Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream!

It's officially Spring, and now that fruits are finally starting to taste the way they should, that means its time to dust off the old ice cream maker and start making ice creams and sorbets!

 
First concoction of the year is strawberry ice cream. It has three ingredients -- strawberries, sugar, and cream. Unfortunately, it also requires three outlets -- for a KitchenAid, a food processor, and the ice cream maker. 

It's pretty simple: Slice a pound of strawberries, cover them in about six tablespoons of sugar and let it sit for at least an hour. Blend in a blender. Whip up about 3/4 of a small container of cream until its thick enough to fold over. Add a bit of vanilla extract if you want. Then add in the strawberry mixture, mix to a nice swirl and pour into the ice cream maker.

Then enjoy the most intensely strawberry-flavored ice cream there is!

Food Art at the Modern

It was last summer that I visted the Modern (at the MOMA) for an amazing tasting menu with wine pairings. The service here was top-notch (should I mention that they very quickly and very discreetly brought me a band-aid within seconds of my inquiry? Let's not ask why), the wines matched the notes of each course amazingly well, but most of all, the presentation was absolutely beautiful!

These pics are highlights from the separate tasting menus that Rob and I enjoyed. There was the foie gras terrine, yellowfin tartare, diver scallops, escargot ravioli... then it starts to get hazy. Let's just enjoy these very colorful and droolworthy pictures from the evening:

After dessert, they rolled out a very amazing dessert cart and encouraged us to try as much as we wanted. A very cruel trick, considering we were all stuffed to the brim. The balsamic lollipop (the only thing I could even consider trying) was really memorable -- the vinegar was surprisingly nice as an after-meal sucker. The "lobster cappuccino," on the other hand, didn't have the same effect, though I know some people that disagree.

If you ever find yourself at the MOMA, stop by next door, grab a seat at the bar, enjoy some free truffled popcorn and order a hinny kick (it's Alice's favorite, as well!). It's a fantastic introduction to this amazing restaurant.

The Modern
9 W. 53rd St.
212-333-1220

Weekend Fix at Blue Bottle

I'm not a coffee snob during the week, but when Saturday and Sunday come around I need a smoother, craftier caffeine fix than the usual grande bold blend from Starbucks. Even though its a bit of a walk, and sometimes its a bit chilly out, and there's ALWAYS a line out the door, I head to Blue Bottle Coffee in Williamsburg to get a special weekend treat before catching the L train to Manhattan. 

Even when its cold out, I have to get a cold-brewed New Orleans iced coffee. It's a bold and flavorful, but with a solid pour of milk (they balance it themselves), its super smooth, a little sweet and adequately creamy. Just check out the deep, nutty-brown color of that iced coffee. Doesn't get much better than that! I only wish they served it in a normal iced coffee cup with a straw.

They also have a fantastic hot chocolate featuring cacao crafted from the bearded Mast Brothers down the street.

I still have yet to try other drip coffees here, but so far, the New Orleans is a winner.

Blue Bottle Coffee
160 Berry Street (betw. N. 4th and N. 5th), Brooklyn, NY

718-387-4160

My 100th Post!

I haven't blogged in the past month or so because it was really hard to find a spot that would one-up my 99th post of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. I've also been spending so much more time in the kitchen than in any restaurant. So I guess it makes sense to do something different here and post about a few food adventures I've had here in the 'ol Greenpoint apartment.

I've been using America's Test Kitchen recipe book as my home cooking Bible. I seriously love this book, not only because every recipe has come out amazingly well, but because they write a little "Why This Recipe Works" blurb for every single recipe. It gives great perspective on why one method or set of ingredients works better than another. And its made it even easier to go from Bisquick and cake mixes to the from-scratch school of thought.

Baking is a million times more fun when you're involved in combining every single basic ingredient. When making brownies, cupcakes or other chocolately desserts, its fun to melt butter and hand-chopped dark chocolate in a glass bowl over a low simmering pot of water. Just make sure the glass you use is tempered -- made that mistake (oops).

The kitchen can get messier than normal, but its definitely a more satisfying experience do it the longhand way.

We snagged my parents' pasta roller and ordered a ravioli maker a few weeks ago. The roller is still attached to the side of our kitchen table in case we want to make more pasta on a whim. The hand-made egg linguinis and other Italian basics are good, but ATK's 4-cheese lasagna with creamy bechamel sauce was a complete revelation. The best ravioli we've cranked out so far is the lamb and spinach; the butternut squash mixed with ricotta wasn't so bad, either.

Breakfast on the weekends has also been pretty good lately. It's been just chilly enough to deter us from going out to brunch, so I like to make the blueberry pancakes recipe from the ATK book. I add a little bit more lemon juice to the milk and let it sit 'til its thick; sometimes I'll add powdered sugar or ricotta cheese directly to the batter to lighten it up a bit. It's still a little early for fresh blueberries (plus, the best blueberries for pancakes are in Maine at the end of August anyway) so I use the frozen kind. They still look pretty while they thaw and drain.

And then there's the freestyle after-work snack. Rosemary pork roast and speck from Eataly, a medium-cooked egg, a few slices of Swiss cheese, a little whole grain mustard on lightly toasted rye, with a final drizzle of truffle oil. I think I'm getting the hang of this cooking thing!

Blue Hill at Stone Barns Part 2

The five-course tasting menu at Blue Hill was truly the perfect amount of food. We got to try all sorts of different flavors and farm-fresh offerings without stretching the limits of our stomachs too much. And while five courses might sound underwhelming, it really meant six amuses, three savory courses, a bread course, another savory course, then we added on a cheese course before dessert #1 and then the dessert amuse. It sounds like a lot, but most everything was just a bite or two of something fresh and unique. It was exactly what I was hoping for.

They pour a mean cocktail at Blue Hill. Much of the drink menu was house-infused, and I was intrigued. I had a perfectly balanced sparkling drink with beet infused vodka, Rob had some kind of herbal elixir. Thanks to this drink menu there are all sorts of science-y looking Mason jars of vegetables floating in vodka in our kitchen now.

And now, the food!

Amuse 1: Veggies on nails. Carrots, watermelon radish, cauliflour, and something leafy and green. I should mention right here that they didn't really do a great job of explaining any of the ingredients in the dishes... kind of disappointing. Anyway, I thought this presentation was really cute and fun, the veggies were insanely fresh and crunchy.

Amuse 2: Carrot juice shooters served in dirt. Kind of like a high-class V8.

Amuse 3: Dried veggie chip tree. There was sweet potato, and regular potato, but none touched the salty perfection of the green kale chip.

Amuse 4: Mini beet sliders served in a glass of seeds. Beety perfection. Unsurprisingly, it went very well with my drink.

Amuse 5: "Potato and leek." I don't know how they got it to taste like perfect melty tofu that dissolved into something that tasted like onion dip, but wow.

Amuse 6: Just a taste of charcuterie from the farm.

Course 1: Veggie pizza. Wood fired dough with cottage cheese and all sorts of farm vegetables. The mix of textures here was the most interesting to me: chewy, creamy, crunchy.

Course 2: Hake with seafood salad. We were instructed to scrape the seafood salad (lobster, shoots, octopus maybe?) into the hake and mix it up with the green sauce. This wasn't my favorite (it was pretty fishy, and parts of the salad were a little chewy) but I really did like the green sauce. Wish I knew what was in it. This really is a terrible food blog.

Course 3: This morning's soft poached egg in winter vegetables. I didn't know it at the time, but this was the dish I'd dream about. It's weird, because at first I was a little put off by the practically raw egg. Something about the way the eggy, watery texture mixed in with the herbalized oaty stuff below was really appealing. It's like poetry, right? I'm really regretting trying to write this without having any clue what I'm talking about.

Mid-course of bread. Hot, crusy onion bread from Balthazar Bakery served with butter from Ronnybrook farms and two kinds of infused salts -- celery and arugula. Finally, something I know! I should also mention that I had to listen in when they told the people next to us what it was and how they did it. The salts were a little overpowering, but a good idea. Honestly the hot bread with the melted butter just by itself was pretty perfect.

Course 4: Meat plate. (Clockwise from top left) Pork belly, polenta cake, pork loin, pork leg. Served with swiss chard and sweet onions. The leg was easily my favorite, followed by the loin. Very clean tasting pieces of meat, cooked to perfection. Swiss chard worked really well here.

Cheese Course: I added this on in a moment of weakness. It's not part of the traditional five-course farmer's feast. I don't care. It was good. The one on the left is a sharp cheddar, served with a sweet quince.... (he was hesitant to say "paste") to balance it out. The one on the right was creamy, I forget exactly what it was, served with bitter greens that enhanced its pastoral flavor. Beneath that was something we never quite figured out. Candied orange peel? It was sweet, gingery, citrus and tangy.

Dessert course: Maple ice cream with chocolate brioche. I need to learn to make molten cakes like this. I really liked the flour-y oats that were sprinkled on the plate. Made me think of tasting the raw ingredients left behind when you're baking. What, no one else does that?

Final dessert course, aka the Go The Hell Home Already course: little bites of chocolate with tiny chocolate milkshakes. The icey drinks were barely sweet, tasted like freshly melted, maybe 80% bitter chocolate and heavy cream. OK by me.

Aside from not really knowing anything about what I ate (I suppose the farm tour is supposed to be self-explanatory?), this was truly a top-notch meal. Two days later my mind still sleepily wanders back to that fresh morning egg. I'd love to come back here in the summertime to see how the menu has changed. At $105 for five courses, its really pretty reasonable. The trick would be the transportation and maybe lodging... I'll have to crunch some numbers.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns
630 Bedford Rd

Pocantico Hills, NY 10591
(914) 366-9600

Blue Hill at Stone Barns Part 1

We really needed to get away this weekend, so I planned an impromtu weekend trip to Tarrytown so we could check out Blue Hill! We visited pigs, chickens, sheep and the greenhouse before heading up to snag bar seats for a 5-course tasting meal.

More to come...

Ice Wine + Flowers