Home Food.

10 days in Portland. This is the story of What I Ate.

Breakfast at Podnah's Pit BBQ. The Best in the Whole Wide World. Seriously. This unassuming plate of buiscuts and sausage gravy is the ONE AND ONLY food that David and I drool over, dream of, long for, would cut off our pinky fingers to get it shipped to us out here in New York. It was the ONE AND ONLY meal out that I just had to have. It was perfection as always.

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Oooooooohhhhhhhh good gracious graaaaaaaaaaavvy!



Mom and I cooked a lot together while I was home, which was just the dreamiest thing. We would sleep in, work out , have coffee at Dragonfly, shop (hi mom!)



and then cook a feast for lovely and various collections of our nearests and dearests! Mild scallop and shrimp curry, fried red plantains courtesy of Kuaku the kool, and of course greens.

When your Dad turns 60...

Throw a great party! With a lot of help from Rodney and his superfantastic crew at my favorite restaurant in Portland, the glamorously titled Podnah's Pit BBQ, I was able to plan a little b-day soirée for my Papa's big 6-0 all the way from New York.

a delicious late summer weekend

A highly refreshing Friday night cocktail at Franny's in Park Slope to welcome the weekend. Mmmm the Spicy Genevieve indeed!

I left my (shinypink) heart at Sahagun....

Lobster Gorge 2010 also known as ...

...Our Fantastic Trip to Martha's Vineyard.

For our 5 year anniversary, David planned a *surprise!* trip for us! 4 days 3 nights on gloriously WASPfab Martha's Vineyard! We stayed here, and we played on the beach and ate our body weight in seafood, mainly- as you'll see - that king of crustacean kind, the LOBSTER. As a West Coaster, the Lobster represents complete, total, borderline ridiculous luxury. It is something I love to pieces and vividly remember the few times in my life I've eaten it. My first time was perfect and unforgettable- I was 17 years old and my mother and I were meeting her college roommate and her husband for dinner at the boathouse in Central Park. I was full of New York City excitement, high on all its shimmering glamour and I was told to "order anything I wanted, anything at all". My whole lobster came with a bibb and everything, and I felt like a Queen.

But I digress. What I'm saying is lobster is heaven to me, and every bite on this trip seemed to contain lobster, and I was in heaven. Oh, plus we were at the beach. And I was with David. And we were far away from New York. And I drank the fanciest bottle of Champagne I have ever tasted. It was heaven times infinity.

The very first thing we ate after checking in to our hotel was a light snack of this:

A Summery feast and a Picnicalicious Recipe Classic

Just for the sake of pure indulgence, allow me to present a recent meal. When the true heat of summer in NYC first set in, I was convinced I wouldn't be eating a real meal again until September.

Recent Events

(old magazine page on display at Magnolia)


We just waved farewell to David's parents, who spent this past week visiting us here in our fair city! It was their first trip, and I made the itinerary of a LIFETIME (read: it is possible I will never physically be able to do this again) which can be summed up by the following :

Eat. Walk walk walk. Eat. Drink. walk walk walk. EAT. Walk walk look point walk. Sleep.

repeat. x7.

PHEW! It was a lovely visit but I think it's fair to say we wore each other out!

A pictorial summary:



Tiffanys - all four floors of it - was a must do for the ladies, naturally.



Magnolia is a very good place to have a snack. Further evidence:


Nothing says "we're MEN" like eating cupcakes.

Us ladies have more delicate tastes, like these caviar-topped lobster salad bites we enjoyed during high tea at the Plaza.



Oh, and we stopped at Momofuku Ssam bar, which is basically a must. It was alright I guess....



Oysters - small and perfect. Oceany depths.


Uni in oyster crema. If the oysters were the briny deep, this was sea foam.


Buttermilk panna cotta. Tangy and savory, almost cheese-like. In a dreamy fuji apple dashi with pine nuts.



Chantrelles and pickled quail eggs with shavings of bone marrow- it may look ugly here, but believe me it was anything but.


We also hit up: ABC kitchen, Les Halles, Shake Shack, Chelsea Market, 53rd and 6th, Barrio, JoeDoe, Tom's in Brooklyn, Balthazar, etc etc. And that's just the food. We ate Nathan's on Coney Island, and burgers at the Statue of Liberty. We just about melted in the sun at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. We didn't see one single celebrity, in spite of my best efforts. We ate Persian food at David's boss's house. We drove each other nuts and laughed really hard all the time. We shopped, played, walked, walked more, drank and then we really laughed hard.

We had a blast.

I can die now.

Tonight I had dinner at Aldea on 17th street here in Manhattan. Mom is in town and she and I went to dinner with David and her old college roommate Laura, as well as Laura's husband Larry and Larry's sister Joan. We had a truly fabulous meal, which lasted well into the eleven o'clock hour. Wine, scallops, black truffles, octopus a la plancha, bacalao croquettes and so on and so on.... ending with a lovely we-closed-down-the-restaurant chat with the absolutely dreamy chef, Georges Mendes. Oh, and he's extremely talented/qualified too.

However, the crowning moment of the evening happened as we walked toward the Q train down 17th. We passed a group of 3 people standing around talking.... I did a double take. There, before my eyes was;



Yes, Jeffery Steingarten. Out walking his dog! With a very necessary push from David I went up and rudely interrupted the conversation (well, only sort of rude, it seemed like they were finishing up anyway) and just said " I just wanted to say that I LOVE your books and your writing. You have been a big inspiration for me, and because of you, and a very few other writers like you I am getting a masters in Food Studies right now at NYU." So began the BEST 20 MINUTES OF MY LIFE!!!!!!!!! I have been in awe of him for YEARS- his rigor, his natural and authoritative style. At once self-depreciating, and disarmingly honest, Jeffery Steingarten is one of if not THE very best living food writer.

And there we stood, talking about Delmonicos, about the lunch menu at the Harvard Club in the 1930's and how bland and horrible it was, about contemporary food culture, Marion Nestle, the Cooking Channel-- and by gosh, he seemed like he was honestly enjoying himself! Just talking to someone with such an encyclopedic knowledge and such a true love and true devotion to food; to food history, to cooking, to taste. I am inspired.

This was one of those nights. I didn't have to worry about catching the Q train after that-- I absolutely flew home.

Oh, and by the way, that couple I interrupted that were talking to Jeffrey first, and who had been sitting right next to us all night at Aldea? It was just good old Wylie Dufresne and his new bride.

NYC Food Film Festival

There is a revolution going on and it's all about ways of learning, showing, tasting. It makes so much sense, such an obvious thing! If you want to teach or show people something about food, shouldn't there be at least an element of something edible involved in the presentation itself? Enter the NYC Food Film Festival, a (literally) delicious event now in its fourth year, whose very tagline sums up this whole idea: "Taste What You See On The Screen"
It is basically a whole weekend of fun Food and Film events, and as you might guess most of the events have been sold out for months. However, I got SUPER lucky yesterday and scored 4 tickets at the last minute to last nights' event "Edible Adventure #001: Smokes, Ears and Ice Cream". Wowza! First of all, the venue. You watch the movies on a beach right on the East River in Long Island City, literally floating on the water as the sunsets, and the movies play on, the Manhattan skyline lights up before your very eyes. Oh, you think Long Island City doesn't sound so hot? Well, take a look at this place:





I won't waste too much time describing the videos, they're short so check them out for yourself! These were my two favorites:

Smokes & Ears (both of which we ate. I learned I do not like pig ears.)


Obsessives: Soda Pop


I am in the best field in the world. Goodness I love food people. and food movies. and food. And New York.

North Market

For all the time we've spent in Ohio, Mom and I had never really been to Columbus. We always arrived and hit the road towards the middle of the state. This past weekend, we found ourselves with a little extra time. Decidedly a bit the worse for wear, we needed a little lightness, a little time spent nurturing ourselves and each other. So we decided to spend the few hours before we flew our separate ways and poke around the big city a big. A bit of yelp research guided us to North Market, and it was just the thing.



We started our visit at the little coffee stand, a very short americano for me, with crema to rival the best of the best, made clearly with love and heart, and just a touch of barista-snobbery, which you've sort of just got to love, especially when it yields caffine like this.



Mom and I wandered the paradise of good food, heartened by the jovial, milling crowds and local, sustainable ethos that permeated the market. We slowly assembled a lunch, with two Ohio cheeses from Curds and Whey, a lovely little cheese stand manned by a young Ohioan who was way too attractive for his own good. And he fed me cheese samples. Oh my. Next stop was Omega breads, whose focaccia- dotted simply with garlic and rosemary- I found so deliciously addictive. You can watch a video about the baker herself here: http://vimeo.com/5999326. She seems pretty much cool. Lovely.



That tub of green looking things is Leek salad (!) which we picked up along with kielbasa and an ultra-garlicky chicken leg at a Polish food stand, which was also really really tasty. Leek salad is like potato salad, only slices of crunchy, mildly spicy leek instead of potatoes!



Scrumptious as all of this was, never far from our mind as we snacked on cheese and bread was the fact that we knew we HAD to save room for dessert. Arguably the highlight of the entire North Market is Jeni's Ice Creams.



In our initial browse through the Market, we passed the stand and honestly as we read the descriptions it was very difficult not to just go ahead and eat ice cream for lunch! I mean, look at these:








We settled on a modest four scoops: #1 wildberry lavender. #2 was lime cardamom yogurt, juicy with lime and warm with cardamom, this was our hands down favorite. #3 was Thai chile peanut, which, between the peanuts and coconut and chiles was sort of like pad thai ice cream. Scoop #4 was rhubarb rose, which actually tasted like rose wine! All were inspiring and mind blowing- I will be learning to make ice cream this summer, it is decided. Ice cream like this WILL be within my repertoire ASAP because I can't go running to Ohio every time I want ice cream, it just isn't practical.




Mom's expression sums up our experience of Jeni's ice cream.



Nothing a little mother/daughter time can't sooth.