangeable in most recipes), but with a thicker shape and grey-green striping. In Persian cuisine, this type of squash is often stuffed – with tabbouleh, rice, lamb, or couscous. Wanting something a bit lighter, I made the squash into a salad that didn’t require turning on the oven. Cousa, with its sweet, creamy, and slightly nutty flavor and firm texture was perfect for this simple and pretty summer salad.
I have great admiration for self-published and small-run bookbooks. In my travels, my suitcase fills up with charming and delectable cookbooks that I heft home, intending (and usually failing) to recreate the flavors of my trip. Browsing through my favorite native cookbooks - xeroxed, spiral bound, stapled, riddled with typos, inside jokes and painful plays on words – they are some of the most honest tellings of a cuisine, its ingredients and preparations. Their authors, whether educators, chefs, local business owners, politicians or just good cooks, plainly contribute and compile their most loved dishes to share. Surpassing luggage weight restrictions and overwhelming my tiny kitchen, these local cookbooks help spark my recall of culinary meanderings. (more…)