DAY 2- GIPSY QUEENS

A mismatch of things-edible from morning to evening. Impossible to find one’s happiness in a tea-bag. They should simply be banned. And those giant cups filled of watery coffee and giant muffins and cupcakes…no, no, no. Size matters and I prefer to keep things down a little.

Wholefoods on Union sq. is one of those trendy healthy supermarkets that is always interesting to explore to check the state of the art. They have a lot of things but I suspect that packaging plays an important role in all of it, I mean, the anglosaxon penchant for didascalism in food and the resulting professionalism and charm of descriptions over the actual quality of food (the money goes to the communicators rather than to the producers). There are hundreds of natural remedies for all sorts of ailments. Nuts, flours, sauces, powdered wheatgrass, all the miracle foods, from goji to acai berries. And a lot of pickles, unpasteurized and lots of bottles of kombucha, equally unpasteurized.

It is upon trying to open one of those that the thing literally gushes out into quasi-champagneasque bubbly foamy spray. When we manage to contain the splurge, the entire floor of the supermarket exist is covered with kombucha…

By lunchtime we are in Soho and dive into one of those basement joints where Chinese proletarians in their 50s go to grub some cheap fare. Crusty pork belly and some sliced cold chicken. Less than 5 dollars and there is enough for two. For dinner we try to be smart and follow a tip from “Edible New York”, a magazine we peeked into at Wholefoods, a Rumanian restaurant that promises kitch and a hearty fare:

http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/sammys-roumanian-steak-house/

But. It actually turns out to be a loud first floor with walls full ugly photoes, business cards and newspaper cutouts. There are no windows in view and too many pot bellies for my liking. So we end up in out 41^st floor apartment and warm up yesterday’s doggy bag from the Korean job.

The real culinary event of the day is an arty one and one we cannot get our sticky fingers into it. At hip Deitch gallery on Broome st., Francine Spiegel makes a splash of fluorescent edible fluids, turning a group of 19^th dressed up ladies into some survivors of a multi-layered mud catastrophy. I did not think much of this. It was a piece of “curiosa” crossing my path and causing minimal damage (read: boredom).

NUEVA IORKE – DIARIOS

 

NIGHT 1 – The Empire State Building and Korea Town The Empire State Building occupies the block on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th street. All around it, on either side of the avenue, it is a maze of Korean joints, especially restaurants and noodle bars. Karaoke places are up on the first floor and above them there are massage parlours and probably other specialties that would require a longer stay and apt “cultural amabassador” in order to find out. On the first NY that’s what we dealt with: dinner at a Korean restaurant. I knew that meat was going to be involved, plus lots of garlic and kimchi, though I know by now that the cured cabbage they serve up as kimchi is definitely not what one’s honorable ancestors would pay a tribute to. Spotting the right place, that is, one where food has not undergone a drastic simplication in order to fit the narrow standards of a Western palate, is quite a task. But we give it a good go. We inspect twenty or so menu cards before narrowing down the choice to three places. In my attempt to gauge Korean delicacies, I employ my Japanese and Chinese references. For example, I look for dishes that include unusual parts of animals and who dare to mention them in detail. Pig trotters, ox knuckles, beef tongue, that sort of thing. Or unusual combinations of meat and seafood. The best is when the menu mentions something I never heard of before. We end up in a place where you can sit on the floor at low tables and where the kimchi is actually made with whole cabbage and cut just before being served. This is actually a good sign. It means that the kimchi master knew what he was doing and that the spices were actually packed by hand between the leaves. I go for a traditional ox knuckle soup, a tasteless milky liquid that reminds me tales from a dear Chinese friend about bones that are slowly cooked and that produce a nourishing and warming soup. The fact that this tastes of nothing is just normal. Most Chinese health soup (and even desserts) taste of nothing. It is the color, texture and porcedure that counts. Another discovery is the Korean penchant for entrails. Stomach, tongue and intestine boiled and cut in slivers and then served with a sweet miso sauce. One can’t compare this with the devine preparations from Toscana, which goes under the name of lampredotto or trippa, but it was interesting nevertheless. And I even found out that Koreans have a very cheap drink called something like “macalli”, which is rough unfiltered (thus milky) sake wine. Rough but similar to some divine unpasteurized sake I had on the island of Kyushu (Japan). Unfortunately my capacity for eating has limits and so I wasn’t able to order the raw oysters with pear juice…

DINNER 4

Springtime in Brussels means a few vegetable treats. On my way to the permaculture garden my friends keep in Brussels, I came across some elderflowers. Stewed in milk, sugar and a little agar agar, they became an unusual pudding. The path to the garden was lined with tall plants of aegopodium, a very perfumed green that can be cooked or fermented for a very aromatic kimchi. I could even pick a few more hop sprouts, before they grew too tall. In a shady corner of the local park, grew leaves and flowers of “ail des ourses”, a green that tastes like spring onions.

The dinner consisted of Japanese rice, cooked without rinsing for a slightly gluey translucent result and mixed with thinly chopped kohlrabi and mustard greens, oil and shiso sauce.  I made a salad of buckwheat, kimchi and parsley and a frittata with more egg whites than yolks, leaves and floweers of “ail des ourses” and courgettes.

DINNER 3, 2009

Bagna Cauda is a traditional dish from Piemonte. It consists of a rich dip of garlic, cream and anchovies and of a large selection of boiled and raw vegetables that go with it. From nutty Jerusalem artichokes to endive, beetroot or daikon. The hard thing is to stop dipping into the sauce and managing the aftermath of the garlic ingestion.

This double-bill dinner featured a twin of the Italian speciality coming straight from the Virgin islands: a rich sauce based on smoked herring and served with fried plantains and polenta (which over there is called fungi). Koor followed two of his grandmother’s recipes: a starter of spicy fishballs and then the rich herring sauce, which has tomatoes, onions and pepper in the place of garlic and cream. The fish note is more prominent and acts well with the sweet flavor of plantains and  the insipid note of polenta.

Very professional Koor came with his set of knives in a leather case. I did my best with some pretty exotic ice-creams: shiso leaves and bergamot-lemon peel (which everybody immediately recognised as the flavor of Eral Grey tea).