01.03.12: dinner (first pizzas of the new year: tomato pie with scallions and bacon and a white pie with ricotta, prosciutto di parma and arugula)

Tomato Pie with Jumbo Scallions and Bacon

I hope the holiday season gave you all time to be still and reflect on the year as it passed perhaps via most golden and perfect of all meditation opportunities, fooling around in your kitchen with no pressing need to generate a large or timely meal, maybe utilizing a night or two in that golden week between Christmas and NYE. If you did not have this opportunity, I guess you missed out.

By the end of it all, even I had had enough. Lasagna and Thanksgiving Food Dinner II with the families, a standing rib roast for the two of us, fried chicken on NYE and a sundry of interspersed meals inspired by greats like Tom Colicchio and David Chang. You might think I’d give up after this feastish onslaught and say “meh” on this particular evening, but the last night before the return to work, waking up early and wrestling I-95 called for something delicious, if not seasonal. E suggested making some pizzas and that felt perfect.

12.29.11: dinner (roast beef sandwiches with grilled red onions and radish slaw from ‘wichcraft)

Roast Beef Sandwich with Grilled Red Onions and Radish Slaw

While I tend to keep these thoughts off of the blog (mainly because Michael doesn’t want this to turn into a let’s-bash-celebrity-chefs snarkfest, a request I can understand), when around friends or coworkers I am known for being a bit…opinionated about various food personalities. My ire is usually only aimed at a select few who will go unnamed here, but when you are generously gifted a cookbook for the holidays and the giver prefaces you opening it with “I don’t know if you like this person” it’s a sign that you can be rather intense about said opinions.

Whoops.

The preface was completely unnecessary, of course, because when I saw it was a copy of Tom Colicchio’s ‘wichcraft I was positively elated. I’ve always wanted to try out his sandwich shop (there are locations all over Manhattan and he’s expanded to other cities too), but in all of our weekend travels around the city I never seemed to be near one when I was searching for something to eat. Well, it’s time to make up for lost time and lost sandwiches, and what better way to dive in than to make his take on a classic roast beef?

Roast Beef with Radish Slaw, Grilled Red Onions, and Black Pepper Mayonnaise

12.28.11: dinner (momofuku’s chicken and egg)

 

Momofuku's chicken and egg

Neither Michael nor I said the actual words over the course of the last week of 2011, but in retrospect it was pretty clear we were both missing our tiny kitchen after four days of holiday celebrating with not much opportunity to get behind the stove. Day two of our mini-we-miss-New-York-Week (subtitle: the week we bounced back and forth between Tom Colicchio and David Chang’s cookbooks) was another “let’s take on a Serious Project!” day–although while this is a dish that takes some time to make, with a little planning I could see us enjoying this on a random weekday evening. It was also a great opportunity to break in one of our Christmas presents (although that is a very poor choice of words given what it is):

12.27.11: dinner (rib roast and Tom Colicchio’s orecchiette with artichoke, cabbage, and cranberry beans)

Bone-In Ribeye Steak, aka the best damn roast beef we ever had.

One of the downsides in traveling to celebrate the holidays is not having a reason to buy any of the special holiday-only products that are usually in one’s supermarket meat department. At Fairway this is particularly difficult when you see such fascinating things like goose or capon or the crown roasts of lamb and pork that are on special and look absolutely delicious, but are far too large for two people to reasonably consume on their own. The week before Christmas tested our resistance to not hauling home a huge hunk of meat when Fairway was sampling its standing choice rib roasts: two bites of the medium-rare beef had us both sorely tempted,  but it felt a little too over-indulgent, even for us. Cut to a few days later when a gift card to my favorite store fell into my lap and it took all of five seconds for me to offer to use it to procure a couple of bones of rib roast. We purchased it the evening before we were heading to Pennsylvania for the holiday weekend, and the following morning it was in the fridge, dry-aging to perfection.

David Chang’s ginger scallion sauce.

Ginger Scallion Sauce

Were I not fairly certain that doing this would elicit more than a few odd glances (and if it lasted more than a day or two), I would make an enormous batch of David Chang’s ginger scallion sauce, dole it out into quart-sized containers and give it to people as holiday gifts. While not nearly as festive as a plate of Christmas cookies, I would dare any recipient to not fall for this sauce/condiment at first bite. It goes with virtually anything we’ve paired it with so far, from ramen to rice noodles to hanger steak;  it’s rather economical to make over and over again once you’ve purchased a good supply of grapeseed oil, sherry vinegar and soy sauce; if you get the right kind of soy sauce (Tamari), it’s virtually gluten-free. Sure, the sodium content is higher than some would like, but it’s not so bad so long as you avoid eating the whole bowl yourself in one sitting.

It doesn’t help that it is all too tempting to do this, but self-restraint, people: show some and your forbearance  will be rewarded.

12.03.11: dinner (orecchiette with sun-dried tomatoes, tarragon, veal stock and some other stuff)

Orecchiette with Tomato, Tarragon and Prosicutto di Parma

You know how when you make a tomato sauce and there’s all of those dark red or purple bits on the side of the pan? I want to make this sauce taste like that.
–Michael on the way home from Fairway after I nagged him to death about his super-secretive sauce idea.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I wish I had some profound reason for our collective silence, but to be honest, it boiled down to not feeling terribly inclined to write about food. The Thanksgiving holiday leaves me with nothing to say about holiday cooking since we’re not the ones cooking it, and we have to travel, and frankly I’m over writing about various squashes and how good they are with sage and rosemary and waxing endlessly on the deliciousness of roasted vegetables.. Yeah–they are all awesome. We know that. Let’s move on.

Over the course of the fall Michael and I have been tweaking red sauces fairly often, in part to rebel against the beige-ness of what tends to be made this time of year. This is a dish that evolved from that culinary puttering (see Michael’s quote above) as well as a very intense desire to have a sun-dried tomato pesto with orecchiette after a rather silly conversation on Twitter (see the #pastawar tag to see what I mean). Michael completely ran with it and flatly refuesd to give me the details of what he was thinking as he gathered ingredients at Fairway. Bastard. But I trusted him because he had a vision, and that vision included prosciutto di Parma, and there was no way I was going to object to any of it.

10.20.11: dinner (marinated hanger steak ssäm from momofuku)

Marinated Hanger Steak Ssäm from Momofuku

I know, I know. We’re egregiously late in jumping on the David Chang/Momofuku bandwagon, but better late then never, right? This is what I’m chanting to myself as I write this post, feeling horribly out of date for never venturing even once to the East Village to try one of his Momofuku iterations, but in my defense I always assumed that all of his places were expensive and difficult to get into–and we really didn’t eat out that often anyway. (People who have asked me for restaurant recommendations know this all too well, as I end up usually directing them to various food stores rather than a lot of restaurants.) It’s not that we never ate out, but venturing to restaurants that didn’t publish menu prices seemed a little risky, or at least that’s what the pragmatist in me would rationalize. Feel free to correct me in the comments.

10.10.11 (dinner–first night with Ferran Adria’s Family Meal, last night as a twentysomething)

Noodles with Shiitake Mushrooms and Ginger

Turning thirty is a big deal…unless you work in market research. While I had no problem milking the day for a few nice things–like two glasses of delicious wine at Barcelona on Tuesday–I can say upon reflection that I think I struggled more with turning 25 (and therefore will do the same once 35 rolls around) because it means I’m in a new demographic age bracket. I’m reminded of the season four premiere episode of Sex and the City when Carrie receives the application to join some singles group and she laments moving onto the next age box, because suddenly you’re now in a group that’s viewed very differently from the one you just left, and somehow that can make you feel older than any one particular birthday.

But since no age-box-shifting took place on this particular birthday, no melancholy is necessary, right?

10.02.11: anniversary dinner (piemonte specials – carpionata piemontese and pappardelle with porcini mushroom and white truffle))

Carpionata Piemontese

Now I am quietly waiting
for the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Frank O’Hara, excerpt of “Mayakovsky” from Meditations in an Emergency

This passage kind of perfectly expresses those mean reds I mentioned a week and a half ago that have taken up in casa TMFP. It hasn’t helped that it was a fairly rainy week and therefore the sky grew dark out even sooner than it should, and in one of those rainstorms Michael’s new car was lightly clipped by some jerk near his office. And ugh–as I write this it’s gotten grey and moody outside again. It’s like the weather is gleefully pissing all over my “Operation: Abolish Mean Reds” efforts with every cold, grey, sodden day. It’s why we curled up with the second season premiere episode of Mad Men in all of its angsty glory but at the same time pushed ourselves from a culinary perspective–we may be indulging our grumpiness in some ways, but tasting something new and different could also be the jolt we both need. First up: our anniversary dinner on Sunday and going back to a genuine happy place.

Meditiations on smoked pork.

Smoked Pork Shoulder

Okay, so I re-visited the local fire codes and electric cooking devices are allowed on patios. I can therefore speak freely now about the latest foray into North-of-the-border balcony barbecue. This venture was not motivated by, but certainly reinforced by one of Alton Brown’s final Good Eats episodes, this an hour-long treatise on pork smokery.

This particular beast was the product of an impromptu spend-off, hastened by the approach of Hurricane Irene. We found ourselves in Fairway the Friday before the storm arrived, ready to fight of hoards of nasty panic-stricken Metro-ites (Metroids?) filling the cart with everything in sight not just for the storm itself, but for the week. Not a terribly logical action, you might say- stocking up on perishables before entering a period where power (and thus refrigeration) loss was highly probably- and you’d be right. I guess fortune favored the foolish and we were lucky enough to retain electricity throught the ordeal and my shoulder, roasted all day Saturday, was safe.