Billy's Bakery

Today has been one of those days when you are woken up at 6 AM by the sounds of garbage trucks and migrating birds and everything goes downhill from there. The train was packed, at the deli I got white toast instead of whole wheat toast with my scrambled eggs (i know i'm being nitpicky, but I am very particular about my breakfast sandwiches and I am not going to apologize for that!) And THEN at work, I come down with a severe case of writer's block and i'm sitting in front of my computer staring blankly at the screen and getting annoyed because i can't read my boss' handwriting and you know how there are those days when everyone at work is getting on your nerves, for no particular reason? All the while thinking about how much work I have to get done by the end of the day. Ugh.

So, I decided to march out of my office and over to Billy's Bakery on 9th Ave to buy myself a chocolate cupcake with chocolate buttercream icing. Even though I am still a little pissy for no reason, this perfect little mound of chocolate, butter and sugar has made me feel much better. The cupcake looks and tastes exactly like the cupcakes at Sugar Sweet Sunshine. Creamy icing, moist and cakey cake. They also offer yellow cupcakes w/ vanilla icing, red velvet, german chocolate and carrot cake. Goodbye.

Chinatown Ice Cream Factory

The Chinatown Ice Cream Factory is a small, easy to miss shop located on Bayard at Mott Street. I went on a Saturday night and the line was out the door. The shop offers "regular flavors" like Lychee, Red Bean, Green Tea, Black Sesame, Chocolate Pandan, Zen Butter and "exotic flavors" such as Pistachio, Mint Chip, Coffee, Vanilla and Strawberry. The Chocolate Pandan was amazing. According to Wikipedia, Pandan is a type of tree whose leaves are used in Southeast Asian cooking to add a distinct aroma to rice and curry dishes such as nasi lemak, kaya preserves and desserts such as pandan cake. Pandan is said to be a restorative, deodorant, indolent and phylactic, promoting a feeling of wellbeing and acting as a counter to tropical lassitude. It may be chewed as a breath sweetener or used as a preservative on foods.

The chocolate was rich and creamy and the pandan added a level of nutty flavor that's hard to describe. All I know is that I want more and I need to make a trip back to Chinatown to get the another scoop of the Chocolate Pandan really soon.

Chilean Sea Bass with Cauliflower Polenta and Asparagus

I got my hands on some really fancy totally awesome Chilean Sea Bass (courtesy of Merrill Lynch) this weekend and I wanted to use it as the centerpiece of a great meal. I cooked with the fish with an Asian-ish marinade and paired it with a polenta side dish I whipped up on the spot and a few stalks of braised asparagus. It came out pretty well, although the polenta needed a lot more salt and the fish marinade could have used a lot less mirin (turns out mirin can be cloyingly sweet.) The meal was a wild carnival of tastes, textures and colors!

First the recipe for the sea bass marinade (adapted from a Bon Appetit recipe)
-1 tablespoon of miso (white or red)
-1/2 tablespoon of mirin
-1 tablespoon of soy sauce
-juice from one lemon
-2 dollops of yellow mustard

Whisk all the ingredients together, pour over the fish and bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes
Would probably work well with salmon as well.

Now, the recipe for my very own baked cauliflower polenta:
-1/2 head of cauliflower, cut up into small florets
-2 cloves of garlic, sliced into large pieces
-1/2 cup of course corn meal
-1 1/2 cup of water
-salt
-generous amount of parmesan cheese
-optional: shredded sharp cheese, like a gruyere or something

- mix the garlic and cauliflower and steam for about 20 minutes, or until the cauliflower is soft
using a potato masher, mash up the cauliflower into small bits, stir in a pinch few pinches of salt
- bring water to a boil, add the corn meal and cook for about 8 minutes (you might have to add more water if the polenta is starting to look really thick and dry)
- combine the mashed cauliflower, polenta, parmesan, generous amounts of salt and the optional sharp cheese
- transfer the mixture into 4 greased ramekins (if you don't have any ramekins, a small baking pan will probably work)
- bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes

Turn the ramekin upside down onto your plate and voila you have the cutest little mound of baked polenta!

Atlantic Antic

This post is a week late, so lets see if I can remember everything. Amar, Jordan, Ursula and I strolled through the Atlantic Antic last Sunday, tasting all the offerings of the festival vendors and of the restaurants residing on Atlantic Ave between 4th ave and Hoyt street. First the good: Key Lime pie, Red Velvet cake, mozzarepa (surprisingly!), and the bad: corn dog (that thing was as dry as a bag of popcorn) and cucumber-flavored lemonade (vegetable does not mix well with lemonade.)

We started with veggie samosas from a Thai (or was it Malaysian?) restaurant close to 4th ave. They were pretty good, the samosas tasted strongly of curry sauce and were awesomely greasy and drippy. It was a little hard to eat these things and walk at the same time...so I think we were all walking around with our mouths wide open, hunched over our little styrofoam plates (see picture.)

Next up: mozzarepas, the bi-racial child of an arepa and a mozzarella cheese stick. I was a little skeptical, but one bite and my uncertainty - over a food that sounds like something Rachel Ray would come up with - quickly disappeared. Cause that thing was good! Gooey cheese sandwiched between soft cornmeal pancakes...a little bland perhaps but also oddly satisfying. (Hey, nice mani!)

I made a beeline for the stand that was selling red velvet cake. No complaints here...moist and rich, with a nice cool cream cheese icing. This cake was pretty good, but i think i still prefer Sugar Sweet Sunshine's red velvet cake with chocolate almond-flavored icing. I like the cream cheese icing, but i like a chocolate icing better. Also, Sugar Sweet's cupcake is more dense.
And finally, Key Lime Pie from Steve's Authentic Key Lime in Red Hook. I'd heard a lot about his key lime pies and had been wanting to try one for a long time. It was good - not as amazing as I had originally expected. The pie was very tart and although I'm not sure if authentic key lime pies are supposed to be so tart, but I definitely prefer pies that don't taste so much like a sour patch kid.

It was really interesting to walk down Atlantic and see how the ethnic/cultural make up of the neighborhoods change so quickly and so suddenly...from West Indian to yuppiehood to Middle Eastern to old, rich Brooklyn.