I first heard about Reds Produce from a FOH trailer at The Restaurant. He mentioned it was right around the corner from where I live. I looked it up on Gothamist (which was the only site that had any real information about the place) and walked by it last night after Matt and I got burgers from Hope & Anchor and picking up a large supply of Twinning’s English Breakfast Tea from Fairway ($10 for a hundred pack!).

Tonight Matt and I went for dinner. It’s a super tiny tapas bar (28-seats and a max of 44 people) right by Moonshine. Working the bar was Red himself (who was born in northern Spain and used to be in the hardcore band YDL) along with Pamela–both extremely welcoming and friendly. They’ve only been open three weeks and are awaiting their liquor liscense–they will have draught beers and Spanish wine ($5 house wine!). Soon they will be selling produce and dried goods–most of it is imported from Spain. So I guess locavores aren’t supposed to be down with it, but dude, it’s got less “carbon footprints” then actually flying to Spain. In your self-righteous face!

Meat and cheese plate: Featuring drunken goat cheese (the rind is washed in wine), serrano ham, membrillo, dried fig and almond cake, some really extreme gnarly blue cheese (cabrales) that looks like it’s fifty years old, manchego and some other cheese.

Small tres colores salad: Carrot with tarragon, beet root and celery root.

Warm chorizo that was super intense. I’m talking caliente, papi!

They want to have live music as well as screen films from local artists. At first they were open ass early for breakfast, but as of now they are open every evening until ten (they are going to change their hours to stay open later).

Reds Produce is located at 289 Columbia Street between Summit and Woodhull (in that area some people call Carroll Gardens, others call Red Hook and a few call Columbia Street Waterfront), Brooklyn (718) 506-5432

Being a grown-up means things like responsibility and jobs and taxes and cleaning up after yourself. It also means you can do whatever the hell you want. From eating chorizo, chippos and soda for dinner to staying up until four in the morning playing videos games to not being forced to go to church or piano lessons. And that’s fucking awesome.

It also means that you get to buy your own shit for your own place. No more plastic on flower printed couches and and stupid, ugly, useless chotchkeys. Shit like new dishes!

Matt and I went to Fishs Eddy on 19th and Broadway to get new plates, bowls and flatware recently.

We selected from The Diner Whites line, which are off-white, of restaurant quality (read: really heavy and sturdy) and has a large selection of shapes and sizes.

We got six each of large dinner plates ($6 each), lunch plates ($4.50 each), soup plates ($5 each) and cereal bowl ($6 each). We selected modern and heavy 18/10 stainless steel flatware, which cost $5 for each piece.

Fishs Eddy is located at 889 Broadway at 19th Street in Manhattan.

You should buy these dishes if you hate getting laid.

One of my best friends and awesome comfort food cook, Joe, got me “The Zodiac Cookbook” for Xmas. It’s a little digest sized, 60-page, picture-less and smelly book for superstitious housewives from 1969. Here’s my food horoscope:

Scorpio

October 24-November 22. Its symbol is the Scorpion, and its element is Water. Topaz is its birthstone, and Tuesday is the luckiest day of the week.

Determination, persistence, and concentration are the qualities to be found in a Scorpion, and when carried into the kitchen, these make for an able homemaker and cook. But truth to tell, Scorpio is not usually found in the kitchen, but rather out in the world on the larger fields of battle. Keenly intuitive, you are at great advantage in mental skirmishes, and although secretive yourself, you have a vast talent for making your adversary reveal more than she intends to. Scorpio likes to play with idea of money, and the power which it will bring her, and often will hide small sums in the cookie jar against a rainy day! The Scorpion quivers with controlled energy, and potential power. The drive for power is intense and is at its best when directed towards the love of humanity. You enjoy good restaurants and finely prepared, elegant foods, so eat out whenever you can! The following are some of your favorite foods, with recipes provided, but we don’t expect you to cook them yourself!

Followed by recipes for paella, sweet and pungent shrimp and mussles mariniere.

Translation: You could cook, but you can’t because you are too busy being a catty housewife who hordes her money to spend on restaurants.

This book is awesome. I’ll be posting more.

If only one day in the future, Perdue could teach me how to roast a chicken. Now where’d I leave that jar of cash for my marijuana cigarettes?

Jamie Oliver’s new cooking show is awesome.

It’s odd they named it “at home” considering all his other shows were filmed at his main home in London. This show takes place at his fancy country home where the fucker grows copious amounts of his own amazing, beautiful produce. Also, this home has like three or four kitchens. One of them being outside. With a wood burning oven. Fucker.

Every episode is seasonal, so you won’t see him making anything with, say, tomatoes right now. Using only seasonal produce also means that the shit he uses is not only readily available, but dirt cheap. Things like raddichio, carrots, beets, fennel and squashes. The only expensive thing you will have to purchase is super good quality extra virgin olive oil, as he drizzles it over everything.

Jamie At Home is on the Food Network. Only on Saturdays at 9:30am. Get a DVR as I think this is one of the very few cooking shows worth watching.

The US version of the accompanying cookbook won’t be available until October ($25), but already out in the UK, which you can order it through UK Amazon ($36 with shipping). Some of the dishes on the show I’ve found in his Cook with Jamie book.

I hope in his next series he raises, slaughters and butchers all sorts of livestock.

Oh, these? Yeah, I grow my own potatoes. What, you don’t? 

As I mentioned before, Quench, the douche bar on Smith Street closed down. I was pretty psyched to hear a wine and cheese bar was opening up, because I love cheese. And although I know almost nothing about wine, I do enjoy it now and then.

I’ve been into the replacement bar, The Jake Walk, on Smith Street a handful of times since it opened. Of course, with my luck, they always stop serving food just at the time I get there after work. I went in this week with some of the waitrons from The Restaurant. I ordered a $6 glass of blended red. It smelled like ass. I tasted it. It tasted like ass. I gave it to everyone at table to sample to see if I was wrong and everyone smelled it and refused to take a sip. So I placed the glass on the far, empty end of our table to signal to the server or bartender there was a problem. Too bad the bartender and barwench were too busy chumming it up with each other and not keeping an eye on the bar or the tables. Eventually the bartender comes over and after using the word “ass” and asking him to smell the wine he gives a diplomatic answer that everyone has a different palate. I ask for a glass of the $5 wine my friend was drinking. The tab comes and they end up charging me for both glasses. Fucking lame.

Isn’t it part of a bartenders job to make sure their stock is up to par? Especially while working at a wine bar, where your product can go rancid in a few days? I mean, at some restaurants, servers have to get the manager to smell and taste every bottle that’s opened or has been opened for a couple of days. Also, being a new bar, wouldn’t you try not to alienate customers?

What I do like about the place is the decor and the concept. I would love to go back. But too bad I’ve only seen the same three people working the bar and I don’t like the cut of any of their jibs. I’ll stick to the beer bar (Bar Great Harry) across the street, where they are very welcoming, apologetic if anything gets fucked up and not up their own asses.

The Jake Walk
282 Smith Street, at Sackett
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

Smugness Alert: Code Orange
Attentiveness of staff: D
Decor: A-
Food: I wouldn’t fucking know and I’m bitter about it
Drink menu: Too big for me, but I guess serious wine and whisky drinkers will love it
Ratio of female to male customers: Clam Bar, 6:1

Yeah, keep on Jake Walkin’ until you hit Bar Great Harry.

Are you a housewife who doesn’t know how to cook? Ashamed that you will get beatened by your husband when he comes home from work and you don’t have dinner ready? Is ramming a whole chicken into a hot oven too complicated for your tiny, inferior female brain? Have no fear! Perdue’s here to help!

It’s as easy as putting on lipstick!

Chicken not scarey. Chicken friend.

I spent a weekend watching the entire first season of Showtime’s “The Tudors”. It’s about the early days of King Henry VII and watches like Melrose Place, except with more graphic sex scenes. They put a lot of money into the beautiful costumes and CGIs of castles, but my only complaint is that they put no research and no money into the food. The king’s feasts usually include lots of bunches of grapes, some citrus fruits, pomegranates and figs. Where are all the thirty course banquets with four foot tall swans made out of pastry crust and decorated with real feathers? I found this information about food in The Tudor period online:

“Three-quarters of the Tudor diet was made up of meat - oxen, deer, calves, pigs or wild boar. They also ate a lot of chicken and other birds - pigeons and sparrows. Peacocks may have been eaten by the very rich.

Meat was roasted, boiled or made into pies. Fish was baked, fried, grilled or boiled.

Tudor food was served in a sauce flavoured with herbs and spices.

Bread was always served with a meal.”

Where’s the beef, Showtime? Can’t you hire some art school intern with a laptop and some Fimo clay?

“The Tudors” on Showtime. First season available on On Demand or on Netflix. Second season starts soon.

Sexual content: A

Betrayel content: A

Food content: F-

Throw a food nerd a bone.

We bake cakes whenever a staff member at The Restaurant has a birthday. (Except mine, which fell on a closed day, but I bring it up all the time that I am offended I didn’t get my creme brulee cake in the shape of buttocks.) So last week it was one of the servers birthdays and he mentioned that he wanted a chocolate bacon cake. And I was to bake it. So my chefs brought in some cookbooks and I selected the World War II Chocolate Mayo Cake from America’s Test Kitchen: America’s Best Lost Recipes.

It sounds pretty gross, but makes sense when you think about it–mayo is made up of egg yolks and oil (plus a shitload of stablizing chemicals and preservatives if you use the store bought kind) . The advantage of using mayo in a cake? Super moisture. Moist like whoa. So moist that you don’t need milk with it. And no, it doesn’t taste like mayo.
Below you will find the recipe, which I fucked with a little.

Crap you need:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder (I’m not quite sure what this means as I don’t really like chocoalte and I don’t bake – I used whatever we had at The Restaurant)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup mayonnaise (I used Hellman’s Real Mayo)
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (please use real bourbon vanilla extract so your cake doesn’t taste like fake ass)
• 1 cup water

How we do:

1. Adjust oven rack to the middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9-inch baking pan (they recommend square, I used round). Sift flour, cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda in medium bowl.

2. Stir the mayonnaise, granulated sugar, and vanilla together in a large bowl until smooth. Add the water and stir until combined. Whisk in the flour mixture until incorporated. (I used the Kitchen Aid for this.) Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes. Cool completely in the pan, at least 45 minutes.

The frosting we used was a sour cream and sugar mix that I wasn’t too crazy about. We smoke our own bacon, so we took a hunk of it, sliced it, cooked it down and then candied it with some sugar and decorated the cake with it.

If I had to make it again, I’d reserve the fat rendered from the bacon and make the icing with that. Or even add it to the cake batter.

Maybe you like your cake a la mode? Here’s a recipe for candied bacon ice cream.

I didn’t have time to take a photo of it, so here’s a photo of someone else’s bacon cake:

I dub thee The Cartman Cake.

Kitchen knives are to me what wands are to witches and wizards in Harry Potter. Not every knife fits every person. You have to be comfortable holding your knife. Preferance for size, shape, weight, balance, metallic make-up all vary from cook to cook.

Really, for the home cook, you only need three knives: A chef’s knife, a paring knife and a serrated knife. And the latter two can be cheap–in price and quality. (And if, for some reason, you don’t eat fresh crusty bread, then you don’t even need the serrtated one.) Unfortunately this doesn’t apply to me, so I end up spending lots of money that probably seems ridiculous to you. But I do like sharp, shiny, pointy things.

I have recently purchased three new knives. I already posted on my new chef’s knife. The only problem with it, is that it’s too large to keep on my station at work during service. So I bought a utility knife which I use as a service knife to do little a la minute jobs–like chiffonade parsley, trim down protein portions and cut pasta sheets. It’s the same brand as my new chef’s knife (Kikuichi) and almost as expensive, but didn’t come with a wooden sheath. The manufacturer calls it a boning knife for some reason. Maybe this is a mistake in translation or maybe they like to make boning things hard for themselves in Japan. 6″ and is carbon steel sandwiched between stainless steel.

Next up is the Wusthof Cruster Buster serrated knife. The fucking this is a called a Crust Buster! It’s 10.5″ inches long and is shaped like a curved chef’s knife for maximum busting through of crusts with minimal effort. $60 with free shipping from Amazon.com. It pretty much rules.

Finally, we have the slicer. Used to, um, slice through meat. Called a sujihiki in Japanese. Using my chef’s knife to make pretty slices out of dozens of portions of meats a night was clumsy and awkward. Kinda like using a toilet wand to brush your teeth. As expensive and the same length as my chef’s knife (9.5″) and obtained from Bowery Kitchen. It’s fucking dreamy and cuts like a hot knife through butter. Using it brings a big shit eating grin to my face.

On knife care: It seems like everyone has an opinion on how to proper care for you knife: Some people hone it on steel before every use (which I don’t). Some people say to never use a diamond honer (which I do). Some people say to never use a honer and only use a sharpening stone (which I use once a week). I find it’s like masturbating–everyone has their own technique to get to the same end.

Alton Brown brings his knives (he is the spokesman for Shun brand) to a professional sharpener, which I was bummed to learn because he’s usually a big D.I.Y. guy.
Now I just have to figure out how to properly dispose of unwanted knives as it’s probably illegal to just leave them on my stoop like people do with clothes, books and old electronics. Anyone have any information regarding this?