noodsletter #.0034
A mini pizza crawl with my kid; some kale
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Back to normal business operations around here, so a wee recipe-like-thing alllllll the way at the bottom and the rest of the stuff on top.
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Recipe List
I was thinking about the recipes I sometimes put up here—their purpose, their utility—and if ultimately a biweekly-ish newsletter about food is meant to serve as a kind of inspiration for the reader’s biweekly-ish kitchen endeavors, I thought it might be useful to have a link list of all the recipes I’ve written up. This week I’ve put it here, right at the top, but I’ll transfer it over to the first installment of noodsletter so there’s an easily accessible repository and link to it at the top in the intro every week.
Came up with this idea because I made the very first noodsletter recipe—”I Have Ground Pork and I Need to Eat”—the other night (because I had ground pork and I needed to eat!), and I thought it was pretty great.
I Have Ground Pork and I Need to Eat (ground pork stir fry)
Chickpeas (chana masala)
I’m Sick of Tomatoes (pasta with fresh tomato sauce)
Sardines I Ate in Greece With My Good Friend Liz
Onions With Katsuobushi
Spigarello Muchim
Celeriac Slaw
Crispy Shrimp Burger
Kebab burger with dandelion greens and Gruyère
A Salad Dressing
Pork Shanks
Rice Cakes
Leeks
Shungiku muchim
Shimeji and Sprouts
How to Make a Noodle Aoup for Lunch
Covid Chicken Soup
Merlot
Stir-Fried Squid
Bharta sandwich
Fennel salad
Mushroom pasta
Beef Pho
Book Bit
“What are you fellows doing here?” Luke Lampson untied his tobacco bag and squinted in the changing colored lights that flickered outdoors above the bar.
“Leaning, Luke.”
“Just leaning.”
“Watching the people driving by.”
They squatted in the grass by the red wall or stood, shoulders hunched against the planking, staring off at the night sky or up and down the black road. Their carrying sticks lay across their knees, ends fastened to personal belongings bundled like cabbage heads at each man’s side. Or the sticks were propped in a row at the wall, like racked rifles, and at each man’s toe there rested a woven football filled with undershirts, shoelaces and packages of glazed saltines. The red neckerchiefs, freshly tied, were new. Their coveralls were heavily dusted from the land they had crossed and they talked together, rustling newspapers in the darkness, of the last automobile they had seen.
From The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes.
As much as I love some of Hawkes’s writing, have to admit I have no literally no idea what happens in this book/what it’s about, and this is the second time I’ve read it (ha!).
Music Bit
Came across this incredible video the other night of Frank Vignola and Jimmy Rosenberg playing in a dingy hotel room in Manhattan. If you like gypsy jazz, it’s worth watching the whole thing, but if you just want to be quickly and efficiently amazed, the percussionist soloing with a couple brushes and a stack of phone books starting at 17:47 is incredible.
A Gift Knife
For my brother’s birthday this year, I bought him a knife. Sort of proud of this purchase as I’m terrible at buying presents, but he needed a decent knife and I’ve got opinions about what constitutes a good or decent knife. If you recall (or if you don’t), I wrote about my small knife collection a while back, and I basically followed the criteria for a good knife laid out there when buying my brother’s knife. However, I did not think he would appreciate the look of a MAC, since they look a little like the 1980s version of “rad kitchenware,” which I think looks rad, but I’m not sure my brother would agree.
Instead, while poking around on Chef Knives To Go, which is a really excellent knife shop/website, I found this custom number Yahiko knife. Yahiko is basically just a line made specifically for CKTG by Tojiro, so it’s got the same build quality, same steel quality, with just slight cosmetic differences. I think this one looks pretty cool, and trust that the knife will have the same performance as the Tojiro gyutou I’ve owned for a decade.
One of the best parts about CKTG is they offer a knife sharpening/finishing service for all knives. It’s an extra $15, but I think it’s well worth it, regardless of whether you sharpen your own knives or not. My brother does not, so getting him a super sharp edge was semi-important. But even for people like me, who sharpen their own knives somewhat frequently with a basic (okay, sub-basic) level of competency, the finishing service not only means you get a laser sharp knife out of the box, but it also sort of sets the bar on how sharp you can get the dang things. Which is, needless to say, very sharp.
I also picked up four (4) freaking huge, live Dungeness crabs from E-fish. It’s $60 for two, $100 for four, so of course I got four, because sometimes being frugal has nothing to do with being impecunious, and sometimes it trumps being cheap. I want to say the price was a steal (the crabs, which I just steamed and then we manhandled into submission, were so so so good, but all crab is so so so so good), but one of my old SE colleagues (thanks, Maggie, for nothing!) told me that right now you can get cooked Dungeness for $8/lb at the Williamsburg Whole Foods. Now that is a steal, but of course that’s pre-cooked, probably frozen then thawed crab. (It’s still crab though so I bet it’s so so so good!)
Also, they do a 12 oysters for $12 deal on Fridays? Something absurd going on at that Whole Foods.
A Pizza Crawl
We’ve been reading J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Every Night is Pizza Night for a what feels like a long time at this point, but I think because my kid has started reading by herself, she’s gotten into it all over again. The other day she asked if we could go out and get some “data” about pizza, just like the protagonist in the book gets “data” about all these non-pizza foods.
I swear this was her idea; I had absolutely nothing to do with it, besides reading this book to her at night a year or two ago. On our way to pick up our weekly pizza dinner (Friday’s, from Nonno’s in Bay Ridge—really excellent thin-crust grandma slices…just crazy good), she wondered whether we could go to three separate pizzerias and compare them. I said we could of course do that, but suggested that we might want to go somewhere where there’s more than one excellent pizzeria (basically, not our neighborhood). She was into it, so on Sunday we hoofed it over to Williamsburg, only because I’d read Chris Crowley’s “Williamsburg Has the Best Pizza in the World” article fairly recently, and only because the graphic that accompanied it made a very good case for the walkability of hitting up more than one pizza place at a time with a 6-year-old in tow.
We started at Leo, made our way to L’Industrie, and finished up at Fini. I picked L’Industrie because I’ve eaten there several times before and I think it’s incredible, but the other two were basically chosen for proximity. My kid just likes plain cheese or pepperoni, so she just got the plain/margarita option, whereas I switched things up a bit.
The potato slice at Leo isn’t just delicious; its architecture is sort of miraculous. Not really sure how they manage to get such a strong, crisp crust that’s nevertheless paper thin and can hold up the weight of a bunch of nicely acidic and onion-y Yukon Golds, but they do. Otherwise, my main takeaway is that there’s just a ton of excellent pizza slices in the neighborhood, and if I lived in the neighborhood I’d eat at L’Industrie all the freaking time.
“News”
Mike Satinover, aka Ramen_Lord, is opening a ramen restaurant in Chicago. Lucky Chicago, I say!
More crab content: Neanderthals, just like us!
Every installment convinces me that Tammie Teclemariam—feel like she should have an acronym at this point: TT—was created for the UG job.
Hydroelectric dam turbines that let eel swim through unharmed. (Mentioned in the piece in passing is the mystery of eel reproduction—so crazy we don’t know how wild eels reproduce. Also reminded me of this old article on the crazy eel black market.)
I, too, have been enjoying The Last of Us and thinking nearly constantly about eating freaking mushrooms as a result.
Another, better version of that from NY Mag. I honestly think this is the kind of content the internet needs more of! Perfect combo of text and images, light-hearted, fun, topical, forgettable, exclamation points(!), deep questions (the question of where post-apocalyptic societies get salt always bothers me, too).
Think I’ve mentioned this before, but mushroom foraging sounds amazing to me ONLY IF it’s in the West or other non-deer-tick infested areas. Anywhere east of the Rockies and it’s like a recipe for Lyme disease.
Don’t eat the Jack Daniels fungus, though.
(Of course, we were the originators of giant towers of pigs!)
Plant-based meat with factory-grown animal fat? I’m a little unconvinced by the reporter’s tastes here, because let’s face it: there’s bacon and there’s good bacon.
A diabetes drug that depresses appetite is being used for weight loss, nice.
Can’t really bring myself to watch the Party Down reboot.
Soleil Ho stepped down as SF Chron restaurant critic and stepped up to the Op-Ed pages.
Instant noodles are apparently a leading cause of scalding injuries in American children. If you read into some of the related/cited studies, it’s a combination of microwaveable cup design and lack of adult supervision that’s behind the trend. Instant noodle liquid (that is, starchy hot water) doesn’t hurt kids more than other kinds of liquid, but the burn patterns are distinct, which is kind of fascinating.
Funny story about “boneless wings”: one of the people interviewed in it ‘hosts a cooking show on local television called “Spatchcock Funk.”’
The long history of the gas stove debate.
If you’re interested in making charcuterie at home, the person who goes by Gastrochemist on Instagram has a guide to doing it without using a dedicated dry-curing chamber. I haven’t dry-cured anything in a year, but I was super into salumi/charcuterie-making a decade ago. Very rewarding hobby!
You can be like this barber in the Bronx who makes incredible closet salumi!
A Northern Thai steamtable in the back of a Latin market in Astoria? Has to be good!
Weird NYT food coverage corner:
This piece about Colombian food.
This mystifying Ligaya Mishan piece on colatura.
This other mystifying piece on the hostility in dining out. (A little unfair to use two of Mishan’s pieces, but they’re great examples of how the “conversation about food” is different when it comes from different intra-NYT food outlets; Mishan just happens to straddle the NYT Mag/T Mag divide.)
Suppose I could have chosen this deeply weird essential Parisian dishes list to illustrate how T Mag is… just weird. Seems like “essential” is meaningless if you don’t have croissants and baguettes, but what do I know!
The piece on colatura is especially weird, since it has the added advantage of underlining just how deranged people can be about Italian food in an era where “respect for cuisines” is otherwise paramount and Columbusing is rightly looked down upon. Mishan “discovers” a very old, pretty commonplace ingredient a year ago at a restaurant in Milan (“I tasted it for the first time in Milan last summer.”) in a pretty unconventional preparation (colatura + bottarga) and the dish is passed off as some regional specialty of the Amalfi coast. I don’t know anything about Italy, but isn’t that like eating blue crab cream cheese in Ohio? There’s other weird stuff in there, like about how “the rest of the world ignored” the discovery of MSG until 2002—does a single person on the NYT Mag editing staff not remember eating Doritos before George W. became president? Cup Noodles? Chinese takeout? McDonald’s?
Which is not to detract from the deliciousness/worthiness of colatura OR bottarga. No need to combine them, really, unless you’re a fancy restaurant in Milan.
But then there’s something like this interactive feature in the Style section, about a Mexican restaurant in Connecticut, that’s both interesting and shows how crazy the NYT UX can be.
Speaking of NYT UX, this is a story about the war in Ukraine affecting prices in Uganda that, as far as I can tell, only exists on the site as this odd widget?
I have never eaten at Superiority Burger, I don’t know why!
Sort of inexplicable that Stained Page News is the only dedicated cookbook reviewing/previewing outfit in all the food media landscape?
While I largely agree with the sentiments expressed here, this little rant about chocolate is so tediously written that it makes me want to disagree with him.
Have we stopped flipping our eggs? I thought about it…and I have! When I do eat fried eggs, I do the Thai-style fried eggs; haven’t had an over-medium in ages.
Herring fishing in Canarsie. HellGate’s fishing in NYC coverage continues to be the best in the biz (also, the only one in the biz?). I have never eaten shad once since moving to the city (the roe, yes, but not the fish itself). I should change that this spring!
Ukrainian restaurants are the only acceptable version of “dining in the dark,” imo:
At Escobar, a Cuban restaurant in Kyiv, there's still live music every Thursday by candlelight.
Guests can dine from a blackout menu including hummus, liver pâté, nachos, steak tartare and avocado salad.
Does home cooking have to have all sorts of *stuff* imbued into it to make it worthwhile? Not for me at all, this idea.
Wheat genetically edited to remove a cancer-causing chemical.
This essay about long Covid is worth a read, even if you don’t know anyone suffering through it.
Recipe - (Lacinato) Kale and Cumin
This was an attempt at switching things up, in part out of necessity. Usually, when I have zero ideas about what to make and I have hardy greens like kale around, I’ll just stir fry them with garlic and fish sauce, hit them with lime at the end. I’d run out of fish sauce, I had some whole cumin seed on the counter, and I had a cut lemon on the cutting board. Turns out that kale stir fried with garlic and seasoned with salt, pepper, soy sauce, and toasted cumin is pretty great.
1 tablespoon neutral oil
2 teaspoons whole cumin seed
1 bunch of lacinato kale, ribs removed, washed and chopped
Pinch of salt, plus more to taste
Black pepper
1 clove of garlic, smashed and minced
1 teaspoon soy sauce (the Zhongba stuff from Mala Market is great with stir fried greens!)
Half a lemon
Heat the oil in a wok or cast iron pan over medium-high heat. Add cumin seeds and cook until the seeds start spitting.
Add kale, pinch of salt, and a couple grinds of black pepper, and toss and stir to coat in oil. Cook, stirring frequently, until kale becomes a dark glossy green, is charred in spots, and reduces by about 2/3 in volume, about 2 minutes.
Add soy sauce around the hot rim of the wok (or just over the greens in the cast iron pan) and stir to combine. Turn off heat.
Squeeze the half lemon over the greens, toss to combine, and then season with additional salt to taste (they should be salty, like you’ll want to eat them with rice). Serve.