freeman's, food 2.0, odds/ends
While I generally think it’s bad form to blog about my job, I do have news, which is that I got hired full time. So to celebrate (OK, not intentionally, the plans were pre-existing) my friend J. and I went to Freeman’s and got drunk. Again, not intentionally; it’s just that we had to wait two hours and 45 minutes for a table.
Two hours and 45 minutes. You can drink three very strong cocktails verrrrry slowly in two hours and 45 minutes. Maybe four. Probably four. But at the 150-minute mark, getting a fourth cocktail might’ve seemed like defeat, an acknowledgment that we would, in fact, never get a table. But good triumphed over evil, and we did get a table, and then J., who is really up there as far as excellent dinner partners go, suggested we split a bottle of wine and picked a good one. So we drank that, and then ate the tastiest artichoke dip I’ve ever had (never would’ve thought to order that, but everyone around us was eating it), and then I had pork loin. It was delicious. Granted, anything would’ve been delicious after that much booze. Still, a great time and an excellent, rambling, nook-filled space; no wonder this place is so popular that you have to wait f’ing three hours to sit and eat fancy dip.
Watched the marathon on Sunday. Hung with mom and dad, ate dinner at the Mermaid Inn, more “celebrating” (again, not pre-planned). Finished Petropolis, which I really liked.
Read this about cooking/chemistry in the Times today.
Oh, and — we are on Artnet. Halloween pics. This is NOT my complete Angelina costume, by the way. I opted out of the Billy Bob tattoos and proper orphan slinging that night.
ramencore, continued
MS and I hit yet another ramen bar on Monday night — Setagaya Ramen, a Tokyo chain — after a stop at Uniqlo. We take the Japan theme very seriously. Anyway, we shared edamame and pickled vegetables; MS hit the regular (hot) ramen in shio broth; I had the tsukemen-style ramen, in which the noodles are served separately, cold, are a little thicker and need to be dipped in the hot broth. Both dishes were delicious, better than Minca for sure, though Momofuku’s berkshire pork ramen is tough to top, quality and tastewise. But this certainly seemed more authentic than Momofuku, less of an ordeal, and cheaper too. And you don’t have to punch someone to get a seat.
highlights reel
DCA and I tried the soup dumplings at Joe’s Shanghai in Chinatown (try the turnip buns). Inspired by this story, I drank real absinthe at MS’s apartment until late, listening to music; a great meal of small plates and sparkling red wine at Il Posto Accanto, in the East Village. The early Thanksgiving dinner that CDA’s (not to be confused with DCA) roommate Ann cooked — more Ann! A post-apocalyptic nautical-themed loft party in Greenpoint. An erotic fictionreading in DUMBO. The entire pan’s worth of brussel sprouts I bought at the farmers’ market and roasted for dinner.
pizza-making effort totally foiled by lazy/rebellious yeast
I tore into that new Cuisinart to make the fried pizza recipe from Mark Bittman’s column in the NYTimes last week — the first time I’ve ever made dough solo. (I did this in spite of my belief that I’m not temperamentally suited to baking because you need to be so careful and precise upfront, whereas with cooking you can generally be messy and make adjustments as you go.) I was in Carroll Gardens that day anyway and so I went to an Italian grocery (the butcher shop I wanted to go to, the one on Court with the sign that just reads “PORK,” was closed) and bought good prosciutto and mozzarella. There seemed to be something off about the dough as I was making it; turns out the problem was that it was about to refuse to rise. No rising. I cooked it anyway, because my friend V. was over and we were hungry and we’d already eaten the brussel sprouts I’d made. It was edible, but too dense and chewy — almost like Elio’s. My advice to all aspiring pizza-dough makers is to be sure your yeast doesn’t completely screw you over.
possible realization of dinner party dream?
My friend and neighbor CDA’s roommate is an amazing cook — I had dinner at their place on Saturday, and she seemed to have just kind of whipped up squash soup topped a turnip and squash mash, pasta with Italian sausage in a butter sauce, and for dessert, pumpkin cupcakes. I asked if she would someday consider coming to my house and cooking and we can put another table in my dining room and have a big dinner party and mix up the guest list and have some sort of organizing theme or principle and make proper cocktails. Almost like the underground restaurants in last week’s Times. (More almost like our longheld dream of hosting the 977 Discussion Series, hatched when we just moved in, wherein JR, LT, and I were going to email Thurston Moore and Jonathan Safran-Foer to see if they would respond to a request from a group of kids in Brooklyn to attend a roundtable discussion, salon-style, in their apartment. (By “their” I mean “ours.”) )
