I’ve written about the Red Hook Food Vendors before (click here) but it’s wasn’t until this past Saturday that I visited them on their home field for a tour led by Chef Aaron Sanchez, part of the Food is Art culinary program, a series of lectures, classes and special events curated by Zarela Martinez in conjunction with the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York. Continue reading ‘Food is Art’
Today I took my first steps in what I hope will end with the triumphant crossing New York City marathon finish line and not sleeping through the Staten Island start, crying on the 59th Street bridge, or passing out in Central Park’s closing stretch. Looking ahead the long Saturday training runs I have planned between now and November, I decided to play around with fresh fruit batidos (also known licuados or preparados depending on the accent). Continue reading ‘Shaking It Up’
I collect links and articles for my monthly catching up posts every day so it’s not until I sit down to go through them all that a theme emerges. The New York Times City Room covered the struggles of two neighborhood restaurants. Due in part to the efforts of community leaders and a last minute fundraiser, Coqui Mexicano was able to temporarily stave off eviction from their South Bronx location but Manhattanville’s La Floridita, one of the last Cuban restaurants left in the area, was forced to close for repairs and faces an uncertain future. The Village Voice interview with Fernando Ruiz of the Tortilleria Nixtamal, which is doing well, was about mistakes, misconceptions, and underappreciated ingredients — a more interesting read but still. Even news that Rick Bayless would be preparing the state dinner President Felipe Calderón of Mexico stirred up some controversy both before and after. On a brighter note, Carolina González wrote for the Daily News about the prominence of women chefs and restaurateurs like Zarela Martínez and Sue Torres in high-end Mexican cuisine. I thought May would farmer’s markets and spring blossoms but there were some shadows too.
After the relative quiet of the last few months, it seems like everyone is ready to celebrate the arrival of summer or at least have a glass of Rioja. From now until May 27th, 25 restaurants in both New York and Chicago will be offering special lunch and dinner menus for Rioja Restaurant Week. Lately it feels like restaurant week year around but it’s definitely worth visiting one, or two or three…Click here for a list of participating restaurants. Continue reading ‘So Much To Do’
A few weeks ago, a friend gave me a list of Puerto Rican classics to try that included asopao de pollo. As she described it, it’s a Puerto Rican risotto that’s not quite soup and not quite stew. My soups often go to gumbo by mistake so I was curious to know what would happen if I made it that way by design. At Jennifer’s suggestion, I checked my Puerto Rican Cookery book first. I realized after additional searches that there were thousands of recipes for asopao, a one-pot, comfort food solution for family dinners and leftovers. After reading them over, I finally circled back to Carmen Aboy Valldejuli. Continue reading ‘Asopao de Pollo’
In the two years since it opened, the Brooklyn Flea has gone from a neighborhood novelty to something that I look forward to each year. I knew it would be crowded but made a plan to meet a friend there when it re-opened its outdoor location in Fort Greene’s Bishop Laughlin Memorial High School this weekend. Slowly working our way through the aisles, I always go with the same hope, that the stands will be full of new (to market) retro kitchen gadgets and that the Red Hook Vendors will be there selling pupusas, tamales, grilled corn sprinkled with chile, and agua fresca. Continue reading ‘Rites of Spring’
In 1992, salsa out-sold ketchup in the United States. I’ve heard that statistic for years, referenced it a few times, and read it again in Julia Moskin’s “Rediscovering Salsa, the Soul of Mexico in a Bowl” in this week’s Dining & Wine section. By now, most Latinos in the United States have claimed salsa’s success as our own. I have friends who’ve worked it into sales pitches and if anyone brings it up around the chip bowl, Mexican or not, we nod knowingly. Yet I’m not sure what kind of legitimacy we feel this confers on Latino cuisine or the growing market for Latino products. What does it say about us? What does it say about them? What does it say about ketchup? With so much baggage, it was great to read an article about salsa that was just that.
After years of winding my way through the streets of lower Manhattan, I think I’ve finally figured out Chinatown. A little overwhelming and often confusing, you always know you’re in New York. A few blocks in any direction and you’re in Little Italy, Tribeca or the Lower East Side. I’d always been curious about the “other” Chinatown – the one they keep in Flushing, where Jennifer 8 Lee said the “real” Chinese restaurants were. I had no good reason for not making it out there until now so when my teacher, Steven Shaw planned an excursion for his current food blogging class, I had to sign up. After all, he’d written the book. This weekend we met up at the French Culinary Institute on a gray day to make our way through cast iron Soho to Spring street where a 6 would get us to the 7 to Flushing. When we came up from the station, it was clear we were not in Manhattan anymore.
If you’d asked me about performance art a few months ago, I wouldn’t have had a very strong opinion. While I keep an open mind, I’ve always preferred the Met to P.S.1 and masters painting infantas to hipsters painting each other. That changed when I went to the opening of Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary at the Neuberger Museum of Art until April 11. I’d always heard about her pieces from friends, but it was incredible to experience twenty years of the artist’s work simultaneously. Featuring multiple performances of her work, I saw walls lined with tea packets in “Poetic Justice” (2002-3), was blinded by klieg lights in “Untitled (Kassel, 2002)”, and had my heart broken by the stench of sugar cane in “Untitled (Havana, 2000)”.
Inspired by Tania and anxious to see more, I went to a members preview of Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present opening at tomorrow at MoMA and running until May 31. Aptly named, she will be present and sitting in the museum’s atrium for 716 hours and thirty minutes at a table with an empty chair. Visitors are invited to wait in line to sit across from her for any length of time. In the galleries, actors trained by the artist recreate her most famous pieces while small screens play video footage of the original works. While many focused on her ability to endure, I was more impressed her perfect concentration and well…presence in everything she did. I couldn’t help but think of all the devices – books, magazine, iPhones, iPods – I use to make me feel that I’m not where Continue reading ‘Performance Break’
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk at my Brooklyn’s Book Court between Thomas Keller and Peter Kaminsky. Though technically about Keller’s latest cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home, it wasn’t strictly about food and cooking. From process and baseball analogies, he got to ritual and repetition and I realized what I’d been missing. Trying to post regularly, I’d become sharkish, cooking in constant motion. I’ve gotten used to being just a few clicks away from French-Italian-Regional-Seasonal-Indian-Mexican-Caribbean. It’s tempting to jump from one to the other, trying everything once then moving on. Having set out to write about traditional food in a new medium, I forget that the best part can be going back, trying again, and making it a little better. I had ritual, but my repetition was lacking. Continue reading ‘Ritual and Repetition’
ana@hungrysofia.com
