Hard to believe a year and a half ago Aly aka Lady Lamb The Beekeeper made Grilled Cheese French Toast with me. Anyways, to help her promote her brand new album Ripely Pine (out now on Ba Da Bing Records), we thought we’d go into the vaults and cut up this gem: Florence Berlin. Watch the video below, feel free to download the full BBS set for free here, and check out the premiere coverage on Consequence of Sound.
The press release for this year’s Googa Mooga made my day. I had so much fun last year.
Offering everything from duck sausage to grilled Maine lobster to Guinness stout brownies to foi gras doughnuts, GoogaMooga’s 2013 food lineup currently encompasses 85 restaurants (listed below). A few particularly exciting new additions this year, each epitomizing Brooklyn’s dynamic role in the culinary landscape, include Gywnnett St., Pork Slope, and Motorino. These join returning Brooklyn favorites such as Roberta’s Pizza, Calexico, Seersucker, South Brooklyn Pizza, Do or Dine, and Char No. 4. Manhattan restaurants new to the festival’s General Admission include Salvation Taco, Umami Burger, The Meatball Shop, Pig and Khao, Pok Pok Phat Thai, Jeepney, Eataly, Craftbar, Jeffrey’s Grocery, and Joe’s Pub. Fans can also look for Baohaus, Big Gay Ice Cream, Dinosaur BBQ, Momofuku Milk Bar, M.Wells, Colicchio & Sons and Crif Dogs, all returning. Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors will be on site with their famous dry-aged, prime beefs and acclaimed chef Ken Oringer will come down from Boston to serve Spanish tapas from his restaurant Toro. For those with dietary concerns, GoogaMooga has added more vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options to its menu.
As for music, the main highlights for me are Flaming Lips, Lee Fields, Sharon Jones, Sharon Van Etten, and my dear friends/BBS alumni Pearl and the Beard.
Tickets go on sale on April 1. Don’t miss out!
You read correctly. I made duck pastrami. That salty, spicy, sweet, and fatty delicious smoked meat, but with a twist that’s better than most M. Night Shyamalan movies: DUCK!
Wednesday night after work, I went to Hong Kong Market in Chinatown to buy two whole ducks. The thing about duck breasts is that they would run about $8 each if butchered. One whole duck in Chinatown would cost as much as 2 breasts in a fancy butcher. SOOOO I butchered them myself with over 5 lbs of leftover duck to make later. Win-win.
I rinsed the duck breasts off, dried them off with a paper towel, and applied a cure to it consisting of the following:
I let that sit in Tupperware in my fridge until Sunday morning. I threw them in a large bowl and added cold water. Every thirty minutes for two hours, I dumped the water and added more to replace it. This is to brine the duck and rinse off the spices at the same time.
After two hours, I rinsed them off one final time, dried them off, and brought them over to my old friend Josh’s apt around the corner to be SMOKED.
Before prepping the fire, I reapplied the following to the entire breast:
We added wood to the makeshift smoker, lit it with Josh’s handy blow torch, and waited for the temperature to reach roughly 220 degrees. We placed aluminum foil over the grill and threw the duck breasts down. This would capture the delicious fat drippings.
After about 2 hours, the breasts were ready. However, the fat was still VERY thick, so we rendered it out in a cast iron skillet. NOTE: I did save the rendered fat, which I will use this week to make confit with the 4 duck legs I butchered.
Then we were ready to slice and taste!!!
Overall, it was approximately an 80+ hour process, but TOTALLY worth it. Next up, I’m going to make pastrami lox. Stay tuned.
We went into the BBS vaults to complete this amazing performance from Givers. If you remember, drummer Kirby and I made masala waffles. And if you like the sound of this song, you can download the full set here.
For my birthday, my girlfriend gave me two surprise classes at Brooklyn Kitchen, the latter of which we would attend together. The first class was Knife Skills and I ended up buying a fancy knife as a birthday gift for myself. The second was, as it turned out, mozzarella making class. The class was being taught by one of the cheesemongers at Eataly, so I knew during her introduction that she would be legit and I’d learn a lot from her.
My mozzarella turned out tasty (as you will see below), but surprisingly didn’t yield as much as expected given that we used 1.5 gallons of milk.
To make the conversions easier from the 1.5G recipe I used, below is the recipe for 1G.
Phase one is making the curd.
Phase two is Stretching
With this cheese I made homemade flatbread pizza…and I mean homemade. The cheese. the sauce. The dough. See below.
I loved both classes at Bk Kitchen. Learned a lot. Got 10% off some awesome kitchen supplies. Definitely recommend taking one if you can.
I made the entire Thanksgiving meal myself. It’s not as bad as many moms and aunts say it is. I enjoy cooking. I enjoy seeing other people enjoy my food. So Thanksgiving is probably the best holiday for me. Plus my family handled all the cleanup, which is usually the worst part.
To open up the meal, I completely winged a salad that ended up tasting delicious.
The night before, I roasted whole medium-sized beets for an hour on 500 degrees. As soon as they came out of the oven, I peeled the outer layer. Waiting until they’re cool will make them more difficult to peel, so bite a wooden spoon and get it done while it’s hot. I then waited for the beets to cool down, cubed them, and put into Tupperware in the fridge.
Two hours before the meal, I made the dressing combining sliced strawberries with aged balsamic, olive oil, and Mike’s Hot Honey with salt and pepper to taste. There should enough liquid to almost completely cover the strawberries in a bowl. I let that sit until everyone was seated and ready to eat.
I added all the dry ingredients in a bowl together (beets, arugula, and toasted walnuts) then slowly tossed in the dressing. I plated the salad with an additional drizzle of hot honey.
It was the perfect sweet, savory, and spicy start to the meal.
So as I mentioned earlier in the summer, I was thoroughly curious as to how Thieving Irons would present their complex rock creations in a semi-acoustic environment. Well, lets just say that they both surprised and impressed me.
A few weeks before the event, my girlfriend ripped an article from Time Out NY about urban honey in NYC. Mike’s Hot Honey jumped out of the page and peaked my interest after my girlfriend recommended I make granola. The concept of spicy granola is unheard of, odd, and had a realistic chance of tasting good. Mike graciously offered up a few bottles for me to test out the recipe and after a few test runs, I was satisfied the balance of sweet, salty, and spicy.
Nate Martinez, the leader of Thieving Irons, met me at my friend Ari and his wife’s beautiful apartment in Prospect Heights on a rainy Sunday morning for yet another indoor backyard brunch. We had never met, but after we had some time to talk about music and food, we were warmed up and ready to cook.
As with most of my dishes, a fair portion of it is improvised, so below is the closest thing you’ll get to a recipe. Each batch makes enough to fill an average sized cookie sheet, which was used to bake it:
The actual process for making it couldn’t be easier and once you actually you make it, you’ll honestly never want to pay $6 for a bag of granola again.
Later in the morning, Dan, his trumpet player came in and he looked strikingly familiar. Turns out he played flugelhorn with Kelli Scarr at a session two summers ago. This time around, Dan brought a rare instrument called an EVI, which is an electronic trumpet of sorts that plays all sorts of trippy atmospheric sounds. This added the perfect accompaniment to Nate’s soft voice and acoustic guitar (listen below).
First to hit the stage was Philly’s Modern Inventors who brought their brand of poppy twangy rock. I was so impressed with their catchy, upbeat set that we went to see them the following weekend in Philly.
And then we got to relax and absorb the atmospheric folk of Thieving Irons. A handful of attendees were either sleeping or put in a dazed trance for their 40 minute set.
You can stream a song from each artist below. If you like what you hear, you can download Thieving Iron’s full set here and Modern Inventors’ set here.
All in all, this yet again another successful summer of backyard brunches (even though only 1 of the 3 were in actually in a backyard). Hard to believe my team and I have been doing this for three years. Thanks once again to Eric, Dan, Jonas, Zach, Mark, and Dominick to another great summer!
Expect more videos soon. Next up is the cooking video for Lucius.
Audio by Acidjack on behalf of NYCTaper. Photos by Dominick Mastrangelo.
