Highs and Lows

I went to New York with two goals – to eat at Mario Batali’s Babbo and to stuff myself silly with the best street food that NY has to offer. I think I did pretty well on both fronts, straddling two extremes of the gastronomic spectrum.

Babbo was as great as I remembered it (I went there for the first time about 4-5 years ago). They serve some of the best octopus I have had to this day, simmered in white wine and charred on a super hot grill. It is so creamy and soft, so full of flavor, and so impossible to reproduce or find anywhere else. I had my very first squab, which to my surprise and delight was cooked to medium rare and tasted exactly like a dense calf’s liver. Totally bizarre, incongruous, and un-bird-like, but also wonderfully delicious.

We ate in good company – besides my friends Kanchan and Shariff, who were celebrating their newly-acquired marriage license (though not yet the marriage itself) we had REM’s Michael Stipe sitting at a table on our left, and Jim Nelson, the editor-in-chief of GQ, sitting on our right. I was feeling very VIP that evening. We totally spent the whole night drinking with Michael Stipe and then Jim Nelson gave me some women’s clothes that had been bumping around the GQ stockrooms… you know, some Prada, some Miu Miu, nothing special. And then I woke up from my octopus-induced coma and realized I should probably stop staring and/or drooling over the famous people.

The rest of the weekend was spent in the pursuit of less refined, though no less complex street food. 1) Pizza at Lombardi’s in SoHo – thin crust (wish it had been more charred), nicely melted mozzarella, anchovies on one half (my half), not too much sauce, way too many tourists with fanny packs;


2) A beautiful skirt steak sandwich at a flea market in the depths of Brooklyn (perhaps my new favorite place). The steak was well-marinated and tender, topped with a spicy aioli and stuffed into a crusty ciabatta roll.


It was horrifically messy, left everything orange and slightly sticky, yet completely happy. The grilled corn on the side though… oh the corn. It was candy sweet and charred from the grill, every kernel so full of juice that it felt like little balls of caviar exploding with every bite. It was amazing and bordeline dessert-like.


Oh but that’s not all. There was also 3) a NY street hot dog (meh), 4) a street cart soft pretzel (meh), 5) some fresh canoli (yay), 6) bison jerky from the Union Sq farmer’s market, and so on and so forth. I think I have only recounted 1/10th of everything I ate in those three days. I am still in recovery from all the eating, but I still love eating vacations. You can get the high-end and the everyday, and each tastes awesome and unique in its own way.






P.S. Next on my NY list – really good Mexican tacos, Chinese dumplings, and hot chocolate form Jacques Torres. Oh, and a really good Rueben, Cubano, a decent margarita would be nice…. And I could go on. My food fantasies tend to run amok.

It's Over. It's Finally Over.

So… I am done. That’s it. I am now Dr. Anna, for whatever that is worth. Not a lot, really, but it’s still something. Now I have to re-write my blog profile blurb and I have no idea what to say. Before, I was a long-suffering grad student, trying to take the edge off a painful schooling experience by eating wonderful things. Now, I am just a person who eats a lot. I am in need of a new niche. If y’all come up with something, let me know. I am feeling dramatically unspecial right now. Boohoo me, right? Not really. I am also immensely relieved and excited to move on, and to get back all the sleep I lost and re-grow all the hair I pulled out in the last two months of dissertation writing and defending. That might take a while though.

One thing that I knew for sure all along is that I would not have made it this far or anywhere at all without the help (and tolerance) of my friends. They came out in force to keep me sane and keep me fed throughout the entire process. One evening, my friend Melissa brought her kitchen to mine. She came over with her favorite Dutch oven, pre-measured ingredients, and a recipe for chicken goulash with sour cream biscuits (from Bon Appetit? Gourmet? Don’t recall. I don’t remember a lot of things from the last month). I tried to help her with making dinner, but have a serious suspicion that I was in her way more than anything else. Turns out I am useless with a pasty cutter and even worse at handling raw chicken. Luckily, I am an excellent eater. No complaints from anyone on that end.

The goulash was a thing of beauty.

Chicken Goulash with Sour Cream Biscuits
2 lbs skinless boneless chicken thighs, cut into 2 inch pieces
1 ½ cups flour
5 tbsp cold unsalted butter
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp baking powder
2 ½ cups chicken stock
1 cup sour cream
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 red bell pepper
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tbsp hot Hungarian paprika
2/4 tsp caraway seeds
1 tsp thyme

- Preheat oven 425F
- Dust chicken with flour
- Melt 1 tbsp butter and olive oil in Dutch oven. Brown chicken on all sides and remove to plate. (may want to add a little bit more flour at this point if you like a thicker stew)

Meanwhile, make biscuits:
- Pulse flour, baking powder, ¼ tsp salt and ¼ tsp pepper in a food processor. Add 4 tbsp cold butter and pulse.
- Whisk ½ cup chicken stock with ½ cup sour cream and add to flour mixture. Pulse until dough forms. Form into 10-12 round biscuits.

- Saute vegetables in Dutch oven until softened, scraping up chicken bits.
- Return chicken to the pot add spices and toast for a couple of minutes.
- Add remaining of chicken broth and sour cream.
- Place biscuits on top of stew.

Into the oven

- Bake for 20 minutes covered. Remove cover and broil for 2 more minutes to brown the biscuit tops.

Melissa’s recipe substitutions and notes – Melissa used white breast meat instead of thigh meat to cut down on the fattiness of the dish (much appreciated) and half regular paprika and half hot paprika to moderate the heat. It was still seriously hot, mind you, and I am not a spice wuss. One final recipe note – make double the number of biscuits. Seriously. They were so good I wanted to hug them. A little tangy from the sour cream and so smooth and creamy. They were perfect with the hot and spicy stew beneath. Oh, and the next day, the flavors in the stew meld together and the liquid soaks up into the biscuits to make bready flavor bombs. Ridiculously good.



If you don’t have a friend like Melissa, I suggest you go find one immediately. It will be worth your while. It was mine.