Thursday N…afternoon Smackdown: I’m Having Dinner at Babbo, Suckas 03 Jul 08

At a VIP table, no less. Suck on THAT.

Okay, I know this is bad form. It’s my blog, it’s my inaugural event, and here I am, copping out and making a quick lunch so I can skip out on you to spend a night on the town. But here’s the thing: cook eat FRET is in town. And she’s now total BFFs with Joe Bastianich, co-owner of many of Mario Batali’s restaurants, so she managed to get this fancy-ass table at Babbo tonight. And I am not afraid to send a deluge of whiny emails to internet personages to secure reservations like this one. And her mother will be at dinner, so hopefully I’ll get a stock of embarrassing childhood stories I can use as blackmail to get more invitations to dinner like this. And so the circle of life continues. It’s beautiful, really.

I couldn’t not smack something down, though, so I decided to make a light lunch that would be worthy of the occasion but would be light enough so as not to impinge on this evening’s gastronomic adventure. Therefore: Chilled cucumber-yogurt soup with quinoa timbales, courtesy of Lorena Sass’ Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way. It’s a perfect refreshing summer lunch, or first course at a fancy vegetarian restaurant, the kind where vegans go for special occasions. (”Will you accept this cruelty-free Canadian diamond set in hemp as a gesture of my desire to spend my life with you in monogamous co-equal sustainable partnership?”)

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Cheap Ass Mondays: A Little Fancy, A Little Schmancy 23 Jun 08

I made this dinner purely as an excuse to gloat about my egg-poaching skills. Seriously, look at that fucking thing. It’s like art.

Did I make this dinner just so I could gloat about my infinitely awesome egg-poaching skills?  I may have.  But maybe I ALSO made it so I could gloat about my willingness to make things painstakingly by hand - let us not forget the angel hair cucumbers - rather than relying on the modern conveniences that would hasten dinner’s journey to my table. Because I? Am better than you.

To wit: fresh, hand rolled and cut pasta tossed with onions, garlic, red spinach and bacon and topped with a poached egg. Proof that cheap can still be pretentious!
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Thursday Night Smackdown: Maybe Fish Sauce Isn’t Entirely Evil 19 Jun 08

I don’t want to harp, really, but I do feel that I must state here again that I do NOT own a mandolin.

I finally got a copy of Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Asian Flavors of Jean-Georges, and immediately wanted pretty much everything in it. I was going to do the peking duck, because yum, but the directions instructed me to hang the glazed raw duck from a hook overnight in the fridge, where you’ve also placed a small battery-powered fan to keep air moving around the duck. Thanks for adapting that recipe for the home cooks with normal-sized refrigerators* at whom your book is aimed, Jean-Georges! Really helpful.

Still, I can’t be too angry at him because despite his chef stardom he still eats hot dogs. So I decided to go with his Charred Lamb Salad, a riff on traditional Thai beef and lettuce wraps that sounds MUCH more boring that it actually is.

*Maybe I didn’t read the introduction carefully, maybe it’s only for home cooks with home meat lockers.

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Ice Cream for a Dead Man 15 Jun 08

Passionfruit, to be specific. But dead people don’t eat ice cream, so it just means more for me.

I just wrote a whole post about this ice cream and my dad. It was really good, filled with humor, pathos, and brilliant photography.

And then Wordpress ate it.

Father’s Day is rough enough as it is and I can’t bring myself to sit here and re-write it, but I don’t want to deprive anyone of delicious, delicious ice cream. So recipe after the jump, and my apologies for the lack of real post.

ETA: Okay, okay, here’s a tidbit. So I have my dad’s high school yearbook from 1951, and each graduate’s photo is accompanied by a painfully wholesome description: “Jimmy is sure to be a great asset to the Army,” “Susan always has a ready smile and a helping hand.” My dad’s? “Rudy is a treat for all the ladies.”

Awww, yeah.

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The day went downhill from here. 12 May 08

NOTE: THE PICS IN THIS POST ARE NOT WHAT THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE AND WILL BE FIXED SHORTLY

Brunch price: $17

Some years I pre-gird my loins in preparation for Mothers’ Day; some days it sneaks up on me. Either way, Mothers’ Day sucks the fat one when you’ve got no mom.* Don’t get me wrong - I utterly adore my mother-in-law** and feel incredibly fortunate to have married into a family that I love as much as my own. But Mothers’ Day still has the power to make me pretty cranky, and in more than 4 of the past 8 years I’ve wanted to tell it to suck my metaphorical dick.***

You know what can make the day better? Getting into a four-car pile-up on the way to your in-laws’ because the assholes around you were too busy talking on the phone and/or rubbernecking at another accident that had happened less than 15 minutes prior.****

*In that she passed away, not that I was asexually created from a single gamete.

**Totally seriously.

***Which is fucking HUGE.

****5 minutes after our accident, while we were waiting on the side of the road for EMTs to show up and check me out, ANOTHER asshole caused ANOTHER three-car pile-up on the SAME stretch of road.

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And this quiche did my taxes. 22 Apr 08

Actually, it didn’t. This quiche had no fucking initiative.

Work is busy this week and Brian is out of town at a conference for work*, and that usually adds up to one thing: cereal for dinner every night. On top of that, part of me doesn’t want to move on to a new post because the feedback from the last one was so lovely and it sparked memories for so many of you; I especially appreciated the universal disdain for pink kitchenware. But eventually you have to move on from the schmaltzy shit and make a damn quiche.

Okay, I’m not quite ready to move on, so this’ll be a short one.

*In New Orleans. And I happen to know that at this exact moment, he’s out at a concert at the House of Blues. I ask you, what kind of “conference” is this? Your tax dollars at work, people.

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Back to our regularly scheduled amateur food porn: Now with Hollandaise! 15 Apr 08

Coming up at 11: When Asparagus Attacks

Some days, work is relatively stress-free and I get home by 5, excited and ready to cook up a storm. The other 364 days a year, I don’t. Unless each of my 6 readers starts loading this page 750,000 times a day each, I’ll be keeping my day job and looking for more quick but interesting weeknight meals.*

Some time ago, I declared the official foodie trend of Spring 2008 to be the poached egg. Today was a lovely spring day - sunny, brisk, daffodils in bloom, Target setting up shop on the street giving away flowers with each purchase of toxic chemical fertilizer - and I had some asparagus in the fridge that was about to buy the farm, so: roasted asparagus with poached eggs and green curry hollandaise. Hollandaise and asparagus are a classic pairing, as are poached eggs and hollandaise (eggs benedict, eggs florentine) and poached eggs and asparagus; marvel at the synergy!

*If you could start doing that, that would be great. Tell your friends and family!

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Les frigging oignons de printemps avec des oeufs poches. 26 Mar 08

The above-mentioned frigging spring onions.

Usually, Wednesday nights are fajita nights. Except this Wednesday, when I totally forgot because I’d been thinking all day about the best way to have poached eggs for dinner. It’s just been so sunny for the last few days and even though it hasn’t been terribly warm, immanent springtime put me in the mood for a lighter meal. When I stopped by Whole Foods after work to pick up some Smackdown ingredients for tomorrow, I saw a big pile of spring onions and immediately thought: spring onion and mushroom saute topped with poached eggs, and a simple salad. Which I came home and started preparing. Because that’s what normal people do.

Unbeknownst to me, Brian had invited his brother and his wife over for fajitas and, because of a failed game of phone tag, there I was with a pan full of spring onions.  Although I love fajita night, I really really wanted a poached egg, so I stuck to my guns (risking displeasing my surprise dinner guests, thus incurring the wrath of my inner Italian nonna).  Because I’m the one cooking, and you’ll eat what I give you and you’ll like it. Okay, not really. But you will.  Like it, I mean.

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Thursday Night Smackdown: Thomas Keller is a hardcore motherf*cker. 20 Mar 08

The news said there was a 65% chance of vampires, so I figured better safe than sorry.

Tonight: Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry Cookbook (cue foreboding music)

I tried to keep the title clean, in case, you know, your frigging kids are reading over your shoulder (go to bed). I’m in a bit of a mood, you see, because Thomas Keller has roundly defeated us with his precise ways and time consuming techniques and bizarre use of hard-boiled egg yolks. How does the man get a single dish out of his kitchen - a phalanx of oompa loompas? Because we’ve been working for 3 days here; we’ve used every dish and pot in the house and I believe several workers may have died of cholera during construction.

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tacogate ‘08: mrs. morales’ flan 18 Mar 08

UPDATE:  We’ve been visited by Mrs. Morales!  Check out the comments for the recipe for this monumental flan!

A giant fucking flan.

This enormous, delicious flan was oh-so-kindly prepared by Mrs. Morales. Her son Jason, a Scrabble-a-thon participant, informs me that she reads TNS and would be tickled to see a picture of her huge and scrumptious flan. So I give you: Mrs. Morales’ Flan. It had a perfect texture, delicious caramel, fed 20 people easily and balanced the federal budget, all before noon.

Mrs. Morales, your son is terrible at Scrabble, but we love your colossal, Brobdingnagian, wonderful wonderful flan.

If we all ask very nicely, there is a chance she may appear in the comments and tell us how to make this outstanding, gargantuan flan.