Leek Soup-Purée

Leeks are great. Let me explain why. First - the taste; it's sweet, with light onion aroma and gentle spice. It adds dimension and depth to dishes without being overpowering. Second - the color; it's a mix of vibrant greens, yellows and whites that becomes even more verdant when heated. Finally, the onion's texture is truly wonderful. It can be crunchy, silky, or disappear all together blending with the main dish.

Leeks are fantastic in soups, in pies or sauteed to accompany fish or meats. Another plus is that leeks are available pretty much all year round. Early autumn being the best time to get them. I came across a fresh bunch of young leeks in my local vegetable shop just recently. These were grown in Guatemala and were much thinner than your usual leeks. Actually they looked more like thick scallions. Whether they were just young or a different type, they had gentler flesh and a wonderful subtle sweet flavor with with just the right amount of bite.

The verdict - a season appropriate soup-purée. Extremely easy to make and tasty as hell. Here's the recipe as interpreted by Julia:

What you need:
1. A nice bunch of leeks, about a pound. If of a regular thick kind, you'll need 3-4 stalks. If a younger thinner kind you'll be OK with 8. Of course depending on your taste preference, you can make it more or less "oniony". In either case pick firm, compact stalks with bright white roots and green un-wilted ends.
2. A cup of cubed carrot (half of a large carrot)
3. Two large potatoes
4. 3 Tbs of olive oil
5. 4-5 cups of water ( enough to cover the potatoes in a pot)
6. Coarse Kosher salt, crushed black pepper, whole white and black peppercorns, mustard seed, coriander seed and crushed bay leaf to taste.

Preparation:
In a large pot bring water to a boil and add cubed potatoes. Place whole spices in a canvas spice bag and place in the pot.



Clean leeks. If necessary, remove the top dead layer and trim the top edges. Cut the stalks lengthwise and wash thoroughly. Cut the leeks in pieces about 1/2 inch wide. Transfer cut leeks in a bowl, add a pinch of coarse salt and squeeze lightly with your hands to release the juice. Let stand for a minute. Heat about 2 table spoons of olive oil in a large pan and saute the leeks until bright green, about 2 minutes. Add carrots and salt and crushed black pepper to taste and saute until carrots start to soften.





Check the potatoes, they should be almost done. Add leeks and carrots. Return the pot to heat and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and cook for about 5 minutes. Turn off heat and remove the spice bag. Let it cool for 5 minutes. Sieve the stock and reserve.

Carefully puree vegetable mixture in the processor in small batches, adding reserved stock to control thickness. Ideal puree shoudl be not too thick, silky and viscous. Transfer the puree back into the pot and return to heat. Add salt, adjust for spices and bring to a boil while stirring. As soon as it boils turn the heat off.

Plate, drizzle with some olive oil and serve with a slice of crusty rustic bread. For extra kick I like to butter the bread and toast it untill just golden brown.

Ramen NYC

Ramen cauldrons at Totto Ramen

For over three years now, there has been an explosion of ramen joints in New York. Ramen - a Japanese comfort food, is a dish of noodles in a hearty broth that is traditionally served with a variety of toppings such as sliced pork belly, seaweed, sprouts, green onions and flavored with soy or miso.

Up until recently my favorite has been a ramen from Sun-Chan, a divy place on 103 St. and Broadway. Their ramen is a simple, light yet flavorful dish with a generous slice of roast pork. The only drawback is that the broth tends to be salty and pork is a bit dry. Still it is a great dish and goes well with Sun-Cha's other specialty - yakitory (skewers of bacon-wrapped quail egg is excellent). And while on the subject of Sun-Chan it's a great place to get sushi and sake as well. Everything is extremely fresh and surprisingly creative for such an under-the-radar joint. Also a nice, truly Japanese touch, is that when sake is served you get to choose your own cups from an array of mismatched options.

After Sun-Chan came Ippudo. This hipped up ramen emporium on the lower east side, which looks a bit too much like a night club, produces extremely hearty and flavorful version of ramen. But their broth, which is pork-based, is extremely heavy. It's a tasty choice, but frankly I couldn't handle a third visit. To me it's a proof that too much of a good thing is not necessarily good. But that could be just my liver talking.

So that brings us to Totto Ramen, on W 52nd. Here you find a perfect balance between all flavors and ingredients. The broth at Totto is chicken-based which lends a certain lightness to the flavor. The noodles are expertly cooked al dente, and the slices of pork belly with stripes of translucent velvety fat melt in your mouth and are crisped by a torch before landing in your bowl. Additional toppings include soy marinated hard boiled egg, sprouts and green onions.



The menu is pretty bare bone and features only a handful of choices - you could get a plain ramen, a spicy ramen (that's regular ramen + a spoonful of chilly oil) or miso ramen. If you order one dish and one dish only - order the miso ramen. The bowl of creamy broth comes with a fragrant scoop of ground pork and fermented miso paste. The broth is so fantastic is almost addictive. The noodles are wavy and chewy and miso adds a level of earthy complexity to the dish. They sometimes serve the soup with diced white onion instead of the green onion, which makes the already sweet broth a bit too sweet for my taste. The pork belly which in itself is a work of art rounds up all flavors with its smoky perfection.

Miso ramen at Totto Ramen

Another nice thing about Totto Ramen is that it's modeled on authentic Japanese ramen joints (so I heard). You don't go there to spend time. You go there to satisfy your hunger or a craving as the case may be. You go in ( that's actually is not entirely true, as the lines outside usually stretch out the experience by extra 30 min), you eat your noodles and get out. The best place in the house is at the counter where you can watch chefs boil noodles, check the fat content of the broth and torch the pork belly and joke with each other at the expense of dinners they find entertaining.


Chef crisping pork belly with a torch

Sorry for the crappy photo quality (thanks for nothing iPhone)

Stuffed Peppers

Stuffed peppers is one of my favorite dishes and one of the most flavorful and visually striking recipes home cooking can provide. Taken to a near art-form by my wife Julia, who religiously produces a dish consisting of almost identical, perfectly shaped vegetables with expertly seasoned delicate filling, this recipe has many versions and spans a number of cuisines.

So here's a bit of a back story. Stuffed peppers are common for Mediterranean, Southern and Eastern European cuisines. Serbians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Romanians all have them. The dish has even infiltrated parts of Russian cuisine. Of course the taste and method of preparation will vary depending on a region. In some recipes, for instance, sour cream or heavy cream is added to the sauce, while others use only pork or only beef instead of a mixture. One thing remains consistent, however - to make a dish you need bell peppers, a mixture of meat and rice and plenty of carrots, tomatoes and onions. Oh yes, and a huge pot or a casserole dish.

In general, the dish is fairly easy to prepare. The intricacy is in coming up with the right proportion of meat to rice - too much meat and you will have a much denser, less delicate filling. The recipe I am providing here is Julia's, but you would have to come up with your own magical touch, since it is that ephemeral ingredient that makes a dish truly great.

Here's what you will need:
1. 5-7 Medium size bell peppers.
When choosing pepper, pay close attention to its shape and feel. Peppers should feel heavy in your hand. It is an indication of thickness of the flesh and will guarantee the best flavor. Try to go for the perfectly shaped vegetables - not too crooked, too long or too shallow. Red peppers have a wonderful, intense flavor. Green peppers tend to be a bit tougher and add earthy tones to the dish. Yellow peppers bring color and brightness to the dish and have a much milder flavor. So use a mix.
2. 1.5 large carrot
3. 3 medium onions
4. 1 cup of cilantro
5. 4 medium tomatoes, or 5-6 plum tomatoes.
You can also use peeled whole tomatoes out of a can. Canned Neapolitan plum tomatoes will work great, just make sure it has no seasoning added to it.
6. 1.5 lb. of ground beef/pork mixture. 50/50 proportion works fine, but don't go for the leanest beef as it tends to be dry. You can also add veal to the mixture.
7. 1/3 - 1/2 a cup of uncooked white rice.
8. Olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano or dry basil for seasoning.

Preparation:
Peel and roughly chop the onions. Peel and grate the carrots using a rough grater. Peel and chop tomatoes. The best way to peel tomatoes is to submerge them in boiling water for about a minute or until the skin pops. Chop cilantro.

Remove stems from the peppers by cutting the tops off to produce an opening large enough to fill the peppers without cracking them. Core and clean them. Place peppers in a large pot filled with boiling water. There should be enough water in the pot to cover the peppers. Bring it back to boil and cook until slightly soft - about 2-3 minutes. They should be able to maintain their shape and stand up when you take them out. Set peppers on a clean plate, careful not to damage them, let them cool. Make sure there is no water left inside the peppers.

Discard most of the water, reserving about 2 cups for cooking rice. In a medium pan rinse rice and add reserved hot water. Par-cook rice, keeping it very al dente. It's OK if rice is still a little wet, as it will add moisture to the filling.

In the large pot heat olive oil, add onions and sauté until slightly soft (about 2 minutes). Remove half of the onions and set aside. Add carrots to the pot and continue to sauté for another 2 minutes. When carrots soften, add crushed tomatoes. Season with some salt and oregano. Taste the sauce to check for acidity. You can always add a pinch of sugar to offset the tartness. Careful not to over cook it. Once combined remove the mixture from the pot and set aside.

Combine beef and pork in a mixing bowl, mix well. Season to taste with salt, pepper and oregano. Add par-cooked rice in about 60/40 ratio of meat to rice. Add cilantro and reserved sauté onions and mix again. Check for seasoning. Using extra care not to damage the peppers with your hand or a small spoon fill peppers with the mixture. If you have some filling remaining, don't worry - you can make excellent meatballs.

Return the large pot to heat and add some of the sauteed vegetables enough to cover the bottom of the pan. Place peppers side by side, open end up. If you have made any meatballs, now is the time to add them as well. Using a spoon, pour vegetable sauce over the peppers, filling spaces between and placing tomato chunks on top of the openings. Sprinkle with remaining cilantro. Cover and simmer until done - for about 60-90 minutes.

Turn off the heat and let it rest covered to cool.

Bibou, BYOB

Bibou BYOB is an excellent French restaurant in Philadelphia. Unpretentious, small (about 8 tables) and moderately priced (you can bring your wine - unheard of in NYC), the restaurant is tucked away in a working class Italian neighborhood of South Philly.

The food is absolutely delicious and flawlessly executed. The menu is small and favors fresh seasonal combinations and classic flavors. A cream of lettuce soup, laden with chunks of crab meat, (part of the summer $45 prix-fixe menu) is guaranteed to blow you away. And so does the appetizer of seared foie-gras in red wine reduction or an entree of soft shell crab with watermelon salsa. The only weak link was duck confit which should have been passed over for lamb chops that looked exceptional.

You can feel the chef's loving touch, as well as his wife's perhaps, who doubles as a hostess, in everything, as even the wait stuff project unusual warmth and friendliness without being too formal or overbearing.

bibou website


Escargot


Seared foie-gras


Soft shell crab with watermelon salsa

Eataly. In pictures. Trieste

Trieste. A Mediterranean city that had rather a prominent status during the reign of Austro-Hungarian Empire but descended into a sort of quite provincialism since then. We spent there about three hours en route from Bologna to Vrsr in Croatia, and not by choice.

It's a hazy line that separates the West from the East. There's not one thing that let's you know that you have finally crossed it. But there is a kind of osmosis that is happening - little things begin to swarm around you until you finally realize - you're on the other side. For us this realization arrived when we tried to catch a bus that was scheduled to take us to our final destination.

Julia has planned this trip for months rather obsessively. Vrsr is not an easy place to get to by public transport. She's checked bus schedules on-line constantly, called up the company about half-a-dozen times, and even enlisted the help of some local Croatian Italians to make sure the information is correct. So when we got off the train we thought we had just enough time to hit some local restaurants (which we did, and it was excellent). It's getting out of Trieste that presented a problem.

It so happened that the bus we were expecting now runs only like twice a week, according to a "new" schedule. Judging by a couple of other confused travelers, that schedule must have been very, very new. So we could either stick around for a couple of days or take another bus that would take us half way. We said "half way it is" and went to take a nap under a tree in a park.



But our lunch was magical. Hot summer day, narrow winding streets, Fresh Mediterranean seafood, cold beer. What could be better?


Octopus salad and fried calamary at El Fornel.

Eataly. In pictures. Bologna

So everybody talks about Italy's food culture. But coming from New York, a place where you can get breakfast at 3 am or 3pm, we tend to forget that the rest of the world does not operate on our insane schedule. It turns out that Italians, as much as they like good food, also like to consume it in a rather orderly fashion and, it seems, they're not particularly good at over-extending themselves by providing 24/7 nourishment to the fellow human beings. That is to say you can forget about getting your breakfast in a restaurant past, let's say, 11 am. Yes, New York spoils you - you eat when you're hungry, not when you're supposed to. And that royally screws you over in Italy. What am i to do if I've missed lunch (catch it between 12 and 2, or go hungry untill 7)?

Enter Aperol-hour, if you're lucky to be in Bologna. This ingenious concept in a true italian fashion is about good food, good drink and good life in general. You can enter any restaurnat, cafe, deli, or pizzeria and order Aperol - a grapefruit/citrus flavored aperitif, served on ice with prosecco and a splash of seltzer - your drink arrives accompanied by an array of small plates, tapas style. What's on those plates depends how generous the cafe is. It could be various crostini, bruscheta, sardines, or simply olives, and even potato chips. One afternoon, just walking through a street hungry, I've sampled three different places, ranging from a hip-looking lounge (Aperol: 3 Euro. Olives, caper berries, sun-dried tomatoes: Priceless) to a mid-range snack bar (Aperol: 2 Euro. Potato chips and crostini) and a hole-in-a-wall filled with university students (drinking beer!) serving 1 Euro Aperol with bite size tomato bread.







Horse-meat bresaola, Parmigiano and arugula salad.

Gorilla?

Speaking of graffiti - art mocking commerce, commerce mocking art.