Good Food Jobs

Good lord, don't let Adam hear about this.

Eat, drink, and mum's the word, guys.

Resto

I was thrilled when my friend Jen suggested a big group dinner out this past Friday night.

This last week was my last one at Harper (no more freelancing), Jen has had some issues at work, and the Soul Twin was starting the healing process after a family tragedy: we were a rag-tag group, for sure.  Put in charge of getting a reservation, Resto seemed the perfect place to eat.  Gorgeous quality, heavy on soul-soothing food, and a casual atmosphere was exactly what we needed (check out the dinner menu - you'll see below that they even offer large format meals with "nose to tail" options).

Friday night was a beautiful autumn evening, crystal-clear with temps in the 60s.  Perfect.  Our group of 7 scored the only table out on the sidewalk so we were able to escape the noise inside; it felt like our very own private space in the middle of a city sidewalk.

One of my favorite things at Resto is the deviled eggs.  They're served on "pork toast": a pig's head is boiled down until it's fatty and melty and then it's smoothed flat in a sheet pan and frozen.  Once solid, it's cut up, breaded, and fried.  Crispy on the outside, melty fattiness on the inside, it's nothing short of pork heaven.  A slightly spicy deviled egg is served on top.

It's insanely rich - four of us shared this and we were more than satiated.

Andrea and Brian shared the moules et frites with Dijon mustard, house-made bacon, Parmesan, onion confit, and tarragon.  Tina and Jen shared the moules et frites with green curry, lemongrass, coconut milk, and kaffir lime.

Adam and Phil both had the burger.

I ordered the skirt steak with wax beans, fine herbs, pistachios, walnuts, pine nuts, and honey.

We also ordered every one of the dipping sauces for the frites: lime pickle; mayo and onion; sweet chili; Old Bay; mayo; Cajun remoulade; Sriracha; lemon and smoked paprika (my favorite!); yogurt, cumin, and roasted garlic; gribiche.

Resto is also one of the rare places that has an outstanding wine AND beer list - it seems that most places only have one or the other. This list isn't the whole book you see below but it's damn close.  The best thing is that I've never had a server at Resto who didn't know their beers and wines from top to bottom - they can find the perfect pairing to anything, I'm sure of it.

An amazing night of good food, good wine, and good friends.

Eat, drink, and share a communal meal to cure what ails you.

La vie, toujours, la vie

Aw, guys. I really want to thank you for sticking with me - I know I've been all over the place lately, and I'm so glad you're still here.

My mom was visiting for the last week and we had the loveliest time. We ate at Resto, shopped at Ann Taylor (I bought this sweater), and visited the High Line. We also tried to navigate the insanity of the TKTS booth in Times Square (result: an hour in line and NO tickets to Mary Poppins). Here's the view of the insanity inTimes Square (photo by Mom):

And my mom is on a restricted diet as of late so making up a menu was a challenge: limited dairy and animal protein, limited wine, no refined sugar, everything multi-grain and whole wheat. Here is one thing I made while she was visiting:

Food and Wine's Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Cabbage and Pine Nuts, served with ricotta-topped grilled bread (I omitted the ricotta on my mom's plate).

I've also been busy working on my iTunes playlists. As you know (here and here, among others), playlists play an integral part in my kitchen and eating life. And with the new computer, I've had to work on reorganizing my 10,000+ tracks. A huge task but one I love, actually.

Also, those of you who have been reading awhile are familiar with the Soul Twin and her husband, My Other Husband. They've had a family tragedy recently that has left me feeling helpless and sad. Ugh. I'm just sick over the whole thing, and I don't know what to do. Cooking, hugs, love...sure, that's all great but it won't bring someone back who never should have left. Shit.  I just can't find words.

But I was going through the blog the other day and looking through past posts (from waaay back!) and thinking about things that I've done, what a full life I've had, and how much I've laughed.  And how much amazing food and drink I've had.  So if you'll indulge me, I'm sharing my trip down memory lane with you:

Back when I still blogged children's books, I went bowling during BEA with Chris, Jack, Scott Westerfeld, and David Levithan.

My first souffle!

Adam and Bug: one of my first photos with my new camera

Homemade calamari is so simple!

Relaxing at home while Adam was on a business trip (this was a Stratus Chardonnay).

A trip to Florida with the Soul Twin

My first taste of Cubanisimo's Rosado

My trip to Anguilla that I never did tell you guys all about, as I promised.

Mixing work and foodie pleasure with In-N-Out (thanks again to Liz Burns and Angie Manfredi for creating one of my favorite conference memories)

Golden Globes party with the Soul Twin 

Beer, sausages, and pretzels for breakfast

My first macarons at Bastille Day 2011!

Lastly, on a really high note, I have to share a video with you. I've been mum about it but now it's known worldwide that Dogfish Head Brewery and some Googlers collaborated on a beer together: Urkontinent. Guess who's Google-y husband spearheaded the project? Mine! Guess who's husband got to brew beer with Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head? Mine! I couldn't be prouder of Adam. The video is below. It's a little on the long side but I promise that it's entertaining and you'll learn some interesting stuff about the brewing process. Not to mention that there's a tall, cute blond guy for you all to look at. Enjoy!



Eat, drink, and let someone know today that you love them.

Opening Day Nachos

I know, it's another football post.  I swear, this will be my last for 2011!

Like last year, I made the traditional NFL Opening Day dish in our home: Roasted Red Pepper and Cannellini Bean Dip (from Cooking Light).

To be quite frank, one of the reasons we make it is because we can munch on it nearly all day and do so relatively guilt-free.  And it's one of the few ways we can get Bug to eat vegetables...lots of them.

Also, like last year, I did a cheese dish because that's the kind of people we are; no meal seems complete without some kind of cheese involved.  While still at my HarperCollins job, I attended the Texas Library Association conference in Austin this past April.  As a thank you from TLA's Children's Round Table, we received a lovely nacho plate from Holman Pottery (specifically, it was the nacho plate in Blue Earth, if you're interested in ordering one).  When Sally gave the dish to me, it came with instructions for nachos which I have long since lost so I had to make it up.  Here's how it turned out*:

OPENING DAY NACHOS
Created by Laura Lutz


Ingredients:
1/2 lb. jack cheese, grated
2 garlic cloves, sliced thin
1 tbsp. pickled jalapenos, chopped
1/2 c.chorizo, chopped
2 tbsp. cilantro, chopped
1 lime, quartered


Preheat oven to 415 degrees.  Spread grated cheese in the dish (you don't need a Holman dish for this - you can use Pyrex or Le Creuset, anything oven-safe) and then sprinkle garlic slivers evenly over the cheese.  Spread jalapenos and chorizo in the dish.  Place dish in oven and bake for about 15 minutes until cheese is golden and bubbly (note: you might want to bake it longer if you want the edges to get crispy).  Remove from oven and sprinkle cilantro on top.  Serve with lime slices and tortilla chips. (Serves 2...because we eat a lot on Opening Day)


Note: all the ingredients above are to taste; feel free to add or omit as much as you want.


Do you have any sports-related traditions in your home?  And what is it with sports and munching?

Speaking of which, I abandoned my old friend Wine for this meal and switched to Beer.  The Magic Hat #9 paired perfectly:

Eat, drink, and celebrate family rituals.


* Note: the Holman nacho dish is the round one only.  The big plate underneath it was one I owned previously.

Dogfish Head Punkin Ale

Adam recently had a once-in-a-lifetime, out-of-this-world opportunity to brew beer with none other than Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head...more on that soon.  In the meantime, I was thrilled to benefit from his trip to the brewery in Delaware:

The very first batch of Dogfish Head Punkin Ale of the season.  It's Autumn in a Glass.

I've been in bed sick all day, watching Anne of Green Gables.  But it's slightly chilly and very rainy and gloomy out, and I can't help but feel like autumn is right around the corner.  So I opened up one of the Punkin Ales as a promise of things to come.

Rooftop dining

It's Crazy Town around here with me leaving for the conference on Wednesday.  It's been so challenging to get out of my own head, away from thoughts about next week, and just be in the moment with my family before I leave.  Luckily, I'm distracted by the joy that my best friends in the world - nay, members of my family - are moving to NYC in a month.  The male half of that pair, Brian, was here last week and through this weekend, looking for apartments and getting a feel for the lay of the land.  I haven't thought about my damn conference at all for the last two days.  That is the magic that is Soul Twin and Brian moving here.

Tonight we sat up on our roof deck for dinner, something we haven't done yet since moving into this apartment three months ago.  And I made my first recipe from Patricia Wells' new cookbook, SALAD AS A MEAL: Scrubbed Bread Tartines with Chorizo, Manchego, and Tomatoes*.  It was so easy and required hardly any heat to be turned on; in short, it was the ideal summer meal.  Here's the lovely dish:

I paired it with a Vinho Verde, which was just lovely.  Vinho Verde is bright and slightly effervescent, and it's lower in alcohol than most wines so it's really the perfect wine on a very warm summer night.  The guys shared a large bottle of Dogfish Head's Squall IPA.  I don't know how it paired for them, though...I'd ask them but I'm back in the apartment typing this and they're back on the roof, smoking cigars.  Overall, between apartment shopping with my best friend and dining al fresco, I'm just the happiest, glowingest gal today.  And right before a conference, that's no small feat.

SCRUBBED BREAD TARTINES WITH CHORIZO, MANCHEGO, AND TOMATOES
adapted from SALAD AS A MEAL by Patricia Wells


4 thin slices hearty bread, toasted or grilled
4 ripe heirloom tomatoes, cut into thin slices
Fleur de sel
8 oz. Manchego cheese, cut into small cubes
8 oz. thinly sliced or cubed smoked chorizo sausage
24 large Spanish olives or green Picholine olives


Brush bread slices with olive oil and grill on stovetop castiron grill (or you can toast them).  Scrub a toasted bread slice with the bottom slice of tomato, until all that is left of the tomato is the skin.  Sprinkle with a little fleur de sel.  Top with a quarter of the tomato slices.  Place the bread slices on a platter.  Scatter some of the cheese, sausage, and olives around the bread.

Eat, drink, and thank goodness for chosen family.


* On my menu, I just wrote "Spanish Tartines" because I'm sick to death of these looooooong recipe titles that tell you every single ingredient in the dish.  For heaven's sake, it's just gotten ridiculous.

Beer for Breakfast

As mentioned, we're in the middle of a move...which means that, basically, I'm semi-permanently in Grump Mode.  Love the excitement, love the adventure, love the promise of a move.  But hate the grunt work, the physical labor, and disorganization of it all.  I realize how silly it is for me to be so grumpy so I try to keep my head above water by playing lots of fun music, drinking an extra glass of wine or two, and trying unexpected recipes (where permitted since, you know, I've packed half my kitchen).

In the midst of weeding through my magazine recipes and articles, I found this one from Saveur, "Breakfast Times Two*."  It's a short blurby article about Munich, specifically, and their traditional zweites Frühstück, or second breakfast.  After a light breakfast, there is the late morning second breakfast, which usually consists of sausage, a soft pretzel, sweet mustard, and a beer.  A beer!  At 11:00 a.m.!  I knew this would be a brilliant way to alleviate my bad attitude.  I mean, how fun and out of the ordinary!

Adam and I started with some yogurt, granola, and coffee around 9:00.  And here was our 11:00 a.m. zweites Frühstück :

Now, I didn't have the traditional pretzel - I am so embarrassed to admit that I used those generic Super Pretzels - but, nevertheless, it was awesome.  The knackwurst we had with it was sweet, the pretzels were salty, the mustard was a tad spicy...and the beer washed it all down to perfection.

Like the photo in Saveur, we drank Schneider Weisse - first, we split a bottle of  the original Schneider Weisse, which was so light as to be almost "American lager"-esque.  Our second beer was the Weihenstephaner, which was a wheat beer with a little more heft and spice.  I liked it a bit more than the Schneider Weisse, but it was purely a personal taste issue - they were very different beers.  If you can't find either of these, you can just stick with anything German and/or wheat - you'll most likely get the spice you'll need for this.

Talking about spice and sausage aside, this is just what the doctor ordered.  We got out of our routine, Adam and I gushed about how delicious and fun it all was, and Bug got to be all shocked about us having beer at 11:00 a.m.  Lots of of laughter all around.  And you can bet that I matched the music: there's a German band that came on my radar a couple years ago, Wir sind Helden**.  They played in the background.  Overall, the whole meal was a triumph and started off my weekend just right.

Eat, drink, and Deutsch werden.


* Apologies for lack of a link to the article - it's not available on Saveur's website.  For the record, the short article was in issue #114, "The Breakfast Issue."
** Never heard of Wir sind Helden?  You don't need to understand German, I assure you, to get addicted to their sound.  Check out the concert footage here and here.  Try to resist the pop sound and the adorable lead singer!

Comfort Food: Risotto

Major changes going on in the Lutz household lately. Here are a few:

• Hell, just a busy week. We rarely ate en famille this past week. Which definitely wears on all of us.
• Bug is starting a new school this Wednesday: The Neighborhood School in the East Village. It's all been somewhat sudden and, while fabulous, still stressful. She'll be starting 4th grade in a new environment and we're hoping it'll be a change for the better. The bad news? Until our lease is up in March 2011, we'll be commuting an hour each way to get her to school. Wow.
• Planning a vacation. I told Adam that I have one goal - and one goal only, really - in 2010: Leave this country. I went to France in 1993, Mexico in 1996...and then haven't left the country since. And I must. The world is calling me. The three of us have passports so what the hell are we waiting for? So Thanksgiving this year. We initially thought Europe (Dublin or London, perhaps) but, post-Hawaii, we're thinking Costa Rica or Turks and Caicos. Readers, weigh in.
• Recommitting ourselves to Frenchness. Thanks to the excellent Wafels and Dinges, Schnitzel and Things, Joyride Truck, and my lack of self-discipline, I'm failing the zipper test. Trés unsexy.

The good news is that we are on the cusp of autumn. And tonight I was finally able to bring some heat into the kitchen: I made risotto. Lemon risotto, specifically. A montage:

As with any recipe, I always recommend getting all ingredients ready ahead of time. (Ignore the oranges in the glass - that was my Lillet on ice)

The thing I love most about risotto is that I can stand there, stirring and stirring, and read. It must've been something unconscious because I "accidentally" left my e-reader full of manuscripts at work on Friday. Which left me free to read David Lebovitz's The Sweet Life in Paris all weekend which, suffice to say, did not quell my wanderlust. It's lovely in every way (the book, that is. Not my wanderlust, which is rather annoying and expensive).

Reference the recipe I linked to above, which I followed almost exactly. However, I didn't have a full two tablespoons of parsley or basil left on my balcony garden. I did have a bunch of sage in my fridge that was about to go bad. So I used 1 tbsp. chopped parsley and 1 tbsp. chopped sage. Then I fried whole sage leaves in 2 tbsp. of butter for garnish:

Lest you think my tastes are too rich (or fattening) for your blood, I didn't add the the butter at the end that the recipe recommended: I figured the butter I used for the fried sage sufficed.

Adam came into the kitchen while I was stirring and reading. He put his arms around me (as all significant others should while someone is cooking an amazing dinner from which they will benefit) and he said, "I could tell you needed this." "Needed what?" I asked. "Needed to just sit in the kitchen with your music playing, stirring. Reading. Glass of wine." And he was right.

Eat, drink, and feel grounded in the kitchen.

Note: In the great Beer vs. Wine battle that goes on in our house, we decided that tonight was a draw. We agreed that the Hermann J. Wiemer 2008 Dry Riesling was exceptional, as was Adam's Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA.

The Day Pinot Was Replaced by Porter

As most of you know, Adam is a beer guy. And he's getting more and more obsessed every day to the point where I'm certain he's going to start homebrewing in our bathtub, thanks to Sam Calagione (the head of all things Dogfish Head) putting ideas into his head. Or he's going to leave me for Sam.*

Adam is also notoriously difficult to shop for and, as such, our families have bombarded him with beer and its various accoutrements for birthdays and holidays. This includes magazine subscriptions. So Adam is reading the latest Beer Traveler and there's a list of the 150 perfect places to drink a beer. One of them is Henry's 12th Street Tavern in Portland (it's #25). So we go there for lunch a couple days ago.


The beer list was insane. Here's a glimpse:


Even I found lots that I wanted to try. Like this Laurelwood Organic Tree Hugger Porter (Portland, OR):


I also tried a sample of the Oakshire Amber (Eugene, OR), which I loved - it was unique and complex in its flavor.

But the STAR of the whole experience? The gorgonzola fries:


I could use all kinds of flowery language and purple prose to describe them but I just can't. Crispness: perfect. Seasoning: perfect. Amount of gorgonzola: perfect. We had one plate of these among five of us, but we could just had two plates and called that our lunch. Next time, no doubt.

The dessert wasn't half-bad either:


That's the creme "brewlee" sampler. They use Widmer Hefeweizen to make the one so there's lots of clove and ginger and spice in it. The chocolate one uses Black Bear XX chocolate stout (of course) and it's so rich that one bite will suffice. Shortbread finishes it out.

Our hope is that Henry's is going to become a tradition - it was fantastic.

Eat, drink, and be open-minded about beer.

Note: The server told us that the waffle fries used in the gorgonzola fries are not housemade but that the fries that came with the burger were. The waffle fries were better by leaps and bounds. The house fries were lukewarm and rather soggy. Stick with the gorgonzola appetizer.

*While visiting the Dogfish Head Brewpub recently, Adam actually met Sam Calagione's son who isn't much older than our Bug. Adam is thinking of arranging their marriage...