Restaurant reservation site OpenTable will now tell you if that restaurant is worth the reservation. Or at least, some stranger will. After dining, site users will receive a survey on the food, ambiance, service, noise factor and overall dining experience. OpenTable will combine these results (ranked between one and five stars) with those of other local diners. Will Yelpers jump ship? [via DCist]
Here's a beautiful grape shallot, and microgreens salad made by Jacquie to offset the duck fat fries and the spit-roasted guinea pig and the egg yolk-laden hamburger and...well, I could probably keep going. Basically, here's your phytonutrient dosage for the day; I thought you could use it.
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It wasn’t exactly a con job, but I did end up spending way too much for the fontina cheese at the local cheesemonger. The man was describing some heavenly stuff that he had just gotten in and I simply got mesmerized. It smelled wonderful and complex and agreed to a 1/2 pound before I even thought about asking the price. When the total came in over $10 I realized I had surpassed my intentions. My original goal was to sprinkle it over some broccoli...and that’s it. That’s an expensive side dish. Cheese this good needed a higher lot in life.
The fiancée actually remembered this recipe out of the well-worn Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces. She claims we had this dish before, and she’s usually right. But we definitely didn’t have it with fontina this good. The level of nutty, earthiness is incredible considering how little cheese is actually used. All the rest is vegetable goodness, and the zucchini, especially, adds some wonderful sweetness. It’s just another potato and pasta recipe that sounds illogical, and yet creates a dish like this one. The recipe's name translates simply as "Pasta with Green Vegetables," but it sounds so much better in Italian.
This week, The Kitchn shares a recipe for super thin homemade breakfast pizza topped with herbs, ricotta cheese, and oozing eggs. It's so delicious, you might want to eat it for lunch and dinner too.
Also on The Kitchn, a review of the Pancake Puff Pan, the unconventional green, fuzzy state of a common food, recipes for rhubarb-based drinks, and ideas for displaying cookie cutters.
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but here in Seattle, summer is taking its time to roll around. On Friday, though, the forecast says we’ll be in the 80s, and with Memorial Day fast approaching, it looks like gin & tonic season is here.
Too bad I hate them like poison.
Well, maybe I should put that in past tense. Until recently, pouring a gin and tonic typically entailed cracking the lid on a plastic liter bottle, and pouring a fizzy, somewhat oily mix of carbonated water, high-fructose corn syrup and assorted flavorings over ice with a good belt of gin. To my taste, it’s too sweet and synthetically bitter at the same time, and on those occasions when I’ve been handed a cup of gin & tonic at a barbecue, I always wind up trying to drink half the mess good-naturedly in gulps so I won’t taste the tonic, then conveniently losing my cup when I just can’t take any more.
In recent years, however, there’s been a growing movement to rescue tonic's reputation. Put off by the sickly sweetness and artificial flavors of mass-produced commercial tonic water, adventurous bartenders such as Daniel Shoemaker at Teardrop Lounge in Portland, Oregon, have been crafting their own tonic waters using natural ingredients. Some entrepreneurs and artisinal producers are following suit, introducing small-batch tonic waters that taste of real botanicals and are lightly sweetened—a vast improvement on the stuff hiding behind yellow labels in the grocery store.
The Chicago Tribune is reporting:
Over the shouted objections of Ald. Joe Moore (49th), the ban's sponsor, the council used a parliamentary manuever to put the ordinance on the floor for a vote.
The council voted 37-6 to repeal the two-year-old ban, which critics argued had made Chicago--and the City Council--a national laughingstock.
And the folks at D'Artagnan just sent out an email blast celebrating. The D'Artagnan missive, after the jump.
Duck fat fries from Duck Fat Restaurant in Portland, Maine. Photograph from the Paupered Chef.
Duck, fat and fries are three words that please most people. Combining them is a very beautiful thing. Chef Amanda Freitag at New York City's The Harrison isn't the only one bathing spuds in quack-quack grease. She cuts hers with a malt vinegar mayo, given the duck fat's richness. After the jump, see what other chefs across the country are skipping peanut or cottonseed oil to embrace rendered duck fat.
Is there a better Mother's Day treat?
Everyone and their mother packed El Pequeño Coffee Shop in Jackson Heights, Queens, this past Sunday afternoon. I was there on a mission that my dear departed mother would have found shocking: to eat cuy asado, or roast Ecuadorean guinea pig. Mom would have put a positive spin on it, though, and voiced pride in my eclectic palate and cast-iron stomach.
Because I rarely think about color when I’m planning what to cook, I always feel guilty when I read about how important it is to one’s enjoyment of a meal. The thing is, I’m not sure how true that is for me. One of my favorite things about my family’s Thanksgiving is that everything on my plate is unapologetically brown, white, and delicious. And when my Tuesday night dinner at home has already taken twice as long as I thought it would to prepare, taking the extra ten minutes to clean and chop a dusting of green herbs or red peppers or yellow lemon zest almost never seems worth it.
I do have a soft spot for vividly or oddly hued foods, and I do try to get a lot of different colors in over the course of the week; I just don’t manage to make every night’s plate look like a color wheel. As a child I was fascinated by page 117 in Martha Stewart’s Entertaining, which features a bowl of pepto-bismol-pink iced borscht framed by spring flowers and garnishes. My desire to eat pink soup was matched only by my determination never to consume a beet, and there the matter stood for most of my life.
Having in my ripening become quite fond of beets, I finally made that soup the other day, and…the color was not right at all! Instead of being spring-tulip-pink it looked, alas, like normal borscht, the shade just past hot pink and before magenta. Since my soup was also not nearly as glossy as the model, I’m wondering if they stirred in some heavy cream, or maybe they used those beautiful candy cane beets instead of the plain old dark ones.
In any event, here is a colorful menu for springtime, all adapted from Entertaining:
Add beets, and you have got an Aussie Burger.
Is there anything greater than the breakfast burger? I love a decent burger, and if you top it with an over easy egg, something magical happens. And that magic is called egg yolk, covering your burger in gooey goodness. Last week I sampled the breakfast burger from Goodburger (a slightly upscale, NYC burger chain) along with some co-workers, one of whom remarked, "Add some beets to this, and you've got an Aussie Burger." Come again? Beets? Now that sounds like something I could get into.
Strange brew. (Photographs from roastingplant.com)
81 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002 (map)
212-775-7755
roastingplant.com
The Roasting Plant, at 81 Orchard Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, is an essential destination for any one who cares about good coffee. Or anyone who wants a glimpse of how we will drink coffee in the future. It was recently Slashdotted for "using new thinking and methodologies to something that was previously regarded as a black art." Gizmag.com called it the world's first "walk-in coffee machine." And a cover story in Design News praised the "real-time distributed control system" for democratizing and streamlining the coffee-making process so that the trip from green bean to creamy cup takes less than 30 seconds and never yields bitterness.
Remember, we're still talking about coffee. And despite the Terry Gilliam–like devices, the Roasting Plant is about the next iteration in American coffee culture, stripping away confections and condiments to reveal a very good cup of Joe. The Ethiopian Harrar Longberry cappuccino that I enjoyed there recently was as beautiful for its cupping qualities—with pleasant blueberry notes—as for the space-age process by which the beans whirred through pneumatic tubes overhead, sorted by the Selectifier (yes, Willy Wonka references are common), and dropped into an Egro brewing machine, guided by selections on a touch screen and the wizardry of the custom-designed Javabot (international patent number PLT/US03/02069). You've got to see it to believe it.
When I was 17, I spent the summer in Italy. After traveling through Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice, I lived with a host family in Sicily for a month. I kept a journal while I was there, and wrote in it religiously every night. A few years ago I found the dairy beneath a pile of books in my childhood bedroom. I thought it would contain a detailed account of my entire trip; instead it was basically one long, exhaustive list of everything I had eaten. I guess I was a food writer before I even knew what it meant to be one.
Today's Cook the Book recipe, excerpted from Wine Bar Food, is for arancini. Here is what I had to say about these delicious, golden-brown bites the first time I had them: "For dinner, they took me to get a 'piccolo arancia [sic]' which is a fried ball of rice with cheese, tomatoes, and meat inside. At first I thought I wouldn't like it, but it was actually wonderful! After that…I had banana ice cream, which was good, but I liked the granita better."
Traditionally a Sicilian dish, this recipe is given a Roman twist with the addition of ground lamb. Perfect for a cocktail party or a casual dinner appetizer, these arancini can be made in advance and frozen for up to a month. Enjoy with a glass of hearty, black current-flavored Nero d'Avola.
As is always the case with our cook the book selections, we're giving away five (5) copies away this week to lucky readers. Enter to win here»
Ever look at a radish with a long root and think, "Hey, that looks like a rat!" Maybe not. But with just a few small slices and cuts, you could make something that kind of looks like a rat. Impress your friends with your food-carving technique; just don't serve your radish rats to anyone who's afraid of rodents.
Watch the instructional video, after the jump.
Nick and Blake, the guys behind The Paupered Chef (also contributors to Serious Eats), retooled their site and headed in a new direction a couple months ago. Toward more involved, long-process, obsessive at-home food adventures. I love reading what they set about doing. Today, Blake posts about making guanciale at home, a process that had him sourcing pig jowls (more difficult than you'd imagine), scavenging an extra fridge, and then going about turning it into the bacon that's preferred by Italians and only now just catching on in the U.S.
"Once a dusty formality that lived on in the form of radish roses in out-of-the-way hotels, food art, as it is known, is enjoying a new vogue." The New York Times gives us an inside look at the competitive world of fruit and vegetable carving. Some chefs take up produce carving to battle boredom or to impress customers, while top carvers can earn thousands of dollars creating elaborate biodegradable centerpieces for their clients.
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With barbecue joints seemingly sprouting up on every corner these days in New York, it's easy to forget what a barbecue wilderness Gotham was for so many years. When I arrived in New York in 1973, there was precious little real barbecue. Then came the 'cue explosion of the '00s, the latest of which is Wildwood BBQ.
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See more photos in the Serious Eats Photo Group at flickr
Fresh fruit and hearty beans make a refreshing side for our Morningstar
Farms® Southwestern Style Veggie Cakes.
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