Frozen treats save steamy day.

I went down to the city for a Tuesday night concert, but once I knew I could bring a backpack in with me, I decided I was on a mission. A weird produce mission. Specifically, I was looking for the beautiful, exotic, alluring mangosteen, but really, anything new would do nicely.

I got in to Grand Central a little after noon, and needed something to tide me over for a few hours:

Subpar lo mein from Feng Shui in Grand Central. It was unbelievably salty and I didn't finish it. That never happens. I should have just stuck with my tasty GCT standby, Cafe Spice.

A few hours later, after hanging out with a good friend until she had to go to work, I was hungry again. Getting your eyebrows threaded for the first time is a surprisingly effective way to work up an appetite.

I wanted to take one of the green trains (4? 5? 6? I'm still learning, folks), so I headed back down to GCT to first snag a refreshing blast of Ciao Bella, where, in the past, I'd had a revelation of mint gelato (it tasted like fresh mint, not mint flavoring!), among other flavors. I ordered the papaya-crème de cassis, expecting unicorns to come charging out of the cupcakes at one of the bakeries and flower petals to rain into the food court, and for world peace to be achieved and cancer to be cured.

It didn't quite live up to that. I was so meh about it that I didn't even take a picture. Of course the papaya-crème de cassis gelato was okay, but I have really high expectations of Ciao Bella. Unicorns, people. I demand to be blown away.

Several hours and a walk to and fro on the Brooklyn Bridge later, I had made my way to Chinatown. It was probably about 6:30, and I wondered after the fact whether it was late enough that I missed the really weird (to me, you know) produce. I really wanted to find mangosteen... Hell, I don't know if they're even in season. Dragonfruit would have been cool. I remember seeing some spiky melon that I think ends in -iya when I lived in San Diego. It was not to be - I could ID pretty much everything I saw. (I'm no expert; there just wasn't that much.) Note to self: Don't worry about the Brooklyn Bridge. Just go to Chinatown with hours to kill.

Fruit and veggie stand in Chinatown. I was probably there later than the really intriguing markets would be open and/or have really intriguing produce.

I wound up with lychees (which I seem to recall my dad ordering at a Chinese restaurant in the East Bay, where we lived til I was 11)...

Lychees. I don't know what to do with them, yet, other than chill, peel and pop 'em. Maybe some kind of granita?


Starting to make up for earlier: barbecued pork buns, or char siu bao, from Excellent Dumplings in Chinatown.

I demolished those buns.

I walked and ate... Classy. From Chinatown I hoofed it up to the DessertTruck...

Dessert Truck scene

... where my day redeemed itself immediately, and wholly:

Lavender-peach sorbet, with crème frâiche, almond meringue and fresh berries. Unbelieveable. Best six bucks I've spent in at least a month.

From Dessert Truck to Webster Hall, every spoonful of that amazing concoction contributed to this stupid grin spreading across my face. Suddenly, the Brooklyn Bridge blisters and ridiculously heavy backpack (why did I buy so many damn lychees?) seemed a million miles away. Lavender-peach sorbet, with crème frâiche, almond meringue and fresh berries = SALVATION IN A CUP.

Concert. Pete Yorn. Eye and ear candy.

The show ended with time to spare before I had to get back up to GCT for the 12:08 train home. I could grab a slice of pizza, I thought, or... I could go to Daydream (which I keep wanting to call Dreamberry, a la Pinkberry frozen yogurt).

Half original icy, half pomegranate tart frozen yogurt, with ripe (yay!) mangoes and blueberries. Found this place after a concert in April. It hits the spot even more on a steamy late-July night.

Snapped this at a station as I was making my way north:

Someone loves breaded, fried pork cutlets more than I do.

dessertforthemorningafter

Ask, and ye shall receive...

I have a couple great friends who live up in Ithaca (about four hours away) who I rarely see. Katie and Jon are two of the most fun people I've ever had the pleasure of hanging out with. We talk only sporadically, and usually conversations are about last-minute invitations to an adventure of some kind. They invited B and I to go camping last weekend, and I couldn't go because I always work weekends.

I asked if they might be available on a Tuesday and/or Wednesday for some antics, and received this reply from Jon:
Tuesday or Wednesday seems like a perfect time to do some wine-touring in the finger lakes. :)

As noted in the last post, I've been wanting to learn. Don't know much about wine, yet, but here's to getting educated (and seeing Katie and Jon).

An education in fermentation.(Rhyming is good, right?)

Sorry, mom and dad...
I lived in Utah for eight years, ages 18 to 26. Prime beer-drinking years, right? I guess. I only went on a booze run up to Evanston, Wyoming, one time, and although I had the world's best fake ID, I was so terrified of getting busted on the way back to Salt Lake that I never went again.

I didn't do much beer-drinking after about age 20. Not because of any kind of moral calling or righteous superiority, I just... didn't. A guy who I was with for a long time didn't drink at all. When I did buy a six-pack, four or five bottles often languished in the fridge for months (gross, absolutely; maybe even borderline criminal). I was so, soooooo boring.

At the beginning of 2008, I moved near one of the state-run wine stores downtown, and began cooking the ethnic-inspired meals nearly weekly for my friends. When possible, I bought wines from the appropriate country. Feeling kind of goofy for the last event, Morocco, I bought one wine from Spain and one from South Africa, and we roughly (very roughly) decided to split the geographical difference. There was no method, usually just madness.

Since moving here, and living with wine drinkers, I've been drinking much more thoughtfully. Which is to say, now I do more than buy whichever bottle has the more interesting label.

Right on Main Street in happenin' downtown Beacon is the Artisan Wine Shop, and these folks have helped me immensely. Although I work nights and weekends and therefore have yet to make it to one of their tasting events, the owners have steered me toward some great bottles. Also, I always assumed that good wine equals expensive, and they have shown me that that doesn't have to be true! I owe so much to these people, and they don't even know it.


A couple of weeks ago I walked in with a blank look on my face, and walked out with three bottles of grapey goodness. One was a white zinfandel, my boyfriend's mom's fave; one was a Spanish red with a dramatic label (I'm not totally out of the woods yet) that my boyfriend had bought before; and the third was a sauvignon blanc to pair with dinner's scallops. I'll be honest: I loved it for the cool label, and I was intrigued by its claim to having citrus notes.

But we opened it, and it really, really did have those citrus notes! It was like grapefruit (or, more accurately, grapefruit's cousin pomelo) slapping you in the tongue. In a good way, of course.

So when I walked in there a few nights ago, I knew at least one thing I wanted. But I know that I know nothing about wine, so I kind of crafted an experiment. "Would it be really lame," I asked, "to get another sauvignon blanc so I could compare them side-by-side and maybe learn more about that family?"

I felt really dumb asking. Like, really dumb. Luckily, Mei Ling So (one of the owners) is either used to dumb questions or good at hiding disdain for their askers... She told me it was actually a pretty good idea, and gave me a couple of choices. Most from France, either the Loire Valley or Bordeaux. I asked her what caused the differences, and finally learned how to pronounce "terroir." (The thing about food editing is that although I've learned to spell unusual words, I haven't always learned how to say them right, if at all. For a long time in Salt Lake, "tart-ees tate-in" was a running joke about tartes tatin...)

So I got the Mason Cellars' Pomelo 2007 sauvignon blanc, and a biodynamic sancerres from Bordeaux. She mentioned that it was citrusy, too, and I got all excited about them being similar, but she shut me down: "They're really different." Apparently the biodynamic winemakers don't "mess with" (I swear those were her words) the winemaking process as much. She described the French one as "yeasty," because fewer preservatives are added. Also, the biodynamic guys add infusions of chamomile and nettles, which is really interesting but I don't really get. Yet.

Oh, boy. Have I got a lot to learn...

Picked up sushi on the way home, and cracked open - well, unscrewed, anyway - the Pomelo. Because it was a school work night for the boyfriend, getting though two bottles of wine was out of the question and the sancerres is still chillin'.

Which means, you know, that I have to go back and get another bottle of Pomelo for an advance-planned tasting. It'll be rough, but I think I'll get through it. Here's to more sushi and wine this Tuesday!

Starting from scratch

Nothing but Miracle-Gro Organic, a bunch of tiny seeds, and crossed fingers.
Everything we bought in May was already sprouted, beyond seedlings, nascent little plants. Like, toddler plants. Things went well, for the most part.

I got ambitious. I bought seeds. I probably waited too long to plant them.

So on July 24, I buckled down and did it. Here's the lettuce (mesclun mix), basil, zucchini (One seed in the packet? Are you kidding me?) and sunflowers. Lettuce and sunflowers are in the full-size egg cartons; basil in five of the six nooks in the smaller one, zucchini in the last niche:

Urban forager

Sign below mulberry tree

Last Friday, I headed down to Denning's Point in search of berries. I've seen several mulberry trees, strawberries, and raspberry canes getting ready to burst, and it felt like time to forage...

Raspberries were first up:

That's a lot of raspberries.


These guys weren't quite ready, but plenty of others were.

I don't know what these two are. I think the berries in the second might be currants?




Leo got to swim in the Hudson:




Then we heard thunder - not exactly a surprise, since it seems like there has been rain every day this summer - so we took off for the car. But first, the mulberries.




I didn't know the flash was on for this, but the unripe berry looked just like that a moment later when there was lightning.




We made it home just before the sky opened up. I had to rush to work, so doing something with berries had to wait. All told, there were about two and a half cups of berries. I made a smoothie with about half of them, plus some blueberries. Mulberries are (mostly) on the left, some with stems; black raspberries (mostly) on the right.




These have been growing in the jungle on the side of my apartment. The landlord said she wouldn't go through the trouble of picking them, but I was welcome to.




The rest of the Denning's Point berries and the backyard blackberries topped a Big Pancake this morning. The camera battery died before I could get closeups of the berries and whipped cream. Suffice it to say that it tasted as good as "fresh berries and fresh whipped cream" sounds.




While walking the dog a few days ago, I discovered the next frontier in my urban forages: a tall old apple tree by the water tower up the hill. Looks like I'll need to find a ladder before autumn...

¿Yutia? ¿Cómo? or, talking tubers...

Way back when, when I started the ethnic cuisine challenge/resolution, I had this precious little idea that I'd walk into an ethnic grocery with a vague idea of what I wanted to cook, then I'd find unknown-to-me ingredients/items and ask the employees/owners how to prepare them. It would have worked in SLC. I regret never having been to one of the African grocers...

So a few months ago - wow, looking up the photos I see that it's been six months - I went to a new-to-me grocery store that looks a little warehouse-y but is closer than the one I had been going to. The produce selection was broad, and prices seemed good. As I wandered the aisles, I came to a tuber section. Yes, a little area with nothing but brown tubers in various lengths, widths, and stages of hair growth. In addition to yams, sweet potatoes, and jicama, signs read batata, malanga, casava, manioc, taro... and my new friend, yutia. A cute little older couple was picking through these tubers, arguing in Spanish about which ones to were good.

Aha! I thought. This was my chance to try to fulfill what I'd originally set out to do. I asked them in my crappy Spanish (I may have studied it for six-plus years, but my last class was in 2002) what this vegetable was, and how to prepare it. Luckily this sweet man was adept at charades, because I understood "slice it thinly" and "bake it."

So I bought some, brought it home, and promptly Googled "yutia." Yeah, it doesn't really exist on the interwebs. Results were spotty at best, and basically told me that South American indigenous peoples cultivated it. After that, I'm not sure what they did with it... It came across as some anthropological curiosity more than a vegetable you'd pick up in a suburban New York ShopRite.



So I did what the abuelito said. I peeled it and sliced it as thinly as I could, which got difficult, as this tuber was really slimy. I tossed the slices in some olive oil and salt and pepper, and stuck it in the oven at 350 for about 15 minutes, tossing it again at some point in there.




When I figured my little medallions were done, it looked like they needed something more. Sour cream! That makes almost everything better. And it did, for these guys. They were still pretty chewy. Pretty bland. One big "meh," you know? But they reminded me of something. I couldn't place it for a few days.



Bam. Top left. Thanks to the "exotic vegetable chip identifier" at Terra Chips' website, I had known this previously as taro... Good to know. There are plenty of recipes out there for taro. It seems like a lot of these starchy/slimy tubers are interchangeable, as far as recipes go. But I'd wanted to do something uniquely yutia... Chips, so original, I know.

Today, six months after starting the yutia journey, I re-Googled "yutia recipe." And got results, including this one for a Filipino tapioca stewy-desserty-thing called tabirak o binignit o ginataan. I ♥ Filipino food, so who knows, maybe I'll give this (and tapioca, eek) a shot sometime.

Also among the Google results: "Did you mean: yautia recipe"

Turns out that yes, yes I did mean "yautia recipe." Where the heck was that six months ago?!? Next time I get a bug to buy it, I know where to find recipes.

Except that I ended up switching back to the other supermarket.

Tomato blight? Not in my backyard.

A horticultural pandemic is sweeping the Northeast.

Late blight, the same fungus that killed three-quarters of Ireland's potato crop in 1846, has taken a severe toll on tomato plants around New York. It's been confirmed in 30 or so of the state's 60ish counties, and Margaret McGrath (a Cornell vegetable epidemiologist) said on today's Brian Lehrer show that plant authorities simply haven't checked the remaining counties.

The fungus is highly contagious, and this spread is starting mainly in backyard gardens. Most outlets are saying that the main source of the blight in the Northeast is plants from big-box stores such as Home Depot and Lowe's. One supplier in the southeastern United States seems to be at the root (no pun intended) of this outbreak. The supplier, Bonnie Plants, says it isn't to blame and that its plants were somehow affected along the supply chain... To the company's credit, they've aggressively worked on recalling all of their plants.

Yellow leaf? yes. Telltale fuzzy spores? No.

Cherry tomatoes. Yum.

Sure, my plants have yellowing and even browning leaves. But that likely has more to do with the nearly nonstop rain this summer, and the fact that a fairly big plant is in a fairly small pot. Are our plants faring better — they're not dropping dead, at least — because we bought them from a local greenhouse? It's possible that quality control is easier when the production scale is smaller. I wonder what, if anything, the GMO-ness of our tomatoes has to do with their hardiness.

Here is McGrath's Cornell blog.


The one on the left was ripe enough a couple days after this was shot.

During the cage installation, three tomatoes fell off of the big plant; we kept them outside anyway. Today I ate one; half of it was good. (The other half was a bit more mealy than I'd have liked.) We've eaten several of the cherry tomatoes, and they've been great.

Last September, I took an incredible daylong class at the Culinary Institute of America right up the road in Hyde Park titled "Taste of the Hudson Valley." It was more than a Millbrook Winery this, Sprout Creek Farm that, Stone Barns blah blah. It delved deeply into food as politics; more deeply than many of the participants were comfortable, I imagine.

Among the hottest topics were the buzzwords "local" and "sustainable." Late blight appears to be neither. Although produce with either of those labels is often more expensive, it seems to be worth it, so far. Does produce come more locally than from my back deck (not that I have a front deck)? I'm still in my first season as a wannabe farmer, so I'm not sure how sustainable this endeavor will be.

The class' instructor reminded us that we vote with our dollars. And it's a deeply personal, and political, decision to just say "no" to big agribusiness. Now, I'll be the first one to admit that I buy the majority of my fruits and vegetables at the local supermarket, but the transition to local/fresh/sustainable feels pretty good. I've been hitting up two local (haha, I had to throw that in) farmers markets and loving what I've come home with.

It's also really cool to me to be able to have a conversation with the person who actually is doing the growing. Maybe I just like to talk; maybe the investment and exchange of ideas appeals to me. But after last Thursday's trip to the Fishkill market, I realized that nowhere else would someone have offered me a plum, even while I was checking out the blueberries. Nowhere else would someone have jogged across a parking lot to tell me I had money hanging out of my back pocket. Nowhere else would a farmer give me advice on what to do with my own fennel, as I wasn't buying hers...

I think I'll go back and see them again tomorrow.