Author Archives: Shannon

What All the Hip Sugar Plum Fairies Are Up to This Weekend

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sugar-sweets-cupcake-2012New Yorkers with a sweet tooth: you may now begin rejoicing. This Sunday, October 21 is the 3rd Annual Havemeyer Sugar Sweets Festival, a bacchanal of sugary goodness benefitting the City Reliquary. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with the City Reliquary, it’s a cool museum devoted to quirky New York artifacts. Ever wanted to see a display of paint chips from the L train or a set of dentures recovered from Dead Horse Bay? You’re in luck.)

Both bakers and eaters of sweet things are welcome at the festival, so head down to the intersection of Havemeyer and Metropolitan in Williamsburg on Sunday and check it out. Even if you don’t happen upon the PitchKnives jam on offer, there will be plenty of treats for sale, as well as contests like the Best Booze-Infused Dessert, Best Sweet Slice and Best Fall-Flavored Treat judged by professional confectioners. Check out all the details here.

Pump up the Jam: Cranberry Orange

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canningAs favors for our wedding last year, Jason and I decided to make a bunch of different homemade jams and give each guest a jar. Why this occurred to me, when I had little to no experience making jam, I have no idea. But aside from some bad pre-wedding dreams of giving botulism to everyone I loved on the same day, the plan went miraculously well.

So when I realized a couple weeks ago that I didn’t know how to bake, I resolved to make some jam for the Havemeyer Sugar Sweets Festival rather than botching a pie or cake. Jam, to me, is easier to deal with than baked goods because you can taste it and make adjustments before you’re done. Plus, the process of sealing the cans is a little like a mad science experiment. I am always inordinately pleased by that little sucking sound that the lids make when a vacuum forms inside the cooling jars.

For those of you who find the idea of preserving something intimidating, here are the basics: you put some sweet or sour stuff in a jar, you wipe off the rim and screw one of those two-piece canning lids on it, you put the whole thing in boiling water for a while, and then it pretty much takes care of itself. (Okay, there are a few more details you should probably mind, but not many. If you find yourself having botulism nightmares, check out Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan as a good resource book.)

Anyway, the fun part is making the jam itself, and for the festival, I went with an autumn theme: apple pie jam and cranberry orange jam. Here’s the recipe for the cranberry variety, which has a yummy sweet-tart thing going and a beautiful ruby hue: Continue reading →

Baggin’ It: Lunch Packing Tips

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brownbagThe lunch tips from our Baggin’ It Challenge are in, and our winners have been declared!* In this post, we’re compiling some of the ideas we received so that our readers never again have to worry about the grim prospects lurking within that brown bag.

Some Assembly Required: Picnics are inherently fun, so take one to work with you. Tearing off hunks of baguette and putting together the perfect combo of pesto, cheese and tomato is the kind of thing that never fails to cheer me. And as an added bonus, packing your lunch piecemeal keeps the bread or crackers from getting soggy over the course of the morning. (One caveat: If you’re packing a lunch for people other than yourself, you might want to clue them in beforehand—my father once choked down a plain dry bagel before finding the container of peanut butter my mother had packed in the bottom of the bag.)

Changing Form: Just because you have leftovers, doesn’t mean you need to eat them in exactly the same way the next day. My office has a microwave, but I rarely use it. You’d be surprised how good (and different) take-out like Chinese or Indian food tastes cold. Put some cold General Tso’s Tofu atop a bed of lettuce and veggies, and you’ve got yourself an excellent salad for tomorrow’s lunch. Continue reading →

Going the Distance

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scarecrow

"Come, ye food pilgrims!" says this scarecrow at Nixtamal.

How far would you travel for the perfect meal? That’s not a purely academic question for most food enthusiasts I know. I’ve been contemplating the importance of the food pilgrimage ever since our friend Ben mentioned the fact that “there are about four restaurants in Queens that people in Brooklyn are willing to travel to.” He and his wife Jenny had just brought Jason and me to one of these places, Tortilleria Nixtamal, in Corona (more on their heavenly homemade tortillas in a moment). The weird thing was, Ben didn’t even need to say the names of the other places he had in mind for me to instantly fill in the blanks with the restaurants I believed he meant: Dosa Delight in Jackson Heights, Nan Xiang in Flushing, and anywhere that is liberal with the feta cheese in Astoria.

I’m not sure what makes these places travel-worthy. I can say with reasonable certainty that I’ve never had and never will have the best meal of my life at any of them. But while I’m probably willing to put more time into traveling for food than most (see: any End of the Line post on this blog), it’s a rare gem that I’ll submit to slogging to repeatedly, and Dosa Delight and Nan Xiang make that list without question.

Perhaps part of it is the travel itself, the hardship endured for the sake of taste. When Jason travels to Jersey City and Sapthagiri Restaurant, I can see his eyes get wider with longing for majjiga with every rumble of the PATH train. Majjiga is a curious beverage, a sort of spicy cilantro-flavored lassi. (Interestingly, the menu translates “majjiga” as “buttermilk.” It is definitely not buttermilk.) As much as Jason enjoys the taste of majjiga, I think he enjoys equally the experience of telling the proprietors of Sapthagiri how far he has traveled to drink it, for which he is often rewarded with slaps on the back and a big pitcher of the stuff on our table. Continue reading →

One Order of Rollmops, Comin’ Up

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It’s been a wet and dismal week here in New York (even without the dying bananas and poisonous rice), so we thought we’d aim for a little mid-week lightness and sunshine with one of our food brainteasers. Can you match these obscure food terms to their meanings? Curl up someplace warm and treat yourself to hot cocoa if you get all of these right. Actually, just drink the cocoa anyway.

1. Laverbread
2. Omakase
3. Brunoise
4. Rollmops
5. Falooda
6. Socarrat
7. Tang
8. Gremolata
9. Poolish
10. Ballotine
11. Cynar
12. Waterzooi
13. Pigeage
14. Affinage
15. Kiwano

a. Pickled herring folded around pieces of onion, olives or pickles
b. A mixture of flour and water with a little yeast, used as a starter some forms of dough
c. The process of punching down the floating grape skins in fermenting wine to drown aerobic bacteria
d. An orange and yellow melon distinguished by the spiny thorns on its skin
e. The section of steel inside the handle of a chef’s knife
f. The art of aging cheese
g. A Welsh delicacy made from seaweed gathered from the rocks on the coastline
h. The toasted rice at the bottom of a pan, especially in paella
i. A deboned leg of a chicken, duck or other poultry stuffed with ground meat and other ingredients, tied and cooked
j. A classic Belgian seafood stew, sometimes including chicken, with an egg yolk-thickened vegetable broth base
k. A bitter Italian liqueur with a strong artichoke flavor
l. A traditional South Asian beverage of rose syrup mixed with vermicelli, tapioca pearls and milk
m. A basic knife cut measuring 1/8 inch by 1/8 inch by 1/8 inch
n. A multiple-course sushi meal chosen by the chef
o. A condiment made from finely minced parsley, garlic and lemon zest

Don’t click “continue” until you’re ready to see the answers! Continue reading →

Baking 101: As Easy As…

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dutch apple pie

Proof that I baked a pie! And that it bubbled over.

I can cook, at least at a level at which I can be reasonably confident of eating and enjoying the result, but I can’t boast the same self-assuredness about baking. A friend and co-worker recently asked me to bake something for the Havemeyer Sugar Sweet Festival (more about this awesome upcoming fundraiser in future posts) and blanching, I realized that, food blogger or no, I don’t know how to bake a damn thing.*

So this fall and winter, I’m going to try to teach myself to bake, and you will have the pleasure of watching all my mistakes. I considered doing a “Julie and Julia” sort of thing in which I try to go through all of the recipes in the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook that my mom gave me when I moved out of the house more than a decade ago, but there are like four or five whole sections in there filled with just baked goods, and really, who has the time? At any rate, I figured that whether I was seeking the alphabetical or philosophical beginning of any dessert list, apple pie would appear near the top. Besides, we had a lot of apples in the fridge.

pie ingredientsI came home with the ingredients for a Dutch apple pie and felt sort of ashamedly intimidated and decided to nap for a little while. Finally, though, screwing up my courage, I embarked on a crust. I had forgotten to buy shortening (doh!), so I used butter, and I also don’t have a pastry cutter, so I used a fork. Let’s just say that this was not ideal, and it was not the most beautiful piecrust in the history of piecrusts. But from there, the process got easier, maybe because I decided to start drinking beer while I peeled the apples. By the time the whole thing was assembled, it looked, if not impressively perfect, at least substantial. I had also made a colossal mess and used up a ridiculous amount of time. Apple pie, unlike Rome, can be built in a day, but if I’m the one constructing it, there better not be too much else going on. Continue reading →

Community News: You Don’t Bring Me Bananas Anymore

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Recently, our friend Eve mentioned in an offhand way that the banana as we know it is dying out. In addition to a wave of banana grief that washed over me, I also felt a small measure of relief; this was one of those news stories that I had heard a few years ago but from which I retained almost none of the scientific detail, and I had begun to think that I dreamed it. But no! The banana horror story is real, and I have collected some of its finer points here.

Black Sigatoka

Yikes! Black Sigatoka! (courtesy of APSnet)

The tragic end of the banana was built into its genes from almost the very beginning, or at least its lucrative economic beginning. In a quest to get more uniform, shippable and still edible fruit, the banana plant was made into a seedless version of its formerly wild self. That means that they are sterile and have to be grafted onto stems by human hands in order to survive. And the variety of bananas was drastically reduced as tropical nations made room for whole plantations of the anointed breed favored by the banana companies, called the Gros Michel.

But raising an army of sterile mutants has its drawbacks. For instance, they can’t naturally evolve to ward off disease, which is exactly what happened to the Gros Michel in the 1960s when it was wiped out by a fungus called Panama disease. This, of course, sent banana scions scurrying for a replacement, and they found a lesser but viable alternative in the Cavendish banana, the variety that currently graces your supermarket shelves. But—egad!—banana lightning does strike twice, and now the Cavendish is being ravaged by a fungus called Black Sigatoka (I am not making these names up, I swear). No adequate fungicide has been found. The prognosis for the Cavendish is bleak. Continue reading →

Lunch at the End of the Line: Love Is Grand in Inwood

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szechuan tofuWe aspire to honesty on this blog, dear readers, so I might as well reveal that I landed at the northern end of the A line, at 207th Street in Inwood, a touch hungover and in a mood that was verging on surly. Manhattan, with its gritted teeth and fake-it-‘til-you-make-it attitude, is usually a marvelous place for a hangover, so I was taken unawares by the blinding good cheer of Inwood. I wandered the streets in a daze, nursing a cup of coffee and trying to take it all in. Birds sang. Trees blew in the breeze. Even the streets themselves had a jaunty roll to them. Outside a mental health facility, the residents parked their wheelchairs and turned their palms and faces to the sun, slight smiles pulling at the corners of their lips. Was I still in New York?

On 207th, street vendors hawked their goods, but rather than the large established halal and pretzel carts of midtown, it looked like someone’s grandfather had wheeled his aging charcoal grill onto the sidewalk and decided to cook you a hot dog. One couple had piled a stolen shopping cart with plastic containers of fruit salad and was doing a brisk business.

There were plenty of restaurants here to choose from, most of them Mexican and Dominican, but I was drawn to a Chinese restaurant called Amy’s, where a man and woman about my age were poring over a menu hanging in the window. They paused every so often to happily embrace, almost sloshing coffee onto each other in their enthusiasm.

“Do you know this place?” I asked.

“No,” the woman answered, gracing me with a beatific smile. “But doesn’t it look amazing?” Continue reading →

Baggin’ It: A Lunch-Packing Challenge

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brownbagWith fall in full effect, it’s the perfect time for some work/school resolutions like “I will never again eat from that taco truck that gives me indigestion,” or “I will rise above the vending machines in the school cafeteria.” But even true food enthusiasts might be confounded by how to pack a punch with a packed lunch.

My mom hated packing my lunch when I was a kid. It wasn’t that she disliked feeding us—quite the contrary, actually—but the sameness of the old sandwich/apple/cookie routine bored her. She once schemed that if she packed a thermos of boiling soup in my brother’s lunchbox that it would slowly cook a hot dog that she nestled next to it. Unfortunately, the thermos was too well insulated and my brother ended up with molten soup and a still-chill dog.

Though the experiment failed, I continue to admire the innovative spirit involved in that endeavor, and we’ve decided to celebrate it here with a little contest. We’re calling on our readers to reveal their best lunch-packing secrets. How do you build a killer sandwich? How do you liven up those leftovers? How do you tell your kid “I love you” with only a banana and a toothpick to work with?

The readers with the best brown bag tips will not only achieve instant fame by having their ideas appear here on the blog, but will also win a special PitchKnives prize! Yes! So send your stories to submissions@pitchknives.com by next Wednesday, October 3. As always, creativity and taste both matter, so go ahead…make our lunch.

The Stillness before Second Crack: Adventures in Coffee Roasting

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coffee plant

Coffee is actually the seed of this fruit, not a bean at all...

I read recently that Honoré de Balzac took his coffee very seriously. He made his own special blend from three specific beans that could only be found in separate neighborhoods of Paris, necessitating a journey that took no less than half a day every time he needed to concoct a new batch. He eschewed common preparation methods in favor of the complex Chaptal-style coffeemaker, and during periods when he was actively writing, he lived on little more than fruit and coffee. Balzac said, of coffee’s influence, “Ideas swing into action like battalions in the Great Army on a battlefield…Memories enlist at the double…and flashes of inspiration join the skirmish; faces take form; the paper is soon covered in ink.”*

You might think that the attention Balzac paid to coffee sounds so extreme that it has the ring of fiction, that it can be easily dismissed as no more real than the obsessive attributes of his characters. At some point, I probably would have agreed with you. And then I started working at Solid State.

Ask anyone at the small IT firm and they will stridently claim that they are not coffee experts, merely hobbyists, but they will say it in the same breath as they deride the tobacco undertones to the most recent inferior cup they happened upon. Continue reading →