The Brooklyn Flea

All New York City foodies owe themselves a trip to the Brooklyn Flea, a weekend market that celebrates the creative culture of Brooklyn. I made my first visit this past Saturday, and was highly impressed with the goods on offer by the vendors. As with any flea market, there is a high amount of junk for sale at the Brooklyn Flea, but with some patience, one can find some great-looking vintage clothing, handmade jewelery, and antique furniture. Of course, I was there for the food, of which I found very little junk. For twenty dollars total, my significant eater and I were able to eat our way through the Brooklyn Flea. It was a great way to spend one of the few beautiful weekend days that New York has had this spring.

We weren't the only ones who decided to go to the Brooklyn Flea last Saturday:


The kind owners of People's Pops pose for a picture. Their ginger-lemon shaved ice (with hand-shaved ice) and strawberry rhubarb popsicles are excellent:


The line for the Red Hook ballfield vendors:


The delicious-looking grilled corn from the Red Hook vendors:


Chicken huaraches from the Red Hook vendors. Like a taco salad, but so much better:


Grilled cheese from Saxelby Cheesemongers, made with Constant Bliss cheese and Brooklyn's McClure's Pickles (another vendor at the Brooklyn Flea):



The creative takes on the hot dog at AsiaDog. I recommend "The Vinh":


Manning the grill at AsiaDog:

A rocking chair circa 1890:


The Brooklyn Flea takes place every Saturday at the following locations:

Saturday: Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School (Lafayette Ave. between Clermont and Vanderbilt Ave)
Fort Greene, Brooklyn
10am to 5pm

Sunday: Under the Brooklyn Bridge
DUMBO, Brooklyn
11am to 6pm

More on Pine Nuts and Pine Mouth

Apparently it wasn't just the pine nuts in Roni-Sue's Bacon Buttercrunch that ruined my taste buds for a few days. According to the Daily Mail, more and more people are being left with a bitter, metallic taste after eating pine nuts. There's even a name for the strange affliction: "pine mouth." From now on, I'll only make pesto with walnuts, thank you very much.

Kung Pao Chicken

To me, Kung Pao chicken is Chinese comfort food. It's one of those guilty pleasures that I find myself frequently making a batch of on Thursday nights when I have little desire desire to cook after a long week of work.

For my latest dose of Kung Pao chicken, I improvised quite a bit based on the ingredients I had on hand. I adapted a recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop, substituting shallots for the a few garlic cloves and adding a healthy dose of spinach. Although it was not quite the real deal, it was completely delicious. For authentic Kung Pao chicken, just omit the spinach addition and shallot-for-garlic substitution.

Eddie's Kung Pao Chicken
Serves 4

Ingredients:

• 1/2 tsp cornstarch
• 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
• 2 lbs. chicken breasts (or thighs), cut into bite-size pieces
• 3 tbsp. peanut oil
• 6 dried chiles
• 1 shallot, minced
• 1 inch piece of ginger, minced
• 1 tsp. sugar
• 3 tbsp. soy sauce
• 1 tsp. sesame oil
• 1 large handful of spinach
• 1 handful of unsalted roasted peanuts, chopped
• 1 scallion, thinly sliced

Directions:

1. Mix cornstarch with wine in a large bowl and whisk until cornstarch dissolves. Add chicken to bowl and mix well to coat pieces with cornstarch mixture.
2. Add oil to wok or large skillet and heat over high heat. Add dried chiles to pan and cook until they are blackened and fragrant, about 5 minutes.
3. Add shallots and ginger to pan and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute.
4. Add chicken to wok and cook, stirring constantly, until chicken is cooked through, about 5 minutes.
5. Reduce heat to low. Add sugar and soy sauce and mix well. Simmer until sauce has thickened slightly, about five minutes.
6. Add spinach and stir until wilted, about two minutes.
7. Remove pan from heat. Mix in peanuts, scallion, and sesame oil and serve.

Granola Bars

I have to give a shout out to this recipe for cranberry-walnut power bars from Food and Wine. They have been powering me through workouts, mid-afternoon slumps, and after-dinner sugar cravings all week. They are tastier, healthier, cheaper, and much more hearty than packaged granola bars. And they are a cinch to make; I made a batch of 16 in less time than it would have taken to walk down the street to the store to purchase a package of six granola bars. I simply can't give these treats enough praise.

Chocolate and Bacon: At Least It Didn't Kill Me

In one of my weaker moments while wandering in through Essex Market in the Lower East Side, I stopped by Roni-Sue's Chocolates to purchase a bag of bacon buttercrunch. For those that haven't been keeping track of the bacon-obsessed New York food media, the bacon buttercrunch candy from Roni-Sue is toffee that has been mixed with pieces of fried bacon and covered with chocolate, pine nuts, and chile. At least too me, the candy sounded like a great idea at the time.

The candy, while not nearly deserving of the hype that some of the major food blogs have given it, was pretty good. The toffee was bursting with butter flavor. The bacon, thank goodness, was added with a light hand, and the chiles gave a nice bite. The pine nuts, while a good idea, could have been toasted more so that they were a bit crunchier. After finishing off the bag with my significant eater, I was glad I tried Roni-Sue's bacon buttercrunch, but doubted that I would try it again. This bacon and chocolate candy just didn't do it for me. Little did I know.

A day after eating the candy, I noticed that everything I ate tasted very bitter. Bitter oatmeal, bitter salad for lunch, and bitter chicken for dinner. I assumed my taste buds were just having a case of the Mondays. I mentioned this oddity to my significant eater who complained that everything tasted bitter to her as well. We had eaten three completely different meals during the day. That's so cute that we have the same afflictions at the same time, I thought.

Two days after eating the bacon buttercrunch, my significant eater and I continued to be afflicted by an awful bitter, metallic taste after every meal. Being the occasional hypochondriac that she occasionally is, my girlfriend decided to do some research to find out what could possibly have ruined both of our taste buds. After ruling out that both of us had come down with oral cancer at the exact same time, she came across this blurb from Wikipedia that mentions: The eating of pine nuts can cause serious taste disturbances, developing 1-3 days after consumption and lasting for days or weeks. A bitter, metallic taste is described. In general, a minority of pine nuts on the market present this problem. Though very unpleasant, there does not seem to be a real health concern." Damn you, bacon buttercrunch and its bad batch of pine nuts! Thankfully, the metallic taste was not a symptom of any grave danger we were in, but we have both now all but sworn off pine nuts (except in pesto, ahem). And we have definitely sworn off all combinations of bacon and chocolate for good. Taste buds and sanity back in tact, I can easily say that I will never again succumb to the gluttonous allure of bacon and chocolate again.

Steamed Salmon with Garlic and Ginger

Despite my grand plans to cook a dinner celebrating the completion of my Greenmarket Challenge, after a particularly wild weekend of birthday parties, I was ready to detox come Sunday night. This salmon recipe, while on the healthy side, adapted from Andrea Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, is a winner. By steaming the salmon until it is barely cooked through, the fish stays moist. The sauce is just bold enough to not overpower the fish.


Steamed Salmon with Garlic and Ginger
Serves 4

Ingredients:

• 4 6 oz. salmon fillets
• 1 1/4 tsp sugar
• Ground black pepper, to taste
• 2 tbsp. oyster sauce
• 2 tbsp. soy sauce
• 2 tbsp. grapeseed oil
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced
• 3 scallions, thinly chopped

Directions:

1. Mix the sugar, pepper, oyster sauce, and soy sauce in a small bowl. Stir until sugar has dissolved.
2. Heat oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and ginger and cook until fragrant, about a minute. Add sauce mixture and bring to boil. Remove from heat and add scallions. Take sauce off heat and let come to room temperature.
3. Fill a saute pan with deep sides half way with water. Bring to a boil.
4. Place salmon fillets in a cake pan (or other pan with sides that is smaller in diameter than the saute pan), Top salmon with sauce mixture.
5. Carefully place pan containing the salmon in the boiling water and cover. Let salmon steam until it flakes with a fork, approximately 7 to 9 minutes.
6. Carefully remove salmon pan from water and serve salmon with the sauce.

Review: Momofuku Ssäm Bar

Fresh off the 12-days of cooking that was my Greenmarket Challenge, I decided to take a night off from cooking and have dinner with my significant eater at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, the only one of the four Momofuku establishments I had yet to try. The great meal that followed extended my enthusiasm for all things Momofuku.

As a starter we ordered the steamed pork buns, a standby at all David Chang restaurants. Like the pork buns at Noodle Bar and Milk Bar, the buns at Ssäm Bar are a celebration in pork fat: melt-in-your-mouth pork belly with thinly sliced cucumbers and hoisin sauce in a soft steamed bun. It may have just been a night in which I was craving pork buns, but the rendition as Ssäm Bar tasted better than any Momofuku pork buns I have had before, with the pork being particularly buttery.

From the "local/seasonal" section of the menu, we ordered snap peas which, along with eggs and mint, were tossed in XO sauce, a traditional Chinese sauce consisting of dried shrimp and scallops in spicy oil. The snap peas showed why David Chang deserves much of the overwhelming praise he receives; the sweet peas alongside the salty XO sauce created an excellent and unique combination of flavors, with the mint brightening the dish just enough.

Due to the Southerner in me, I have a difficult time passing up a fried chicken dish on a menu and my visit to Ssäm Bar was no exception. I ordered the fried chicken dish, assured that Chang would take fried chicken to a new level; the menu was certainly convincing, even in the teasing way of dishes are described at all Momofuku restaurants: "bell & evan's fried chicken-- ramps porcinis, egg." At least to me, neither of those ingredients can do any wrong. Unfortunately, the fried chicken was the one letdown of the night. While delicious, I was hoping my $24 would get more than two large cubes of crispy dark meat, a few morels, and a very rich egg yolk. Of course, despite my slight disappointment, my significant eater and I all but licked the plate dry. If anything, this dish served as reminder that David Chang is not quite the culinary god that some make him out to be; you expect a fried chicken dish from him to be transcendent, but this one was merely very good.

While perusing the dessert menu, the hostess told us we had to try the ice cream pie, which had recently been added to the menu. We took her advice and ordered the pie, which consisted of the Momofuku-trademark cereal milk ice cream in a salty and sweet cornmeal crust. The pie was served with a compote of tri-star strawberries. The hostess was right on with the ice cream pie; it was excellent, with each element being equally delicious on its own as it was with the other two elements. Some may balk at the texture of the re-frozen soft serve ice cream, which made the ice cream slightly icy and not as creamy as one may expect an ice cream pie to be; my significant eater and I had no complaints.

Like the other Momofuku establishments, Ssäm Bar turns a blind eye to the established rules of fine dining. The room is extremely loud. The service is rushed, although friendly enough. For the most part, the only utensils offered are in a canister of chop sticks in the center of each table. Despite these deficiencies, there is a reason why the restaurant is packed with diners night after night; the food is excellent. If anything, Ssäm Bar's lack of fine dining pretense-- although it does carry a high degree of the annoying hipster pretense -- is refreshing. Most of all, the food at Ssäm Bar makes the deficiencies worth putting up with.

As we left Ssäm Bar, my significant eater and I made a pit stop next door at Momofuku Milk Bar and purchased a slice of "crack pie" to eat at home. We didn't need another pie out of hunger-- the portions at Ssäm Bar are more than adequate-- we just weren't quite ready to end our Momofuku night. Fortunately for us, the buttery slice of crack extended our Momofuku high a little bit longer.


Momofuku Ssäm Bar
207 2nd Ave. (at 13th St.)
New York, NY 10003