FreshDirect Has Il Laboratorio del Gelato's Basil Ice Cream: Eat It

So the Lower East Side is about a half hour to forty-five minutes

from our apartment in Midtown West.

Ludlow is simply far.

But FreshDirect has saved us some effort

by providing Il Laboratorio del Gelato to come straight to our door practically.

Since a container of it costs about $10,

and our freezer was meant for New Yorkers who don't shop at Costco,

we got one of these babies.

And it was delicious on its own.

Jon was fantasizing about eating it with mozzarella and tomatoes,

extra virgin olive oil and aged basalmic.

This is what his fantasy looks like in real life.

Unfortunately we eat all our dinners around ten at night

since he gets home so late,

so the lighting doesn't make it look as awesome as it tasted.

Believe me though,

basil ice cream is a revelation to accompany what we think as normally savory foods.

Eat it.

Eat it now!

Rana's Bacalao Ravioli

Jon picked this ravioli up

when Martha Stewart was dining at Rana

the other night.

It was good,

but we both wished we had eaten it with red sauce instead.

I'd get it again.

It's a good fish ravioli.

Crouching Eggs, Hidden Lamb Bacon

After doing a yoga class, some elliptical, some rowing, and then a zumba class,

so two and a half hours later,

Jon 

(who only did forty minutes of ellipticalling)

made us each an egg and a whole lotta lamb bacon.

Of course, we were still starving after that and ate a whole bunch of 

more stuff

from our fridge.

The lamb bacon was delicious.

Like bacon, but with a lamb taste.

Not gamey.

If your butcher has it, get some!

Dino Dinner and Di(n)o-ramas

Chicken-nugget dinosaurs are the most fun food to eat.

They are also delicious.

When faced with the dilemma of something to eat,

these are our go-to meat from D'ag.

The other night,

I picked some of these bad boys up and . . . 

. . . made some dioramas!

These dinos are hanging out by a tree.

Jon says that the T-rex is watching the other dinosaurs

fatten up on the tree

before eating them.

Little does does the T-rex know,

though, he'll be eaten!

Ha!

This is a dead brontosaurus

that would normally become a fossil,

but didn't,

because I ate it.

Ha!

This was a quick meal:

dinosaurs - ten minutes or so in the toaster oven

(yes, Dani, the toaster oven!)

broccoli - twenty minutes or so in the toaster oven

mushroom cous cous - five minutes

Done!

Nathan Myhrvold's Lecture on the Making of Modernist Cuisine

Over a year ago at Astor Center we saw Nathan Myhrvold speak about the making of Modernist Cuisine. Jon got us a signed book plate that they especially made for the books for our edition. It's funny how he just glows in that light.

Nathan's speech was mostly things that he thought was cool about the making of the book. There was wine and water and bread and cheese. It was a nice event. Not stuck up at all. And intimate. (The space was about half the space of the "cocktail" hour space at Blue Hill for private dining. It's reminiscent of that space anyway.)

One of the interesting things was that the ink of all the tomes are something like six pounds or something nuts. The ink additional adds girth to the books too. I never gave much thought to ink before on books I've worked on.

Also, it was here that we first were introduced to Nathan's "pea-ness" joke. Say that outloud: pea-ness. He's mentioned it at every event/talk since then. Oh, Nathan.

Luckily, we recently were able to taste the pea-ness he's talking about. It was really quite delicious. After hearing so much about it, it was exciting to finally taste it. I wish we had a bit more to taste though.

Thanksgiving 2012: I Love Thanksgiving Ham, I Do, I Do, Said Sam I Am

Thanksgiving ham

is the other white meat

on our table of plenty.

I used to not be a huge ham fan.

I think it was because it tasted too salty or something.

But the pineapples help a lot.

My cousin Steven doesn't usually eat turkey,

but he usually eats the ham.

(This year he tried the magnificent turkey.)

I'm watching Death Becomes Her as I write this.

Meryl Streep just came back alive!

What an awesome movie.

I love it.

Just like ham.

Thanksgiving 2012: Celebrating Movember with Mustache Sugar Cookies

When I went home for my mom's birthday

a couple weeks ago, 

I noticed my brother grew a mustache.

Since he's half Italian, he was able to grow a mustache at least,

but since he is half Chinese, it was a little thinner in some places.

It was also dark brown with some blond highlights.

I thought he wanted to look like my dad

for some reason.

My dad is famous for his glasses and mustache.

He has a dark blond mustache with gray highlights,

but that's the only similarity between their mustaches (being bicolored).

My brother mumbled something about Movember.

He didn't really explain it though.

So that weekend, I saw the Office episode that explained it!

That episode was funny.

If you're not going to watch the episode, here it is from the official site:

During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in the US and around the world. With their Mo's, these men raise vital awareness and funds for men's health issues, specifically prostate and testicular cancer initiatives.

I got mustache cookie cutters and stamps

for my birthday,

so I thought since our cheese appetizer failed,

it would be very timely to have Movember cookies

for Thanksgiving.

We'd used almost all our butter for our

supersilky smooth mashed potatoes,

so I had to make due with the stick we had left.

I only made these two trays,

but after the meal we just ate, 

it was definitely enough.

I used a quick recipe I found online since it automatically did the

proportions for me.

No one thought the recipe was that awesome

(the people's comments are a bit exaggerated on the website),

including me.

But it worked in a butter pinch. 

Mustache party!

My popo, ayee, and mom,

showing off their mustaches.

Such deliciously hairy women.

Oh, and it's hereditary.

Wee even sported a goatee with the freehand 'stache we made.

Thanksgiving 2012: The Juicy Turkey

My aunt Florence (Ayee) successfully replicated

her giant juicy turkey for Thanksgiving this year.

I'll reveal how big the turkey was at the end of this post,

but try to guess.

There were twelve of us:

four Hues and Chris

five Solazzos and Jon

and PoPo.

My cousin Samantha is giving us some perspective

by showing how big the turkey is compared to her mouth.

Good job, Sam!

I'm guessing you think that it looks a little burnt.

That just adds flavor, baby.

My aunt uses Alton Brown's turkey recipe.

She's Alton's #1 fan.

We used some of the extra leftover vegetable stock that she had 

made for the brine

for a Parmesan soup for a light dinner on Friday.

Turkey leg.

None of us ate it or took it home.

We left it for PoPo

to eventually make a delicious Chinese soup out of it.

Warm, juicy turkey.

You have no idea how good this is.

It's like what every turkey should taste like.

Sweet and intensely turkeyish and a little salty.

What's interesting is that last year my aunt

was a little worried about the kitchen not smelling

like delicious turkey.

You know why?

Because all the juices stayed inside the turkey

for flavor.

Damn good flavor too.

(Auntie Anne's burns a vanilla candle 

to whet your appetite.)

Cutting up the breast,

cutting up the breast,

cutting up the breast.

Mmm, mmm good.

Mmm, mmm good.

That reminds me of the 

Giblets (c) 2012 Christina and Lisa Solazzo 

song and dance

we made up.

Man, Thanksgiving was fun!

26.82 pounds!

It was a giant bird that didn't die in vain for this holiday.

Thank you for your life, Mr. Turkey.

Thanks for the great turkey, Ayee!

The Incredible, Edible Kale

Blanche up some kale,

and I'm good to go.

Unfortunately,

I'm a very slow cook,

so the whole process of going through

an order of FreshDirect kale

takes a few hours.

First I clean the leaves from the stems.

Then I roll up the leaves as best as I can

to cut them into strips.

Then I try to wash as much as I can 

without it falling all over the sink

and floor.

I blanche the strips in salted water,

and fish it out to dump in ice water.

Finally, I balled it up from the ice water bath

to squeeze out the excess water.

I had a lot of kale.

It was the most delicious snack:

soft, chewy, green, and sweet.

It's better than spinach--its limpy, not as cool sister.

Boiled Lobster a Few Ways

On Good Friday,

you're not supposed to eat meat.

And you're probably not supposed to eat succulent lobsters,

but people have to eat, right?

So Jon picked up two boiled lobsters

from his fish place.

(He has a meat place and a vegetable and fruit place too.

It's freakin' awesome to work by Chelsea Market it seems.)

He shelled the lobsters

and cooked some parts of them in bouillabaisse

that he got from Mitsuwa.

We had that with some linguine.

Oh, so good!

While we waited for the bouillabaisse,

I put the tail pieces from my lobster into a salad.

It was sweet and salty--so perfect.

Jon dipped his tail pieces into butter

and ate it sans lettuce.

To each their own.

Egg-in-a-Hole

For a snappy snack try an egg-in-a-hole.

Butter up a piece of aluminum foil.
Cut out the bread hole with a cookie cutter.
Drop in one egg.
Use the toaster setting on your toaster oven
to obtain desired doneness.
Add truffle salt or bacon salt or sea salt
and some fresh cracked pepper.

What to do with that holed-out white part?
Put some cheese on it.
Melt it a little in the toaster oven.

Pair it all with some apples or other crispy fruit or vegetables.

Voilà!

Dinner Party Leftovers

parmesean

gravy

lasagna

spinach ricotta

lasagna

spinach ricotta

lasagna

(recycled leftover components
from the vegetarian birthday party dinner)

A Vegetarian Birthday Party Dinner

We celebrated Carmina's birthday with a dinner

on St. Patrick's Day.

She's vegetarian,

so no corn beef and cabbage today.

What we had was so much better!

Jon made a beet vinaigrette for a small salad to start. 

I had no idea that the magenta sauce in the cup was the vinaigrette 

at the time that I took this photo.

Anyway, right before serving it, he dressed the salads for us.

It was really delicious.

For a small appetizer, 

he used up some leftover fancy spaghetti we had 

to serve with a vegetarian interpreted carbonara sauce: 

very buttery and Parmesan-y.

He topped it off with some truffle caviar.

We all had seconds.

For the main course,

we had cannelloni filled with spinach and ricotta 

(that first photo above) 

topped with saffron-and-paprika-infused oil.

Jon took sheets of fresh lasagna, halved, and cooked them.

While he did that, he baked the spinach and ricotta mixture to warm it up.

Then he assembled it.

This cooking-things-separate method made for a really nice presentation.

And you wouldn't believe how delicious it was!

For dessert we had olive oil cake,

fresh whipped cream,

and freshly pureed blueberries on the side.

The extra mini cakes we gave away as party favors.

I think it was a very good dinner party,

and we each had beer to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

The birthday girl got a bit tipsy

and our stomachs were full

and we had fun.

Success!

TGIF!

This has been quite a week. 

January has passed by all so quickly anyway, don't you think?

We're heading to Copenhagen to eat at NOMA!

(Uggs vs. Sorels? Discuss ballets, Keds, and Cons for travel.)

Maybe Berlin and/or Hamburg?

Definitely Paris for Valentine's Day.

Oh, the Places You'll Go! 

(Though I'll probably never go to Burning Man.)

Tomorrow we celebrate Chinese new year part deux.

But tonight we celebrate Charleen's birthday!

Happy birthday (tomorrow) to you!

A Tale of Two Dinners

A fancy store's window on Fifth Avenue

On Thursday, Lakshmi and Pam came over for dinner. It was the rainiest day of the week, and that they still wanted to come despite the rain, cheered me up. I made the last of our rice (our usual sushi rice supplemented with some sweet rice to make at least two cups of rice for four people), ground lamb with apples (the Macoun apples provided a nice contrast to the slightly gamey lamb and the cracked black pepper ties it all together; the head chef was a bit miffed by the white pieces of sliced garlic that were added as basically an afterthought, since they didn't brown, but whatever), and spinach (with oyster sauce; the spinach turned out kind of watery, but at least it wasn't burnt like every other spinach I've made in the last few months), and apple crumbles for dessert. (I'm not sure why Lakshmi calls it a streusel in her blog, but it's all good. Lakshmi peeled and cut the apples for this dish and the lamb because I was doing a crappy job of it.) Lakshmi brought her mom's homemade coconut chutney and spiny melon chutney. Both chutneys were delicious and went well with the meal. We caught up and watched the Halloween episode of Community together.

The back/unfinished part of our apartment

After the utter failure of not placing in the Halloween contest at work, I thought of another masochistic thing I could do: try to get Laduree macarons for dessert that evening. I walked up there from work, and forty-five minutes later, I realized how dumb it was because the line was really long (though inside the store, which I suppose is great), but after waiting a few minutes, I realized how dumb it was to wait with the tourists. Cause after a few minutes, I realized that they had to be all tourists since they all looked so confused.

(Laduree, you need to get your shit together. You need to have flavors posted like an ice-cream shop and prepackaged assortments of macarons and all. You need someone taking orders from people who know what they want and not just want to gawk at the variety of flavors. I have money. I want macarons. I want efficient service.)

I took the M66 across town and walked to D'Agostino to get my mozzarella ball. (If I'm serving salad, I feel like there should be mozzarella as an option too.) Hetal came soon after I got in and watch in horror as I cut up the apples for another apple crumble. (We have a chef's knife to cut up things. I like seeing my fingertips when I cut things so I know where they are. Apparently, this is a bad way to cut things. But I've yet to cut myself, so I don't see any reason for alarm.) Then Dani came with Crumbs cupcakes--one with a vampire guy on top of it. And Nat came shortly after too. I forget what happened, but I think Hetal was cold, so I went to grab a sweater that I didn't want anymore and told her that she could keep it, and I suggested they all look at my "give-away" clothes bins. I had three bins, and they each took a nice bundle of clothing. One bin is entirely empty now. I'm excited that I had desirable stuff! I feel like when I try giving stuff to my sister or mom they look at me like I'm nuts or try to convince me to keep it. I just haven't got any room though I have relatively lots of room. Jon came home at some point and started cooking the meal while I finished prepping. Aditya came and showed us photos of his engagement party and beautiful fiancee.

Our menu included: olive bread, pumpkin ravioli with brown butter and sage, rye bread with carmelized onions (we made that on Wednesday for an onion soup that we ultimately never made) topped with some Swiss cheese (so like onion soup without the broth), and lettuce with mozzarella and the "good" balsamic vinegar. One should never fill up on lettuce or eat lettuce while the other food is warm anyway, is my motto. For dessert we had apple crumble (this time with MiniWheats in the crumble as well) with amaretto-almond crunch ice cream and split the vampire-baby Halloween cupcake. I had the lemon cupcake for breakfast the next day. So nice and lemony!

Day 42

It was so sunny this morning, but now it's kind of cloudy and dark and depressing. It's only 6 p.m. I have to finish proofreading a kind of scary middle-grade book about a girl who turns her friends (and mother) into dolls. The designer didn't use the character styles, so none of the italics picked up. I had a lot to underline and mark to ital.

This weekend's weather was perfect. I tried absorbing in as much of it as possible. My parents went down the shore and to the beach. In an e-mail from the beach:

Water is fine! Lots of schools of baby fish!

I am so jealous.

Around noon on Saturday, Jon and I went to the New York Mutual Trading Japanese Food & Restaurant Show 2011. We passed by the line to get into the Gilt Warehouse sale. (It stretched to the end of the block.) There were tons of women and some men. Anyway, at the NYMT show, I felt a little too overwhelmed after I nearly trip over a kid and knocked over a sign, so I went towards Fifth Avenue to touch things and maybe buy something.

I stopped in Paper Presentation and spent a long time looking at paper products, stamps, pens, inks, flocking powder (!), glitters, ribbons, etc.

Then I stopped in at Zara. All the dresses I saw that were really nice pattern-wise, sucked material-wise. There's no way I'm going to pay for anything that's made out of viscose or polyester or nylon or crap like that. There were also a cute pair of shoes: pointy black in the front; faux-snakeskin party in in the back and had a nude-color ankle strap, but I couldn't imagine them being comfortable for more than the two minutes I had them on to see how cute they actually were on my feet. (Oddly the price in the store was more like $30. Maybe online shopping isn't all that great?)

Last stop was at J.Crew. I have a story about that for another day, which ends in buying booties and wedges. I love happy endings.

Jon and I met up with Dani and Hetal at MARKT for an mid-afternoon brunch. Brunch was tasty though kind of expensive for what it was, but I guess that's just how brunch always is. Then we went back to J.Crew for Dani to get a pair of wedges too cause they're just that cute. Hetal very bravely resisted any urge to buy anything.

Then we went to Eataly, which I've never been, to get fig sorbet and some grocery items for dinner. While Jon got some skirt steak, pasta, tomatoes, apples, and red cow cheese, which he turned into a delicious dinner the next day, Dani, Hetal, and I waited on line for gelato and sorbet. I got white peach sorbet, sweet milk gelato, and pistachio gelato. (It looked like the Italian flag since the white peach was kind of pink.) Unfortunately they ran out of the fig. Dani got mixed berry sorbet, and Hetal got the banana with chocolate chips. They were all so tasty. So, so tasty. We ate outside at some tables until the sun set. It was a lot of fun just hanging out without some predetermined activity of seeing something or doing something and reminded me of all the hours we used to spend whiling away the hours together when we were like twelve through eighteen. So many awesome hours without any pressure of doing something with our time. I think that's a really terrible part about growing up. We see our time now as valuable or something. Blah.

On Sunday, I woke up early and prepared to go to brunch (more like breakfast since we were meeting at 10:30) at MARKT again. It's not that MARKT is amazing or anything. It's just convenient, and on Saturday it was new. But, yeah, on Sunday morning it was just convenient. I wasn't in the brunch-talking kind of mood, though it was nice seeing Tina, Lina, and Cristina. It was an "-ina" bruncheon.

I then met up with my sister and aunt at P.J. Clarke's and we hung out in front of the reflecting pool thing at Lincoln Center until their "War Horse" play started. When I got home, I wanted to go back out, but it was nice being alone with Jon in a quiet apartment.

I painted my toes and cleaned my hair out of the drain this weekend too. Glug, glug, glug. Hair balls.

Day 41

roasted tomatoes and garlic, blue crab, and cheddar

"kitefish" with japanese flavors

"surf and turf," sprouts with bacon salt

kiwi uzumaki, scent amandine

jacques torres's ice-cream sandwich