Desserts: Lady M and The Little Chef

We're lucky enough in Princeton not only to be close to NYC, but to have a top-rate pastry shop right around the corner. Last week, after a trip to the Met, my parents brought back a couple slices of Lady M's famous mille-crepe cake. Twenty crepes with layers of cream between, and burnt sugar on top.

On Saturday, some friends were visiting from NYC and Philly, so walking home after dinner we stopped at The Little Chef and picked up some treats. I can't remember the name of this mini-cake, but it was light, chocolatey and cinnamony, and oh-so-pretty. The chocolate-hazlenut torte was rich and fudgy, and redneckhunter's a huge fan of the macaroons, though the plain ones while good, are nothing compared to the ones dipped in dark chocolate.




Lady M Cake Boutique
41 East 78th Street (bet. Madison Ave & Park Ave)
New York, NY 10021
Tel: 212-452 2222

Little Chef Pastry Shop
8 S Tulane St
Princeton, NJ 08542
(609) 924-5335

Christmas Day Lunch

I've got a backup of posts to do from the holidays. Props to Fougoo for picking up my slack.

Anyways, Christmas lunch was at Fougoo's mom and dad's place like every year. They made some of my favorite dishes. For me, this is my comfort food.
These are curried beef pastries. When I was a kid, this was one of my favorite snacks my grandma used to make for me. You take a pie crust and fill it with ground beef and onions seasoned with curry, then paint on some egg on the top- simple, elegant- delicious.



Fougoo's dad is the master of frying the perfect spring roll. I don't think you can get spring rolls as good as this anywhere, and they should only be eaten when thsy are crisp right out of the fryer.












Fougoo's mom's wontons are the best, too. The filling is actually mostly vegetables with a little bit of pork or chicken- healthy and yummy.
It should be noted that all these items are so good that they require no ancillary items like soy sauce- all of them are best eaten as is.

Mediterranean Eats in NYC

We had a friend from Omaha come to visit over the weekend, and she was in the mood for some hearty winter fare. We took her to 2 places that kind of embody the NYC casual neighborhood place -- small, cozy, crowded with walk-ins, exposed brick. Friday night was Il Corallo in Soho for simple homemade pasta, thick and al dente. The have a long pasta menu, and I always deliberate, but then end up always ordering the same thing: the pappardelle con funghi (pictured above).

Saturday night was Uncle Nick's in Hell's Kitchen. We started with some mezze -- the sampler of dips: taromasalata, an eggplant dip, a really garlicky potatoey one, and tzaziki, spicy meatballs, and a "flaming cheese." The waiter was too fast for me to snap the 2 foot flame that shot up when he lit the sharp ouzo-soaked cheese on fire.

I got the grilled sardines (below) as my entree. Redneckhunter got moussaka (a huge plate!) and our friend got grilled lemon shrimp. She was happy all around with the weekend eats!

Il Corallo Trattoria
176 Prince St (between Thompson and Sullivan)
New York, NY 10012
212-941-7119

Uncle Nick's
747 9th Ave
New York, NY 10019
(212) 245-7992

Mie Thai, North Brunswick, NJ

I forgot my camera that night, but I did have leftovers from a surprisingly good dinner at Mie Thai in North Brunswick. Above is the Pad Prig Thai Sod -- beef with lime leaves, chili, Thai basil and young peppercorn in chili sauce. We asked for it Hot assuring the always cautious waiter that we liked spicy food. It had a nice kick -- just look at all the chili pepper seeds in it! The flavor was helped along by fresh peppercorns still on the stem (below).

The other dishes we tried were Larb with chicken, nice and gingery; and Pad Woon Sen -- shrimp and chicken sautéed with bean thread noodles, vegetables and eggs. There was something about this dish that made us not able to stop eating it.

My only complaint was that no one warned us that they were charging us $4 each for sticky rice! This place was good but way exceeded the usual $15 per person ethnic food max price tag, so definitely worth going back, but probably not as often as I'd like.

Mie Thai
2800 Route 27
No. Brunswick, NJ 08902
732-297-3066

Red Ginger of Georgetown, New Year's Eve

While I know that prix fixe menus are not the best judge of a restaurant, I was just hoping for more for New Year's Eve. While I didn't dislike the food at Red Ginger, it just wasn't anything special. The appetizers were the best part of the meal: mine was lobster with leeks and cremini mushrooms over grits with a curry cream sauce, redneckhunter got a jerk chicken served with vidalia onion, cabbage and potato hash. Both sauces were so good I sopped them up with the bread.


Started going downhill 2nd course: redneckhunter got a crab cake with mango relish (ho-hum) and I got crispy quail (not as good as Aladdin's Palace) with an enoki mushroom and three bean salad (kinda bland).


For the main courses, the main problem was that while the meat was cooked well, the flavors and sauces lacked any interest. I got whole red snapper (pictured above)-- the tomato-based sauce was like something I could have made myself.

Redneckhunter's adobo duck with a blood-orange reduction didn't really have any adobo flavor, and the sauce was just sweet. His side dish, a quinoa-pumpkin salad, was bland.

Dessert was equally disappointing: in the mango cobbler, the fruit wasn't cooked soft enough. The flourless chocolate cake should have been more decadently rich. The best part of both desserts was the ice cream.

Nashville Eats: The White Trash Cafe

I'll admit it, we picked this place off the Hollyeats list because of the name. But rather than Northeast hipster irony, here we were met by the super-sincere, super-nice, super-laid back proprietor who asked us where we were from and thanked us for taking the time to stop in at his place. It was pretty much just him doing all the waiting and bussing tables, and an older guy (his dad, maybe?) in an apron in back.

It was a simple down-home "meat and three" place (local speak for one meat with three side dishes). The menu was hand-written and photocopied -- so simple I can pretty much recreate it here: fried chicken, roast beef, country fried steak, mac and cheese, mixed beans, turnip greens, mashed taters, fried apples, corn - that's about it, no prices. After all our eating the past few days, we needed to take it easy and just ordered three sides to share, cornbread and coffee. "Are y'all vegetarian?" he asked.

Anyway when we were all done, he said, "How about... 5 bucks? 6? What do you think?" How great is this place?! Inside and out it was just full of great junk too -- he had a sign up saying if you wanted any of it, he'd let you have it in exchange for a donation to the SPCA.



White Trash Cafe
1914 Bransford Avenue
Nashville TN
(615) 383-0109

Nashville Eats: Prince's Hot Chicken

Now on to the real food in Nashville. I saw this place listed on Hollyeats.com -- actually he had so many good-looking places, we just had to pick a couple and go for it. Prince's Hot Chicken: I love fried chicken and I love spicy food, so the thought of hot spicy fried chicken - how could I resist?

Clearly this place is a local favorite -- when we got there, every seat was taken and a line of people the length of the restaurant were waiting for their orders. You could order your chicken mild, medium, hot and X-hot. I read in a Nashville free weekly that mild would make you break into a sweat, so we opted for hot. A woman in front of us in line concurred -- she said the extra-hot was just painful.

We ordered a 1/2 chicken hot with baked beans and waited, and we waited, and we waited. An hour and a 1/2 later and still waiting, and the people coming in just never stopped. Finally got our chicken and ate it back in our hotel room, just tearing it apart. Man, it was worth the wait -- spice all over our face and hands, lips feeling the lingering burn, white bread to cool the heat and sop up all the sauce.

We head out in search of a milkshake after that, again on a Holly recommendation, but no dice -- the Elliston Place Soda Shop was closed. Too bad, the place looked cool.



Prince's Hot Chicken
123 Ewing Drive
Nashville, TN
(615) 226-9442

Elliston Place Soda Shop
2111 Elliston Place
Nashville, TN
(615) 327-1090

The Frothy Monkey, Nashville

After Memphis, our arteries needed bit of a break, so we found this coffeehouse in what's known as Nashville's 12South neighborhood, a newly boho area situated on, (naturally) 12th Avenue South. The Mac to PC ratio (5 to 1) and the wardrobe (seriously, not a football sweatshirt or baseball cap in sight!) was a good indicator of the hipness of the clientele.

It became our regular morning joint for cleansing breakfast fare and wireless internet. The coffee was only so-so, but oatmeal with fresh fruit, yogurt and granola parfait, organic eggs, homemade carrot-bran muffins and banana bread -- that kind of thing really hit the spot.



The Frothy Monkey
2509 12th Ave South
Nashville, TN 37204
(615) 292-1808