Highlights from the Weekend

September 6, 2011 //
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Staying in town Labor Day weekend has many benefits. Not sitting in traffic, attending the U.S. open, and time for all those food projects, are among the main attractions. I love Vermont and upstate and swimming and grilling and hammocks, but once in a while a staycation can be just as restful and restorative.

Yesterday I met my friend Laura, in town from D.C., for brunch. I like going out to eat with Laura, a vegan for at least the past two years, because it gives me the opportunity to venture out from the typical eggs-benedict brunch and try something a little more interesting, mindful. A bit of internet research, and a recommendation from my friend Jill, suggested Sun in Bloom, a small, sunny restaurant and cafe on Bergen Street in North Park Slope, near Flatbush Avenue.

I think a lot of us have been scared off from restaurants that bill themselves as vegan, or gluten-free, or raw, let alone all three. Sun in Bloom is not one of those freaky deaky joints that serve lots of tvp or fake meat or unsalted greens. The only cliché about this place was Bob Marley on the sound system, which I didn’t mind at all. The space was bright, simple, and inviting.

They have a rotating daily lasse or smoothie and yesterday it was a Blueberries & Cream Immunity Booster, made of coconut kefir and fresh blueberries. Also on the menu: an energizing & alkalizing raw greens oup of cucumber, romaine, parsley, avocado and lemon. I’ll have to go back to try that.

Laura ordered the quiche with roasted tomatoes, shitake mushrooms, caramelized onions, kale, roasted garlic, and pepper flakes, with a side of parsnip hash, for $10. I had the “huevos rancheros” burrito with butternut squash hash; the burrito was filled with a spicy tofu scramble, greens, brown rice, and black beans, wrapped in an Ezekiel sprouted tortilla, for $10.50. Next time I’d also love to try the tempeh reuben and bloom burger.

Earlier in the weekend I went to see the documentary El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, by the German Gereon Wetzel, about the famous Spanish restaurant, which closed its doors last month to much press and fanfare. The film is a meditation on an idea. The creation of a dish from seed to flower, the deconstruction of a sweet potato, from root vegetable to juice to gnocchi. The art of the film was not so much in the technical savvy of the filmmaker, but in the way it shows artists at work, regardless of the profession. Yes these happen to be very skilled chefs in southern Spain, but they could’ve been painters or sculptors, architects or musicians. They begin with an idea for a dish, they mess up, there are trials and errors, but after six months of lab-testing in Barcelona in the winter, the chefs of el Bulli would come up with a hundred ideas for new dishes to present in the restaurant in springtime.

The film does a good job of not treating the restaurant, or its star chef, Ferran Adrià, as too precious. The chefs make fun of themselves, and have fun, amidst all the seriousness and pressure. At one point, one of the chefs is meant to be serving an invented cocktail of oil and water, to be poured at the table; he discovers to his horror, mid-pour, he has brought a bottle of sparkling water instead of still water. You really feel for the guy as he’s recreating the tale back in the safety of the kitchen.

As an aside, this is one of the things I love about New York: Film Forum. Where else can you see a film about avant-garde cooking, Serge Gainsbourg, and a film-noir of post-war Tokyo all in the same night? If I had money and a will I would leave them something. (I recommend House of Bamboo by the way.)

Finally, tennis. The U.S. Open started last weekend in Flushing, Queens and this was my first year to attend. I started playing tennis last summer and have gotten hooked on the game. This weekend I got to play on Saturday on Long Island, while visiting my grandmother, then watched a number of matches over the weekend, and attended two matches at Arthur Ashe stadium (the largest tennis venue in the world) Sunday night: the number-four men’s player in the world, Andy Murray from Scotland, who beat Feliciano Lopez; and the number-two women’s player, Vera Zvonareva, who beat the German Sabine Lisicki. Not much to say about the food I’m afraid, except as one friend put, why isn’t there a Shake Shack?

Posts to follow soon on some food projects from this past weekend that I couldn’t fit in here. Look out. And go Rafa!

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Categories Holidays, Summer

Brownies, from Paris to New York

September 4, 2011 //
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The blogosphere is well-stocked with food blogs. Mine is one of probably one million. I think one of the best is David Lebovitz’s Living the Sweet Life in Paris.

While many Parisians had taken off for August, Lebovitz kept on blogging, in part from San Francisco, where he was attending the 40th anniversary celebrations of Chez Panisse, where he was a cook and pastry chef from 1986 to 1999.

I haven’t been baking much this summer but these brownies on his blog caught my eye. They’re gluten-free, for one, and looked fudgy and amazing. (He must shoot with a Canon 7D and not an iPhone.) I don’t even really eat brownies anymore—I’m trying to eat less sugar and chocolate—but they were too darn pretty not to try. I figured I wouldn’t have too much trouble pawning them off on friends or my grandmother.

Instead of flour the recipe calls for corn starch and unsweetened cocoa powder which act as binders along with the eggs and provide a brownie-like consistency instead of just fudge. These brownies do get crumbly but are chocolately, dense, and moist. You need to mix these well and apparently that will achieve a less crumbly consistency. One of the keys here is to use the best quality ingredients you can find. Good cocoa powder for example, high-quality chocolate (upgrade from Baker’s, for instance), and good butter. And that’s basically all these brownies are. I used Valrhona cocoa powder, Ghirardelli 60% cocoa bars, and unsalted Kate’s Butter from Maine.

For a twist, I added a pinch of cayenne pepper and two pinches of Maldon sea salt. You could taste the heat just a little bit with each bite to make you wonder what was that flavor. I used a cup of toasted walnuts, but you could also use almonds or pecans.

Next time I make these I might try adding one more egg, to achieve just a little more cake-like consistency and less crumble; maple syrup instead of turbinado sugar (some of the crystals didn’t melt and integrate); cacao nibs for crunch, like Lebovitz does; and instead of lining my pan with wax paper, which just stuck like glue to the bottom of the brownies even though greased, I wouldn’t use any liner and just butter and flour the bottom of the glass pan well.

And the good news: you can serve these to your gluten-free friends! (But sadly, not to vegan friends because of the eggs.) They’ll be an almost universal crowd-pleaser.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Brownies
Adapted from David Lebovitz

Makes 9 brownies

6 tbsp (85 g) butter, salted or unsalted (if unsalted, add a pinch of salt)
8 oz (225 g) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped
3/4 c (150 g) sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
3 tbsp (30 g) corn starch
optional: 1 c (135 g) nuts, toasted and coarsely chopped
optional: pinch of cayenne

Grease an 8-inch (23 cm) square pan then lightly flour. Set aside. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees (180C).

In a double boiler (or on very, very low heat) melt the butter and chocolate (and salt, if using) in a medium saucepan, stirring constantly until smooth. Remove from heat and stir in the sugar, then the eggs, one at a time.

Sift together the cocoa powder and corn starch in a bowl, stir, then add to the chocolate mixture. Beat the batter vigorously for at least one minute (no less!), until the batter is smooth and not grainy. Add the nuts, if using, and pour into your pan.

Bake for approximately 30 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Do not overbake. Let the brownies cool completely before cutting or transferring to a plate.

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Categories Chocolate, Desserts

Greener pastures

August 31, 2011 //
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Like a lot of folks I know, I recently started drinking green smoothies. Wait, don’t close your browser! To some—I won’t point fingers—that sounds, well, less tasty than something you can chew or grill. I understand.

But I also love greens. Adore even. Ever since I started eating greens that were prepared well. You’ve heard me lament on this site before about all the frozen and canned and non-existent vegetables I ate (or didn’t eat) growing up, so I’m making up for lost time. Kale and chard and spinach and all kinds of lettuces and herbs. A meal isn’t really complete to me without something green on the plate.

I remember being thirteen years old, I had just moved to Middlebury, VT, to live with my dad, and my friend brought me into the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op. It was like entering a foreign bazaar: the smells, the breads, the vegetables I couldn’t identify, the bulk bins. I’d never seen anything like it in Levittown. Never smelled that co-op smell before.

That same year, the morning after a sleep-over at my friend Arianna’s house in Ripton, her mom gave us breakfast of granola and soy milk. I translated the food in front of me as “cereal and cow’s milk” and poured a big bowl and dove in. After a few bites I remember feeling so full; I either pushed the bowl away or more likely, to be polite, made myself eat the whole thing. This granola stuff was so much more filling than the Corn Pops I ate at home. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

By the time I was sixteen I was a cashier at the food co-op and loving it. All of my  high school jobs in VT in fact were in food services: working in the Middlebury College dining hall, serving ice cream at Baba’s, making sandwiches and serving scones at Harrington’s, and, for a very brief stint, working behind the butcher counter in a grocery store. But by far my favorite was the co-op. I got something like a 20% discount, which went toward Tiger bars, chocolate chip cookies, and occasionally an olive loaf from Bristol Bakery. (These were my gateway foods.)

Well it’s been a fun seventeen years since those early days of choking on granola. I’ve gone through vegetarianism, a brief stint at veganism, and came full swing as a meat-eater again in 2005 while working as a cook at Plantation Farm Camp in California. Now I’m back to eating way less meat, more greens, and starting off each morning with a green smoothie.

I had been doing these off and on for years but nothing ritualistic and with no knowledge of why, except for obvious reasons, these might be good for me. And then recently my friend Melony told me about this book our friend Kyle was really into. Really into. Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko. And since then I’ve found out lots of people I know are also into green smoothies.

The philosophy, in a nutshell, is that the human diet should consist of way more plants, dark leafy greens in particular, than most of us come even close to consuming daily. And that we don’t get the full range of nutrients, fiber, and chlorophyll found in these foods just by chewing (you’d have to chew all day), so that by blending them we do. Juicing is a whole different story and deprives us of most of the good stuff found in the fruits and veggies. Boutenko has some funny and enlightening charts in her book comparing the modern human diet to a chimpanzee’s diet. The thinking is that humans are so close genetically to chimpanzees we could learn a thing or two about what to eat by observing them. And they eat mostly fruits and greens, then a tiny bit of protein, nuts, and fats.

Oh, and good news, greens actually contain a fair share of protein.

But forget philosophy! These smoothies actually taste good, promise. I couldn’t drink them if they didn’t.

Today in Union Square I picked up beautiful organic dandelion greens (wrapped up with the bulb, roots, dirt and all), and gorgeous rainbow chard I couldn’t pass by. Tomorrow morning I’ll do a dandelion-banana-peach smoothie to start the day. Then Amy and I are off to the co-op to try again after last Friday’s frenzy due to the impending hurricane.

Welcome Smoothie for Beginners

Blend well:
1 c chard
1 c spinach
8-10 strawberries, can include stems
1 mango, peeled
1 apple
1 banana
juice of 1 lemon
Yields 2 quarts


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Categories Breakfast, Green Smoothies
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