Girls Cooking Night: Tapas

We've reached the point where in girls cooking night, a lot of us are starting to bring 2 dishes -- we thought this would be fine for Tapas Night, but well, no one really made tapas-sized small plate portions... Still even with all this food, we managed to devour most of it!

Melissa, as host, actually felt compelled to make 3 dishes: a spicy potato and chorizo; a salad with apples, cheese, and walnuts; and a classic Andalusian gazpacho with wonderful homemade croutons.


















Brownie made a baked mushroom, potato, onion dish. Debbie brought a green salad dressed with peaches and a tasty dressing, and sauteed spinach with pine nuts.








Kim supplied us with virgin and regular sangria, and two kinds of marinated olives.






I brought a crab and roasted pepper dip, and for dessert, toasted bread with chocolate drizzled with olive oil and sea salt.





And Marian brought the other dessert, a reprise of her delicious flan. She even went out and bought ramekins especially for the occasion!

Iggie's Pizza in Baltimore

Last week, went with bigfatlar, kwan, and 2 members of Chicago band Mass Shivers to local Baltimore pizza place Iggie's in Mount Vernon. Honestly, they now have topped my list as favorite pizza in Baltimore.
The place is BYOB and you also bus your own table, but their Neapolitan style pizza was delicious and worth any hassle.
We started with a great Caesar salad with anchovies and Iggie's arugula salad. We also ordered a side of macaroni and cheese with 4 cheeses and herbes de provence.

Their pizza has a fantastic thin crust the way I prefer. We got the Funghi with mushroom ragu, leeks and goat cheese.
The Salsiccia had sausage, fennel and tomato ragu.

We also got the Alice with garlic spinach, fresh tomato, goat cheese and pesto.

For dessert, we finished off with a blood orange sorbetto- a little tart mixed with sweet was a perfect end to the meal.


Iggie's
818 N. Calvert Street
Mount Vernon
Baltimore, MD 21202
(410) 528-0818

Queens Food Safari Part 2

Stop #3 was my favorite on the safari. Unidentified Flying Chickens is one of several Korean fried chicken places that have opened up in the city. The Korean style of frying chicken involves frying once, pulling the chicken out and letting it cool slightly, then frying a second time. What this does is render the fat of the skin, making it thin and crispy. Then your choice of sauce is put on the chicken. We went with soy-ginger and spicy hot sauce. They were both phenomenal, and the crispy skin was amazing.

I'm also hoping that they'll sell t-shirts online one day with their cute logo chickens.






Our final stop for dinner was the Holy Grail of Thai food in NYC, which brownie had been wanting to go to for years now: Sripraphai.

We started with a variety of salads: the crispy watercress salad which I love, a shredded green mango salad that was also wonderful, and a dried mushroom salad.



The "dried mushrooms" were actually ying-er, or silver wood ear, a tree fungus.






It's amazing how even though the salads had similar ingredients -- squid, red onion, lime -- the flavors of each salad were so different.






We also got drunken noodles (above), green curry with fish cake and thai eggplants, and sa-tor beans with spicy sauce and shrimp. Brownie was the only one who liked the bitter beans, but the other two dishes were wonderful as always.















Unidentified Flying Chickens
71-22 Roosevelt Avenue
Jackson Heights, NY
718-205-6662

Sripraphai
64-13 39th Ave., between 64th and 65th Sts.
Woodside
718-899-9599

Queens Food Safari: Part One

What's the perfect bachelorette party for a foodie? A day of ethnic eating in Queens of course! For brownie's girls day, we made a trek up to explore Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside and Jackson Heights.



First stop was Izalco, a Salvadoran restaurant. We were stopping here based on Robert Sietsema's glowing words: "Culinary triumphs include elote tamales -- husk-wrapped, studded with corn kernels, and light as souffles."
We got one with chicken. They truly were light - probably the lightest masa I've ever had in a tamale. And wrapped with plaintain leaves rather than corn husks. So good I wanted to ordered another one, but we had more stops to go and need to pace ourselves.

We also tried a fried elote tamale with crema. Interesting -- never knew a tamale could be unwrapped and fried -- it was sweet too like corn bread.




For "dessert" we had a plaintain cake stuffed with sweet crema -- like a plaintain twinkie. Some of us liked it, some didn't. Me personally, I liked the cream inside but thought the plaintain was kind of mushy and starchy.


Second stop was La Uruguaya y Paraguayita Bakery. Sietsema said their spinach empanada was "worth walking a mile for." I much prefer baked empanadas like these, rather than fried. Fresh out of the oven, these would have been amazing. Microwaved to heat them up, they were still pretty damn good.


We got a spinach and a tuna - marinated the Spanish way. We were also curious about the barrels and barrels of little baked nuggets that were all over this place.



Marian bought us a bag -- they were like an oyster cracker-tarralle. Dry and crunchy, slightly peppery and seasoned lightly of fennel.




Izalco Restaurant
64-05 Roosevelt Avenue, Woodside
(718) 533-8373

La Uruguaya y Paraguayita Bakery
68-24 Roosevelt Avenue, Woodside
(718) 672-1919

Heirlooms Make Everything Better!

While I've been dreading the weekly dump of squash, I continue to eagerly look forward to each week's batch of tomatoes. Each week we've gotten 1 1/2 pints of tasty sungold and regular cherry tomatoes, 3 lbs of regular tomatoes, and 4 lbs of a variety of heirlooms ranging from big and red, to small and orange, to green, to deep blackish-red. Makes for wonderfully mixed caprese salads (with my favorite vinegar).

Good tomatoes make such a difference, and it's such luxury being able to eat a great tomato with anything. I think redneckhunter and I are probably the only people in the world eating heirloom, liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches though...

Ben's Chili Bowl and Waffle House

I was sure that at some point someone had blogged Ben's Chili Bowl, a Washington DC institution, but looking back through the archives, no one has. So here I will remedy the situation. The first time 1000yregg took me to Ben's, we each had chili half-smokes (Bill Cosby's favorite!) and shared an order of cheese fries. The gooey nacho cheese was just so guiltily good!

We had gone there before a show at the 9:30 Club and by the time we got to the club, I couldn't stand up to wait in line -- I just had to sit on the curb for a good 20 minutes until the food coma subsided and my head was clear!

We started out our last trip to DC with redneckhunter's brothers at Ben's Chili Bowl, and ended the weekend at Waffle House.

Redneckhunter and I both like our hash browns only Smothered and Covered (with sauteed onions and melted cheese), but his brother decided to go with the works: Smothered, Covered, Chunked, Topped, Capped, and Diced (Onions, Cheese, Ham, Chili, Mushrooms, and Diced Tomatoes)! The only thing he left off was Peppered (with jalapenos).

Ben's Chili Bowl
1213 U Street, N.W.
Washington D.C. 20009
(202) 667-0909

BrookLEn in Greece: an overview

Well, I finally made an honest woman out of LBT after all these blog-ed years, and after an amazing wedding, we jetted off to Greece for the views, the sun, and of course, the big eats. Late July in Greece is high-tourist season, but fortunately, LBT has some old friends living in Athens who helped to guide us on either end of our 'honey-trip', with some trial-and-error on the way.

Our first lesson of Greek food: aim for the middle. We tried some high-end eating (1800 in Santorini was the best test; great views, tasty but forgettable dishes), but the more outstanding and memorable meals were tavernas in the middle of our price range. To start, our Athens hosts, Kim and Maro, took us to Bakaliko, which has several locations in the outskirts of the city. Starting with a most impressive olive tasting, we had a 'special' lasagna: fettuccine congealed with bechamel and meat. Kim also had risotto-stuffed pepper and tomato which might have been the most delicate dish we had in the country.

Next lesson: Try the fish. On Santorini, we scored with a recommendation from a boat captain, who suggested we go to "the last taverna on the pier", a little place called Taverna Dimitri. There, we experienced seismically good swordfish and orata (sea bream), so good we only got pictures before the grill. Paradisos Taverna on Santorini offered us "little fish", or whatever the Greek fisher-dad caught that day. Probably sardines, they tasted robust, oily, and delicious.

Last lesson: Go with the flow. No Greek word is ever spelled in English the same way twice, and no eating experience ever goes like you'd expect. Our hosts took us for a final taverna meal to a place as what I can only guess is called Oxapa. Maro ordered a flurry of food for us, and though much of it was fried, all was taken in with glee and abandon; sausages, fried zucchini, tzatziki, feta salads, with great Greek wine (our favorite label was Sigalas)... one last blurry meal for a speedy honeymoon trip.

Girls Cooking Night: Raw Food

The girls and I had our most ambitious cooking night yet. We decided to make raw foods, as in the "Raw Food" movement. Brownie pointed us to this Green Chefs site for recipe ideas.















We started out with Melissa's delicious fruit and tomato gazpacho, and Kim's whitefish and scallop ceviches.









I made nori rolls which used cauliflower chopped in the blender to mimic the rice.



I think perhaps only brownie and Marian truly followed all the "Raw Food" rules -- nothing over 110 degrees and vegan. Fish, of course... not vegan. Nori... roasted. Dessert... made with honey.

Brownie's lasagna was not only pretty but yummy. The "cheese" was made of pureed pine nuts. The zucchini and tomatoes were sliced so thin to serve as the lasagna sheets. Marian's beet ravioli (also really pretty) had mandolined beets, soaked in olive oil and lemon as the pasta. The "cheese" filling was pureed cashews and seasonings, and a pureed red pepper sauce.


Debbie made desserts. The no-bake cookies were really good. Like cookie batter or peanut butter balls. The carrot cake was so rich and sticky-sweet, we could only eat tiny slivers. I had also made a tofu chocolate pudding. I've made this before with melted chocolate and it's yummy, but to follow the raw rules, I used cocoa instead. It came out soupier and less thick than with melted chocolate -- when the chocolate rechills I'm sure it helps gel up the pudding. Without that, it's just the tofu giving it any body. Maybe a firmer tofu would have helped.