Doan goes to Mikey’s Burger

January 30, 2010 in dining experiences, food review, meat, sandwich | by doanbuu | 1 comment

A couple of weeks ago while trying to enjoy myself in the Lower East Side a friend of mine and I went to get some post drink snacks at Mikey’s Burger, the latest offering from lower Manhattan’s leader of Vietnamication, Michael “Bao” Huynh, the guy behind Baoguette and Bia. A smallish, tiled greasy spoon, Mikey’s Burger just sells burgers, hotdogs, fries and shakes, mixing in elements of Southeast Asia with the classics of American fast food.
My friend Steve and I, after glancing over the menu, decided to go with the The Mikey, which is a burger topped with onions, corned beef, and pickled mustard seed. We perched ourselves on two stools by the fryer and watched as the cooks took out and shaped fresh hamburger patties and cooked them to order on the grill. I also took note that the precooked fries were kept oiled in a tray before they hit the fryer, which, while I dont know much about frying, struck me as a pretty interesting approach as I always assumed blanching was the way to go when making fries. Either way if and when I ever decide to make my own french fries, I might give that approach a try, but then again we didn’t get the fries so I have no idea if they were any good. Anyways, after about 5 minutes, we got our burgers, served in little paper tries. I proceeded to pour some Sriracha on the burger and dig in. The first thing I noticed was that the burger itself was juicy and thick, as they went with the more patted down ball of meat approach as opposed to the patty. But beyond that I didnt really taste the corned beef or the mustard seed. All in all it wasn’t a bad burger, and it really hit the spot at 3AM, however it’s a tad bit pricey ($5.50…I guess it could be worse), but when you’re drunk at 3AM, everything seems like a great idea.

Home is where the Hardwood eating mycelium is (are)

December 23, 2009 in buy this, drugz, food review, video, wtf | by davekrofta | 3 comments

Right before i left for Brooklyn and my ensuing duties there, I wanted to do some real fun stuff before I lost all the space I could claim as “mine” for the following months. And really what better way is there to claim a space a home than to grow edible fungus? Let me tell you folks, there isn’t one. Fuck your interior improvement and couch re-upholstering projects sir, grow some mushrooms in your house and a bottomless well spring of home-ownership with bound forth from your bosom like never before.

First i went to youtube and watched shroom videos. really good and really entertaining….

these are about growing all kinds of mushrooms…

and these are about taking magic mushrooms…

At any rate i grew some edible non-hallucinogenic mushrooms from a kit i bought off of a website called fungi perfecti which sells kits for growing a slew of edible mushrooms. I chose the bearded tooth mushroom because it yields softball sized balls of little tiny white icicles. Also i chose it because it is supposed to taste like lobster, which is so luxurious i just had to get it. This mushroom is also know as lion’s mane, but i prefer the idea of a “bearded tooth” so i am going to call it that.The kit its self is basically a bag of hardwood sawdust and wood chips that have been innouclated with spores. Exposing them to air signals to the spores it’s time to fruit. When you get the bag all you have to do is cut some holes for the mushrooms to grow through, and then mist the whole bag 2 or 3 times a day.

Here are photos of the kit and the bearded tooth’s growth over the course of 6 weeks.

This is the bag as it came to me, on top are some fruits from the mushroom, i hat to scrape these off to start the spores to fruiting again.

Here in this very fuzzy photo, you can see the spores starting to cover the interior of the bag. in a while they will begin to push out from the bag and grow these mushroom clusters.

This is after about six weeks of care, the spores aren’t very big, but you can get the idea. Also, for the purposes of eating, you have to get them while they are young to get the maximum tenderness and flavor form them. If they are left to grow big they my stop growing and start to brown on top, which is a sign they are old bitter tasting.

It was at this point that i made my first harvest.

and here it is all fried up with garlic and butter and green onion.

In conclusion, this does taste vaguely fishy, and kind of lobstery, and on the flavor front in general it is pretty amazing. On the growing stuff front this was a sucess, but was it worth 50 bucks for shipping + a kit? Maybe… given that dried Bearded Tooth mushrooms go for 8 dollars an ounce some places, it’s a pretty good return on my investment. PLUS you can use the substrate to innouclate logs or other matter like coffee grounds and keep growing mushroom as long as you have the intrest to do so. COOL!

Doan goes to Bark.

December 19, 2009 in dining experiences, food review, meat, restaurant review | by doanbuu | 3 comments

These are not my dogs nor is this a picture i took. But these are dogs from Bark.

Today I made a trek through the snow globe that has become the northeast to Bark Hot Dogs, a newish(?) semi-upscale hot dog spot in Park Slope.

The interior is nice, modern, sparse, and sort of fancy what with its wood panelling, plain white brick walls, and long communal bar benches, which I always think is a crucial set up when ever hotdogs and burgers are involved. But enough about the interior, I’m here to talk about the dogs, and they were…ok. I got my usual litmus test dogs, chili cheese and sauerkraut with mustard, and a lemon-lime FoxOn Park soda. After a 5 or so minute wait, my order came out on a nice little metal tray lined with butcher paper. The first thing I noticed was that they went for the “just right” approach with the toppings. As opposed to some hot dog places like say, Happy Dog in Cleveland who overload your dog to the point that you need a knife and fork, Bark put just the right amount so that things were spilling out all over the place while you ate or overpowering the fairly slender dog (oddly enough though, my chili cheese dog sort of ended up leaning to one side of the paper tray it sat in and the chili and melted cheese ended up adhering to the tray so I used a knife and fork anyways). The second thing I noticed was that the dogs were longer than the bun and curled up on the sides. The weiners had a nice snap and fairly mellow hot dog flavor, which I think could be attributed to the use of a pork blend as opposed to the heavier somewhat spicier taste of all beef, which I prefer but I’m not complaining either. The cheese was a melted white cheddar and the chili was a beanless meat sauce (yes!) both of which were decent. The kraut dog was pretty straightforward, nothing really notable to mention, but one thing that did stick out to me about both dogs was the bun. They were toasted really nicely and had a nice chewiness to them, a real quality piece of bread.

All in all the meal was pretty good, leaning more towards decent as opposed to awesome, but something that kept ringing in my ear from the second I paid to my walk home was that 2 hot dogs and a soda came out to about $15. A while back there was a small discussion in the comment section here about people paying way too much money for what’s supposed to an everyday man’s meal, and I honestly leaned towards the “sometimes you’ve just gotta pay a little more for a quality product”. But after eating at Bark, and I am no way saying it’s a total rip off or anything, I couldn’t stop thinking about the David Cross bit about eating at Jean Georges and then while eating you realize “WAIT A MINUTE…THIS ISNT WORTH $______!” I mean, I think Crif Dogs makes a more quality product and they’re at least a dollar cheaper across the board. Five Guys, despite being about $12 for a burger, fries, and a drink, fills you up and gives you enough fries to feed a small family.

So there you have it, my all over the place review of Bark Hot Dogs. Pretty good, definitely worth a stop in if you’re in the area, and possibly worth a second visit (they serve breakfast on weekend mornings, as well as burgers and fries which I didn’t try), but nothing really mindblowing.

Salty Peanut Butter Duck Egg Cookies

December 5, 2009 in dessert, egg, recipe, snacks | Tags: affair, bad idea, breakfast cookies, buttery, cookies, craigslist, duck, excellent idea, farm, good idea, gross, honey, idea, no sugar, peanut butter, peanuts, recipe, satin, smart idea, snack, stupid idea, talking to animals, tiger woods | by Christine Kelly | 2 comments

One day I sold something on Craigslist and went to this farm in Trumansburg, NY to drop off the item. The woman gave me a tour of her farm and gave me a small bag of duck eggs. It bothered me that the eggs were still warm from coming out of the ducks and that I had made small talk with the ducks whose bodies they had exited, so I decided if I was going to eat these then they needed to be as removed from the experience of eating eggs as possible. I altered a recipe for peanut butter cookies and was extremely pleased with the result. Allow me:

2/3 cup butter

2/3 cup honey

1 cup peanut butter

1 duck egg

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 3/4 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

7 cups why were you talking to ducks

1 teaspoon salt (more or less depending on how salty you what them to be)

Beat the honey and butter together until it’s satiny. Touchable almost (resist). The other wet ingredients may now join. Peanut butter, egg, milk, vanilla. Continue beating. Mix dry ingredients in another bowl, then slowly combine it with the wet mixture. Oil up your baking sheets and decorate them with an array of tablespoon sized dough balls. Press your fork into these balls to make crosshatch patterns and bake 12-15 minutes on 325.

Plate made by Zena Pesta. Cookies made with help of bees, ducks, and cows.

Exploding Tacos

December 4, 2009 in snacks, video, wtf | Tags: awesome, explosions, tacos | by erikaneola | Leave a comment

Need my mexican heart say more?

Today I conquered butter.

October 25, 2009 in Food Links, Me!, breakfast, recipe, wtf | Tags: DIY | by davekrofta | 3 comments

makin butter

I was looking for fun places to eat on one of my favorite websites, Chowhound.com, and I had never noticed how well built and jam packed that site is. Lots and lots of fun cooking tips in video form. Everything from the “no duh” to the “no way”. One of them was a really basic but totally amazing thing… making butter from heavy whipping cream.

Now some people who grew up on ‘the farm’ or just had some cool teacher along the way have done this before, but lots of people like me have heard that this is possible, but have never done this. Well, I am here to tell you kids that it is possible. All you need is some room temp heavy whipping cream, a good size jar with a tight fitting lid, some elbow grease, and 30 minutes of your precious time, and you’ve got yourself a big wad of unsalted creamy butter!

10 minutes into shaking

10 minutes in it’s basically unsweetened whipcream.

after 30+ minutes of shaking

and after 30 or so minutes… BUTTER!

and a bonus…

buttermilk

Buttermilk!

Churning physically agitates the cream until it ruptures the fragile membranes surrounding the milk fat. Once broken, the fat droplets can join with each other and form clumps of fat, or butter grains.

As churning continues, larger clusters of fat collect until they begin to form a network with the air bubbles that are generated by the churning; this traps the liquid and produces a foam. As the fat clumps increase in size, there are also fewer to enclose the air cells. So the bubbles pop, run together, and the foam begins to leak. (per the wikipedia “butter churning” entry)

Basically what happens is you shake the cream so hard, it separates into the fatty stuff and the milky stuff, butter(fat) and butter milk (the rest). SO COOL.

Make some butter today!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY THU TRAN~!

October 17, 2009 in events, exotic places, party, video, wtf | Tags: bad brilliance, shonen knife, thu tran | by erikaneola | 2 comments

Today is Thu Tran’s Birthday!!!!! Happy Birthday Thu!
Last night to celebrate Thu’s birthday we went to Fette Sau and ate our body weight in meat. After that we rolled over to Santos Party House to catch SHONEN KNIFE!! Here is a video I took on my phone [it's totally crappy].

Miho Hatori [from Cibo Matto and Gorillaz] and her new band opened up. They are called NEW OPTIMISM and the one and only Bad Brilliance got up onstage and danced with Miho and her hot male revue. Check it out!

Here is the cutest video from Shonen Knife’s new album, Super Group! Have a good birthday THU!

Antonio Velotta at 14 years old

October 11, 2009 in FriENDZZZ, drugz, video, wtf | by Thu Tran | 3 comments

This is Antonio Velotta, and he is so funny and amazing. He is a very talented hair artist who cuts my hair and the hair of many many others.

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He recently celebrated his 30th birthday at the McDonald’s at Time Square.

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When he was 14 years old back in the nineties, he made these really wild videos with his little sister Cristina. Recently, I offered to edit them down for him for youtube. Here are a few:::

This last one is Antonio pretending to be Lorena Bobbitt. NSFW!! Play at your own risk!!

The Artist Formerly Know as The Prince of Pesticides

October 9, 2009 in video, wtf | Tags: food music | by davekrofta | Leave a comment

So online I stumbled upon Dr. Carl Winter’s website Food Safety Music. This guy is great! Essentially he does food safety themed covers a-la Weird Al.

The Elvis of Ecoli

With songs like “Who Left The Food Out”, “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Oysters”, and my personal favorite ” I Will Survive”, where he basically breaks up with salmonella, this guy is a real class act.

PICKLIN’ with PETER

October 5, 2009 in Uncategorized | by misslisa | 2 comments

Hey guys! Who wants to know what kind of food I’ve been eating? Well I don’t know, it’s the usual crap. BUT soon I WILL be eating the plentiful product of today’s pickling party with Peter van Hyning. Today we made dilly beans, pickled carrots, pickled garlic, and pickles. Justin Stewart was here too.

How today went, first I slept in and then Peter and Justin went to the store to buy the vegetables, garlic, and cans for pickling. In addition to finding the necessary pickling parts, they met a beautiful and enchanting pickling goddess. So lucky they were to bump into her before she left the city this very night to pickle and can at an enchanted and beautiful farm upstate. Justin got her number. She knows everything about pickling and canning and had some great recommendations for them about pickling today. I personally don’t know what those recommendations are, I’ve heard only of her beauty, not of her practical pickling knowledge.

Anyways, in the meantime I went to buy dill flowers at the farmers market and I filled out a survey on sexual assault in Williamsburg in exchange for a hotdog (a ho hum hotdog). I also got a shit ton of vinegar. Peter and I then went to a Polish deli to get some pickling spices. As far as i can tell the Polish pickling secret recipe is mustard seed, coriander, bay leaves, whole nutmegs, and crushed cinnamon sticks. We also tossed in the dill flowers, a clove of garlic, and some crushed red pepper. Right around this time Justin Stewart left. To contemplate the beauty of the picking goddess in the privacy of his own home, I assume. I had a lunch of canned fish and Peter ate cheese and crackers.

So when you pickle you have to boil everything except the food and spices. You boil the cans and the lids. You boil the water and the salt. You boil everything after it’s sealed. But never the vegetables or seasonings. It’s totally wild. It’s like opposite cooking. Another opposite thing we did was like Peter was talking out of his ass. How very BACKWARDS! fun! For dinner we made a tuna noodle casserole and Peter spent my money on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. Soon we’ll watch The Fireman’s Ball. I think it’s funny that the porno version would be The Fireman’s Balls.

(I’d also like to add that this was actually LAST week’s activity but I was missing my camera cord and we just can’t post a blog without a visual hm? What I’m getting at is that those pickles are f*cking delicious. So flavorful. Now for the pictures…)

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Let’s spend some time with Candy Corn

October 3, 2009 in candy | by davekrofta | Leave a comment

Hey kids it’s that time of year, Fall is here. Time to begrudgingly pull out sweaters and scarves. Time for every store to start putting out Christmas decorations, because Halloween is less than a month away. And thanks to that much poo poo-ed tradition of capitalist holiday enthusiasm, one of my favorite candies has been out on the shelves for months, and that means lots and lots of opportunity for gorging on CANDY CORN!

A study back in 2001 found that annual production that year was 20 million pounds, which is approximately 8.3 billion kernels!! Which is crazy considering how few people i know are as koo-koo for them as i am. When the candy debuted in the 1900’s its process was so revolutionary that people went ga-ga, but at that time production was done entirely by hand, from the production of the cornstarch molds to the hand pouring of the 45 pound ladles of steaming sugary goodness… all by hand. This was back in the day when every factory job was crazy dangerous, even candy corn production. “how did your grampa die again?” “Oh he was killed by a giant ladle of the orange color in candy corn.” “oh man, that’s tough.”

Eat it!

2 awesome and gross things

September 29, 2009 in exotic places, snacks | by Thu Tran | 3 comments

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The picture on top, I took at a Japanese mart in Vancouver, BC in Canada. These Beer Pretz were on sale for 49 cents because they were expired. I bought 2 boxes. They still tasted okay.

The picture on the bottom, I took in Seattle, WA at post-ally(??). It’s a wall covered in ABC gum. The ally smelled like old spit. It looked really incredible.

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Dream Doughnut Shop

September 29, 2009 in dessert, gangsta cuisine, restaurant review | by Thu Tran | 1 comment

I met the doughnut shop of my dreams a couple weeks ago in Portland Oregon. It’s called Voodoo Doughnuts.

I went here late night one Wednesday with Chris Duffy to find bums, musicians, Scion reps, teens, all hanging out like a big cloud around the front of the shop.

Inside, it’s decorated like a big weird dougnut shrine, with a bunch of artifacts and fun crap. It’s pretty packed with crap. Also as we were waiting in line, some sort of drunk drama was unfolding before us as some girl waiting in line flirted with some dude who apparently was not her boyfriend, who stormed in seconds later to pull her out of the line. At the time that we went, this Voodoo Doughnut was staffed by very cute and pierced and punky black t-shirted teens.

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The doughnut selection itself is every bratty 12 year old’s dream come true. Doughnuts here are topped with captain crunch, froot loops, cocoa puffs, dubble bubble gum, marshmallows, crispy bacon, etc… They are flavored by sprinkling various flavors of powdered kool-aid and tang and nestea on top, which is totally brilliant by the way. And they are variably shaped like giant penises, huge blunts, playfully tortured voodoo dolls, sloppy chunks, and of course like a doughnut. On their online menu, they definitely had once offered doughnuts glazed in pepto-bismal and nyquil.

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The doughnut I went for that evening was the “GRAPE APE.” The secret ingredient here was definitely a thin layer of powdered grape kool-aid delicately coating the icing on top. This doughnut blew my mind. It tasted exactly how a grape doughnut would taste: sugary, yeasty, grape aftertaste. I’ll be coming back for more.

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ribs and cellphones

September 26, 2009 in video | by Thu Tran | 6 comments

Here is a Nokia cell phone web blog video I am in. Features music by White Williams. The dinner I am making here is black cherry cola ribs, shrimp and peach spring rolls, fried dough dipped tofu with powdered sugar, and scallion buttered stove-burner-grilled corn. We ate this a couple weeks ago. I oven baked these ribs, and embarrassingly burned them a little! (I’m still so bad at oven-cooking, I admit it!!) Still decent ribs, if not jerkey-ish, which is totally acceptable to me. Check out our favorite hair artist extraordinaire, Antonio Velotta’s, amazing pose in the final still of the video. He blew dried my hair that day!!! He can do yours as well!

The guys who filmed this, Andrew Hinton, Daniel Trapp, and Josh Neale were pretty cool, really British, in their thirties, nice, handsome, really into eating different things, and hanging out. Check it out, it’s wild.

The Colonel’s Heart Attack

September 24, 2009 in sandwich | by doanbuu | 4 comments

So a little while ago there was a big buzz in the fast food world about KFC’s Double Down sandwich, which if you don’t know is a sandwich where fried chicken is the bun and bacon, cheese, and some mystery sauce is the filler. However it was then revealed that it was only being sold in select markets and those of us not in those markets were left with only our imaginations as to what this monstrosity could taste like and just how many of them we could eat before dying.
Well, what was also sort of causing a little buzz, granted only in the midtown lunch world, was Midtown Lunch’s Sandwich Challenge. Sort of a competition, the idea was for midtown lunch spots to come up with a sandwich under $10 that is, in Zach’s words, “Bold. New. Unhealthy. Wrong (but oh so right.)”. Some entries included a Mexican Cheesestreak from the El Rey del Sabor cart, a Fried Calamari Hero from Lazzara’s, and a Duck Pastrami Sandwich from Free Foods. Sadly enough, a lot of these places are a little too far out of my jurisdiction here in midtown east (the El Rey Del Sabor near me didnt have it), so I didnt get around to trying any of them…until now. And which one did I try? The winner of the Midtown Lunch August Sandwich Challenge, The Colonel’s Heart Attack from Cer Te.
Located a little bit of a walk from my work, Cer Te is a place Id been meaning to check out for a while due to the many entries about on Midtown Lunch. So with today finally being a slow day here in magic TV land, me and my usual lunch companions Phil and Delancey made the trek and got 3 Colonel’s Heart Attacks to go. Oh what’s that? What’s a Colonel’s Heart Attack? Well I’m glad you asked. It’s 2 pieces of boneless fried chicken breast, topped with mac & cheese, and collard greens sandwiched in a biscuit with a side of gravy. How can you go wrong? Well first off, upon ordering the guy told us they were out of collard greens, but they had sauteed spinach. Ok, fine, even though I would’ve rather have had the collard greens. And then we ended up waiting for honestly at least 15 minutes. Ok, whatever. Like I said, it’s a slow day at work. And it’s a $9.75 sandwich. Look as long as it fills me up and is good, fine. We get our sandwiches after slowly depleting their supply of free brownie samples and made the trip back to the office. Everything looked good, it was a good size, and I dug in. Shit was crumbly. Crumbs were flying all over the place so I switched to a fork and knife. Still crumbs, so I put it on a paper plate and went to town. It was good, but I noticed that it was also somehow a tad bland and dry. But no problem right? They gave us gravy on the side…no they didn’t. It turned out to be a little container of cole slaw and some bullshit pickle (I hate pickles). But whatever, I dumped some hot sauce on and finished that thing.
The moral of the story: conceptually it was a good idea, but, but what I think this is an issue with a lot of these Frankenstein Foods is that as you start to combine all these foods, shit just gets too convoluted and next thing you know you’re not really tasting one thing or the other. And in the case of the Colonel’s Heart Attack, not only did flavors blend into each other, they blended into each other in a bland way. I mean right now it feels like I just ate a biscuit and spinach sandwich that had some crusty stuff and yellow glop in it. Now before this ends with me sounding like I’m damning the Colonel’s Heart Attack, I still want to commend Cer Te for making a creative sandwich, and I will definitely consider going back to check out some of their other sandwich specials such as the Thanksgiving Dip (I’ve always wanted to open a year round Thanksgiving restaurant that just served Thanksgiving food), as well as what looked like quality desserts.
It’s also summer 2.0 outside, so you should just do yourself a favor and go for a walk regardless.
Enjoy!
yeah!