rebecca LANDO

mikehudack:

Notre Dame.

About a block down the quai from Le Tour d’Argent, across from the Dame’s flying buttresses, is a little restaurant called La Rotisserie du Beaujolais. It’s owned by the same family as Le Tour and draws from Le Tour’s world-class wine cellar, but is small, casual, and eminently delicious. The côte de boeuf avec frites is enough to feed 3 people at least, and La Rotisserie has the best île flottante I’ve ever had. 

wcfoodies:

Hog Butchering Demo by The Piggery at Jimmy’s No. 43

Last week, I squeezed into the small but efficient kitchen of one of my favorite restaurants, Jimmy’s No. 43 on the Lower East Side, to help with the kickoff to Pig Week. Brad and Heather, the farmers and butchers of the Piggery, near Ithaca, NY, had brought down half a hog (plus the head, obviously) and some of their farm-made sausages and paté for the lunch, which we cooked up in batches and served buffet-style to the pig-hungry crowds. There was live bluegrass in the back for anyone who didn’t feel up to eating pig while watching a pig butchering.

So what is Pig Week, and why do we need one? Pig Week was a celebration not only of all things porcine, but also all things regional, sustainable, and farm-related. Jimmy Carbone, the owner of Jimmy’s, has always used his kitchen and menu to promote and support regional farmers and specialty produce and meats; over the past couple years, he’s expanded his farm-friendly philosophy to make Jimmy’s No. 43 a pickup location for a growing number of CSAs. 

And that’s what Pig Week was all about: promoting and celebrating an all-pork CSA, perhaps the first of its kind, from the Piggery. 

We’ll hopefully be doing more with the Piggery in the future, but here’s a little background information on the farm and their pigs. Brad and Heather have been butchering hogs for about 7 years and raising their own pigs for 5. They breed selectively, crossing old, endangered breeds of pigs with newer breeds, to create animals that are both healthier and tastier than any supermarket ham. They pasture raise their pigs to 9 months of age, which is about double the age of slaughter for factory farm-raised pigs.

Brad and Heather have such a strong respect for and bond with their pigs that at one point during the butchering, Brad stopped to take a closer look at the half hog in front of him to figure out which pig it was. It was an extremely poignant moment for the audience at Jimmy’s: here we were, with the farmer who’d raised the food we were eating, with a hog he knew personally before him.

And this is what’s so intrinsically fantastic about small, regional family farms: the connection from animal to farmer to consumer is something real and tangible. Factory farms may be large and efficient, but they can never foster that connection of respect and care you get from your CSA or market farmer, whether the farm produces pigs, beets, or oranges.

Stay tuned for my account of what it was like working in an actual kitchen, if only for a day, along with the recipes for the sandwiches we made for the farm-style Piggery lunch at Jimmy’s No. 43.

wcfoodies:

If you’re in New York, come by Jimmy’s No. 43 on Sunday for the Pig Week Kickoff! We’ll be filming the event, and I’ll even be helping out in the kitchen, cooking up delicious, locally-raised pork for you to eat. So come say hi, and maybe get yourself in an episode of Working Class Foodies!

Pork belly & mashed potatoes at the Breslin

Give yourself the chance to have dinner at the Breslin. Just don’t be stupid, like me.

My cousin Amy is in town this week. When Amy’s around, it means a nonstop bacchanalia at some of the best new restaurants in the city. It does not matter if it’s only Monday night. You will drink, and you will eat, and you will do so for hours.

Last night, Amy, her friend Matthew, and I started with a few rounds of cocktails and some appetizers at Rye House. Our bartender looked like she was maybe 21, but she poured a damn good drink and out-mixed her lumberjack-esque partner. The food was fine; the standout were pork and gruyere empanadas, the fragile dough threatening to give under the weight of the juicy filling.

At 9, we headed up to the Breslin. Even on a Monday night, there was an hour wait, so we had a drink at the Ace Hotel lobby bar. At 10, it was finally time for dinner.

We ordered a small terrine board and the pork belly & mashed potatoes for 2. The terrine board alone would have been enough to feed two moderately hungry people: 6 terrines, including headcheese, and an exceptionally smooth and delicate chicken liver pate. The guinea hen terrine was superb; the pickled tarragon and shallot salad and the pickled cauliflower that accompanied the board were a perfect foil to the dense, creamy fattiness of the terrines. I’d never had headcheese before, but dove right in, without any idea what to expect. The headcheese was mild; a study of texture rather than of flavor, with distinct regions of jelly, meat, and creamy fat. I prefer slightly bolder flavors, but I’d eat it again.

Honestly, I could have stopped there. I did not need the pork belly and mashed potatoes.

Now, that crappy cell phone picture doesn’t do this dish - or its size - justice. That bouche noelle of a pork belly was about 7” long and 4” high. The sticky, sweet crust on top was satisfyingly chewy - not a hard shell of browned cracklings, it was soft and pliant and melted sweetly in my mouth. The layers of meat below were cooked perfectly: fork-tender, no uneven texture, gently flavored. Three of us attacked this, and only got through about half of it. 4 bites is all you need.

The mashed potatoes, by contrast, were a huge disappointment. The slightly tart buttermilk flavor was nice, but they were uniformly thick and smooth - a gluey potato paste, and underseasoned, to boot. The fig gravy that accompanied the potatoes added a much-needed punch of salt and figgy sweetness, but gravy should never be served in a creamer; there was no way to avoid the thick pool of fat floating on top of the gravy.

We also shared a bottle of wine, which, I am sorry, I barely remember. It was French (an AOC burgundy), it was light, oaky and very slightly acidic, and it balanced all the fat pretty well.

The question isn’t whether or not I’d go back to the Breslin; the question is whether or not, after that pork belly, I’ll ever need to eat again. By all means, go and try it for yourself - just not on a Monday night, after 10pm. Not if you enjoy things like a good night’s sleep (which I did not get) and making it through the next day (which is already proving extremely difficult).

Delancey: Billy’s tomatoes with Willie’s corn, basil, & a shallot vinaigrette

(via thecookbookchronicles)