Steak as Medicine

It has happened again. Working 60+ hours a week in a restaurant does a pretty good job of kicking you out of your home kitchen. When you're working FOH, your diet inevitably degrades to pan from the bread baskets, cappuccinos, and half-eaten chicken legs left on the plates of small stomached Financial District lady guests or fussy children. Delicious. Since starting at a new, downtown French bistro I've come home full of cheap carbs and caffeine and so dead tired that opening the refrigerator seems a painful task. And pointless, too, since little time is left for grocery shopping. I'm behind on my work shifts at the Co-op again, but I think I've lost 7 pounds.

Sometimes when you're a waitress you make a fat chunk of tip money that you can spend on semi-fancy to fancy dinners on the days you don't have to hustle the dining room. Especially in a city like New York and double especially if you're as charming and attractive a waitress as I am. Sometimes. Other times, like the past three months, you work 6 hours and walk out of your restaurant with $10 in your pocket. I haven't had a less lucrative job since I was 14 and wasn't paying $950 a month for rent.

Things get worse when your fellow staff members make you so sick to your stomach that you can hardly finish the 1 free dessert your restaurant has ever given you. Now, ask anyone I know: I'm as nice as nice gets. But when the person in "charge" of you, who gets paid more than you do, who's 2 years younger than you are and not college educated, and who spells "Quiche", "Keesh" and "Asparagus", "Espairigus" you've gotta be allowed to get a little in your face, no? Things are bad.

How do you solve these waitress woes? 48 oz Medium Rare Rib Eye for You & Your Honey. Bam. Sure - it wasn't really in my budget, but it was New Year's Eve and all and it had been since Italy that Jeff and I had shared a sexy meal. We had walked by Convivium Osteria on 5th and St. Mark's about 57 times and had made loads of promises about one day going in an ordering the restaurant's semi-famed steak and nothing else. We've been talking a lot recently about how other couples manage to go into a restaurant, order an entree a piece, and leave in an hour with money left in their pocket. Jeff and I take a different approach - get there at 6pm, have a few beers, cocktails, split some appetizers, 2 entrees, a bottle of wine in between, neither of us pass on dessert, I usually go for a Sauternes or the like, he's been deep into limoncello and of course espresso for him and American coffee for me. We leave at 11:30 or so, go home (in a $25 taxi, because getting on the Subway after a good meal ruins everything), get into bed, and spend a mandatory 1/2 hour decompressing and, because we are shaken with the guilt of having spent all the money we made in two weeks AND the money our moms gave us to help out with our gas bills, consoling each other.

But this time we had a plan:

On New Year's Eve, I was working at the restaurant from 7am-4:30 then hostessing at a Russian stranger's cocktail party in Chelsea from 9pm-2am. We were going to get to the restaurant at 5pm, order the steak and two glasses of champagne, eat, leave. We sat down, took a look at the menu, and agree promptly that we should go for the $26 seafood platter for two. Everything sounded so good!

Jeff and I had had a pretty knockout seafood platter at Gambero Rosso in Cinque Tere for my birthday in October and had concluded that anchovies were new on the list of things to love. We got anchovies this time, too, two ways! And juicy/sweet crabcakes, and red peppers stuffed with lobster and garlicky, for once NOT over cooked grilled prawns.

Two glasses of champagne, bah. After that we ordered a bottle of Barbera D'Alba (another newbie on the favorites list) and awaited our rib-eye with dripping fangs and forks in our hands...

HOLY MOLY this baby was massive! Easily bigger than my head. Our server started cutting into it and he thought (and we agreed) that it was still a little too red (believe me, I like my meat bloody as hell, but Jeff, bless his heart, has alerted me to the truth that cooking steak medium rare gives the fat more time to render and seep into the meat, resulting in way more intense flavor). But before the server put the baby back on the burner we had him slice of the end pieces that would have ended up on a one-way train to Mediumwellsville.

The steak was one of the best I've ever had. It was salt-pepper-garlic rubbed, basted in butter, and fragrant with rosemary. The cow that became our meal was grass-fed, so her meat had a beautiful, almost purple-ish color and a deep, woody, sweet-ish taste. Every bite tasted different and every bite tasted good. We got through the whole thing, gnawed on the bones, and still had room for dessert.

That night, between me, Jeff, and Rib-eye, juicy, bright-red, tasty love was in the air, and ready for a New Year of delicious eating.

We'll Start With Lunch

Jeff, who had just finished his very first shopping session as a new member at the Park Slope Food Co-op (congratulations, Jeff!), walked into my smoky kitchen, lifted the top off my resting sauté pan, and asked "What are you doing with these little cabbages?"

"You mean my Brussels sprouts?" I shouted from the other room.

When I came back into the kitchen, Jeff was staring at his shoes. "Connie?" His head was still down. "Can I tell you something?" He stared at my shoes. "I always thought Brussels sprouts were those little clearish white things in Pad Thai". His voice was smaller than it had ever been.

But this is not his fault! Brussels sprouts, like anchovies and prunes and countless other misunderstood foodstuffs, have fallen tragically victim to an unshakable bad reputation started by the unknowing and whining children of helpless 50's housewives who didn't know any better than to boil the sprouts in water until they were limp and brown and mushy and stinky and then drench them with salt, put them on a plate with ground beef and ketchup and call it dinner.

Now, the cruciferous vegetable only show up on the dinner table when the whole extended family gets together for Thanksgiving and your middle-aged, polyester-wearing uncle Stan throws a tizzy-fit if the Brussels sprout casserole baked with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, like Momma used to make, is no where to be found. Yuck.

It's true that when cooked too long, the sulfur compounds in the Brussels sprouts are released and leave your kitchen smelling quite unpleasant.

What a shame. When cooked correctly, Brussels sprouts have an incredible nutty flavor and a satisfying initial crunch that makes way for an almost creamy, tender inside that make them one of my absolute favorite winter vegetables.

I enjoyed them so much for dinner last night that I made them exactly the same way for lunch today!

Here's how to make Caramelized Brussels Sprouts with Shallots and Apple


Ingredients (2 servings):

2 double handfuls of fresh and local Brussels sprouts, stems removed, cut in half
1 Shallot
1/2 Apple, peeled and cubed
2 Tbsp Pork Lard*
1 Tbsp Butter

Salt
Pepper


1. Prepare an ice bath for your Brussels sprouts and set aside. Bring a heavy stock pot of water to a rolling boil. Once boiling, blanch the Brussels sprouts for 1-2 minutes, or until very bright green. Transfer to ice bath and strain.

2. In a large saute pan, melt the lard and butter on medium heat. Add the shallot and apple & sautee until both are soft and caramel colored (about 10 minutes). Turn heat up to high for about 45 seconds to allow shallots to get a little crispy and the apples to get brown on the edges.

3. Turn heat off and transfer apples and shallots from the pan to a plate or bowl. Leave the lard and butter in the pan. Return pan the high heat and place the Brussels sprouts flat side down in the pan. Using tongs to check, sear until they are caramel colored and even a little charred. Flip them over and do the same for the rounded side.

4. Turn off heat and return apples & shallots to the pan. Toss together. Salt & pepper to taste. Serve immediately. Allow all blindly accepted preconceptions to melt away.



*A note about Pork Lard: It's really a shame that the health food industry and agro-moguls like Monstanto and ConAngra did such a stellar job of scaring Americans into thinking that cancer and diabetes causing partially hydrogenated oils, like soy bean oil and margarine, were "better for you" than real, non-factory made foods (Plenty more on this later).

Pork Lard only sounds scary. In real life, Prometheus lost his freaking LIVER so that humans could begin cooking with pork lard. It's terrific! Its high burning point (about 390 degrees) and sweet, meaty flavor make it ideal for sauteeing. And for those of you counting about calories, 1 tbsp has 120 calories, exactly the same amount as Olive Oil.

I buy my lard already rendered from Flying Pigs Farm at the Prospect Park Farmer's Market on Saturdays.

Back At The (American) Table

I left the country for a long time. At last I have returned, and in full force. In the upcoming weeks I intend to recount some of the more noteworthy meals I've eaten lately and make linear sense of the conclusions I've come to and the new questions I've asked about America's very fatal and multifaceted eating disorder. One step at a time.

Back - For (a few) seconds?

All I do is eat. And think about eating and think about buying groceries and think about trying harder to not eat so much and not to spend so much money on groceries. Sometimes my obsession with eating is healthy and interesting and other times it's the same-old, hum-drum, lifted straight from an Oprah magazine sob-story piece about fat women who spoon White Chocolate Macademia Nut Raspberry Haagen-Dazs straight from the tub when they're feeling sad.

My biggest trouble with food these days seems to be my simultaneous obsession with claiming that I want to be a food writer and my extreme refusal to sit down, focus, and write any coherent thoughts on the matter. Now that I'm down to my very last day of unemployment and am feeling tremendously guilty for not having spent my free-time winning a James Beard award, I figured I'd give it yet again another shot.

I have this new boyfriend who has done everything to distract me from my flimsy efforts to move food away from the center of my existence. The first night we spent together, I, half blurred by booze and half in post-coital disarray, told him about the time I slaughtered a goat. He was impressed, we talked about steaks, we made out a little more, and we went to sleep, unaware of the high-calorie meals that awaited us in the future. Since then, we've been ransacking the folks at Elk Trails at the Union Square Greenmarket for grass-fed bison steaks and marrow bones, getting Niman Ranch pork cheek and belly delivered by the box-full, talking about, dreaming about, planning, cooking, and spending money on meat.

I've had some pretty impressive meals lately and it'd be a shame to go on without sharing them. This week, then, I'll make hard efforts to recount my favorites.

Peter Luger's

Being a studious and thorough diner, I made sure I did my share of research before showing up to my 10:45 pm Saturday reservation at Peter Luger's. I knew before, of course, that it was established in 1887, had been voted New York's best steak house for 24 years running, and took only Peter Luger's Official Credit Cards, cash, and gift certificate. I knew also not to ask for a menu, to order the porterhouse with the potato and spinach sides, and that brining in your own wine was strictly prohibited. I also knew that thousands of past diners consider the Peter Luger porterhouse to be one of the best steaks in the entire world.

What I didn't know was:

THEY WERE WRONG.

I'm going to make this short and sweet, since I've been prolonging posting this for decades now. It's a real good thing that my company was so good because the steak just wasn't. Porterhouse is pretty tough to begin with because it has so many different density/textures of meat on the same cut. Unless someone is being very careful to hold the tenderloin off the grill while the strip keeps cooking, I find the tenderloin gets the hell cooked out of it before the strip loin gets cooked enough for the fat to render. Our steak was all sorts of chewy, well-done in some places and too bloody in others, and kinda bland. That's that.

Moving on, people fucking rave about these side dishes. Here's what they taste like:

Hospital food.

The spinach was overcooked, mushy and tasted acidic, which in spinach world means rotten. The potatoes were underseasoned, diner home fries at best. And their famous sauce brought high-fructose corn syrup and ketchup to mind.

I was happy to hear that my date and I were on the same page re: tastiness. We agreed that a good ol' fashion ice cream sundae would at least leave a good taste in our mouths before we took off. Alas, our waiter was pretty angry we were keeping him at work, and his tossing our sundae onto our table with a snarl and growl (what Peter Luger's calls "character) made the ice cream less sweet and more tummy-ache inducing.

Oh well.

Cooking with Vermin

Hi Friends,

Being a good, progressive and earth-minded eater (and being stuck in this hell-hole on a sunny morning) requires actively questioning the categorization of the animal kingdom into animals to be eaten (chickens, cows, pigs etc), animals to put rhinestone collars on (dogs, cats, ferrets), and animals to reference when making crude and insensitive jokes about the diets of Appalachian Mountain People (woodchucks, beavers, kangaroo rats, squirrels) etc, etc.

This week, the folks at Gourmet gave a nod to Americana and embraced, kitsch-ily, the small game-o-centric recipes that they once loved:

http://www.gourmet.com/recipes/menus/2008/01/varmints

But, what's with this? They admit to not re-testing the recipes before presenting them in this article? I know what a beaver looks like, dudes...But what does "Roast Beaver Michigan" looks like! Shame on them.

My favorite is the creamed woodchuck. This time of year, I like to substitute the roasted yams for parsnips- to add an unexpected layer of bite that contrasts the sweetness of the cream and the stank of the 'chuck.
Gourmet reminds us: be careful to remove the kernels under the forelegs and in the small of the back. What Gourmet doesn't tell you is that those kernels under the forelegs are scent glands that if cooked with the rest of the animal will leave the whole thing tasting like mayo, egg-yolk, and lobster-gut soup leftover from a hot Phoenix picnic.

But if you're really wondering what to do with the raccoon carcasses falling from your trees into your kiddie pool (Kyra- this might only apply to you) then Ruth Reichel and her staff of tongue-in-cheek phonies can't help you much. Go to the professionals:

http://www.wildliferecipes.net/Game_recipes/Small_game_recipes/Woodchuck_recipes/index.asp

http://www.backwoodsbound.com/zracoon.html


The woodchuck patties in tomato sauce is a year-round favorite. Can't find decent tomatoes in March? You don't need to! The "tomato" flavor of the recipe comes from catsup and Worcestershire, American kitchen staples that transcend seasons.

Really, though...so my Trio of Rabbit (Loin, Rack and Braised Leg) with Baby Vegetables,
Roasted Garlic, Natural Jus at La Folie (dry and bland, last time I had it) makes it onto a $90 Passot tasting menu but men won't make-out with me at bars when I admit to having once eaten squirrel that I killed and roasted myself! Come on Keller, Boulud! If ya'll are gonna buy into this whole seasonal and local thing: we're in America- where's the woodchuck?

Oh, and FYI re: SnAKS

The restaurant at Saks Fifth Ave. is the like a new, 20th century version of HELL!