The Nightmare that became Christmas Dinner

I've finally garnered the nerve to document my ill-fated cooking adventure on Christmas. I'd had a half-baked notion this year of roasting a chicken stuffed with sticky glutinous rice spiked with Chinese sausage, shittake mushrooms, and other seasonings commonly found in a zongzi, or bamboo leaf-wrapped rice dumpling. The original idea was to serve this in individual Cornish hens, but after taking a glance at the tennis ball-sized fowl wrapped in plastic in the grocery store, I realized that this could not be.

Christmas Hot Pot

The meal my family eats on Christmas Eve, a stark contrast to the all-American holiday meals like Thanksgiving, is usually an all-out feast of 5-10 Chinese dishes cooked by my uncle and my mom, a roast duck or chicken from the store added on, and a dessert of some type that we're too full to eat. This year, we decided to do something different and serve hot pot. I've seen some places refer to this communal meal as "Chinese fondue," while others go with the Japanese word for it, Shabu Shabu. Basically, it's the type of meal that Scarlett Johannsen and Bill Murray are befuddled by in that scene in the restaurant in that hideous movie, Lost in Translation.

Christmas Morning Quiche with Pineapple Salsa

I'd like to think there's an old Hawaiian tradition of serving Christmas ham with pineapple. I'd also like to think that I'm in Hawaii instead of New Jersey this Christmas as well. But unfortunately, neither are most likely true. But because ham is not on the menu for my family's Christmas this year, or for our traditional night-before-Christmas elaborate Chinese feast (which will be posted and explained soon), or any time really this year, I thought I'd pay my respect to the Christmasy fare by having it for breakfast.

Potage Parmentier avec Lardon

I began reading Julie and Julia, Julie Powell's memoir about her year of cooking every single recipe in the 1961 classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her first success is the potato soup, or potage parmentier. The soup's ingredients are potatoes, leeks, butter, cream, and salt. Not such a hard thing to swing on a weeknight when you've already got most of the ingredients in your kitchen. Alright, with a little improvisation (substituting red onions for the leeks, milk for cream), you've got all of them.

Orange You Glad I Ate Out in Cincinnati?

A quintessential plate of 4-way chili at Skyline Chili: that's cheese on top of chili on top of spaghetti. Yes, spaghetti. I was pretty sure that Ohio wasn't the cheese state. But what did I know? It was my first trip to anywhere in the midwest, not including airport layovers. I found myself there last weekend because my college buddy Aaron had gotten married to a Japanese girl while teaching English in Japan, and had brought her back to his home base in Cincinnati. Instead of having a formal wedding, they threw a weekend-long celebration with friends from across the country, and me and fellow Brooklynite Jordan booked flights for Saturday and Sunday, packed a light bag, and went. And so I learned that Cincinnati is very fond of bad, processed cheese in great quantities.

NY Times Recipe Disaster: Stuffed-Under-the-Skin Chicken

braised whatever Technology, bitter foe. I came home excited to make this recipe I saw in the Times, along with a fascinating article on Hungarian Hannukah cooking. Nevermind that I had really only read the article, and barely glanced at the recipe. I could remember well enough what kind of supplies I would need at the store--chicken quarters, Hungarian paprika, mushrooms, green beans, and carrots. But once everything was home, of course it was time to really follow a recipe. I'm not Hungarian and wasn't about to wing this.

Simplified Coq Au Vin (and How Not to Cook in One’s Own Kitchen)

Long frustrating story, but the bottom line is: Keyspan sucks. There's still no gas in my apartment. The good thing is, my friends have been offering me their delicious home cooking, and in one instance let me use their kitchen to make them dinner. It's been a harmonious transaction.

Birthday Recap

photo of The Cherry Tree's backyard courtesy of Meredith--thanks! Over the weekend, I celebrated my 25th birthday with a few friends by bar-hopping around my old streets in Park Slope. Little did I know you can now bar-hop on Fourth Avenue. We began at Sheep Station, at 4th Ave. and Douglass, and I was dismayed to discover it had changed overnight into primarily a sit-down restaurant (no doubt thanks to the NYTimes review), and there was no room for us to just drink. So we headed a few blocks up to The Cherry Tree on 4th and Bergen, hung out in their beautiful backyard, which was well-heated thanks to the warm brick pizza oven back there (Adam, you might want to check this out if you haven't already--my friends were raving about it and they're generally picky about pizza), and a warm WHOLE PIG that happened to be roasting in the middle of the backyard. We'd stumbled into the place on the first Saturday of the month, which according to head chef Patric, was free roast pig night. He informed us the thing had been killed that morning in New Jersey and had been roasting and smoking for a good part of the day, though he was disappointed he didn't have as much time to marinate it as he would have liked.

Worst Week for NEOINY Part 2

Some things I've eaten lately: Steamed frozen pork gyoza and steamed frozen edamame. Steamed eggs. Bread, croissants, fruit, cheese, vegetables, salad...candles.

Clementimes

Winter is upon us, and what better indicator of it than bushels of sunny, orange miniature citrus fruits? Like many people around my age, I was introduced to clementines as a lunch bag accoutrement some time late into grade school. Rather, I should say I was bombarded with them in multiples of twos and threes--they seemed to appear everywhere, not just in lunch bags anymore but in my gifts, Christmas stockings, and were tossed at me like hackey sacks every time I tried to leave the house. At first I may have guessed that my parents were so enthralled by the fruit that they decided to buy barrels full of them (and no doubt the novelty of the crates made this true to some extent). Then it occurred to me that clementines were sold only in bulk, and came in a flaky birch wood crate holding about 25 of the little seedless juicy nuggets.