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celebrating the glories of eating in brooklyn. from the gut.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Thanksgiving Tips

Here are a few useful links on everything from carving a turkey to menu planning. Lots of recipes for deep frying a turkey. They say it's delicious, but the thought of it alone turns me off. You could deep fry shoe leather and it would taste good.

Celebrate with Epicurious

Let's Talk Turkey (Foodnetwork)

Thanksgiving on Martha Stewart.com

What to make first? A plan (NY Times)

The pilgrims didn't brine (NY Times)

Fit for a pilgrim (LA Times)

Eating Out for Thanksgiving in Brooklyn

A bit of history (The History Channel)

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Home Style Cooking at Maggie Brown

Clinton Hill's Maggie Brown, replete with velvet Victorian wallpaper and retro chandeliers, is designed to make you feel like you're at your grandmother's old house. Somehow that aspect works.

Home-spun food, with an international twist, is the name of the game at Maggie Brown. Sometimes this can be just what you want on a Sunday night when the thought of returning to work on Monday puts butterflies in your stomach. And sometimes home-style cooking can be, well, too homey, which was my experience this past Sunday. Don't get me wrong the taste was there -- from the crispy fried chicken to the coffee ice cream sunday with chocolate sauce and pecans. However, I wasn't pleased with the grains of sand and dirt left in the Swiss chard and the chunks of fat mixed in with the shredded short ribs. Did I mention the mashed potatoes were cold? That's something my grandmother would never do.

I want to like this place because we all have that need for comfort food. The fried chicken is a real treat, the short ribs are tender and tastey and they have a delicious organic brown ale on tap. Main courses are reasonably priced around $15.00. Now if they could just put that same love into food preparation that dear old grandmother does, we'd have something to write home about.

Maggie Brown is located at 455 Myrtle Avenue at Washington Avenue. 718-643-7001.

Friday, November 11, 2005

Did Michelin lower the bar for New York?

There's been such a fuss kicked up over Michelin's first ever New York restaurant guide. Slate asks: did Michelin lower the bar?

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Eating as an Act of Conservation

I bit the bullet and decided to spend a little extra on a heritage turkey this year. I ordered it from Staubitz Market. There was a slight price reduction from $9.99 to $7.99 a pound, which is not really the reason why I ordered it. At one point the Narragansett breed, the oldest in North America, was nearly extinct and ironically the best way to bring them back from near extinction was to start eating them. The bigger the market, the more birds they'll raise. This really sold me. Here are a few interesting links:

Articles:
Gobbling up heritage turkey

Have a Heritage Turkey: The old bird wins a side-by-side taste-off

Recipes:

How to Roast a Heritage Turkey

Heritage Turkey with Rosemary Maple Butter

Friday, November 04, 2005

Food Beyond Eating

The New York Times has this interesting article today about the role food plays in deciphering history.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Heritage Turkeys?

This year I'm obsessed with cooking a heritage turkey for Thanksgiving. They're the ancestral birds to the industrially-farmed turkeys we eat today. I'm not really a fan of those turkeys which to me are bland and dry. I know you can combat the dryness with either brining or buying a Kosher turkey. But really what I want to try is a heritage turkey. Maybe because I love food history and I wonder where has this bird gone and why is it so hard to come by? And ultimately, it must taste a lot better.

It's not easy locating a heritage turkey. I found a link online, but their map is not at all helpful. I also called Staubitz butcher and they told me they can special order a heritage turkey (16-20lbs) for $9.99 a pound. That's about $160-$200 for a turkey. I'm not too keen on that idea. I also heard the Park Slope Food Coop has them. I plan to find out this weekend.

Barring those two options, does anyone out there know where to get a heritage turkey either in Brooklyn, New York or online even? Any cooking tips would be welcome too.