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.
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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.
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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.
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Good-bye, Park Slope. Hello, Fort Greene. It’s been about 2 weeks after moving into my new apartment, two days since I got the gas stove working, and before the cooking begins, a good assessment on my former and current surroundings.

After some thought, I present the culinary pros and cons of Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, and Park Slope. Two neighborhoods that vaguely border one another in Brooklyn, one definitely larger and more developed, the other up-and-coming and containing a block that Time Out New York recently called the “Best Block” in all of NYC to live on, very well may have much to share in the way of culinary tastes. But you won’t be hearing any of that from my highly unscientific, first-hand account of their respective pros and cons to the busy not eating out foodophile. I feel confident that my expertise on the Park Slope area is quite fair, having lived in north Park Slope for two years. But if I am leaving anything out about the Fort Greene and Clinton Hill area, which I have lived in for two weeks, I would very much welcome any corrections and suggestions from discerning experts or enthusiasts of said neighborhood.
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In case you haven’t checked out one of my favorite blogs, which also happens to be written by a young female foodie living in Brooklyn, it’s a fine time to begin. Eat Drink One Woman hosted by Ganda Suthivarakan has a Q&A with me on it, but there’s plenty better stuff on the site to read.

In other news, the gas has officially turned on in my apartment, so you’ll probably be seeing a series of very quickly written recipes in the next few weeks as I reunite with the stove.

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.
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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.
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Despite barraging into every type of major media save for perhaps a Hollywood film, Rachael Ray still manages to lack the one thing that goes together with foodies like pears and chocolate: a truly interactive website.

Serious Eats (www.seriouseats.com) is just that. A collaborative project by an all-star cast of food bloggers and writers, it’s sure to trump many other food websites with its creative and far-reaching combination of notes from food blogging world, and the high profile food literati (the newly launched site features a video with Jeffrey Steingarten). If there is a considerable distinction between the two these days.

I’m not a PR manager for Serious Eats (and I apologize to Rachael Ray’s), but I strongly suggest you frequent this site and get more serious about your internet food addiction(s).

Some things I’ve eaten lately:

Steamed frozen pork gyoza and steamed frozen edamame.

Steamed eggs.

Bread, croissants, fruit, cheese, vegetables, salad…candles.
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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.
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