Rumspringa in New York 🌇

Luxury Wagyu and budget bentos.

Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we eat outside for the first time in a long time. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.

Uni and Wagyu beef roll at Salt + Charcoal

171 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11249

It’s Rumspringa for everyone in New York right now, that brief window of frantic adolescence where we feel emboldened to eat outside in restaurants and go to the beach and maybe even give a friend a hug while we dream of doing much riskier of things because we know the lockdown of fall is coming, and for god knows how long. The downside of second adolescence is that it comes with all the lovely parts of first adolescence: Social anxiety, awkwardness, forgetting how to make eye contact with other human beings because you’ve spent most of your days indoors on the computer. The upside of second adolescence is that everything is new again, everything is a thrill again, every pleasurable thing we do feels tinged with guilt and rebellion in a both nerve-wracking and absolutely delightful way. For my very first restaurant meal since March, I went all out and ordered this absolutely excessive beef sashimi (?) at Salt + Charcoal, a very hip Williamsburg steakhouse I have been eyeing for months. Everything about this dish is over-the-top and pure luxury, but I very much enjoyed it. Because what is adulthood but being a teenager with a paycheck and therapy?

Cold brew at home

Do this at home, but only if you’re chaotic

I have been making cold brew in what is possibly the most chaotic method ever, like it’d be smack-dab in the bottom right-hand corner of the alignment chart if this was a DND meme about coffee-making. What I’m saying is that you should stop reading this paragraph now if you have any opinions on the One True and Precise Way to Make Coffee. OK here goes: I like to buy ground coffee beans that’s meant for espresso machines and brew it in a teapot. You laugh at me, but actually works extremely… well? Here’s how you can also brew chaos in your own home: Take a small teapot with a fine mesh metal filter, pour ground coffee beans to the top of the filter, and fill slowly with filtered cold water. Set it in the fridge overnight, and enjoy over ice, with milk in the morning. What’s that? You want measurements? I have no idea how big this teapot is and it’d simply be too logical to measure the volume it can hold so instead I’ll let you know that the internet suggests 6 tbs coarsely ground coffee to 2 cups of cold water. Oh, and here’s that brand of espresso beans I like.

Night market crispy chicken bento box at Taiwan Bear House 

11 Pell St, New York, NY 10013, https://www.taiwanbearhouseny.com/

The bento boxes at Taiwan Bear House are my platonic ideal of a lunch box. They are my happiest of meals. They are what I order when I don’t want to eat because I am sad or stressed. The price is good, the fried popcorn chicken is crispy and plentiful (seasoned with a hint of, is it five spice?), the rice is white, the meat sauce provides a nice thin blanket on top, the sauteed cabbage reminds me of home cooking, and it’s all topped off with a tea egg (is there any food more cute and perfect than an egg?) and delivered to you in a round bamboo container. Ordering a bento from Bear House makes me feel like a kid on a school trip, or like I’m about to take a long, peaceful train ride through the countryside, in a blissful, COVID-free world. Also, the milk teas are tasty (I got jasmine flavor). 

Bad day miso ramen at home

Make it at home.

This is the perfect meal to nurture your inner child, for days when you’ve had an extra-hard therapy session, or you go through a little COVID heartbreak. It’s no fancy ramen, but it’s extremely simple, comforting, and salty-rich. The key to making a thick broth in a hurry is to not skimp on sesame oil. To make it: Fry 2 cloves smashed and diced garlic and 1 inch of ginger, grated or finely diced, in ½ tbs of toasted sesame oil in a small, heavy-bottom pot. (Normally, it’s against my upbringing to cook things in sesame oil but this does the extra-flavor trick.) Add 2 cups, 1 dash of soy sauce, and bring to a boil. Add a handful of frozen corn, 1 bundle frozen fresh noodles or 1 packet of ramen minus the flavoring, and cook just till noodles are done. Snip in some fresh cilantro, and stir in 2 tbs white miso. Add sesame oil, a soft-boiled egg, and white pepper to taste.

Marian Burro’s Original Plum Torte at home

Recipe available at NYT Cooking

It wouldn’t be summer (even though it hardly has been!) without making the Original Plum Torte. Involving only the simplest of ingredients (flour, sugar, eggs, baking powder, butter, cinnamon, and plums), one bowl, and a greased pan, this magical cake bakes up into something so much more than the sum of its parts. It’s also impossible to eff up -- I’ve made it with all different kinds of fruit (you can try various ideas here), almond flour (replace up to half), and cardamom instead of cinnamon. But the original plum version remains the best. You can find the OG recipe at NYT Cooking, or un-paywalled at Smitten Kitchen.

XOXO,

Soph

P.S. Next weekend I will be getting my head scanned, so no newsletter (unless inspiration strikes)!