My friend sent me a link to a NY Times article about dining in the current recession so I thought I’d share it with you. They interviewed some of the major restaurateurs and talked about the steps they were taking to encourage customers to visit their restaurants. I had my own experience with this when I went to Artisanal for Restaurant Week with some friends and were each given a restriction free $20 gift certificate to use at Picholine as a way to say thanks for our patronage.
The article also mentioned about how easy it was to get reservations and a majority of the restaurants now which I can also attest to. I was able to get a last minute reservation at August and walked into Bocca during restaurant week. Additionally, I was at Cafecito on a Saturday night and there were still empty tables at 9pm.
Eater and Grub Street have started tagging posts for recession deals so it might be worth following them to bring down your dining expenses a bit.
- Eater’s Deal Feed
- Eater’s Recession Specials
- Grub Street’s Recession Specials
February 4th, 2009 in
Uncategorized |
No Comments
Recently, I decided to host a dinner in the style of Sunday Night Dinner’s after being inspired by Tamara & Zora’s model. They have a set price to cover the cost of the ingredients that everyone donates along with bringing a bottle of wine to share. I opted for a smaller party of 8 (including myself) rather than Tamara’s 20 because my kitchen and living room are considerably smaller and it was my first time cooking 5 courses on my own for a group that big. The final menu ended up being mostly what I was originally planning:
- Roasted beet & orange salad w/ candied nuts & feta cheese on top of mixed leafy greens
- French onion soup topped with a mixture of pecorino & gruyère cheese
- Sautéed swiss chard with raisins & roasted pine nuts
- Coq au vin
- Dried fruit compote stewed with wine, honey, and water, served with rum flavored whipped cream
My target was $20 a person which I was able to hit after a last minute addition, but then that became a last minute cancellation and it was $23 a person instead. The portions were the right size though because except for the coq au vin (Alton Brown’s recipe) we ended up finishing just about everything. There was a bit left over of the swiss chard dish (Tamara’s recipe) but that was because I didn’t cook it properly. The first time I made it, a year prior, it was amazing, but this time it was still a bit tough and probably needed to cook more. I think I was crowding my saute pan by trying to cook three times the size of the original portion in a pan just slightly bigger than I had before. I’ll have to work on that recipe a bit.
The soup (Alton Brown’s recipe) was a bit on the sweet side and needed a bit more liquid, but overall it was still pretty tasty and a success for my second time making it ever. The beet & orange salad (my own creation) was the overall favorite of the night (according to the anonymous questionnaire forms I passed out) which made me pretty happy so I’ll probably repeat it again sometime in the future. I forgot to add the lemon juice to the fruit compote so it was in need of some acid (which some people said on the comments), but the overall flavor was pretty good. I seasoned it with a bit of cardamom to give it a Middle Eastern or South Asian twist. The rum flavored whipped cream was a last minute idea I had when I was in the grocery store that replaced the store bought ice cream. Ice cream might have been a better accompaniment to the compote, but this way I got to make something instead of just buy it. Well, that was the intention… A few of my guests ended up whipping the cream for me while I got the compote ready to go so many thanks to all of them for lending a hand! Anyhow, I added about 2 teaspoons of 8 year old rum for about a pint or so of cream, but I think I’d go a bit heavier on the rum next time. It was garnished with some powdered cinnamon and served in a martini glass.
The questionnaire had pretty positive remarks in terms of portion size, number of courses, cost & format of the meal so I think I’ll try to keep it the same and just do it again with new recipes. Realistically, it might be hard to keep it to $20 for 5 courses though because I barely made the cut with that budget this time around and there were numerous things that helped keep the cost down this time that might not the next: 1) I was cooking bone in, dark meat chicken which is extremely cheap, 2) I was able to use lots of ingredients I happened to already have, 3) With the exception of the swiss chard, most of the ingredients were available locally in this season so I didn’t have to pay for anything that was shipped from far away. If I decide to incorporate any exotic fruits and vegetables or cook any red meat, seafood, or more exotic meats (bison has been on my list) it will be hard to keep it to $20. Also, if I cook something where I don’t happen to have a lot of the ingredients for already, it will be hard to keep it to $20. I think $25 is probably going to be a bit more realistic without dropping the number of courses to 3 or 4, but my goal is definitely to keep it as reasonable as possible.
For the next couple dinners I think I’ll try a Spanish themed dinner an a Middle Eastern themed dinner at some point. I have a bunch of lamb bones from a dinner at Tamara’s when they roasted a whole lamb so that would probably make a good stock for a dish or two at the Middle Eastern themed dinner. If it goes well and I still want to keep doing this when the weather if nice outside I’ll try a farmer’s market dinner with all the nice summertime produce. Who knows what time will tell though… I might decide I’d rather be on the beach. 
February 4th, 2009 in
Uncategorized |
2 Comments
This is a slightly adapted version of a fantastic cookbook I bough when I was in Spain called Cooking in Spain. I changed it to be more of stew and used all dark meat instead of chicken breast. It takes a bit of time to shop all the vegetables, but once you have everything prepped it doesn’t take much active time to cook. Most of the time is spent time letting it stew and do its thing.
Ingredients:
- 4 chicken legs split into drumsticks & thighs (skin removed, but bones on)
- one large onion or 2 small ones (sliced)
- 4 red bell peppers (sliced)
- 4 cloves of garlic (minced)
- 4 tomatoes (seeded, peeled and diced)
- enough sherry to cover all the chicken (about half a bottle)
Steps:
1. Salt, pepper, and flour the chicken pieces.
2. Brown the chicken pieces in one pan while the onions saute in a sauce pan or ideally, a dutch oven.
3. After the onions saute for a bit, add the bell peppers and saute until softened
4. When the chicken is browned on all sides deglaze the pan with the sherry.
5. Add the tomatoes & garlic to the pot with onions and saute for a minute or so
5. Add the chicken and the sherry to the pot, cover and stew for 30-45 minutes until the chicken falls off the bone.
Notes:
- You can probably put it in a cast iron dutch oven and stew it at 325 for an hour or so instead of stewing on the stove top
- You might need to add a water in addition to the sherry when stewing
- You can serve it with rice or some crusty bread to sop up the sauce
Tortilla Española
Ingredients:
- About 4 medium-large potatoes
- 4-6 cloves of minced garlic
- 6-8 eggs
Steps:
1. Peel and dice the potatoes. They don’t need to be the exact same size, but something close would allow them to cook at about the same pace.
2. Fry the potatoes in a generous amount of olive oil in a pan (enough go cover most of the potatoes).
3. Fry them until they are soft on the inside and lightly brown out the outside.
4. Saving the oil for later use, strain out the potatoes in a bowl and mix in the garlic letting the hot oil cook the garlic a bit (a minute or so is fine). I am not sure if this is really necessary, but I like to do it hoping the garlic flavor gets softened a bit more.
5. Season with salt and pepper. I season liberally with salt at this phase because there is a lot of food mass to season.
6. Stir in the beaten eggs. There should be enough that the liquid covers up most of the potatoes.
7. Put the mixture in an 8″ or 10″ sloped-sided saute pan and heat while covered on medium to medium-low heat. Jiggle the pan around to make sure there are no cracks in the bottom.
8. It should be about an inch thick of mass so you need to let it cook through for 5-10 minutes. Before it is ready to flip you must be able to move around the tortilla when you jiggle the pan. It should not feel like it is stuck to the pan at all.
9. The tricky part is to flip it and get it back into the pan without making a mess. The best way that I know to do this is to find a plate that fits inside of your saute pan but still covers all of the tortilla. Then flip the entire thing over so the plate is on the bottom and the pan is on the top. Put the pan back on the stove and carefully slide the tortilla off the plate and back in the pan.
10. Jiggle the pan around to make sure there are no cracks on the bottom and then let it sit there and firm up for another 5 minutes or until you think the eggs are cooked to your liking.
11. Let it cool for about 30 minutes to an hour before slicing into wedges and serving. You can make it hours in advance and serve it at room temperature but I like to have mine a little bit on the warm side.
January 30th, 2009 in
Uncategorized | tags:
Recipe,
Spanish |
1 Comment
My old roommate from Madrid, who is now living in D.C., was visiting over the last long weekend and we were supposed to go to Tamara’s in Astoria for spit-roasted lamb dinner, but due to weather constraints (ie: snow & sub-freezing temperatures) roasting a lamb over hot coals for 4 hours was not an option. The dinner was canceled and postponed to this past Sunday (which I enjoyed thoroughly). Anyhow, we instead opted to create our own home cooked dinner. In honor of the year we spent in Spain we made a few Spanish inspired dishes. On the menu included:
- Almond-stuffed dates wrapped in bacon
- Tortilla Española (Spanish omelet with potatoes)
- Pollo a la Sevillana (Chicken stewed with sherry and red bell peppers)
Here is one recipe to start off with. The others will be posted in the next couple days.
Almond-stuffed dates wrapped in bacon
Ingredients:
- Dates with the seeds removed
- salted & roasted almonds
- One half strip of bacon per date
Steps:
- Stuff the dates with the almonds
- Wrap the date with a half strip of bacon
- Roast in the oven at 350 until the bacon is nice and crispy
Note: You can make this without the bacon as well and it is quite delicious and much more nutritious. It depends on how much of a bacon lover you are.
I have been meaning to sign up for these cooking classes at the Institute of Culinary Education for a while now. It is a 5 part series that focuses on the basic techniques of cooking with more of an emphasis on learning the skills used to cook the dish rather than the actual recipe. I am hoping these will be more useful to me than the latter because I can follow a recipe if I have to but the technique of doing a good roast or proper poach is more difficult.
Anyhow, I started this past Wednesday and so far so good. We had about 2.5 hours of lecture, 2 hours of cooking, and a half hour to eat. We covered a lot of basic concepts since it was the first class such as equipment, food safety, and chopping before going into the specific techniques for that session which were blanching, vinaigrettes, emulsions, & sautéing. After going through the techniques in with lecture & demonstrations we split up into groups of four and made the following:
- seared lamb chops with a compote butter topping
- diced potatoes sautéed with persillade (minced parsley & garlic)
- hot & spicy vegetable soup
- creamy shallot vinaigrette with champagne vinegar
- blueberries macerated with maple syrup
Other groups made pretty much the same thing except they replaced the hot soup with gazpacho (which I liked better), they did a different vinaigrette, and did a different macerated fruit dessert.
The class is going to go every Wednesday, but I am actually going to have to skip this week because I have a friend in town and will make it up in a few months.
January 25th, 2009 in
Uncategorized | tags:
Classes |
No Comments
As if we didn’t need yet another bit of evidence that we are in a recession. Aside from the shrinking economy and rounds of layoffs all around, the sheer ease at getting a reservation during this year’s Restaurant Week is astounding. I was able to get a reservation at August in the West Village just four days in advance for 7:45 on a weeknight which is prime-time weeknight dining for me. I was also able to walk into Bocca, which is also participating in the Winter 2009 Restaurant Week this year, at 9pm on a Thursday night without having to wait at all for a table. This is Thursday, right? The supposed start of the weekend. Shouldn’t they be packed to the brim? Something seems amiss…
Also, I feel like the food that they are putting on the Restaurant Week menu is better than in previous years. Usually I feel like they have to create a special menu that doesn’t properly represent what they usually serve and then the quality of what you get goes down in par with the reduced prix fixe price you pay. This year I have seen pretty much the same dishes that appear on the special menu on the regular menu as well, which is a good sign.
So far I have been to both August and Bocca for dinner. I am going to Artisanal next Monday and planning a lunch in the Upper East Side somewhere on Thursday. I’ll be posting up reviews & photos (hopefully) soon.
After finding what is to date the best tamales I have ever had at a street cart in San Jose del Cabo I didn’t really feel the need to continue on to dinner that night. I was perfectly happy eating more street food and calling that dinner. Luckily, my friends convinced me otherwise and we ended up continuing on to dinner at Damiana on our second to last night of our new year’s eve trip to Baja California. This ended up being my favorite sit down meal from my entire 11 day trip through Belize and Cabo.
It started off very promising with some outstanding tortilla soup. After having quite a bit of tortilla soup at various Mexican restaurants it was nice to have some that really stood out. Something about it seemed fresher and more flavorful than any of the other renditions I have had before. Then the main courses came out. My sister and I shared an order of the stuffed peppers (chile rellenos) and the guajillo shrimp. Its been a few weeks now so I don’t remember what specifically was so different about the chile rellenos, but like the tortilla soup, it was a dish that was especially amazing after having so many times before. The guajillo shrimp was my dish of the night though so I am now on a search for a good recipe. It would be lovely to recreate the flavors I remember having in the warm weather down there while in my apartment in the frigid northeast.
The other mains that were ordered were lobster and a pasta dish with shrimp in a cream sauce. The lobster was fresh and sweet as it should be. Its hard to get seafood that fresh in the states for some reason. The pasta was nothing to write home about and I wouldn’t suggest ordering it unless you were really craving some form of Italian food and got dragged to an amazing Mexican restaurant instead.
And then as a finale to an amazing meal you get a free shot of their homemade damiana liqueur at the bar on your way out. It is made from a plant that supposedly has aphrodisiac properties when brewed as a tea. I am not sure it had the same effect when fermented into an alcohol more so than a shot of anything else…
It is very close to the tamale cart I mentioned earlier, but I would recommend keeping your appetite wide open for the tasty treats here and not snacking on tamales prior to dinner.
Damiana Restaurant Bar and Patio
Boulevard Mijares #8, on the eastern side of Plaza Mijares
San Jose del Cabo, Los Cabos, Baja California Sur, Mexico
+52 (624) 142-0499
Unlimited food & open bar (wine, beer, sodas) for $35 in Manhattan . That should be enough to sell it to anyone. To top it off, the food is a unique collection of The Village Voice picks from all the boroughs.
Here is the official text from the Village Voice:
Featuring handpicked restaurants from Robert Sietsema’s Counter Culture AND Sarah DiGregorio’s Fork in the Road.
In recognition of the tantalizing and eclectic cuisine featured by resident food critics, Robert Sietsema and Sarah DiGregorio, The Village Voice is proud to present our second annual Choice Eats tasting event. We have scaled New York’s eclectic culinary landscape to bring together Robert’s and Sarah’s tastiest picks from years of unearthing the five borough’s best-kept secrets.
Set amid the backdrop of the historic 69th Armory on Lexington Avenue, guests will be invited to sample delicious cuisines that would otherwise require days of travel. Featuring over 50 restaurants, and representing foods from all nations, this is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for Voice readers to treat their taste buds to a trip around the world.
I went last year and enjoyed it immensely. While some of them clearly didn’t bring the best they had to offer for the event, some were absolutely delicious and I am wondering why I still haven’t had time to pay them a visit. There are a couple repeats from last year, but plenty of new places that have opened up since recently as well. I have a post on one of them, Top Cafe Tibet, and been to a few others like Mercadito & Back Forty and haven’t had a chance to write about them yet.
The price this year went up from $25 to $35 but it is still a great deal and a portion of the proceeds will go to a City Harvest.
Tickets go on sale tonight at midnight.
For more details and the official list, check out the official page.
On the second to last night of our stay in Cabo San Lucas we decided to take the short cab ride over to San Jose del Cabo and have dinner at restaurant called Damiana. But before we sat down for dinner my sister and I noticed a few carts in the plaza just in front of the restaurant and made a bee-line for them because we were both craving some street food after all the formal restaurants we had been going to.
There was one cart that had significantly more foot traffic than the other one so we decided to start off with that one. They had four kinds of tamales along with a variety of drinks such as horchata & jamaica. The tamale varieties included: rajas con queso (chili & cheese), carne en salsa roja (beef in red salsa), pollo en salsa verde (chicken in green salsa), and elote (corn). My sister and I started off with the rajas con queso and the beef tamales and were both thoroughly impressed. Then my friend got the pollo en salsa verde. I had low expectations since chicken, while being usually a bit healthier, is also usually lacking in the flavor deptartment and can be on the tough side if its overcooked. Surprisingly, this was super tender and the green salsa gave it some nice flavor.
All in all, they were some of the best tamales I have had. My sister, who lives in Tucson and gets plenty of authentic Mexican food, agreed that these were the best tamales she has had as well. The corn masa itself was the perfect texture and had excellent flavor. I am not sure how they made it so amazing, but I wish I could get them like that in New York City or anywhere north of the border for that matter. After enjoying a few bites of the tamale in its unaltered state I then topped all of them off with some of their homemade salsa picante to kick up the heat a bit though.
All the fillings were damn good but if I had to rank them I would put the pollo en salsa verde at the top because its rare to chicken this tender and flavorful. Usually beef or pork reigns as king since they typically have more flavor, but this was some damn good chicken. A close second would be the rajas con queso because the cheese had a nice saltiness to it and the green chili peppers gave it some nice heat that was different than their spicy salsa that was made with red chili’s. The least favorite, but still utterly delicious and better than anything else I have had anywhere else, was the carne en salsa roja. All of them were well about a dollar each.
The place doesn’t really have a name but they are in the Northeast quadrant of Plaza Mijeres in San Jose del Cabo. If you were in the restaurant Damiana, you would just walk straight out the door and you would run into it. Here is a photo of the cart so you know what to look for.