Red Sauce

The Old Man and Scotch on the Rocks

The lemons were as big as grapefruit. They brought down some branches of the lemon tree so low that they touched the brown, Arizona desert leaving a round, soft indent in the sand.
“Do they taste sweeter than regular lemons, more tart?” I kept asking this, incessantly. The question itself was annoying me and my eagerness and earnest tone was cloying. Oy.
“They are lemons. They taste like lemons. Lemons aren’t sweet. Are you crazy?” my dad said. And that was the obvious answer.
My dad was showing me his garden, full of lemon trees, a fig tree, a nectarine tree and a few apple trees. In a corner was a smaller garden with peppers, tomatoes and zucchini.
He took me to Mrs. White’s in Phoenix and we bonded over the little things like the crushed and whole fennel in my grandfather, his father’s, Italian sausage and then we marveled at the uptight 'tude of my body building brother.
I haven’t been around here in a while, but I am going to post a previously posted and then deleted post I wrote about my dad.
Just visited the old guy in Arizona, home of wrinkled, tanned, turqoised Midwesterners and New Yorkers who go to the land of the sun to live our their last days. I fell in love with the Southwest and with my dad all over again.
So no matter what anyone thinks of this post (which I took down after someone that I relied on at the time told me it didn’t “do it” for her) this post was all about love. So fuck the player haters and upward and onward. Here's to cheating, stealing, tanned, wrinkled dads who live their life like they know it's going to end abruptly and ugly one day.

Show and Tell, Just a Game You Play

After a harrowing day at the runners’ office, I headed downtown for some wine and some nosh. (Nosh-a horrible word)
I was meeting a fellow GPer who was very excited about going to Centovini.
As I passed through the double glass doors of the mini mall like building and parted the ridiculously thick half circle of gray curtains that proceeded the doors, I was bombarded by a short man with slicked back hair and an overzealous Italian accent who thrust a rectangular plastic card with a number on it in front of me.
What’s this?
For the umbrella, he said.
And another for the coat.
In another awkward moment that happened at lightning speed, another short man with slicked back hair grabbed my backpack as I started to disrobe of my coat and hand over the offensive umbrella.
I looked at yet another person, a woman this time, who was staring at me and I quickly said, I am just going to go to the bar to wait for my friend.
Once at the bar with wine menu in hand, my disappointment and awkwardness continued. As two women bitched about another woman, a friend, who "has simply lost it. I mean have you seen her lately?" I was actually surprised by the menu that has been applauded by so many other food writers. It was boring and obvious (obvious cheese choices, meats and the standard antipasti).
The wine choices by the glass were not all that interesting or affordable if you like the bolder reds, either. Prices by the glass in the heavier reds category start around $15.
The Italian cheeses were nothing special and the Italian sausages that our bartender convinced us to order were a bit precious and redolent of mint, of all things.
So, as we finally prepare to leave, the wrong coat is brought to me. And my umbrella is lost.
It’s just then when I thought, the image of you is what I hoped you’d be. Isn’t that always the case in life, love and precious wine bars that everyone is talking about?

I Like My Oysters With Just Lemon, Thanks

Aah, yes, blogging. I have not been so into it, lately, as you can see.
So, I am here today to tell you the obvious. Blogging will be sporadic but still here in the future.
I am just not feeling the blog lately. I am feeling dreadful and embarrassed that this has become more diary than anything else and that grosses me out, as any articulate might say.
One too many people in my life have cut me off, mid-story to tell me, “Oh, I know that already, I read it in your blog.”
My intention was not to make this a diary. But alas, intentions are meaningless sometimes.
Let me just recap some great food moments of late and then hope that when I begin working at home in my skivvies in a couple of weeks, I will have more interesting things to share than what I ate, where I ate it and what I am thinking about Mariah Carey and/or my mother that day. Oy vey…
Oysters, Crab, Aretha
Crab cake, oysters, at Grand Central Oyster Bar.
Crab cake, not freshly cooked. And oddly seemed deep fried. But nice big lumps of crab in there.
Oysters—I have decided definitively after oyster eating binges lately, my favorite oysters are Malpeques.
Spare ribs, shrimp wonton soup at N.Y. Noodle Town.
Proscuitto, Arugula pizza at Graziella’s.
On another note—the lovely Aretha (this review says she was recovering from a cold in Boston) has lost some of her Aretha range. And her show was something like a Vegas-act with old jazz standards sung in between some Aretha-classics. But she’s still the queen. Seeing her live, though, a bit sad these days.
But I have faith that she will be singing the national anthem at one of the Tigers' World Series games!!!
Go Tigers!

Sending Props to the Ghetto Chicken Shack

Once, while treading up a low hill near Lake Michigan in Chicago, a bird shat on my mother’s shoulder. We were headed up to meet some of my friends for brunch and as my mother huffed and puffed her way up this little hill, a gray blob dropped from the sky and landed on the shoulder of her St. John suit.
She looked over at her broad shoulder and, in Italian said, “la mia fortuna.”
But is there such a thing as bad luck? Or black clouds or even mercury in retrograde?
Last night, I experienced a series of bad luck moments. Or what could be construed as bad luck moments.
A behemoth of a vehicle keeps breaking down on me. And I have no control over it. My presta valves on my beloved bicycles keep breaking off, leaving me with eventual flat tires. I am constantly changing tubes.
Finally, on a bicycle ride over to see a friend and to have some much needed drinks after a series of bad luck moments throughout the day, all the songs on my ipod mysteriously vanished. No more songs on my iPod. No more soothing Aretha, crazy Mariah, depressing Smiths. Nada. Nothing.
So, after sitting through trivia night at a Brooklyn bar, I headed to Crown Chicken for an 8 piece order of chicken nuggets and fries at midnight.
Crown Chicken’s nuggets are surprisingly tasty, all white meat and all 8 of them were surprisingly void of strange cartilage and/or rough bits. And the batter was salty and sweet. The fries were thin and crisp. Thank god for the corner, greasy chicken joint in the ghetto. People do not take them seriously. But, Crown Chicken is now my go to spot for after the bar and after a series of bad luck or just down days.
Everyone else who came in while I waited for my box of nuggets ordered Gyros (pronounced Jie-Rose). So, maybe I am missing out on something else at the Crown Chicken. But I am going to stick to their specialty. Thank god for Crown Chicken.

On an unrelated note--heads up to everyone on one of my favorite enlightening time wasters--Elisabeth Vincentelli's lovely blog here.

Give Me a Donut and a Cop, Pronto!

“Can I interest you in some pastry items?”
This was the opening line of the community police meetings in Park Slope that I attended as a youngish reporter. Never failed. Once everyone was seated in their pews, a chubby cop with a tight shirt and small, fat hands would offer up the “pastry items.” And every time it made me smile because the pastry items were just a bunch of donuts in a box. Not even Dunkin Donuts. No, these were bought at the local grocery store.
The meetings were at times stultifying and revelatory. Mostly, the complaints dealt with noise. And it being Park Slope other less stultifying complaints dealt with racism and crime. And I would have to then go back to the offices of the papers I worked for, where I barely made any money and got absolutely no respect. I then stayed up late and wrote at least two stories from these meetings and eventually I got fired. But that's another story for another time.
Back to the noise...The noise complaints used to make me cringe. It’s New York City, I thought. So what if a truck rolls by once in a while and makes your brownstone shake? What do you expect? A new bar opens on your street, there will be noise, you crazy old people. Construction down the road? Live with it! Or move to the ‘burbs. Or move in with your children who you say are so wonderful. Go away.

Finding Fennel, Finding Home

"Oh my gad! Oh my gad!"
From ten feet away I could hear the familiar nasal tones of a native Chicagoan and it brought me back. Well, to be more exact, the nearly mulleted, high-browed, eyeshadowed Midwesterner brought my own nasal tones back for a bit, at least. Like déjà vu the accent just kicked in as if there was a plump, nearly purple Traverse City bing cherry pressed up against the back of my nasal passage. All I could do was chime in, “Oh my gad.” And yes, a smile and not a smirkcame from the woman. We in the Midwest know the art of self-deprecation. Oooeee, shure we do!
This leads me to sausage. There's sausage and then there's my grandfather's sausage. There's the delicate use of spice and then there's the bold use of fennel. I prefer fennel seeds in my sausage. Not that overwhelming abundance that can repulse. Nah, a refreshing handful to just lend some texture and earthiness to the pork. And my granfather’s sausage was amazing with a slightly loose grind, a sweet pork flavor (even in his hotter sausage) and a nutty note of fennel along with just the right salt and pepper. But every time he got applause for his sausage, he brushed it off. Even though he was from the old country, he adopted that Michigan self-deprecation.
It’s hard to find and it’s hard to forget.
As happens many times, when people die, so do their recipes.
So my dead grandfather took his sausage recipe with him. So there I am on a Saturday at an Italian deli in Windsor Terrace picking up subpar sausage minus fennel. But then I picked up some amazing, fluffy light freshly made cheese ravioli and truffle oil, still an obsession.
So my Saturday night, pre—Oh My Gad! dinner—consisted of subpar sausage, cheese ravioli and mushrooms in truffle oil.
A bit too hearty to be light on your feet and talking smack with a nasal-toned, highlighted, high-waisted nurse from Skokie, but you can’t always have what you want. But you can try to get close to it.
Next up--homemade sausage experimenting.

An Ode to Tokyo Rose

A while ago, maybe a couple years now, I worked on a book that involved interviewing people about how food influenced, intersected in their life. At one time, I interviewed a woman I will call Amaya for now, at Superfine in Dumbo. She grew up in Chicago and had a story about Tokyo Rose, who died today.
Here's Amaya's story.

Amaya and Tokyo Rose

*Amaya* met Tokyo Rose when she was 15. On a quiet, cool Chicago fall night, this woman who had come into her parent’s restaurant regularly and who had become friends with her family, suddenly had a story, a legendary one. But Amaya couldn’t tell anyone about it. Her father forbade that. It wasn’t until she was flipping through a Lucky Magazine when she was 30, feeling a bit lost in life, that she was able to choke out the Tokyo Rose story to an unknowing Mac Cosmetics employee.
Amaya grew up in a restaurant family. She bussed tables, cleaned the kitchen, scooped out Udon and spent a lot of time alone and with babysitters at home while her parents were working. One of her earliest memories was pushing over the plates and linens underneath the counter of her parent’s restaurant on Division Street in Chicago and making a place to lie down and sleep.
Her father used to cook for the royal family in Japan. But when he emigrated to Chicago he struggled and worked at Benihana’s and finally opened his own Japanese restaurant on Division Street and served sushi and udon before the masses caught on. The restaurant was modeled on the ramen shops in Japan, casual and packed with intensely fresh ingredients. With fresh noodles made and hung along the kitchen daily to dry, the smell of the flour burrowed into her nostrils and Amaya set off to shop with her father at the markets. She can truthfully say that she has seen a chicken run around with his neck cut off at a butcher shop in Chicago’s Southside.
She did her homework under the counter of the restaurant, slept under the counter on a heaping pile of tablecloths and watched people come in from all over the city for what was then an exotic cuisine. Her mother made sure to pack her sandwiches after she had an embarrassing moment trying to explain her bento box at a privatge school on Chicago’s North Side.
Besides packs of men and women from the Southside coming into the restaurant for chicken wings (they were barbecued and tangy, sweet and sour, crunchy—better than anything they could find on the South side) so did the city’s Japanese community.
“They were so quiet and intense,” Amaya says.
One night she was finally struck by the oddity of growing up in a restaurant.

Got My Aretha Back in a Banana Cone

I had a banana sorbet during lunch today. I also had some leftover (best in the world) mac and cheese and buttermilk fried chicken but the highlight was the walk along the park with a sorbet on a cone that I had seen and wondered about but suddenly fell in love with during a slow impromptu walk along Central Park.
Ciao Bella was out of my raspberry sorbet. And as I perused the options next to a trio of Upper East Side young ladies who lunch, who were clad in crisp Oxfords and khakis, I decided after I watched them opt for mint chocolate chip and hazelnut, I would go freaky on them and get the banana sorbet. While the beloved, but sadly absent today, raspberry sorbet tastes like the very essence of the lovely little bombs, (sidenote-favorite raspberry moment? Eating a carton of the lovelies on the Champs Elysees with three of my favorite people in the world—Framboise et al), the banana sorbet immediately reminded me of an overripe banana flambéed, carmelized and heated up, then frozen. Lovely. Made me want to make a sandwich of nutella, banana and Italian bread pressed and melted in my George Foreman tonight. I am all about indulging myself these days.
Funny how I have been eating better and enjoying eating, drinking, perusing the city but not feeling like sharing it at all.
Here we go, self-conscious blog moment. It’s the jumping the shark moment, isn’t it?
So soon?
Perhaps not. Maybe I just needed a break. And I needed a jolt of new, lovely and new.
I am in rediscovery mode, bitches. It's fall and I feel it again, as Lavern Baker would say.
I went through my CD collection and loaded all the R&B and soul I had all but neglected for nearly a year. Now, I am back and up to the challenge of listening to Aretha Franklin daily again. Praise her.
And I am off to the gym so I can eat a large piece of the apple pear pie I made this past Sunday.
I made the pie crust with just butter and added some sugar as some recipes suggested. But I fear the sugar made the crust less flaky than I would have hoped. I want flaky.
I am on a mission to find some lard, as Aretha blares in my headphones.

Apple Pear Pie

Crust:
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
3 tablespoons (or more) ice water

In the pie:
4 peeled pears
7 peeled apples
Cinnamon
Nutmeg
¼ cup brown sugar
A few pats of butter
Some salt

Mix flour, sugar, and salt together in bowl. Add butter and mix with fingers until coarse meal forms. Add 3 tablespoons water. Mix together just until moist clumps form, adding more water by 1/2 tablespoonfuls if dough is dry. Gather dough into ball; flatten into disk. Wrap in plastic; refrigerate 1 hour. (Can be made 2 days ahead. Keep chilled. Soften slightly at room temperature before rolling.)

Slice up pears and apples. In a large bowl, mix fruit with cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg and salt.

Roll out half the dough, place in buttered pie dish. Place fruit on crust. Roll out the rest of the dough and place it on top. Pinch bottom and top dough together.
Cook at 400 for about 45 minutes.

Pink Shirts and Chorizo the Next Day

Cool and sunny. I took the turn with the other spandex-clad group and rounded the slight decline in a tucked, lovely aerodynamic position. I was ahead and while it was no race, I was enjoying leading the huffy group of men in their tight shorts and their serious mouths. Then all the sudden I hear this woman off to the left say, “Look, there, you got one, the pink shirt.” She was looking at me, pointing at me and talking into a walky talky device.
I stopped since I noticed my fellow shiny clothed friends also stopped and then it dawned on me quickly. I was wearing a pink shirt, a pink lycra shirt. Not my usual color choice but it figured when a police officer stops me for running a red light while on a bike path in Central Park, I would be sporting my bubble gum colored cycling shirt. In fact, it was the only time this year I had it on. When I showed up at Central Park, my riding partner just looked at me and said, “Rose. Pink. Right on.”
So then just about 30 minutes and 12 miles later, I got pulled over by a cop and threatened with a ticket for running a red light in my pink shirt. But I do believe the pink shirt saved me a bit. How do you give someone a slap when they are wearing pink?
I was also lucky to be riding with a native New Yorker and a law student working for Eliot Spitzer who talked me out of the ticket by simply asking the cop not to yell at us, “please.” The cop stopped, thought about it and told me, the pink shirt, to go on my way.
Just after that I nearly mowed down an old man and his dog who were both looking the wrong way as they crossed the path.
I hate to become a pedestrian basher but if I am going to get my peach pie stuffed fat ass out at Central Park at 630 a.m. and don a pink shirt to ride with the serious cycling kids then I should be looked for on the path by this old man and his dog out for their morning walk. They should know better.
Last night’s dinner was a mash of leftovers that turned into a master piece of textural complexity and color. I was all Sarah Moulton in the kitchen. I took Sunday dinner’s leftovers and made a lovely Tuesday night meal.
On Sunday, besides peach pie, I made tacos. Chorizo, beef and bean tacos. Last night, I cut up the leftovers, added some onion, garlic and fresh basil with a generous amount of olive oil and mixed in some cavatelli and parmesan.
Lovely and amazing, just like the first time around.

My Afternoon With a Whorey Pie

It's amazing that I went all summer without making pie. Until yesterday, that is. Late in the afternoon, I stood at my kitchen table and made a pie crust simply with flour, butter and salt. This came after much discussion about whether to use all butter, all Crisco or half and half. I went for the all butter. Butter is better. No doubt about it. And I agree with one of my consultants who said, "Crisco just scares me." Then I peeled a large bag of sweet peaches I bought in Greenpoint.
I cut up the peaches and placed them gingerly in the buttery pie crust with their striated red marks, perforated from their now missing pits, looking upwards. Topped it all off with a muddy mixture of sugar, butter and an egg. On top of that, I sprinkled cinnamon and nutmeg.
Then the double crusted bad boy went into the oven for nearly an hour. It’s true! Pies take a long time to cook.
But so does a late summer transformation…..
As Pascale Le Draoulec, a French author in search of the perfect American Pie in her book "American Pie: Slices of Life," says, "Pie just may be the madonna-whore of the dessert world." She explains that pie is both sensuous and maternal. Pie, the perfect whore.
The outcome of my own sensuous and maternal whorey peach pie was pretty excellent. Although, I would have liked the crust to be a tad bit flakier. My guess is that I manhandled it a bit too much when I formed it into a ball. And one consultant suggested I may not have let it rest long enough. It was only in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes.
This week, I am going to tackle more pie. Maybe this time, I will make the crust with lard.
Any suggestions?

Peach Pie

Pie Crust:

2 Cups all-purpose unbleached flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup cold unsalted butter
5 tbs. cold water

Cut the butter into little pieces. Dump the flour and salt into a bowl of and mix. Add the butter and cut it in with a fork until the batter becomes pebbly. Add the water, adding it a little at a time to make sure you have the right amount.
Press dough together gently into a ball. Do not overhandle.
Place plastic wrap over dough and let it rest in refrigerator for at least an hour.
Roll out dough with floured rolling pin on floured surface. Place dough in pie pan and cut off excess. Gently roll excess into a ball and roll out again. This is the top layer. Place top layer over peach mixture.

Peach mixture:
5 1/2 cups peaches, cut and peeled.
cinnamon
nutmeg
one egg
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbs. flour
1/2 cup butter

Place peaches center side up on bottom. Pour cinnamon and nutmeg over mixture. Mix together egg, sugar, flour and butter. Pour this over the peaches. Top the pie with the top crust.

Bake at 450 for 15 minutes. Then turn down oven to 350 and bake for about 35 more minutes.