Saturday, February 22, 2014

Gold Medal Skate




with capers, lemon and parsley.


heart healthy is butter off

What’s not to love about pale green and fruity olive oil?

buongustofarms.com

Great frying, high burning, and best of all
 it’s very good for you.


maremmaguide.com

Wouldn’t it be great if we could bake with it? 

We can!


There’s not a drop of butter in this 
and it’s a moist, delicious cake.

 

Start with your dry ingredients, 2 cups of flour, 1 and ¾ of sugar, 


1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt, 


and ½ teaspoon each of both baking soda and baking powder.


Blend it all together and set it aside. 

In a second bowl start with 1 1/3rd cups of the best olive oil you can afford. 


Extra virgin first cold press is the kind you want: the “extra virgin” means it’s the first squeeze and contains no more than one percent oleic acid. 


The “cold press” means no heat has been used to extract more oil. Those cheaper oils are bulk packaged for institutional use.

Now add 1 ¼ cups of whole milk.


And three eggs.


Weird, huh? You just wait.
Now zest an orange.


Squeeze out ¼ cup (all) of the fresh juice.



Now toss it all into the wet ingredients with ¼ cup of Grand Marnier.


Yum. Now beat the wet stuff,


Pour it into the dry stuff,


Mix it well and set aside. 

Now here’s a trick.
Trace your cake pan on parchment paper, cut the shape and line the bottom of the pan.


Nothing will stick and you can get the cake out whole with ease.


350 degrees for an hour, if you’ve preheated. 

That’s it. 
When a knife comes out clean its done.


I turned it out onto a plate and made a heart stencil for Valentine’s Day.



Warm from the oven? Be still my healthy heart!


Friday, February 21, 2014

get meowta here



the rodent component


reddit


Well rats!

At least the blocks between 86th and 96th streets have an excuse: the Second Avenue Subway has rats on the move. 


Half of all restaurants there are infected. Yuck.


10021 is one of America’s richest zipcodes and it’s still
46% ratty.

Tribeca and Soho get better grades, between 7 and 11 percent there.


So how do we shape up? In Mott Haven?

10454 is on par with the UpperEastSide at 49%. Blech. 

About half of all restaurants in our hood feed the rats
 as routinely as they feed us.

So how did our homeboy do?


Come for dinner this weekend!



Thursday, February 20, 2014

landed gentry-fication



When TimeWarner announced the construction of their building on Columbus Circle, the Pierre and Sherry Netherland hotels were quite upset.


The original design was shorter but broad and solid, more like the UN Building.

UnitedNations

But that would block the storied sunsets for which those hotels are very famous.


The hotels sued, the developer adapted and the solution was to split the towers to let the light through, then build higher to make up the missing interior volume.


Now Time Warner has announced it is selling 
and leaving their building.


It is moving to the Hudson River Yards near the Javits Center, to a proposed 80 story, 1227 foot tall tower they will build there to house their HBO, Warner Brothers, Turner Broadcasting and Time publishing operations.


Columbus Circle was a dowdy little neighborhood when the New York Coliseum was there. 


The Coliseum was a personality-free exhibit and trade show hall built in the 1950‘s and succeeded by the Javits Center in 1986.


Today the TimeWarner Building hosts the Mandarin Hotel, Jazz at Lincoln Center and a collection of very high-end shops.


TimeWarner expects to relocate 5000 employees by late 2018, effectively doing for the west 30’s what it did for Columbus Circle.


Time to open a sandwich shop on west 33rd street, hm?