just a taste (in which our heroine donates her body to culinary science)

So this morning I got up early and went to yoga, and we did lots of twisting which is very cleansing, and the teacher said, "be sure to drink a lot of water and eat fresh foods today!" because of all the cleansing, and I felt very cleansed and also thinner, and then I came home and took a shower and drank a lot of water and then my one true love and I went to the Great Pork Festival.

We shook hands with all the barbeque people. We compared notes and shared bites with other chefs and assorted foodbiz people. We stuck our noses in smokers.

Our Virgil on this voyage through the Madison Park barbeque inferno was a food writer of our acquaintance. Josh is a pro--the real deal. This is a man who has strong feelings about the consistency of tinned chocolate pudding; who knows the history of the taco; who can talk with equal authority about the minutae of esoteric Japanese seasonal cuisine and the tiniest details of Texas vs Carolina pig-smoking technique. And he's literally written the book on meat.

Josh had been eating pork and drinking bourbon for approximately 36 hours. His eyes were bloodshot, his fingers swollen. Still he soldiered on, tasting, sharing, inhaling smoke and nitrates, talking at top speed. He was tireless, unflagging. A true professional.

At our first stop--a station belonging to a Texas bbq outfit which opened an outpost in the city this very weekend--he handed me a brontosaurus-sized rib, dotted with great restraint with sauce. He eyed me approvingly as I gnawed on the thing like a hound--then critically, disappointed, as I failed to polish it off. "Is it too chewy?" he asked, voice full of concern. "Should we get you another one?"

At our second pulled-pork station, he reached up--risking his fingers as the bbq chef’s scimitar ravaged the pork butt on the cutting block--and grabbed me a handful of pure fat, still bubbling, held together with the brown, crackling skin. "Taste this," he urged, with enthusiasm.

My sweetie looked at me expectantly.

This was research!

So I did.

Such is the glamorous life of the chef's sig oth.

The other weekend, we went for a long walk (very healthy!), down through the Lower East Side, and then around and through the Seaport, and up through Battery Park City. We contemplated walking across the Williamsburg Bridge, but then we were just in Williamsburg a couple of weekends before.

Good trip, that Williamsburg one. We went to this little indoor-flea-market-type-place (where they were also selling vintage buttons, with, like, Blondie on 'em, and Iggy Pop, and of course the classic Never Mind the Bollocks one and the timeless masterpiece checkerboard-black-and-white The Beat--and I thought about it--but would I look, like, cool--or like I was still wearing my Never Mind the Bollocks button from the first time round? I mean, I see junkies in the East Village all the time still wearing their leathers and spikes and eyeliner and sometimes even their mohawks from back in the day--and they’re still extremely...hip--but in an East-Village-punk-authentique kind of way, like the Last Living Confederate Widow or some such, especially now that CBGB is gone. (Maybe they should give them some sort of official cultural title? Historical Ambassadors?) But then I saw this woman the other day, forty-something, in purple stirrup pants, and leg warmers, and eyeliner inside the bottom eyelid. Without irony. Does she notice that suddenly everyone is dressed like her again? Or did she just never notice when the thing died the first time? Bet she has Flashdance on her iPod.)

So I didn’t buy the buttons. My sweetie bought a t-shirt with skulls, and then we stopped in at this classic-diner-type-hipster-place. (The guy at the counter next to me was reading one of the His Dark Materials books. And there were several men in checked shirts and ironic glasses, which I thought were so over already but I guess the proto-Devo geekboy look is just perennially cool, and they were with tall thin women with swingie hair and interesting boots and sometimes with hats, and also there were at least three women in overalls). We had coffee and an appetizer, so to speak--just some fries, because they have legendary fries, and a bite or two of the pie. Which is said to be truly great pie.

This was research. For my honey's work.

Also it was to tide us over while we were waiting for our reservation at Peter Luger’s--you know, that's the steak place? with the ancient old-school Brooklyn waiters with the slicked-back hair, and the no décor? And it's stockbrokers having hair-of-the-dog, and families celebrating birthdays, and a couple where he wears the gold and she has very expensive breasts? We were very restrained, at Peter Luger's. Because that's the right thing to do, and also it' a fortune. And after all this was just lunch. So instead of ordering mammoth zillion-dollar steaks, we had burgers. But then we ordered the onion rings, which are I mean really great but still--but they are truly really great--and then also we add in a couple of beers and then maybe a couple more, and then plus we have to have dessert so we have dessert and with dessert we need to have a cup of coffee--so anyway then it’s a hundred bucks plus tax and tip and also I’m feeling maybe a little had-it-up-to-here (here being somewhere in the vicinity of your gag reflex) and all we’ve had is lunch, a coupla burgers.

But they were truly great burgers.

And if my sweetie decides to open a steakhouse one day--or a burger joint (very hot right now in New York--have I told you about our extensive burger joint research? Maybe later)--or perhaps a diner--all of this will be very useful and important!

So anyway. We’d just been to Williamsburg, so when we got to the bridge we kept going down towards the bottom of Manhattan--past the funky little bars and bodegas on Avenue C, past the projects and bike shops, past those weird co-op apartments looming up next to the bridge--all the way down to Chinatown and around to the Seaport.

Very healthy, walking. Very good for you. Burns many calories. And it was hot and we were sweating so much we had to stop for a couple bottles of water along the way, so it was all very cleansing. Like a bikram yoga class. Only not boring. And not led by a man dressed all in white and wearing a Rolex and sitting on a platform above eye level, cross-legged, wearing a Madonna headpiece-thing.

So by the time we got down to the Seaport--not the touristy bit with the Sharper Image store and that place with the Bodies exhibit (all those dead political prisoners from China pumped full of chemicals and stripped naked without their skins, not terribly appetizing in my opinion)--but the other bit, with the refurbished colonial buildings, really pretty and cobblestoney and Olde New Amsterdam-style out front and then teeny tiny high-tech apartments for Wall Street jockeys inside--we were ready for lunch. And conveniently, there's this little pizza shop, which a different food writer had said was the Real Thing. Straight from Italy it is, except that the server was this twentysomething blonde cornfed person who kept playing with her hair as she told us the specials and who said her mom had a lot of opinions about the pizza.

And, I mean, we’d worked so hard! We were starving, almost. Must have sweated out six or seven pounds at least!

And it's possible that my one true love will be putting pizza on the menu soon. So this is extremely important and relevant research.

So then we ordered two pies. Small ones, I mean. Personal-size.

And then it was hot (just like Italy: no air conditioning: very environmentally appropriate). And water just somehow never really cools you down.

So then we ordered a couple of beers. Which were ice-cold! So that was a good choice.

And then just a couple of sorbetti and gelati to finish. Because you need something sweet after you eat pizza.

We considered the pizza, and our opinion, and the food writer's opinion. Our opinion: eh. The crust didn't have enough salt, and so on. So then we were thinking about who's got the best pizza in the city. So then we had to find out.

This is not the sort of thing that can wait till the next time you happen to feel like pizza at an appropriate mealtime. Or even until you're hungry again. It's important.

(Things move fast, in the culinary world. And if my one true love missed it? Disaster. Potentially.)

So then we went to this little ultra-modern ultra-Euro pizzeria on the Lower East Side where the pies are all out on display behind the counter, and they were good and all but not fresh in a freshfresh kind of way. And then we went to this famous pizzeria in what used to be Little Italy and is now NoHo, with a serious old coal-burning oven from before there were laws about such things, but the cheese...huh. And then we detoured out to Brooklyn after all, because there's this old dude who makes pizzas by hand, one at a time, and it's all very atmospheric and Brooklynesque and authentique, but it takes forever and in my opinion the pizza lacks a certain something, since you can't actually taste the part where you wait in line. So then we went to this other place in our own neighborhood: straight from Naples, watery Italian beer and all, and it seemed like every Italian in Manhattan under the age of forty was there, and our server wore skinny black jeans and a hot-pink studded punk belt, and Italian music videos played on the tv in the back (lots of blue light and neon, endless ballads played by men alone on stage with guitars, then techno), and that, we decided, was the best pizza.

We had four different pies to make sure.

Now we're sure.

And we drank red wine which is very good for you and healthy.

They had dessert, but we didn't want dessert there because--you know--Italian desserts--so then we went down the street to that great little bakery and had these gorgeous dark-chocolate tarts.

And then we walked home!

So that was very healthy, the walking.

And the next day my sweetie had been reading about this fried chicken place, because he'd made some fried chicken for another food writer he knew, and the food writer had said of course that my sweetie's fried chicken was the best--but that there was this new place uptown which was really, really, good--so then, you know, we had to check it out.

Research.

(In our opinion, highly over-rated. For the record. We tried the barbeque, too. So-so. But we haven't tried the fried chicken everywhere else, so we can't seriously come to any conclusions. Yet.)

And then there was also this new gelato place that opened in the West 70s?

But I mean we walked there. From 110th Street. So the fried chicken was totally gone by then.

And for ten blocks at least there was a street fair (people selling tube socks three for $5; potted houseplants; funnel cakes; handmade handbags from Guatemala and also from Brooklyn; brand-name bras). So that right there was like speed-walking an obstacle course. Which is like at least three hundred calories more, all that ducking and weaving and sidestepping and hopping over (strollers) and unexpected full stops. It was interval training! Which is extremely good for you calorie-burning-wise.

So by the time we got to the gelato we were totally allowed to have whatever we wanted, after all that hard work in the heat, and we ordered Small anyway because we were being so restrained. But the gelato had this really chemically taste and my sweetie's melted without warning (all over his shoe in fact), so it was not a satisfying eating experience. (Which is not to say that we didn't finish it. Because the thing about frozen desserts? They change at different temperatures. And what if we didn't finish, and the chemically taste was only at the most-frozen or medium-frozen point, and actually at the least-frozen point this was the best gelato we'd ever tasted, and my sweetie didn't know, and then he ignored that technique?) And so it wasn’t entirely surprising that later--after dinner--we decided all at once that the only thing to do was to get up and go get some gelato from that place on Mott Street that we love!

Mostly for comparison's sake.

So then we did.

And we had to take a cab down because it was closing, but we ran from the cab a full block to the store, and then we walked all the way back, fast! So that was like we ate nothing, really. Nothing, with sprinkles. Rainbow ones.

And then of course we were very healthy all week. We exercised. We ate salad.

By Friday we were almost see-through!

So then on Saturday, after breakfast (oatmeal--very healthy), Josh picked us up in his '82 white Caddie DeVille with vinyl seats and red velvet upholstery for the drive out to Red Hook, to these famous soccer fields, where these very serious leagues of guys from Latin America play every weekend, but nobody watches the soccer because really it's all about the vendors who set up these tents around the edge of the park and sell homemade Latino food. Josh was doing a video blog of this other chef who makes Mexican food, and we were just along for the ride, so to speak--for research purposes. In case for instance my honey decides one day that he's going to open a Latin American restaurant. Or maybe serve Mexican specials. You never know.

It was getting on 11:30 or so--almost lunchtime--so Josh had this excellent idea, and first we stopped at Katz's Deli on the Lower East Side, for some "forspeis," which in this context means "New York Jewish appetizer consumed before eating tacos." So we had a couple hotdogs and some knoblewurst and a bag of fries, but shared between four of us so it was like nothing! Right?

And then we went out to Red Hook, and the park was crawling with Brooklyn hipsters-with-kids and Williamsburg post-collegiate babies in ironic shoes and lesbian couples dressed like 1987 the first time round and Latino families from the ‘hood, all sharing space at picnic tables and crowded on benches under the tents, staying out of the sun and eating enormous platefuls of fresh-fried food and eyeing one another’s children. We started with these huge tacos, goat and beef, with four different salsas, and aqua frescas to wash it down--hibiscus, and this other one that was just like rice pudding. It was a thousand degrees which somehow made us more hungry, even though it's supposed to make you feel full, so then we had some more of those, because we were really just there to taste but I mean. And the vendor, she made us this special dish consisting of something's knuckles--beef maybe or pork--with this vinegar sauce and cheese on top. And that was just the first stop, and there were like fifteen tents!

But we just--you know--tasted. For research purposes.

And on the way to the car--we were going to make a stop at this little wine store down the way, just past the projects, where the owner has her own whiskey made back home in Kentucky; and then we would have a drink maybe at this other place because it was 90 degrees and New York humid which is like the tropics, and as the English discovered during colonial times, gin-based drinks are ideal on days like that for warding off tropic-type insect-borne diseases (West Nile, etc), but then it was closed so we went back to Manhattan and had mojitos at the other chef's restaurant, and he had the cooks bring out just a couple of little things, tacos with cheese and beef and whatever, to compare his kind of Mexican cooking with the street-food kind of Mexican cooking from the soccer park. Research, it was. My sweetie learned so much!--anyway, we were walking to the car in Red Hook, and we passed this family hanging out at their car, and the kids, they were eating bright-orange chip-like things, from a factory and in a color not found in nature, and they were only a half-block away from the soccer fields! And I said, "oh, that was the saddest thing, wasn’t it?" and the other chef, he goes, "yeah, you know, childhood obesity--it's so sad that parents don’t know how to help their kids eat right! 'Cause that's a lifetime of bad eating habits, there, man."

And we all agreed it was very sad.

We walked home from the other chef's restaurant. All the way from the Lower East Side. At a fairly good clip. Considering.

Back at the Pork Fest, we had reached the end of the line: whole baby pig, marinated in vinegar Carolina-style (so much lighter than Texas sauce!), smoked for fourteen hours, till it was so tender the meat just fell off the bone. Chopped, shredded, served up still hot on an egg-yellow hamburger bun, with a side of vinegar slaw.

And also something flat and crackling which might have been skin but which was probably just a huge slab of fat.

My sweetie learned so much about barbeque styles, and smoking times, and vinegar versus sauce, and regional specialties!

And then we walked home, and we thought we'd better have some whiskey, just to clear the arteries, so to speak.

And then after a little lie-down (two or three hours. Very good for the digestion), we had dinner. Salad! Very light and healthy.

Josh was still there when we left, still working the Porkfest, but he was getting ready to head out. He had a date last night, he said. He was thinking about cooking a pork chop.

back to the rabbit hole...