Meat and Potatoes

I was in a lousy mood yesterday, so I was yearning for a comfort-food dinner.  I was thinking mac and cheese, but Bruce was thinking a big hunk o' meat.  Since I wanted to take my mind off my ailing cat, I decided to cook something that I never had cooked: veal chops.  I've had them at restaurants, and loved them, but assumed they would be daunting to prepare.  Not a bit!  (And, yes, it was sustainable, cruelty-free, uncrated veal, okay?)

Of course, with meat, potatoes are de rigueur.  The first step, then, was to get the baby Yukon Golds in the oven.  Wash, dry.  Place on a baking pan, then coat them with olive oil, rosemary, and sea salt.


Roast at 425 until the skins are wrinkly and the insides tender and creamy, about 30 minutes.  (Meanwhile, take the chops, which should be about an inch thick, out of the fridge and let them come to room temperature.)  Pull the potatoes from the oven, and turn it to broil.  Rub the chops with garlic, then salt, pepper, and rub with olive oil.  The broiler rack should be on the highest shelf.  Broil 4 1/2 minutes per side, then let rest for 5 minutes or so.  The inner meat should still be pink.  If you are, heaven help you, a devotee of well-done meat, cook for 5 minutes per side, but I won't answer for the consequences.

I served the meat and taters with delicate little fiddleheads on the side.  It wasn't mac and cheese; in fact, it was far less time-consuming to make.  And pretty comforting, at that.

Sorrel Seems to Be the Hardest Word

Perhaps not quite the hardest, but it is frequently massacred by people who should know better. Sorrel is pronounced like the color, not Rob Petrie's writing sidekick, Buddy Sorrell.  To confuse matters further, sorrel the leaf is not related to the chestnut-horse sorrel, but to an old German word for sour, which is more than apt.

Last Saturday, when I was planning on making cream of sorrel soup, I got to the market too late; all that was left was a bunch of tender baby leaves, not nearly enough for me.  This week, at the same stand, the sorrel was all grown up, sporting huge coarse leaves and a rather insolent air.  Perhaps I would not be chiffonading this bunch, but wrestling it to the ground.

Sorrel soup  is tartly refreshing, and can be served anywhere along the heat scale from steaming to icy, generally in inverse to the weather.  The day was  relatively warm, so I decided on a lightly chilled soup.

First, peel a medium baking potato and cut it into smallish chunks.  Next, chop about 5 good-sized shallots, totaling about 1/4 cup.  While that was going on, melt a lump of butter (2 tablespoons or so)  in a large pot.  When the butter starts to bubble,  turn down the heat a bit and added the potatoes and shallots. 

 While they're heating,  chop up  five large bunches of sorrel, discarding any thick stems or brownish leaves.  Add to the pot, stirring as they soften.  Bite into a leaf: You'll get a real citrus punch!  Once the leaves are wilted, pour in about five cups of chicken or vegetable stock, bring to a simmer over medium to medium-low heat, and cook until the vegetables are quite soft, from 25 to 40 minutes, depending on your, stove, your pot, and how you chopped the vegetables.  Soup is very forgiving.


Remove from the heat and let cool a bit, so that  you don't burn yourself during the next step, which is pureeing the soup using an immersion blender or food processor.  Leave it a bit chunky , if you'd like, which is better for hot soup or puree it more thoroughly for cold.  Return to the heat, add a cup of heavy cream, bring it to almost, but definitely not, a boil, then turn off.  If serving hot, season and serve.  If serving cold, season more vigorously (cold turns down the temperature on spices), and chill. Don't shove it in the fridge right away, though, as doing so can quickly bring your fridge's temperature down to an unsafe level.

I like to garnish this soup with very thinly sliced young radishes, and serve with popovers.

Pearls before Swine Pasta Smackdown

Pasta versus antipasta death match.

Cupcakes, Cupcakes, Everywhere: Help Me, Alan!

Since when did cupcakes become a major food group? Since Sex and the City, that's when.  I've nothing against a cupcake a year or two, but these seemingly insidious little snack cakes are marching over the landscape like little frosted storm troopers.  Two cupcakes stores in Chelsea Market?  I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the food mall's name changed to Cupcake Market any day now.

I was going to further document the phenomen, but then--mirabile dictu!--Alan Rickman strolled by, and my mind instantly turned to thoughts of  a very different sort of treat.

More on Baohaus: Old? Ugly? Stay Away!

Eddie Huang, owner of Baohaus and the impending Xiao Ye, clearly doesn't like older people, or plan on getting older himself.  His statements are vile (not to mention discriminatory); I will never go near an establishment of his again.  [Eater]

Baohaus, or, wherein I disagree with every other NYC food blogger

                                        
 I'd been planning to go to Baohaus for some time, but kept putting it off due to a sense of unease.  Frankly, I was shying away from it, because Baohaus's pork bun was being cried up as the only pork bun now worth eating, and, oh, how deluded, nay, misguided we had all been before this charming little place came along and led us to the light.  Really?

It's a Taiwanese style bun; that is, it's more like an open-faced sandwich that the jelly-doughnut style pork bun that most of us are accustomed to.  Yes, the place is adorable, the people are charming, and the quality of the ingredients in the pork bun is impeccable, even though the tasty pork was so chewy that I had to shred it with my fingers.  But $4.50 for a two-bite bun?  That's one expensive little snack. 
 

I'll stick with the likes of Mei Li Wah, where I can get a super pork bun that serves as a meal...for about a buck.  Or stay closer to home, where I can get two plain slices for $4.50.  Maybe it's me, maybe it's the changes in the neighborhood, but I'm altogether tired of being offered tiny things for big bucks.

Wednesday Food Roundup

Sam Sifton reviews Nello, a restaurant that most can't afford, at which the food is inedible. Sign me up!
Our friends at Serious Eats talk about Pylos, one of my favorite EV restaurants.  Don't miss the fries, which are redolent of oregano and cheese.
Now that spring has come to NYC, you should be checking Lucy's Greenmarket Report at least three times a week--she'll tell you what's new and who has it.
A 135 year tradition ends, as Maine's last sardine cannery closes its doors, as reported by the San Luis Obispo Tribune. Another rural way of life ends. Sad.

Peach Ginger Sorbet from Ciao Bella

This peachy, gingery (she said, stating the obvious) sorbet, is riddled with chunks of ginger.  Breakfast of champions, particularly with the rather good California strawberries now coming into market.  There are tons of other intriguing flavors on the Ciao Bella website that don't seem to have made it to local stores; I hope that this one is the first of many.

Led Zeppole, Indeed

I truly wanted to like the zeppoles at Led Zeppole for couple of reasons:  First, I was raised on a diet of bad puns.  Second, I was a child at a time in this country when the Campbell's Soup kids were the physical ideal: I was considered underweight, and thus was allowed a bag of zeppoles from a Nostrand Avenue pizzeria a few times a week, after I'd already burned off twenty million calories in the adjacent playground.  I love zeppoles.

On the other hand,  I love pizza, and I had earlier found the eponymous pizza at LZ's companion joint, Artichoke Pizza, to be a gloppy mess, tasting as though cream of artichoke soup had been dumped on chewy, chewy mozz.  (In fact, when I realized that I had been chewing the same piece of cheese as though it were Bazooka for two avenue blocks, I gave up on the whole enterprise.)

Fitting right in with the current notion that more is better and too much is fantastic, the zeppole were coated with so damn much powdered sugar that, when I pulled one from the bag, my poor camera was showered with so much sugar that it looked like a tiny snowdrift on a strap.  The inside was doughy and heavy, likely in part because they were so supersized (see more is better, above) that they couldn't cook all the way through.   

Since this place is positioned (open until 4AM) in large part to fill the bellies of drunken revelers, not only with zeppoles, but fried Oreos and fried cream puffs, I'm sure they will do more than fine without .my approbation.  Me, I'll  head back to Brooklyn to find the ideal zeppole, and maybe have another go at that seesaw.

 

Does This Thai Match?

[Having a hard time trying to balance this blog, the NY Daily News blog, and copy editing cookbooks. I'm trying to come up with some kind of rotation by which none of them is neglected for too long.  We'll see.  One good thing for With Leftovers is that I can't barrage the News with stuff from lower Manhattan without end, so I think a lot of that stuff will wind up here, which is largely read (read?  really?) by people hereabouts.]

I really miss Thai on Clinton.  It was our go-to on nights when I was in too bad a mood to cook, a rare thing, or there was something super important going on, like the Rangers playing the Ducks. (That lamest NHL team name ever, except for collective names like the Colorado Avalanche.  The Rangers had a t-shirt a while back that said I Am A Ranger, translated into all the different languages spoken by the guys on the team  How do you do that with a collective? You don't, that's how).

ToC was bought out by a chain, which promptly dropped my favorite, peanut dumplings.  Soon, the food went altogether slipshod, and we stopped ordering.  This was followed by Eastern Parkway or Road or Bypass; it was not open long enough for its name to register.  There was a fair bit of  blog chatter about it, but it sank without trace in less than a month.

Now, we have Pa-Plern, which opened last week.  Ordering was a struggle, as the phone-order taker had little English.  She called us back three times to explain things about our order that I might not have understood that I had already explained I understood.  Repeatedly.  It was rather entertaining, but it won't be next time.

We ordered three apps from the Appetizer Sampler menu (3/$13, 4/$16. 5/$15): peanut dumplings (yay!), curry puffs, and crispy basil duck roll, as well as beef satay and summer rolls from the regular app menu.
The entire order, save the summer roll,  was jumbled together unappetizingly in a single takeout container.  The sauces were thoughtfully labelled to indicate what went with what, though, a nice little touch.

Peanut dumpling was first up.  Smaller, sloppier than ToC, but still quite tasty, with that wonderful glutinous mouthfeel.  I could eat a double order of these for dinner, and probably shall quite soon.

The beef satay ("satae" on the menu) was two large strips of beef with the usual peanut sauce.  I would have preferred four smaller strips, and wound up tearing them in half, but the meat itself was tender and not overcooked.  A bit more char would have bumped it up.



Curry puffs were tender and mild, with a delicious (but perhaps not altogether appropriate) hoisin-ish sauce topped with peanuts. 

The crispy basil duck roll looked more  like a Turkish sigara boregi than a roll. It was nice and crisp, the duck a bit dry, but reasonably well flavored, except for the curious muteness of the basil.



 The vegetarian summer rolls were a mess.  They were poorly wrapped and flavorless, and their primary component was iceberg lettuce.  One contained tofu, the other didn't.  They fell completely apart at first bite.



 Throughout the meal, I tried to keep in mind that the place had been open less that a week, and that it had returned peanut dumplings to my life.  I look forward to Pa-Plem passing through the usual new restaurant growing pains, and turning into a regular go-to to go.