Things I Like

I’ve had a ton of free time in the past couple of weeks and although I haven’t been writing about food as much as I have been, it doesn’t mean that I haven’t been eating/thinking and talking about/cooking/obsessing over food. There has probably been more food in my life than I have time to write about.

Today, in lieu of writing about any one food subject I thought I’d write down a list of foodish things that I’ve enjoyed in the past week or so.

• Goat Cheese dumplings and summer vegetable pesto. After seeing Dan Barber of Blue Hill's summer menu, I felt the need to figure out how to serve goat cheese dumplings with my own version of his summer vegetable pesto. I served these to some friends last Sunday and saw people giving each other the "holy s%#@! this is good, look" something any chef strives for. Essentially I coarsely grated potatoes with a cheese grater, coated balls of chevre with the shavings and fried them in oil so there was a crispy outside with a soft tangy chevre center.

• Eating raw fish. It's summer and raw fish is delicious, light and refreshing. It's even better with black Hawaiian sea salt.

• In keeping with the fish theme, I've started reading The Zen of Fish. It's a very interesting read if you eat sushi frequently or are interested in social histories or if you simply like food.

• Restaurants. Restaurant week is coming up and my stomach can barely contain it's excitement (that sounds kind of gross but I hope you get the point.) I also went back to Boqueria last night for the first time in a while--it was fantastic as always; and am going to 26 seats tonight. I'm excited about a little pissaladiere and sub $15 dollar entrees, a true rarity in this city.

• The Annotated Dish feature on Grub Street. This is more of a constant like for me, but I thought I'd mention it here anyway for those not in the know. I really enjoy seeing all the components of the featured dishes although I do think that the chefs probably make these dishes seem more complicated than they really are
  

• Old food magazines. My wonderful neighbors recently decided to get rid of all of their old food magazines (there were a lot) and instead of throwing them out, they gave them to me. While the articles in food magazines might be dated, the real meat of the magazines, the ideas and recipes are always fun for me to look at. I never really follow the recipes, but I still find that having access to ideas can help me grow as a cook. It's also fun to see features from 2001 magazines (about 4 years before my food obsession began to take hold) and see features on Giada de Laurentiis as a home chef and Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 (one of my favorites) as a rising star chef.
  

• I'm also excited about cooking a belated father's day dinner (they were in Sweden) for my dad and mom on Sunday and using it as an excuse to drink his very good bottle of Amarone.
  

Hope everyone has a great weekend and is able to take advantage of restaurant week next week!