So my buddy Lionel aka @LyleDAL has been staying on me to keep busy with my recent life changes and not be stuck at home, so each time I have to go into the city for an appointment or interview, I’ve been trying to find ways to keep myself there longer and do something, whether it’s just walking around snapping photos, or staying and having lunch or window shopping for ridiculously priced sunglasses.
So in the interest of appeasing him and for the chance to tease him, I give you: Lionel’s Imaginary Day in Manhattan.
We’ll start with lunch, since no humane day begins before noon… Curry in a Hurry at the corner of 28th & Lex was our destination of choice.
I decided to have some chicken tikka masala, & vegetable curry Lyle had the Uttapaam with soup & we shared the rice and naan.
From there we had to pop next door because Lionel did not believe that a place of wonder, and spice and hot sauces, could really exist. He didn’t believe in Kalustyan’s!
After proving the existence of Kalustyan’s, I also got Lionel to admit that the Tooth Fairie & Easter Bunny also exist. He has seen the light.
We continued our day heading towards Bryant Park and just happened to pass by Macy*s in Herald Square.. Well, when Miss Lionel saw they were having their annual flower show I heard the kind of squeal that normally only comes from teenage girls. He dragged me by the arm and ran inside to see the “Bouquet of the Day.”
He hyperventilated so hard he feinted.
When he finally came to we were asked to leave by security, and continued on our trek to the park.
At last we arrived, used the free wifi and relaxed in the sun.
As we were leaving we stopped to pay our respects to St. Gertude and called it a day.
And thus concludes Lionel’s Imaginary Day in Manhattan.
Please note the above is entirely a work of fiction because as Merlene says…
So, my friend Leigh has a great relationship with her dad, and they have awesome Sunday dinners that Leigh is almost always the one cooking for and she has a challenge, her dad can’t have gluten which rules out anything with wheat flour. Breadcrumbs being an important part of meatballs pretty much rules them out for him.
I’ve been doing the low carb thing again, and last year had made low-carb meatballs that just happen to be GF (Gluten Free) so this weekend I made them again and this time, I made notes and measured things so I’d have a proper recipe to share with Leigh.
So here we go.
Low-Carb/GF Meatballs
First you’ll need about 1 quart of your favorite tomato sauce, if your favorite sauce comes from a jar in the food store, then make this one. (blend until smooth)
Ingredients:
Meatballs:
1lb ground chicken or lean pork (I used chicken this time)
1 1/2 lbs of ground beef 90/10 would best
1/4 cup finely chopped flat leaf parsley
2 eggs
2 teaspoons of oregano
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon red chile flakes
salt to taste or dietary requirements
2 ounces pine nuts toasted
1 1/2 ounces grated fresh romano
Equipment:
Parchment Paper (NOT waxed paper) & Heavy Duty foil
Stand Mixer (or your hands)
Baking dish
Frying pan (largest one you have)
Pot (for the sauce)
measuring devices, spatulas, tongs, etc.
Method:
Toast the pine nuts in a dry pan, let them cool and then grind in a food processor until pebbly, add the grated cheese and pulse until it looks like breadcrumbs.
Put the meats, spices, eggs and nut/cheese into the mixer and mix well. Take a small portion of the mixutre, make into a thin patty and cook so you can taste it, adjust seasoning if needed and taste again.
Cover and chill while you make the sauce, Set sauce aside.
Preheat oven to 325F
Form meatballs, a little bigger than golf balls, brown them in the frying pan with some olive oil. Meanwhile place a thin layer of sauce in the baking dish, when meatballs are browned on all sides, put them in the baking dish, cover with remaining sauce. Cover with parchment paper and then with the foil (the parchment prevents the sauce from reacting with the foil). Bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Remove from oven, remove foil and parchment (set oven to broil), skim off any grease that you can, add the topping (recipe follows) and put under broiler for two minutes.
Serves 4-6
Topping:
2 ounces of pine nuts
1 1/2 ounces of grated fresh romano
2 tablespoons butter in small pieces (cold)
Grind the pine nuts and cheese until fine, add the butter and pulse until combined, should be a clumpy wet sand texture. Spread this over the top of the meatballs after baking and broil 2 minutes until golden.
I’ve been tagged by Merlene to write a post with 8 random things about myself, so here we go.
I’ve hung out with Bronski Beat (post Somerville) after a show at a Gay Pride festival. Went to see Berlin with a friend and ended up hanging out with Terri Nunn and with said friend acted as her security for the evening. Dated a former publicist for Dionne Warwick and got to hang out with her after a show in Vegas, I met her son, her mother, and a prince from Africa. Mostly we sat around the bar of her dressing suite and talked for several hours. When we went to escort her to her elevator we met Burt Bacharach, and I went speechless, babbled and managed a “Thank You.” He left and I turned to Dionne and said “How is it I can talk to you for hours on end, but Mr. Bacharach comes by and I become a babbling idiot?”
Was taught to read at age 3, but couldn’t tie my shoes until I was 7. Today I’m a voracious reader and I wear Merrell Jungle Mocs & Birkenstocks and thusly don’t need to tie my shoes.
I’ve lived in 19 different apartments moving an average of every 2.1 years, and I am not a military brat. 5 of those apartments were in 2 buildings on the same street. Call me fickle, or whatever, I like a change of layout and views. Though, I’d sell an organ or two if I could have back my sweet studio at 1261 N. Laurel in West Hollywood.
Once baked over 3,330 chocolate chip cookies for charity in a 48 hour period over 3 days. I was in a standard kitchen with one oven, and only 2 cookie sheets.
From June – October of 2002 I traveled over 16,000 miles on Greyhound buses traversing the United States several times, in addition to this there was an additional 4,000 miles in a car during this same time.
I first got on-line in April of 1992, the weekend of the Rodney King Riots. I was on several local BBS’s, Prodigy, used a Netcom shell account for IRC.
I worked in the Adult Entertainment Industry for two and half years in the early 90’s. I was not the talent I worked back-office handling wholesale sales, and tracking order stats.
This morning I was catching up on reading other blogs and came across a recipe for Kale & Roasted Vegetable Soup. I thought it was interesting but have family members who don’t like kale, and it was also a vegan recipe, and I think we all know how I feel about Vegans, (they should be roasted and served with a cream sauce) so there were some obvious adjustments that needed to be made to that recipe, and since I like to fiddle I changed quite a bit of it to come up with the recipe for Roasted Vegetable Soup that follows.
Later in the morning I was tweeting over at twitter.comand saw the obnoxious but funny bot script @Br3ndaBot insulting someone I hadn’t seen before so I checked out @teobromina and came across her blog where she had posted Chancho en amapolaI don’t read Spanish but the awesome @LyleDAL thought to run it through Google’s translator and it turned out to be sausage wrapped in puff pastry and coated with poppy seeds, and now I had the perfect accompaniment for my soup. I ended up using chicken sausage for mine and it was amazing.
And there you have how Web 2.0 and social media created a delicious and healthy meal that is still lingering on my palette hours later.
Note: Photos from this cooking experiment are in a flickr setin the order you’d need to see them for assistance.
Roasted Vegetable Soup
Ingredients:
1/2 butternut squash peeled seeded cut length wise into 1/2 by 1/2 in strips
4 carrots peeled cut in half lengthwise
5 plum tomatoes halved lengthwise
1 large yellow onion quartered
1 head of garlic
1 roasted red pepper (jarred roasted red pepper)
A few threads of saffron
1/4 cup white wine
3 cups veggie stock
3 cups chicken stock
3 Tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 of a 9 ounce bag of spinach
3 sprigs of fresh thyme
1 15 oz can of cannelini beans drained but not rinsed.
Sea Salt
Black pepper
Extra virgin olive oil
Arrange the butternut squash and carrots onto a pan and drizzle with olive oil S&P.
Peel and quarter the onion, set aside 1/4 of the onion, cut 3 remaining quarters in half lengthwise into 6 wedges arrange on pan and drizzle with olive oil S&P
Cut plum tomatoes in half arrange on pan and drizzle with olive oil S&P
Cut top off the head of garlic brush with oil, surround with foil pour a little oil over top and close foil wrapping tightly.
Roast vegetables and garlic for 40 minutes, then set aside to cool for 10 minutes
While the vegetables are roasting:
Roughly chop remaining quarter of onion add to a pan with 2 Tablespoons of unsalted butter (I use French butter). Chop the pepper roughly add to pan and sautee until onions are translucent (10-15 minutes). Add saffron threads, cook two more minutes, add the wine and cook until the wine is gone. Transfer mixture to the food processor.
After the vegetables have cooled for 10 minutes add the onion, and tomatoes to the food processor with the sauteed onions and peppers, squeeze the roasted garlic from its skin and put in food processor, add one half cup of the vegetable stock and puree until almost smooth.
Transfer the puree to the stock pot add the thyme and remaining vegetable stock and chicken stock, bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and simmer for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile cut the carrots and butternut squash in to roughly 1/2 inch cubes, chop the spinach roughly.
After 20 minutes remove the thyme sprigs, peeling the leaves off if they haven’t fallen off while cooking. Add the carrots, squash, spinach and the beans, simmer 20 minutes longer adjusting salt and pepper as needed. Lastly add the remaining tablespoon of butter. Stir until blended and serve.
I booked the trip to Paris this morning. My sister Cathy and I depart on May 21st and return on June 1st giving us 10 days to explore the city in more depth than on the previous trips. We’ll be staying in the Montparnasse area right on the border of the 14th & 6th arrondissements.
It’s 3 months and 6 days away but I’m sure that time is going to fly.
So, reports are coming out that this year’s flu vaccine isn’t as effective as it should be, because strains that weren’t expected are popping up and I’m fairly sure that I am on the receiving end of one of those strains; at least I got the shot which should shunt some of the worst effects and give me a quicker recovery time…
So what does that mean for me, well for one it means low-energy and conserving resources, and it means kicking back a bit and day-dreaming.Though, in this case day-dreaming can also be called planning.Yes, it is that time of year again, time to plan out the birthday trip to Paris,yes, I know my birthday is still three months and two-weeks away, but dammit these trips require planning to get the most bang for the buck (or Euro) and the time.
I’m making a list of things to do and places to go in Paris that I haven’t been able to do previously, and this year is the year to do them, because I’m taking my sister Cathy with me, and we have more similar interests, I can also count on her to be slightly more adventurous with food.*
So the list so far is:
Pere LaChaise – Oscar Wilde, Maria Callas, Gertrude Stein for me & Jim Morrison for Cathy
The Catacombs – My mother thought is was too creepy
Ile St. Louis – Somehow just never made it there
Montmarte (aside from Sacre Cœur)
Allee des Cygnes
Chinatown – Must see what the French do with Chinese food.
Musee d’Orsay
Rodin musuem
The Palace at Versailles
Have a picnic along the Seine
See whichever “American Blockbuster Movie” that is released on Chazmorial Day Weekend (some people insist on still calling it “Memorial Day”).
There are so many things left unseen, entire parts of the city I have yet to explore, and my desire to do so grows with each visit…
I’m sure I’ll be writing about this more and more as the time approaches.
*She won’t eat fish either, but at least she won’t have a melt-down if she’s served shrimp and the heads are still on them.
I can’t go somewhere and not end up writing about the food, and the trip to Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo is no exception. I had some really great food on this trip.
I didn’t take a lot of pictures of food this time, I know, bad me, bad *spank* but I’ve got some. My favorite place of all to eat on this trip was “Momma Norma & Deborah” in Ixtapa. I went there four times to really give Deborah’s food a try and I was very happy I did. I had read a bit about the restaurant on the Zihuatanejo message board and had to check it out. On my first visit as I was drinking my pre-appetizer margarita (well made) Deborah herself came in to the restaurant carrying a large cake of some kind, and since it was early and I was the first dinner customer of the night she stopped and chatted with me for a few minutes, recommended that I have (oh dear I’ve forgotten) the coconut cream pie (I think, I know it had coconut). I told her I was more interested in knowing what that cake was she had carried in, and she told me that it was her award winning chocolate cake, I told her I’d save room for dessert and have that and with that she was off.
The next night when I went in for dinner she stopped by my table again, and apologized for being curt, (she hadn’t been in my opinion) and she told me how she was still recovering from Thanksgiving having served 150 Thanksgiving dinners, and how she had cooked all the turkeys herself because it’s not a bird that they have in Mexico and her staff still hasn’t quite ‘gotten it’ when it comes to making that. I expressed my amazement at the amount of food she had made and we chatted some more.
I told her how exquisite the spicy calamari was and Deborah said it took her a while to get her staff to make it right. Her staff has it down, this is hands down the best calamari I have ever had. EVER. I love calamari and use it as a test of a restaurant’s ability. The calamari at Momma Norma & Deborah was the most tender, succulent and juicy… I have never before, upon inserting my fork into a piece of fried calamari, had it squirt juice. I think my jaw dropped but I may have just opened it wider to get that sucker in faster! So before we go on, here’s the calamari.
AMAZING CALAMARI
Did I mention it was delicious?
Over the course of my four visits, I had dinner and breakfast twice (happy hour 2-4-1 margaritas rock). I tried a number of dishes among them the Spinach Salad which has a unique dressing that is just delicious, I asked one of the staff what was in it and he told me it was a secret.
The Mexican Combo Platter was very filling (but I still managed that chocolate cake) the platter was Enchiladas in a Salsa Roja, Tamale in Salsa Verde, & Taquitos with salad and cheese on top of them, in addition to that, there were the sides of guacamole & chips, rice & beans. Very filling but so good you are compelled to finish every last bite.
It’s bigger than the photo suggests.
Now about the breakfasts not only were they hearty & delicious, they were unbelievably priced. Converting Mexican Pesos to dollars the French Toast was $2.50 as were the eggs (and I can’t remember what they were served with, I’m thinking toast and maybe rice and beans). Breakfast on both occasions, including coffee, water, Juice and tip was less than $7 US and I tip well. Deborah’s French Toast also has a little something different in it, she puts some orange juice in to the batter and it gives a unique and very nice taste.
I can’t wait to go back to Ixtapa and to Momma Norma & Deborah. Now this wasn’t the only place I ate at but it was most certainly the best.
I had a really nice breakfast at Cafe Marina in ‘downtown’ Ziahuatanejo, right off the beach near where the fishmongers are selling the catch of the day. The woman who waited on me was not amused that I didn’t speak Spanish, but she was kind enough to correct me (nicely) on my pronunciation of Desayuno & Jugo (breakfast & juice). About the juice, I love grapefruit juice especially fresh squeezed but in the area it tasted different, not bad, but different. like it had a hint of rose water in it, this was everywhere… they have a different breed of grapefruit in Mexico is my guess, it isn’t bad, but it takes a little getting use to.
Fragolino’s is another must try, Italian style gelato and ice creams. So delicious, and with the heat and humidity it was so very refreshing.
Now for the hottest meal I had on my trip it was a simple lunch of shrimp, lightly cooked and chilled and served with a ’sauce’ of citrus juice and pieces, chilis, and red onion. It was several glasses of water hot, and two Coronas … Coronas which cost$15 Pesos ($1.50 US). Last time I had one in Manhattan it set me back $6.00 plus tip.
So very delicious!
Which I had here
Now not having a kitchen or kitchenette in my hotel room I had to pass on this chicken, but damn I wanted to try it. and that’s $45 Pesos ($4.50 US)
I’ve left a bunch of stuff out, like the other place in Ixtapa where I had breakfast and made this silly video.
When Enya came on, I immediately thought “QUICK, video the grapefruit juice!”And there we go, my food adventures in Ixtapa/Zihuatanejo.Charles.
Is something I didn’t think I would do, fear of heights and all that, but my Mexican Escape was all about firsts and trying new things, that is not what got me up in the air… It was the 2 margaritas before noon (what? vacation = no rules) and the third one shortly after with a lite lunch, and well…
I walked up to the guys on the beach, asked how much, and went for it. So here we go….
Preperation, instructions, and suit up, cross check and…
Away we go, 3 steps later and…
I’m airborne, no aborting this mission.
I got a 10 minute ride around the northern end of Ixtapa, the marina, did a wide turn and headed back.
This is a good point in the post to tell you what it was and what it wasn’t. It wasn’t scary, at all. It wasn’t exhilarating, aside from take off and landing, those were a little… But once you’re up, it’s peaceful, the only things you hear are the speedboat a couple hundred feet below and in front of you, and the wind whipping by your ears. It’s calming and an interesting way to get a look at the area. I will do this again. it was pretty awesome.
So, yeah, I haven’t really written anything since late November…
I got a cold on the plane back from Mexico, then the holidays happened, then my youngest Niece and Nephew gave me a respiratory infection that kicked my ass so hard I was out of work for over a week, and if you know me, I don’t take more than a day out a couple times a year.
So, I’m working on some things, finishing writing about my Mexico trip is a priority, and I was gently chastised by somone I care for and respect greatly, it seems a few people were actually using my food logs to help themselves lose weight… So I started working on some things to get back to that, not the food logs, but the help. I’m creating some meal plans that should help anyone, including myself to forge onward.
Thanks for your patience, and hopefully I’m back to form and ready to roll!
(post Somerville) after a show at a Gay Pride festival. Went to see 
