Definitely Soup

So I decided that the stock, or maybe soup, or maybe stock, or maybe soup, that I was working on should be soup after all. Figured that after going out and buying stew beef, I may as well turn this directly into something I could eat. Grabbed another couple of carrots and another couple of sticks of celery out of the fridge, cut them up and added them to the pot. Went to the grocery store and picked up a couple of small potatoes and a shallot; peeled them, cut them up, threw them in with the rest, left it all to simmer for another couple of hours. Voila: soup!

And let me tell you... it was great! Here's what it looked like in the pot, after I'd eaten about half of it:


And in a bowl, ready to go:


I don't know that there's another expensive steak dinner in my near future, so I won't have steak bones to start with again, but I think I may try the same thing with just stew beef sometime. Maybe I'll buy some marrow bones too, because mmmmm marrow.

Adventures In... Stock? Soup? TBD...

About a week and a half ago, my cousin Mike and I went to Wolfgang's in Tribeca and had some steaks. (Well, had a steak, since Wolfgang's does "steak for N" in the same style as Peter Luger.) When we got done eating, there was this lovely t-bone with a fair amount of meat still on it, and it seemed like it would be a shame to just let it get thrown away, so I took it home planning to make beef stock out of it. (I had done the same thing a couple of years ago with a couple of Peter Luger steak bones, and figured maybe I could manage the same thing now.)

So I started the bone boiling in water, added a couple of carrots and a couple of stalks of celery and an onion, figuring that those were about the basic ingredients of beef stock. And salt and pepper, because everything needs salt and pepper. After about four hours of simmering the first night, I realized that the taste was very watery, and that I had to add more beef. So I went to Trader Joe's and bought a pound of stew meat, browned that in a hot pan and then put it into the pot with the rest. At this point it occurred to me that maybe instead of stock I could make beef vegetable soup, so... now I'm trying to decide whether to do that. I guess we'll see what I decide! Stay tuned...

Josh's New York

I think maybe I was the only one who watched the TV show Keen Eddie, which aired briefly on Fox in the summer of 2003. Keen Eddie was a fish-out-of-water cop show about titular New York policeman Eddie Arlette (played by Mark Valley, currently starring in the TV comic book adaptation Human Target), who has been assigned to work for a police precinct in London. The show also starred Julian Rhind-Tutt (perhaps best known as Angelina Jolie's sidekick in the first Tomb Raider movie) as Eddie's uptight English partner, Colin Salmon (of, among other things, three of the Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movies) as their no-nonsense superintendent, and Sienna Miller as Eddie's will-they-or-won't-they landlady.

One of the show's plot devices was this: In the pilot, which told the story of how Eddie bungled a case and was sent to London to clean up his mess, we see a few scenes in Eddie's apartment. On his wall, we see a map of New York (referred to, and maybe also labeled, "Eddie's New York"), with matchbooks from various establishments tacked up at (presumably) their locations in the city. During the pilot, there's a fire in the apartment, and the matchbooks and lots of other things burn to ashes, perhaps symbolizing the destruction of Eddie's career in New York. Once he's posted to London, he starts a new map, adding a new matchbook each episode corresponding to an establishment that was related to the episode's plot. (This was a plot device, at least, for the five or six episodes that aired before Fox pulled the plug. I haven't yet bought the DVDs to see whether they kept it up for the whole season, but I assume so.)

Well, I thought, that looked really cool, and I decided to emulate it. I picked up a wall-sized map of Manhattan (where I lived at the time, since supplemented by a Brooklyn map), tacked it up on my wall, and started taking matchbooks at restaurants and adding them to the map. (Over the past few years, due to the much-appreciated smoking ban, some restaurants have offered cards rather than matchbooks, but those work just as well, although they're sometimes larger.) Here's what the map looks like this evening, November 2, 2010, as I'm writing this:



Writing out a full list would be a tedious process and would just result in boring you, so I'll just include some of the highlights:

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, from the Harlem location of the Upstate NY institution:



Vintage New York Wine Bar (which sadly closed a couple of years ago), a wine bar/restaurant focusing on New York State-produced wines; they stood out by offering, instead of matchbooks or cards, a cork imprinted with their business information:



Delhi Brasserie, an Indian restaurant in Southwest London that I visited during my first trip over there back in the summer of 2006, shown at the eastern edge of Long Island because if I were to locate it precisely to scale it'd probably have to be two buildings over:



Florent, a Meatpacking District institution since the mid-'80s that closed a couple of years ago after being priced out by the blandification of the neighborhood:



I'll add new entries here for new matchbooks as I add them to the map, and perhaps also add pictures for some older ones if I'm stuck for things to write about here.

Dish Soaking Fail

I'm not sure how this happened, but... this happened:



And not through any action of my own, to be clear, but somehow a soup spoon and my vegetable peeler... attempted to mate? While they were soaking in a bowl in my sink? I don't really know. What I do know is that my attempts to separate them resulted in this:



And now I need to buy a new vegetable peeler.

I Wrote A Thing About Soccer

and if you are interested in that sort of thing, you should go read it. It's posted over at Craven Cottage Newsround, which is an excellent blog for fans of Fulham Football Club.

Wait... What?

So when I finally got around to firing up the Philly cheesesteak episode of Food Wars that aired a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that it pitted Pat's against... Tony Luke's? How on earth do you do an episode about cheesesteak and not have it be Pat's vs. Geno's? I mean, those are pretty clearly the two most famous places (if you Google "philly cheesesteak" you get the Wikipedia article, Pat's, and Geno's, in that order, as your top three hits), not to mention the fact that they're right across the street from each other would make for good TV. I almost didn't want to watch the episode because this seems so wrong, but I had to see whether Geno's even got mentioned - they didn't, and the shots of Pat's were framed so as not to show it either. I can only assume there must've been a contract dispute or something.

By the way, they changed the format (no longer a blind taste test, the owners of the two places come out and talk to the judges while they're eating; the host is now one of the judges and they structured it so that she cast the deciding vote, rather than a local, which was also odd), and the winner was Pat's, but that almost seems secondary to the strange choice of contestants.

(I should add that this has also been discussed on the show's official discussion forum, where multiple astute viewers also noted that Joey Vento of Geno's was in the show's introduction prior to the changes mentioned above.)

Chicken and Rice Follow-Up

You may recall that back in the spring I wrote about a trip to get food at 53rd Street and 6th Avenue, New York's most famous corner for chicken and rice. Because my friend and I didn't want to wait too long, we ordered food from the cart on the southeast corner of the intersection that is, I was informed, functionally identical to the more well-known cart on the southwest corner of the intersection that gets ridiculously long lines. You may also recall that I wasn't particularly impressed by the food we ate, and resolved to return and try the food at the more well-known cart at some point when the line wasn't so long.

As luck would have it, I had an opportunity to do so last night. I spent the better part of the evening on the roof deck at Ava Lounge on 55th (good drinks, gorgeous view, prices to match) celebrating a friend's birthday, without having had dinner beforehand, and afterward found myself right near the chicken and rice carts and needing food. And, even better, the famous cart was just setting up for business for the night and there wasn't any line at all. Ordered my chicken and rice, paid my $6, took my white sauce and my hot sauce, and sat down on a bench nearby to dig in while it was fresh.

And... meh. The food was the same as last time, and I still don't see the appeal. Granted, there's a lot of food for $6 and I always approve of a good value, and the hot sauce was just as hot as I remembered. But honestly, the chicken was bland, as was the rice. I couldn't say for sure since I don't spend a whole lot of time in Midtown, but I'd be inclined to guess that there's better food to be had at other carts right there in the immediate area; the food at the good ole Frito-Lay truck (since re-named "Gyro House", despite the fact that it does not reside in anything resembling a house) is certainly better. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad or anything, and if someone handed me a free chicken and rice platter I wouldn't turn it down, but I'm certainly not going to spend an hour waiting for it anytime soon.