I have tried one final time and now must admit defeat - I do not like tinned salmon. I like tinned tuna - love is probably more accurate - and I subsist on tinned sardines. But tinned salmon is gross. There is an unnatural slime to it, and there are lots of little cartilage bits that make me think of eye sockets and it doesn’t matter how much you dress it up, it still tastes like something you would get in an airport. I’ve tried salmon cakes, and fakey nicoise, and all manner of mayo- and olive oil-based salads. No good. Unfortunately I recently purchased a selection of cans from Trader Joes, to do a tinned salmon taste-off. I only made it through the first (wild Alaskan) and still have unused cans of wild Red and Pink. If you want them just leave me a comment to that effect and I’ll bring them over.

Oy. I can’t really post because the Internet is for all intents and purposes inaccessible from Old Stove HQ right now, and I don’t want to distinguish myself in the new job as She Who Blogs During Work Hours, but there are a few things I’d like to say:

1) I finally understand ramen, thanks to Ippudo, who have a ridiculously porky broth that I could eat several times a week. Ippudo’s owner/chef/ramen engineer is the ramen purveyor selected to sell ramen in Japan’s Shinyokohama Raumen Museum. He is a master and his secret recipe helps me understand the obsessive nature behind hardcore ramen fans. Additionally, the restaurant is a Japanese interpretation of a Rock ‘n’ Roll log cabin with exuberantly deferential service to boot, so it is a feast for all senses. Pork Ramen Original Akamaru Shin. Eat it.

2) A bunch of dandelion greens, blanched for 5 minutes in very salty water and dressed with olive oil in which you’ve softened some sliced garlic, makes a very good lunch with a hard boiled egg sliced on top.

3) Tampopo - which is the title of what I think is probably the best food movie ever - means dandelion in Japanese. One of my most favorite memories of food and movies is my best friend’s older brother showing us that movie and then disappearing halfway through, only to return with bowls of homemade ramen towards the end so we could eat along with the actors.

The important thing when pickling squid is to let the flavors mature over a couple of days. When I first made the salad I had for lunch today, it was pretty bland, but over the past two days the flavor has matured into something sharp and tasty. The texture of the squid is firm and not at all chewy, and is complimented by the sweet, soft carrots and beans.

If you are buying your squid frozen or at Whole Foods, it is probably already cleaned, and you are missing out on some good cleaning fun - cutting off the head, picking out the beak, squeezing little fish and sea gunk out of the body, peeling off the membrane - but if you are squeamish and are used to squid that has been breaded and fried, it might be the better option.

1. Bring a cup of vinegar - I used white wine, you could also use red or rice - and a quart of water to a boil. Add 2 tablespoons of salt, hot pepper flakes to taste, a fresh chile if you like it spicy, a few cloves of sliced garlicand one red onion sliced very thin, and boil for ten minutes.
2. Add two large carrots sliced into coins and simmer for 5 minutes. 
3. Clean a pound of squid and cut it into rings while the brine and carrots are cooking. Add the squid to the simmering brine and cook for a minute or so, just until the squid is opaque.
4. Add one can of rinsed white beans - I used cannelini - and cook until beans are hot, another two minutes. Spoon the solids into a quart mason jar, and top with brine.  
5. Set in the refrigerator to age for a couple of days, then serve on a bed of Bibb lettuce with some crusty buttered bread.

First, let me say happy birthday to Luke, Lilly and Lucy. My dear friends have a penchant for naming their babies with L-names. Love.

Also. I ate lunch at home today, which I can do because I work around the corner from HQ. Step out of the office and into the kitchen.

I had spicy eggplant salad on bran crisps. I made the salad yesterday as part of a “stock up the larder for lunch” cooking frenzy. Two eggplants. I punctured neither’s skin before baking, and while this facilitates the skin peeling away from the flesh like bark, it is dangerous if you test for doneness by poking the roasting fruit too hard. One exploded with a loud pop like an overblown balloon when prodded. Theresult was quite a start and some splatter burns, as well as a messy oven. The other was fine. I think this danger can be avoided by using common sense and inserting a knife to test for doneness, or prodding less forcefully. Alternately, simply remove a 1 pound fruit from the oven after 45 minutes or so.

Choosing a sweet eggplant to roast is simple if you know the trick about the “sex “of the fruit, although as I understand it, fruit really has no gender. There is in common wisdom (and my experience) a difference between eggplants with a shallow circle at the blossom end or bottom of the fruit (often called “male”), and those with an deeper, oval-shaped groove (”female”). Those with a deep oval have more seeds, and a greater tendency to bitterness. Create your own simile.

I mixed the roasted, peeled, chopped eggplant with olive oil and tom yum soup base (cribbed directly from the restaurant),but the options for mix-ins to roasted eggplants are flexible and broad. Add some cumin and yogurt, or some ras-al-hanout for a Top Chef spin, or some mint leaves and feta for Eggplant ala Greque. Even just some minced garlic, olive oil and salt is a winning flavor.

Regardless of mix-in, however, in photographs, eggplant salad looks like babyfood.

I love sardines because they are an affordable protein and have a great texture and taste. I love fresh sardines grilled or marinated, but I also really love tinned sardines.

One tin served on bran crisps with generous slathers of mustard and limitless cornichon is fast, clean and points-friendly (3 points!). This, or a variation of this (e.g on whole wheat bread with a splash of vinegar) is my standard lunch these days. Although I don’t see getting sick of it (I can eat the same thing for lunch for months on end, as evidenced by the turkey wrap era of May - August 2006), I am interested, in the sake of science and gastronomy, in using canned sardines in other applications.

Today I used sardines in a dish inspired in equal parts by Angelica Kitchen’s Mixed Sprout Salad and by Thai Som Tum salad.

I combined equal parts shredded cabbage and mixed sprouts (alfalfa, snow pea, sunflower, garbanzo, etc.) with cherry tomatoes and sliced jalapenos and a ton - at least a 1/4 cup - of mint leaves (I cut them into fine chiffonade ribbons, but you could chop roughly), and dressed it with equal parts fish sauce and lime juice.

You might adjust the ratio of lime juice to fish sauce in favor of the lime juice, but I like it pretty pungent. You could add sugar (ideally palm sugar, but brown or even refined will do) - maybe a teaspoon of sugar for a half cup of liquid - but I don’t think it really needs it. If you have rice wine vinegar or sesame oil around the house, a splash of either or both makes the dressing more fragrant.

Top with a tin of sardines and toss, and the oily fish gives the vegetables just the right slickness. This is a super healthy, satisfying lunch that would transport to work as tin of fish/tupperware bowl of vegetables/small container of dressing for easy office assemblage.

So dinner at Ko, right? After all of the adrenal sweat that went into getting a reservation, was it worth it?

As capital F “Food”, it was all very good, sometimes great, and three times excellent. As capital D “Dining” it was decent value for money, but the beverage program is weak, the quarters verging on too tight, the allocation of space weird and the seats (unless you are blessed with impeccable posture) straight-up uncomfortable.

The best thing I ate was a spring pea soup with black trumpet mushrooms. The soup was sweet and smooth, not at all starchy as you might think such early peas might be. Also memorable was a dish of raw amaebi, tiny sweet shrimp, simple and creamy and vaguely briney. Pan seared scallops, cooked with a perfect crust that enclosed a buttery interior, sitting on bacon dashi, were also extraordinarily good.

What is remarkable about these being the most successful dishes is twofold: First, Ko has been identified as a working food lab of sorts, a sandbox for the Momofuku chefs, but the dishes that resonate the most with me were not terribly experimental. Second, the cook crush observed that the most successful food served was in the dishes that were the most refined, meaning, those that had been worked over and tweaked into a state of near-perfection. But upon reflection, I realized that two of the three best dishes were quickly developed specials, as according to the chef both the peas and the shrimp had arrived new to them that day. So how much refinement could actually be at play?

The lightly smoked, soft cooked egg (from the cook crush: “hen’s egg - just in case we thought it was a rooster’s egg”) served on soubise onions, topped with paddlefish caviar and garnished with tiny potato chips was refined in the sense of being well executed examples of each technique combined with elegant simplicity, but not anything challenging in terms of preparation or presentation.

Since the dinner I continue to marvel about the deep-fried shortribs, not so much because I want to eat them again, but because I’d like to know how they treat the meat to get it to be so completely different from its usual state. Short ribs are generally striated with fat and need to be cooked slowly in order to be tender (or sliced thinthinthin and grilled). These were dense meaty chunks. I think they must sous vide the ribs so that all of the fat and gelatin disperse through the meat, and then fry the resultant dense chunks. They were delicious and the texture was gorgeous.

One unique dish was the shaved fois gras over lychees, riesling jelly and pine nut brittle. It was very delicious and decadent, and I liked the textural weirdness of the grated fois, but as unique and tasty as it is, I did not like the presentation. A tiny quibble, maybe, and I realize that everyone else who has written about this dish has raved about it so this admission may expose me as a philistine, but the shaggy fois in the swooping dish seemed messy to me, and I had to hold the plate in place in order to get all the elements on my spoon at once. I liked the taste but I didn’t like eating it. 

The desserts were clever - a high-falutin’ play on McDonald’s apple pie ingenously combined with toasted miso paste and sour ice cream, and a “cereal milk” panna cotta with home made cornflakes and chocolate - but I’m not a huge dessert girl, so I can’t really speak about how these compare to other hip Chef dessert acts. I’m happy with a bowl of simple ice cream.

The only real flaw in the evening was the beverage service. Agreeing to share, the cook crush opted for the $80 pairing and I for the $50 pairing, with the idea that we would get to taste more. Aside from the white beer served with the shortribs (mine), none of the pairings in anyway elevated the food presented. The pours were inconsistant and frankly, a little short. Generally the wine in the $80 pairing wasn’t better tasting or paired than the $50 pairing except one course when the pairing for each of us was from the same winemaker and my wine was notably inferior (and maybe not suitable for food). Wine doesn’t seem to be a core competency for the Momofuku gang, and that can be OK, as long as they don’t pretend that it is by offering costly pairings.  

It was a great date. We ate very well and enjoyed sitting and watching the cooks finish presentations and try their hand at service. If in a couple of months someone has a reservation and asks me if I want to join, I’ll say yes. But it isn’t worth breaking a sweat for, and if I go again, I’m sticking with beer.

When I left the Bank it was to 1) go to cooking school and then 2) spend some time working on the line before 3) finding a job that would marry my intellectual disposition with my interest in food, drink and hospitality, all on the way to 4) opening the Old Stove tavern.

I expected to spend about a year working on the line, but as it turns out, I will only spend 6 months, as today I accepted an offer from The Astor Center to direct their growth strategy.

I’m really excited - it will give me the opportunity to shape a very worthwhile startup, will expose me to all manner of ideas and people in food-related industries, and will give me health insurance. Heaven!

I’ll miss the line and there is no doubt I’m leaving before I’ve learned everything about cooking that I need to in order to open the Tavern, but I’ll have to rely on my curiousity to fill in my gaps in knowledge about cooking food. Finding a happy place where I can get paid enough to live for work I might otherwise do for free is something I’m lucky to get to choose. Before the Tavern happens, there are ideas behind the running of an event space that I need to master, and a world of knowledge about wine that I want to get at least a little more familiar with, and this job affords both.

I’m attending an event tonight on France’s grape brandies in the Center’s Study . It will not only be my first time visiting the space as a student, it will also be my first time visiting as an employee. I’m very excited about this new identity of mine!

In pursuit of an answer to the question, “is it possible to eat dinner at Ko whilst watching one’s weight?” and more tactically, to understand how far I need to run this afternoon to have such a meal guilt-free tonight, I have estimated how many Weight Watchers points my meal at Ko will rack up.

I based my estimate on the course-by-course description/photos of a Ko meal on The Wandering Eater, and the handy point estimation tools on the Weight Watchers site. I made educated guesses about size, added .5 points to almost every course based on Chef Chang’s claim that his secret ingredient is pork fat, and compared the apple pie dessert to a McDonald’s pie, as has been done with less scientific objectivity at the heart of the comparison, in other parts of the Ko blog tsunami.

I came up with the following estimates:

• Chicharrón: 3 points
• Homemade English muffin with rendered pork fat: 3 points
• Sashimi with buttermilk: 2 points
• Kimchi, oyster and pork belly: 3 points
• Coddled egg with caviar and potato chips: 8 points
• Scallop with clam and bacon dashi: 4 points
• Fois gras torchon with riesling jelly etc.: 3 points
• Deep fried short ribs: 8 points
• Miso soup and fried rice: 4 points
• Pineapple sorbet with dried pineapple: 3 points
• Deep fried apple pie, sour ice cream, toasted miso: 10 points
• Wine pairing: 8 points

A nice, round total of 60 points. My specific meal may vary, and they may have changed the menu some, but knowing the larder Chang usually cooks from and my good standing as a member of the clean plate club, I think this is a pretty sound estimate.

I’m entitled to 22 points a day, and have a weekly bonus point bank of 35 points, which is to say, I have 57 points to spend if I am disciplined the rest of the week and don’t go over my daily allowance (and I’m generally pretty disciplined, so I think I’ll be OK). 

So I am left with an outstanding balance of 3 points if I only eat zero point foods all day today (and I am prepared to do so with stockpiled cherry tomatoes, pickles and GG bran crispbreads - I don’t really do hungry).  

I never count the first 3 miles of a run against my balance as I think everyone should exercise for 30 minutes every day, but I sometimes do give myself 1 point per mile thereafter. This means I need to go on a 6 mile run. This is pretty easily done.

Therefore, eating dinner at Ko - even with wine pairing - whilst watching one’s weight is, in the long view, possible. Put the pork on my fork!

“Lake Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1992″

Isn’t this insane? This is from an exhibit at the Met selected from photographs Lee Friedlander took during a decade spent looking at Frederick Law Olmstead’s public and private parks. I’ve always had a thing for Olmstead - considering that I grew up in Buffalo and Boston and make my home in New York City, this is no surprise; these were the cities in which Olmstead created his greatest “landscapes of illusion”. His parks have dominated my personal landscape, and as an adult, have helped me survive urban living. I’ve written about my love of Prospect Park, and I know that Olmstead loved it best of his creations, and I believe that Friedlander loves it, too:

“Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, 1989″

About taking these photographs, Friedlander wrote that even with work that was “ok or even good”, he felt that it was “still a touchstone or a fast glance at the real thing itself”, and exhorts you to go, be in and look for yourself.

Seeing his photos had the desired intent: I want to get on the Q train, drop my bag at the cook crush’s, and head out on foot to pound out a run around Prospect Park, thankful for its design and smarter for a fresh view of it.

The photo above is of a can of red lentil soup. It is one product in a large range of frozen and canned Middle Eastern foods sold by a Lebanese company, Alwadi Al Akhdar. But this post is not about lentil soup.

Yesterday I bought a can of Alwadi Al Akhdar chickpea and potato soup at the Food Coop. I had it for dinner this evening with some broccoli and a toasted whole wheat pita (entire meal = 6 points). I ate it, so I know it exists. I’m looking at the label on the can right now. But I can find no trace of this product online, even on the Alwadi Al Akhdar website.

I noticed at the time of purchase that there were only three cans and today when I went back there were none on the shelf. This is a shame because those may have been the last three cans in the world, and it is quite tasty although not a smooth puree as I had expected.

I can tell that it will be a winner in my best friend’s book, based on her love of the spinach and chickpea salad at Moustache, which it closely resembles. I do not know why the Alwadi has decided to eliminate this product from their line of gourmet soups, but I’m relieved to say that the ingredient list is short so it should only take a little tinkering to recreate.

The ingredients are chickpeas, potatoes, spinach (it is that fatigue green color), lemon juice (quite a bit, it is tart), tahini (the source of most of the points), olive oil, garlic, salt, cumin, coriander and cumin. I am planning on making some and then pureeing it to a smoother consistency.

I’ll start with one cubed potato that has been cooked until tender; I’ll drain all but a cup of the potato water and use it to cook the spinach and chickpeas, add the potatoes back in, mash it all together, stir in 3 tablespoons tahini, a quarter cup of lemon juice, and 1/4 teaspoon of each of the spices, then adjust to taste.