The WesFoodie's

CSA in Westchester

2007-03-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

For years I have wanted to participate in a CSA with local farms. With CSA (community supported agriculture) you get the best vegetables at their peak directly from the field of a local farm in exchange for paying the farm at the beginning of the season so the farmers can buy seed, invest in farming equipment and otherwise support their farm for the year.

With CSA you know that every week from spring through fall you will get the pick of the crop at the tastiest moment and at a very good price. CSA must also be the world's most delicious way to do good; you help small local organic farms to survive and prosper by eating some of the freshest, tastiest food the planet has found a way to make possible. Eat to save the planet! I like it.

I've never been able connect with a CSA from a local farm though because, like most mere mortals, I work and can't drive across county during the day on a weekday to pick up my share from volunteers at a church. What's a working family to do? Pay outrageous amounts each weekend at the Whole Foods for stuff flown in from California? Yes. But no more: Problem solved.

Now, we can get great produce from local farms that is actually delivered to our home! The farms still get the help. We get great fresh produce from local farms and we don't have to quit our jobs to get it.

A few months back I wrote about home delivery of milk in Westchester. Nostalgia and convenience met, took a walk down the road of commerce and voila, milk in a bottle at your door in 2007. right here in Westchester, works with local milk delivery men to deliver produce from local farms to homes in Westchester. Slurpingly good Ronnybrook milk, mouth re-orienting heirloom tomatoes, crispy lettuces freshly torn from the earth, regal cabbage, sweet melons. Oh mercy. The good Earth has found a passage to my door and its a temperature controlled van.

Homegrown

2007-03-10T06:23:00.000-08:00

Ya mon, there’s nothing like homegrown. I speak of tomatoes, cucumbers and the like, of course. But there was that friend’s dad in High School with six foot plants in his Brooklyn apartment, but let’s not stray from the path…..

Nothing breaks the gloom and forsaken dank of a cold March like seeing seedlings sprouting. They have no doubt that summer is coming even when your rational mind gives way to an uneasy suspicion that winter will linger without end.

Homegrown crops are far superior to what you can get at even the best farmers markets in Westchester (and the Community Markets are very good). And, yes, homegrown takes the store bought stuff by its scruffy limp neck and shakes it out all across town. So don’t buy veg in the stores after June and before Thanksgiving, it’s just not right. But why better than the farmers market? you ask.

First, variety – there is no limit to the obscure deliciousness you can grow in your own backyard. As previously reported, the Seed Savers exchange lists 1,518 different types of tomatoes available for growing (and that does not include the inferior hybrids such as Big Boy and its ilk). Have you ever eaten a Sudduth’s Strain Brandywine tomato? Do. Because these fist-sized pink fruits have a sweet tomato flavor that deepens as you indulge in the meaty flesh. An unctuousness that is incomparable. It’s the “ugly ripes” from the super market times twelve. Sudduth, by the way, is the family that kept this variety in existence for over one hundred years. They may be old, they may be odd shaped, but the eating is good!

Second freshness – even if you get the crop that was just picked by the farmers there still is not the same moment of perfection that can be achieved on a micro-scale in your own yard.

Third, sweat of the brow – if you work for it you’re just going to enjoy it more. Think of your kids. Almost. But growing a plant from seed (or seedling), watching it mature, flower and ultimately bear fruit makes one enjoy the produce more.

So git out there and grow some. If you can’t or don’t want to try growing from seed a terrific source for great heirloom variety seedlings (from tomatoes to leeks to melons) is Silver Heights farm in Jeffersonville – they have a stand at the Union Square Farmers Market in NYC. Here are some great places to get seeds for the most green thumbed readers and those who aspire to be such:

Seed Savers

Seeds of Change

Baker's Creek

WesFoodie Fact

2007-02-14T17:31:00.000-08:00

America's eating is a rutterless ship bouncing uneasily in a sea of random trends and born again solutions. And no wonder, when it comes to gastronomy and health, most of us don't believe in "truth."

RANDOM WESFOODIE FACT: 80% of Americans believe that the advice experts will give five years from now about what to eat and what not to eat will be completely different from current accepted theory. Let us call this the Woody Allen Syndrome after the scientists in Sleeper who, in the future, reveal that junk food is actually healthy for humans.

Mayonnaise Soda

2007-02-07T16:21:00.000-08:00

From, eh, Channel Ate, one of the great food related songs: Lou Reed's What's Good.

Reed uses food to express his odd pop wisdom about experiencing life as he copes with the loss of a friend.

Not incidentally, looking back to the WesFoodie's Yiddish Walkabout of the Palate, Lou Reed was a student (at Syracuse U.) of Delmore Schwartz and not accidentally, a Jew as well. So in his own beautiful and idiosyncratic way, Lou Reed has carried forward the great Yiddish tradition - he is of the Zscheni (Yiddish for "genius").

Modern Times Taste Bad

2007-01-25T18:32:00.000-08:00

As winter finally descends on the freshly wind chapped suburbs and hopelessness hangs heavy in the air threatening to settle amongst those who love to work the earth, through the symmetry of nature and the ingenious ways of marketers, a ray of light arrives. It’s in the mailbox. It’s made of paper. Something seedy this way comes. Yes, the farm catalogs have arrived!

Not to get to gardeny on you, I promise not to talk about arrangements of ferns and such, but ever since I learned of an effort under way in the former Iron Curtain countries to save the quickly disappearing genetic diversity in plant varieties (particularly the tasty kinds) I have been fascinated and occasionally obsessed with seeds. There are amazing, scrumptious, gorgeous plants, fruits and vegetables out there that need to be saved – Amen! And there are many at work in the U.S. and across the world now saving seeds. Forget the lame supermarket stuff (you knew that), but also get beyond the heirlooms at most high end restaurants; it’s bigger than that.

1,518 unique varieties of tomatoes! 186 different kinds of watermelons. 127 types of carrots. That is just the start for what’s available through the Seed Savers Exchange. At Heritage Farm, the group grows 24,000 varieties of heirloom vegetables. As I start to select which plants I will grow in my garden come spring, I am once again taken by the open pollinated varieties available. Open pollinated? Oh yes, OP.

Open pollinated plants are varieties that will reproduce true to their parents. Unlike hybrids, which are the result of crossing two different parents and the offspring of which will be something very different containing “break-out” features of each of its parent’s genomes, OP plants can be reproduced generation after generation in the same form as their parents so long as both parents are of the same OP variety. Heirloom vegetables and flowers are open pollinated varieties that date back to previous generations (of gardeners – and plants). With heirlooms, adventurous gardeners can try out the same tomatoes as were eaten during the Civil War, taste the apples Thomas Jefferson cultivated at Monticello and eat squash favored by Native American tribes. Or you can make a new heirloom by crossing two OP varieties and “stabilizing” the cross (and keeping them for a long time). Stabilizing involves creating enough generations of the crossed variety that all variables are expressed and remain constant.

I highly recommend experimenting with heirloom OP varieties. They tend to be more delicious than hybrids because the varieties date back to a time before breeding was done for reasons other than taste (like how long they would last in a supermarket display or how many could be packed into an airplane cargo hold). Modern Times taste bad. Sepia tastes bad too; but ole time flavor hits the spot. Many heirlooms were bred and maintained for taste. And taste you will find.

The most popular heirloom vegetable is the Brandywine tomato. Like all things popular, the Brandywine name is used to mean a lot of different things. What’s the true Brandywine? Well, what’s a true “prophet” or a real “Democrat?” No one really knows but I find the Sudduth’s Strain of Brandywine to be the very finest Brandwine. According to the Seed Savers, Brandywine “first appeared in the 1889 catalog of Johnson & Stokes of Philadelphia and by 1902 was also offered by four additional seed companies.” The Sudduth’s strain “was obtained by tomato collector Ben Quisenberry of Big Tomato Gardens in 1980 from Dorris Sudduth Hill whose family grew them for 80 years.” According to my calculations that puts the strain’s use by the Sudduth family beginning at around 1900. It’s a darn good To – Mater. It is large, unevenly shaped, pink-ish red and meaty but moist. When you first bite into a Brandywine you taste the slightly citric, hushed sweetness and true old time tomato flavor. But then there is a second flush – deep flavor that is sensed at the back of the mouth and tongue; something more complex and almost earthy; it completes the taste sensation, lending a fullness; it is lush-ess.

Seed Savers can be found at www.seedsavers.org. Another terrific source for heirlooms from around the world is www.rareseeds.com, aka Baker’s Creek Seeds. Make history, taste history. Grow em!

Viva - Vegetables for Cheap

2007-01-20T06:30:00.000-08:00

I did it. No, I’m not entirely proud. I speak about it carefully, to a selective audience; and only with a full explanation.

So it wasn’t organic. No, none of it. But prices for organic red leaf lettuce were up 20% in one week at Whole Foods and the heads were small. They were $2.50 each! The cucumbers were limp and pricey. They didn’t even have long ones other than overpriced English types. They were mushy too. And you know the English – all tidy and put together on the outside but inside, brutal.

This week, instead of shelling out top dollar for Whole Foods vegetables I went to a super-discount store in New Rochelle: Viva Ranch. For what I would pay for a single limp cuke at Whole Foods, I got five long green crispy cucumbers at Viva. Yeah, five for a single dollar! And the Kirby cukes were cheap too. And crisp, and crisp. The lettuce was full leafed and cost ninety nine cents. Pomegranates for a buck a piece were piled in huge boxes up front. Mangoes cost the same – mangoes with a sweet ambrosial scent with undertones of limes and honey. Not the diseased stiff kind from Stop and Shop mind you. It cost me one fifty for a quart of California strawberries. Yes they were ripe. No, not overripe. They were small and tender with a wet sweetness that bloomed with berry tang. There is no way I could get out of Whole Foods with the same product for less than twice as much (legally). Plus they have Mexican herbs (and salt) for sale along with piles of fresh and dried chili peppers. Parking is free. For the language impaired, English is spoken.

Now, I am a firm believer in personally subsidizing local farms and small scale organic production. I will gladly, well reluctantly but consistently, pay double for organic because it supports The Movement. In fact, I have dreams of myself bringing locally farmed delectibles to the masses. I’m working on it. But all too often these days the organic is unavailable or unfit in the off-season and I wind up paying top dollar at W.F. for conventional produce. Now there is a good alternative – Viva!

There are two Viva markets in New Rochelle. Both are excellent, well stocked (actually amazingly well stocked) and cheap-adi-cheap. Parking is available at the Centre Street location. On Main, it’s the street.

Viva Ranch Fruit Market
477 Main Street
and
38 Centre Street
New Rochelle

Meringue

2007-01-11T17:59:00.000-08:00

1: Okay, one question: What did Casper eat? Yes, the friendly ghost.

2: Well, yeah, he ate those white Styrofoam packing peanuts. Right?

3: No, that’s not what he ate.

1: Ok - then what did he eat?

3: Meringue. He ate meringue.

2: You mean like Baked Alaska?

3: Yes, Baked Alaska for instance. Ghosts eat that. That’s why the Titanic went down because of all the Baked Alaska they were serving to the passengers – it took them too close to the spirit world. It’s ghost food.

Meringue can be tricky to work with but there are always some beautiful moments in its preparation – owing perhaps to its delectability to the other side, or not.

I recently made cookies with a meringue base that were light with air, sweet with cane juice and filled with melting away dulce de leche and three variations on chocolate ganache.

Meringue is air, air held together by tiny strands of egg whites. With their minute white points and billowing bottoms, they are as ghosts visiting from beyond. A cookie made with meringue is like a sweet little edible cloud. Cloud cookies.

There comes a moment in the preparation of a proper meringue cookie when the egg whites, already stiff with air, are forcefully whisked into a sugar emulsion. This moment is magic. The buoyant whites become stretched and glossy with the sugar. What was bubbles transforms into a sleek translucent sheen. Ordinary egg whites give way to shiny candy skinned foam.

Here is the recipe for the cookies (adapted from a recipe in Gourmet Mag):

For Cookies
6 oz sliced blanched almonds (not slivered – the skins must be removed;
2 cups)
1 1/2 cups confectioners sugar (if you can get raw confectioners sugar – it will be tastier but the cookies will be brown, not pink but this can be compensated for with a simple sugar, water and dye icing)
3 large egg whites
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
Red or pink food coloring

For chocolate ganache
3 oz good bittersweet chocolate – chopped
1/3 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon softened butter
Various flavoring can be used such as almond extract, strawberry syrup, etc. – just a dab will do ya

For Dulce de Leche
1 cup Good quality dulce – or bake a can of sweetened condensed milk in a pot of water in the over for an hour on high heat – let cool before opening
½ cup natural cream cheese
¼ cup confectioners sugar

To Make Cookies:
Line baking sheets with parchment paper.

Using a food processor, process almonds with 1/2 cup confectioners sugar until the mixture is a very fine crumb. Sift in and mix with the remaining cup of confectioners sugar in a bowl.

Beat egg whites with salt in another bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed until they just hold soft peaks. Here comes the magic party - add the granulated sugar, a little at a time, beating, then increase speed to high and continue to beat until whites just hold stiff, glossy peaks. If using white confectioners sugar (don’t bother if using the raw sugar) add a drop or two of food coloring to the desired shade and mix at low speed until evenly combined.

Stir almond mixture into meringue until completely incorporated. (Meringue will deflate.)

Spoon batter into bag, pressing out excess air, and snip off 1 corner of plastic bag to create a 1/4-inch opening. Twist bag firmly just above batter, then pipe peaked mounds of batter (the size of a chocolate kiss) onto lined sheets about 1 1/2 inches apart.

Let cookies stand, uncovered, at room temperature until tops are no longer sticky and a light crust forms, 20 to 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 300°F.

Bake cookies, switching position of sheets halfway through baking, until crisp and edges are just slightly darker, 20 to 25 minutes.

Cool completely on sheets on racks, about 30 minutes.

Make ganache:

Melt chocolate with cream in a metal bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water or in top of a double boiler, stirring until smooth. (Bowl should not touch water.) Remove bowl from heat, then add butter, stirring until butter is melted. Separate into individual small batches, each to be flavored with a drop or two of your favorite flavorings (e.g., almond extract). Let stand at room temperature until cooled completely and slightly thickened.

Make Dulce de Leche filling:

Mix dulce de leche with cream cheese and sweeten with confectioners sugar to taste. Assemble cookies:Carefully peel cookies from parchment (they will be fragile). Sandwich a thin layer of ganache or ducle filling (about 1/2 teaspoon) between flat sides of cookies.

I think these cookies are better the second day. The resting time allows the moisture from the fillings to permeate the crisp cookie, softening it and making it tender with a slightly wet sweetness.

Makes about 2 dozen cookies.

Channel Ate

2007-01-04T16:33:00.000-08:00

Mmmmmmnnnn. For those of us still suffering from New Year's hangovers, here is a tasty clip from the Globe Trekker on a Mexican hangover hospital/cafe. Oh, from Channel Ate, the WesFoodie's Video Faves.

The Holiday Meal

2006-12-21T18:20:00.000-08:00

In this season, The WesFoodie’s family performs an odd, half-realized dance of cultural confusions called The Holidays. I look forward to it all the rest of the year. The best parts are about the eatings.

Although entirely Jewish, and a mix of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic at that, my wife’s family celebrates a certain version of X-Mas. It is a celebration of something other than the birth of Jesus. It is probably best described as a celebration of the American celebration of the birth of Jesus but without the birth of Jesus part. That is ( I think) a celebration of the American celebration in late December where gifts are given, warmth is shared, food is eaten and for others there is something-else-going-on-that-has-something-to-do-with-otherness-things-but-let’s-not-talk-about-it,-think-about-it,-or-do-anthing-about-it. The Holidays.

Each year we gather at my in-laws for a feast and copious present giving. I really enjoy both so this is a big treat for me. Unfortunately the food sometimes needs to be coaxed toward the tasty variety and away from the tendency for everything to taste as white as the fur lining on Santa’s neck piece.

To decide just what to eat for The Holiday Meal among the ten independent minded people involved, a method has been devised involving voting. Complex formulas involving weighted votes have been proposed, but basically it comes down to one person one vote every year. Finally this year my wife and I have another baby so we have as many votes as my in-laws. It makes sense of all the sleepless nights and diapering disasters – we now have an additional vote. The grandparents are the tie breakers and that will require lobbying efforts, minor excusable bribes and ultimately throwing a fit for which I will be embarrassed until next October when I start juicing up for The Holiday Meal again. Oh well, its worth it. No, not really; I need to find a better way to advance the culinary arts at my in-laws.

This year, having lots of food writing experience, I am devising a list of voting choices which I am sure, almost, will result in my favorite winning out (and without the adult tantrum).

Here they are – see if you can guess which is the real WesFoodie Choice.

Indulge in the French Influence on Asian Cuisine
Close your eyes. Picture a white heron gently lifting its wings and gliding up from a green misted rice field. Smell the Golden pho gha, an aromatic pot of chicken soup, slow simmered in a nearby kitchen. Imagine salmon in a clay pot with caramel sauce, lemongrass infused com suon suong (grilled pork), bo luc lac (beef cubes) and (for grown ups) caphe phin den da (Vietnamese iced coffee)! Now you have seen our family holiday meal. A favorite of all involved, Vietnamese Kicks Holiday Tush. Let’s chow down with the best of Saigon.

Whole Succulent Suckling Pig
What better way to celebrate something, uh, other than the birth of baby Jesus, than with a whole suckling pig oven baked and tender to the tooth. Crispy skin, moist meat, fascinating cuts of porkness, its all there for the eating. Served with a variety of home cooked sauces, bar-be-que, plum, soy ginger, mustard, this little piggy is going to market all right! Come and taste the oinkness!

Scrumptious Healthful Prime Rib Roast - An Essential Holiday Feast
Nothing satisfies the family's cravings for holiday warmth like a celebratory standing rib roast. Cut thick and fresh the roast pleases with the deep rich flavor of beef, a note of garlic, a gentle breath of herbs and slight bite of pepper from its crust. This is a meal that brings grandparents back to a more elegant time, fulfills parent's desires for a true holiday experience and treats children to a new tradition. The roast is perfect for a real holiday feast.

The roast will be served with a choice of light and buttery mashed potatoes, fragrant jasmine rice, tender vegetables and a nuanced mushroom shallot sauce.

Anything Else - It Ain't Dirt
Fish, pasta or chicken, at the holiday table, it may not be the first thing everyone wants but, well, it ain't dirt. Dirt consists of mineral and organic matter, including living organisms. Dirt, comprising the pedosphere, is positioned at the interface of the lithosphere with the biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere. Dirt formation, or pedogenesis, is the combined effect of physical, chemical, biological, and anthropogenic processes on soil parent material resulting in the formation of soil horizons. The holiday meal, ideally, will contain no dirt.

What Americans Eat - The Census Report

2006-12-16T05:32:00.000-08:00

The United States Census Bureau has issued its annual Statistical Abstract of the United States. According to The New York Times “an eclectic portrait” of sorts may be drawn from the report. Actually, Grey Lady, it’s just a set of largely banal facts, there is no artistry in it whatsoever.

But like the Times, I am trying to gain a better understanding of my fellow Americans nonetheless – lest the endless toil of thousands of statisticians (who, let’s face it, get a bad wrap as “bean counter” types) go to waste.

Back at the The New York Times they are reporting that according to the Abstract, “Americans drank more than 23 gallons of bottled water per person in 2004 — about 10 times as much as in 1980. We consumed more than twice as much high fructose corn syrup per person as in 1980 and remained the fattest inhabitants of the planet, although Mexicans, Australians, Greeks, New Zealanders and Britons are not too far[, er,] behind. [emphasis not in the original, of course]. Good to know.

There are some other interesting food facts to be culled from the Abstract. For instance, while Americans are engaged in a big long fond embrace of cheese generally – and yes my friends, someone has been nibbling at the cheese – Americans have turned a bitter “talk to the hand” palm up against cottage cheese’s face (see Table 201, line 51, reporting that cottage cheese consumption has descended from 4.5 lbs to 2.6 lbs per person while cheese consumption in general has almost doubled, see id. at line 43).

Cocoa consumption has almost doubled too – that’s good, but only if its quality stuff and nothing in the report indicates whether there has been a rise in quality or if the USA is just grabbing cheap cocoa butter laden bars on the sly.

Well, moooove over Julia Roberts, apparently America is having a love affair with edible beef tallow now because we eat quadruple what we did a few years ago. My question is: “what is it?” I wouldn’t know edible beef tallow from a scruffy old beach towel.

Looks like its nix for the fake butter sticks – America hates, hates margarine. Well, no, not hate, hate is for mongers, but dislike is for the rest of us, and our dislike of margarine must be on the rise because consumption of margarine is down by around 75%.

We are right back where we started on tea drinking with each American drinking 7.3 gallons of sips per year – the same as in 1980. I probably drink 7.3 gallons of tea each week. Which is why it can be said, although I may not be the fattest inhabitant of the planet or have a Mexican, an Australian, a Greek, New Zealander and Brit following me, like the American The New York Times wrote about, I do have in common with my fellow USAers, a propensity to drink a lot.

The Rugelach They Carried

2006-12-07T15:33:00.001-08:00

In boatloads they came to America. Crowded on ships with fear and the exultation of people who had risked what little they had for the hope of a life more livable than what they left behind. And they carried things with them.

The Jews of Eastern Europe brought to America the rich literary tradition of Yiddish, a profound humanism and reverence for education, the tragic humor of the schtetl, the few belongings they kept and a delectable peasant cuisine. Not least among the many recipes remembered by the immigrants was one (in a multitude of variations) for a rolled pastry made sweet with sugar, honey and fruits called rugelach.

A century later, rugelach is on the verge of becoming as American as the bagel, “schmuck” and “oy vey.”

At the forefront of rugelach infiltration of the mainstream in Westchester, home to so many children of the bubbies and zeydes who carried the cookies to America, is Suzanne Fromm.

Suzanne founded Suzanne’s Sweets in 2004 after a first career in technology. Since then her hand-rolled rugelach business has turned into one of the County’s food success stories. Suzanne’s Sweets now ships the little schtetl cookies across the country and they are offered throughout the towns and villages of Westchester.

These rugelach are top notch. Without sacrificing authenticity, they are baked with a modern sensibility. Never overly dense or bland (as, let’s face it, some of bubbie’s rugelach were), Suzanne’s cookies have a tender pastry surrounding crushed nuts and sweetness. No one ingredient in each rugelach, not chocolate nor fruit, overwhelms. They are each a well balanced, satisfyingly sweet and perfectly sized treat.

It may yet take a few years for rugelach to be offered on every street corner in cities across the country – Wyoming may be a hold out too – but with Suzanne’s Sweets, rugelach is sure to be no mere relic of what The Tribe once was. A delectable piece of the past is being made very much a part of today.

Suzanne’s Sweets rugelach can be found at www.suzannessweets.com

King of the Eats

2006-12-06T18:57:00.000-08:00

Probably the best known eater in Westchester is Jughead. Yes, Archie Comics are all made here in Westchester. Originally, and until recently, the Archies came outta Mamaroneck.

You may have noticed that this Riverdale (read "Mamaroneck") resident relates to food much like The WesFoodie. But Jughead does not have a healthy relationship with eating. He is obsessive.

Archie comics are missed in Mamaroneck. Many 'neckers miss seeing Juggy slurp down several slices at Sal's (yes Liz, Jughead is one of the old timers who like this spot for the 'za). At least though, the line at Walter's isn't quite as long after High School lets out - and they don't automatically run out of shakes when that soft crown of the king of snacks comes around.

Juggy is old school and never goes in for haute cuisine - but I'd love to see him dig through one of chef Matthew Karp's extraordinary giant Ring Ding's at Plates.

Recently, The WesFoodie sat down with Jughead to talk about the food scene right round the Burbs. Jughead only wanted to talk about one thing: how the High School was going to start a garden.

Miss Beazly, it seems, recently attended a presentation by Alice Waters about The Edible Schoolyard and loh and behold, next year Riverdale High is starting an organic garden that will help to feed the kids in the cafeteria. Go Beazly!

Yiddish Walkabout of the Palate

2006-12-03T18:11:00.000-08:00

I recently walked the streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in a kind of a walkabout of the palate - visiting the last vestiges of Jewish immigrant culture and especially the kosher food spots. Amidst the sleek new condos and overrun illicit street scenes there are pockets of Yiddish America still vivid with flavor and a connection to The Tribe even as the throngs have left the tenements for the Burbs and (for the great grand kids) to head back to Brooklyn.

Still I can't help but feel that something has been or is nearly lost - not merely relocated to more auspicious surroundings. The depth of Jewish humanism, intellectual rigor and creative genius is growing dangerously thin. Where three generations ago minds fresh off the schtetl were blazing the imaginations of a nation now what is there? What does it mean for a people who were once Delmore Schwartz but now, David Brooks?

It so happens that I am currently writing a piece on the phenomena: the descent of the Jewish American mind (its an insider account). While I work my way through it (and I have some very nice video, photo and written material - thanks) we can watch this video by Bret Sigler on Houston Street and especially the food there. Enjoy.

Click Here For "Houston Street", a film on the Lower East Side.

Starbucks in Larchmont, White Plains, Rye, Mamaroneck, Chappaqua, Rye Brook and You

2006-11-25T08:14:00.001-08:00

An unavoidable part of the experience of heading toward middle-age in the Burbs is having popular culture leave you behind. You don’t like pop music anymore, most movies seem entirely uninteresting, you don’t identify with pop icons, the new clothes are ridiculous costumes – oh, yes, it is happening. But folks, let me fill you in on a not so well kept secret: there’s nothing natural or inevitable about this. It’s done on purpose. And by a relatively small number of people pulling the proverbial levers. It’s all about post-war advertising strategies.

You may know that advertisers relying on questionable research have determined that Americans older than their twenties are not highly desirable targets for ads. Why? Because supposedly the older folks are not likely to change product brands. According to this widely ascribed to theory, once you enter into your thirties you have brand loyalty and no amount of advertising is likely to seduce you away to new soaps and deodorants.

The culture industries are either directly or indirectly (but within a degree or so) dependent on advertising revenue for their profit and thus survival. So they ain’t gonna waste their time on cultural products (music, movies, sandwiches, etc.) on anyone that their advertisers don’t want to market to. And that means me – and you (probably). But definitely anyone closer than a decade or two to middle aged.

So no wonder you can’t stand to listen to commercial radio anymore – it could care less about what you like. Of course, as you well know, the young don’t know what the heck they like and will take to pretty much anything wrapped up for them in a tidy little package with a colorful bow on it. So they’re being spoon fed unspeakable things in order to get them to buy other unspeakably useless things that they are too darn naïve to recognize as unspeakable or useless. It’s almost enough to make me glad I’m an aging, overweight Burbanite with antiquated tastes and no obvious purpose in the culture anymore.

This may be changing a bit.

Starbucks likes people like me.

The ubiquitous coffee chain has found out that there are a lot of people who are older than twenty five, who do not crave just intense doses of salt pierced by shockingly sweet and mind puckering sour bursts of flavor from food, don’t really want to listen to hip-hop and one Simpson sister or another all the time and need to sit down and go to the bathroom (a clean one) on a regular basis. They have researched you and they know that you want to have good flaky butter-layered croissants, strong dark coffee, salads with artisan ingredients; that you want to listen to Bob Dylan, Sheryl Crow and Amos Lee; that you want organic.

Starbucks knows. And they aim to deliver to me the things I want to make me, well, be me.

The artist Ashley Bickerton, a prominent member of the “Neo-Geo” art movement of the 1980’s, created a series of extremely well constructed devices that hung on the wall and were emblazoned with various product and company logos. He explained his work as being engaged in the process by which individuals constructed their identities through consumer choices. Now this is a bit simplistic (remember this was the ‘80’s) but Bickerton has a point.

There’s no doubt that Starbucks offerings are in synch with a sensibility that I identify with and that aspect of identity is reinforced by eating, drinking, listening and being at Starbucks - as antithetical to that very sensibility as it may sound. But I do wonder, is Starbucks serving an authentic cultural niche that I independently like and call my own and with which Starbucks is genuinely in synch? Or are they just going for seconds on selling artifacts to a consumer group that the rest of pop culture long ago abandoned for passé? Bickerton (and his spiritual godfather Andy Warhol) might have asked: what’s the difference?

Feed The Hungry!

2006-11-21T17:43:00.000-08:00

It's Thanksgiving time. The WesFoodie hopes you have a wonderful, warming, filling and most scrumptous meal with your family. I'm going to take this occasion to write a short note on a very serious food matter and I hope you will forgive my indulgence - I know you didn't come here to read about hunger.

Friends, this Thanksgiving week thirty five million Americans are struggling to feed themselves and their families. Of the thirty five million, eleven million people will go hungry tonight, in our country.

This week the United States government responded by issuing a report that changed the terminology so that there are no "hungry" in America anymore - thirty five million of our fellow Americans who cannot feed themselves or their children are according to the Administration people who have "very low food security." (For an article click here and here)

For those who would like to help feed the hungry among us, Food-Patch, an affiliate of Second Harvest, operates a food bank for the hungry here in Westchester. The phone number is 914 923-1100. For those who like to play word games click here.

Doorstep Connection: Milk Delivery in Westchester

2006-11-10T17:55:00.000-08:00

Our connection with milk is primal and basic. Milk is the first food we consume when we enter the world and a source of sustenance in our formative years. In its whiteness, milk is reflective of our desire for things pure and unadulterated.

Many of us have a deep nostalgia connected to milk. We hold memories of cold glasses of milk with home baked cookies, warm milk for sleepless childhood nights and bowls of cereal on lazy weekend mornings. One of my favorite food memories is of the eighty five cent pints of chocolate milk at H&H Bagels on Broadway in the late 1980’s when my crew and I were hanging out around the Upper West Side; cheap, sweet and chocolaty, with its smooth texture and depth of body – goes nice with Led Zep – best deal in town.

For those old enough to remember times before supermarkets and convenience stores, and many of us who know those times only through sepia photos and shared stories, milk bottles delivered by hand to the doorstep of home speak to a sense of community and simple pleasures of life all too often difficult to find in the shadow of Gotham today.

Tom Rubino of The Hudson Milk Company knows about milk. And he knows how milk, a glass bottle and its connection to your doorstep can bring back a piece of that something that feels lost in today’s world.

A few years back Tom changed his life around. He wanted to reconnect with people and community on a one to one basis – like his father the butcher did in his business years ago. So with a strong sense of the possible, a truck and six customers in the first year, Tom started a company to deliver locally farmed, natural, fresh milk to people’s doorsteps across the region. Twelve years later Tom has multiplied his customer base many fold, added a second truck and just happens to be at the forefront of an international movement rediscovering locally produced organic and naturally made foods.

Tom attributes the growing interest in milk truck deliveries to the growing recognition that local, hand made foods offer flavor and health unequaled by supermarket offerings. There is a growing sensibility that values knowing where one’s food comes from. Tom’s milk satisfies this need, all the milk Hudson Milk delivers is from cows raised locally, not in feed lots across the continent from home.

The Hudson Milk Company delivers a variety of milks, cheeses, eggs and other good local products to doorsteps in Northern Westchester and across Putnam County. Prices are highly competitive and the delivery charge is a modest two dollars. Tin boxes are available for safe keeping of the products – lest the raccoons get the best stuff. Nostalgia rekindled is free.

The Hudson Milk Company
http://Hudsonmilk.com
(914) 245-0409
Email: hudsonmilk@optonline.net

Rolly Polly Fish Heads

2006-11-08T18:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a bit of an amuse bouche to tide us over - for those of us who came of age in the decade of pastiche, Cyndi Lauper, conservative high schoolers and the like, this one brings ya right back.

TEA

2006-10-31T16:34:00.000-08:00

The heat of a sip flushes the lips and reluctant tongue as it washes down towards the dark of the throat. Muscles unclench releasing the last of the day’s irate contractions and the remaining traces of blunt telephone hours. Splash into the chest with a hot pain and then welcome emptiness. Good tea.

It’s hard to avoid haiku-like prose when describing tea – and why try? Tea in fact originates from and remains deeply associated in the West with Asian cultures. All true tea is from the Himilayan native Camellia Thea, a member of the Theaceae family of plants. The leaves of either the Camellia assamica or Camellia sinensis (or a hybrid of the two) form the basis for all tea. The two varieties are commonly referred to as Indian and Chinese teas, respectively.

As tea comes from Asia, and the West came to know the pleasures of tea on its early expeditions Eastward, Tea’s history is, of course, intricately connected to colonialism. It wasn’t until the late 17th century that tea drinking became popular in England. But oh when it did, the British East India Company engaged in a most egregious drugs-for-tea scheme that was as dark and indecent as anything afoot today. The scheme gave rise to the Opium Wars. There was also that regrettable tax put on tea in the American colonies and the reaction to it that forms a notable part of tea lore in this country to this day.

Tea has seen to the survival of its species through ingenious execution of a dual strategy of public and private existence. Tea is both a cultural phenomena and a most private experience. As with the dog (another species unessential to mankind’s basic needs that survives nonetheless by virtue of its place in culture writ large along with its place in the most personal chamber of the human thumping muscle), tea has assured its future along side our own.

Modern America was, on the whole, not particularly discerning about its teas. Industrialism brought with it a rank selection of bagged teas with little flavor and virtually no nuance. Much of “tea” in the bags is actually the leftovers of far superior leaf teas that are swept up from production floors. Those “tiny little tea leaves” are really nothing to be excited about. It’s the dust of real tea too plentiful for the trash bin. In the 1980’s herbal “teas” were widely marketed together with flavored black teas. The 80’s herbals were basically the same floor sweepings with some fruit peels for taste.

As for alternative rock music, the 1990’s were good for tea. Like a “Nevermind” of the palate, The Republic of Tea’s loose leaf selections and round bagged leaves brought the good stuff to the masses at just the right moment. In addition to writing a great memoir/case study on starting their tea company, “The Republic of Tea” (if you’ve ever even thought of starting your own food business you have to read this book!), Patricia and Mel Ziegler, the couple who founded Banana Republic, and Bill Rosenzweig, the guy who did all the work, understood that America was ready to stop gulping and start sipping (to paraphrase the Republic’s Ministers as they called themselves – hokey, indeed, but endearing in a nerd-cum-millionaire sort of way).

It’s unreasonably hard to find good loose tea for sale at local stores. Beware of any shop that stores or displays its tea in glass or clear plastic jars. Sunlight causes tea to lose its flavor. If they store it in transparent containers it is a clear sign they don’t know what they are doing. But the Internet has some really great tea vendors. Two of my favorites are the Assam Tea Company (for black teas) and Adagio (for green teas and tea making equipment).

The folks behind the Assam Tea Co. travel to tea estates in India and have brought back a most astounding array of fine black teas. Among my favorites are the Full Leaf Darjeeling and the Satrupa Golden Pekoe. The F.L. Darjeeling is like no other Darjeeling I’ve had. Usually these teas have a slight mustiness to them. Not the Full Leaf. This is a bright tea with definite fruity notes. It is full and has a slight depth to its aftertaste. It’s a wonderful tea. The Pekoe is bold and heavy. It has the sought after dark malt and smooth finish of a great breakfast tea.

Adagio has some very unusual and worthwhile green tea blends. One of the best is the Mandarin Green. Large green Camellia leaves are tossed with dried orange peel. The complex slightly vegetable flavor of the tea leaves are heightened by the bright sweetness and tang of the orange. It’s a nice tea to sooth at the end of a long day. Green tea has less caffeine than black tea (which generally has half as much caffeine as coffee), making it a good choice for before bed sipping. Adagio also has a terrific little one cup brewing device. It’s a plastic case that when placed on top of your tea cup automatically releases a well strained stream of tea into the cup. Ingenious indeed, they call it IngenuiTea.

The Assam Tea Company
www.tfactor.us

Adagio
www.adagio.com

Growing Garlic

2006-10-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

According to the great tonic and cures salesmen of the American frontier, garlic, grown right, can save the soul, seduce the palate and stimulate the mind. Fortunately, Westchester has a great climate, decent soil (with some help) and plenty of people in dire need of a little culinary seduction and the intensity of allium sativum (yes, garlic).

And just as the growing season has come to a close (and gardeners’ moods are tempted towards darkness), the garlic season is coming upon us. Garlic is best planted in these parts in late October through early December. The idea is to give the bulbs a bit of time to put down roots before the ground freezes hard. The roots will hold the bulbs in place against the heaving frosts of winter. In the spring, green tips will rocket up before virtually anything else living has breached the cold surface of the ground. In mild winters the garlic will grow humbly all season long and then shoot suddenly toward the sun when temperatures warm and days grow longer.

There are 274 distinct varieties of garlic listed and available through the Seed Savers Exchange. They all can be traced back to garlic’s origins in South Central Asia (hence the saying, “If you can’t find a clove of garlic, just look in the sack of a Yomna horseman”) but many are associated with more recent varietal origins. Some of The WesFoodie’s favorites are these:

MUSIC: Named for Al Music, the man who brought this variety to America. Music has large fat cloves and a heart thumping flash of heat. The pink skin on each clove lends a delicate beauty to this favorite of the organic set.

ITALIAN PURPLE: This garlic has a clean taste with a kick that hits when tooth meets clove and then fades fast leaving just a full garlic flavor. Probably my favorite.

ROMANIAN RED: RR has fire. This clove bites the tongue and flushes the cheeks with its heat. True garlic lovers will eat this one raw.

Interest in small batch garlic farming has increased dramatically in recent years. Many garlic connoisseurs regard the crop in much the same way as wine; something intricately tied to the particulars of soil and weather conditions fixed in place and time. The truth is that growing garlic is fairly easy. Compared to cultivating wine grapes or orchids, it’s a walk in the fields.

Just plant each clove (with peel on) pointed side up about an inch and a half below the surface. Keep each clove at least six inches apart from its neighbors. Cover with some organic mulch – leaves or straw work nicely. Water once. Viola. A garlic field.

The only real tricks are deciding when (or if, but do it no matter what some people say) to remove the scapes – the long green flowering tips that appears in late spring to early summer – and when to harvest. First, snip off the scapes as soon as they bend onto themselves to form a circle. This will be obvious when it happens. By removing the scape you will give the garlic the impulse to put all of its energy into the bulbs and not the flower. The scapes by the way make the most wonderful pesto if you just blend them up with some nuts and olive oil – I mean really the best! Then harvest the garlic when the bottom leaves have yellowed and browned so that there are only four living green leaves left. For each leaf there is one layer of wrapper on the bulbs. If you go to less than four the cloves will be exposed and they won’t keep well or look like you expect. So pull ‘em at four. Brush off the soil and let them “cure” in a dark cool place for a couple of weeks then cut off the stalks. That’s it. Your harvest is ready for the kitchen.

The definitive guide to growing organic garlic is Growing Great Garlic by Ron England. A transcendent tale of a New Mexico garlic farm is sung by Stanley Crawford in A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm. Crawford farms poems.

You can order seed garlic at Johnny’s Seeds (http://www.johnnyseeds.com/) and The Garlic Store (http://www.thegarlicstore.com/). Hurry they are running out of stock fast.

Try growing some garlic this year. Just grab some cloves, get down and get dirty.

Low Down Purr and Sweet Sugar Finish at Coffee Labs, Slave to the Grind, Noka Joe's

2006-10-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

Years after I first spurned the snap jawed caffeine buzz of the roasted bean in favor of the tranquil fermentation of tea, and months into a downward spiral of a lowbrow tooth-to-gutter descent that landed me in Dunkin Donuts coffee, The WesFoodie has rediscovered the full bodied joys of the high priestess of darkness. And in public places. In the suburbs. No, I don’t mean Jeannine Pirro or her husband’s mistress. For this rapidly aging, stomach bulging, sleep deprived, tied to a desk, blind-in-one-eye-from-staring-at-the-glow-of-a-computer-screen Burbanite who still needs more hours in the day to get some work done and assure his kids that daddy hasn’t gone bye-bye like great grandpa, a dark and tempting priestess up high means up-market coffee, of course. And it is to the heights of coffee that I once again turn in my time of need for an energy substitute with kick.

Earlier, The WesFoodie famously described the downward arc of my coffee palate (well, not famously, but not entirely in obscurity either – the article is Number One on Google for “Westchester Food’s Dark Master” and it’s good to be number one). That was a tale of the descent of taste in the age of caffeine frenzy, or how I went from drinking a really great cup of coffee to slurping down fast food Styrofoam cups of light roasts. No more! The devolution had to stop somewhere! And that place turned out to be the crowded, fluorescent lighted, road side Dunkin Donuts near Highway One where I was served my forth or fifth consecutive cup of dastardly sour and burned brew with too little sugar and too much cold light cream. “This is terrible” I said with frowning puckered lips and pain squinted eyes. I didn’t even finish the cup.

Cue up the Pearl Jam, its back to the bean roasters for The WesFoodie! I’m getting back on that gussied up oil laden engine of brew with the low down purr and sweet sugar finish. It’s good to be on top of my coffee game again. From up here you can see the caffeine highway cutting a ribbon of speed through drowsy afternoon hills. It looks like alls go from here on in.

Lo and behold, it turns out that there are not just one but at least three really great coffee bars in Westchester. And there are some not so great ones. I’ll stick to the good stuff:

Coffee Labs Roasters on Main Street in Tarrytown has what is to my taste the best brew in the Burbs. One sip of the deep, balanced roasted cup and my mouth comes alive with the multi-note flavor of the bean. It’s like an old friend. A sip, and . . . “hello old friend bean,” mellow giver of jolt. And just three more sips of the stuff and I had enough energy to walk to the corner again (even with my five year old clutching onto my leg at once begging for and demanding another pretend light saber battle). Thank you old friend.

A new favorite is Noka Joe’s in Katonah. Their’s is a rich brew with heavy body and a slight bite of bitter at the finish. Unlike many coffee bars that self-connect to the hipster parlors of earlier years with a dark lighted nod to the Beats, Noka Joe’s feels right at home in Katonah with its small town feel and preference for friendly, never alienated, hip gilding. Perks, another local coffee bar (also good), down the avenue from Noka Joe’s gilds it up a bit more.

Another uber coffee spot is Slave to the Grind in Bronxville. With a steady influx of Sarah Lawrence students, this coffee house feels young and out-of-the-ordinary in its staid Bronxville environs. Slave has been serving up good strong cups of dark roasts for years and they have kept the quality high. There isn’t much seating but it’s the kind of place that lets you hangout forever once you’ve grabbed a table. I’m not sure what grinding the locals are slavish about but this place makes a nice strong cup of brew.

Coffee Labs Roasters
7 Main Street
Tarrytown
(914) 332-1479

Slave to the Grind
58 Pondfield Road
Bronxville
(914) 961-8622

Noka Joe’s
25 Katonah Avenue
Katonah
(914) 232-7278

Find Flavor - Restaurants in Westchester

2006-10-10T16:40:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Table

There is something essential in the act of welcoming people to one’s table. Hosting is intrinsically bound with the culture of food. Some chefs are gifted at conveying their welcome through the presentation of a dish, the warmth of a restaurant’s design, the articulation of a menu or myriad other ways, some obvious and some slightly felt.

For this very enthusiastic but self-taught and reasonably competently skilled cook, pleasing others is integral to why I put fire to the pan.

Ideas about food and opinions, secrets about what we eat, where we eat it and with whom, are like food itself, deeply satisfying to share. And as with food, some of us can get a little obsessive with sharing (for example, one might start a food blog and take digital photos of everything you eat). We all need an outlet for our obsessions.

This is a long way of The WesFoodie saying: Please come share, dish some dirt, sling some verbal hash, tell some secrets and read everybody else’s minds on the new Find Flavor wiki. We’ve custom built an online wiki restaurant review engine and listing feature that you can use to write your own reviews, share tips and let everybody else in on your innermost foodie thoughts and find great restaurants and read everybody else’s stuff.

So come on! Write a review, find a great restaurant, share your food secrets: Check it out by clicking here: Find Flavor!

With each user's input, the listings and reviews will grow. To begin with we have listings for restaurants including The Willett House, Little Mexican Cafe, Le Provencal Bistro, The Flying Pig, Crabtree's Kittle House and more.

Oh The Places YouTube Goes - To Dan Barber's Kitchen For One

2006-10-10T04:41:00.000-07:00

You may have heard by now that the online video sharing site YouTube has been purchased by Google (for a tidy sum).

While their foodie video collection is still somewhat meager, perusing the collection I did find this gem of a video on our friend Dan Barber and his Stonebarns Center (you may recall a WesFoodie posting or two on this bold experiment in culinary delights).

To watch the video just click on the play arrow below.

The Wesfoodie's Dark Master - No More? - Redux

2006-10-06T16:04:00.000-07:00

The WesFoodie was at one time an enthusiastic and constant coffee drinker. My devotion was not entirely to the caffeine. In fact, while I was certainly dependent on my caffeine fix – and it was fierce – my coffee drinking was mostly about the enjoyment of a good hot cup of sweet bean.

Like most native New Yorkers, I was raised on the cheap weak stuff at Greek diners. (For those who can’t remember that far back, when Starbuck’s hit the City in the early nineties, the going rate for a cup of Joe was fiddy cents at the neighborhood diner. Starbuck’s doubled the price and the rest is history.) However, my coffee palette was suddenly elevated in the late 1980’s when I traveled to Berkeley. There, in the city of hills, great year-round frontlawn gardens, aging hippies and C—z P—e (the holy one whose name must not be uttered) my cousin pointed out the window of her little car and said, “There’s Peet’s. Its really good coffee – you should try it.” And I did. Man, the Major Dickenson’s blend. Really good. When my pal came out to visit from the City and I walked him across town for a cup (like I did everyday) he was like: “Man, if you put sugar in its like ice cream.” He was giddy. (We weren’t aging but we were probably hippies.) I drank Peet’s whenever I had the chance for years. It was my coffee of choice.

Sometime in the mid-nineties, Au Bon Pain (whose name we can definitely utter) started serving Peet’s at its stores in New York. Yeah really great. They were all over town. Go into the Au Bon and get a chocolate croissant and a big cup of Peet’s coffee. You’re set. Right? No. It turns out its hard to make a good cup of Peet’s coffee. At least for the under-trained and cranky counter staff at the Au Bon. Really hard. Impossibly hard. The coffee sucked and pretty soon I was not drinking Peet’s anymore.

Fortunately, by that time Starbuck’s had arrived in the Big Apple. So many Starbuck’s in fact that, like the fabled squirrel of virgin North America that could cross the continent from tree to tree without ever touching ground, I could walk from tip to tip of Manhattan island sipping my grande Starbuck's and refueling at the next Starbuck’s without ever missing a warm gulp of Sumatra (the Tiger). Fortunately for Starbuck’s, and Starbuck’s was quite fortunate, the first Bush economy was causing recent Phd.’s to work retail. So at Starbuck’s one could pretty much count on getting your $1.25 cup from a college grad. Now, one must also note as a matter of historical significance that the cultural moment was ripe with Seattle then. Not only was Starbuck’s revolutionizing hot beverage consumption and café aesthetics, but Pearl Jam and Nirvana were dominating musical tastes. Certainly mine. So for someone in the Wesfoodie’s socio-cultural demographic, drinking the Starbuck’s was, you know, right up there.

I don’t know when I first noticed that Starbuck’s coffee was at best inconsistent and often downright lousy. But once the realization took hold I was already weaning myself off of my coffee cup and towards the Zen tranquility of a good cuppa. The Wesfoodie was really stressed out at work and I couldn’t handle the bean anymore. So to the tea leaf I went. Half the caffeine and just as hot and sweet. Coffee was now strictly for the weekend.

One might think that when coffee became a rare treat, my taste for it would naturally rise towards the highest quality, perhaps rarest, grind; that I would crave the perfect roast from the most exclusive estates. That with but two days a week to enjoy, I would have for myself a level of quality otherwise unaffordable or a cup just too damn good for the everyday drinker. But this is not what happened. Just as my taste for coffees could be expected to ascend . . . . Devolution!

The downward arc of my coffee palette is unmistakable. From the platitudes of Peet's Berkeley brilliance, to Starbuck's off-the-mark but well informed roasts, a short lived romance with a local coffee bar with pale pedestrian brews and then to the ubiquitous drive up donut shops. But I'm not too highbrow to admit to it (or to write an essay about it and post it on the Internet for that matter). In fact, its interesting to me. Like a clue into my yet to be fully known self. A hint at my true nature? Maybe that's going too far but its close. The fact that I now crave not Pete's gourmet roasts but a pink and orange styrofoam cup filled with Dunkin Donuts coffee (milk and sugar please) must say something about who I've become and what makes me who that is.

Note to readers: This piece was originally posted in April 2006 and appears once again as a prelude to Part II of the Dark Brew, a piece which will run in the Westchester Times Tribune on October 12 and will be posted here simultaneous with its print publication.

Chicken Soup

2006-09-30T05:45:00.000-07:00

Hovering over a bowl of golden chicken broth with tiny circles of schmaltz dappling over its surface and green snips of bright dill gathering around half sunken bulges of carrot and potatoes will do you more good than actually slurping up spoonfuls of it. The healing power of chicken soup seems, in the scientific analysis, to arise in fact from the ability of steam to open and clear the sinuses. Maybe.

Recently The WesFoodie was sick. So when it came time for dinner, little held out any attraction except for a nice steamy bowl of chicken soup. To the alley with science! When it comes to nursing an early fall bout of woe I turn to the soup bowl. However, with a head full of sick and the wife doing no better, we had to forego the homemade ecstasy of chicken in the pot and head out to nearby commercial kitchens for our nurturing elixir.

We sampled take out soup from three close-by restaurants, all in Larchmont/Mamaroneck (c’mon, I’m not feeling well): Turquoise, The Nautilus Diner and Cosi (a chain). The resulting supper was not bad, pretty good in fact. We found one great matzo ball, one all around homey tasting authentic Jewish style chicken soup and one fine side bread. Unfortunately, each one came from a different one of the restaurants.

By far the best, most wholesome and all around tasty soup was from Turquoise. This restaurant on Palmer Avenue has gone through some changes. First it was a small take out place with some seats to eat-in. Then it was a small take out place with some seats but mostly a grocery store with Turkish delicacies and imported French cheeses – go figure, there are lots of French families living in Larchmont. Now it’s a full-scale low- to mid-priced restaurant serving Turkish cuisine. But Jewish. Yes, the owners are Turkish Jews and these members of The Tribe cook up some nice yoykh (Yiddish for chicken broth – right!). Theirs is a deeply flavored broth with large pieces of pulled chicken meat, roughly chopped carrots and floating herbs. It’s a full bodied homemade style soup.

The Nautilus Diner makes a good matzo ball. Almost the size of baseballs, they are light but with substance. Not an easy thing to pull off. And I can tell you about some hard little matzo balls I’ve endured – but I won’t. The soup on this particular evening, however, was salty enough to double the size of our digits within minutes of finishing our bowl.

The bread at Cosi - if you haven’t had it you should - is addictive. With the warmth of its crisp and salty crust and light doughy taste, this flat bread made Cosi into a major national chain. It sure beats the bun. The chicken soup itself is dominated by vegetables. The broth has a definite leaf and root flavor – herbs and onions are the lead notes here. The chicken though, comes in less than appealing cubes and the noodles are very small bow-tie like shaped pasta. And, hey, I’ve seen them opening big plastic bags of the stuff and pouring it into a microwave contraption for heating, i.e., those big black kettles they dish the soup out of are for looks only.

All in all, we did pretty well with the soups. I am feeling a bit better and with the holidays upon us I’m inspired to dig out the old knedlach and chicken soup recipes. We’ll see how they measure up against the locals (and a steam machine).

* * *
Turquoise
1895 Palmer Avenue
Larchmont
914-834-9888

Nautilus Diner
1240 West Boston Post Road
Mamaroneck
914-833-1320

Cosi
Various locations including Mamaroneck, Mt. Kisco and Rye
www.getcosi.com

Store Wars - May The Farm Be With You

2006-09-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

Join the Organic Rebellion. Watch the Store Wars Saga Below!

It's not just a highly ridiculous parody of Star Wars, it's also an important message about the values of organic food in this time of factory farming and industrial construction of what we eat. Brought to you by the Organic Trade Association, Store Wars is the tale of young Cuke Skywalker and his battle against the evil Darth Tater, a genetically altered vegetable. So, not that far off from George Lucas' original.

To watch the video just click on the play arrow in the center of the screen - it may take just a moment to load. The movie lasts for around five and a half minutes.

Hole in the Wall

2006-09-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

What is a hole in the wall?

Well, the chowhounds who like to search down great cheap eats use the term to describe small, independent food joints with no-frills service. My wife still raves about the hole in the wall Vietnamese spot in Paris where she frequently ate while briefly living in France decades ago. This was literally a hole in the wall. One had to move aside tall plywood planks to reveal a dark entranceway into the tiny but bright space where elderly Vietnamese ladies dished out portions of pho and fried spring rolls to students and others who put aside propriety in favor of deep bowls of steaming soup with fragrant basil, cilantro and handfuls of green onions.

Another hole in the wall was constructed by Indian researcher Suata Mitra in New Delhi. Mitra embedded a high-speed computer in the wall separating his company’s headquarters from the neighboring slum. He found that the impoverished children from across the wall quickly learned the technology to enable themselves to use the Internet. It seems Mr. Mitra found another way to put a light space at the other end of a dark hole in the wall.

In the late eighteen hundreds, the American outlaws Jesse James, Laughing Sam Carey, George Flat Nose Currie, Butch Cassidy and others formed the Hole in the Wall Gang in Johnson County near the “hole in the wall” through the mountains in Wyoming. A quick getaway from the law?

Time Magazine reports on the emergence of a hole in the wall in 1963. Gates were built into the Berlin Wall through which Christmas gifts were delivered to East Germans behind the wall.

Ruth’s Jamaican Hot and Cold Deli on Battle Avenue in White Plains is a hole in the wall. In the tiny kitchen in back of this cluttered space, Ruth and her family make spicy, sauce infused Jamaican dishes and serve them up front for a few dollars a meal. Make your way past the few groceries, international calling cards, laminated pictures of Bob Marley and small badges with the names of Island nations for sale on the shelves against the wall and belly up to the counter to place your order.

The brown stew chicken, rich broth softened pieces of moist meat on the bone, is mild and earthy. The stew melts into accompanying rice and vegetables lending its slightly salty flavor to the delicate tasting sides. The jerk is spicy and pungent. The sauce kicks with heat and a cascade of sensations from its multi-spice elements. An expert hand can be felt behind each dish. They carry an ease and familiarity born of this kitchen’s lifetime of experience cooking good Island food.

It seems there’s always something unexpected coming through a hole in the wall. Something that puts the lie to barriers and limits constructed. Sometimes it’s the hole itself that’s the surprise. As with Ruth’s; a tiny kitchen on a small road in the back of White Plains serving up some of the best cheap eats around.

Ruth’s Jamaican Hot and Cold Deli
255 Battle Avenue (off of Central Avenue near the County Center )
White Plains , New York
914-289-0155

Frodo's Restaurant

2006-09-19T16:50:00.001-07:00

Dining in the Burbs has unquestionably improved over the past few years. Gone are the days when eating in Westchester meant grey meat and potatoes, sub-gummy Chinese, greasy diners, family style Italian or unthinkable Japanese. Now, we don’t want to jinx our good fortune, but it is interesting to look at what’s driving the rise in culinary possibilities.

Well, there are many suspect factors: an influx of immigrant food entrepreneurs bringing culinary traditions to the county’s kitchens and a maturing of the movement for organic, local and seasonal ingredients chief among them. Chef Daniel Petrilli of Frodo’s restaurant in Pleasantville has another explanation. Petrilli sees new restaurants in Westchester serving a higher level of cuisine in response to diners’ heightened desire to be close to home while experiencing the pleasures once found only on forays into the City; a desire to remain close born of the events on and following September 11, 2001. It’s a keen insight from a close observer of the Westchester food scene. Our appreciation of home has strengthened but our drive to experience the good things in life has been undiminished.

With more Burbanites seeking well prepared food in a local setting, Petrilli and his staff at Frodo’s deliver the goods. Frodo’s serves new American cuisine with an emphasis on deeply flavored sauces and eye pleasing presentations. The restaurant is a curious blend of a comfortable neighborhood joint with affordable prices but with a menu that aspires to greater heights and a name and aspects of its decor that suggest the fantastical.

Frodo’s has the laid back feel of a local place with a reliable clientele; a place to come for a meal after work among regular folks. The door is left open and the staff is attentive while remaining entirely casual and unaffected. It’s a friendly place. A small restaurant that houses bigger ambitions. One would never expect this storefront space to offer dishes with the level of artistic presentation and sophistication in pairing of ingredients that chef Petrilli offers at Frodo’s.

One recent dish offered as both an appetizer and entrée was a ravioli filled with asparagus and apples. The light tender pasta arrived under a slightly sweet warm yellow sauce of apples that worked well with the mild vegetable flavor of the asparagus filling. The dish was heightened by the richness of the nutty warm butter surrounding the doughy pockets. A duck breast was served in a generous offering of thick rare slices of meat over a bed of red and purple wine infused cabbage. Browned pan fried cubed potatoes were scattered across a rich brown sauce tasting deeply of smokey pancetta. In each dish chef Petrilli uses color as intentionally as he does flavors. He has a natural and artful approach to each.

You may have noticed from the restaurant’s name that Frodo’s is quite curiously named. Interestingly, when Petrilli set out to open a restaurant of his own after many years working in three star Manhattan venues and at Strega’s, he sought to make a bold beginning with a grand restaurant he planned to call Rivendale after the elaborate castle of the fairy king in Lord of the Rings. When the initial space and plans were scaled back a bit, Petrilli aptly named his new venue after the small but beloved hobbit character from the J.R.R. Tolkien series. Why? Simple, Petrilli loves the Lord of the Rings. He’s also included some touched in the décor (such as the stone paneled walls and mountainscape images on the wall) that recall the fantasy series. That’s the kind of idiosyncratic and passionate sensibility that comes through at Frodo’s.
Frodo’s is one of a kind. It’s serious about good food but it doesn’t take itself too seriously – a casual neighborhood place that happens to have a fine chef with big dreams as its owner. Chef Petrilli has a contagious warmth and big ambitions but with a common touch that brings it all back home.

Frodo’s Restaurant
472 Bedford RoadPleasantville, N.Y. 10570
Phone: (914) 747-4646Fax: (914) 747-4660

http://www.frodosrestaurant.com

Yvonne's Southern Cuisine Restaurant

2006-09-12T16:42:00.000-07:00

Every place has a story; a history that runs deep and allows it to become itself. In America some of that history always comes borrowed from other places in other times. It is a particularly American irony that the soul of each place, what makes it uniquely what it is, so often starts with a some other place’s history, a story carried with the people who came to it. And so it is here; Westchester is made of borrowed histories and things brought to it by transplants from the City and places more distant.

We are fortunate that Yvonne Parker has brought to Westchester the authentic food of the American South. At Yvonne’s Southern Cuisine Restaurant in Pelham, Ms. Parker serves traditional African American and Southern dishes with warmth and style. Yvonne’s has become a Westchester institution – but don’t let that fool you; the food is alive with its tradition (not resting on it) and the true generosity of a cook welcoming guests to her table.

One dish borrowed from one place to another, and that is never quite the same in any two places, is Jerk Chicken. The Jerk at Yvonne’s is profound. This chicken, rubbed deeply in spices and brushed in a dark sauce of heat and juices, is an all consuming sensation of Island flavor. The ordinary bird is utterly transformed into a new creation of tang, brown, fire and succulence. The pieces are moist and plentiful but no matter how many you eat you will still be longing for just another taste tomorrow.

Bathed in a sweet and smokey tomato sauce, the Barbequed pork ribs are the taste of Southern que. The fat rippled meat easily slides off the bone with the pull of a fork or a gentle toothy bite. There are many types of barbequed ribs and people can get rather, well, testy over which is the “True Que.” There are great arguments and brawls over St. Louis Style versus Carolina Que. If you want to slug it out with Bobby Flay, by all means…. I’m not getting in the middle of all that here. Let’s just say, if you like them tender, sweet and saucy these ribs will satisfy.

The dark browned ox tails, slow cooked and served in the rich sauce from the stew pot, please with a meaty and full textured straight on taste of beef. These are thick cuts of meat with big flavor.

Now, I love canned string beans. They remind me of dinner at my grandmother’s. I know, I know. I’ve had green beans fresh from the field prepared by some renowned chefs and I don’t confuse masterful cooking with the Green Giant – but hidden between the taste molecules in the salty faded kind, cut and canned, are ghosts whispering of meals had on sleepy nights, in soft pajamas on pillowed couches at my Nana’s house. So I’m gonna keep on loving those beans - and the green beans at Yvonne’s. Only, the beans at Yvonne’s have a multi-layered flavor from cooking along side some smokey ham. So even if you don’t associate salty boiled beans with love and comfort (yet) you can enjoy Yvonne’s side of green beans.

The candied yams are alone worth the trip to Pelham. These small orange boulders of soft sweet tubers burst with earthy flavor and subterranean sugars. Rice and beans come with pieces of sausage tumbled in the mix. The black eyed peas are delicate to the bite and drenched in a brothy sauce that nudges the beans a couple of degrees up in flavor.

There are many dishes to discover or re-discover at Yvonne’s. And there is no comparing Yvonne’s to any other food in the Burbs. It stands alone as a source for great cuisine in the Southern tradition. A tradition carried here has become our own. In borrowing the history of the smoke, sauce, sweet and stewed comforts of the South, Yvonne’s enriches the borrowed soul of the Burbs. How American. How delicious.

Yvonne's Southern Cuisine
503 Fifth Avenue, Pelham. (914) 738-2005
www.yvonnesoutherncuisine.com

The Food Network

2006-09-08T16:49:00.000-07:00

The WesFoodie isn’t too proud to admit that he has spent many a night draped over the couch, mouth ajar, tongue drooping down chin, staring mesmerized at the television. Watching the Food Network. Now I can get just as cranky about the current line up as anyone but I will try at least to remain calm over the network programmers’ seeming inability to stop reshuffling, cancelling, and developing new, ever less substantial shows.

Ah, the golden age – probably around two years ago – when Rachel Ray had but one show (the cheap get around one), Anthony Bourdain ruled the waves (air that is) and that funny Australian dude with a knife visited exotic ports of call to look for fruit. That was cool. Gone now. Programmers were antsy.

I will refrain too from asking why the Network thinks it is genius to put on twelve different shows on sugar sculpture competitions (or is it only one that they keep showing over and over?). Or just what secret about which network executive does Bobby Flay have the goods on to explain why he gets half the programs for himself. I mean come on if it isn’t blackmail, why not give that weird little Southern dude who was Flay’s equal on the original grilling show a go at some of the spotlight. I won’t ask why there is back-to-back B-B-Que programming throughout the summer. Or why their current trend is to develop and promote shows that rely heavily on blowing food up.

No, I will focus on one thing only.

Have you ever noticed that all of the food advertised on the Food Network is really bad and bad for you? Yeah, its all white fat food – ultra processed and super high in calories. And they have those fake show commercials where the announcer walks you through a recipe for making junk food that will make mom fat, give dad a heart attack and leave the kids in a diabetic coma: “Just take a loaf of white bread, hollow it out and stuff it full with real whipped dessert topping. Then dunk your loaf in a bowl of heavy cream and corn syrup. Add the food coloring and viola!, a fun treat for the whole family.”

Perhaps this explains why they yanked out of prime time the two remaining really great shows (besides Iron Chef): Restaurant Makeover and Recipe for Success. Who wants to go out and buy a whole mess of sweet squirty stuff after watching someone trying to eke out a living in the food business? Let’s face it, there’s nothing about seeing a struggling food entrepreneur borrowing from the kids’ college saving plan to finance their organic pasta venture that motivates going out and buying a forty eight pack of frosted treats at Costco. Reality is just not yummy enough for Food TV.

Let’s look at the new shows in the fall lineup. Tell me these aren’t some programming exec’s idea of what might really drum up ad revenue by highlighting the junk food that their advertisers want to promote. First is a program called “Taking it Home,” a show that follows one Southern housewife as she feeds her family take out for a year while passing it off as her own home cooking. Will they believe she really made that triple cheese-in-the-crust pizza? I don’t know but I want to find out! Next there’s Rachel Ray’s FHM Iron Chef. Nuff said. Finally, there is “Till Dawn We Munch.” It’s a great concept (one right out of the MTV playbook): track real college kids snacking forays after a long night at the dorm listening to stuff like Bob Marley and Led Zeppelin. Picture sophomore gals (think Lindsay Lohan) with piercings downing entire pints of Haagen Daz while their boyfriends devour bags of Cheetos. I like the demographics. Someone pass me the chips.

What Corn Bread Says

2006-09-05T16:15:00.000-07:00

Beans grabbed cornbread by the toe
Beans said "Cornbread let me go"
Cornbread said "I'll lay you low
I’m gonna fight you, you so and so"
Meet me on the corner
meet me on the corner tomorrow night
That’s what Beans said to Cornbread
you so bad, you always wanna fight

- Luis Jordan, Beans and Cornbread

When it comes to roots food, corn bread is about as subterranean as it gets. The stuff runs deep. You can sense it in the bread itself. Its firm and has a warmth that speaks of basic sustenance and fundamental prosperity.

Corn bread is older than the States, older than European settlement of America in fact; more American than America. It has its roots in Native American Indian cooking where maize formed an important part of many diets. It has become is a staple of African American cooking and also synonymous with the South.

A reader recently (that’s “recently” on Southern time by the way, i.e., several weeks ago) wrote in suggesting a piece on the corny stuff. It’s a very good idea. One worthy of my poking around the county for some spots that serve it. As one might suspect, the Burbs are not exactly one big blackened skillet cooking up corn bread and serving it out hot. But here are three pretty different shops with their own take on corn bread:

At Q, the corn bread is warm, slightly sweet and radiates a grainy down to the kernel corn flavor. This is a corn bread that pleases. It has a substantial crumb that holds together well. The firm but moist inner cake is yellow and covered by a brown smoother paper thin top. A few roughly cut squares come with each entrée. (Click here for The WesFoodie’s bit on Q)

Yvonne’s Southern Cuisine serves a more traditional Southern version. Its not as sweet as the Yankee type bread. And not as yellow. This corn bread is served in pieces of various sizes and rectangular shapes. It has a more pronounced crumb and a drier mouth feel. People tell me the Southern stuff grows on you.

Now there’s nothing more hoi polloi than corn bread so don’t get all hoity-toity on me when I tell you that the corn bread at Boston Market has a devoted following. Its very moist and its the sweetest of this troika for certain. BM serves it up in individual “loaves” of yellow cake. The crumb is a bit thinner than that of Q’s and Yvonne’s bread and the top can be a little sticky (this can be a good thing).

For those who want to try their hand at recreating a bit of the South in the Burbs here is a link to “Aunt Martha’s” corn bread recipe via NPR channeling Joseph E. Dabney's Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking. Save some for me, please!

Q Restaurant
112 N. Main St.
Port Chester
(914) 933-7427

Yvonne's Southern Cuisine
503 Fifth Avenue, Pelham. (914) 738-2005
www.yvonnesoutherncuisine.com

Boston Market
Various Locations
www.bostonmarket.com

Fantasy Food

2006-08-23T18:31:00.000-07:00

“We are very excited to have you with us this evening.” She spoke with a casual air of authority and a slight playful tone that hinted at something unusual and exciting to come. “If it pleases you, the chef . . . everyone, would like to cook a special meal for you. A tasting menu.” Now, these are beautiful words to hear anytime. Spoken by the head waiter at Blue Hill, home to one of the most gifted, ambitious, palette pleasing, inventive kitchens ever to focus on organic, locally grown seasonal ingredients, this was one of the key moments of culinary promise that I have ever been fortunate enough to celebrate. I accepted. What followed was a three and a half hour, nine course wonderment of color, texture, flavor and giddy anticipation.

There is nothing like a tasting menu. It is a true gastronomic adventure. Course after course presented for sampling and moments after moment of indulgence. It is the tasting menu that inspired one my favorite culinary games, Fantasy Food. Well, that and fantasy football.

Fantasy Food is when you make your own line up of favorite dishes from favorite restaurants and put them together, in a specific order, to make up your ideal tasting menu. It can be centered around a particular ingredient, theme or just random pleasure. Here’s how I’d put together a five course Fantasy Food tasting menu focusing on pork from my favorite places right round the Burbs:

Dish One – a salad of tender greens from the surrounding farm’s hills with a thin, translucent ribbon of pork, the essence of the Berkshire’s foraging in the nearby woods served on a clean slab of dark slate from Blue Hill at Stone Barns (click here for The WesFoodie piece on BH).

Dish Two - freshly made gnocchi bathed in a rich sauce of tomatoes and herbed wild boar meat from Lanterna in Larchmont. The gnocchi stays just the right degree of firm under tooth before succumbing to the bite in a soft finish that coats the tongue with warmth and a quick burst of spice from the sauce.

Dish Three – smokey, deep rubbed St. Louis ribs from Q in Port Chester (click here for The WesFoodie piece on Q). The pork falls from the bone with the touch of a fork or a gentlebit pull of the teeth.

Dish Four – the cleansing, cool flush of slightly piquant tamarind ice at Palleteria Fernandez (click here for The WesFoodie piece on Paletteria Fernandez) in Port Chester. The ice melts across the tongue and pleases with an unlikely flush of sun, tropics and chill.

Dish Five – dense, dark and moist, the slices of chocolate cake are two fists tall, just as wide and twice as long at Kneaded Bread in Port Chester. The mellow sweet icing is butter’s beautiful doppelganger, buttercream with cane and cocoa. Deeply chocolate. Forever a favorite. And a wonderful way to end a Fantasy Meal.

Pop Rocks

2006-08-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

Woody Gutherie found Dustbowl Era America out on the plains of the West. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe located the soul of 1980’s America in New York City; in the folly of Wall Street. Francis Ford Coppola revealed the mad spirit of the 1960’s in the dark heart of Vietnam. He pointed us to it coiled like a snake in the black twisted river flowing inexcerably towards the moment of climactic ritual assassination.

Is there always a place where a nation’s soul resides? If it can be in a place, can it be in a taste? Is there a food that captures the essence of where we, as a nation, are at this moment in history? Can an era be found in flavor; an epoch learned in a sensation along the edge of one’s tongue?

In a previous post, I suggested that perhaps our moment could be tasted in the smoke and fire pit of bar-be-que. And there is much to be said for that view. But perhaps I was missing an ingredient. Yes, this is a time of smoke and fire. But it is also a time of Pop, pop as in acrid sweet, pop as in impossibly wide, pop as in just as shallow, pop as in there goes the bubble, pop as in explosive. Pop and fear. Our moment can be found in the flavor and gas bursts of Pop Rocks on the tongue.

Pop! All the world’s a stage. Pop, pop! Another one’s down. Pop, pop, pop – it feels like my mouth might explode.

When I was young and actually liked to eat Pop Rocks there was a rumor that Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials had died from eating too many Pop Rocks. Every kid knew about the untimely demise of Mikey. Of course it only added intrigue to the Pop Rocks. A little fear piques the interest. Fear and Pop Rocks. The slight scare is definitely part of the candy’s appeal. Maybe the makers of Pop Rocks invented the fear to promote their little cracklings of pops and sweets. Imagine that.

Pop, pop!

Q in Port Chester

2006-08-10T17:51:00.000-07:00

A que, yes the que, is a wonderful thing. Thick slabs of St. Louis style ribs rubbed in spices, glistening with melting pork fat and nuanced smoke and sauce. Crisp skinned chickens, hot, moist and speckled with pepper and char from the fire. Soft, juicy brisket, sliced into marbled slabs and draped over pieces of fresh baked bread. No matter your particular cultural inclinations, this is the American moment for Bar-B-Que. Laid back, kicked up and down home, it is where we are right now.

Down in Port Chester in a bright orange building with an ultra-modern dining room and an open kitchen, Q is serving up some righteous bar-be-que to the good folks of Westchester County. The duo that owns and runs Kneaded Bread, The WesFoodie’s dream land of scrumptions (click here for my first bit on KB), Jennifer and Jeffrey Kohn are the founders of Q. This is good. The same high skills, warmth and attention that defines the KB staff can be found at work in Q. This team knows how to run a restaurant and make their guests feel welcomed, wanted, and comfortable. Which isn’t so easy to do when you have to order at the register.

Now, I was reading Liz Johnson’s post on the bar-be-que at Bailey’s in Blauvelt and its tough to look at those pictures without wanting to tear into some ribs and holler up some more. Besides delectable que though, the two joints don’t seem much alike. Q isn’t a raucous place with juke box blaring like Bailey’s sounds like. There’s no impromptu square dancing or open mike hootinanis in between these orange walls either. It maintains a certain laid back elegance. But there’s nothing constrained about the eats.

The main courses are served with some moist, dense but crumbly and, well, corny, corn bread. If you really want to get into some good eating, order up the biscuits with maple butter. They are outrageous, buttery, fist sized pillows of flaky dough. The maple butter is rich and sweet – knife a small slab of it on top and the firm syrup laden cream pushes the biscuits right over the top (which is where you want to go when you’re eating que).

While you’re up high with the maple sugars, dig down into some of the sides. The collard greens are a flash of vinegary sweetness, slow cooked and served in a pork infused broth. The baked beans are a warm stew of complex spices and sugars around tender but firm beans. You can’t go wrong though – they’re all good.

When we look back on the Zero Years its pretty darn safe to say that the memories will be scattered across a backdrop of smoke, Dixie Chicks and Little Willies, swaggerin’ n’ struttin’ Texans, fear, loathing, country home buying, blogs, and yes, Queing. There’s no denying that its all part of the mix – love it or loath it. If you want to catch some of the smoke – the good tasty grilling kind – get yourself and your kin down to Q. Kick back, get your fingers saucy and taste the moment - this part of it at least is real good.

Q Restaurant

112 N. Main St.

Port Chester

(914) 933-7427

Between the Noun and the Egg Falls the Shadow

2006-08-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

There are some fundamental differences between words and food. And some telling and tantalizing similarities as well. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson quoting Eliot, between the noun and the egg falls the shadow.

“‘Its very provoking,’ Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, ‘to be called an egg – very!’” – Through the Looking Glass

An interesting conversation about language takes place between a noun and an egg in Through The Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty, the egg in this case (in Chapter 6) says to Alice “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” To which Alice, a proper noun, replies, “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question, said Humpty Dumpty,” also a noun I might add, “is which is to be master – that’s all.”

Some chefs like to stretch the meaning of nouns. The use of nouns can transform the “meaning” of food by altering your expectations and the touchstones for your subjective judgments about taste.

The chef of the moment taking this technique to the limit is Wyle Dufresne of WD~50 in NYC. Take for instance WD’s “Carrot Coconut Sunnyside Up” (pictured at left). It’s called a sunnyside up, it looks like a sunnyside up but its made of carrot (the yolk sack) and coconut cream (the egg whites). The verbal and visual switcheroo makes one take a step back. You sense the shadow – between the idea and the reality, the noun and the egg. Sometimes the shadow tastes good and sometimes, well, its just a shadow.

Right rounds the Burbs, a masterful stroke in word and food fun is made by Matthew Karp of Plates in Larchmont. Mr. Karp’s “Giant Ring Ding” ain’t no Drake’s Cake. It is a rich, luxurious chocolate cake with a cream center cloaked in a deep think layer of dark chocolate. Is the noun or the cake itself made the master – as Humpty might ask? It depends on which way you look at it - like through a looking glass. Either way Alice would love it – and so would that cantankerous egg sitting on a wall.

W D~50 (images of some wild Joycian dishes)

Plates

Teaching Kids Great Food

2006-08-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

To some it may seem like a long trek between Savoy, the elegant restaurant and shrine to sustainable agriculture in Soho famously admired by uber-critic and editor Ruth Reichl, and a storefront across the street from Mamaroneck Harbor festively decorated for children’s parties. Not to Liv Grey, a chef and food entrepreneur with a passion for connecting kids with great food and cooking. Grey, the mother of two and a veteran of the Savoy kitchen is bringing her classical cooking skills and cutting edge culinary sensibility to her work teaching kids to prepare and celebrate good food right in the heart of Westchester’s Sound Shore.

When she left behind the City and a position as a chef in Martha Stewart Livings’ kitchen for the Burbs, Liv was admittedly unprepared for the (then unknown to her but sadly inevitable) drop in food sophistication amongst her peers. She had grown accustomed to young mothers preparing their own organic food in their downtown apartments. The Burbs were filled with play dates littered with packaged snacks and junk food. What was a young Sustaindanista Mom to do?

Grey founded Medium Rare LLC, and began to offer cooking classes. This past March, together with her partner, Rachel Goldman, Grey started to hold cooking parties for kids and cooking classes for kids and teens with Goldman’s company, It’s My Party.

Grey’s classes and parties tend to bring out a certain food savvy and confidence in kids. One ten year old girl chose to forgo all of the ten choices of menus offered by Grey in favor of preparing a dinner featuring sushi and other Japanese delicacies. “Just call me Rachel Ray” insisted a twelve year old boy getting ready to show his kitchen skills at one of Grey’s classes. They may have the chutzpa of the TV food star, but the food experience Grey offers far surpasses what the kids get from watching the Food Network. For one, the children actually touch and taste real food. “You made it” is a virtual mantra for Grey, who works to instill the pride of creatorship in each young cook. Another key difference: rather than relying on the store bought short cuts, grey emphasizes that good ingredients produce good results.

Over time, Grey has witnessed a growing awareness about food in Westchester. The opening of Whole Foods in White Plains she says has made a big difference. Now parents are more often putting in the effort to seek out healthy and good tasting alternatives for their families to eat.

While building It’s My Party, Grey continues to run Medium Rare and teaches mommies and daddies how to wield extremely sharp knives and other useful techniques and essential skills of cooking and good parenting. In the fall she will begin a program to teach teens great vegetarian cooking. If her success thus far is any indication, liberation from the food domination of carnivore parents is about to sweep the Burbs.

Liv Grey

Medium Rare

It's My Party

114 W. Boston Post Road

Mamaroneck, New York 10543

Phone: 914-777-RARE (7273)

E-mail: liv@mediumrarellc.com

Lupita's Tacos

2006-07-31T17:42:00.000-07:00

Oh the taco. The ubiquitous folded grab bag of savory treasures and earthly delights made so much a part of the collective American table. Those readers partial to the Choco-Taco, the dessert of choice at Taco Bell® will forgive my limiting adjective, “savory,” in the prior sentence (please save the barrage of emails for other controversies). But, perhaps because the taco has been mainstreamed to the point where such a thing as the Choco-Taco exists, it can be very difficult to find a tasty authentic taco – especially in the Burbs and most especially in the Burbs in the Northeast.

Recently Cindy Price wrote a piece for The New York Times on “Chasing the Taco Up the California Coast.” It’s a great story. Price rips up the coastline finding outrageously sumptuous tacos filled with exotic cuts of meats and fresh herbs in tiny shacks and on trucks parked across Highway One with the mists of the Pacific adding flavor to authentic Mexican favorites. She even bumps into David Crosby who with twinkling eyes blesses his choice for the best tacos on this green Earth. Love that piece.

Price used a West Coast blogger to find these great spots (and she gives credit which is very nice and, friends, the “mainstream media” is a bit slow to recognize blogs (except, curiously, their own)). Now, both Price and her blogging sherpa (www.tacohunt.blogspot.com) did a great job and I’d like to be able to offer similar quality here, but let’s face it folks, finding great tacos in Westchester County, New York, well, it ain’t Cali.

Don’t despair – wait, don’t jump (to another site), no need for tacoxic shock, there are some great tacos to be had right round the Burbs. Deep in the back of a tiny storefront deli at the end of Mamaroneck Avenue there is kitchen that is making authentic Mexican tacos with warm corn and flour tortillas filled with plump fresh pork, chili marinated beef, chorizo, chicken or lamb and topped with crisp onion and fragrant chopped cilantro. At Lupita’s Deli, the carnitas (pork) tacos are loaded with soft juicy meat rich with a melting layer pork fat. The chorizo (Mexican sausage) is deeply spiced and kicks with just the right amount of heat. And a friendlier, more welcoming (and forgiving of the Spanish language-impaired) host and hostess you will not find.

Along with the tacos, a variety of burritos, tortas, enchiladas, huevos (eggs), soups and entrees (the pollo guisado – stewed chicken – was mild and tender) are served. On Sundays they have specials including baked lamb, beef tripe, seafood soup and consome de babacoa (lamb soup). Oh, and they also sell groceries including packaged Mexican herbs, canned iguana soup and cold mango and tamarind drinks.

As you stand outside Lupitas munching on your taco with steaming adobada (chili marinated beef), sip a refreshing mouthful of tamarind soda and smell the salt water spraying in from the nearby harbor then close your eyes and imagine yourself for a moment on the Pacific coast, feet in dry SoCal dirt and heat on your face. You will have achieved, if but for a moment, a true experience of taco. And that ain’t so bad for the Burbs.

Lupita's Deli
Mamaroneck Avenue (just off the Boston Post Road)
914-381-5003

Chocolate: Cocoa in Larchmont and Beyond

2006-07-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately for The WesFoodie’s aging waistline, chocolate is the axis around which most of my weeknights turn. The devil that lurked in Aztec stone pots and cacao urns calling the People of the Sun to feast on the elixir of roasted beans knew well then how to seduce the tongue and lay waste to restraint. He is one to be reckoned with still. And what fun it is to tango with the dark and delightful demon. But he does leave his mark on the belly of those who dare to dance; a mark which is not easily removed – but that’s what running twenty miles a week is for, to outpace this beast.

If you have felt a certain uneasiness, an unaccounted for twitching of your chocolate nub, a pervasive sense of something happening to which you must be a part but has yet to be revealed, you have no doubt sensed but not fulfilled an inner longing to try the chocolate at Cocoa in Larchmont. Cocoa makes the molten, deep and most mesmerizingly indulgent hot chocolate in Westchester – and it rivals any hot chocolate I’ve had anywhere. It is to chocolate what great tequila is to mescal, true to its source but schooled in the arts of pleasure. For summer they have chilled it out and now offer a cold cup as well. To the Aztec’s Cocoa offers their “dennis bark,” Belgian milk chocolate with chipotle and roasted almonds.

For those looking for a day trip down to the City and a new source for chocolate pleasures here’s a good trifecta of titillation:

One, head down Jacque Torres’ squeaky clean fabulous factory of confections in lower Manhattan. There you will find his “Wicked Hot Chocolate,” a spicy rich concoction that combines chili peppers and cacao. To my taste, the chilis tease more than arouse the buds. But its fun no matter how many heat Units on the Scoville scale you favor. And the chocolate covered marshmallows are great – pillows of sugar entombed in heavy coats of dark chocolate.

From there head down Spring Street into the heart of Soho to the very fashionable Vorges Haute Chocolate of Chicago. They make Red Fire, a very spicy chocolate that hits considerably higher than Monsieur Torres’s cup on the Scoville scale. It kicks with heat and deep tones of cacao and cinnamon.

When you head back home, stop at Li-Lac Chocolates in the Grand Central Terminal Market. Lilac makes a delicate milk chocolate and if you take a bag of bite size drops with you on the Metro North back to Westchester, you will melt your way in a sweet chocolate haze over the Harlem River tressel, through the Bronx and back home again.

Cocoa: 2107A Boston Post Road, Larchmont – 914-834-6464 www.cocoachocolateshop.com

Jacques Torres Haven: 350 Hudson Street, New York – 212-414-2462 www.mrchocolate.com

Vosges Haute Chocolate: 132 Spring Street, New York – 212-625-2929 www.vosgeschocolate.com

Li-Lac: Grand Central Terminal Market, New York – 212-273-7374

www.li-lacchocolates.com

Summer Rolls

2006-07-20T16:36:00.000-07:00

The cool flush of fresh mint. Deliciously cold and thin rice noodles softly fold away from the bite. A deeper tone of sea and slight salt sounds in the flavor of steamed shrimp as the juicy meat unfolds from the tightly filled rice crepe. Crisp lettuce crunches before a last pull on the moist white wrapper finishes the first bite of summer roll. Oh they’re good. Dam da (duhm dahh) (translation: deeply flavored good food). And perfect for the hot days and humid nights of July and August.

Vietnamese summer rolls, or goi cuon, are best eaten with two dipping sauces. The earthy brown and sweet peanut sauce, nuoc leo, and nuoc cham, the savory, salty fish sauce with shredded carrot that is ever present on the Vietnamese table. I like to dip in the nuoc cham first and then double dip into the nuoc leo. The cham enhances the nuoc leo left in its dish – but not so much the other way around.

Although the People’s Campaign for a Vietnamese Restaurant in Westchester (PCVRW!) continues, there are none here yet. Deep sigh. But they do make a nice version of gui cuon at the Hay Day Market/Balducci’s sushi counter in Scarsdale (15 Palmer Avenue at the Four Corners - 914-722-0200). The rice paper is moist and tender, the shrimp are fresh and cooked just enough and the sauce is good – if a bit sweet. They also sell some summer rolls pre-made at Whole Foods, but to my taste, well, if you can make it to Scarsdale, do it. Or better yet make some at home.

Summer rolls are fairly easy to make. The recipe is simple (and one is below) – but the trick is all in the technique. I’ll let the experts teach this one. Check out the excellent primer on using Vietnamese rice paper wrappers at the Vietworld Kitchen.

All the ingredients can be had right round the Burbs at Kam Sen market in White Plains. 22 Barker Avenue, White Plains (914) 428-4500.

Enjoy.

SUMMER ROLLS

Nuoc Cham
Nuoc Leo

Steamed or grilled shrimp – halved the long way
One package of bahn trang rice paper wrappers
Thin rice noodles – soaked and boiled according to directions and cooled
Lettuce leaves – whole, washed and dried
Fresh mint leaves – washed, dried and leaves separated
A basin of warm water large enough to comfortably fit each rice paper wrapper
Moist clean towels – for preparation surfaces
Cilantro (optional)
Pickled daikon and carrots – julienned (optional)

Take a bahn trang wrapper from the pack. It will be dry and fragile. Soak it in the warm water basin for a few moments. Remove and place on the moist towel.

Put a line of shrimp, colorful side down on the surface near the middle of the wrapper, leaving about an inch on either end of the line of shrimp to the edge of the wrapper.

Cover the shrimp in lettuce leaves. Cover the lettuce leaves in a handful of rice noodles.

Place a few mint leaves over the lettuce. If you like, add some cilantro leaves and pickled vegetables.

Fold the wrapper over and under the pile of ingredients length wise. Tightly pull the wrapper over the filling and fold the edges in. Roll closed – the rice paper wrapper will stick to itself and form a seal. Follow the technique at Vietworld for folding the wrapper correctly.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns

2006-07-13T17:10:00.000-07:00

Be here now. Right here! Right now!

When I recently sat down with Dan Barber, the chef of the two renowned Blue Hill restaurants and Creative Director of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, Barber was clear that Blue Hill at Stone Barns was not a departure from the Blue Hill restaurant he has run for years in downtown New York – that his approach to food remained unaltered by his experience with the pioneering center for sustainable agriculture he founded in Westchester.

The fact that Chef Barber’s cuisine has not been changed by Stone Barns is remarkable. How could living the most far reaching social experiment to take place in the Hudson Valley since Harvard scientists Timothy Leary and David Alpert (Ram Dass) turned the Danheim estate into a living laboratory of communal odyssey, LSD, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and inner peace not change Barber’s approach to food? But to Barber it’s a sign of success.

When we spoke, I took him to mean that this extraordinary fact held out the promise that cuisine based in seasonal local ingredients stood on its own and could be emulated in a variety of places – that the experiment could be replicated and was therefore revealing of an objective truth. But perhaps it was less that and more of an appreciation of the realization of an unchanging personal truth, one that is as much about the Blue Hill aesthetic of controlled elegance as political and social in nature. Perhaps the Stone Barns experience is a manifestation of that aesthetic. (Note to Readers: This has significant implications for the observations and issues discussed when I first wrote about Stone Barns. Click here for the post.)

At the heart of Stone Barns is the Blue Hill restaurant where Barber oversees a kitchen that serves the peas, mint, radishes, Berkshire pig, lamb, eggs and ever changing produce and meats from the Stone Barns farm, together with complimentary ingredients from more somewhat distant sources, into a gracious dining room that opens itself to the hills of working fields, grazing pastures and woods in which it is nested.

When I dined at Blue Hill in early summer the menu was focused on sweet peas, fava beans, cauliflower, baby summer vegetables and Berkshire pig from the farm. The kitchen does no more to each ingredient than is essential to present its full flavor for realization in taste. A confident intuition of maximum restraint is at work in each dish with results that favor the aesthetics of truth of native flavor over the glory of transformation. This approach makes it possible to serve the crops of the moment across several courses without reliance on pyrotechnics of spice and richness of sauce.

In a first course, Blue Hill picks up each small white turnip, rosy headed radish, orange and white carrot and slender young fennel with pale root below extravagant wispy leaves and places them, intact from the root point to the still delicate greens, atop a small spike on an unadorned wooden block. The vegetables appear as an apparition of the rows of root crops in the field – freed of the earth, now washed, and dipped in just enough salted brine to cultivate the inherent flavor - arriving to initiate one into the meal.
Peas are served first as a cool but deeply bodied soup to be sipped from a tall clear shot glass. Then alone, a small pile of blanched snap peas are presented with only a few flakes of sea salt and a hint of oil but with a rich smooth green emulsion of pea beneath the shells pooled in the base of the miniature dish in which the bright peas are stacked. Each pod is impeccably cleaned and heated just enough to give with ease to the bite but without surrendering any decibel of crunch. The peas have been gently forced to fully assert their own sugars and elemental qualities.

Simple cod served glistening white with coconut broth on its surface is pitch perfect. The garlic scapes and spike of intense parsley flavor in the green speckled pistou bring the dish back from far away places with coconut palms to the immediacy of the farm.

The pork, rare slices of loin together with a thick cut of soft belly meat and melting fat under crisp salted skin, was precisely as I had wished it would be, a preparation seeming to follow inevitably from the sight of foraging fat Berkshires in the nearby woods, rooting and positioning for sunning spots in leaves on the cool wooded earth.

Dining at Blue Hill is an experience that is immediate, complex and intricately connected to the joys and pleasures in the here and now of season and place. The restaurant makes sense of the larger Stone Barns experiment. How anyone could experience the vivid sensations created from simple ingredients of the moment in the Blue Hill kitchen and not want to find a way to infuse the rest of life with what they have discovered is beyond me.

The People's Campaign for a Vietnamese Restaurant in Westchester

2006-07-08T05:42:00.000-07:00

People of the Burbs, unite and walk proudly towards a golden future - the dawn of a finely made pho gha awaits you. For too long you have suffered without lemongrass infused com suon suong (grilled pork). Your throats are dry, deprived of caphe phin den da (Vietnamese iced coffee)! With a communal voice we call for bo luc lac (beef cubes). Together we demand a Vietnamese restaurant in Westchester County!

We moved to the suburbs, not the moon. Must we give up the exquisite crisp bite of fried spring roll and the cool green of a summer roll dipped in nouc cham in July? Never! To the Burbs must come Nha Trang, Pho Pasteure or at least a bahn mi stand (Vietnamese sandwich on baguette with pickled daikon and pate with butter) .

Join now in petitioning for a Vietnamese restaurant in Westchester! We will submit our petitions to Vietnamese restaurant entrepreneurs in New York City and Connecticut. Lend me your voice and they will come. Pho, pho, we need pho!

Email The WesFoodie for petitions - Unite for Flavor!

What We Dream for When We Scream for Ice Cream

2006-07-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

The tamarind ice falls onto your tongue giving easily under a toothy bite. The speckled pale freeze melts away and spreads like a cooling pool of delicately tart juice washing away any heat and dipping you, if just for a moment, into an icy current running up from an underground spring in a far away tropic. Let yourself go long enough to allow your lips to gently pull a strand of cream from the dripping layers of deep milky browned sugar and the dulce de leche will bring you with it to indulge in the abundance that comes naturally only to warm places with birthright to be nearer to the sun.

And it is with birthright that Florencio Fernandez with the help of his brother are now creating their amazing, succulent, inventive, cooling, deconstructive, sweet, redefining, tangy, cleansing, surprising, and profoundly pleasuring frozen eats at their Peleteria Fernandez in Port Chester, New York. The Fernandez brothers came to Port Chester from Guadalajara, the city in Mexico known as the “Pearl of the West”; the nation’s second largest metropolis. And it is in Guadalajara that their father owns and runs four peleterias.

Although born to an ice cream dynasty, the Fernandez brothers have struggled over the last year to establish their small shop in this outpost destination for many immigrants from Central and South America in the northern suburbs of New York. All of the over forty flavors of paletas de fruta (frozen fruit pops) and paletas de leche (milk pops) are hand crafted using all natural ingredients and fresh fruit in the back of their bright store front on North Main Street and the two brothers chop, churn, stir, hoist and scoop all of it themselves. It is exhausting physical and mental labor requiring endurance and culinary savvy together with their particular inventive genius. But the brothers are determined to introduce New York to what had been a delectable treasure to only Guadalajara and their efforts are starting to pay off. A steady stream of customers, mostly local to Port Chester, comes through the store front - enough to keep the brothers hustling to fill orders and make more cream.

Walking into the shop, it is at first glance bright and unassuming. The walls are streaked with bright yellow paint. Posters with slogans in Spanish and photographs of the brothers and their ice cream are neatly tacked up in high places. A huge sign with flavors and prices in English and Spanish hangs above the counter. Walk past the few tables and small booths in front and one can gaze into the traditional glass topped white freezers in which neatly stacked piles of paleta de fruta, paletas de leche and large tubs of freshly made nieves (ice cream) wait to be picked by children with faces pressed up against the glass to find their favorites. Behind the freezers, glass front refrigerators store papayas, sliced mango, pears and large jars of juice.

The choices of flavors of paletas are astounding. The watermelon is a red splash of full-on sweet true melon flavor with a crush of ice. The rice pudding is rich, milky and has just enough rice to give it a playful texture - keeping a mouth interested while the taste buds are intoxicating the mind with sugary fun. The chocolate covered banana is just that, a frozen whole ripe banana coated in dark chocolate and made easy to bite on a stick. Along with the refreshing tamarind (made from the tart seeds of the tamarind tree) and decadent dulce de leche, one can choose from avocado, nance, plum, blackberry, nuez (peanut), spicy mango with chiles and dozens of other flavors.

This parlor is not sleekly designed or publicized by a well financed restaurant management company. The flavors were not test marketed on focus groups. The crowds here are not chic. Paleteria Fernandez is a family operation where the paletas and ice cream flavors are conjured by the magic of taste and sensation and the management philosophy is do what it takes to make people happy. One look at the fruit splashed faces of the kids coming out of the paleteria with dripping sticks in hand and it’s clear that the Fernandez brothers and their paletas are working some very, very happy magic of summer. They may just forever change what we dream for when we scream for ice cream.

Paleteria Fernandez

33 North Main Street

Port Chester, NY 10573

(914) 939-3694

Open 7 days a week

July 4th: Independence from the Jarred Stuff

2006-06-29T18:05:00.000-07:00

It's Independence Day weekend! The Fourth! If you’re like The WesFoodie chances are you’re looking forward to some Que, a little cookin’ out, and on the Fourth that means hot dogs.

But this is no ordinary Independence Day. Why is this Fourth different from all other fourths? Because this Fourth, The WesFoodie and you (and this is an invitation to join me) are declaring our taste buds’ independence from the Jarred Stuff – the runny, alarmingly luminous, acrid yellow spread that they have the nerve to call mustard.

Yes, we are going to free ourselves from the jar and connect with local, seasonal ingredients by collecting our own mustard plants in full flowering glory and grind out our own beautiful glistening intensely-hued homemade mustard and cover some snappy, garlicy dogs in it. Mmmm Hmmmm.
Mustard grows wild throughout North America. It is ubiquitous on the sides or roads and highways in New York and New England. Mustard flowers are small, delicate, yellow and bursting out just in time for the Fourth of July. There are also many cultivated varieties that can be grown in the garden. Seed Savers (an organization dedicated to preserving America’s food heritage – and a fantastic source for heirloom seeds and plants) lists forty two varieties of mustard currently available for cultivation.
Making mustard is surprisingly easy. Traditionally, it is made with crushed seed from the mustard plant combined with vinegar and spices. When making mustard with hand collected ingredients in the first days of July, however, it can be a real challenge to gather enough of the tiny seeds (which appear and mature on the plant after the flowers have been pollinated and wilt away) to make enough mustard to cover your franks. So The WesFoodie has whipped up a recipe that uses the flowers, seeds and some leaves of the mustard plant – you’ll thank me later. Its green and its delicious – far superior to the jar – you will be a hero for making this and a great slow food revolutionary in the Army of the Sustainable to boot.

Green Honey Garlic Mustard

Ingredients:
¾ Cup fresh organic mustard flowers, seeds and greens (at least 50% flowers and seeds) – chopped. Retain a sprig or two of mustard flowers for garnish.
2 Cloves heirloom garlic
1 Tablespoon Honey
¼ Cup champagne vinegar or white vinegar
3 Tablespoons good olive oil
½ Teaspoon whole peppercorns
½ Teaspoon sea salt or kosher salt

Combine chopped mustard parts, garlic, pepper and salt in a food processor or blender. Slowly add the honey, vinegar and olive oil while processing greens.
Strain through a fine wire sieve.
Serve with flowers for garnish.

I Scream,You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream

2006-06-22T17:44:00.000-07:00

In an act of sudden liberation The WesFoodie ran out to the grocery store, grabbed a pint of Haagen Dazs chocolate chocolate chip from the freezer, carried it out in a paper bag with a plastic spoon, returned to my house and sat on the couch, alone, digging through the frozen cream and slanted bits of bittersweet chocolate until nothing but a slip of melted dairy remained in the curve of the carton’s bottom.

No one must know about this. Too much sweet; too much cream; too much goodness! No one can see my cacao covered chin. The empty pint will be hidden away, not to be found. Actually, that isn’t true. The WesFoodie made it all up. But I made it up to illustrate a point (so its okay): ice cream occupies a special, important and peculiar place in Americans’ eating habits.

We recognize ice cream as an acceptable way to act out against propriety. Over indulging in ice cream eating is a rare socially sanctioned deviation – an open secret – an okay naughty. The contradictions inherent in such a permitted no-no are irresistible in our always-get-it-right, do-it-right culture. And it tastes really good.

Oddly enough, the very same thing that is such a twisted taboo-too-good-not-to-do when practiced alone, is nothing but uncomplicated good fun when done with the whole family. Nothing beats taking the kids out for ice cream on a hot summer day. It’s a universal rite of summer in the Burbs.

The WesFoodie has done some research into ice cream ‘round haar (hard labor my friends). In addition to the usual chains there are a number of local mom and pop ice cream parlors to choose from (most even let you take, geepers, a pint home with you).

A prominent local ice cream maker is Longford’s. With three locations (Larchmont, Rye and Port Chester) of their own and distribution to independently owned and operated parlors, Longford’s has been serving ice cream to the Westchester masses for over a decade. Their cream is good. Not wrap your tongue in a blanket of seemingly infinite ecstasy good, but good for Westchester good.

The WesFoodie recently took the kids over to Longford’s for hot fudge sundaes. We enjoyed the treats but the hot fudge sauce was thin and saucy, not thick and deep like it ought to be and the whipped cream, while perfectly fine, was nothing special (and frankly it doesn’t take that much to make it a little special – real heavy cream, a sprinkle of sugar and a blender). Now, I will, no doubt, return to Longford’s. But I expected more of a local ice cream parlor up against the big boys of cones.

The post I wanted to write was all fluttering excitement about how much better than the chains the local made ice cream is. I had already prepared this line (based on my memories of local parlors from when I was an eat it with gusto kid): “If you want a little more character to the cream, some unusual flavors and the real parlor experience try out some of the local ice cream shops.”

Unfortunately, I can’t post that – not yet. The WesFoodie will keep eating my way through own-made ice cream in the Burbs though and maybe we’ll find some outrageous cream this summer. Hey, if you know where it’s at – email me (wesfoodie@yahoo.com)!

LongFord's: Larchmont - 1941 Palmer Avenue - 914.834.0207, Rye - 4 Elm Place - 914.967.3797, Port Chester - Biltomore at Bowman Ave - 914.939.5749

Father's Day

2006-06-18T06:11:00.000-07:00

This was not instant pudding, our treat’s lesser sib found next to it in the Jello aisle. We ate only the cooked kind. “My-T-Fine”. The pudding in the rectangular box with the waxy paper envelope inside that you’d tear to pour out the fine light brown powder. And only chocolate.

It wasn’t how he made the chocolate pudding -- although he made it the hard way. Powder emptied into a pot. Milk added and stirred and stirred again over the gas fire until thick and bubbling with cocoa gasses burping out hot globules of steaming pudding onto the sides of the metal pot. Some sputterings made their way to form tiny puddles on the white surface of our white four burner stove. Each puddle destined to become outlines of splashes drawn in hardened pudding after a cloth would wipe away the still soft middles leaving only the edges that had already cooled and stuck firm. Stovetop artifacts of our sweets.

After the liquid thickened, he would pour the hot liquid into two bowls, one for me and one for my sister. He would push and scrape the pudding off the sides and bottom of the pot to form a little river of sweet mudslide flowing out into the waiting bowls. The time it took for my father to turn from the stove, walk to the refrigerator and return with the half pint of heavy cream would allow just enough time for a thin skin to form on and cover the resting pudding. Cool on top, gently resistant and when punctured with a spoon, revealing of the molten mass of chocolate underneath. The skin conveniently provided a cream-proof surface allowing the little white mote of slippery fat pooled to form around the edges of my bowl. That was good.

The first spoonful was taken from the side - where the pudding had molded to the edge of the bowl into a curve that mirrored the shallow rounding of my spoon. On the spoon sat a semi-circle of pudding, warm for my mouth but with the cool slick of heavy cream ready to coat my tongue in its viscous lusciousness.

The first bite was the best bite. The ultimate in a pudding composition: smooth, warm and thick across my tongue. The flavor hit with chocolate deep like the taste embodiment of the density of the pudding’s quivering body.

When the bowls were poured, while my sister and I were spooning the pudding into our pleased child mouths, my father would help himself to his portion. It was an aesthete’s helping. Although not wholly stoic, my father took his share with an element of self-denial. He ate only what remained of the treat he prepared clinging to the already scraped down sides of the pudding pot; spooning the streaks and mining the corners of the pot for the last pools of sweet soft mush. That was the way he ate his chocolate pudding; happily gobbling up what was left over from his children.

The Greening of the Pols

2006-06-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

As we head toward summer, the area green markets are overflowing with sharp-flavored garlic scapes, soft sweet strawberries, crisp snap peas and . . . glad handling pols? Yes, the latest hot spots for campaigning politicians are the metro area farmers’ markets.

Candidate for New York State Attorney General Mark Green recently kicked-off his post convention petition drive at the Union Square Green Market in Manhattan. At the grand opening of the new Larchmont farmers market in Westchester, one-time NY State Lt. Governor candidate, county party boss and current Assemblyman George Latimer (pictured left in the blue shirt buying some strawberries) could be seen working the crowd of organic vegetable munchers. Along with George were several local pols each vying for attention with the heirloom lettuces and tender carrots just pulled from the earth.

As a recovering political junkie, The WesFoodie thinks this is a very positive development. Not for the farmers markets, but for the politicians. Let’s hope that for these pols hanging around bunches of radishes and green onions is just step one on a long journey into the pleasures of Sustainable Ag.

It won’t be long until Gov Pataki starts grinding up his own pot bellied pork sausages made with herbs from his own no-pesticide garden and berries he foraged in the Columbia County woods. Former County D.A. Jeannine Pirro may take to pulling on waist-high rubber boots to stomp into the coop to pull out her free-range chickens with all insect diets and cruelty-free eggs. Get ready for Hillary to start handing out heritage breed Narragansett turkeys for Thanksgiving.

(At left Assemblyman Latimer works the organic marketers)

Tongue Curling Flavor

2006-06-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an elixir that could make even the most ordinary food exciting to the buds – a wake-me-up to dispel boredom of the palate? A strike force of sensation. And for but pennies a serving? The closest that the science and art of food has come is the satori-inducing kick in the mouth, Sriracha Sauce!

Announced proudly by the Red Rooster on its busy plastic bottle face, Sriracha Sauce is curling tongues with its electric red flash across the continent and to the coast lines. Beware though, this sauce kicks with heat and more heat. But its not merely (or primarily) the bite that pleases, it’s the vinegary, slightly sweet, delicately salty flavor.

The WesFoodie had one crispy, olive oil infused slice of pizza at Sophia’s in Portland, Maine dipped in Sriracha and it made my vacation. Having a bottle of Srirachi on the counter next to the napkins immediately set this small shop apart from the rest – as soon as I saw the proud rooster under the green spout, I knew this was a place that honored taste over convention and propriety. It was a flag for Foodie Nation.

The chili-based sauce is ubiquitous on Southeast Asian restaurant tables and has made its way into hot dog stands, diner counters and eateries of all persuasions. Sriracha Sauce (Sauce Aux Piments Forts) has its origins in Vietnam but is produced in the U.S. – in the City of Angels – by Huy Fong Foods, a company founded by first generation American immigrant, David Trang. It is Trang’s zodiac sign that gives rise to the rooster on each bottle.

I’m not big on hot sauces generally. I usually prefer savory to hot. But since I first tasted Sriracha at Nha Trang in C-Town (probably the best, and one of the first, Vietnamese joints in NYC), I don’t like to eat a meal without it. Get yourself a bottle. Better yet, get yourself two - one for work and one for home. Each should cost between $2.50 and $4.00 and it will last ya. In Westchester it can be had at Naippon Daido in White Plains (522 Mamaroneck Avenue), Kam Sen also in White Plains (22 Barker Avenue), and Food Horizons in Larchmont (112 Chatsworth Avenue), among other fine Asian grocery stores.

The Farmers Are Back!

2006-06-05T16:18:00.000-07:00

The Farmers are back! The Markets are open. The WesFoodie is very excited. We are celebrating the opening of the area’s farmers’ markets this past weekend. Finally, some tasty fresh morsels outside of Whole Foods.

On Saturday we trekked over to Hastings-on-Hudson to the mist enshrouded cliffs overlooking the River and Jersey (where there are other cliffs staring back at ya). There atop a hill and next to the public library was the Hastings-on-Hudson Farmers Market. This year looks like a good one too.

In addition to the old favorites, the market has added Panzarella Food Supply which has some of the silkiest mozzarella this side of Hoboken with a just slightly salty flavor of fresh and rich ripened dairy. They also carry a deeply smokey mozzie with the familiar browned skin and a drier, firmer mouth feel. Panzarella’s breads are exquisite and plentiful.

Another new favorite is Pickleicious' pickles. Wow. These are some outstanding crunchers. The half sour pickles taste like you always wanted them to taste: fresh but briny; salty but retaining a bit more than a hint of their green garden flavor. And they are crisp. The pickled tomatoes are a different food than the inedible sour stuff at even the best delis. These have the same bite of brine but true flavor too. Love um. If you like hot, try the hot sours – tasty, but not overly puckering and with a real kick. These are artisan pickles and at $3.50 a pint, a real bargain.

Orchards at Concklin, an anchor merchant, has some very sweet strawberries with real berry flavor and soft juicey flesh – red from skin to center. Get them while they are still in the short season.

There is also early garlic (with sweet undeveloped bulbs and flavorful greens for soups and sauces), chives with beautiful, delicate (but workable) purple flowers perfect for adorning salads or bowls of rice; great chicken (buyer beware, once you taste these birds, you will not be able to eat the supermarket stuff - really); plants (mostly perennial flowers, i.e., don’t come for a full selection of heirloom tomatoes); and a huge selection of lettuces and herbs.

The Hastings market feels genuine and friendly. There are kids running around and dancing to the live fiddle and horns. People shop here for their kitchens, its not a tourist site, but folks are there to see as much as to buy. Walking from booth to booth, checking out the ever-changing offerings, one feels a part of something. Something good and real.

See you there next week!

Lunch Revisited

2006-05-26T18:07:00.000-07:00

The WesFoodie was very pleased to learn that my bit on chicken salad (click here) is the number one out of thirty two million two hundred thousand hits on Google for “Your Basic Lunch.” William Burroughs would be proud, I’m sure. To mark this solemn occasion, I would like to revisit the deceptively humble LUNCH.

Many trace modernism back to Manet’s “Lunch on the Grass” (Déjeuner sur l'Herbe). It has been said that “all of classicism leads up to it. All of modernism from it.” Yes, it was lunch that triggered the momentous, radical, horrific, heroic, futile, fatal, progressive, sad explosion of the Modern. Why not dinner? Why not le petite dejeuner, the breakfast? Why le dejeuner, the lunch?

Certainly we can observe the essence of modernism in the pure elemental forms of the square meal and the triangles of the USDA food pyramid. But this is not unique to lunch – Dejeuner shares these Descartian ideals with dinner and breakfast. Perhaps it is because lunch lends itself to the modernist faith in the act of construction. The utility of the lunch; a source of energy for the machine of the body during the work day. On the other hand, lunch does precede siesta, when we come in touch with the dream. And we know the modernist love of all things subconscious.

Post-modernism too has lunch. Lunch at its simulacrum of a heart.

Forget the end of history – its all about the end of the meal baby. Post-modernism can be located in the shiny veneers and simulated sustenance of the Happy Meal and Big Mac with fries; the endless repetition of Wendy’s square patties; and send-up perfection of the rectangular forms of Burger Kings in rest stops on the lines of highways drawing across America. In these post-modern menus we can see the mirage of modernism, an elemental vision giving the illusion of enduring substance but delivering nothing more than a temporary excursion, a quick fix, a lunch on the glowing green astroturf.

Well anyway, let’s leave all that to those college folk (either teaching or studying) and get down to some eating. A really great lunch can be found in unexpected places. If you want a takeout lunch to bring back to your work or home, some of the best places in Westchester are not restaurants but grocery stores. Yes, groceries. The following are four Asian groceries to get great (inexpensive) lunches:

Nippon Daido. This king of Japanese markets has freshly made sushi and a variety of hot dishes including curries, teriyaki and fried pork or chicken. Take it out with a bottle of cold green tea and you have one nice lunch on the go. 522 Mamaroneck Avenue, White Plains.

Lord’s Farm. Located just off the Post Road in Mamaroneck, this small grocery store has some of the best chicken salad this side of the Hudson River (I know, we’re on the decidedly narrow side), sushi and a quality (but not local) produce along with artisan breads trucked in and the usual deli sandwiches. 1120 East Boston Post Road, Mamaroneck.

Kam Sen. I can’t leave out the Asian megamarket in White Plains. Named to the Delicious Dozen on these very pages (click here), Kam Sen has the best (only?) Cantonese style meats and delectables in the county. For less than $6 you can have your choice of duck, roast pig and soy braised chicken on rice. Best deal in town. 22 Barker Avenue, White Plains.

Oishinbo. This Harrison storefront grocery has a super friendly young staff and excellent freshly made lunch boxes with pickled vegetables, rice topped with toasted sesame seeds and your choice of Japanese prepared meats. Also try some very decent sushi rolls and the Korean bi bim bop with whole fried eggs on a rice bowl filled with goodies. 283 Halstead Avenue, Harrison.

The Delicious Dozen: Twelve Great Places to Eat in Westchester

2006-05-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

The burbs have come a long, long way since the time (Clinton was president) when the only sure way to get great eats was to MetroNorth it to the City. But now there are some amazing grazing holes, if you have the time to look (yes, the last time you had free time, Clinton was president). No need to wag into tongue envy, The WesFoodie is always on the lookout for these yet undiscovered spots to grab some great vittles and share them with you, so . . . Twelve (like the tribes brother, my brother) Great Places to Eat in Westchester: the Delicious Dozen.

Plates – Just the best restaurant for inventive new American food in the burbs. (Click here for my review.)
www.platesonthepark.com – 121 Myrtle Boulevard, Larchmont (914) 834-1244.

Misti Pollo A La Brasa – A very popular Peruvian joint in Port Chester – try the Saltado (kind of like Chinese stir fried beef or chicken over a pile of French fries with rice; the sauce gets into the fries and its crunch, salty and frenzy inspiring) and Pollo a la Brasa with salad and rice, their signature dish.
110 North Main Street, Port Chester (914) 939-9437

Toyo – nicely designed, welcoming and always competent Japanese food in Mamaroneck. The WesFoodie never misses a chance to order their spicy yellowtail roll.
www.toyosushi.com - 253 Mamaroneck Avenue, Mamaroneck (914) 777-8696

Walter’s – Ole style road side hot dog stand with the best grilled dogs and fries around – I mean it. The lines are always long, but its because the history is deep and the dogs are buttery, snappy and grilled right in front of you.
www.waltershotdogs.com - 937 Palmer Avenue, Larchmont

Stone Barns Café – Whether you think the SB experience is an Eden or an Epcot Center for the Foodie set (for The WesFoodie article on SB click here) the café at this Mecca of sustainable agriculture and cuisine delivers some very nice panini and treats – a cut above the rest in Westchester. Sustaindanistas Unite!
www.stonebarnscenter.org – 630 Bedford Road, Pocantico Hills (914) 366-6200

Latin American Café – Long time White Plains favorite for slightly higher end Cuban cuisine. Its good.
134 East Post Road, White Plains (914) 948-6606

Kam-Sen Market – This Asian super duper super market across from the DMV in White Plains has the best (only?) Cantonese China Town style roast meats (y’know, the hanging lacquered ducks) and mixed bag hot food in Westchester. Try the duck and the roast pig (tip: not the “pork”, the “pig” - with skin).
22 Barker Avenue, White Plains (914) 428-4500

Kneaded Bread – Oh man, don’t get me started. The WesFoodie loves, lusts and longs for this all-from-scratch wonderland (for The WesFoodie's little bit on the place click here). Get there!
181 North Main Street, Port Chester (914) 937-9489

Le Jardin du Roi – What a sweet, well done French bistro/café in Chappaqua. Go for brunch, sit for awhile.
95 King Street, Chappaqua – (914) 238-1368

Perks – For awhile this place convinced me that Katonah was a hip, artsy place to be. The coffee is good, the tea is really good and try the chocolate rugelah, it doesn’t disappoint.
197 Katonah Avenue, Katonah – (914) 232-0293

Ray’s Café – The WesFoodie loves this pair of outstanding Shanghai food spots. The beef with eggplant is about as good a Chinese dish as you will ever eat in Westchester. And the proprietors are so sweet and unassuming.
176 South Ridge Street, Rye Brook (914) 937-0747, 1995 Palmer Avenue, Larchmont (914) 833-2551

Westchester Farmers Markets – Okay, The WesFoodie lied, the Markets aren’t great places to eat but they are really great places if you love to eat - to get just-off-the-farm, in-season organic fruit, vegetables, meat and fresh baked scrumshens from across the Hudson Valley. Can you wait for all the farmers markets to open for the season? Me either. The one in White Plains is open – don’t miss the top notch organics from Butternut Valley Organics. Also among the best markets is the Hastings-on-Hudson market on Saturdays from 8:30-2 at the library on Maple Ave starting June 3.
White Plains Farmers Market – 225 Main Street, White Plains 8AM-4PM.

Nectarines and Ruby Slippers

2006-05-06T15:30:00.000-07:00

Charlie Brown was overcome by the ghost hiding in a bowl of his morning cereal. The same spirit caught Snoopy off guard and transported them both back to when they were master and puppy – before Lucy, before Woodstock. Just a little bald boy and his beagle. Entenmanns signed a deal with the spirit world, securing for decades to come, the presence of ghosts in golden iced fudge cake, butter pound loaf and cookies. In his first draft, L. Frank Baum had Dorothy transported back to Kansas by a ghost sleeping inside a cracker in her dress pocket. That same ghost went on to be the one that brought a little boy back in the slick of a nectarine slice to a picnic between the trees in Queens. Hiding in the yellow crescent flesh to haunt him with home.

We know little about the ghosts that hide in between taste molecules waiting to be invoked at the proper moment; waiting to reveal themselves to unsuspecting taste buds for a one way trip up the nervous system to brains expecting nothing more haunting than flavor.

Okay, ok. Maybe I’m taking it too far; cartoons, ghosts, Dorothy – c’mon. But I think it is undeniable that food and its ability to conjure memory, wanted and preferred repressed, is a significant part of eating - one that has gone virtually unexplored in modern cuisine. Taste and smell were used with great effect by shaman and pre-industrial healers. Burning sage cleared the space of bad spirits. Ritual teas were drunk to connect with the ghost world. It is an art that has been largely lost and not yet re-found by today’s chefs and other witch doctors of contemporary culture. But who among us has not been transported to another place and time by the taste and aroma of food? I can’t even think about sautéed calf’s brains without stepping into the light and winding up in the Hell’s Kitchen apartment my father moved to when my folks divorced when I was nine (“Stay away from the light….”). Well that’s not a very nice one, but there seems to me to be a chance for some real alchemy here.

And Lord knows we need an outlet to deal with ghosts and ghouls these days. Post-9-11, America is obsessed with them. You can’t turn on the television or go to the movies without being scared out of your bageebers. I for one would rather evoke grandmother spirits in the rising mist of steamy peach pie than get all wigged out by Patricia Arquette or Jennifer Love Hewitt.

For starters, I ate a nectarine at the farmer’s market in the park next to Ground Zero. It had an ole time flavor I hadn’t tasted in years, hadn’t remembered. In its soft sweetness and slight vegetable complexity I sensed something with one foot next to its pit and one next to the peddle of my red glittery banana seat bike in August 1978, speeding along the asphalt in Forest Park, Queens.

Gotto Get Ourselves Back To The Garden

2006-05-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

The WesFoodie is an ever vigilant crusader for the sophisticated and rightfully demanding palates of devoted readers. So this weekend rather than scrape and paint the back of my garage (sorely in need of a new coat) and clean it out for spring, I packed up the family into the SUV and hightailed it to the Pocantico hills for a pilgrimage to the Stone Barns Center. For those not In The Know, Stone Barns is the brainchild of Dan Barber and the lovechild of David Rockefeller. A 80 acre working farm with a half acre greenhouse, over 50 miles of trails, a café and an elegant restaurant with a seasonal menu. Stone Barns describes its mission as “to demonstrate, teach, and promote sustainable, community-based food production.” Yeah, you got it, it’s a shrine to the Movement. A $30 million Rockefeller financed shrine. And it is very beautiful….

I was very excited to take this trip to the Garden. I had read many amazing things about Stone Barns in the two years since its opening in the spring of 2004. If you peruse the literature on Stone Barns, you would understand that Barber has re-created Eden only with a much better selection of heritage breed pigs and a state-of-the-art kitchen with full staff and a pre fixe tasting menu. According to Westchester Magazine, Stone Barns is the “Best Place to Experience a Culinary Revolution.” The New York Times reported that the Center is the flagship of that Revolution and has many worthwhile educational programs as well. Which it does. So with press like that you can forgive a Sustaindanista like me for being ready for something really great, something maybe just a little life changing.

Well, call me a curmudgeon, but having walked the trails, admired the greenhouse and tasted the food, the WesFoodie finds the whole thing a bit fussy. I’m still trying to figure it out but something is not quiet natural about Stone Barns. There are high concept, masterly designed graphics explaining the benefits of small farming over agri-business. There’s a gift shop with gardening cloths with the Stone Barns’ logo on the lapel. Did Barber invent little biodynamic strap-on buckets for the chickens to collect their waste and wisk it off to the organic herb garden for soil enrichment before it can be seen by any guests? Has he hired an army of Stone Barns’ cool designer t-shirt clad farm hands to steal away each errant weed seed on the heirloom garlic fields just as each is about to sprout? I don’t know. But he has recycled the stone silos on the barn into comfortable wood enscossed reading rooms complete with books for all ages and a large Stone Barns trademark sticker on each cover. Trust me, you won’t get any hay or grain in your hair walking around these barns. Which is good because a sizable portion of Stone Barns’ visitors come prepared for the farm in dark blazers and Italian leather loafers. “Community-based food production?” I guess so. But what community?

Its just not a good sign when you leave a place like this thinking maybe you ought to move to Mexico City after all – that maybe a little smog wouldn’t hurt. There’s a real danger here that people are going to get turned off, give up and start cooking like Rachel Ray or something – “Hey – don’t want to get flour on your silk blouse, why pretend - open a can of ravioli – Yummy!”

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that Stone Barns isn’t an agent for ecological change, it is, it definitely is. And the food is certainly good. I had a really nice duck Panini with pickled daikon and golden raisons and a fine sampling of salads at the Café. As I was peeking into the secret back door of the restaurant’s kitchen, David Rockefeller and his entourage emerged and that was exciting. It is a gorgeous pastoral setting. But like an Epcot Center for foodies, its fun to check out and walk around but at the end of the day you’re probably not leaving with much more than you came in with – except maybe the mouse ears you bought at the gift shop.

(Left - The Secret Door to the Kitchen from which emerged David Rockefeller)

Forget the Cafeteria

2006-04-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

Stamford is a weird town. There are huge office buildings – modern and opulent – forming its skyline and framing I-95 (its spinal cord connection to the commuters that inhabit it by day). Its motto: The City That Works. But while thousands upon thousands work here, the streets are virtually empty. Downtown on a sunny afternoon in spring looks like an outtake from The Omega Man – Charlton Heston’s post-apocalyptic nightmare flick from the seventies.

So where’s a working stiff to eat in a town with no people? Forget the company cafeteria. For those adventurous corporate souls willing to get out into the city, meet some local folks and taste the tastes of Stamford there are some spots worth traveling to.

One of them is Casa Villa. This small hole-in-the-wallish authentic Mexican storefront has tacos that are filled with soft meat glistening with natural juices, fine slices of fresh onions, succulent garlic infused sauces and each is topped with chopped green herbs. They’re terrific. And cheap ($2.50 each). This is a local joint filled with people from the surrounding community. The young woman at the counter is friendly to the WesFoodie and not at all put off by unilingual inabilities. It may just become my dining hole frequentemente.

And a Partridge in a Pear ...

2006-04-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

It is helpful to have a butcher in the family. Most regrettably, the only butcher in the WesFoodie’s bloodline passed from this world in the middle of the last century denying me my birthright cuts of brisket and my sharehold of fine poultry. Now when I want a really great steak its off to the City to Florence on Jones Street or Ceriello in the Grand Central Market and I get hooked up with some prime pieces of meat. But birds can be elusive.

Way back in Winter ’04 - the holiday season was upon us and a meal I had to make. ‘Twas for the inlaws and to their place we did go. Here is where the scene of me and my family, singing merrily along as we woosh through the snowy down blanket upon the hills of New England should appear to you. Picture me, just my nose and open singing mouth visible in the middle of my fur-lined parka hood and handsome green winter scarf. Your mind’s eye focuses in on my joyful song-filled mouth as I sing . . . and a partridge in a pear . . . SAUCE! Eureka, my menu was writ. Never mind that I had the lyric wrong – I didn't even celebrate Christmas. It was enough: Unusual ingredient, tasty (probably) and sufficiently clever holiday theme; I would get a couple of dozen partridges, resist the Danny and Keith jokes, cook up some pear sauce with nuoc chom and ginger and we’d have a meal to remember – done.

Not done. It is very difficult to find enough fresh partridges on short notice to feed a table of nine. Somehow I had it in my mind that I had seen partridges at the Whole Foods Market just sitting on the shelf all wrapped up in plastic and Styrofoam next to the chickens. This probably never really happened; the odds are clearly with this having been a figment of the WesFoodie’s holiday imagination; a ghost conjured up by some illicit nog. Regardless, when I went to get my birds, not surprisingly in the eternal sobriety of hindsight, there were none to be had.

Like a ghost of my ancestors, my friendly Whole Foods butcher took it upon himself to navigate the poultry bureaucracy for me. He procured the birds at a wholesaler outside of Boston and had them delivered to my in-laws’ doorstep in time for the holiday dinner. And he charged me nothing because he hadn’t gotten them for me earlier than he did. Incredible. Unbelievable. This is better than being related to the guy – way better actually - and I am forever loyal to the Whole Foods for this extraordinary holiday feat. Unfortunately, that was the high point of our meal.

The sauce came off just fine. A variety of cored and skinned pears, some ginger, nuoc chom, pink peppercorns, wine, a touch of sugar – beautiful. My mother in-law went nuts for this. The birds were tougher (yeah they were tough). Feeding tiny birds, heads on and beaks forward, to my niece and nephew (11 and 8) and in-laws had its own possibilities and potential pitfalls. I wound up twisting the heads off once I had them roasted, eyes darting over my shoulder to make sure the kids were far away, removing the breast meat from the bone (somehow this is okay for the kids to watch) and serving it in neat and tidy slices on the plate with the sauce and a small pear. It looked good. Everyone liked the theme and said they liked the food (my in-laws are very generous when it comes to my cooking). But I wasn’t crazy for the partridge meat. It was tough and meager, not a generous bird, the partridge. A good idea with poor execution. Next year I would do better. Anyone for turtle doves?

Sustainable?

2006-04-19T16:41:00.000-07:00

That America is in the midst of a food revolution making for some very fine eats is undeniable. But let’s face it, all the great eating means that not only is there a more intense rush of food pleasure throbbing through our palettes but there are also a lot of fat foodies out there. Once the weight is on, and for most of us, its on baby, its on, altering one’s relations to eating is very difficult. Foodies talk a lot about sustainability these days. But is our culinary adventure sustainable?

Several years ago the WesFoodie lost around 40 pounds over three to four months. I did it by so twisting my perception of eating that I reached the tipping point – that place where it was more pleasurable to deny myself the donut than to eat it. I carefully monitored the amount of such totally and completely unnecessary calorie laden marginalia as olive oil and milk. Butter was unthinkable. Those others were just ice cream eating fools! The plates full of steak, rice and black beans that I had so casually and utterly thoughtlessly consumed before were outrageous impossibilities; laughable extremes. I also exercised for several hours every day until my very purpose for being was to deny myself the foolish pleasures and comforts that stood in the way of my getting into shape.

This way of living had been totally unheard of to me. I grew up eating what I wanted, limited more by how much food cost than how fat it would make me. I learned early on this little secret: Few things in life are as satisfying at a very basic level as consuming, without pause, an entire package of Entenmann’s cream filled cupcakes or a box of a dozen chocolate covered donuts. With secret knowledge like that, change came hard. Changing the way I ate and thought about food required me to force my body inside out. A lifetime of fixed notions had to be undone. An entire neural network was torn apart and new webs of positive and negative associations were spun in furious spurts of energy born of fat fire and burned calories. But it worked. And I loved it. The WesFoodie was ALIVE – the Lewis and Clark of weight loss forging a new frontier of self. But it didn’t last. In the seven years since I lost the 40 pounds, I’ve gained back about 1/3 of it and lost it again, and over again. I just love great food.

Can we eat like foodies and live to tell the tale or are we sippin’ fois into an early clogging for which no stent can be inserted? Thoughtful balanced nutrition is not something Americans are particularly good at. It just doesn’t come natural. But hey, if Alice Waters can turn wretched school lunches into ripe organic tastiness, maybe it isn’t impossible to make sustainability sustainable.

The Produce Section

2006-04-16T15:21:00.000-07:00

While performing some follow-up research for a soon-to-be-posted blog entry on turning a favorite holiday carol into a themed dinner for the inlaws (stay tuned loyal Burban readers), I discovered that while heirloom vegetable production in my backyard is really still at preliminary levels, harvest is well under way at the local Whole Foods market.

The image at left is the WesFoodie's best tomato sprout (var.=Purple Calabash) as of this afternoon after six weeks of caring, warming, lighting and prayer and at right is the daily harvest this morning at Whole Foods.

A Review Review

2006-04-12T14:09:00.000-07:00

The WesFoodie does not write reviews for The New York Times. But from time to time I do review the reviews of restaurants in the Times’ Wes Section. Why? Well, the Grey Lady is a force to be reckoned with. When the blue bag hits pavement on weekend mornings, Wesites come running. The restaurant reviews enter the cultural zeitgeist through all of those hungry burban eyes. Criticism is literature no matter how utilitarian its purposes and we all know that literature forms the historical narrative. So lest we allow our story to be writ for us, we must criticize the critics’ works:

On Sunday (4/9) the Times published a menu review of Café Mirage in Port Chester (The Original Times Review). This is a welcome description of the restaurant’s menu: reliable in its faithful cataloging of the kitchen’s oeuvre. The use of classic Asian/Latin food review adjectives lend flare: the broth is “zesty” and “pungency” abounds.

Best of all – there are not one, but two, plugs for Kneaded Bread, the home of cakes and baked deliciousness with which the WesFoodie has a not merely platonic obsession.

Now maybe the WesFoodie’s perception of Port Chester is somehow constructed off the Main Street of reality, but I’m pretty certain that Port Chester is a town where the pastoral sights and sounds of the Byram River have not been culturally or sensuously significant in a long, long time. And this is where the menu review loses its mission, stretches to locate itself in a socio-cultural space (by going on about the sounds of the river and the development, etc…) and winds up falling off the menu and down some imagined rabbit hole.

The development of the waterfront (and Café Mirage, Kneaded Bread and other hot spots) is taking place amidst a tangle of struggling communities, vivid cultural flashes and deeply rooted histories – both personal and public. Port Chester is one tough town. Of course, that makes its culinary riches possible. So why hide it or pretend this great delicious and dangerous village is anything but? Sometimes ugly begets beauty.

Jewcy Seder

2006-04-10T16:09:00.000-07:00

Nothing says roots like Passover food. So when my mom was in town this weekend (just a few days shy of Pesach) we chowed down like Rabbis. A few days early. Gefilte fish is the ultimate insider dish. No one with any taste outside of The Tribe can even tolerate it. But to the tongue raised in awe of the adults at the Seder table eating these beige odd shaped dumplings of the tub, there is joy in the bite of purple horseradish and the flush of sweet fish as the gefilte crumbles over the palette.

There are great, great stories about the first generation of off-the-schtettle wives keeping carp alive in the bathtub in Brooklyn for days before they cut it up and mixed it with whitefish and pike, matzo and egg. My grandmother’s mother was one of those Jewesses and I can still remember staring at my Nanna’s tub imagining a big fish swimming around next to the Donald duck decals she had stuck on the bottom for my bath times. No wonder I love even the gefilte jelly in the Mrs. Adler jars from Shop and Stop. For a little Jewish kid growing up in the City this is magic folklore.

At our pre-Pesach seder I plated the gefilte with some tender arugala that I’ve been growing in a coldframe in my backyard. Then I took a picture of it with my cell phone and posted it on the blog. How is that going to compare to the tub stories for my kids? Magic? Maybe, maybe not, but it sure feels Tribal and that’s real Jewcy for this Jew.

Not Just Good

2006-04-07T09:43:00.000-07:00

Before say, 1998, restaurant food in the burbs was pretty darn backwater. It was bad. It was (as the yogurt loving gal pals on the Yoplait commercial might say) "sell your house and move bad." And yet still it can be difficult to find a compelling meal and dining experience in the burbs. If you're like the Wesfoodie and you spend most waking hours working to pay off your Westchester sized mortgage and professional/grad school loans you probably don't enjoy sitting down to a pricey but glum meal when you finally get to stretch your legs and treat your taste buds a bit. And who would?

That is why the WesFoodie likes to share, from time to time, some thoughts on worthwhile meals had right round the burbs. Well, "worthwhile" actually doesn't begin to describe what happened when I ate at Plates in Larchmont....

To understand Plates and just how good it is – let me start with the end of the meal. The waitress, who has grown much more comfortable in this small and well fitting space over the course of the evening, places down a small, round and white plate with a square of warm homemade caramel on it for each guest. This is just cooked sugar, you know - caramel. But what sugar could ever imagine itself transforming into this? For common cane to aspire to these heights is beyond even the most starry eyed hopes of the sweetest of granes. It is at once both knowingly familiar and a little adventure to somewhere new; comforting in its warmth and the depth of its sweet but challenging one’s taste towards a higher note. But its not trying to be anything other than what it is: candy of heated sugar and butter.

Plates is thoughout the meal like the caramel that ends the evening - as comfortable as a piece of candy like the one in a denim jacket pocket in some distant memory of you as a kid and yet taken to a level only a mature hand could dream of mastering. This is Plate’s greatness – it is as accomplished as it is unpretentious. It is at once a small neighborhood place where everyone is friendly and relaxed and simultaneously the venue for Westchester’s most natural and talented chef: Matt Karp.

http://www.platesonthepark.com

Your Basic Lunch Food

2006-04-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

The Wesfoodie spends most days at a place where the only reasonably accessible food is in a corporate cafeteria at an adjacent building. So I have spent a fair amount of time together with various sandwiches and chip combinations. Cafeteria food is not something very many of us think about all too often; it is like a white painted wall or short neatly parted hair for men, totally normative. It is so standard as to go unnoticed as culturally significant. It is the basis from which all other things deviate. One does not remark that a wall is white – we take notice only of a wall that differs from the norm – a red painted wall, a polka dotted wall, a mud wall – and regard the painted white wall as neutral. Same with the neatly parted hair and chicken salad sandwich.

One could safely say that chicken salad is a basic. But, as for all things, its normative value is illusory. On closer inspection its neutrality collapses and something much more complex, vivid and disjunctive appears. After all, we are talking about a chopped up creature originating from the Indian jungle boiled in a substance older than life on earth, mixed together with an emulsion of oil and the creature’s own eggs first whipped up in France two centuries ago and usually dotted with little chunks of an ancient Greek holy plant (celery). Put that together on a roll with some pickles and chips and for $3.95 you have yourself: The Lunch Counter Special.

Now the Wesfoodie does not too much like the idea of eating “chopped up creature” boiled in primordial liquids no matter how accurate that may be. There’s something very comforting about going and getting your basic sandwich for lunch and eating it without much ado. As Caravaggio and Woody Allen knew, illusions aren’t all bad all of the time. Sometimes we just need the eggs, or it could be chicken salad. Whichever comes along first. But would it kill someone to add a little curry?

Kneaded Bread

2006-03-22T17:24:00.000-08:00

Lately the WesFoodie thinks food in Westchester begins and ends with Kneaded Bread in Port Chester. I have been making the notsoshort trip over to this small but incredible Main Street bakery on the far Greenwich end of PC at least once a week for many weeks now. I don't plan on stopping these caked ending pilgrimages any time soon.

If you're lucky - or if one of the genuine and friendly counter staff clue you in - you will be present when a fresh chocolate cake comes out. This is the real thing: "mushafugga chocolate cake". Take a bite and mushafugga this is really good. A slice is about a half foot tall and almost as wide at the outside. It has two layers of dense, thickly moist and deeply chocolaty devils food. The cake is frosted with butter. Chocolate and sweet butter. But its butter and its delicious. Don't miss it.