Staycation's All I Ever Wanted

With my parents away on a real vacation in Europe, I thought it would be a nice time to take a staycation at their place, to get out of the city, kind of like going to a B&B except it's free. And unlike a B&B, I had to feed the ornery goat that resides in our backyard barn. Interestingly, I'm so used to living in 550 square feet in the city, that my former home in the country felt too large, with its dark, empty, creaky, dusty open spaces.

I had envisioned a gorgeous fall weekend of colorful foliage, hiking, apple picking, and so on. Instead it was dreary gray and miserably drizzly all weekend. We still managed to fit in a visit to Applewood Orchards & Winery - I think it was the only winery left in the Hudson Valley that we hadn't yet visited.
I couldn't tell the difference, but Jesse thought Applewood's wines bested them all, so we actually bought a whole case, when normally we'd politely buy just one or two bottles.

Applewood also features orchards for picking, but we weren't in the mood, so we just walked around, saw their pretty gardens, and headed back home.

The chilly gray day called for a warm, hearty dinner. I made chili, using the wealth of banana peppers and tomatoes from my mom's vegetable garden, along with some local onions, half a bottle of beer, and ground turkey (nonlocal and nonorganic because there wasn't much selection at the Warwick Shoprite). The chili wasn't very spicy because of the dearth of spices available in my mom's kitchen, but it was simple, fresh, colorful, and yummy. I put Jesse in charge of making cornbread, using the recipe on the back of the Bob's Red Mill course-ground cornmeal package, and it actually turned out great. He's a good sous chef. We paired it with Applewood's hard cider, a perfect accompaniment.

Now I'm back at the grind, back in the city. I finally managed to get a shot of the view from the deck of the apartment I don't really live in. The huge monolith of a building on the right is some kind of Verizon station, and the tall buildings straight ahead are the Bushwick projects.

Veal Chops to Die For

Guest post from my sister Lisa, who worked at Bobolink farm this summer selling bread and cheese, and is in Brooklyn for the week. Dinner last night:
Veal chops with caremelized onion, baby garlic, currants and sage and wine
Salad of baby greens, spearmint and basil
Mashed New Potatoes

Last night I finally got the chance to cook the two veal chops I had fatefully acquired (without paying $40!) from Bobolink Farms where I work. They had been sitting in my freezer for 3 weeks begging me to cook them. But who was I to share them with? There were but two chops.
Long story short, last night there was a gourmet meal, Luke and Lisa style, featuring the chops. I can't even describe how amazing they were. My tongue was at a loss for words. A lot of that is probably owed to Luke's repeated recomendation of "mo' buttaaa!" And the fact that this was one of the happiest little calves in the history of veal, roaming free on the land of Bobolink farm for all its short life. While working at the farmers market in Warwick this past Sunday I was also the joyous recipient of a whole load of vegetables to incorporate. And then my mom's garden in Warwick supplied the rest. So basically this meal was as free as it could get!
Veal Chops with Reduced Wine, Onion, and Sage Sauce
3 small white onions
a bunch of small cloves of garlic
lots of sage!
2 veal chops
some white wine (we used vinho verde - $4 at trader joes)
butter
olive oil

1) sautee onions, garlic, sage, salt, pepper in 1 tbsp each butter and olive oil until caremelized
2) take out of pan
3) add 1 more tbsp each of butter and olive oil
4) cook the chops 5 minutes medium heat on both sides (sprinkle on salt and pepper generously in the first few minutes)
5) remove from pan
6) pour 1/3 cup white wine into pan and scrape around
7) add onion mixture back in and let reduce until thick and delicous looking
8) pour this over the chops
9 ) eat!!
10) ready to die yet? I am

A Pleasant Surprise

So my sister's aforementioned graduation party took place this past weekend. The menu we planned sounded impressive, but in the end I felt it all fell a little flat. My rosemary roasted potatoes nicely browned but then grew soggy in the hours before they were served. My brownies came out neither fudgy nor cakey, but chalky. The chocolate coating for the strawberries was pasty and watery due to the low quality chocolate chips my mother procured from Shoprite. Then there was the oozing overly lemon zested icing on the lemon ricotta cake; the gummy rice in my rice, chickpea, and asparagus pilaf; the overly lemony hummus and the overly garlicky white bean and spinach dip. We love to cook, but aren't always that great in executing our menus. But everyone still ate most of the food and seemed to like it, so I wouldn't call it a failure by any means.


While at home in Warwick for the weekend, which is positively verdant this time of year, we had the chance to not only enjoy a double feature at the drive in despite the rainy forecast, but to check out the Warwick Farmers Market. It wasn't too large, but featured lots of baked goods, wine, homemade gourmet goods, plants, and a couple meat and vegetable stands. Since my hometown is about 50 miles outside of New York City, there is some overlap between our farmers markets. I was thrilled to see Dines Farms, which used to be my main meat guy until they were kicked out of the McCarren Park Greenmarket for some reason. I had a reliable source of tasty chicken up until then, and haven't had much chicken since. So we got a huge chicken breast and some mushrooms from Dines Farms to cook up for dinner, as well as some kind of wild green from Rogowski farm, which they told us was a kind of Mexican spinach, so I think it was quelites.


We rounded out our dinner plans with a bottle of Seyval Chardonnay Reserve from Applewood winery, which is aged in oak, making it more complex than Applewood's slightly cheaper regular Seyval Chardonnay blend.


We planned on taking a hike but got lazy and read books instead in my sunny backyard before taking our booty back to Brooklyn to cook up dinner. Can you blame us?


I wanted to keep our things really simple, so I didn't even add onions or garlic or any spices. I just chopped up the mushrooms and the quelites, sauteed them in olive oil with a couple glugs of the wine and shakes of salt and pepper, and covered the pan for about 15 minutes until wilted. So simple in fact, that that's really all of a recipe you need.


Meanwhile, Jesse grilled the hunka chicken along with a couple buttery yellow potatoes from Berried Treasures in a pocket of foil because we are potato addicts. We ate about a third of the chicken that night and smartly saved the rest in the fridge for future use (such as in the yummy chicken, radish, lettuce, and mayonnaise sandwich I just ate for dinner tonight).


But back to that night's dinner. I quartered the potatoes and slathered them with Ronnybrook butter and a sprinkle of fresh sage from my container garden. Then I sliced up the chicken and laid it over the sauteed quelites and mushrooms to practice my plating skills. Plunked down a glass of that white wine. And yum. Now, I've never liked mushrooms very much, but I really enjoyed these. Something about the earthy sour smell usually turns me off, but I always had this hope that maybe it would be different with mushrooms from the farmers market. So that's what led me to give these mushrooms a whirl, and it was a pleasant surprise - their smell and flavor was mild enough to just give a meaty oomph to the sauteed greens without overpowering my nosebuds. Success! If only I knew what they were called so I could find them again. Name that mushroom? Anyone?


It feels like the Dark Days Challenge just ended, yet here is two months later, moving on into One Local Summer. The challenge is this: to prepare and blog about one meal each week using only locally grown ingredients - the exceptions are oil, salt and pepper, and spices. Reading One Local Summer was what inspired me to start cooking local meals in the first place last summer, but I was too late in the game to join. Now that eating local is old hat, here goes another delicious summer, starting with this very first OLS entry of the summer.

Dark Days Challenge Week 1: Steak, Roasted Potatoes, and Kale

I was supposed to make falafel this weekend, but due to changes in plans I ended up letting the dried chickpeas soak so long that they got all foamy with a bad smell. After doing some research, I determined this was definitely not good, so I threw them out. Chickpeas really only need to soak 12 hours, but you can keep them soaking up to 36 hours. I think the key is to rinse them out and put them in fresh water every 12 hours to prevent bad smell.

To replace the falafel endeavor for dinner tonight, I pulled a steak out of the freezer. We finally tried out the new meat vendor Elysian Fields Farm at our greenmarket that offers organic, grass fed heritage beef, pork, and chicken - we took home a sirloin steak that we grilled and served with colorful roasted potatoes and sauteed kale tonight for a romantic, gourmet meal at home. The steak was disappointly tough, but wikipedia tells me that's because sirloin is typically tougher than other premium steaks.

As an appetizer, we enjoyed slices of fresh baked bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. This was my second attempt at baking a whole wheat loaf based on the Loaf for Learning in the Laurel's Kitchen Guide to Whole Grain Bread Baking, and it came out moister and more flavorful than last time. I had read that a longer rise creates a better flavor, but I didn't believe it until I tried it today - I let the bread rise slowly at room temperature throughout the day (7 hours start to finish!) and it worked out beautifully. Next time I'll make two loaves at a time so I can gobble it up fresh out of the oven and still have enough left for the rest of the week.

I tried to improve on my usual sauteed kale with onion and garlic by steaming it in a light sauce: 1 1/2 tsp dijon mustard, 1/2 tsp balsamic vinegar, 2 tbsp water, 1/2 tsp dried rosemary, 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper, and salt and pepper to taste. This sauce produced a subtly sweet and spicy flavor that made the kale go down easier (I still don't love kale, except in colcannon, but it's good for me and it's one of the few season vegetables still available).

These beautiful potatoes - Adirondack reds and Adirondack blues - were chopped into small pieces, tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and dried rosemary, and then roasted for 45 minutes. We've noticed that these potatoes actually cook up faster and softer than ordinary yukon golds.

To top things off, Jesse picked up a bottle of red wine at Uva, which was decidedly unlocal. We haven't officially gone local/organic with alcohol, but I chastised him nonetheless for not thinking to buy an organic bottle. Regardless, Diano d'Alba le Cecche 2004 from Italy's Piemonte region was a pleasant dry red wine that went well with our steak and vegetables. I've decided to start recording wines here too so that I'll actually be able to enjoy repeat wine experiences. I can never remember the names of wines I like. Who can? Everytime I go to a wine store I'm overwhelmed by the new names around me.

This post is part of the Dark Days Challenge, in which I prepare at least one meal each week comprised of mostly local ingredients. Below is a summary of food mileage for this meal:

Sirloin - Elysian Fields Farm, Sloansville, NY - 190 miles
Kale and Onion - Garden of Eve Farm, Riverhead, NY - 76 miles
Garlic and Potatoes - unknown farm at greenmarket - under 300 miles
Rosemary - dried from unknown farm at greenmarket, Goshen, NY - 73 miles
Fall Flower Honey - Natures Way Farm, Lowman, NY - 236 miles
Arrowhead Mills Organic Stone Ground Whole Wheat Flour; Annie's organic mustard, salt, pepper - unknown
Whole Foods 365 Organic Olive Oil; balsamic vinegar - Italy

Local Wine Surprise

It's been a very social past two weeks. Jesse's friends want to hang out with him or talk to him on the phone nonstop and I'm trying to retaliate by getting a life. The result is that we've been out with or without each other almost every night, and I think that pizza was the only thing I cooked since my birthday.

Anyway, one day this week we were early to meet some of Jesse's friends at a bar in Soho, so we decided to walk around the area and find a place for a quick drink and bite to eat. I lamented in my head about how I hate when this kind of situation happens, because I always end up eating a shitty meal at some random place, while there are so many restaurants out there on my list of places to go. This time, the gods smiled at me.

"What about that wine bar?" Jesse asked.

"What wine bar?" I responded.

"That one, where it says 'Wine Bar' down the street."

I squinted, and sure enough I saw a giant sign saying just that, Wine Bar. We approached and were delighted to find that it is actually the Vintage NY Wine Bar, a place we'd long ago thought about going to after we bought some wine from the Vintage NY wine store uptown, and then forgot about. These people need a new name for their wine bar...as the name makes passersby think it's your average wine bar like a million others around New York City. When it is actually a TREASURE. They need to do a better job marketing, because that place should not have been as empty as it was.

Vintage NY is a company that sells only New York-made wine in its stores, and the Wine Bar follows the same principle with an extensive list of wines that are exclusively from Long Island, Hudson Valley, and the Finger Lakes region. The menu proclaims "Eat Local" and "Drink Local." Even the beers are all from the New York area. This is my dream!

I had a Rivendell Riesling, which I knew I would like because I had it when we went wine tasting at Rivendell last fall. We ordered from the Tasty Bites portion of the menu, three for $15. I enjoyed the "crispy chevre," delightful fried squares of goat cheese that I scooped into my mouth with a perfect touch of sweetness from the drizzle of honey on the plate. We also really liked our "Long Island duck meatball," which was a nice mixture of meat, with a mystery flavor that made it slightly sweet. We had to run soon after to the bar for the meet up, but we will go back someday, as this is one of the few places in the city that I can drink wine guilt free when it comes to my carbon footprint. For some reason, it's so much easier to get local beer than local wine, which is just silly, because I think New York made wines are just fine. Maybe wine conoisseurs would disagree.

Interestingly enough, while we ate, we enjoyed eavesdropping on a nearby table, where they were having a discussion about the hunt for buying an apartment in Brooklyn, bucking the trend by being young, single women buying on their own, biking all sweaty to open houses, in comparison to the well-groomed couples looking at condos with them. I wished we we had joined in on their conversation, since Jesse and I may soon be doing that, biking to open houses to find a place to buy when our lease is up this July. But let's not talk about that too much, because it makes me feel nervous.