Flavor of the Week 2 Purslane

The second issue of Flavor of the Week is out- this week's highlight ingredient is purslane!

Work beckons, so I can only upload photos for now but it was a ton of a fun cooking with an ingredient I rarely get to use- I hope you like this salad as much as I do!

If you don't have a grill, searing the peaches in a pan would work too. Follow the same steps up until the grill. It will taste great both ways.

Finding stracciatella cheese: (you can substitute with burrata)

Two Brooklyn spots-

The Brooklyn Larder

The larder flys in their burrata from Italy every Thursday!

Marlow and Daughters

In Manhattan-

Agata and Valentina

And if you're over by the Union Square Market, stop in the Whole Foods right there.

Flavor of the Week Begins!

After volunteering a few times at Brooklyn Grange, the most incredible rooftop farm in Brooklyn, we've paired up to give the farm's CSA members recipes with their basket each week. If you've ever belonged to a CSA you know that half the time it's hard to even identify what you've received that week- that's where I come in to show you how to use the ingredients you haven't worked with before! I'll be posting each week's recipes and a few pictures on how to get through them. If you belong to the CSA and have more questions about what to do with what The Grange is dishing out that week- give me a shout!

The farm is absolutely gorgeous! It's right over the bridge in Long Island City on top of a mostly unoccupied warehouse with stunning views of Manhattan. It farm stretches the entire roof with beds sprawling across like rainbows of different vegetables and herbs. It's really incredible to see a sanctuary of growth in the middle of this city.

Right before spring, Erik and I helped build the greenhouse to protect the veggies at the start of the season.

Getting creative latching the cover together.
Squiggle wire!

Elise and I hoeing away! We learned the hard way that it takes 3 people, 2 hours, and unbearably sore arms just to turn one bed to get it ready for planting.

Brooklyn Grange's website posts all their open volunteer days and if you ever get a chance, you should really get your hands in the dirt over there- until then, have fun with your CSA basket.

Here's the first of many issues of Flavor of the Week!

Raw Kale Salad

The dressing for the salad is super simple- garlic, shallot, vinegar, olive oil, lemon juice...

Cut your garlic and shallot up as finely as you can- they are pretty harsh to bite into raw, so you're looking for just a hint of them in the dressing, not chunks.

Try making a paste with the garlic before adding it to the dressing. Using the back of a knife, press the garlic with course salt back and forth on the cutting board until it becomes pastey- then whisk it in with your dressing.

Try to get your kale into small ribbons...

Mix it up- you're done!

First Signs of Summer Cocktail

Lavender is super strong, so when you make this drink- follow the recipe closely or the simple syrup with have a soapy taste.
This recipe makes more than you need for the drinks and the simple syrup will hold in your fridge for awhile- save it for next weekends drinks!

My favorite summer drink is also my favorite popsicle- I froze my batch with some crushed blueberries for gin, lavender and blueberry popsicles. After a hot bike ride home, these are amazing!! They'd work with any fruit- I just saw some beautiful strawberries at the market today, throw a handful of those in instead, either way, it's going to be delicious.

Happy first CSA- let summer begin!

Next and Aviary

If Grant Achatz wanted people to view dining and drinking differently, he definitely accomplished that with Next and Aviary.

He established the "best restaurant" in the country using techniques far ahead of our culinary norm and then opened Next, a themed restaurant with the opening theme of "Paris 1906, Escoffier at the Ritz." I can't think of more opposite cooking styles to pair up against each other- but I think he was making a statement. With proof of his gastronomic abilities set in stone, I think he set out to prove that he could cook the foundations of cooking absolutely perfectly. And he did.

Our menu offered the numbers for each course that corresponded with it's recipe from Escoffier's book. The diners next to us actually brought the book and were critiquing each course according to the encyclopedia as they took each bite. It looked like they were in agreement- these were the classics, the foundations of cooking themselves, done absolutely perfectly by the master of molecular gastronomy- Grant Achatz.

Outside of just the food making a statement, the entire concept of both Next and Aviary made a statement.

Reservations for Next, scored via email list and internet only design the eaters to be young and internet savvy. Orders at Aviary are taken via Iphone. Our servers at Next were so lax that almost every course was delivered with a borderline inappropriate joke such as - "And this petifour is a wine cork, the other one is a grown up Gusher" and when the turtle consomme was put in front of us it was "I hope you guys didn't have turtle sanwhiches for lunch." Statements were being made left and right- his staff wasn't trained to grab Michelin stars, they were trained to poke fun at the food and entertain. What was interesting as we looked around was that most tables were groups of four, not like the two tops filling Alinea. The menu in pictures below:

Potage a la Tortue Claire

Filet de Sole Daumont

Supremes de Poussin

Caneton Rouennais a la Presse

Pommes de Terre a la Dauphinoise

Salade Irma

A little taste of 1906- Liquid Nitrogen Sancerre...hmmm...

Finally- Bombe Ceylan

Next door, connected by a shared bathroom space, is Aviary- the drink spot where line cooks spend their night forklifting ice out of the mini-cooper sized ice machine and chiseling it away. 22 kinds of ice fill up the mis-en-place for the line...bartenders??

They have stations like a kitchen, each cook...or bartender...is responsible for a handful of drinks, allowing them to concentrate fully on their stations drinks. Set up behind a cage where tall bar tables allow people to stand and watch their drinks being made- there's an entire open kitchen devoted to drinks.

A friend from work knew the guy on expo so we got a pretty awesome tour of the underground prep.

We hung out in the ice room where some guy spends his day creating these 22 different kinds of ice. There was a circulator reading negative numbers, a small crane to life blocks of ice, trays of silicone molds holding different shapes and flavors of ice, and injecting needles for drinks "in the rocks."

Some pictures of the drinks!

The White Russian with frozen milk that slowly melts into your drink

The Rooibos in the backround- a drink brewed table side and the Blueberry- where liquor infuses into a rainbow of ingredients

The Ginger with ginger infused ice!

Why don't more people live on Martha's Vineyard?

Martha's Vineyard is a food lover's heaven.

It's wrought with specialty stores, sprawling farms and blessed with beautiful seafood. I just spent the most wonderful weekend being reminded that cooking is a celebration of what's around you- and on the Vineyard, that's a lot of amazing food!

Living in New York makes it easy to forget how difficult it is to make a simple meal. Granted in New York we have access to sort-of-locally grown produce at Union Square and fantastic seafood at the Chelsea Market, but to gather them becomes an all day event. On the Vineyard, there really isn't another choice than to drive to the water, buy fish caught that day and then head to a farmstead to pick up accoutrements grown in the backyard farm.

Browsing the Vineyard's offerings was absolutely invigorating. I'd never cooked or eaten bluefish but at Larson's Fish Market- that was the only whole fish they had.

I came at the perfect time. When I asked for whole fish, the butcher in the back was mid-breakdown of a bunch bluefish caught that day and had a few stunning bluefish untouched. He warned me that a lot of people don't like this fish because it tasted...like fish. That's perplexing, but I was a little nervous that my eaters would prefer a more mild fish but when I arrived carrying a black garbage back filled with bluefish, they went wild- bluefish is their favorite!

While he gutted them for me, I picked up a few of the lobsters they pulled in from traps that morning and reveled in how cool it was that these weren't flown in from Nova Scotia like the ones I schlep in and out of a boiling vat of water every day at work. I know that our fish is in the restaurant is fresh, we get it literally hours from being caught and it's probably the nicest in the city...but standing a few hundred yards from where your purchase was caught makes fresh feel a little fresher.

I spotted some tuna steaks and asked if they had any offcuts. With that beautiful of a fish, I hardly wanted to put heat to it. A nice thick piece would be much more suitable to give a quick sear to than these steaks. The butcher pulled out a bunch of scraps and let me have my pick! I landed the perfect scrap!

Seared tuna with the coveted avocado puree that the group is still torturing my amazing "sous-chef" for. Luckily, he's pretty loyal.

Before I knew it, my bag was so heavy that I couldn't carry it and I'd forgotten what I even planned on making for dinner. Now I had scallops, mussels, tuna, and two bluefish. Woops. Now what?

We pulled over the car at the first farm stand we saw- Fiddlehead. I walked out with everything I needed, including San Marzano tomatoes! The freshest ingredients spurred the simplest dinner and one of the most memorable meals I've ever cooked.

There's got to be a way to bring that level of simplicity to a restaurant without it getting muddled in yelp.com reviews and michelin stars. What if your dream restaurant included a ban on feeding anyone that worked for Michelin? That dream is most likely the exact opposite of every fellow line cook in NYC but I wonder if people sat down to a meal without critiquing it and instead took each bite with appreciation for where it came from then eating might become more of a celebration than a judgement of a cooking competition. Call me crazy but if I got to cook meals like the one on Martha's Vineyard every night to people that really just appreciated good ingredients...I'd stand by that dream.

FISHIES!