Welcome to peak flu season 🤧
Welcome to the second edition of Five Things I Ate! If you missed last week’s post, which is all about things you can sip, you can catch up here.
Chicken and rice soup with Japanese pumpkin
My apartment — and yours, too
Quarantine your friends and coworkers, folks: it’s (almost) peak flu season! To help bolster the cold, I give you a loose approximation of a soup recipe I threw together last Sunday. It has all my favorite winter ingredients (chicken, carrots, and pumpkin), is peppery and soothing, and a cheery shade of yellow.
To make the soup: Drizzle some olive oil in a large pot and set it over a medium flame. Meanwhile, peel and dice two large carrots and one large onion. Throw it into the pot with a big pinch of salt and pepper, a spoonful of crushed ginger and a spoonful of crushed garlic (you can use fresh grated ginger and two cloves garlic) and cook until wilted. Add three boneless skinless chicken thighs, eight cups water, cover, and bring to a simmer for about 20-30 minutes, or until the chicken is tender. Meanwhile, cut a small Japanese pumpkin in half, scoop out the seeds, and roughly cube (this is hard, but worth it. Use a good sharp knife and a lot of caution). When the chicken is tender, take it out and set it on a plate. Add two-thirds cup jasmine rice and the pumpkin and bring to a simmer for 20 more minutes, or until rice and pumpkin are both tender. Shred the chicken, stir it into the soup, add liberal amounts of salt and pepper, and serve.
The Flirtibird at Angel’s Share
8 Stuyvesant St, New York, NY 10003
The Flirtibird is not a feathered friend who likes to lead you on, or a fun and fruity tropical drink, which is what it sounds like. A reference to a musical number by Duke Ellington, it’s a rather grounded and earthy drink you can find at Angel’s Share, one of the O.G. speakeasy bars in Manhattan. Made with barley shochu (not soju) and yuzu, served with a plum salt rim and shiso leaf in a stoneware tea cup, the drink is inspired by a margarita but tastes much more complex.
Protip: Angel’s Share is inside the restaurant Village Yokocho, on the second floor behind an unmarked wooden door. To avoid long lines (which there almost always are), go on a weekday, before dinner, not after. There’s actually a second secret location right next door, but I can’t vouch for the menu there, which is not the same.
Cherry pistachio danish at Colina Cuervo
759 Nostrand Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216
The cherry pistachio danish at Colina Cuervo is a feast for the eyes, with a deeply caramelized, glazed exterior, the color of a body of a violin. Biting into it, my eating companion, who was waiting patiently for his steak and eggs, marveled at the flaky layers. “Look at all the work that went into that,” he said. “It’s like a piece of art,” I replied. Was it the fact that this danish, which was really more like a kouign amann with a little dab of cherry jam and pistachio cream in the center, was the first thing that I’d eaten all day at two in the afternoon that made me find it so enchanting? I’ll have to return for a quality check, and I’m looking forward to it.
Falafel sandwich at Souk and Sandwich
117 6th Ave, New York, NY 10013
There are about as many opinions on who makes the best falafel in New York as there are places to get falafel — which is to say, very many. I’m not about to jump into this dogfight, but I will make a timid suggestion from the corner to try the falafel sandwich at Souk and Sandwich, a Lebanese take-out stand in Soho. It’s not the standard fluffy pita and hummus affair; the falafel is served Lebanese style, wrapped in a thin pita with a sprinkling of tabbouleh, bright pink pickled turnips, and ample amounts of tahini sauce. The whole thing is grilled and wrapped in foil, making for a rather pretty sandwich with nice grill marks on the outside and crispy exterior. I won’t compare it to the likes of Taim or Ba’al, but I will say I heartily enjoyed my lunch. Extra points to the fact that it comes automatically with a little cup of extra tahini sauce, and you don’t have to barter for it.
Cheese mousse at Hakata Tonton
61 Grove St, New York, NY 10014
I was tempted to make this week’s newsletter exclusively feature food from the dinner I ate at Hakata Tonton last Friday (which now seems like weeks ago), because it’s by far the best meal I’ve had all year. And now here we are, at the end of the newsletter, and I’ve restrained myself from sharing more than one dish. Yes, we’re less than two weeks into the year, but Hakata Tonton, a cozy little Japanese “soul food” eatery in the West Village, is very, very good. Standouts included salmon carpaccio sashimi and crispy pigs’ feet covered in chili oil and cilantro (the restaurant, whose logo is a pig’s snout, is known for its pig part dishes). But the dish I couldn’t stop thinking about was the cheese mousse on the dessert platter. The “cheese” in cheese mousse means cheesecake, not Gouda; it’s a raspberry tinted cheesecake mousse with a vanilla ice cream center, served with a bowl of crunchy cookie shards. Salty-sweet perfection.
Bonus: A feast of two plates of sashimi, an appetizer, a tray of hefty pork belly buns, a bowl of wonton soup, and a dessert sampler plus sake came out to a reasonable 50 dollars a person for a table of three. This is the perfect place for a dinner date (but make sure to make a reservation!).
Stay warm,
Sophie
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