We Made a Blog

I’m lucky to be where I am today. Not by myself, summer’s on the way.
The jobs I’ll be working, the money I’ll spend,
not making a living, just making new friends.
And I’m trying my hardest to make the most out of every minute.
Not getting any younger, getting older. It’s scary.

-Gorilla Biscuits

Last week, inspired by David Chang, I decided to make a dish where protein was not the dominant theme. I wound up with a small portion of pork and a healthy dose of beans. The beans were made with jalapeno, tomato paste and sriracha. Delicious, but not quite perfect.

I set out to rectify that.

Cooking, I have a knack for. Recipe creation, not really. A solid base of information provided by my mother and the occasional class at The Brooklyn Kitchen have given me enough know-how to whip something up. But an actual original recipe, other than my infamous worked-over veggie burgers, I have not created.

What follows is the perfect recipe for a chili concoction that will rock your taste buds as much as it does your colon.

I realized that what I was missing in my last attempt was a fatty substance to add that lingering flavor you get out of true dishes. I also only used one jalapeno, forcing the addition of the sriracha.

This time I solved both issues. For depth of flavor, bacon is an obvious choice. Take five slabs, chop them and then render in a medium-sized saucepan. Once rendered, add three diced jalapenos. Cook until the bacon begins to crisp and your nose starts to burn.

Take about a pound of ground turkey and season with salt (lightly), black pepper, garlic powder and onion powder. Of course fresh garlic and onion is preferred. Dump the meat in the pan to brown.

After a half a minute, add two tablespoons of tomato paste. Stir.

Let the meat brown. Now taste. Depending on how spicy the meat is, add an appropriate amount of honey. Start with a three-second squirt out of your honey bear. Taste. Too spicy? Add more honey. Once you have the correct ratio of honey, take a tablespoon of white vinegar and add to the mix. This will help cut the richness of the chili.

Take a small can of pinto beans and strain as much liquid out as possible. Add to the pot. Let that all simmer for at least 15 minutes once the beans are added.

Get some extra-sharp cheddar, the amount is kind of up to you, shred and fold into the the beans and meat.  Shred some extra for topping.

Let the pan simmer for a bit. There’s no science to how long it cooks at this point, it really just depends on how much time you have.

I like polenta – a lot. So I like to take half-inch slices and fry them up. Season with a  pinch of salt, pepper and garlic powder. Don’t overcook! Just brown them on medium-low heat. You want a slight crunch without losing the creaminess in the middle.

Take your bean, meat, bacon and jalapeno mix and pour over the sliced polenta. Take the extra shredded cheese and put it on top as soon as you as you can so it melts nicely.

There you go. You will flip out at the depth of flavor here and, more importantly, that you only have a single pot to clean.

I’ve walked past Saltie so many times I thought I‘d actually eaten there already. It’s at a particular locus between my apartment and other haunts that means I’m usually not hungry when I pass by. Yesterday, I was.

And I faced the scary menu. Sardines, pickled egg, capers, pickled carrot and parsley sound more like someone’s pranking you than suggesting a sandwich. But you remember that Saltie is in some way connected to Marlow & Daughters and the ingredients suddenly transform into hidden secrets you never dreamt of.

So I ordered the Captain’s Daughter (the aforementioned combination) with a cup of hot chocolate. The hot chocolate was excellent; thick and creamy, with just the right level of sweetness. Even if as soon as I was out the door I pondered what made me think to order a hot chocolate with a fish sandwich. But it was an excellent hand warmer for the walk home.

The sandwich was excellent. Most things placed on fresh focaccia are. The saltiness of the capers brought out the best in the sardine, which was slightly muted by the pickled egg, and the parsley, bathed in something acidic, cut through any heft. So, yes, I do suggest you give it a try.

But that isn’t why I felt the need to write this. Now, I can’t give a full review of the place because I’ve only been there the one time, but the fact is, the sandwich was $10. Actually, all of the sandwiches were $10 or hovering slightly above, which makes you wonder how they figure out what to charge. In any case, I would gladly pay $10 for the sandwich on taste alone. What enraged me was when I got home I discovered that my sandwich wasn’t even cut in half. Ten dollars and you couldn’t cut my sandwich in half?

Fine. Whatever. I’ll get over it. It tastes that good. But what’s this? My bread is falling to pieces. Remember, this isn’t a cold-cut sandwich; you need to apply pressure to keep all the pieces of fish and egg from falling out. In trying to keep your sandwich whole, you inevitably begin to bend it. The more it bends, the more it falls apart.

Again, for $10 you couldn’t cut my sandwich in half?

This is the problem with charging so much for something as quotidian as a sandwich. It brings it up a level in expectation. If this were maybe $7, I would be back again and again. But when you ask someone to pay that much for a sandwich and you don’t deliver perfection, it’s hard not to be disappointed.

Also, why the fuck are sardines and eggs costing me this much? I know this is exotic food to the uninitiated but, really, this is peasant food. The kind of thing my Dad would whip up for me for lunch on a Saturday when my Mom wasn’t around to complain about the smell.

We Brooklynites love our food. Especially anything novel. And often around here, things are as advertised. Saltie makes very good food – let that not get lost in this rant – but I just want to get what I pay for. Or vice versa.

Some Hollywood pitches consist of little more than the familiar trope of this meets that, as in: “It’s ‘Annie Hall’ meets ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’!”. If you had to sell Off/short, it would have to be as Sundance meets Burning Man.

France gets a two-night, two-day nomadic city of “invaders” (filmmakers who get to set up their own unique screening spaces) that show 500 short films – fiction, documentary, animated, clips, screen tests, series or “unidentified filming objects.” The screening areas only have to meet two requirements: they have to be able to be moved and have capacity for at least one person. What constitutes a screen is just as flexible, so if you’re an attendee, be prepared to possibly huddle around someone’s cell phone.

Off/short 2010 is set to invade the town of Aisne in the north of France from August 27th to 29th. The festival will be as cinematic as the creations it shows, with ghost boats, spontaneous pyrotechnics and image mazes. Get a glimpse of last year and set up camp waiting for scenes from this one.

This has been a bad week for hipsters.

n+1 has announced it’s working on “What Was the Hipster?“, a book on “the rise and fall of the hipster.” It’ll cover what happened to sneaker shop Alfie Rivington and weigh in on that age-old debate, Hasids versus hipsters.

American Apparel lothario, um, CEO Dov Charney maybe got his hands on an advance copy. “Hipsters are from a certain time period,” he told the Village Voice. “The stereotype of a hipster is not something people aspire to anymore. Do you want to be a hipster? Nobody wants to be a hipster.”

And The New York Times is declaring even the word itself over. “In any case, hipster’s second life as hip slang seems to have lost its freshness,” Philip B. Corbett writes. “It may still be useful occasionally, but let’s look for alternatives and try to give it some rest.”

Looks like that hipster remover may be working.

We Made a Blog writes a lot about food (and drink) we’ve consumed that’s been prepared by others. But we do actually cook – pretty well and with feeling. So we whiled away a few winter (ah, winter) and spring evenings this year in the kitchen – Brooklyn Kitchen Labs, that is – taking classes to expand our home-based culinary ventures.

The Brooklyn Kitchen cohabitates with carnivore paradise The Meat Hook. The shop flaunts vintage finds (if I ever need to recreate my grandmother’s kitchen – from harvest gold Tupperware to blue wheat-stamped CorningWare – I know where to go) and the latest in kitchen gadgets. On the day of class, you get a 10% discount on any of their wares (excluding meat and dairy) and the staff is friendly and helpful (we sought their advice more than once in a goat cheese project we undertook). The labs consist of one warmly lit spacious brick-walled kitchen on the lower level and one smaller bright one lofted above it. On our first visit we wandered into the wrong kitchen and were sent, prosecco-filled, to the proper one. It was an auspicious start.

We embarked on Oysters 101, given by the incredibly knowledgeable Nellie Wu and Michael Kidera of W&T Seafood. They take oysters very seriously and that passion translated into an enjoyable and information-packed two hours. We spent the first hour learning the biology and culture of the oyster and then got around to sort of destroying both by learning how to shuck. The second part of the class was devoted to cooking; mignonette sauce, oysters Rockefeller and oyster chowder were more than enough to count as that evening’s meal.

We had high hopes for our next class, Japanese Takeout, with Cathy Erway of the blog Not Eating Out in New York. We have an obvious bias toward bloggers and we wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone from taking a cooking class given by someone with only that credit in the experience column but this is the only class we can’t wholeheartedly endorse. The description foretold of an evening filled with miso soup, ginger dressing, katsu and sushi. We did gain some expertise in the miso/ginger arena but sushi skills were what we were really there for. We assumed we would be learning about how to select and slice fish but fish was nowhere to be seen. It was explained away quickly with something about mercury and something about overfishing and we spent a good amount of time making hand rolls that were free of the sea. Katsu was also not in attendance.

Now any time I think about baking bread, I picture Nicolas Cage in one of my favorite movies of all time, “Moonstruck.” Glinting with sweat and anger in the fiery subterranean of the bakery he owns, he reflects on his profession. “They say bread is life,” he starts out but it’s soon clear that he holds the opposite view. Matt Tilden of SCRATCHbread, our instructor for our foray into focaccia, seems like he would be more than happy to take up the issue with him. As enthusiastic as his blissed-out state would allow, Matt delved into the chemistry behind perfect loaves and the more alchemical ingredient of love. He did some light iPod DJing, kept up the patter, served some Brooklyn Lager and generally made the class forget that we weren’t tasting our delicious endeavors until about four hours had passed. When we did, it was well worth it. We’d created simultaneously fluffy and dense squares embedded with our selections from the available fennel seeds, gray salt, sweet red onions, fresh thyme, fresh rosemary, cracked pepper, lemon zest, parmagiano reggiano, coarsely ground mustard, thick-cut bacon and speck. As a bonus, we took home some dough that made every effort to burst out of its wrappings, fresh yeast and gray salt so that we could wake up to fresh focaccia in the morning.

There is no way to describe just how profound Knife Skills was. Taught by Chef Brendan McDermott, it goes way beyond merely conquering the performance anxiety induced by having someone watch you cook. Brendan handled the class as well as he handled the knife. Funny and charming, he managed to even deal with a small crisis of a fainting student (a bit of kitchen heat, not any knife-related injury, was the culprit) in a way that comforted the student and didn’t disrupt the lesson. The slicing (chopping is only for herbs, as we learned) technique was brilliantly simple to master and the tips given for specific vegetables were nothing short of a revelation. If you take the class you will have to often repress your urge to show off your one-stroke cauliflower decapitation trick. With the exception of a chicken deboning demonstration, the class was hands-on. It’s bring your own knife, so be prepared to wander the streets of Brooklyn as we did, knife handle sticking out of a purse for me, poorly disguised knife wrapped in newspaper for Hillel.

The last class we tried is one of the quickest to fill up – Pickling. McClure’s Pickles is well-known for its pickling pickings, and Bob McClure, one half of the sibling duo behind the brand, set up a bubbling, boiling pickling central in one of the labs. Most of the class was observation of the procedures behind preserving (in this case, of asparagus) with the opportunity to pack a small Mason jar with as much or as little spice as you can handle and a fresh handful of spears. You then wait it out a week (or more; pickling preserves fairly indefinitely) to try your treat and can reuse the brine once to do a simple refrigerator pickle.

We Made a Blog now makes a lot of new dishes. But if you see any class at Brooklyn Kitchen called We Made a Blog Makes Goat Cheese, I advise you to steer clear because all you will learn is how to make hot goat’s milk spiked with rennet that 24 hours later will be room temperature goat’s milk spiked with rennet. Trust me on this one.