Sometimes all your afternoon needs is the perfect mix of espresso and steamed milk, married together 15 seconds before it hits your lips.  The Cortado at Café Integral happened to be exactly that.  My friend César Vega roasts the beans himself in Manhattan, and they are exclusively Nicaraguan (as he is).  As a Cortado, this espresso was nutty with a hint of fruit.  It was a pleasant respite from typically somber Monday afternoons. This might have to become a Monday tradition.

I’m a big fan of Bulleit whiskies- especially their Rye.  Their Bourbon is my go-to when mixing brown cocktails, but I generally found myself avoiding it neat.  I had always wished it could be a bit smoother, a bit more complex, and a bit more refined.

Enter Bulleit 10 year.   I had been itching to try it the moment I heard about it.   My friend Michael at IceandNeat procured a bottle and brought it to a gentlemanly gathering I organized last night.

How does it compare to the regular Bourbon? Well, it’s like comparing 800 thread count sheets to 400 thread count sheets.  The 10 year has a fantastic nose- sweet but not overpowering, and it has a beautiful mouth-feel.   It envelopes your tongue and cheeks like silk- the acidity is subdued, and it’s a pleasure to sip on its own.

I wonder if it comes in a big-gulp size?

One thing I caught myself wondering the other day: If World War 2 had manifested itself as a cook/booze-off, how would we have fared? America/France/England versus Germany/Japan/Italy.  I’m obviously oversimplifying, as over 51 countries made up the Allies by 1945.

Still, it’s fun to speculate.  How innocuous would conflict be if the kitchens were battlefields and the bars were bunkers? Maybe we would find something reassuring in the fact that food and drink transcends borders- that there’s an underlying commonality to the ingredients we use and the things we do to them to make them palatable and culturally appealing. Name me a country that doesn’t use fermentation in a single dish. Hard, right?

I like to think the photo above embodies this idea in some sort of way.  Schaller & Weber Beerwurst paired with Suntory Yamazaki 12yr Whisky. The art of butchering and charcuterie is a global one, and ensures that animal parts don’t go to waste. Sure, the Germans are widely known for their sausages and meat products, but you don’t have to look far to find other countries and cultures being awesome with their cold cuts.  Beerwurst covers the grey area between an outright cut of meat and the homogenized abstraction of meat as found in Bologna (which is delicious). Meaty, fatty chunks throughout the cold cut almost seem to act as a less subtle reminder that you were eating something that was once living. It brings with it a texture that has personality that compliments its more intense flavor.

While Beerwurst’s most popular liquid accompaniment may in fact be quite obvious, i thought a Japanese Whisky might be more fitting.  An Eastern approach applied to Western boozemaking results in a spirit with an intricate yet soft taste. It’s both refined and comforting at the same time.  I smirk whenever I drink Suntory as I remember numerous instances where I had to inform people that it isn’t a fake whisky company that was created solely for the purpose of a cameo appearance in “Lost in Translation.” In fact, they’ve been around since 1923.

Maybe it’s just me, but it makes for a thought-provoking snack.

At the behest of my friend Mike at @IceandNeat, we braved the nightmare that is getting to Brooklyn on a weekend and visited the Kings County Distillery for a tour of their whiskey-making operation and a taste of their output.

$8 gets you a $20 tour of the distillery, where you get educated on not only how whiskey is made, but on the history of NY State distilleries as well. The prevalence and notoriety of the Kentucky Bourbon producers might have you think that NY-based distilleries are an outlier, a fad folly assimilated into the hipster construct. You would be wrong.

As Kings County’s Master Distiller Nicole Austin told us, NY state has quite a bit of history hidden within. At its peak prior to prohibition, NY state contained over 1,000 distilleries- ranking 7th in the country, far outnumbering its Kentucky brethren.

As luck would have it, Kings County distillery has the honor of being NYC’s first operating whiskey distillery since prohibition went the way of the dodo.

The tour was an intimate showing of the intimate craft that is small-batch distilling. The distillery, whose aged walls reside in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, bears a connection to the past both in setting and history. Getting an up-close view of the process highlights the balance of chemistry and art that makes whiskey production so fascinating.

On the ground floor, a spacious room with tall ceilings contained vats of fermenting locally-grown grains, four modestly size stills used in current production, and larger equipment such as two massive bulbous copper pot stills, capable of producing 30 gallons of whiskey a day.

The second floor was the aging room, containing over 400 five-gallon American Oak barrels.  these small barrels, while being more practical for smaller producers, also bring with them the advantage of needing considerably less aging time. A smaller barrel makes for a higher ratio of surface area exposure to wood by volume, and means that their whiskey only needs to age between 12 and 18 months to get to a good place.

We poked around in the aging room as Master Distiller Nicole Austin answered booze-related questions and shared her process and thoughts on Whiskey distilling in general. Afterwards we meandered into the next room where we tasted their three whiskies and toured the “Boozeum,” which expanded on the drunken history of Whiskey production in the State.

Their lineup includes a Bourbon, Moonshine made from corn, and a chocolate “flavored” whiskey, infused with spent Mast Brothers cocoa husks. The goods, contained in minimal and unpretentious 200ml bottles, can be purchased as a boxed set for $70, which is a pretty satisfying purchase.

Of the three, my favorite has been the chocolate whiskey. It’s about as far as you can get from what normally passes for chocolate-flavored alcohol these days. It’s a sipping whiskey, full of chocolate character without the sweetness. Think cocoa nibs instead of milk chocolate.

Our Kings County Distillery excursion will be the first of many, as we set on a quest to tackle the Brooklyn Spirits trail and beyond.  So far, I think it rings true that consuming food and drink is a more encompassing experience when you learn about how it’s made, who it’s made by, and why it’s made the way it was. These whiskeys are no exception, and I’ll be sipping them more thoughtfully than I would have been without visiting their birthplace.

If you’re going to cheat on a diet, you best do it with style. See above.

I’ve been trying to lighten my eating habits as of late, relying primarily on the awesome CSA veggies that come in every week from Barefoot organics. Sometimes I feel like I give off this impression that I rely solely on a steady diet of animal and dairy-based products, which is about 40% true. However, I’m an ardent omnivore at heart, and am happy eating anything that was grown responsibly and is true to the source that it comes from.

My girfriend and I have been marvelling at the veggies that come in, and we’ve been making some great, healthy dinners with those veggies. In fact, stay tuned for a few upcoming posts on dishes made with those fantastic ingredients that we receive directly from farmers on a weekly basis.

But this post isn’t about market-fresh veggies, succulent peaches, or insanely good tomatoes.  No, no,  This post is about temptation.  It’s about the catch-22 of being invited by friends to a Brisketlab event that night. You haven’t seen these friends in ages, and they’ve reserved 2 lbs of brisket from the folks at Delaney BBQ.  How can you say no?

I think for a second “Maybe I can go and not eat anything, and then have a salad when I get home.”  Fat, brisket-y chance.

I showed up and the minute I smelled the culmination of meat and spices cooked at an agonizingly slow pace, I knew what I was in for.

The brisket was pretty great-  we got all “Amurrrica” on it and at it with white bread, pickles, and onions.  I longed for some form of a vinegar-based bbq sauce, but it didn’t dampen my experience.  The spices had a warm familiarity to them that complimented the meat, which was falling apart on itself.  A fork proved to be almost useless.

And so we partook, catching up and enjoying each others’ company as brisket juice dripped from our fingers and chins.  Once we were done, we said our goodbyes and went back to our Manhattan lives, with our stomachs carrying the souvenirs of our respite from discipline.

I’ve had a hard time thinking about what I should write about lately. I’ve got an over-abundance of food-porny close-ups from some marathon eating sessions, but I got a bit sick of the bragadaccio associated with showing off to everyone in internet land.   Knowing me and my narcissistic tendencies however,  I’m sure this will pass.

My late grandmother on my mother’s side is someone who puts a smile on my face whenever I think about her.  Her name was Clementine, but we all called her Titine (pronounced “Tee-teen”). Titine was an amazing woman by all accounts,  and I was so lucky to know her for the first 13 years of my silly life on this planet. While it may be 15 years since she’s left us,  her mark on me hasn’t faded much. Why is that?  The answer lies in that photo.

Titine was prolific in the kitchen.  Her cuisine spoke to her Iraqi/Chaldean/Ottoman roots, and she handed it down with furor to her children. The food was simple, heartfelt, and full of comfort, texture, and flavor.

I’ve talked about it a few times before, and it seems to be a recurring theme for me: Food as an emotional connector.

When you use food to provide for people you care about, it transcends its role as a type of physical sustenance.  When you strive to cook food that makes people happy, it becomes something experiential. It might be a stretch, but I really believe that food and more specifically, the act of cooking, can be one of the most powerful legacies we hand down to family and friends. It evolves bit by bit as it moves from generation to generation. These changes can be caused by external cultural influences, availability of ingredients, and the cooking style of the individual. In a way, family dishes can evolve from generation to generation much like our DNA does.  I think that’s awesome.

The dish in the photo above is called “Djadj Mayy Narenge.”  Loosely translated, it means “water from the bitter orange.”   If you’re a smartie pants, you may come to the conclusion that this is a stew that has some citrus characteristics to it.  You would be right.

The funny part is that I just discovered the name of the dish today. All of my life, I never had to call it by its real name. My brothers and I would just hassle my mother and ask her to make the “Lemon chicken stew.”

Djadj Mayy Narenge is a thick, filling chicken and potato stew that’s traditionally flavored with a citrus fruit known as “Bitter Orange.”  This fruit, indigenous to Iraq and surrounding areas, is a close cousin of the Seville Orange. Here in NYC, we modify the recipe by using orange juice or lemon juice and honey as a substitute.  The presence of saffron and cardamom adds complexity, warmth and aroma to the dish.  The smell alone is invasive in a wonderfully comforting way, and the simple combination of those spices provides a delicate balance of exoticism to the universal (but not necessarily boring) chicken and potato.  We like to pair it with a Persian preparation of Basmati rice, touched with saffron and cooked in a way that allows it to develop a crunchy crust (also known as tadigh).

Up until last year I had never made it myself.  The thought of trying to replicate something so close to home was intimidating to me-  more so than trying to pull off recipes by the likes of Jean-Georges and Eric Ripert.  Finally, last new year’s, I decided to make it for family and friends. Having them take part in eating a dish so close to me and my family was a special thing to me.  I was able to share a side of myself and my family that I hadn’t really done before, and I really enjoyed doing so.

It occured to me that sharing something like this with the world is more important to me than showing off something beautiful I ate at a michelin starred restaurant.  Food from home might lack the polish and professional touch of haute cuisine, but becomes a powerful, accessible vehicle for shared tastes and experiences.

I’d like to think that Titine would be proud that we keep her with us through the food she made for us.  I might be a bit fatter for it, but I wouldn’t trade my olfactory connection to my family for anything.

Recipes Below:

Djadj Mayy Narenge

Makes 6 servings

10 Skinless, Boneless chicken thighs
2 Tbsp. Flour
2 Lb Small red potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 in. pieces (half if necessary)
6 Cups chicken broth
3 Saffron packets
10 Cardamom pods in a cheesecloth bundle tied with string
2 Tbsp. Butter and veg oil for sauteing
1 cup lemon juice
1 Tbsp honey

In a large enameled cast iron pot, bring broth to a boil, add 3 small individual packs of saffron and cardamom, and a little salt. Add potatoes and simmer for 15 – 20min,  they should still feel firm. Reserve.

Take the chicken pieces , season them w salt + pepper, put in a ziplock bag with 2 Tbsp of flour, shake to coat.
Take a large teflon saute pan, heat to medium high, add butter (2Tbsp) and grapeseed oil, shake excess flour from chicken and saute until golden color (don’t overcook, just make sure they’re cooked outside. Cook chicken in batches to prevent overcrowding the pan. Remove with a slotted spatula and put on 2 layers of paper towels to absorb excess fat.

Add 1 cup lemon juice to the potato/broth and 1 Tbsp honey, stir to dissolve  well and add chicken to the lemon broth/potatoes, let simmer for a good hour or so. Taste and adjust seasoning. The earlier you cook it the better so flavors really mingle.

Persian-Style Basmati Saffron Rice

Count 1 cup of dry Basmati rice for 3ppl.

3 Saffron packets

5 Tbsp Butter

In a bowl, put the rice and rinse several times with tepid water, then let it soak for up to 1 hour.

In the large Teflon pot, almost fill with water, add 1 Tbsp Kosher salt, bring to a boil. Strain rice and add to boiling water, let boil for approx 4 minutes, strain in a colander.

Add 2 Tbsp butter in the Teflon pot, along with 1/2 cup water, and 2 to 3 small saffron individual packets, mix well, bring to a boil, the gently fold in rice, mix gently with wood spatula until rice is yellow, then add on the top 5 pats of butter (max 1/2 Tbsp each) evenly spaced, cover with 2 papertowels under the lid and put on low for a couple of hours. Don’t touch the rice or stir.

Now for the tricky part.  When you are ready to serve,  remove the cover,  place the serving plate upside down on top of the pot,  and flip the whole thing over.   If you did it right, the entire rice “cake” should pop right out, and the crust should be a golden yellow-brown color.

Is it wrong to talk about V-day once it’s passed?

Too bad.

I’ve waxed poetic about emotional connections to food a few times now, and you can’t escape valentine’s day without seeing it first hand.

That’s especially true when your lady friend buys you an entire box of heart-shaped, red velvet whoopie pies from Tribeca Treats.

I countered with a box of Jacques Torres Chocolate, but I think we can all agree that she won this round.

Nom.

Well, there you have it- winter’s finally here, and we’re fresh into the new year.

With 2012 firmly in hand, I begrudgingly begin to act on those resolutions we all make: Lose weight, work out more, try not to eat a meat sandwich at Dickson’s every day, etc…

Initially I’m saddened by the self-imposed culinary guidelines that I’ve decided to adopt, but then I look at it another way: a challenge.

Eating well, nay, eating healthily, doesn’t necessarily doom you to the world of sadly scoffing down 32 egg whites every morning. Throwing out those egg yolks should be a crime.  We’ve all heard the saying that Fat=flavor.  While the foie gras, pork belly, and duck fat-loving French part of me agrees, flavor isn’t in a monogamous relationship with taste.

To put it eloquently,  there are a buttload of healthy, fresh things to eat in this world, and a ton of ways to prepare them.  I refuse to go the way of surrendering the culinary experience for the sake of a diet.

Might that be why healthy eating fails? Because you think you have to eat bland, ugly, processed food all the time? Have fun with that.

The above picture is my rebuttal.  It’s one of my favorite recipes. It’s healthy, filling, and hell, it’s even vegan (initially).

The recipe is a variation on the “Lively up yourself Lentil soup” from 101 cookbooks.  Here it is:

Let’s talk about variations.  Most of the time I leave out the greek yogurt, although it’s a delicious addition.  I’ll typically squeeze some lemon juice in there to taste, as well as smoked spanish paprika and cumin.

While the soup itself is filling in its own right thanks to the lentils, I like to add a protein component in order to mix things up.  This recipe makes a ton of soup, and can feed you through most of the work week. I have two favorite additions:

A sunny-side up egg:

And Spicy Seared Shrimp, lifted from Mark Bittman’s fantastic Shrimp Salad Recipe:

Give the soup a try. put your own touch on it.  If you see the recipe as more of a guide then you have more room for interpretation.  Make it your own and don’t be afraid to fuck it up (after all, it’s just vegetables and water).  Sometimes it’ll be “meh,” and sometimes it’ll be a revelation.  The great batches make it worth it, and it allows you to grow as a cook.

Hopefully this post inspires you to take on the same challenge of healthier eating without the depressing lack of flavor.  And before you go ahead and assume that I’ve sworn off my favorite fatty animal products, remember what literature’s favorite narcissist Oscar Wilde once said:

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

I think one of the travesties in mainstream American food culture is the kneejerk revulsion towards offal.  For those of you unfamiliar with offal, it typically refers to edible internal organs and entrails of animals.  Liver, intestine, myriad glands, brains,  the list goes on.  These animal parts span across the taste and texture spectrum, and pervade almost any culture.  Some preparations and parts are considered delicacies (Foie Gras, Sweetbreads) while others are known as being “poor food” (Tripe, tendon).

As I’ve mentioned before, I love odd animal cuts.  If we truly want to be more responsible consumers of animals, we have to go beyond eating organic, local, and traceable. Knowing how and where your animals come from is of the utmost importance, but there’s more to it.  We need to open ourselves up to eating more than just filet and hanger steak.  Call it the snout-to-tail movement, if you will.

Once you open your mind (and palette) up to eating odd cuts and offal, you’ll find that there are so many different types of flavors to work with.  Eating Offal was largely born of necessity; after all the prime, expensive cuts were sold, butchers would sell off scraps and offal at lower prices for lower-class families.

One of the more ingenious uses of leftover animal parts is scrapple.

Scrapple,  or as I like to call it, “The Foie Gras of Pennsylvania,” is “a mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and flour, often buckwheat flour, and spices. The mush is formed into a semi-solid congealed loaf, and slices of the scrapple are then panfried before serving. Scraps of meat left over from butchering, not used or sold elsewhere, were made into scrapple to avoid waste.” (Wikipedia)

While Wikipedia’s description might sound awful, let me tell you that it’s one of my guilty pleasures.

Scrapple is delicious.  It’s rich, fatty, and when cooked properly, simultaneously crispy and smooth. Its taste is the essence of pork (in the same ways that oysters taste of the ocean)  it’s the black sheep underdog of breakfast meats.  It’s powerful, unrefined, a bit greasy, and unapolagetic.

That being said, it’s got a bit of stigma to it.  Since the late 1800′s, scrapple has been a source of heated culinary contention, inciting debate reminiscent of message board flame wars in the pages of the New York Times: The Great Scrapple correspondence of 1872.

Even then, scrapple polarized the nation as a food product, with comments ranging from the eloquent compliment of “a positive luxury, throwing the Frenchman’s pâté de foie gras entirely into the shade,” to perfunctory insults, such as referring to the meal as a “culinary fraud upon the stomach.”

Try as I might, I know this blog post probably won’t convince you to try real scrapple.  As with many things, perception beats and seemingly defines reality. I did, however, find a more palpable gateway to trying this delicious breakfast meat:

West Coast Scrapple (pictured above) has made it their mission to make scrapple more approachable. It’s scrapple in terms of preparation, but its makeup is markedly different. For one, there’s no offal- No organ meat.  It’s also made with high-quality cuts of pork instead of unsellable scraps.  Additionally, the cuts they used to make it are much leaner.  What you end up with is scrapple that’s healthier and more accessible.

The folks at WCS were nice enough to send me a package to try out for myself.  There’s nothing I love more than getting pork products overnighted to me. Does this mean my food blog has made it to the big time?

The scrapple arrived packaged in a freezer pack, ready to go.  The next morning, I slapped some on the skillet.

It still has the comforting look of something you would want to eat as part of a greasy hangover treatment. The spices they’ve added to it give it depth that more than compensates for the lack of stronger-tasting body parts.  And while it’s quite lean (only 1 gr of saturated fat per 2 oz. serving), it tasted quite rich.

The Scrapple browned rather well, and it was a fantastic accompaniment to an eggy breakfast.  I’ll definitely be buying from them in the future.

I really appreciate WCS’ take on this traditional NorthEast breakfast meat.  My hope, though, is that it serves as a gateway meat for people so that they might be more open to consuming a wider variety of animal cuts in the name of responsible butchering and meat consumption.

Remember kids,  Offal is Awesome! Especially for breakfast.

Call me lazy, but I’ve been trying to keep it simple lately.  Especially in the presence of good ingredients.

It just so happens that a pound of said ingredients recently landed at my place.  Yesterday my friend Dorian (from Dorian’s Seafood Market) posted on my facebook wall saying she had some Nantucket Bay scallops she wanted me to try.  Not being one to turn away mollusky delights, I instantly wondered what I could do with them.

Fresh scallops beg to be treated simply.  they have a soft sweetness and texture to them that is easy to lose in the commotion of an overactive seasoner or a paranoid overcooker.  if they’re not fresh enough to eat raw you probably shouldn’t be eaten them at all, dontcha think?

These nantucket bay scallops are smaller than scallops people would pick if it were up to them, but I love that about them.  they’re bite-sized- you almost pop them like candy.

I decided to do them two ways.  only one of them made it to camera.

The one you won’t see is the ceviche. Lemon, orange, siracha, salt, pepper, and some cilantro.  let it sit (covered) in a fridge for a few hours and your set.

What I did manage to shoot was the pan-seared lemon-cumin preparation:

• pat the scallops dry
• Salt, Pepper, Cumin
• Get a pan very, very hot, and use a mixture of butter and olive oil
• sear it for maybe 2 minutes.  they should still be tender to the touch and opaque in the center when you take them off the fire
• remove the scallops, bring the pan back to the burner, and deglaze the pan with lemon juice (and white wine if you like)
• Serve with a giant, interesting salad (and stop using iceberg lettuce, everyone mocks you about that when your back is turned)