RW Summer 2008, pt 1

I used to get very excited about Restaurant Week, guessing which restaurants would be participating and making reservations even before the list was published, but after 8 years, I've been to a lot of the interesting restaurants and let's face it, there's a lot of chafe. By the time this summer's RW started, I'd only made one reservation, but somehow, I still ended up at four different participants.

* Blue Fin was one of those restaurants I'd always avoided, assuming that a hotel restaurant in Times Sq couldn't be all that good, but I was pleasantly surprised. I'd go back for RW, and not just because the mixed drinks are delicious.

* While I enjoy red meat, I rarely go to steakhouses - I enjoy innovative cuisine more than large quantities of food - but my friend Kat had a reservation for Kobe Club. I ordered the RW menu, which could be upgraded from the hamburger to the wagyus, and she had the tasting menu, meaning that we could taste everything they offered, but still spend a little less than the usual. Well, not that much less. The dishes were interesting and side by side, I could taste the difference between the American, Australian, and Japanese wagyus, but for that amount of money, I'd rather go to Le Bernardin. The wine list is very interesting.

* I wasn't particularly excited about Grayz, but I needed a same-week lunch reservation in midtown west. I'd never have gone there otherwise. It's on the site of the old Aquavit, where I'd had my first disappointing RW meal, and I'm a big believer in food karma. After all that, it turned out to be better than expected. We started with a spicy tuna-kampachi tartare with a lovely presentation: there was an arrangement of tuna in the middle, held together with tortilla chips, with an artful scoop of tomato salsa on the side. The entree was short rib croque monsieur, which was too much of a good thing, alas. The black forest parfait was delicious. I was ready to go back the next time I needed a nice restaurant near work, but then they gave us a $25 coupon for our next visit, which sealed the deal. To me, that's what RW should be - an introduction to a restaurant you've never been to before, but might return if you like it.

I'll save the other restaurant for its own post. Read More......

Low Weight Food

My mother was horrified to find two boxes of dried fruit on my counter. "That stuff is full of calories!" When you're backpacking, that's the point: maximum calories per oz. Over the weekend, I went on my final training backpack for a six day mountaineering trip to Mt. Rainier. The guiding service provides breakfast and dinner, but we are responsible for our own lunches, so among other things, I wanted to try foods I might eat on the mountain. I usually eat a deli sandwich the first day and a Starkist tuna salad package the second; for this trip, I wanted to see how I felt about eating the same thing multiple days in a row, especially when it's not my usual fare, and I wanted to see how my body felt about the completely different macronutrient profile.

Salami is a treat I don't usually allow myself to indulge in, so having salami and pita bread (whole wheat of course) was like a party. I would happily have eaten it a third day, although perhaps for the actual trip, I'll bring a good pepperoni, which I enjoy even more. The cheese was a parmesan chock full of preservatives - it too was delicious, although I quickly realized that if I ate those two for lunch, I wouldn't have to worry about replacing salt, no matter how fast we moved.

My biggest food-related problem over the weekend was that we were moving too fast to rely on fat burning. My heart rate profile was more similar to a run than a typical hike, and when I run for hours, I regularly eat gels - I came closer to hitting the wall over the weekend than I did during last year's marathon. Hopefully my comrades in three weeks will pause more often for snacks.

I felt a brief pang of guilt over how many grams of fat I ate - but then again, I burned almost twice as many calories compared to a usual sedentary day. And I noticed that I didn't need nearly as much food as I expected. Of course when I got home, I made a simple salad of romaine lettuce, tomatoes, and sherry vinegar and thought it was the most delicious thing in the world. I bet I'll be eating a lot of salad when I get off the mountain. Read More......

Would you like that on Wonderbread?

Lunch yesterday at the cafeteria was chicken pot pie, braised beef tenders, macaroni & cheese, buttered noodles, twice baked potatoes, parslied (sic) turnips, and asparagus stir fry. Particularly galling as earlier in the day, I came across this article which lists obesity as a potentially job-threatening habit. whiskey-tango-foxtrot?

Me, I had a spinach-celery-ginger juice with protein powder. I've had it before, but with parsley, which was delicious. Without the brightness of the parsley, the mustiness of the spinach and the tang of the ginger conflicted too much and the whole drink was out of whack :(

Read More......

Hello, world!

or, a bio is a bio, but a blog post is forever.

The best introduction to this journal I haven't written yet is to tell you about its naming. A year or two ago, I thought of creating a blog called "The Hapless Chef," because at the time, I was learning to cook and the results were mixed, to put it kindly. My family isn't big on cooking - my mother often tells me, when I call her with cooking questions, "Why don't you just order in? That's what I would do if I lived in NYC." Actually, the reason I started cooking for myself was that when I moved to a new neighborhood, I found it easier to learn to cook than to get menus from the various takeout places. In other words, I learned to cook because I was lazy.

My cooking hasn't improved that much since then, but the time I have available for "cooking" has decreased. (There might be a relationship between the two.) I'm currently training for the New York City Marathon, training to climb Mt. Rainier, and taking aerial silk and trapeze classes at the New York Circus Arts Academy. Oh yeah, and working.

Instead, I've embraced what a friend calls lame-ass cooking. It's cooking that takes as little time as possible. While I still want to make yummy, healthy food, I've added efficiency as a goal: a yummy, healthy meal that takes 30mins from start to finish is obviously better than one that takes 2 hours and leaves me with a hot meal at 10pm. Moreover, I've come to realize that some foods are just unreasonable to make at home for one person, especially if I can get them delivered for a nominal amount. There are definitely techniques and tricks to making quick, healthy, tasty food - this blog will document my ongoing efforts to develop them. Read More......