For the “self-proclaimed foodie” on your list: Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home.
Eat Me Daily writes:
Ad Hoc at Home is a gateway drug to Keller cuisine: accessible, affordable, recognizable, and yet with subtleties in the food and philosophy that give rise to promises of much more to come.
Cirino, Daniel, M., and Akiko et al certainly won’t be doing coast-to-coast dinners partially inspired by this book … but it’s something for the rest of us to sink our baby-teeth into.
For a party on Saturday, M. and Akiko made Bo Ssäm, a specialty of Momofuku Ssäm Bar (Akiko used to be a chef there).
It’s an entire pork butt that is brined, slow-cooked, and basted with brown sugar. It’s so tender that it falls apart with the flick of a fork. You wrap it in lettuce leaves with a variety of quick-pickles (Asian pear, ginger, red onion, jicama, cucumber, and radishes), sagyegeol ssäm jang (a Korean soybean paste), kimchee, and rice.*
It is out of this world.
Here’s mine (hell yeah I ate meat for the occasion!):
And I totally ate some for breakfast the next day.
* At Ssäm Bar it’s served with raw oysters. You may remember Anthony Bourdain and David Chang gorging on it on an episode of “No Reservations.”
The dinner was the debut of Cathy and Akiko’s Hapa Kitchen, a supper club. (“Hapa” is a Hawaiian word for a half-Asian person.) The food — a homage to lamb and other fruits of spring, as well as Asian and Western cuisines — was the best of Akiko’s I’ve eaten, and that’s saying a great deal.
Pictured above: the first course, lamb and pork belly lettuce satay with pickled carrots, daikon, and cabbage, and a spicy almond-ginger sauce.
Pictured below: the second course, lamb gyoka/jiaozi with apples and beet-stained honey-sweetened yogurt sauce. (Akiko confessed that she amused herself by including pink or purple in four out of five courses. Very “Hello Kitty.”)
And below is the fifth course, curry-carrot ice cream garnished with a cinnamon-sugar dosa and ginger whipcream.
Jessica passed around little cards for guests to send their comments and congratulations to the chef. Very clever idea.
Doesn’t Akiko look absurdly lovely?
Circus Elephants Parade Across Manhattan Tonight [March 23, 2009]
animalinsider (via elephanteater):
Some things are too crazy even for Penn Station. Apparently circus elephants qualify. Once again the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus is heading into town and since the elephants can’t go up train station escalators, they need to get off a stop early in Queens and walk through the Mid-Town Tunnel, and straight across Manhattan to Madison Square Garden.
I was supposed to go see this spectacle with M. and Akiko et al but I started to get a bit sad, thinking about those gentle beasts trudging through Manhattan. Moreover, I’ve got to be up at 6 am to run a conference on green leasing, then work all afternoon, then go to a cocktail tasting and celebrate my half-birthday (his idea, I swear), then prep for the green workforce development panel, then Bloc Party on Wednesday night, then drive to Bumblefuck, CT, at 6 am on Thursday for conference and drive back by 8 pm for a crawfish boil….
In case you were wondering.
So as not to spoil it for anyone who may have DVR’d it, I will simply say that I AM SO PISSED OFF ABOUT THE TOP CHEF WINNER THAT I MAY NEVER WATCH THE SHOW AGAIN.
That is, unless we can convince my friend Akiko to try out and she gets in. Or there’s nothing better on TV.
The Great American Cooking Project