So this week I did something any restaurant cook does on a daily basis. I made the same dish again, wanting it to taste exactly the same. I was supposed to bring it to my cousin’s last week, but we cancelled because of snow. So, for this Saturday, I wanted to make the same dish again. I used a touch less brown sugar, chopped the prunes in quarters rather than halves, and, most differently, used sirloin steak tips instead of bottom round chunks.
The stew came out great. I needed to cook it closer to 2 hours rather than the one the recipe calls for, but the meat was cooked through and tasty. I think the marbling in the sirloin gave a juicier meat. It was an interesting experiment, since I am not a restaurant cook and most of the time, I tend to improvise to a greater or lesser degree.
The irony, of course, is that Beth Ann cancelled me this time because she was sick. Still, the stew turned out great and I brought it to Gid and Katie’s, where it quickly vanished.
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Wok Hai and Frozen Pizza
by Don on January 14, 2010
All it takes is a morning of winter thaw and I’m immediately remembering the beach. Summers when I was a boy, my family went to Far Rockaway beach. Rows of tiny bungalows, a boardwalk and a beach. For an apartment house boy, it was heaven. The boardwalk extended from Beach 1st street to around Beach 168th street, wood for almost all of its length, and once a summer all of us used to get up early and bike to the end of the boardwalk (the long way). You actually reached the end–the metal pipe railing extended straight across it. We’d rest, eat the sandwiches our mothers had prepared, then bike back.
Stone jetties broke the waves every 5 blocks or so. My friend Freddie and I used to sit at the end of the Beach 35th St jetty, as far out as we could go, and watch the spray break right in front of us. You could get far enough out that the spray never hit you, but burst right up in front of where you sat. At night, I’d turn around and watch the lights of the arcades and fast food places throw rippling red, turquoise, amber, white, and blue lines on the waves. The carnival lights on the water… for real.
After a while, we’d pick out way back to the beach, then hit one of the food places for pizza. Truth be told, it wasn’t great pizza–frozen crust, cooked in a small square oven that sat on a counter–but it came out bubbling hot. We called them scorchers and I loved the dance of taking small bites of molten cheese without searing the roof of my mouth.
When I took a class at the CIA, one of the rules was to serve “hot food hot and cold food cold.” The Chinese have a term-wok hai or wok hay–that refers to the smell and the taste that a searingly hot wok imparts to a stir fried dish. I love when a dish comes to the table bubbling and hot. I sneak tiny tastes until that perfect moment when it has barely cooled enough to eat. Thirty seconds later, it is warm and the life has gone out of it, no matter how good it still tastes. Grab life when it’s ready I suppose is the lesson. Remember to breathe when the air smells tantalizingly of humus.
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