Author Archives: Jason

An Elizabethan Tribute to Canadian Halibut

Posted on by

This past Spring, Shannon and I traveled to Vancouver Island and made a stop in small town surfer mecca Tofino.  While there, we visited The Schooner Restaurant, and I ordered the Halibut Bawden Bay entree.

It was so good I had to write an Elizabethan Sonnet in tribute.

From seas I did once shy because their fruit
Did not appeal.  For life wants life, (will flee
its death), and blood is not what I’m aboot.
Until a Schooner had my tastebuds tree’d.
Sun-crusted white Tofino halibut
Beneath corn’d pepper glaze with needle dressed
Near ghostly was an orchard caught and cut
And stuffed with shrimp and Brie and Dungeness.
The rain made blue and gray the sun setting
Into the mountain peaks that time will crush,
While dry behind the glass, and without frettings,
Post haste I crushed, myself, my dinner lush:
Proof succulence exists; and now you see
My stomach brought my conscience to its knees.

We also went to a parrot refuge while on the island. This has nothing to do with Tofino or halibut, but it's kind of wild, so I'm throwing it up.

 

Masala Peanuts: The Bar Snack of Superpowers if the World Were Fair

Posted on by

Andrew took this photo. We busted out and used chopped cashews and almonds in place of peanuts. Then we destroyed them.

One of my favorite things in the world is Indian food.  I fervently hope that when America stumbles off the World Power pedestal India is there to step up and thus spread its fine, fine cuisine all across the globe.  Of course, I suppose that’s already happening, and if you don’t need to be a superpower, why solicit the headache and guilty conscience?  So maybe India can just keep working what seems to be working.  India, you are badass!  Your food is way better than China’s!!  Gastronomic superpower status is yours for the taking!!!  That’s the idea.

Amongst the grub that confers that badass status is what Shannon calls “Indian savory snacks,” which pretty much consists of something friable fried very, very deeply and smothered in various combinations of mouthwatering spices.  The best we have found is not a savory snack you buy in a package, however, but one you can make easily at home, and one you don’t need to fry the hell out of either.  Witness: masala peanuts.

We were introduced to masala peanuts by the writer Saloni Meghani in Calcutta (or Kolkata, if that’s your political persuasion).  They are apparently widely gnoshed bar food.  I have spend many, many hours – possibly years – in bars, and I can say with complete confidence that every single minute of that time would have been enhanced greatly with masala peanuts at my side.  And it’s not just me.  My brother reeled when I introduced them to him.  He stuffed soup spoonfuls-worth into his maw.  Now, pretty much whenever I visit him, we make a massive batch.  It rarely lasts beyond that evening, even if we make pounds.  It is not unheard of to stand in the fridge in one’s underwear in the middle of the night or in PJs the morning after and continue to crush these nuts.  The Leahey family has written songs about these nuts.  If the Israelites had masala peanuts instead of manna, they would have commanded all of Canaan in four years instead of forty.  The Yahweh of the Old Testament would have been a benevolent rather than jealous god.  The planet could have been a completely different place.  That’s how momentous this shit is. Continue reading →

Roanoke Kinda Sucks (Except for this Moon Pie)

Posted on by

I noted the existence of Moon Pies in a post a few weeks back.  I declared them “two pieces of cardboard stuffed with low-grade putty and shellacked in plastic.”  Lo and behold, on a trip down the Shenandoah Valley last week, I was forced to eat my words.  That, of course, has never happened before.

This eating of words proved to be, happily enough, the most pleasant part of our 20-hour stay in Roanoke, Virginia.  Shannon and I were both excited to visit Roanoke, though neither of us could say exactly why.  Maybe it was because it’s a city in the western edge of the state, a beautiful part of the country, or maybe it was because it shares the name of the famous Lost Colony, and few things get me as excited as groups of people, shrouded by the mists of history, mysteriously wiped off the face of the earth without a trace.  Regardless of the reasons for our excitement, modern Roanoke is a bit of a lost colony itself.  A railroad boom town gone bust, it is a charmingly refurbished and tiny city center ringed by a blasted landscape of empty streets and crumbling housing surrounded by lovely countryside carved into a sprawling network of McMansions.  Want to be depressed?  Drive around Roanoke.

But that charmingly refurbished city center did include the Euro Bakery, which sold us a homemade Moon Pie.  Now, the Moon Pie was born about a century ago across the border in Chattanooga.  It is supposed to be a mound of marshmallow glop sandwiched between two graham cracker-style cookies.  It is, without a doubt, vile.  This Moon Pie, however, appropriated the title for what is essentially a homemade Swiss Roll made in a Moon Pie shape.  Continue reading →

Rabbit Poop, Warhol Chickens, and How to Crush an Avocado Stone with Your Bare Hands

Posted on by

I had the good fortune this summer of working with the Learning Gardens program of the City Parks Foundation, a program that hires public high school students to learn about garden basics while maintaining community gardens.  One of our field trips took us the EarthMatters, a pretty fantastic composting facility on Governor’s Island.

Amongst the things learned:

1 – Avocado pits are hard as hell.  And yet…

…three weeks in a compost pile big enough to generate some real heat, and I could crush this pit in my palm with only a little more effort than it takes to squish a banana.  I find this absolutely, completely fantastic, though no one else to whom I have detailed this little miracle seems quite as excited as me. Continue reading →

Swiss Lentils with Dill and Poached Egg

Posted on by

The writer Carlynn Houghton dropped this on me the other day.  Her name for the dish is Lentils with Dill & Yumminess.  At its core, it’s a simple lentil recipe taken from The Joy of Cooking, but it veers off the expected course in a kind of funky way.

To start: I’ve never considered adding dill to lentils.  When it comes to these legumes, I’ve always been firmly rooted in the gastronomic headspace of the Indian subcontinent and, thanks to Shannon’s creation of a vegetarian Cincinnati Chili, the American Midwest.  I’ve also never considered adding an egg, let alone a poached egg, which is what Carlynn does in this recipe and is what adds the “Swiss” prefix.

I’m fairly “ehh” on poached eggs, but I think they’re fantastic for this recipe.  I usually think of the unexpected egg as something fairly American, as if it primarily takes the form of a hamburger topping that crowns bacon, fried onions, mushrooms, ketchup, mayo, and cheddar cheese.  The fact that the unexpected egg can come at me out of left field from some place as sensible and subdued as Switzerland makes me happy.  It reminds me not to condescend.

Carlynn wrote: My cousin in Switzerland poached an egg and put it on top. This made a delicious lunch with cheese and bread on a table overlooking Lake Geneva and the French Alps. Sadly, my photos are from NYC.

Here are the goods…

Ingredients:

1/3 C. olive oil
1 large onion, minced
1 1/2 C. lentils
5 C. vegetable stock
salt and pepper
1/3 C. finely chopped fresh dill
1 egg

Sauté the onion in the olive oil until golden brown. Add the lentils and stir to coat in oil. Add vegetable stock and bring to a boil. Simmer 60-90 minutes. Add more boiling water if the pot starts to dry out. Poach an egg.  When lentils are tender, season to taste. Remove from heat and stir in the dill.  Gently place egg on top.

Soda Internacional

Posted on by

I’m not really a junk food guy, but I am a weird food guy.  And by weird I don’t just mean bizarre (like that pregnant mud eel that Shannon made me eat at a Cambodian “air force” base) but also novel, cute, odd, etc.  Maybe my first exposure to weird junk food was through my old man, who still to this day will bi-annually rock a Moon Pie.  Moon Pies, in case you are unaware, are two pieces of cardboard stuffed with low-grade putty and shellacked in plastic.  Now, even though I know these taste like wood and petroleum products, I inevitably eat one if it’s presented to me sufficiently long after my last taste.  The fact that these things are still actually produced and actually purchased for consumption is just too nonsensical for me to ignore.

It's Country Club brand, so I knew it would be refined.

Less nonsensical but equally novel and compelling are what I am going to label here as Hispanic sodas. Jarrito is one brand you may have seen.  Its different flavors are different Lifesaver colors.  New York has a fantastic collections of these sodas, and a specimen I’d never seen before, one from the Dominican Republic, caught my eye the other say.

That’s right, that’s meringue flavored soda.  And the spokescharacter, is that a drop of soda giving the thumbs-up within a different drop of soda?  I’m pretty sure it is.  How am I going to say no to that?

So I pony’d up two-twenty-five (?!) for this bottle of Country Club and twisted off the top.

Sweet Jesus. 

It tasted like a liquid Dum Dum lollipop, which is far, far less tasty than it sounds.  The meringue flavor itself was sort of a mutant cream soda, recognizable but overgrown to Godzilla proportions.  It did not taste like meringue.  It almost didn’t take like sugar.  It tasted like “sweet” turned up to eleven.  Perhaps that’s because, I noticed after my teeth stopped quivering in my gums, the bottle had 47 grams of sugar.  That’s eight more than Coke.  And that was more or less my soda intake for the remainder of 2013.

Jay’s Summer Squash Shredder Sandwich

Posted on by

Some people love summer squash.

I am not one of those people.

Zucchini, pattypan, straight-up yellow, all of these guys bore me a little.  They’re bland.  And for whatever reason, I have a hard time coming up with ways to sex them up like I can, for example,  for summer greens.

But Windfall Farms, our CSA farm, dropped some pattypans on us, and I concocted a sandwich that turned out really, really well.  This made me feel good not just because I made good use of the pattypans, but because pattypans are so cute, odd outliers in a world of goose-shaped and phallic cousins, and I like outliers.

Jay’s Summer Squash Shredder Sandwich (serves two)

Ingredients:

1 large of 2 small summer squash
strong blue cheese
a small handful of walnuts
arugula
basil
thick sourdough bread or equivalent
4 or 5 cloves of garlic
half a lemon
salt & pepper

Step One:  Grate (that’s right, grate) your squash on a cheese grater.  In a pan, fry the crushed garlic in a dab of butter and tablespoon of olive oil on low heat.  After four or five minutes, toss in shredded squash.  After another four or 5 minutes, add the juice of half the lemon, salt, and lots of pepper.  Remove from heat. Continue reading →

Wilco, Newports, and Hoboken’s Finest

Posted on by

I have this on a shirt from a show I attended in 1998. That's right, baby, the "Being There" tour. Jay Bennet played fiddle while hanging by his knees from the HVAC.

Broadening PitchKnives’ scope from comestibles to ingestibles, allow me to recount last Friday night at the Americanarama Music Festival in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The overwhelming takeaway from the evening was a trio of rock n roll reiterations and a surprise:

1)    My Morning Jacket is the weirdest, mightiest, stadium-sized ROCK! band alive.
2)    Wilco is an unstoppable, deeply organic live act that covers a sweeping stylistic range in realizing some of the very best songs of the last 20 years.
3)     Bob Dylan can deliver a much better performance than you might expect.

That these are the takeaways is a testament to what the bands accomplished.

Because approximately 90 seconds into My Morning Jacket’s set, the crowd two feet in front of us scattered apart to reveal two men, each roughly twenty-five pounds over weight and with a bronze badge swinging from a chain around his neck, slamming a college-aged kid in loafers into the grass.  My first thought was of festival security and the fact that they weren’t interested in what I took out of my backpack and jammed into my pockets, only that I leave the empty backpack in the trash.  The Boston Marathon was on my mind.

But it immediately became clear that Hoboken’s Finest had, at the instant the kid broke out a dime bag to roll a joint, tackled his ass, twisted his limbs around, pressed his face into the ground, and cuffed him.  Why bother, after all, with something like, “Sorry, buddy, you’re busted; you’re under arrest; let’s go” when you can save your breath and rough up the threat to society?  The kid had no chance to run.  He didn’t even know what hit him.  Continue reading →

The Union Square Farmers Market Nightmarket: Very Pretty, Pretty Pricey

Posted on by

Last week, the Union Square Farmer’s Market, one of the biggest and best in the city, put on its first nightmarket, billed in a lavender promotional jpeg as “A Midsummer Night’s Green Market.”  The farmers stayed twice as long as they usually do, there was beer and music, and a handful of area restaurants turned out to dish out.

So we turned out, too.  We were psyched.

It ended up a bit of a very crowded catwalk of very good looking food.

We tried Telepan’s blueberry crescent and fried eggplant with ratatouille, both of which were pretty, decent, unspectacular.  Each of these guys were four bucks.

 

Next up was the peach turnover from Union Square Café, which was not only infinitely superior to its blueberry cousin but pretty damn delicious.  Once you accept the fact that any turnover stuffed with corn syrup gloop masquerading as fruit is an offense to all that is good and noble in the world, you are left with a turnover’s pastry as its defining feature.  The Café’s was fantastic: delicately crispy on the top, firm and flaky elsewhere.  Cost: six bucks. Continue reading →

Cabbage Worms Begone: A Safe, Organic Critter Repellent to Save your Crops

Posted on by

My broccoli and cauliflower plants were getting hammered by some critter that skulks forward in the dead of night and goes to town on their leaves.  This happened last year to my Brussels sprouts, taking out one of four plants before I found an organic pest repellent.

There are a number of things you can do to minimize pest damage to your garden without spraying on pesticides that you’ll subsequently have to eat.  Marigolds, of course, are excellent to keeping damaging bug punks away.  Mint and lemongrass plants are as well.

But those guys are significantly suggestions.  Last year, to perform triage on the Brussels, I discovered Neem oil.

The Neem plant is indigenous to India and has a variety of Ayurvedic uses.  It will also keep everything from the Japanese beetle to the cabbage worm away from your crops.  The bottle I shown above cost me about fifteen bucks.  To use it, you mix half a tablespoon in a pint and a half of water in a spray bottle, add a little biodegradable dish soap (as an emulsifier), shake, and shoot.

It works like a charm, and it’s not harmful to mammals, birds, earthworms, lady bugs, etc.  Continue reading →