Going Away

Today I leave for Massachusetts for an extended Easter weekend. As much as I dislike leaving Manhattan to go to other U.S. states with worse weather, I am really looking forward to spending time with relatives and a much needed break from eating pork and red meat (after a week and a half of a restaurant meal each day, my belly is beginning to inflate.)

The culinarily fun part of leaving home for a few days is trying to figure out creative ways to cook, only using things you have in the house. Granted we have a lot of strange condiments like truffle honey and garlic gelee, we also have several things that probably need to be used by this weekend.

I present you with crazy scrambled eggs:


They’re not that crazy, but they have mustard seeds, leftover chives, smoked salmon, leftover pea greens and cornichon pickles. All of this is heaped on top of a slice of whole wheat toast. Overall this wasn’t too bad, although the pickles might have been a little over the top.

For dinner that night I used chorizo, Italian sausage, bok choy, red cabbage, farmers market kimchee, onions, fresh tomatoes, canned tomatoes, ginger, garlic and red wine to make CRAZY PASTA. This was actually a little stranger than the scrambled eggs and was surprisingly good. As this Korean/Italian Bolognese was cooking I kept on taking sniffs of the sauce and it smelled different each time, with smells ranging from sausage to ginger to tomato to garlic. Unfortunately no picture here.


Finally tonight I used the remaining potatoes, onions, shallots, ‘baby’ carrots, rosemary, shallots and some dried porcinis and balsamic vinegar to make this:


I thought it would be nice to eat a steak and drink some Malbec and watch baseball on a cold rainy night before leaving for the weekend.


Still working on writeups of eleven Madison park, L’impero, Boqueria, and Urena