Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we make peachy croissants, and drink a celery cocktail. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Peach cobbler croissants at home
Recipe adapted from Pillsbury.com
This is a delightfully 1960’s semi-homemade recipe and if you are not here for that kind of supermarket realness, you can step out of my, warm, inviting, butter-and-peach scented kitchen right now. Also, it’s an opportunity for me to share my favorite tweet with the world. I, for one, am not going to bother ever trying to make any kind of pastry that involves puffs or layers so I will continue buying crescent rolls. Also, it’s really nice to wake up in the morning and be able to make a recipe with four ingredients that takes 30 minutes. All you need is a can of crescent rolls, one perfectly ripe peach, sliced into eight slices, ⅓ cup of brown sugar, 2 tablespoons of melted butter, and a dash of nutmeg. Preheat your oven to 375F, slice your peach, melt the butter, mix the brown sugar with a pinch of nutmeg and unroll your crescent rolls into triangles. Toss the peach slices with a tablespoon of butter, and divide the brown sugar mixture on top of the dough triangles. Add one slice of peach to the wide end of each, roll, up, and fit snugly into a 8x8 baking pan. Brush with melted butter, bake for 10-12 minutes, until nicely golden brown on top, and share with loving friends and family (or just eat in front of your cat).
Famous Garlic Aromatic Crispy Chicken (脆皮蒜香鸡) at Wu’s Wonton King
165 E Broadway, New York, NY 10002
Wu’s Wonton King is the kind of place you can arrive a Full New York Late (1 hour and a broken subway car) to and still enjoy the food even though it’s gone cold and everyone else has already finished eating. Just order a cold Tsingtao beer to go with the crispy chicken, which is the kind of thing that’s just as good after being left out on the table, and scoop up the crispy bits of fried garlic and drippings to put over rice. The pea shoots are garlicky and tender, the Peking duck (get a half bird for your table, for sure) which is hanging in the window display next to a bug-zapper lantern (it wouldn’t be an authentic Chinatown restaurant without one) has tender, sweet flesh and perfectly fatty, crispy skin, and the wontons are big and plump and full of shrimp. As I clear up the leftovers on the table, some restaurant workers begin peeling a big tub of shrimp at a table behind us, and a family celebrates a child’s birthday party in the corner. I can’t imagine how delicious the food would be if it was still warm.
Chocolate and halva pan pastry at Black Star Bakery
Various locations, including 1597 York Ave, New York, NY 10028
I know I have waxed poetic about this halva pan pastry before, but I don’t care. I love it so much and I want to write about it all the time. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result, maybe true love is just doing the same thing over and over again and being happy each and every time. No one really wants to read about true love, preferring a plot less mundane, but I am here to write about it. I’m still not sure what a pan pastry is (isn’t all pastry baked on some sort of pan?) but I would best describe it as a puff pastry treat filled with chunks of halva and chocolate. The way the flaky, buttery pastry melts into the sweet and dense sesame halva and swirls with the milky chocolate is worth writing about every time.
The #7 (strawberry and vanilla wafer milkshake) at Breezy Shakes
At the Rockaway Ferry Terminal -- check Instagram for daily location
The Rockaway Ferry is almost always late. In fact, it’s so often late that maybe it’s actually just 30 minutes early, and the ferry that you’re boarding is in fact that next one that’s slotted to arrive. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because if you’re taking the ferry to the beach on a Friday, time is a loose construct anyways. Also, the Breezy Shakes truck is almost always parked at the Rockaway Ferry Terminal, and there is nothing better to do than to drink a milkshake under the sun while waiting for your ship to come in. I love everything about the Breezy Shakes truck, including the laid-back penguin mascot, the truly excessive number of flavor combos, and the fact that when you get the milkshake, they dollop a little dollop of vanilla soft serve around the straw which is like getting a tiny scoop of ice cream and a shake all in one. My two favorite milkshake flavors are vanilla and strawberry, and I can never decide which one I want which is why I order the #7, which has both strawberry and vanilla and comes with a little wafer cookie. It is just as good as you can imagine.
Celery Spritz at Chez Ma Tante
90 Calyer St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
Chez Ma Tante is not a French restaurant, despite having a French name. Apparently it’s not a British restaurant either, despite the fact that the chips are really fries and they have Pimm’s cup and kedgeree on the menu. Yelp says it’s “New American,” the website says that its name is Canadian, and honestly at this point I don’t really care because the food is tasty, in a summery, white-table cloth kind of way. I like all the cold starters on the menu and the kedgeree for the main, which comes out covered in a small mountain of celery leaves. This is a very pro-celery restaurant. They serve celery soda (which is good if you like the flavor of Chinese medicine) and also a celery spritz on the cocktail menu, with green Chartreuse, celery juice, lime, and sparkling wine. It’s worth trying, as long as you don’t let it sit too long -- cold, the spritz tastes snappy and refreshing with the medicinal flavor of celery; but warm, it just tastes like an alcoholic soup.
Have a good weekend,
Soph
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