Tag: pork

Calexico with The Wandering Foodie

Before I get down to the nitty-gritty of my Thailand trip, let me just get you up to speed on the past week. So, I roll back into town, and it’s the middle of winter. That’s bad, but what’s even worse is that I have no appetite: American food seems pallid, bland and joyless. Peter and I hole up in our house and make spicy noodles to console ourselves.

A few days after this rough transition, I finally go outside to meet Hagan Blount, aka the Wandering Foodie, at the Calexico cart in SoHo. I go because 1) Hagan seems like a maniac in the best way: He has voluntarily scheduled an entire month of NYC restaurant eating, breakfast, lunch and dinner, which comes out to 93 plates. It sounds exactly like one of my guidebook research trips, except a little longer.

Also, 2) I’m curious about Calexico, because I want there to be more Mexican food everywhere in New York City. If we can’t have giant Thai food courts, we can at least foster our neighbors to the south, who make almost as amazing colorful and tasty fresh food. (Whenever I come back from Mexico, I feel color and flavor withdrawal–like post-Thailand, but a little more mild.) My major complaint with Mexican food in NYC is that the tacos are too gigantic. A taco should be a snack, not a meal.

Calexico sets up shop right where I used to work (back when I had a job! Like, in the last century!), at Prince and Wooster, next to the Camper store. Great location. Uh. If it weren’t pouring rain, that is. It was raining so hard that our basement flooded, which made me late to meet Hagan. But, as if the gods were smiling on our foolhardy lunch, the sky was dry by the time we got there.

Calexico touts its carne asada–spiced grilled beef. So we ordered some of that in a quesadilla, which came with “crack” chipotle sauce. Oy. This treads dangerously close to Mexi restos with giant sombreros for decor. But anyway. Also loaded up on a chicken taco and a pork taco. And a side of guac.

starbuxThen we retired to the nearest Starbucks to eat. I love how, since Starbucks has saturated the landscape, they’ve basically been forced into becoming quasi-public spaces. This Starbucks, at the corner of West Broadway and Houston, was inhabited by a crew of older Italian gentlemen in cardigan sweaters, who weren’t really drinking anything, just shooting the shit. It reminded me of the Greek guys in the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner in my nabe. It’s kind of like how the spot on which a temple used to exist continues to be holy, even if it’s occupied by an office park.

After ordering token teas, we shamelessly spread out our lunch and proceeded to sample.

Chicken taco: Totally meh. Soggy. I’m trying to cut back on factory-farmed meat, and this taco made it very easy for me. I had a couple bites and left it. And as usual, tacos are gigantic and bursting out of their corn tortillas. Mess.

Pork taco: Better. Nice grilled flavor. Drier, too, so everything holds together better.

Carne asada quesadilla: Total rainy day pleasure. I probably wouldn’t have gone to town on it in the same way on a sunny day, but in the gray and damp, the oozy melted cheese hit the spot. And the carne asada had some nice herbalicious treatment that the other meats lacked. This basically said, “Dude, we told you we specialized in carne asada–why did you even order those other things?”

“Crack” chipotle sauce, in case you’re wondering, is just chipotle mayo. Or maybe chipotle sour cream. Anyway, chipotle in something gooey. Also a good rainy-day pleasure, but not life-wreckingly addicting. No turning tricks in alleys for this stuff, that’s for sure. Oh, and the guac–forgettable. I honestly can’t remember what I thought about it.

Overall, Calexico made me a little depressed about the state of Mexican food in NYC. When I saw David Chang speak at B&N a little while ago, he was really putting his money on Mexican food as the next thing to get hip and super-flavorized. Calexico is, at least at this cart, impossibly far from anything Chang’s imagining. But if Calexico had been there back in 1999, when I worked right on the corner, I probably would’ve eaten lunch there a lot.

And it was a pleasure to eat with Hagan. He’s so energetic and enthusiastic about eating restaurant food for a month straight that I felt like I’d better step up and appreciate my job a lot more (I get serious restaurant burnout within a week on a research trip, and complain about it to everyone in earshot). He’s also basically living in Starbucks this month (I left him at the one where we ate, to kill time till his dinner date), and has not yet lost his shit after hearing the same songs a million times. Guidebook editors: Snap this guy up, and fast!

NY Times: Caged Pork Fanatic

Last week, Peter sent me a link to this lunatic op-ed in the NY Times. Short version: foodies are all wrong in promoting free-range meat, because it will surely kill them. Factory farming is so much safer. Or I guess that’s what he was saying. It gets pretty loopy at the end.

I read it, thought about it, sputtered a little and did not really have time to articulate what was so totally wrong with the guy’s thinking. In fact, I read it, and then went out and had a piece of toast with tasty free-range jamon serrano on it for breakfast, along with my fresh-squeezed orange juice. Call me a foodie, whatever–I’m sure I’m eating better than this ass in Texas.

Fortunately, while I was digesting, the incisive Ms. Julie Powell came along and wrote something sharp about it for me, and noted the addendum the Times had to print. Que sorpresa. (That’s Spanish for “no doy.”)

Climbing Mt. Cassoulet, Part 1: The Complaining

Fucking hell. Last week of the cookbook work (or it had better be…), and I had to squeeze in another cassoulet.

Cassoulet–just saying it kind of makes my lips turn up in a snarl.

See, French food kind of pisses me off. Everyone talks about how oooh-fabulous and delicious it is, but, duh–what doesn’t taste fabulous when you cook it with 8 pounds of butter and a pint of meat stock, oh, and some wine? I read a recipe for braised celery in my copy of La Bonne Cuisine, and it involved simmering celery for, like, 4 hours in a pound of butter. I love butter, but c’mon. Give the celery a fighting chance!

Anyway, this is all to say I have always thought cassoulet was not all that. Because, uh, it’s beans and meat. What makes it superior to any other cuisine’s meat-and-beans combo? Nothin’ but the accent and the Gallic attitude with which it is preciously delivered to your table.

This led to a dilemma re: the cookbook, as Tamara wanted to include a cassoulet recipe. It was not a project I could really get behind, but we drew up a rough recipe based on the couple of times we’ve done it for SND-related things. We made it, and it was just as I remembered: a big mass of meat flavor, and nothing more. Palate-dulling.

After that, I took it upon myself to learn more about cassoulet. Maybe I just hadn’t had any really good stuff? I made a list of restaurants in NYC to visit, and I even checked out cheap fares to Toulouse. I checked Julia Child and Paula Wolfert out of the library. I didn’t go to Toulouse, but I did take a 12-hour trip to Boston, to sample some vouched-for quality cassoulet.

Dang, I ate some nasty shit. I will call foul on Les Halles, because I swear to god I tasted a maple-flavored breakfast link in my bowl. But maybe it was just the residual sugar from the Van de Kamp’s canned beans it was swimming in. I don’t know much, but I do know cassoulet should not be sweet.

I ate some experimental versions of cassoulet at some less-vaunted outlets. People, adding collard greens will not make this thing “healthy,” K?

I ate a pretty decent cassoulet at a random bistro in the upper 30s on the east side–one of those places that you wonder how it stays in business.

And the Boston cassoulet–very good, though my palate was a bit clogged with duck fat by then.

And I got to go to a party at Saveur, where I was served a fucking fantastic cassoulet–just hours after I’d read the recipe in the January issue, and wondered if something cooked for such a relatively short time and with such a minimum of fuss could be really good. It was–and bread crumbs, that’s where it’s at.

So I finally synthesized all this into my own pot of pork and beans.

Which I’ll tell you all about in the next post, rather than bog you down here.

Spoiler alert: Today I ate some leftover cassoulet for lunch, voluntarily.