GoogaMooga: Ready, Set, Go.

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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

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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 →

Great GoogaMooga: Kelly Taylor from KelSo Beer Co.

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nut brown lager

Kelly's personal fave (photo courtesy of KelSo)

From vegan cupcakes we leap to beer, which, if you ask me, is not a bad leap to make, particularly if it’s the delicious Brooklyn-made brews from KelSo Beer. In fact, I think that a fairly good test of a local bar is whether or not it has KelSo IPA on tap; it’s a magical substance that tastes like someone waved a wand and turned a juicy grapefruit into a beer.

So there’s good news for beer lovers attending GoogaMooga, as KelSo will be serving up refreshing craft beverages all weekend long. Here’s more from KelSo brewer and co-owner Kelly Taylor on how he and his wife and business partner Sonya Giacobbe keep Brooklyners happy:

What is KelSo’s specialty and why is Brooklyn a good place for it?
Fresh, classic, and satisfying beers. The people of Brooklyn appreciate quality and freshness, and demand a lot in their local foods. In our beer, it doesn’t have to be a “blow to the head” to be appreciated.

What is your favorite beer of the moment?
Our nut brown lager. Great with food or alone. Malty/toasty/clean. Good to cook with as well. If not ours, I love the Captain Lawrence Freshchester pale ale. Very fruity and smooth.

What’s your favorite Brooklyn restaurant that’s still off most people’s radar?
I love love love al di la in Park slope. Always excellent food. Down the street and known for great beer but lesser known for great sandwiches is Bierkraft. Truly amazing. Continue reading →

Great GoogaMooga: Aimee Follette from Sun In Bloom

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cupcake

The vegan chocolate peanut butter cupcake from Sun In Bloom that I just demolished

The Great GoogaMooga is upon us! With concerts ranging from The Flaming Lips to Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, the food and music fest promises to draw the hungry hordes to Brooklyn this weekend. So that you can properly prepare to get your grub on, we’re running some profiles of the vendors we’re most looking forward to as we count down to the festival.

Last year, GoogaMooga was heavy on the pork, but this year it’s aiming to please its vegetarian friends as well. Hoisting high the vegan banner is Park Slope’s Sun in Bloom. Here’s more from chef and owner Aimee Follette on community, massaged kale, and Radiohead:

sun in bloom

If you look closely, you can see that they give a source for this quote. I think that's pretty cute.

What is Sun In Bloom’s specialty and why is Brooklyn a good place for it?
Sun In Bloom’s specialty is creating hand-crafted gluten-free vegan foods, made with some serious love, that can be enjoyed by everyone.  I opened Sun In Bloom with the intention to introduce the healing power of food and how it truly can create a foundation for us all to experience our best life.  My vision for Sun In Bloom being a community meeting place goes hand-in-hand with why people move to Brooklyn; they move to Brooklyn to be part of a strong community. I think generally, people have a strong desire to be healthy and are recognizing the food they eat will either make them feel good or make them feel sick.

What is your favorite dish of the moment?
As the chef of Sun In Bloom, I only create dishes that I really love.  However, I do have an affinity towards our Bella Divine salad — kale massaged in a live (made from sprouted sunflower seeds) sesame ginger dressing, raw sauerkraut, dulse, and avocado. Continue reading →

The Fish-&-Chips Classes Beneath John Lydon’s Salty Smirk: The Atlanic Chip Shop

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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 →

Issues of Connotation in the Phrase, “Beer-Themed”

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Beer-themed invites...so subtlety is not our forte

When I saw the phrase “beer-themed” noted on the wedding photographer’s invoice, I felt surprisingly embarrassed. My stomach fell in a way it hasn’t since the Fritos incident of 1988. Yes, the wedding is beer-themed, though we had never used those words to describe this momentous occasion. I felt “beer-themed” better described certain dude movies like Beer Fest or, you know, real beer festivals (which, coincidentally, are actually dude-themed).

As a beverage, beer has earned a certain reputation — that being that it is not wine. Or champagne. I believe I’ve soap boxed before about beer being my drink of choice to cheers with for celebrations large and small. But how do we differentiate between a “beer-themed” celebration of a union of two people in love and a thinly veiled (sorry) excuse get blotto. …Perhaps the larger question here is: does it really matter?  Continue reading →

My Summer To-Read Picks from the Food Book Festival

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food books

I know the audacity of saying something like this since I edit a food blog, but here’s the truth of it–food books often leave me a little cold. There are just so many pitfalls that a volume of food writing can fall into, including:

  • The tortured chef memoir. Boy, chefs do a lot of coke, or at least it seems that way from the explosion of depressing tell-all autobiographies. And, man, I really do not care to read about it.
  • The restaurant cookbook. This can be nice, I guess, if you really love the restaurant. But then again, if you could really cook that stuff at home, why would you ever bother to go out to eat?
  • The ultra-specific sourcebook. Truly, I sort of admire the geeked-out nature of this sub-genre, but I also find it hard to imagine staying interested in foraging or home brewing or pickling things for upwards of three hundred pages

But enough of the negatives. When I stopped by the Food Book Festival in Williamsburg last weekend, there were plenty of books to intrigue those who love both good food and good writing. Here are a few that I intend to read cover-to-cover:

Cooked by Michael Pollan
If ever there were a food writing superstar, it is Michael Pollan. He can research, he can write, and his books use lovely patterns that release some kind of pressure in my brain. In this new book, he goes back to the structure that he popularized in The Botany of Desire, with each of the four sections of the book devoted to one of the four classical elements (fire, water, air, earth) and how it has changed cooking. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: Urban Space-Crunch Seed Starting in the Land of Implacable Cats

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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 starting 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.

Continue reading →

The Plant Sale Is On!

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wagon

Loadin' up our wagon...

Maybe if you’re a fan of the Farmer’s Almanac, you know that it’s time to plant by waiting until leaves are the size of squirrels’ ears or something like that, but as a New Yorker, I know it’s time to break out the trowel when the Brooklyn Botanic Garden holds its annual plant sale. And that time is upon us. Come on, how often do you get to run over old ladies with a Radio Flyer red wagon and race for plants like its some kind of great pioneer land grab?

plant saleThe plant sale has just about any plant you can think of, from serious landscaping items to tiny, delicate potted orchids. Personally, I think the geraniums at the sale are second none (they bloom for months and have been known to withstand blizzards), and I scored some other pretty flowers for our windows. On the food side of things, our haul wasn’t quite as large this year, since Jason has been into saving seeds. Even so, we’re not always the best at self-restraint. Jason added to his rapidly increasing stock of tomato varieties with a Sungold and a Bush Goliath. And the little basil market packs for $2.50 are great. So if you’re in the area, get out there and grab a wagon–the sale runs through tomorrow at 1 p.m.

And if you score any unusual or particularly promising plants, whether its at the BBG or elsewhere, tell us all about it in the comments section. Take your marks…get set…garden!

A Quick Note on Stomach Aches

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I go a little bipolar on dinner 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 →