SHISO!!!

When Ben told me that he had a surplus of shiso- I was pumped! I've never worked with it and the other night at Blue Ribbon, I had a friend run back to the kitchen to snag a leaf so I could get an idea for some pairings. Naturally, raw fish came to mind, so I have a great recipe for ceviche. The other two recipes were inspired by mostly heatless, totally ovenless desires. I'm ready for this heat wave to end. Have fun with your shiso this week- I totally fell in love with it's unique flavor!

Making granita!

Flavor of the Week 5 Rainbow Swiss Chard

I loved getting this swiss chard! It was so SO awesome!!!! It was the cutest bundle of vibrant rainbow stemmed leaves that tasted so great! I can't stop feasting on this quiche either- enjoy!

How cute is this??

A quick visual guide to the roasting garlic section: (it's so simple!!)

Trim the top off, sprinkle with olive oil and salt.

Package it up in a little bubble of foil and throw it in the oven and let it roast away!

Here's a little shot of what the farm is looking like today- it is SO GREEN UP THERE! I can't believe the amount of vegetation that is flourishing up there. It is really a miracle up there. Walking through beds of chard, I stumbled on a big purple shies plant and couldn't get over how cool it was that what looked like a week on this massive rooftop farm...was shies! Get up there and check it out soon if you haven't yet.

Getting Southern! Week 4

Collard greens were so foreign to me when I first tasted them. They are often bitter or intensely flavored and a lot harder to work with than something mild like spinach. They absorb flavor so well though that cooking them this way makes them so delicious! When I was in Tennessee we used Benton's bacon to flavor our cooking liquid...actually we used Benton's bacon for everything, but our collard greens were superrrrrb! I couldn't get my hands on any Benton's nor could I locate some ham hocks, although I did scrounge up an old ham leg bone from the kind they slice at the super market. Okay, so I couldn't pick the meat off the bones and mix them in with the greens or find super crunchy pockets of bacon lardons in each bite, but it still flavored the batch well.

Flavor of the Week 3 Pickles!

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!