Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we eat Tawainese food, make Japanese Iced coffee, and live with chronic anxiety. Need I say more? Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Pea Shoots With Tofu Skin (豆苗百葉) at 886
26 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10003
There is a point in the night, sitting there on Saint Mark’s street, eating heaps of pea shoots and drinking hard seltzer with a good friend that I haven’t seen in two years, that I realize that I am surrounded by happy Asian faces. I see big tables of friends and families laughing and ordering extra bottles of beer and inside of me a knot that has been growing since the Atlanta shootings quietly unties itself. 886 is magical like that. It has the energy of a college house party, if your friends also happened to be exceptionally good at cooking Taiwanese food (in other words, the perfect house party). The owner, Eric Sze (along with Andy Chuang, who was too busy to chat), has a friendly, outsize personality; after the kitchen closes he sits at a table with his friends, and sends my friend a free beer when he sees him getting harassed by a person on the street. Everything we ordered off the menu was delicious, but the pea shoots with tofu skin -- a last minute, underdog option -- was the clear winner. I am not sure how something so simple could taste so good, but I’m ordering an extra helping next time.
Lunar yuzu hard seltzer at 886
26 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10003 (Also you can order online)
Usually I am opposed to the concept of hard seltzer with every cell in my whiskey-loving, natural-wine-funk-only body. But the yuzu hard seltzer by Lunar is delicious. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s Not Too Sweet, and doesn’t taste like cheap vodka, like a lot of hard seltzers come off to me. I will be honest with you, I have no idea what the corn alcohol in this is, it could be straight up a tiny shot of rubbing alcohol for all I care. The yuzu flavor is so nice and citrusy, I am just going to enjoy it.
Japanese style iced coffee at home
Recipe from Serious Eats.
Forget cold brew (or at least, set it aside for just one day) — my favorite kind of iced coffee is Japanese pour over. As longtime readers will know, pour over is my absolute favorite technique for coffee-making, and this extends to the iced variety. Unlike making cold brew, you do not have to have any foresight which is great for those of us who are chaotically aligned. All you have to do is make a double strength dose of pour over coffee and let it drip on a full cup of ice: 1 oz of coffee grounds to 8 oz of ice, brewed with 8 oz of freshly boiled water. (Read the article for detailed instructions). There is something about immediately icing the freshly brewed coffee that makes the already delicious and clean taste even brighter and more flavorful. It’s so good that I might never buy cold brew again.
Miso butter and salmon rice balls (onigiri) at home
Recipe from my kitchen.
If you’ve never topped off steamy sushi rice fresh from the Zojurushi with a pat of golden, melty butter, you’re really missing out. As apparently I have been, my entire life, before I watched this episode of Midnight Diner. Instead of “just a little” drop of soy sauce, I like to mix in a little spoonful of mild miso in my rice, for the perfect, slightly sweet, slightly savory, perfectly buttery bowl. But why stop there? For a complete snack, and an easy make-ahead lunch, flake in some roasted salmon and pack it into rice balls. Just soak 1 (rice cooker measurer) cup of sushi rice in water for 30 minutes, rinse and cook according to rice cooker directions. Meanwhile, marinate a fillet of salmon (I simply use a defrosted fillet from Whole Foods) in some cooking sake; then roast at 400F for 10-15 minutes, or until just tender. Stir a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of white miso into your piping hot rice; flake in the salmon, and pack into snack-size rice balls with your hands or a musubi or onigiri press. Eat half now, and save half for lunch tomorrow. Makes four.
Omakase at Sushi Noz
181 E 78th St, New York, NY 10075
Every time someone takes me out to a really nice dinner, I am terrified that I am going to ruin it. I am filled with anxiety that I will lose my appetite (which, in turn, does in fact make me lose my appetite), or that I will wear the wrong thing, or say the wrong thing, like exclaim to the sushi chef that we both like the same tattoo artist, except I got the knockoff version, to the polite but slightly appalled laughter of the pastel-toned Upper East Side family who’s sharing the counter. And then I will never be invited to eat a nice dinner again. I could write to you about the food, but I think it’s kind of pointless to tell you how amazing Michelin-starred sushi is. Sushi is probably my favorite food (which is in line with my cat-self), and Sushi Noz is better than any sushi I’ve ever eaten. So writing about how much better a food that I already love is at the highest level feels futile. The truth is, I don’t mind being afraid of eating at nice places. I think it heightens the experience. It makes me hyper-aware of my surroundings, which, in turn, makes me intensely focused on my company, and every piece of food that is served to me. I think if I didn’t feel anything special at all to go out somewhere nice, then it would make me kind of sad.
XOXO,
Soph
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