Dine In Brooklyn (aka Brooklyn Restaurant Week) is going on right now and until the 30th of March. Three (or sometimes two) course prix fixe for lunch and/or dinner for $21.12.

The hot-spots seem to be: Bay Ridge, Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene and, of course, Park Slope (including Blue Ribbon).

Neighborhoods with only one participating restaurant: Canarsie, Bushwish, Columbia Waterfront (which is really just WeCaGa for you n00bz), Coney Island, Crown Heights, Ditmas Park, Flatbush, Greenpoint, Mill Basin and Windsor Terrace.

Today I got another book sent to me from a friend. “Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors” by Andrea Nguyen. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. So I was more than pleased to receive it. I’m actually surprised it’s taken Vietnamese food so long to catch on with Americans, considering that it’s French influenced (due to France’s colonization of the country from 1858 until 1954), based on fresh ingredients, generally healthy and visually appealing. This book is HUGE. It breaks down Vietnamese cooking and dishes so they are simple and not intimadating. In the beginning is a brief history lesson and in the back is a descriptive glossary for the exotic ingredients.

I haven’t met anyone who didn’t like pho or a banh mi. But there’s so much more to Vietnamese cuisine than those two.

I really miss my mom’s banh xeo - savory crepes made from rice flour, coconut and tumeric and stuffed with deliciousness like shrimp, chicken, mung beans, bean sprouts and julienned veggies and eaten with lettuce, mint, cucumbers and nuoc cham (seasoned fish sauce and rice vinegar dipping sauce). It was so very good that even though I haven’t had it in over seven years, I can still visualize it, photographically remember the base recipe and practically taste it - hot and cold and crispy and crunchy and soft and little sweet and a little spicy and a little salty all in one bite. It was quality. It’s hard to find banh xeo the way my mom made it in restaurants in NYC due to either regional variations or half-assed cooking. Some place will serve it soggy and floppy. Some are too oily. Some aren’t yellow enough. Most of them are stingy with the stuffing. I won’t randomly order it in restaurants without a referral because I’m scared of being disappointed. And being let down by food really bums me out.

Something I love about Vietnamese food is that’s it is unpretentious: There are no rules to eating it*. You don’t want hoisin sauce in your pho? No problem! You wanna eat with your hands? Go ahead! Slurp your broth? Of course! Whenever my mom would have her white friends over, they were polite and respectful of etiquette (like not eating until everyone is seated and until the host takes the first bite), but my mom would yell at them to dig in while she was still cooking. Eat all you want and get as messy as you want. How can you not get into that?

*The only thing my mom was strict about was how I held my chopsticks: Paupers, she said, held theirs lower down, closer to the food and royalty could manage them from the very top of the sticks.

I am not a fan of most chocolates. I am picky about chocolate. I snub my nose at Mars and Snickers and just about any other chocolate candy you will find at the impulse buy section of a drugstore. I won’t even put a single Hersey’s Chocolate Kiss in my mouth. But I am a real sucker for Guylian’s Perles de Ocean. I think Pierre Marcolini is a chocolate artist and genius and could eat an entire box of his chocolates in one sitting. And I probably would if they weren’t so expensive. So I was kinda bummed that America didn’t have great commerical chocolates as Europe does. Until I was introduced to The Cocoa Room.

My old boss gave me a box of Chicago based The Cocoa Room’s Eclectic Mix Dragee (retail price $6-7* for 4 oz.) for Christmas of 2005. They are pretty, shiny, color coated chocolate coated sunflower seeds, almonds and peanuts (much prettier and shinier and delicious than M&M’s). They come in a clear and frosted plastic box tied with a ribbon. They just look appetizing. Not like a plain ol’ regular chocolate bar, which looks like, well you’ve seen “Caddyshack”.

I cannot tell you how fun it is to eat these things. The textures are amazing. The taste is sweet without hurting your teeth and not chalky like macro chocolatiers. The sunflower seed ones taste like chocolate covered Rice Krispies. The peanuts are coated in something delicious I cannot identify - I think it’s some sort of peanut brittle material. And dark chocolate covers (I should use the word “enrobed” because that seems to be a term people use to describe luxurious chocolate things) the almonds.

They have flavors like green tea, lavender blueberry, cayenne pepper, white ginger and pumpkin spice that I cannot wait to try. As well as chocolate covered fruit - apricot, blueberry and cherry.

www.thecocoaroom.com or available at various stores like Crate & Barrel

*That’s the price of a pack of cigarettes. I quit smoking a couple of months ago and now like to justify my spending on various things by reasoning, “Well, I’m not spending it on cigarettes!”

The James Beard Foundation released its list of 2007 nominees. Among the categories is “Writing on Food”. Nominated is:

Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford (click on the link to read a review by Anthony Bourdain - who seems to be doing a lot of “guest” jobs lately)

The Omnivore’s Dilema: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

The United States of Arugula: How We Become a Gourmet Nation by David Kamp

Matt’s reading Heat right now and loves it. He says it’s fascinating and captivating. I’m half-way through Arugula and it’s extremely well written and informative (and if you don’t know who James Beard is, it’ll tell you). I’m up the part where Italian food starts to get gourmet and popular in New York. Omnivore is on my Amazon wish list. Maybe one day I will make a post that doesn’t mention Amazon.com.

I was listening to an NPR podcast about an anthropologist, Timothy Jones, who basically went through people’s garbage for years. He was researching the eating habits of Americans. Jones came to the conclusion that the average American wastes about 14% of their food (or $600) a year. He said many people do their grocery shopping on Sundays, but barely use their perishables during the week (being too tired to cook after work). They also think they are being healthy by buying fresh fruit and veg, but they don’t actually eat a lot of it. Another factor is that Americans tend to buy more things in bulk and Europeans tend to buy smaller portions*.

Continue reading…

I consulted two food related message boards, a knife skill book and Alton Brown. I don’t think I’ve ever thought so hard about a $40 purchase. A new paring knife.

As it is now, I have a crappy little Sabatier (French) stamped paring knife that I only use on fruit. It stinks. It came in a Sabatier block knife set I got over five years ago for about $100 on Amazon before I really became infatuated with cooking. I would buy decent but cheap gear instead of high-quality and long lasting (expensive).

The knife I use is a Wusthof (German) santoku. It suits me well for most jobs, though sometimes I require more length and heft (insert penis joke). Did I want to get a Wusthof paring knife? My friend Jen would say, “Yes! It matches! Get the set!” And my German heritage tries beckon me. Wusthof’s are more commercially available, which is smart marketing as more and more Americans are taking cooking seriously. I went to Crate & Barrel and they had mostly Wusthofs and I even saw them at an outlet mall in Jersey.

I consulted that knife skill book I got and it says to get the smallest paring knife you can get (3″ or 3 1/2″). And as straight as a blade as possible.

I decided on the Global (Japanese) 3 1/2″ western-style GS38 - on sale at Amazon (qualifies for free super-saver shipping and tax free). Short? Check. Straight blade? Check. Good handle? Check. Globals are highly rated because so many pro chefs use them. What is alluring about Globals is that they are forged from one piece of metal (no rivets), lightweight and made from extra hard stainless steel so it stays sharper longer.

And then I got one of these jobs:

Miu (French) 20″ magnetic knife holder for $24.

Global also sells the same size for $115. Now I don’t know if they are worth paying five times more for. I am not certain, but they may contain treasure inside like frankincense or cigarettes or onion rings. Or it could be a total jack aimed at people who are obsessively product loyal like the suckers who buy the Apple Airport Base Station for $200.

I don’t remember the last time I wanted to see an animated Disney movie, but “Ratatouille” looks really cute. It’s about a mouse who lives in the sewers of Paris and has a gourmet palate. Disney was nice enough to dumb down the title for us uncultured Americans by spelling it out phonetically on their posters. Maybe it will get pudgy Cartman-like children to eat less crap.

The Trailer

Midtown Manhattan. Formerly known as the land of shitty pizza.

I say “formerly” as a new discovery has just saved this area from the seventh level of pizza hell. A find more awesome than James Cameron’s unearthing of the tomb of Jesus, but with no Discovery channel special (so far). I present to you one of the greatest inventions known to man:

Pizza Truck (with an oven in it!).

Pizza truck (actually called Jiannetto’s Pizza) serves all sorts of I-talian foods - pasta, sammiches, various types of parmigianas and, of course, pizza. Not just any pizza either, this is old school Sicilian style: Rectangular “slices”, all sauce, no cheese and done right - not to mention served fresh and hot, thanks to the futuristic internal truck oven. In addition to the foods I just listed, they also have (a limited number each day) Arancine (I-talian Rice balls for you filthy Americans). As I’m not super-fat just yet, I only ate the pizza and the arancine, so I can speak for the quality of the other stuff but, feel free to try it and let me know - my days of eating everything on the menu (over the course of time, mind you) are over. Continue reading…

Matt and I are moving to Carroll Gardens in a couple of weeks and I was excited about the prospect of joining, despite the mixed reviews, the food co-op in Park Slope. I’ve been reading about CSA (community supported agriculture) on various food blogs and looked up to see if there was one in my future neighborhood and what it entailed. I thought that you actually had to go work in garden a la a John Steinbeck novel. And I pretty much stink at gardening. I can’t even get herb gardens in my kitchen going.

What I found: For $475* you get 24 weeks of fresh, locally grown organic vegetables. Or if you want, you can get a half share for $245. They also offer farm fresh, free-range, antibiotic and hormone free eggs, organic flowers and local farm (but not organic) fruit.

You just pay, show up to the designated location (i.e. Saturdays from 10am-12pm) and pick up your junk. You also have to volunteer for two pick-ups during the season. Which, for me, may be fun if I get to meet local gourmands I can invite over for dinner and then take advantage of them by having them Pokey-sit. Or, at the very least, get good stories about hippies acting all weird and preachy. Or challenge pale, weak yuppie men to fisticuffs for my own amusement.

Locations in the five boroughs and Long Island: http://www.justfood.org/csa/locations/

*Yes, it seems expensive, but it works out to be less than $20 a week - which is on par to how much I spend on vegetables anyway. And less than half of what I buy now is organic. Can you believe Whole Foods wants $4 for a bunch of celery?! The Park Slope csa is only $340. Upper West Side is $600 and also offer meat and raw milk.

Electric kettles are a must if you love hot beverages. I would say ours gets turned on about a dozen times a day. Every Brit, Scot and Irish has one in their kitchen because they love tea as much as they love a pint. I don’t know why it hasn’t caught on here (except in hotels).

This dealie heats up water in seconds and frees up your stove’s burners. The best thing? It’s for the forgetful. You turn it on, leave to do some other shit and it turns out automatically after it comes to a roaring boil.

Alton Brown uses his to make hard boiled eggs in. We use it for our coffee (recently switching from drip to French press).

Now you are probably going to say, “Chewy, you are smart, funny, talented and beautiful and I’d hate to argue with you, but aren’t those things going to become obsolete when everyone has a Tasso-type machine?” No! Those on cup pod machine things are amazingly fast, but they won’t make you a proper cup. Water for coffee should be heated to about 190 degrees F and water for green tea should be heated to about 165 degrees F.

$10 from Amazon.com* (as pictured). They have $60+ Braun ones, but that’s a jack. Why pay six times more for something that just heats water? I guess if you are a sucker for designer names and chrome, but you shouldn’t be reading this blog if you are like that, anyway.

*Right now, they have a promotion at Amazon.com where if you buy four selected kitchen gadgets, you get one of them for free. And this electric kettle is in the deal. I’ve already taken advantage of it twice.