Get in my belly

I cannot believe I waited this long to get to Bon Chon (recall, the NYTimes piece on Korean fried chicken over a year ago). I went to Baden Baden some months back and was unimpressed, and mistakenly thought I’d have to put off a proper chicken fix until I got out to Flushing. But no, here it was, all along, right in K-town.

So good, it made Bert cry. (Okay, the weeping might be because it’s spicy.)

And yes, get the Large.

Name: Tim
Age: 33
Occupation: Cooker
Grocery shops: Twice a week
Cooks: Three times a week
Eats out: The other times that I don’t cook. Or a lot.

Favorite condiment: Mustard. There are five types in my fridge, from your typical Dijon, to German sweet, whole grain, extra spicy, and another extra hot German variety. and Sriracha gets a lot of play.
Favorite beer: Lately, Ommegang’s Belgian-style ales, NY-made, well-crafted beers
Favorite wine: You can see a lot of bubbly stuff in there. There is cava, a sparkling chenin blanc from the Loire, Lambruscos, and it’s rosé season, so that too.
Favorite takeout: Lately into Zaytoons, which is a sort of dirty local middle eastern spot with a serviceable shawarma sandwich.

Grossest thing in there: Probably a tie between the months-old half-drunken bottle of red Gatorade from a hungover morning, and the half-eaten Greek yogurt and overly sweet store-bought granola (try to make my own) although the champagne mangoes on top probably give the edge to the Gatorade. Also: the nacho-style cheese barely visible in the back of the top shelf. I actually kinda like the stuff. More a most embarassing thing as opposed to a grossest.

Other things of note: a foie torchon that I made a while ago covered in duck fat. And the Campari and gin visible on top of the fridge which illustrate my current Negroni obsession… also visible is a jar of pickled peppers from last years fire escape garden.

I am convinced that alfajores are the new hot cookie. (Macarons are so 2004.) The alfajor de nieve at Citizen Cake is a particularly wonderful specimen: tender, delicate, buttery discs cemented together by dulce de leche. Yes, that’s right: delicious, delicious dulce de leche. Also known as “substance I wouldn’t mind mainlining.”

Jim invited me to tag along with him and Christine yesterday on an eel expedition. Centovini is doing a Venetian dinner tonight, and they’re making bisato sull’ara, eel baked with bay leaves. In order to make this dish, Christine needed live eels. And moral support (more on that in a bit).

The eel expedition entailed two key steps.

1. Catching the live eel:

2. Killing the live eel:

The thing with eel is that even after it’s been decapitated and gutted, its muscles continue to undergo rigor mortis for hours afterward. The twitching and convulsing is a little freaky, and Christine prefers it when someone else is in charge of the dead eel bag.

Someday, I hope to have a home (that I actually own, though right now it seems more likely that I’ll win the lottery — especially sad, given that I don’t even play the lottery) that is filled only with things made by my friends or by me. This weekend, on his trip down from Montreal, David made good on his end of our barter and put me a little closer to that goal. I have about five months to get him outfitted for next winter, since I couldn’t seem to get my knit on this past one.

But back to my pasta bowls: Beauties, aren’t they?

And best of all, because David knows me and knows food and knows how I like to roll, he cleverly placed a little divot at the bottom of each bowl to catch some extra sauce.

We were in the process of scarfing down the entire basket of strawberries when I remembered that I owed winnie a photo of farm box strawberries.

Sadly, the strawberries this week are only about 2/3 as delicious as they were last week. That didn’t stop us though, and only five strawberries survived the first onslaught, only to be murderously dismembered and put in the icebox.

The survivors did not last long, as they were sacrificed along with a bowl of Shredded Spoonfuls the next morning.

The best banh mi I have ever had, hands down. Ba Xuyen in Sunset Park. This is the No. 1: a perfectly balanced combination of crusty, yeasty rice-flour baguette, a generous slice each of creamy, velvety-rich pork pâté, delicately gelatinous headcheese, salty-sweet smoked ham, and the zingy acidity of pickled julienned carrot and daikon. Cilantro and mayo bind all of it together into one truly transcendental mouthful. I could eat one every day. Actually, I could probably handle only half of one every day; you get a lot of banh mi for your $3.50.

I can’t believe it took me six years to get my hands on this. I have been remiss. But believe you me, I am going to make up for lost time. And lost sandwiches.

Also: trust the nice lady when she tells you that the avocado shake is really good. It is.

Probably best not to go here if you’re feeling the least bit hungry.

This is definitely becoming a regular Sunday brunch.

(Thanks, Matt, for the perfect soundtrack. Too bad you’re working, or I’d invite you over too.)

Chambers Street, enroute to the Tribeca Greenmarket, 7:45 a.m. this morning.

When I got home on Wednesday, our usual farm box pickup day, A. complained about how light it was, implying that we hadn’t gotten very much this week. When we opened it up, we realized that the majority of the farm box value was represented by a basket of succulent red jewels. Technically strawberry season began last week, but I was out of the country and thus opted out of last week’s box.

Also, my CSA has a blog now.