Author Archives: Shannon

Food Haiku Contest!

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Half of National Poetry Month has already slipped by! Doesn’t it make sense to use these last two weeks of April to create something poetic and tasty? As motivation, we’re holding a food haiku contest. Send us your best food-themed haiku by Monday, April 28th. We’ll post our favorites on the blog, and the top haiku will score its author an awesome prize.

You remember how to write a haiku, don’t you? You definitely learned in second grade. Here’s an example:

food poetry

Photo from Smithsonian Magazine

This onion bagel
Spackles the hole in my heart
With its thick cream cheese.

If any brave individual wants to experiment with more complex poetic forms, we will definitely post those endeavors, as well, but for the purposes of the contest, we’re just looking for the ol’ 5-7-5. Send your entries to submissions@pitchknives.com. Please limit two haiku per contestant. Happy poem-writing, everybody!

File with the Takeout Menus

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Last night, while I was struggling to pull myself together after a weekend out of town, I was reminded afresh of the bounty of the New York City take-out scene. With dozens of places willing to deliver until late, it’s a miracle that I ever manage to cook anything at all. But how to choose with so many possibilities? I made this flowchart to help me decide; feel free to use it if you live in the neighborhood or try making your own.

takeout flowchart

My Beef with Culinary Prodigies

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mcgarry

Glamour shot of Flynn McGarry from the recent NYT Magazine profile

Being both a writer and a voracious eater, I work up a nerdy store of anticipation in advance of the annual food issues of The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. So there was a little twinge of disappointment in my heart when I finished the cover story from this year’s NYT Magazine offering. It’s about Flynn McGarry, a fifteen-year-old prodigy chef, who aspires to own a New York restaurant by the time he is nineteen. Am I the only one who thinks that the editorial choice to focus on this kid, above all other possible stories from the world of food, smells kind of funny? Like something just went really rotten in the crisper?

Let me be clear, before the haters get all over my case: I have never tasted anything from the kitchen of Flynn McGarry, but I have no doubt that he is very talented (and cute—he kind of has a young Harry Connick, Jr. thing going on). And I totally buy the idea of culinary prodigies being a real phenomenon; the mix of physical and conceptual skills necessary for preparing inventive haute cuisine seems similar in many ways to those celebrated in musical prodigies. And we can even leave aside the fact that every quote from his mother, Meg, made me grind my teeth in irritation, because that’s just me being a judgmental jerk.

So why do I have a bee in my bonnet about this? I think what bugs me about McGarry’s story (and maybe all child prodigies’s stories) is that it seems engineered mostly to serve adults’ delight at a high-class version of a freak show. “Hey, look, the kid who made the asparagus gelée I’m eating can’t even drive a car yet! Dance monkey dance!” It feels a little icky to me. I buy that McGarry cooks because he loves it, and it’s cool for his parents or other people in his life to encourage that love. You want to grow edible flowers and micro-lettuces in your backyard? Go for it. You want to roast a couple of goats over a fire with the owner of Alma? Knock yourself out. But why the need for an eleven-year-old to start a weekly $160-a-plate supper club patronized mostly by L.A.’s rich and famous? Continue reading →

More Gadgets from Nancy: Time Travel Edition

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Yes, dear readers, some time has passed since I last posted. There are a few reasons for this, the most excellent one being that I was visiting my parents in Florida and communing with my spirit animal, the manatee (quiet, gentle, vegetarian, spends most waking hours eating). But the blog was on my mind while I was traveling, as my mother, Nancy, introduced me to a new batch of fun kitchen gadgets.

tasting spoonA couple of these were a blast from the past, like this rad hand-carved tasting spoon from the Berea College in Kentucky. This place is worth checking out; they give scholarships in exchange for work in their crafts studio, and the students make some beautiful stuff. But back to the spoon: you use the big end to stir with, and instead of slobbering all over it with your dirty mouth, you tip it backward and the soup or sauce runs backward along the channel where you can taste it from the little spoon. Apparently these have been used in France for ages, and the ones from Berea have a nice old-fashioned feel, meaning that they make great gifts for both those with Little House on the Prairie sensibilities (me) or germophobes (you know who you are).

baker's broomAnother find from Berea was this little baker’s broom that you hang in your kitchen. “What do you sweep with it?” you may be asking. Nothing! Ha! Got you! When you bake a cake, you’re supposed to snap off one of the bristles and use it to test if the cake is done. Seriously, how did my mom know that Jason tried to use a chopstick to test banana bread last week? Anyway, she thought that this might have been an old Shaker invention, and though I couldn’t find any proof of that, I believe her, the Shakers being notorious for their furniture-making, riotous dancing and cake-testing. Continue reading →

Anthropological Study of Brooklyn Male Making Banana Bread

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anthropology

“It’s true that I wasn’t paying attention to the recipe,” subject admits. “My plan was to just mix everything together.”

4:58 p.m. Subject announces desire to “whip up” some banana bread. Makes telephone call to sister-in-law, the source of excellent banana bread recipe, to discuss some possible alterations. Subject is heard to become very distracted, however, and start talking about horses instead.

6:10 p.m. Observer enters kitchen to see if it will soon be clear for dinner preparation. Banana bread still in early stages.
“Do we have a sifter?” subject asks, eyeing the brown sugar.
“I think you’re supposed to pack brown sugar,” observer offers.
“Ah, right,” subjects says, and then adds sugar to dry ingredients.
“Doesn’t sugar usually go with the wet ingredients?” observer asks innocently.
Subject becomes bashful and starts to pick out chunks of brown sugar with a fork. Mentions that maybe it won’t matter since he is substituting Greek yogurt for butter. Observer begins to have serious doubts about edibility of final product.

6:47 p.m. Subject becomes very dejected about de-sugaring process. Decides to wait until after observer has cooked dinner to finish banana bread endeavor. Subject then remembers the foraged black walnuts that have been in the refrigerator for months due to both the subject and the observer being too lazy to hull them. Subject retires to front stoop to smash them with rocks.

8:30 p.m. Observer tries to assess subject’s confidence level. Subject responds: “You know, I’m feeling more confident than ever. I feel like you are losing confidence, but mine is only growing. It may have been a rough start in some ways to some people, but I’m not worried.” Continue reading →

The Seduction of Spring: A Seed Catalog Puzzle

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Renee's GardenI woke up this morning feeling, in light of last weekend’s sidewalk thaw, that it might be a good morning for a run. Then I realized it was 14 degrees outside, and my enthusiasm waned considerably. I like winter (I do!), but this is the time of year when gardeners and cooks alike begin to itch for warm weather and the promise of fresh local produce.

Reading through seed catalogs on a morning like this feels illicit, full of sensual but very distant pleasures. This is at least in part due to the descriptions themselves, which are colorful, exuberant and (at least to my cold-addled brain) a touch erotic. Below, I’ve pulled some names and descriptions from the online seed catalog for Renee’s Garden. Can you guess what kind of vegetable is being described in each case? If you can identify all twelve, you’ve got it bad for spring.

1) Chelsea Prize: Elegantly slender, thin-skinned English with absolutely delicious, crispy sweet flesh. Easy to digest. Self-pollinating, vigorous vines.

2) Circus Circus: Our trio of cool colors includes creamy white, bright orange and a deep, dark purple with orange centers. All 3 well-bred Dutch varieties are sweet tasting, crisp and smooth.

3) Garden Babies: These babies have softly folded leaves, a lovely buttery texture and outstanding sweet taste. Ideal for containers, Garden Babies are slow bolting, heat tolerant, and make compact 6-inch heads at maturity.

4) Mandarin Cross: Golden-orange fruits with wonderful creamy texture and a mouthwatering sweet, even flavor finish These gorgeous fruit are borne in abundance and ripen like jewels on strong indeterminate vines.

5) Neon Glow: Color combo of vivid Magenta Sunset and Golden Sunrise stalks that contrast beautifully with green savoyed leaves for bright color and great eating. Eye-catching, productive, and striking in both vegetable and flowerbeds.

6) Profuma di Genova: Our fine Italian import is bred for pure bright flavor without minty/clove overtones, a compact shape and excellent disease resistance.

7) Raven: Dark green, smooth-skinned, cylindrical fruits are glossy and especially tender-fleshed. Delicious flavor picked as babies or at larger sizes. Abundant fruits are born high up on bush style plants that don’t sprawl.

8) Slenderette: The sleek rounded pods of gourmet-quality Slenderette are particularly tender, juicy, and sweet tasting with no tough tips or fiber. Vigorous, productive plants bear delectable, bright green, 5 inch pods early in the season.

9) Striped Chioggia: Italian heirloom with bright, candy-red exteriors & interior flesh beautifully marked in alternating rings of cherry red and white. Delicious sweet flavor & fine texture. Great tasting leafy tops.

10) Sugar Daddy: High yielding bush vines that load up early with double pods, plump and nutty-sweet, at each plant node. Hard to resist eating right on the spot.

11) Sunset: Beautiful heirloom mix yields huge, elongated tapering fruits with thick, meaty flesh that mature to rich red, yellow or orange. Perfect for snacking, salads, sauté, or roasting.

12) Wyatt’s Wonder: Gorgeous, globe-shaped, deeply lobed, rich orange giants. Developed especially for impressive size and beauty.

Don’t click Continue until you’re ready for the answers… Continue reading →

The Winter Thaw, or Cocktail Class with Encyclopedia Brown

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Benjamin Zorn

Benjamin Zorn, preaching the good word at the BPL

Benjamin Zorn is a bartender at Tooker Alley in Prospect Heights and a cocktail-smith of the highest order. He also looks a little like Encyclopedia Brown, but that was appropriate to the context in which I first encountered him. Last week, Jason and I took one of the “culinary cocktails” series of classes at the Brooklyn Public Library for which Zorn was the master of ceremonies. Why the library decided to let a bunch of people come drink in their fancy new lab area, I’m not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the library being awesome.

Similar to many enthusiasts of offbeat and intricate crafts, Zorn was almost visibly vibrating with fervor and brimming over with an abundance of helpful hints. These ranged from the obscure (explaining the dangers of ice chips in egg-white cocktails to a crowd of people who did not look as though they previously knew egg-white cocktails existed) to the obvious (“You can tell a bartender’s sense of humor from the way he names his drinks”*), from the practical (the difference between an $8 bottle of vodka and a $15 bottle of vodka is mostly sensed in the hangover) to the near-mystical (“Always pour with confidence!” my final note of the evening reads, which I must have written right before I chucked my notebook aside and started drinking the free samples.)

But perhaps the most useful concept (and the main theme of February’s class) was this: you can get a lot of mileage out of sticking to the elegant proportions of classic drinks but jazzing them up with infused liquors and syrups. Usually, I’m not wild about Old Fashioneds but when Zorn made one with star-anise simple syrup, Brooklyn-made bitters and an orange peel…hot diggedy!

Anyway, I didn’t want to rip off Zorn’s recipes, so I decided to use what he taught us and come up with my own take on a Tom Collins. I call it the Winter Thaw, and I’ll post the recipe below so you can rev yourself up before attending Zorn’s next library class in March.

The Winter Thaw Continue reading →

A Culinary Commemoration of Our First President

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crossing the delaware

Liberty and cornmeal for all!

This weekend I found myself a little depressed by our collective neglect of Presidents Day, or rather, our insistence that we get the day off work or school without any actual lauding of our nation’s leaders. Come on guys: George Washington was kind of awesome, and we’ve already downgraded his birthday to a more generic celebration of all presidents. Doesn’t he deserve a little more respect? What form that respect should take is a little harder to parse. It’s not like I’m suggesting we go full-on North Korea with demonstrations of military might and square dancing for our former leaders’ birthdays. But since fate was bringing me to the nation’s capital on Presidents Day weekend and I always prefer tributes involving food, I thought that I should do my best to find a Washington-worthy dish.

I spent Saturday in Baltimore, and though I was in the most Washingtonian of neighborhoods, Mount Vernon, complete with a toga-wearing statue of the man himself, the mushroom sandwich that I ate there did not strike me as particularly presidential. Nor was the delicious Mexican food I ate that night, nor the delectable Burmese food I had the next day in D.C. I’m hardly an expert in the realm of presidential trivia, but the possibility of Washington having traveled extensively in Mexico or Burma seemed like a bit of a stretch to me.

So as my time in D.C. was drawing to a close and my last meal there was shaping up to be lunch with my friend Mignon at the Bayou Bakery (her one-time Grub Match pick), the prospects for a culinary GW send-up were looking pretty grim. And then—eureka! Continue reading →

Off-the-Hook Mayonnaise for the Stubborn or Scientifically Curious

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asparagus with aioliI knew that something was amiss when I asked Roger if he made mayonnaise with a whisk or a mortar and pestle and he looked at me as if I had just asked if he preferred swallowing knives or molten lava. “Are you serious? Use a blender,” he said. And I should have trusted him, since he is a food guru, a homemade mayonnaise enthusiast and, though we have never arm-wrestled to prove it, probably somewhat better endowed with arm strength than I am. But I was supposed to be doing it by hand to better study the emulsifying process for my MOOC, and I had been bolstered by misleading videos of famous chef Nandu Jubany whipping some up in five minutes flat, so I cheerfully embarked on the most brutally work-intensive quarter cup of mayonnaise ever created.

mayonnaise

This is a horrible photo, but my wrist was too tired from stirring to hold the camera.

Aside from carpal tunnel syndrome being one of the main ingredients, homemade mayonnaise really is easy. It consists entirely of things that are likely in your kitchen already, namely an egg yolk, some olive oil, a clove or two of garlic (if you like saying the word aioli) and some salt and pepper. And, no joke, it tastes much better than what comes in a jar from the store. When I let Jason taste it, he called it “off the hook,” which is one of the highest compliments that can be bestowed upon a condiment. It was a little salty on its own for my taste (Jason loves salt so much that I think he is part ocean fish), but on an open-faced sandwich with some lemon tofu and lightly sautéed asparagus, it really was delicious. Jason kept making soft moaning sounds throughout the meal, presumably to express pleasure and encourage future mayonnaise making on my part. But I think this is really the kind of culinary experiment that he needs to experience for himself.

And here’s how you can experience it. Continue reading →

Preparing for National Corn Chip Day, or the Strange World of Food Holidays

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I have neither the skill set nor the personality to be a good bartender or business owner, but I think if I ever received a windfall of money it would be hard to not capitalize on an idea for a bar that my friend Mignon and I developed many years ago. It would be called Holiday, and it would operate under the premise that “every day’s a holiday.” There would be a drink special of the day that would pay homage to whatever bizarre and little-known holiday happened to fall on that date.

National Corn Chip Day

It’s best to eat a few in advance to really get in the spirit of things.

You might think it preposterous that we could find a holiday for every day of the year, but the real problem would be choosing between all of the possible options for any given day. As I type this, it is, according to various sites, Fun at Work Day, National Kazoo Day and Thank a Plugin Developer Day. It would be a stretch, I think, to create a plugin-themed drink. But come on—a kazoo-themed one is just too easy.

One thing that quickly becomes apparent if you scan one of these lists of holidays is that a disproportionate number of them have to do with food. This month alone is Hot Tea Month, National Oatmeal Month, National Soup Month, Artichoke and Asparagus Month and California Dried Plum Digestive Month (among others). Unfortunately, you missed Chocolate Cake Day by a hair (January 27th), but there’s still time to prepare for National Corn Chip Day (January 29th). Continue reading →