Tea Leaves

We had folks over for one of our periodic Chinese dumpling parties. The food came out particularly well this time, and I managed to use my nifty Panasonic LX-3 to take pictures of some parts of the process. So here is an updated and hopefully slightly more useful version of the reference recipe.
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This weekend was the opening weekend for the Farmer’s Market at the Firehouse in the Strip, our favorite place to go for this sort of thing. The market is run by the Slow Food Pittsburgh people and has gradually grown to be a fantastic source for local organic produce, meats, and other products. This week we got wild leeks (ramps) and morel mushrooms. So to celebrate, I made eggs for breakfast on Sunday.
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Consider the humble sardine.

Yes, yes, I’m doing it again: rehabilitating foods that odds are you, for some godforsaken reason, don’t eat. Even though these foods are awesome. I’m not going to stop anytime soon. You don’t eat prunes, so I tell you to eat prunes. You don’t eat olives, so I tell you to eat olives. You don’t eat liver, so I tell you – at least those of you without heart conditions – to eat liver.

You don’t eat sardines. You should eat sardines. Here’s a recipe that is better than most of the pasta recipes you’ve made in the past year. Unless you’re Lidia Bastianich. In which case you already know that you should be eating sardines. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve been trying to get a handle on a few basic techniques, one of which is braising meat. I’ve always had good luck with making stew but mixed luck with braising. After gaining some insight through failed practice sessions, I think I finally cracked the code this weekend. So here is what you do.
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We were in Dinette the other night getting ready to tuck into one of their excellent pancetta and sunny-side up egg pizzas when we spied a plate of prosciutto go by to the table in the back. It was placed in front of a young girl, maybe 8 years old. “That’s a lot of ham”, I thought. A while later, having polished off the pizza we looked back over and the plate was empty and a second plate of ham was being placed in front of the young girl. Now, I’m sure she had some help from dad in polishing this off, but she still ate most of the second plate as well. My heart was warmed and I thought to myself that here was a rare child whose dad was nurturing a healthy future love for that perfect food: pork
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Cocktail-making is as close as most people get to alchemy.

One might think that cooking or baking qualify, as well. But in both cooking and baking, technique can tend to predominate, and it’s rare that you end up with something inexplicably numinous. In the cocktail, however, more often than you’d think, you can put three ugly ducks into a shaker and end up with a swan. The sum of the ingredients is greater than its parts. Read the rest of this entry »

Long time readers will no doubt remember that my favorite Asian food restaurant in Pittsburgh is Rose Tea Cafe in Squirrel Hill. Rose Tea is so good that you can come back to Pittsburgh after a week in a city with a real Chinese Food community and eat there without blinking. If this was all they had achieved, the place would represent a true watershed in the food history of our fair city. But, Rose Tea has actually achieved much more than this and is therefore an even more important entity in the city. The reason is simple: they are teaching the locals how to eat real Chinese food by only serving them real Chinese food.
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The Whole Foods tater tots are back. They are almost as good as before, but a little bit different.

Phew.

Everyone who knows me knows that I hate fusion food. This isn’t actually true. I tend to hate East/West fusion food when cooked by Western cooks who don’t know shit about the Eastern cuisine they think has influenced them. Meanwhile, my experience is that West/East fusion cooked by Eastern cooks who know what they are doing tends to work better.

So tonight, just to amaze you, I present my perfect West/East fusion Pittsburgh bar food: Chinese mini-steamed bun curried turkey burger sliders.
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The Whole Foods tater tots are gone. This is a great tragedy in the area of foods formed from shredded potatoes. For some reason the Whole Foods ones had just the right balance of starch, oil and salt so if you roasted them at 400F for 20 minutes or so they were little cylindrical bundles of crunchy joy.

But they’ve been gone for a couple of months. I think this bodes ill. What am I going to do for lazy potatoes now?