Sneakeater

Sure. But it's not a dead end even technically, since you can turn off to Beach Street where the park is (unless it's one-way the wrong way, in which case you can turn onto it from Beach Street, and then continue onto Church Street where West Broadway terminates). What useful not-a-waste-of-words information was he trying to convey?

Uptown chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten doing a pop-up on the premises of a hotel where he already runs a restaurant constitutes his "head[ing] uptown"? OK West Broadway where Frenchette is "a dead-end road in Tribeca"? OK

It's incredible to me that I didn't know until a few minutes ago that Lou Reed's college roommate was Elizabeth Swados's older brother. I'm sure everybody else knew it.

Unlike Illinoise, which took a great album and made it banal.

I loved that to pieces.

Yeah obvs I'm not talking about Moynihan.

It took me a long time to convince myself I could eat raw shellfish in Penn Station and not die. But I could, it finally turned out. I never had such misgivings in Grand Central proper. But then, Grand Central proper isn't disgusting like Penn Station.

Purim is the most festive day on the Jewish calendar. The main traditional stricture is that you get blind drunk. Perhaps for that reason, there are few traditional foods for the holiday -- even though a celebration is very much enjoined. Sure, there are hamantaschen, as everybody knows. But that's a dessert snack treat, not a meal. And by analogy to hamantaschen, you're traditionally supposed to have savory filled dumplings. But what about the rest of the meal? I mean, you've got to sop up all that mandatory alcohol with something. There's a recent trend of having Persian food, since the (totally fictional) Purim story takes place in Persia. I object to this on every intellectual level: as a fairly committed atheist, I observe Jewish holidays to connect with my ancestors, not to engage in role-play commemorating total historical fictions (especially since this particular fiction, if you read it to the very end, reflects a mindset that, while understandable in an oppressed marginalized population, leads demonstrably to unspeakable evil when that population gets power). And I can tell you pretty definitively that, whatever my great-grandparents might have eaten on Purim in the Shetl, it wasn't Persian food. Nevertheless, for want of a better idea, I ended up making a Persian style braised lamb shank* to follow my bowl of mushroom-sauerkraut pierogi (savory filled dumplings are not a problem in my new neighborhood) tossed in butter and scallion (we're counting sauerkraut and maybe scallion as the green vegetables in this dinner). This lamb was another dish that amazingly came out just the way I intended. I'm especially relieved as the spice blend I came up with was a lot more elaborate than what I'd usually try, so I was really risking an unbalanced mess. I had the lamb shank and its supernal gravy over basmati rice. Usually, I wouldn't have rice and dumplings in the same meal. But hey, it's the most festive night on the Jewish calendar. Hamantaschen for dessert. I get what @backyardchef means when he says he respects Rudy's Bakery & Cafe but doesn't love it -- but they nail hamantaschen. Except for their only making prune and apricot and not mohn. Maybe if I whine enough. (Not that my whining has had them having chocolate chip cookie dough cake as anything more than an occasional special.) Of course you'd have a Moravian wine with all this. 2020 Milan Nestarec Nach Kidding aside, a blend of Blaufränkisch, Pinot Noir, and St. Laurent would seem like a promising pairing for lamb shanks braised in, among other things, pomegranate nectar (hell, I threw in some Grenadine). Also, its 1L bottle size permitted me to pour some wine into the braising liquid (something they'd never do in Iran -- but the last I checked, Queens isn't in Iran) while still leaving enough to insure my compliance with drunkenness mitzvah. Yeah, this WAS a perfect pairing. Bright tart fruit -- REALLY tart -- that even tasted a bit like pomegranate. Plentiful acid to cut through the fat (these are lamb shanks, after all) and also to match the black limes I put into the supernal gravy. A different kind of pairing would have had some serious tannins to bond with all the fat in this dish. But on this particularly festive night, I wanted something that brooded less. (A LOT less, as it turned out: this wine is expressly made for quaffing.) ___________________________________________________________- * My initial thought for the main dish was a sort of pomegranate-glazed lamb ribs: that seemed to nod to Persia without putting on a costume. The counterguy at the Ridgewood Pork Store informed me that they didn't have lamb ribs this week, as they were saving their lamb onslaught for Easter next week. ME: I'm more concerned with Purim, which is TOMORROW. ALL THREE GUYS BEHIND THE COUNTER, IN UNISON: For Purim you want a lamb shank. ME: I should have known that you guys would know more about Purim dinner than I do.

Wow.

Wow.

Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd-Webber share a birthday (day not year) (today, as it happens). What a difference!

There was also a tuna variation. Either way, one of the best things I've ever had.

That's an old Dave Santos classic!

Yeah my mother too. But I attributed that to her almost magical ability to overcook ANYTHING and didn’t think it had universal applicability.

Seared Crescent duck breast with Five Spice powder under a sort of lazybones mushroom civet. On rice. Sautéed wild broccoli rabe with garlic on the side. There's one wine grape that's a slam dunk with Five Spice Powder. 2021 Rémi Poujol Le Temps fait Tout And this wine is 50% that grape, Carignan. Then there's 30% Grenache and 20% Syrah. And in this natural wine some of that Carignan mild-spice flavor comes through. Other than that, there's a great general vivaciousness -- this is one of those wines that POP -- ending in puckering sour finish. Now you either like that finish or you don't -- that's why some people just don't like Natural wine -- but with a nicely fatty duck breast (nobody’s ever going to accuse Crescent’s ducks of being too lean) it was very welcome to me.

In my American ignorance, I always figured that canned corn beef was what would happen if you took regular corned beef and compressed it into a block for canning.

Either that or a laxative.

I dunno, but I'm pretty sure "Rock Me" was about retirement.

Among other things, it was never clear to me whether you could overcook a braise.

Also, everybody thinks "Magic Carpet Ride" is about drugs, but John Kaye was really thinking about housecleaning.

I actually read somewhere that that's what Mars Bonfire was thinking about when he wrote the song. He was shocked when it came to be associated with motorcycles.

Hmmmm. So people were picking it up before that incidental New Yorker mention. I guess the guy in the New Yorker article had to hear about it from somewhere. (I must have seen The Infatuation piece, since I mentioned to the owner how odd it was that they had been said to play Zouk instead of Maloyas on their playlist, and he replied, "no the night she was here we were playing Zouk!")

Gorgeous

This is all stuff I've always wondered about: https://www.nytimes.com/article/how-to-braise-meat.html

It occurs to me that if it were 200 years ago, the menu would have included dodo.