The Last Supper Festival

This fall season has brought me many wonderful events, and lined them up all in a row so that reporting on them fell off-until now. So, way back on Saturday 9/20/08 was the raucous Last Supper Festival at the artspace/venue 3rd Ward in Brooklyn. It was a multimedia event held at the change of the season to celebrate the harvest and the switch and featured an unusual mix of Brooklyn creatives. There were 13 short films, 13 artists, 13 food artists and bands (including a wild performance by the Hungry March Band) all brought together for an evening in Bushwick. The theme was "landscape" and the show came together as a poignant multi-sensory experience.

The food art included woks as suspended scales, acting as a mobile/serving buffet, and beautiful cast sugar medical objects, by duo Eve and Bowie.

I made architectural cookies, including this edible floor tile pattern of lavender sugar cookies and chocolate red chile cookies. On the wall were a selection of cookies based on some of my favorite ironwork fences from Greenpoint Brooklyn.

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Exotic Albany

Unexpected Jewels in New York's Capital City

I visited New York's capital region, a destination rich in Americana. Among the bowling alleys, drive-in movies, estate sales and homey porches are community vegetable gardens, old school diners, and a solid tradition of soft-serve ice cream.

There are piles of old cookbooks to be found in junk stores and garage sales, from church-lady collections to volumes compiled to promote a single product, such as Diamond walnuts or bananas or peanut butter. I love the illustrations of these books, especially the gelatin depictions. Luminous and futuristic, I try and understand the appeal; how it might have seemed modern to suspend food in any shape we wanted,with gem-like chunks set in a color-coded and quivering force-field. As interested as I am in texture and mouthfeel, imagining these dishes in my mouth does an effective job of reinforcing my interest in authentic foods. Especially ones I can't suck through my teeth.

At our visit to the Pig Pit barbecue joint I was thrilled with fried okra, sliced brisket and corn fritters. My southwestern genetic heritage giggled as I focused on my okra and glanced around to see the words "tamales", "Frito pie" and "RC Cola". I knew not to get too excited about the Frito pie, and was right to be skeptical as I saw one being made, apparently created with a dollop of everything edible in the room.

At the Snow Man in Troy, NY, I had the most perfect soft cone of my life. It had a beautiful texture and was so dense and smooth that it displayed the fine lines from my tongue for a moment before slumping slightly into a mirror-melt surface.

Lunch at the Miss Albany Diner was a wonderful adventure. Its a compact original diner on an industrial stretch of road and has clearly staked out its greasy place in the world. There are rules posted everywhere mostly pertaining to how your kids should behave ("perhaps you should look into acting schools if your kid is attracting the attention of other patrons") and how many people can sit in the small wooden booths on what days that there are no substitutions. The cook regularly comes out to serve food and joke or give people a hard time, and there is an inventive "gourmet" side of the menu, which is totally unique. I had some pork sausage ("we make it in the kitchen and it has herbs, such as sage") with eggs and several cups of coffee.

On the way out I go in an abandoned-looking office furniture place across from the Miss Albany Diner to see if they have anything old or interesting. It looks like no one is there, but eventually a towering, shiny woman appears from behind a bank of computers and shows me some old (lame) stock in the back room. As I am leaving without chairs I notice that the mysterious office furniture woman is tanned and made up and hair pouffed and is wearing several inch high black patent leather heels with ankle straps and a satin miniskirt and top. Maybe this is Miss Albany herself?

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Nice Coffee

The iced coffee drinking days of summer are growing numbered, but how else is a girl supposed to do the research unless she spends most of those days with an iced coffee in each hand? I offer up this end-of-summer review of some cold coffees you can grab in Brooklyn (and Queens) for one more month. (5 *'s is the best).

Cafe Grumpy
193 Meserole Avenue (at Diamond St.)
Brooklyn, NY 11222 (there is also one in Chelsea)

$2.75/Lg
Frequency card: Yes
Food: Some ?
Consistency: Pretty good

Comments: The most expensive of today's list, the coffee is good and strong with a bit of sourness. The environment is large and varied with windows and a cozy, relaxed front room and a cavernous back room. There is a bench out front.

Rating: * * * * Strong is good.


Wyckoff Starr
30 Wyckoff Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11226

$2.50/Lg
Frequency Card: No
Food: Yes
Consistency: Medium. Get it together!

Comments: They have the market cornered in Bushwick, and sometimes the quality can be a toss-up. However, they have the nicest staff in NY and when the coffee is good, its good. They have ok pastries. They have some interesting new savory tarts. They have fresh orange juice. They have good bagels. They have the option of tofu or regular cream cheese, with onions and cucumbers and tomatoes. This is a great breakfast sandwich, but hard to eat. They need to SLICE these options THINNER because big hunks of raw onion are unpleasant. They have seating out front and a tiny indoor space and they play good music. It is truly a community place.
Rating: * * * * This is a great place for making connections and feeling at home. One less star for the quality problems.

Baruir
4007 Queens Blvd.
Sunnyside, NY 11104

$2.50/Lg
Frequency Card: no
Food: Sort of

Consistency: Decent
Comments: This Turkish grocery and coffee store has some canned and dry goods and some cheeses and coffee by the pound. I had a wonderful spinach pie for $1.25 from the counter, and they dress your cup with milk and sugar before handing it to you, like at the deli. They use sugar instead of simple syrup so it's a little grainy, but they carefully plunk in homemade ice cubes made from coffee fetched from a Tupperware container. Aww.
Rating: * * * I'm sold on the cubes.

Gimme Coffee
495 Lorimer St (betw. Powers and Grand)
Brooklyn, NY 11211 (part of a mini-chain)

$2.20/Lg
Frequency Card: Yes
Food: Balthazar pastries

Consistency: Good
Comments: Gimme Coffee! really cares about coffee, and they sell coffee beans as well as coffee drinks. They seem dedicated to developing the farm-to-cup perspective meaning that they are involved in pursuing and selling fair-trade, organic, sustainable or shade-grown coffees, as well as organic milks in their stores, compostable plastics and sourcing locally when possible. As far as the iced one goes: it has a creamy texture and a balanced flavor. The red interior and the graphic logo help create a dynamic brand that is focused and simple.
Rating: * * * * * Devotion to this kind of thoughtful behavior in business earns another star. All companies should address this stuff and not need to show off about it.

Champion Coffee
1108 Manhattan Ave. (betw. Clay and Dupont)
Brooklyn, NY 11222

$2.50/Lg
Frequency Card: Yes
Food: Yes!
Consistency: Awesome

Comments: The iced coffee is Americano (3 shots of espresso over water and ice) and it is perfect every time. Strong, never bitter or sour or burnt. There is a bench out front. There is a great backyard and a cozy interior. The staff is friendly. The food options are VERY good. There is a limited but quality selection of pastries, egg dishes, sandwiches, salads and a great gazpacho. I love the mini baguette sandwich with goat cheese, tomatoes and Calamata olives. Everything is appropriately priced and the logo is snappy.
Rating: * * * * * Champions.

A Closed Mouth Don't Get Fed

New Mexico July Part 4

It used to be that Santa Fe was served by many tiny local grocery stores tucked into every neighborhood. Most of these are gone, and the city has the big mainstream grocery stores. There's an Albertson's and a Whole Foods and a Wild Oats and a Trader Joes along with some successful smaller local stores like the Market Place and Kaune's Foodtown. And happily, there is still Johnny's Cash Store, a tiny one room grocery that opened in 1946 and is still run by Johnny and his family. The store is hidden up a hill in an old part of town, where the streets are narrow and twisting, and turning into the dirt parking lot could feel accidetal.

In high school, this is where we went if we had a break or ditched school and bought tamales and Dr. Pepper and individual cigarettes and sat outside on the portal to share them. The tamales are excellent and hot. This one was red chile pork and had ideal proportions of filling and masa.

Blue Sky soda is from Santa Fe and many flavors are made with real sugar. I like the grapefruit because it is not too sweet and makes a great substitute for tonic.





Johnny's also offers burritos.

Even though I bought the large bag of tamales from Johnny's, I still stopped at Albertsons to buy tubs of frozen chile. Everything (15-20 lbs) went into an insulated tote bag and got checked at the airport. It should last at least a month.

A Burned Kitchen

New Mexico July Part 3

In a forgotten high place in the desert is a burned house. It was a wash, and almost everything remains where it fell. Whoever lived there moved on, or perhaps they rebuilt on another side of the property and never went back. Pots sit on the stove with skinny looped bars sticking out, their wood or plastic handles that provided leverage long gone. The sink is filled with the ceiling and the kitchen window.

A potato ricer is evenly rusted; encouraged by the many years of sparse rain falling into the room from the sky. A pantry cabinet has fallen all the way out of the kitchen onto its back below the slab. I am not sure why dishes and enamel cookware also litter the front yard. Were they thrown from below the billowing smoke that could be seen from miles away? Were they picked over later when the damage was complete and dropped dismissively into the dirt? There are shards of thick swirling glass midcentury accent pieces, and glinting triangles of a textured ochre pane maybe from the dining room or the front door. Flowers are still sweetly pink, patterns recognizable even after their residence became their most frightening kiln.

There is a high risk for fire in New Mexico, but I am not aware that houses here burn any more frequently than other places in the country. I have never been in a house fire, and hopefully I never will be. I walked through this record of fire and thought of the situations where I had to make the assessment: what do I have? What do I need?

Of course this could apply all things: to food, love, time, money, space, heath or furniture, but my life isn't always budgeted evenly. The questions mainly come up when I taste there isn't enough salt in what I've made or when looking at my collected dimensional clutter and bare walls, I wonder why I don't have more 2-D decor. I can feel at home almost anywhere and I have enough space to live and sleep and cook, but is it enough? Is it in the right place? Is it the ideal elastic hammock of my independent youth? What do I have and what do I need?

The smell of New Mexico is strong. After it rains, everything in the ground takes a deep breath and makes itself available to the air. The light bakes everything and the fearless plants are determined and fragrant. The environment is adaptable, wild, mysterious and comforting to me, and I breathe it. I try and smell the answers.

The smell of this fire is long gone. When I walk out of the kitchen and look at clouds above me I know I'll always have New Mexico, and it knows I need to go and be under more roofs. It won't tell me where, so I suspect there's more smelling to be done. And besides, the house in New Mexico isn't ready for me yet.

Prize of the Plaza

New Mexico July Part 2

The Original. This is the classic Frito Pie from the Five & Dime (formerly Woolworth's) on the plaza in downtown Santa Fe. Served in the bag, eaten with a spork, it is a hot aromatic nest of Fritos ladled with red chile, pinto beans, ground beef and cheese. I also like the optional diced raw onion on top. (A great-but-different version is served at the Atomic. Compare and contrast by clicking here). For me the ritual is completed by eating the Pie on a bench in the plaza with a Dr. Pepper, scarfing the spicy dripping crunchiness until I am glowing and red chile stains the corners of my mouth like a toddler after SpaghettiOs.

When Woolworth's began closing its stores in 1997, the residents of Santa Fe were so unhappily fired up about it that developers and an owner of the building protected a third of the store and essentially made it into a shrine to the former general store and lunch counter. They sold off a bunch of the old stuff including the lunch counter waitress uniform dresses. I got one and it ended up making a great "Ghost-of-Woolworth's" costume for Halloween. They added more postcards and tchochkas and kept the employees and Frito Pies. They also have good and very hot green chile stew (with beef).



On the plaza itself is a food cart, Roque's Carnitas. Roque is a fast talking character, and of course I love the food more because of him. He sells tamales and chicken or beef carnitas. He grills the meat with onions and green chiles and then puts it in a thick flour tortilla with salsa. His salsa is heavy with large pieces of tomato and is mostly liquid. I have never been able to really eat one with grace. I do manage to pay attention to the earthy, charred ingredients with bright, spicy slurping. They are satisfying because they are simple and good, and they taste like all the other carnitas he has ever made, the developed layers of everything that's been on that grill before.

Home for Chile Flowers

New Mexico July Part 1

Along an arroyo that runs through Santa Fe, New Mexico is chef Katherine Kagel's organic purple amaranth plant. All the plants in her home garden are organic, provided by Seeds of Change, a company that sells and promotes organic seeds and foods. Her restaurant, Cafe Pasqual's serves 98 percent organic food and wine. This afternoon I follow her from garden to kitchen to table, where eight people are fed a beautiful fresh summer dinner.

KK snips bok choy and yellow chard.



And bok choy comes in twins!

Check out this fabuloso recession special: greens from the July garden, garlic, pecans, feta and lemon served forth in a beautiful micaceous platter. Add some grains underneath and some tequila above and weather the stormclouds to come.

Sunday in Southern Manhattan

It was an eventful weekend (as in, the weekend was full of large organized events with websites). There was the Fancy Food Show at the Javits and the Unfancy Food Show in Brooklyn. There was the opening of Olafur Eliasson's waterfalls, (see one in the photo above) and there was the New Amsterdam Market, held outside of the Old Fulton Fish Market by the Brooklyn Bridge. (To see what goes on at the new one, click here).

I loved looking at all the bread, but especially these stenciled and slashed ones from B.R. Guest.

This is a luminous sample of fancy-tasting pomegranate chardonnay jelly from long island.

The market has occurred twice before, with the goal of becoming a permanent fixture for local producers. As it stands now, it is reminiscent of the Greenmarket but more like an expo with booths and samples and information, with a limited amount of products for purchase.

Also on display were foraged wild foods (loosely and quickly packaged), cheese from farms and companies like Saxelby Cheesemonger, honey, bread, a pizza maker, magazines and pickle producers. There were two ice cream flavors from the excellent Marlow & Sons: Cherry Chip and Anise Hyssop, both were intelligent and dreamy.

Even with the lovely samples of pink peppercorn goat cheese and beet soup, a more satisfying lunch was still necessary, as was escaping another dramatic thunderstorm. Luckily the special occasion Market was located very close to the old standby Joe's Shanghai, where soup dumplings were cheap and sublime, like always.