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Hi boys and girls! I am back in Brooklyn after an enlightening experience through the wilderness of Nebraska. I have actually been back for about three weeks now, but I have finally settled into my new apartment and our internet is good, even though we can not figure out how to hook up the router.
The subject of this blog is regarding a real FOOD PARTY at my apartment a few days ago. I don’t remember the cause for this dinner party, but I do remember that it was planned out a few days before hand. Plus we had a lot of friends visiting from out of town. Anyway, who cares about the reason, we had a blast!
First of all, this was the entree:
It was marinated and basted in this:
plus salt and pepper, duh.
I roasted a 6 pound pork shoulder for like, i don’t know, all day. It was awesome. The meat was very TENDER and JUICY. However, the birch beer flavor was more of an afternote in the tastebuds. I’ve experimented with coca cola pulled pork before that yielded similar results, where the cola flavor was difficult to accentuate. In the future when cooking with soda pops, I think I will have to reduce the soda down to its essence to really make it stand out. There is too much water in soda pop that I think I just need to boil out.
SPOILER: : : My next experiment will involve a roasted turkey marinated and basted in mountain dew, and stuffed with flaming hot cheetohs.
Here are some of the other dishes served at this food party:
These are two different kinds of collard greens. The top is butter and water, the bottom is cooked in birch beer pork juice. There are two different kinds because we catered to vegetarians at this dinner party. Luckily, no vegans were around, so we did not have to cook a third kind, that would have just been cooked in water. The beauty of living in Bed Stuy, as opposed to Williamsburg, is that collard greens at the grocery store a block from my home was only $1.00 for two bunches that were as big as human toddlers.
Jed made this lovely veggie mac n cheez:
It was very rich and full of large chunks of garlic cloves. Needless to say, everyone had bad breath upon eating this deliciously heavy dish.
Ani made these wonderful corn muffins. They were probably the best cornbread I’ve ever had. Can you guess the secret ingredients?
Well, I’m not sure what she actually did to them, but they had LIME, CHEDDAR, and JALEPENO. What a clever girl. These things generally taste good with corn, so of course, they complimented this cornbread QUITE WELL.
This was a dish that I did not get a chance to sample, but Jess Langley prepared this as the vegetarian entree:
I did not get a chance to sample this, but the vegetarians, as well as non-vegetarians assured me that this was delicious. I simple did not have room on my plate for this. However, what it entails is the following things: crusty bread, avocado, carmelized onion, balsamic vinegar, and possibly cottage cheese.
Of course to accompany everything was rice:
Here is the spread:
Here are a few people enjoying this feast, everyone is having a lovely time with each other:
I am happy to be back in New York.
a little over a year ago i discovered a great little website called hollyeats. having just moved to new york city, i was in search of some great grimey food spots, specifically in the hotdog genre to explore and through the magic of google search, i found the site.
bored at work i would often sift through all the grease stain reviews he gave and it was there that i was introduced to what looked like the most incredible thing i had ever seen: the lobster roll.
lobster, butter, new england style hotdog bun (which if youre not familiar, looks like a mini loaf of bread but split in half along the top). maybe a lemon. maybe some mayo. genius.
i instantly became obsessed with finding and eating one of these and while i found that they are pretty easy to find here in new york, i wanted the real deal, which led to the initial new england lobster roll expedition of 2006.
my girlfriend jacqueline and i hopped in her minivan one saturday and drove to johnny ad’s in old saybrook, ct (which was exceptional by the way) for the sole purpose of eating a lobster roll, and disappointed we were not. if youve never had one, its everything you would imagine it to be: amazing, awesome, and really good. it looked something like this:
lobster roll, clam strips, lobster bisque, some cole slaw, and jacq being overjoyed by the sight of it all.
heading back to new york that day we concluded that a farther expedition was in order, to go to maine, the source of the lobster roll and eat whatever creature the ocean had to offer on the way.
about a year later, we took some days off of work and did it. with the help of hollyeats and roadfood.com, our itinerary was as such: start in brooklyn, going through connecticut, rhode island, stop in boston, and then head up to portland, maine. this trip actually happened a few weeks ago but i/we’ve been lazy about posting so uh, yeah. sorry.
day 1
we left the city at about 9am, and i was hoping to have some breakfast at super duper weenie, a hotdog spot in fairfield, ct that we stopped at last year, but we must have missed the sign because, uh, well we didn’t see the sign. so instead we held out for the first place on our itinerary, captain scott’s lobster dock in new london.
located down a couple of back roads in a sort of small gloomy new england town, captain jack’s is pretty much how it looks in the picture. a little shack on a dock with some picnic tables for some fine outside waterfront eating. we wanted to have a nice well rounded meal so we each got a lobster roll, and then decided to split some clam fritters and a cup of rhode island style clam chowder, and like most meals, it came with a free side of cole slaw.
it was a pretty blustery day, especially since we were by the water but we decided to get the full effect and sit outside. the lobster rolls were pretty damned good, as the meat was pretty damned succulent and everything was buttered nicely. the clam fritters were pretty good, especially with some hot sauce on them but they, like most fritters, are really just a lot of fried dough and these were pretty gargantuan and got boring after 1 or 2. we opted for the rhode island style chowder seeing how neither of us had never had it and i must say that it’s not bad. based on clam broth as opposed to new england and manhattan style, rhode island style’s got the same major ingredients (potatoes, clams…uh…clams) but is more like a clam soup or stew as opposed to the conventional dairy based chowder. it wasn’t spectacular but id be willing to try it again somewhere else just so that id have something to compare it to.
after new london we went through rhode island because i thought there would be things to see and while im sure there are plenty of things to see, nothing really struck our fancy from the view of the highway so we kept on trucking to boston.
this picture isn’t from the trip but from a prior recon mission i took to boston over the summer. i just posted it for effect.
we got to boston (cambridge specifically) at about 4 in afternoon, where we parked the car and wandered around waiting for my friend and host jason to get off of work. we got some beers (sam adams octoberfest and shipyard export to be specific) and relaxed for a bit before we headed out for the evening to watch game one of the ALCS between the red sox and the tribe (i conveniently spent game 1 of both the ALDS and the ALCS in enemy territory) at a sports bar that, while wasn’t bad, wasn’t interesting enough to make note of. even though our trip was mainly based on the idea of eating sea food all the time, captain scott’s had kinda burnt us out on seafood for the day so we were up for whatever.
i had the wings. tribe lost.
we spent the rest of the night drinking with friends and then turned in fairly early to prepare for day 2 of our food odyssey.
what wonders did boston have in store for us? would we be able to get some of that fabled new england clam chowder? would we go sight seeing? would i keep not taking pictures?
stay tuned and find in out day 2 of doan & jacq’s new england seafood trip extravaganza!
Now I know that this is a little late for Halloween stuff, but let’s get real there is always more than enough time to get weirded out by a food product or shitty costume. That being said let me introduce you to my new friend D’Gari.
I’m sure that you are already scurred enough, but I will go on.
You see D’gari may not seem frightening because of it’s seeming simplicity, in the guise of ghetto Mexican Jello, the inviting chap on the front with his freaky pink eyes, and smirking mouth. FYI; because there is no pigment on the area of the packaging near the white of his eyes, it appears pink, but if you get apple D’gari, you get a pastel green demon eyed child instead. Delicious snack!?
WELCOME TO THE CABBAGE PATCH MOTHERFUCKER!!!
Look what happens when you open a pack of D’Gari! Boil milk and let chill my ass! On the real though, this stuff tastes as cheap as it is. which is like 80 cents a pack, but the detail retention is pretty good. Also, the serving size is 2 tbsp. so if are even slightly diabetic, you better get yourself a zwieback or something.
Most of you know Ian Charnas, a man of many splendored things. He’s a bit like Max Fischer from Rushmore, in that he is always doing amazing, spectacular things, and its sometimes hard to believe that anyone is doing these things, let alone one guy from Cleveland. So, one of Ian’s latest adventures, after the huge Field Trip Event at the Natural History Museum, but before the (failed) boomerang lessons, was a trip to a secret apple orchard.
This is the story as I know it: Dave and I are in Ian’s room at the Thank You Dinner for all Field Trip participants. Ian is getting down some vital information from us to put inside of another spectacular invention that will amplify our dreams, using crystals and other awesome technologies. Ian’s like “what are you 2 doing on monday??” and Dave and I are like “working. why?” Apparently Mr. Charnas found the Garden of Eden, right here in America! Somewhere, he didn’t know where, (it turns out its New York somewhere) Ian found the location of this secret apple orchard that has apple trees growing from all over the world in it. It’s not public, you certainly can’t go there, UNLESS….you say you’re from the Natural History Museum and you want to take some “research students” to “study and visit the orchard” aka “friends to dance and frolick”. So this is what Ian does and IT WORKS! The guy is letting him bring some “research assistants” to “study”.
Dave and I can’t believe we’re missing this. However, Ian was fortunate enough to bring me the following specimens. I have made a handy dandy chart. Following the chart is my taste test of each apple. ENJOY! Because you’ll probably never meet these apples and I most likely never will again either.
- Let’s start with Italy. I don’t know if the shelf life was not too long, but this yellowish variety was sweet but mushy. Similar to a Gala apple almost.
- The small dudes from CUTESVILLE I think he said were American. They are DELICIOUS! They are sweet and tangy, not bitter like a crab apple. They reminded me of miniature macintosh apples, one of my favorite kinds.
- The tiny guy in the middle was the only one of its kind I received. It tasted kind of like a Pink Lady, though not as sweet. A lovely apple, and cute. Obviously.
- Kazakhstan delivered me the best apple, by far. These little gems are SWEET and CRISP and they taste like candy. SO SO SO GOOD!
- The green knobbly dude was a bit tart, like a granny apple. But sweet like a Pink lady too. Not too mushy, not too crisp. Nice. Real nice.
- I have yet to try Deutschland or Red Delicious looking dude.
In conclusion, Kazakhstan wins. Italy loses.
