Jerky for Dessert

A Chinatown eating tour...

Last week to commemorate the Lunar New Year, I prepared a pot of Braised Chinese Short Ribs that changed my life. I have never been very well versed in Asian cuisine. I'm familiar with and enjoy the flavors, but being such a minimalist I've always leaned towards food with less ingredients. Despite this, I've been eager lately to dabble a bit more in this area. I found a recipe from a trusted source, which involved cuts of beef slowly braised in a broth flavored with sherry, orange and ginger. I was convinced this would be a winner. Preceeded by a romaine salad with Meyer lemon vinaigrette, grapefruit and watermelon radishes, it was!
Save this recipe for when you have plenty of time. You can't rush these flavors. The meat takes a full 2 1/2 hours to become completely tender, but it's well worth it. The resulting broth is practically drinkable, making even I (who made the dish from start to finish) wonder WHAT mysterious ingredient is in this that makes it SO GOOD!?
The answer is quality ingredients, proper technique, plenty of time, and lots of love.
Follow the recipe and you can't go wrong.

Foodie-kind
Last week after a day of running errands in the city, I unpacked my gear to find a hunk of aged Laguiole raw milk cheese in my gym shoe (relax, it was wrapped in plastic). Desperate for more room in my bag, I remembered putting it there earlier that day during a snack run at Whole Foods. This was the same day I emptied my jacket pocket and unexpectedly found a napkin wrapped around a fantastic oatmeal cookie with dried cranberries and pecans. It was a last minute purchase at the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory (2 Old Fulton St), where I have an ice cream loyalty. I don't know why my pocket seemed like the best place for a cookie, or my shoe a good place for cheese, or why when sampling spicy cucumber pickles on the Lower East Side I asked for a napkin and the Pickle Guy offered me his sleeve. Besides not being a germophobe when it comes to eating, it's times like this when I realized what being a serious foodie is all about. It's a commitment, an obsession, even a compulsion. Sometimes the best medicine for people afflicted with foodie-ism is for us to hang out with our own kind.

Which is why I was delighted to spend the afternoon with a foodie friend from Hong Kong, eating our way around Chinatown. I have a love affair with noodles, and he told me about a place that makes fresh, hand pulled wheat noodles every day. Food Shing Restaurant (2 East Broadway) is a generic looking spot I never would have noticed from the street. I asked my friend to order his favorite things, and within a few minutes two steaming hot bowls of noodle soup appeared before us. The slices of slowly cooked beef tendon were much more flavorful and pleasant in texture than I thought they would be, surrounded by the most perfectly toothsome noodles and magnificent beefy broth with hints of ginger and star anise.
Slurping a bowl of noodles doesn't take long, so we were quickly on to our next stop. But not before devouring a perfectly sweet ginger doughnut that I picked up on the way over from my beloved Doughnut Plant (see past newsletter, Food Nostalgia archived on my blog). Mark Isreal's coconut filled doughnut is possibly the most euphoria-inducing food item I've had in my life, but I digress.
On the way to our next stop we peeked in the windows of another favorite Chinatown food spot (Yummy Noodles) , and one of the oldest dim sum and tea houses in the city. In the shadow on the Confucious building, 9 Chatham Square Restaurant is a favorite of the elderly Chinese set. A popular and bustling lunch spot serving Hong Kong style fare, including a beverage made of half coffee/half black tea called Yin Yuan tea.
Try Yummy Noodles (46 Bowery) for their famous claypot rice casserole topped with Chinese sausage, succulent roast duck and "bbq" meats, or a variety of congees (savory rice porrige).

For dessert!
Discovering K.L. Malaysia Beef Jerky Inc. (95A Elizabeth St.) was the foodie highlight of my week. A little tiny place with not much more than a heat lamp and piles of delicious meat treats. This is not the jerky you are thinking of, the oversalted and impossibly tough strips your uncle decided to make after a deer hunting trip once.
Malaysia Jerky has several varieties, all made in small square 1/4 inch thick sheets, with a texture closer to soft fruit leather or thinly sliced spam. If you are one of those people who can admit that spam is actually really tasty (becuase it IS), Malaysia Jerky is for you. The warm, spicy, sweet and slightly smoky pork jerky is cooked over charcoal and just fatty enough to be absolutely mouthwatering. I ate the rest of my purchase the day after, cold, right out of the refrigator and savored every bite.
After sampling even more Hong Kong style street food from a cart at Grand and Bowery (glutinous rice rolls with sweet sticky soy sauce and dry shrimp), I concluded my lunch hour tour, totally stuffed and grateful to live in such a diverse and wonderful city.

Cooking lessons
Whether you want to eat out less, entertain more, learn how to prepare healthy snacks, or just brush up on your efficiency in the kitchen.. a private cooking lesson is a great idea. Choose your own menu, learn to shop for the best ingredients and get professional tips to help make cooking more fun and less daunting!

Rates for private cooking lessons start at $175.

Unfussy Food can help you identify and reach your food goals, whether you need a food coach or a personal chef. Check out our custom services page for more rates and info.


Eat well and be well this holiday weekend!

-Holly

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FALL in love.. with food!

originally published November 28th, 2007

That's right. It's still fall. The first day of winter is more than three weeks away. The autumn leaves are just past their peak and we're not even close to being tired of apples yet!
Are we?
Though my head is spinning with holiday party plans, I relish this season and what it brings. After a very active and adventurous summer, I'm thoroughly enjoying my days and nights indoors. Animals and plants hibernate during the winter with good reason. The cold seasons are a time to restore, reflect and rejuvenate. It's an opportunity to slow down and nourish yourself. Even at the end of a very busy day, I find cooking to be great therapy and stress relief. There's something so simple and comforting about warming the house and filling it with delicious smells of sauteing onions and garlic. Tonight I took a short break from a long day at my desk to make a pot of chili. The recipe only has a few ingredients, but the most important of those is time. The longer you can leave the pot to simmer, the better. Winter is a time to do just that. A time for pondering over stews and soups and slow-roasted meats. In the time of wood-burning stoves, the heat did double duty as a method of cooking and also warming the home. Though most of us have electric or gas heat nowadays, I always think of my kitchen in winter as a sort of hearth. Anytime something is cooking, it feels warm and inviting. If you've ever been in a house full of people, you know that the smell of baking immediately draws everyone into the kitchen.
I imagine the satisfaction my great grandmothers and their mothers had when they pulled out their own carrots, potatoes, and onions from the root cellars to make meals each winter. It wasn't novelty to them, of course. It's just what they did. If they didn't grow and store enough food each summer in winter they could go hungry. It was simply survival.
Somehow the idea of this kind of bucolic existence has become synonymous with privilege in our society.
If my great great grandmother saw the ultra-high priced organic produce at Whole Foods i don't know if she'd laugh or cry. We are lucky in NYC to have a great network of local farmers so that we don't have to depend on supermarkets, but not everyone is so lucky.
I consider the availability of pure, nourishing foods to be a basic human necessity (or even a right), not a privilege. Moreover, the preparation of good food for oneself and others is such a simple act of kindness, that is often forgotten or underappreciated.

I once cooked a meal for a friend, who complimented me and thanked me profusely. Not used to this kind of praise, I passed off the compliments and said "it was nothing". She argued that it absolutely was something. She said "who cooks for you (as in, all of us), besides your mother and your lover?" It's important! I tend to agree. Now when people thank me for my food, I say "you're welcome".

This summer I heard a wonderful interview with Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver is most recently the author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle which documents an entire year her family survived by procuring as much of their food as possible from neighboring farms and their own backyard.
The interview topic was "The Ethics of Eating" and I really loved the following quote.

" I think what suprised me the most is that we didn't really miss anything. We went into it probably thinking too much about what we were not going to be able to have (strawberries in January) but when we changed our thinking and started every meal with the question "what do we have? what's in season? what do we have plenty of?"
It became a long exercise in gratitude.
The ethical choice of supporting your local farmer also tastes better. And it does involve cooking, but that's also such a wonderful thing to come home to. I think that the planning of beautiful meals and investing one's heart and time in their preparation is the opposite of self indulgence".

It's a wonderful interview. You can download the entire podcast here

But back to that pot of chili I was making. While I typed this newsletter, the chili cooked and cooked three times longer than I usually leave it on. The results are fantastic.
This season, take some time to restore and reflect. Nourish yourself with some slow food when you can, and share it with friends!

Web news
In case you haven't visited the site lately, there's a new feature to check out. Each time you visit a new page, you'll see a new Unfussy Fact at the bottom. Facts are generated randomly each time a page is opened so keep surfing and see what new info you find!

Holiday Gifting
I know everyone is thrusting gift ideas on you all these days, and not all of them are good. I have a great one! The gift of good food and good health. A lot of folks want to improve their diets, and even learn more about cooking and food. Cooking classes, a gift of delivered meals or a pantry makeover are a great way to get started on the road to good eating! Unfussy Food offers something for every budget, and gift certificates to be redeemed in the New Year. Instead of just trying to keep New Year's resolutions, why not begin healthy lifelong habits?

Check out our Custom Services for gift ideas!

This week at the market...
tat soi, brussels sprouts, asian pears, Red Jacket Orchard's Tart Cherry Stomp (awesome cherry juice), cider donuts, apples, apples and more apples!

My favorite recipe of the week...
Roasted Autumn Vegetable Soup

One very nice thing to do this season is to forward my newsletter or a link to my website on to a friend. It's free, entertaining and hopefully enlightening.

Keep warm and eat well,

-Holly