Here’s a quick drink recipe that will provide a smoky yet sweet cocktail to take the edge off and give you a little buzz.
Stir it all together and serve on the rocks for a really nice cocktail.
My wife and I dreamed up this incredible concoction about a week ago. Last night we finally gave it a shot. It’s a pretty straight forward recipe, so no real instructional videos or any other complicated bullshit to show you.
The first thing you’ll want to do is some basic prep. Dice up your ham steak, potato, onion and jalapeño. Mince your garlic, and slice your chives, bacon and sausage. These will be more like “toppings” for your rice, so as not to moisten the rice while cooking together.
Fry some shit off in olive oil and butter. I did the potato, pepper, onion and garlic together to form a hash, and then I put it aside in a bowl lined with paper towels to get rid of some of the grease and excess moisture.
Since we used frozen spinach (you can use fresh), we threw that in a pan by itself to dry it out and remove all the excess water.
We gave a little fry to the bacon and sausage too. Here are some of the components before adding to the rice:
Grab your rice and throw it into a hot buttery wok or pan.
Once its all hot, you can mix in your scrambled egg, which you should first cook in a separate pan:
Once you get some snap, crackle and pop going, and some crispy browned rice forming at the bottom of the pan/wok, you can lower the heat and fry off the other egg separately for the top of the rice:
Fill a bowl with rice and start to assemble your dish by adding the toppings. Don’t forget the cheese!
Here’s a jerkworthy shot of the finished product:
Dive in and eat. I like to mix it all around, break the yolk, fold the spinach in, etc. Then I get a little bit of everything in each bite.
My wife picked up a Living Social deal for an eight course Peking duck dinner at Golden Unicorn, which is otherwise famous for its dim sum service. I was pretty impressed overall. But let me babble about a few other things first…
First off, I absolutely love this part of town. East Broadway and the surrounding side streets encircling the Manhattan Bridge still feel like old NYC. Not much has changed, save for a few new buildings poking up here and there. Walking around, you’ll feel like you’ve stepped back in time, possibly even into another country.
This area is the real deal Chinatown, unlike the tourist-laden, knock-off selling, shitty DVD purveying hustle on Canal street. Take a closer look in these parts, or allow a lingering eye to glance into some storefronts, and you’ll spy people working at a ground floor dumpling factory. You’ll see produce, dry goods and health products that most white people have no idea about, and you can’t even read the signs to get more info, because they’re all in Chinese. It has a busy, bustling vibe and I love it.
Okay on to the fucking food. First up was egg drop soup with chicken. This was pretty good, though I did have to add a little bit of hot sauce to punch it up slightly.
Next were two types of dumplings: crystal shrimp and siu mai. Both were excellent. If you swing by this joint for dim sum, these are some of the delights you can enjoy from the carts. Both were packed with ingredients and nicely steamed.
Then the spring rolls came out. They didn’t look like much, but they had great flavor. I was actually surprised, although they were a little bit too greasy on the shell.
Our waitress then brought out the Peking duck. YES!
She cut off a good deal of the crispy skin and more generous portions of meat, and, with that, assembled six steamed buns for us, accompanied by hoisin sauce, scallion and cucumber. They were awesome. Crispy, fatty, juicy… all around excellent.
The rest of the duck was chopped up for us and served on a plate:
The meal kept on trucking along with this ginger beef and broccoli dish. The ginger was fresh and sliced thin. The beef was tender and flavorful. I think it was a mix of flank and rib eye. And the broccoli was steamed in the sauce, so it tasted awesome.
There was also some fried rice with shrimp, roast pork, ham, peas, onion and egg. We were really too full to dig into this too far.
At the end of the meal, some honeydew and orange arrived at the table. A nice, refreshing, smiley-face looking end to the meal.
Excellent deal. Jump on it if you see another Living Social or Groupon offering for this place. And definitely check out their dim sum on the weekend for lunch.
GOLDEN UNICORN
18 E. Broadway
New York, NY 10002
Landjager is a traditional semi-dry sausage product reminiscent of jerky sticks, but more natural. My wife brought home this package:
Here’s what I found on Tannenhof: they seem to be a purveyor of cured meats. Their products look tasty. Schwarzwalder seems to be a type of landjager, since I see other brands using the moniker, but it seems that all landjager are made of roughly equal amounts of pork, beef and lard.
“Savory snack” is written beneath the word landjager. I think you can guess that the green emblem says “traditional specialty” and “guaranteed quality,” since English is a Germanic language and all that nonsense… Anyway here’s what they look like – there were actually two pair of links in the package:
The sausages themselves are very smoky in flavor. They’re somewhat hard like a pepperoni in texture, but not as spiced. They seem to be real sausages and not some mashed up conglomerate like a Slim Jim, though I suppose anyone can mold them to look like real sausages. Take a look at the cross-section and decide for yourself.
The smell is reminiscent of raw hide dog treats. They taste okay – no added flavors other than smoke and whatever spices were used in the initial sausage making, but it was tough for me to get beyond that dog snack smell, having had German Shepherds all my life and giving them snacks that smelled exactly like this. If I can’t snack on them, they might be good to cook with as a smoky flavor enhancer in something like split pea soup.
One last thing: Don’t hassle the Tannenhof.
CHECK OUT THE RIDE & REVIEW HERE!!!
This recent addition (last 2 years) to the downtown barscape benefits from ample seating (indoor and outdoor), a massive amount of space, and a good selection of beer.
My wife and I stopped here for a quick drink and a bite before seeing an extremely overpriced and under-sized studio apartment that is up for sale nearby.
Pretty cool to see a few kids playing with the giant Jenga set on one bench. Nice.
I was happy to see that it was happy hour on the weekend, so that’s a big plus.
We started with a pair of $5 pints (growler was filled with water):
My pour, on the right, was a little bit shy of a full glass, but whatever.
I ordered the chicken sandwich, which came with fries, and was topped with lettuce, pesto sauce and brie cheese on a potato bun:
Pretty good. The breast was juicy – not dry as I expected it might be.
My wife had the crispy buffalo cauliflower, an interesting concoction that almost makes you feel like you’re eating healthy if it weren’t for the buttery hot sauce and crumbled blue cheese sprinkled all over the batter-fried veggie morsels. Tasty!
This part of downtown could use a kick in the ass for nightlife and daytime boozing. Clinton Hall is a welcome addition to the area.
UPDATE 11/10/2023 – Great food options here, and a perfect spot for our Electric Wednesday ebike meetup.
CLINTON HALL
90 Washington St.
New York, NY 10006
I whipped this shit up on a whim with some bullshit items I had laying around, some of which required more effort than others.
Example: the veggie stock I used as the base was made two days earlier by roasting a bunch of veggies I had in the fridge before they went bad. Onion, garlic, shallot, carrots, celery, etc. After roasting with some olive oil and spices, I boiled the fuck out of it all and reduced it to a stock of sorts. You can just cheat and use a stock of your choice.
Then I added some extra water, a packet of Tonkotsu pork ramen seasoning, black garlic oil, sesame oil, sesame seeds (toasted and regular), dried garlic chips and a huge heap of spicy, mouth-numbing Szechuan peppercorns. This was to be my hot pot broth/ramen base hybrid. See it bubbling up below:
I boiled up some tofu skin knots as well. These things are awesome in a soup.
And some dried instant ramen noodles, of course, from the packet.
The end result was a pretty tasty and spicy soup. Not so bad for a home episode of Chopped. Just strain off the junk that is floating around in the broth first, that way you have a nice clean soup as an end-product.
This little Hell’s Kitchen joint offered up a decent Groupon that made it worth while to try. An app, two entrees, two drinks and a bread for $30.
I had a banana lassi. It was good, but I wish it was colder. Drinking room temperature banana yogurt isn’t that appealing. My wife had a pistachio shake, but it was more like a lassi than what we expected a shake to be (cold, creamy, ice cream-ish). They both looked exactly the same, so here is a generic shot. Can you guess which this is?
For the app, we shared some lamb kebob, which came to us plated and un-skewered. This was deliciously spiced lamb that was minced into a sausage-like texture.
I ate a biryani lamb and spicy rice dish, and my wife had a lamb curry that was mild and creamy.
As you can tell, this was a lamb-centric meal. The biryani was a bit dry and oddly spiced, but tasty nonetheless. In hindsight I probably should have gone with my staple Indian food order to test the waters, chicken saag.
My wife’s lamb curry was the winner on the day. It was creamy, mildly spiced, and mildly sweet from the presence of pineapple.
Our bread selection was a naan that was filled with coconut and pistachio. Really nice.
BOMBAY GRILL HOUSE
764 9th Ave.
New York, NY 10019
Wogies is known around town as having some great Philly cheesesteaks. I had been to the one in the west village once before. When I was downtown to meet a friend at a bar, I noticed a new Wogies location down by Rector Street on Trinity. I gave it a shot on my way home.
I tried a chicken and regular Philly cheesesteak, both with wiz, American and onions.
Pretty tasty. Only down side is that the cheese was not evenly distributed throughout the meat. It was mostly packed into the back of the sandwich, where the top and bottom sandwich bread meet, at the crease.
This other one I tried from the west village location was a cheeseburger hero. Pretty good, though heavy on the lettuce:
WOGIE’S
39 Greenwich Ave.
New York, NY 10014
This joint is awesome in the summer time. The music is going, the doors and windows are all wide open, and everyone is at the bar or eating outside along the pier.
I tried the burger. It was very under seasoned, but it did have a really nice char. The potato bun was slightly stale, but the rest of the toppings and the ratio of toppings to meat was correct.
They also cooked it just right, so this place is on the right path to a good burger. It just needs some minor tweaking.
Fries were pretty good. Thick, seasoned style fries that had a good crisp exterior and a soft interior.
PIER A HARBOR HOUSE
22 Battery Pl.
New York, NY 10004
My wife and I scored tickets to another MasterCard Priceless Table dinner. This time the event was held on the Weill roof terrace and in the Weill terrace room at Carnegie Hall. Really, an amazing venue and a once in a lifetime opportunity to dine there.
We went with our food blogger friend Chubby Chinese Girl and her husband.
The views at night were insane.
The evening was catered by Chef Ashley James of STARR events. He has worked in several Michelin star restaurants in England, France, Spain and Germany, and is a frequent guest on Access Hollywood, E! and the Today Show.
Cocktail hour was outside on the terrace, and we enjoyed the music of the Julliard String Quartet from inside.
Cocktail hour, obviously, served us some booze, but it also included passed Hors d’Oeuvres that consisted of mini lamb chop Provencal; crab Louis with Meyer lemon and chive on a house made whole wheat cracker; James River oysters on the half shell with mignonette caviar, micro chives and shaved horseradish; Scottish smoked salmon and cucumber mille feuille; traditional Angus steak tartare on ficelle crostinis; veal sweetbread with Madeira and morel mushroom vol au vent; and watermelon with feta crema, aged balsamic and micro basil.
My favorites of these were actually the tartare and the watermelon. Both were vibrant pops of flavor. Unfortunately the lamb and tartare didn’t come around as often as we would have liked, and I never did see the crab item.
The dinner menu, inspired by the movie Titanic, started with a chilled vichyssoise with Meyer lemon creme fraiche, a baby squash blossom and Petrossian caviar.
This was velvety and smooth. The caviar gave it a nice salty pop. It was my wife’s favorite dish of the night.
The fish course was Lobster Thermidor: Maine lobster with spinach, parmesan, bisque and XO cognac.
This was incredible. The preparation is masterful. The lobster is sitting on top of a bed of cooked spinach which is placed inside the shell, and the lobster meat is then put back into the shell.
The entree was Tournedos Rossini (beef medallion/filet mignon) with foie gras, truffle Madeira jus, Thumbelina carrots and pommes puree. Beautiful.
My cut was perfectly cooked, as you can see. The cuts varied, so other diners had a thinner piece, or an overcooked piece. I enjoyed mine, but nothing comes close to Didier’s version of this at La Sirene.
The dessert was a plated baked Alaska with summer berries:
The ice cream beneath was a little hard, and the marshmallow topping wasn’t as flambéed or as thick as I typically like, but it was still very tasty.
And Petit Fours included French palmiers, macarons, madeleines, and Grand Marnier truffles.
The French palmiers were my favorite, the little curly cookie thing right in the center of the plate. It was buttery, flakey, and both salty and sweet at the same time. I loved it.
The great part is that our ticket price contained a donation to the Stand Up 2 Cancer program, so it’s all for a good cause, just like the other Priceless Table experiences we’ve been going to.
