GoogaMooga, you tease! The beginning of our relationship held so much promise. You debuted with The Darkness, a magnificent treat that so many of your suitors couldn’t get off work early enough to see, a guitar shredder clad in David Lee Roth’s best zebra-striped jumpsuit doing handstands on the drum riser and wailing
falsetto. You wooed me with Mac and Cheese from Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, so creamy and dense, the word succulent comes to mind. And even if Wayne Coyne’s voice was ragged, the La Mamasita Arepa from Caracas Rockaway was crisp, chewy, oily-as-hell, and stuffed with grilled mushrooms and plantains and cheese. It’s true that the mushrooms got lost a bit in the jumble of tastes, but it was yummy all the same. I washed it down with a strange and tasty Chery and Basil soda from Brooklyn Soda Works and then watched Karen O leap and yawp across the stage like a maniac, all dressed in a collision of Liberace and Michael Jackson, grungy blues riffs turned into dance music and Brooklyn jumping about happily. Continue reading
Author Archives: Jason
GoogaMooga: Ready, Set, Go.
Superfly Presents unleashes the Great GoogaMooga today. We’re psyched. Check out below the thoughts Superfly co-founder Kerry Black has on the grub at the festival.
Why combine a food festival with a music festival, and why is Brooklyn a good place to do so?
Put most simply, we love food and we love music! Together, the two are the perfect combination. We wanted to really celebrate everything that makes New York culture so amazing with GoogaMooga, and Brooklyn is a very obvious leader in both food and music. We’re New Yorkers who are always seeing shows and eating out, in Brooklyn in particular. Then to throw GoogaMooga in Prospect Park was our ideal. There is so much beauty and personality to that space.
How will this year’s GoogaMooga be different from last year’s?
We’re introducing Cafe GoogaMooga this year and three very cool Pop-Ups by April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman, Gabe Stulman and Roberta’s. The VIP Cocktail Experience is a new take on VIP with 10 different cocktail bars like Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog, Clover Club, Pouring Ribbons, and Dutch Kills.
Any particular favorite vendors you’re looking forward to patronizing?
All of them, but let’s see…Roberta’s Ren Fair, Kasadels, Jeepney, and Baohaus.
Great GoogaMooga: Marcos Lainez from the El Olomega
Marcos Lainez’s family has been selling fresh Salvadoran food to hungry soccer players in 
Red Hook since 1988. Their signature snack is the pupusa, a stuffed corn pancake created by the Pipils Indians in the territory now demarcated as El Salvador, but they also turn out freshly fried plantain chips and atoll de elote, a hot drink made of yellow corn. Pupusas are similar to arepas or gorditas, except instead of regular corn dough, pupusas are prepared with nixtamal, a kind of corn flower that’s mixed with an alkaline solution that makes the nutrients more easily absorbed by the body. The Pipils (or their progenitors) figured this out around 2000 BC, using quicklime and ash. We asked Marcos about his pupusas, Brooklyn eats, and the weekend’s performers. We edited his answers a bit to fit the format.
What is Red Hook El Olomega Pupusas’ specialty?
Our specialty is the Pupusas. A pupasa is a traditional Salvadoran dish made by hand using traditional, non-additive corn flour. The main ingredient is pork & cheese but can be made of a variety of flavors, like beans & cheese and spinach & cheese. From our menu my favorite pupusa is a very traditional Loroco flower and cheese.
Why is Brooklyn a good place for El Olomega?
We have been in Brooklyn for over 20 years and the pupusa is still fairly unknown
here and in the U.S., but each day it is gaining popularity among a very wide group of people. Brooklyn is now a very diversified borough, and this is the time and place to let them know about this Salvadoran treat.
What band are you looking forward to hearing at GoogaMooga? What’s the best concert you’ve ever seen?
I am looking forward to hear the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I am not familiar with them, but had to give my friend a ticket because he has talked about them so much that I am very excited. Saturday and Sunday I expect to be very busy, so I will do a quick tour each day. Continue reading
The Fish-&-Chips Classes Beneath John Lydon’s Salty Smirk: The Atlanic Chip Shop
I am, I sometimes admit, something of a poseur vegetarian. For the past few years, I’ve 
dabbled in the occasional non-Kosher bottom feeders and, on the even rarer occasion, an honest-to-God fish. I feel bad about the fish, though. I dwell on them once I’ve eaten them. So I only do so a couple of times a year.
One of those times was a few weeks ago at The Atlantic Chip Shop, the purveyor of the best fish and chips, deep-fried chocolate bars, and Carlsberg on tap in Brooklyn. Shannon was out of town and my buddy Rachel was in, and Rachel, having become something of an informal (but forceful) advocate of all things meaty over the past decade or so, jumped at the chance to go. She always jumps at the opportunity to witness someone eating meat. Have you noticed, vegetarians, how excited some folks get if they suspect you might eat some flesh? They act like it’s Christmas morning. It’s cute.
The Chip Shop in fact offers some choice tasty veggie options, including a mushroom mac and cheese and a Welsh rarebit, but the fish is the most captivating opportunity. It’s divided between three pesca-social classes—Cod, Haddock, and Plaice—and you can choose between them while sitting beneath a few Sex Pistols posters hanging on the wall, which John Lydon probably would appreciate. Continue reading
Concrete Jungle: Urban Space-Crunch Seed Starting in the Land of Implacable Cats
This is my first year planting from saved seed. Last fall, I saved seed from three heirloom tomato varieties, and last week I needed to get them going. I’m behind. I should have been doing this in March so I could have six-inch-tall seedlings ready to be transplanted into the garden around now.
Oh well. Life is too hectic and, as if in correlation, my apartment is too small. It’s not small as far as New York apartments go, but it’s definitely too small as far as st
arting seeds indoors goes. This is our only South-facing window, the only place I could start seeds without reliance on artificial lighting and, really, about the only open spot in the apartment to begin with. It’s also a favorite sunning spot for the cats. That pot to the left once contained a mum so vibrant that it could be killed only by Bruce’s laconic insistence on curling into a doughnut on top of it over, and over, and over again.
So what’s a guy to do?
Hang the boys from the ceiling.
A Quick Note on Stomach Aches
I go a little bipolar on dinn
er sometimes, occasionally eating just enough to be full, occasionally cooking a feast and going to town on it.
So stomach aches happen.
I’m in the Land of Milk and Honey and I put them on the table.
And I’ve discovered that better than anything I’ve ever purchased in a pharmacy, better even than the Yogi Tea Stomach Ache tea, is simple ginger in hot water.
Just cut some slices off a ginger root, drop them in some hot water, and presto. Continue reading
Cheese-Making Part II: a Bowline, some Brine, and Abruzzese
Cheese is without a doubt my favorite food, so I was psyched when Shannon took us to the cheese-making class. Shannon listed her take-aways yesterday, but she overlooked a few things.
- Cheese (according to our teacher, whose expertise, while genuine, seemed possibly inflated) predates recorded history. The first written record is in Egyptian Hieroglyphics and recounts a traveler who filled his drinking pouch, made of animal intestine, with milk. The jostling on his journey, combined with the rennet living in the intestines, produced curd. Patrick declares that such an individual had to be male because only a male would simply chug milk without sniffing it and only a male would, after tasting something rather questionable, immediately seek out his friends and force it upon them.
- The Arabic word for cheese is “mish.” The Arabic word for apricot is “mish mish.” The etymology involved here intrigues the hell out of me. It makes me think of English Wensleydale all stuffed with dried fruits.
- Mozzarella, when newly made and still wet, is shockingly easy to tie in knots. I’m
The bowline, as you might remember from your BSA Field Guide, is useful because while under a heavy load it neither slips nor binds.
talking you can tie a loop and freely pull each end in opposite directions and the cheese slides together as easily as any kind of modern rope made of pulp and plastic fibers. Here, I have demonstrated this fact by tying a bowline, one of the classic Boy Scout knots. Yeah, man, I still know that stuff. Continue reading
Overwintered Salad Goodies
Remember that hoop house video I posted in October? Well, I’ve come to brag and to confess.
Confession: Winter is crazy-time work-wise, and I haven’t directly watered our hoop house greens in probably two months. I’m a bad person.
Brag: After getting only what water they could absorb from the soil surrounding the plot, I picked this for dinner:
That's Ragged Jack Kale, Chard, and Rocket Arugula
This came from a potential harvest big enough to make about twelve monster salads. I’m talking full-meal salads, no side or garden numbers.
Just think what I could have pulled off if I stayed on the watering and picking.
The Adirondacks and a Carola Bury My Grocery Store Russet
Other than the recipe for my Indian sweet potato fries, I haven’t written about potatoes yet this season. I know it’s suppose to be Spring now, but it’s not, at least not in New York, so I’m going to jump on this oversight now before the tulips, already sprouted, get over their confusion at the climate-change weather and pop their pretty heads.
We know that potatoes “saved Europe” in that they kept the lower classes alive just well enough to keep them from rising up, in their starvation and despair, and taking out their monarchs. We know them, thus, as a staple. Or at least I do. Their manipulation by the Queen drove my people to America, and for many a year they, in their fry form, were the highlight of the cafeteria.
But I ate some potatoes last week that made the standard, American Grocery Store-variety potato seem as bland as spray starch.
Healthway Farmsis a small farm in the Hudson Valley north of the city, and over the winter
Note: An old toothbrush is an excellent tool for scrubbing the dirt from your potatoes.
I’ve come to know that they grow superb spuds. I bought three varieties from them: Adirondack Red, Adirondack Blue, and Carola. I baked all of them with only olive oil, salt, and pepper so we could compare the taste.
Adirondack Blue: You may have had purple fingerling potatoes. I love them. Shannon is “coming to like them.” She claims they have a trace of a metallic taste to them. The Adirondack Blue has a deeper taste than its purple fingerling cousins and none of that sharp minerality. It’s starchier – more potato-y in its way – and holds together in your mouth. Though it is quite different in taste from your standard Russet, its heft and density made it seem the most traditional of our lot, despite the color. Continue reading
Sorta Kinda Chinese Tea Series Entry Three: Taro Green Milk Tea (Redux)
I decided to try Taro tea at the Dragon Land Bakery. I don’t know what it is about Taro. I’m afraid it really might be as simple as the color. But I felt the need to give it a shot beyond the root-canal version of the flavor as I endured it at CoCo a few weeks back. So I bought a Taro Green Milk Tea.
And it was a whole new world. Whereas CoCo’s tea was an assault, Dragon Land’s was almost velvety and just a little sweet, almost the taste equivalent of the texture you get when you let butter mints dissolve on your tongue, if that makes any sense. And while CoCoc’s taro was a Continue reading