Get in my belly

David captures the whole Pied de Cochon head-eating experience better than I ever could. Makes me wish I were back there, right now.

But there’s (just a little) time yet for some Red Hook action:

Everyone goes on about the huaraches and tacos, but I have to say, these might be my favorite. Best tamale I’ve ever had in NYC. And god, I LOVE maduros.

Other recent highlights:
- Aquavit, which has made it into my top 5. If you’re a fan of bright, clean Scandinavian flavors (or bright, clean Scandinavian furniture design), this is the place for you. Oh, and there are those meatballs too. Unlike Franny’s, the check holds only pleasant surprises.
- Queen’s Hideaway, which impresses with its price point but disappoints with incredibly slow, inattentive service. (I guess you get what you pay for. Or don’t pay for, more like.) If you don’t like your food salty (sometimes inedibly so), this is not the place for you. Good ideas, imperfect execution, but I’ll definitely go back. There’s just something that feels right about it. And if I ever move out of Fort Greene, Greenpoint is where I plan to hang my hat. (Though by the time I get around to it, I bet I’ll be priced out of the hat rack.)
- Black bean soup, which is the first thing I think of when I make stock from the gleanings and leavings of a roasted chicken. I think I hate Whole Foods’ beans though. Soup is the first thing I ever made that showed me how magical cooking can be — all that flavor, coaxed out of ostensibly inedible bones, and the whole most definitely more than the sum of its parts. So much more.

Listening to:
- Animal Collective’s “Strawberry Jam”
- Stars’ “In Our Bedroom After the War”

Reading:
- (like everyone else I know) Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- Bonny Wolf’s Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes, and Other Kitchen Stories. If you liked Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant, you ought to read this one as well. I’m inspired to cook something from every single one of the essays in this book.

This is what Vermont looks like:

This is what LA looks like:

Raw peanuts at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market. God, California produce makes me weep.

Dim sum at New Capital in Monterey Park. This was my favorite (along with dou hua, or “flower tofu,” which is warm, creamy soft tofu that’s drizzled with a sugar syrup and SO FRICKIN’ GOOD): battered and deep-fried smelt, each stuffed with roe.

And what’s a post of mine without a picture of pork? From Pork Night #4 (I believe) at Kate and Ian’s:

Thanks, Marisa, for pointing me to the thought-provoking documentation of this couple’s wonderfully imaginative approach to food: IDEAS IN FOOD.

I can’t believe they’re giving all this away for free.

We pigged out at Au Pied de Cochon. Twice.

Pig-out #1: tête de cochon special. With clams and beans (that’s the pile around the head) and sea urchin (that’s what’s crowning the little guy). Any place that serves up pig’s head like this is my kinda place. Perhaps the best part of ordering this was when we asked how big it would be and our server replied, “Well, usually everything we say is for two people is actually for three or four, but this is really only enough for two.” And he was right. We went to town and dug up every tasty morsel we could find. And at the end, there was only a little mound — maybe a couple ounces’ worth — left for Steven’s breakfast. And yes, I ate an eyeball. And made David eat the other one. It was much meatier than the goat eyeballs I’ve had. We were disappointed when we were going in for the brain and our server informed us that they weren’t equipped to help us break it open out there at our table. His explanation made sense though: the roasting they do for the outside of the head probably doesn’t do a whole lot for the inside (overcooked brain = gross). He packed it all up for us to take home and crack open ourselves, and we nearly did, but after several more days of gluttony, we really hadn’t the stomach for it any more. So sorry, no brain dissection shots.

Pig-out #1.5: Le Club Chasse et Pêche. This is the braised suckling pig risotto with shavings of foie gras. Only Budapest could compete with Montreal in scale when it comes to foie, but Montrealers have got it down in terms of preparation and imagination. And there’s a really wonderful sense of humor that prevails here that you can read in menus and see in platings (see above pig’s head, for example). I like your style, Montreal. And I like your tasty beasts. Chasse et Pêche has great service. Perhaps some of the best service I’ve had in an upper-mid-range restaurant.

We took a break from pork for breakfast on Day 3

with smoked meat from the fabled Schwartz’s. Which was great, but Steven prefers the pastrami/liver at Katz’s.

Pig-out #2, PDC: There was less pig at this dinner, and it was found mostly in the potée de PDC (boudin, pork chunks, some kielbasa-type thing, etc.). Instead, we thought we might support the local foie industry and follow everyone’s advice to order the foie gras poutine. Which is AWESOME. The poutine at Duckfat in Portland was very good, but we probably could have downed another plate of PDC’s. Not only does the gravy have this additional dimension of richness and depth to it, but they also add a little (though not enough, it’s so damn good) jus alongside. Oh god, I want another one, right now. Also great: bison tartare. They give you a giant brick of the stuff, perfectly ground to an unctuous near-paste consistency. Well seasoned. And the eponymous pig’s foot. Delicious. Although it came with a weird sort of square croquette that was filled with meat-flavored grey goo that we weren’t so into. Not so great: the plogue à champlain (foie on buckwheat pancake with bacon, potato, cheddar, and maple syrup) was way too heavy on the maple syrup; and the tarte de foie gras cru au sel was only okay (too much mashed potato).

The only place I spent more time in than PDC was Jean-Talon. And is it any wonder why?

I wanted to write about this book yesterday but decided it merited its very own post and more attention than I could give it in the wee hours of the morning. Quite simply, it is one of the most engaging food books I’ve read this year (the others being Omnivore’s Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), and while not necessarily life-changing like the others, it’s stuck around in my head the past few days. Specifically, these essays about what people cook and eat when they’re alone made me think about what I cook and eat when I’m alone. And while I had expected this to be full of empowering manifestos for the solo diner, it turned out that most people eating alone are lonely. At one point I found myself marveling over just how many of these stories were about post-breakup eating habits.

And I’ve been thinking about that too. My most memorable period of party-of-one cooking and eating was in my first year in Italy (so many of these essays also seem to deal with being a hungry stranger in a strange land, not unsurprisingly) and also dealing with (or reeling from) the implosion of a relationship (the double-whammy seems to be the most common thread, of course). And that’s about as personal as I’ll ever get here. If you don’t consider the minutiae of my eating habits personal, that is.

That first year, before I had any real friends or any real life to speak of outside of knitting and feeling sorry for myself in the ugliest apartment I’ve ever lived in, I indulged in some serious alone-time eating habits. I already have the tendency to take a new food discovery or flavor I love and run with it, but there’s some special comfort in returning day after to day to the same thing when you’re feeling sad or lonely (at least one author in this book agrees), and so I found myself eating, for weeks at a time:

- a chicken thigh (the butchers in my small Italian town always sold the entire leg, so there was thigh AND drumstick), divested of skin and poached. Poaching meant barely covering the leg in cold water and adding maybe half an onion, a carrot, and celery stalk, bringing the pot to a boil and then turning it off. Through trial and error, I discovered this yielded the most succulent, flavorful result — especially if you let the chicken rest in the water until the whole thing was cool. Eating the chicken while still hot was generally a mistake, since the flesh was not only seized up from the heat, but inevitably it wasn’t as thoroughly cooked and needed to be dropped back in after a bite was taken out of it. That and it was dang hot. Oh, but I left out the most important part: I would pull all the flesh off the cooled, cooked leg and shred it and then drizzle the best olive oil I had in the house over it, sprinkle the chicken copiously with Maldon, squeeze a little lemon juice on, and then attack it with gusto. I hardly ever ate it with anything else.
- black beans (just like Jeremy Jackson! Whose essay made laugh out loud right from the opening. Laugh and run around making everyone else in the room read it too.), made into a soup with the liquid from the poached chicken (fortified with more aromatics/mirepoix) and lime juice and buzzed for just a little bit with the immersion blender. When I could find cilantro, that was added too. Usually some chile pepper and nearly always a dollop of yogurt. I would usually alternate these two things, the chicken and the black bean soup, so that I would always have chicken-y cooking liquid for the beans and wouldn’t be eating so much chicken (which seemed sort of unhealthy).
- pa amb tomaquet (just like Paula Wolfert! There must be something universal about eating-alone foods). My version required picking up a loaf of the pane di campagna (which I think they called pane dell’acqua or something like that) from the good bakery (there were so few, strangely, and yet so many butchers in this town) on Via Pollenzo and a perfectly ripe, juicy-to-bursting tomato from the town market. I would lay thick slices of the bread in the oven to toast, ideally till they reached 97% dryness. I would then take a thick end slice of tomato and scrub the toasted slices all over (but only on one side, unlike Wolfert), drizzle olive oil on it, sprinkle Maldon on it, eat. Repeat with another slice. This was largely inspired by this book, though I remember a New York pa amb tomaquet phase when I read about it in a John Thorne book too. They tasted totally different though.
- boiled potato. Preferably a floury one. I would just fish out the spud once it was done (too many times before it was done, even), break into it and inhale the earthy, mineral-scented steam wafting up from it, and then drizzle olive oil on it and sprinkle Maldon on top. (Methinks I see a pattern.) This is probably the saddest of the eat-alone foods, but it’s definitely the one I love most.

Weirdly, it’s not until I’m at my happiest that I cook up a storm for myself. Who knows why this is? Maybe it’s a tiny act of rebellion, a show of self indulgence to NOT eat a square meal like I was taught to. Or maybe it’s another way of pitying one’s self. Either way, just thinking about these is stirring up a craving. I can’t wait for a poached chicken thigh night.

You should definitely, definitely read this book. Especially you, Joyce. Now I want to know what everyone’s eat-alone food is. What’s yours?

I spent the weekend submerged in, surrounded and inundated by inspiration. I don’t know if it’s the independent-minded spirit of that big nation to the north or a certain DIY aesthetic, but this stuff is amazing:

- Haida art. Check this, this, and this out. First saw it in Vancouver a few weeks ago and then again this weekend, and the images have been floating in my head ever since.
- Slightly related to the previous: Emily Carr.
- Worn journal.
- preloved. Specifically, my newly acquired fashioned-old-sweaters preloved fall wardrobe.
- the new Manu Chao album (which isn’t really Canadian in any sense, except that I heard a sick track off it blasting from the speakers of a record shop while I was walking down Mont Royal in Montreal this afternoon.)
- Première Moisson, quite possibly the best bakery chain ever.

But more on Canadian gustatory delights tomorrow.

Last week, I was walking down the street on my way home from work, when something I saw out of the corner of my eye made me stop and send a text message:

Winnie: There’s a man walking down Park Ave with a cat sitting on his head.

A couple minutes later, I received this reply:

Steven: Must be a very rich and powerful cat.