I’ve never been to Eccolo, the restaurant that replaced Ginger Island on 4th Street in Berkeley. Though it was started by former Chez Panisse sous chef Christopher Lee, but its reviews were always mixed, making some people happy and other furious. With very limited restaurant money, I never was too tempted to take the chance and try it.
I just found out that it recently closed through a very interesting article by Eccolo sous chef Samin Nosrat on the Food section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle (another business that is likely to fail in the near future). Nosrat explains how the business went under – basically, the economy put them in a position of either significantly downgrading their ingredients or significantly increasing their clientele. Despite a series of gimmicks (happy hour, more comfort food, etc.), they were not able to do the latter and they refused to do the former further, so their only choice was to close down. I’m sure that most restaurants nowadays are facing similar issues, and I wonder how many are choosing to downgrade their ingredients to stay alive.
The impact may be particularly bad for “nice” restaurants in the high end of the price scale (i.e. with entrees in the twenties). Even people who can still afford to go out to eat semi-regularly seem to be downgrading their restaurant choices. Indeed, many of the new restaurants that are arising (and yes, new restaurants are still opening in this economy) are pricing their dishes in the teens. The question is whether they can survive on that.
All this said, I’ve always thought that foreign/ethnic cuisines (Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Ethiopian) often offer tastier dishes than Californian restaurants at significantly lower prices (of course, we rather not think much as to the quality of the ingredients they use), so hopefully they’ll do better.
But all in all, I think/hope that the restaurants that will survive are those that offer good food and have consistent good reviews.
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London Broil is the name given to top round in California. It’s a very lean, very tough cut of meat. I used to use it to make a tomato-sauce based stew, that cooks just for under an hour, and it was quite good for that. But I’ve always been weary about grilling it because of its toughness.
Still, the times are tough and, like everyone else, I want to save money. And London broil is ridiculously cheap right now – last week it was under $2 lb – so I wanted to cook it. I found this recipe at epicurious.com which got raves. Alas, thinking back, given all the ingredients for the marinade, the final dish is not necessarily cheap, but other than the beef, I had everything else saved for the lemons.
In any case, the meat was VERY yummy, I loved the tangy flavor given by the marinade. I’d use it with london broil again. The key is to marinade the meat OVERNIGHT, any less and it won’t get enough flavor.
Note that I’m writing the quantities needed to make HALF of the quantity that the original recipe makes – the original recipe says to keep half to serve as a sauce, but I found the sauce too tangy to go with either the beef or the couscous I served with it. I’d just skip it. The quantities below should be enough to marinate a 2lbs (or even bigger) chunk of meat. You can use flank, tri-tip or other similar cuts in addition to top round.
Ingredients
- 1 lemon
- 1/2 onion, finely chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
- 1/2 cup soy sauce
- 1/4 cup distilled white vinegar
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil
- 2 bay leaves, crumbled
- 1 1/2 tsp. coriander seeds
- 1/2 tsp. black pepper
Juice the lemon and then chop the rind. Put in a medium size bowl and add the rest of the ingredients. Mix well.
Put the meat your are using in a large, sealable plastic bag and pour in the marinade. Marinade overnight, turning from time to time.
I bought this wine at Grocery Outlet a few weeks back, mostly because it was Argentinian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s not a big enough reason to try a wine, but I’d been wanting to give Grocery Outlet wines a chance for a while. Baaaaad Idea. I’ve drank a lot of bad wine in my life, but this one seemed to be spoiled. It tasted sour and well, spoiled. I don’t know if Grocery Outlet will take it back (I’ll check next time I go), but I will take this as a warning against buying wines at Grocery Outlet.
A factor I didn’t consider when I made my menu plans for the week (I’ll be cooking Colombian and Costan Rican food, and trying to make desserts from the Baleares, Bordeaux and Croatia). Fortunately Ramadan lasts a whole month, so I have time to get in the spirit of the season 🙂
I’ll be cooking a Chinese Muslim dish next week, the only one I could find, and then I’ll look for some typical Ramadan food. I remember that when I was in Morocco (over fifteen years ago), the iftar menu was pretty standard. It had some lentil soup, a hard boiled egg and a very sweet pastry – I don’t remember if anything else. I’ll look it up and try it.
If you know traditional Ramadan food from any other country, please let me know.
You’ve heard it over and over, from both expert cooks and people who have barely stepped into a kitchen: “never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink”. I think few commands have frightened people off the kitchen, or at least off cooking with wine, than this one. While there are many drinkable wines under $5-10, it’s hard to predict whether the one you chose will be one of them, so if you follow this mantra chances are you’ll end up spending much more money on the wine that you’d otherwise want to. And all for nothing, because the truth is, cheap wine makes GREAT cooking wine.
I’ve been cooking with 2-bucks-chuck pretty much since it came out. I won’t drink it unless I have to, but I find it perfectly fine to flavor sauces, braises, stews and marinades. I very seriously doubt that anyone would be able to tell the difference between a dish cooked with a $20 award winning wine and one with chuck – once you heat them up and combine them with other flavors, cheap wine improves magnificently. Indeed, that’s what NY Time food writer Julia Moskin found out, when she decided to test the premise by making identical dishes both with good wine and cheap wine – she couldn’t tell the difference in the finished dishes.
And it’s not only cheap wine that makes great cooking wine – old wine is also good for food. I pretty much never finish a bottle of wine when I open it – so I keep the leftovers in the fridge for when the muse inspires me to cook. In my experience, wine will still be good for at least two weeks after you open the bottle. Just make sure to put the cork back before you put it in the fridge.
Last night the kids were at a sleepover and Mike and I went to see Julie & Julia. I had read great things about the “Julia” part of the movie, and I was vaguely interested in the “Julie” part, as my friend Lola had followed the blog way back then and really enjoyed it. Alas, like everyone else said, that part of the movie was pretty “blah”. Julie looks for a gimmick for getting rich/famous as a writer, lucks into a good one, gets rich/famous as a writer while spouting some nonsense about being saved by Julia or becoming a better person through Julia. A pretty weak dramatic arch, if you ask me, and one that the actual Julia Childs does not seem to have bought into. Indeed, she seemed to think, correctly IMHO, that it was just a stunt. But hey, more power to Julie, right? Too bad she didn’t wait until Julia was at least dead so as to not mock her on her face. But as Julie herself acknowledged in the movie, she is quite the egocentric person.
The Julia part, as everyone said, was wonderful – and yes, I hated not seeing Meryl Streep/Julia, more on the screen. I thought that Mery Streep was great in mimicking Julia’s accent and joie de vive, though I’d like to have seen more complexity to the character – which I’m sure could have been shown if they’d cut the Julie story out of it.
In all it was a sweet movie, nothing if not fluffy, but enjoyable enough. I did not get out of it wanting to cook or eat French food (the way you drool over Mexican food in Tortilla Soup), though that duck at the end seemed like a fun challenge.
My food website now has a new section: Granny’s and Gladys’ Recipe Book. This new section will consist of the typed-up recipes from the notebook that my paternal grandmother and aunt left me when they passed away. I tasted some of these recipes as a child, and some never at all, but I will try to make them all at some point. There aren’t that many. To start, I’ve typed up this recipe for Apple Sauce Cake a la Lacabe that my sister has been asking me for. I guess I’ll have to make it as well 🙂
Last night I made Reeses peanut butter cup ice cream, from the Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book
So here is the recipe. I used an egg beater to whisk everything, easier than a whisk and it gave it the right consistency. I used slightly less than the 3/4 cup of sugar, regular whipping cream, 1% milk and organic salted smooth peanut butter.
- 2 large eggs
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 2 cups whipping cream
- 1 cup milk
- 1/3 cup smooth natural peanut butter
- 8 Reeses peanut butter cups, chopped into largish bites
Whisk the eggs until light and frothy. Add the sugar slowly, whisking constantly to incorporate. Add the whipping cream and milk and whisk until smooth. Pour 1 cup of the mixture into a separate bowl and add the peanut butter to that bowl. Mix well and pour peanut butter mixture into the cream mixture. Whisk in until fully incorporated.
Freeze mixture in your ice cream maker as per the manufacturer’s instructions. Two minutes before the ice cream is due to be done add the peanut butter cup pieces.
Pour into a tupperware or similar container and freeze until hard (it should take about 5-6 hours).
I usually get my olive oil at Trader Joe’s (though I wonder if it’s real olive oil), but I was out of it a couple of weeks ago and I was at Costco and decided to get their house brand: Cost Kirkland Filippo Berio Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Bad call. The olive oil has a very nice olive oil scent, fresh and vibrant. But it has a bitter edge to it, it probably doesn’t matter for cooking, but it’s not too pleasant to eat with bread. I won’t buy it again.
Yesterday and today I made grilled/smoked steaks for dinner, served with a very nice mustard-basil sauce. I got the recipe at epicurious.com, my favorite recipe site, and it was surprisingly good. When I just made it I thought it tasted too much of mustard, so much thought that it’d overwhelm the meat, but it mellowed down when it cooled and the basil took over, not really tasting like basil, but giving a nice fresh tasting to the meat.
Here is the recipe, which I copy because it’s so easy.
Ingredients
- 1/2 tsp. drained capers
- 1 small garlic clove, peeled
- 1/4 tsp. salt
- 1 1/2 Tbsp. fresh basil
- 4 Tbsp. unsalted butter, softened
- 2 tsp. coarse grained mustard
- 1 1/2 Tbsp. Dijon mustard
Directions
Mix all the ingredients in a mini-chopper and chop/grind until it becomes a smooth paste. Put the bowl in the freezer for 5 minutes. Remove and scoop the butter into a clean cutting board, shape in a cylinder shape and cover with plastic wrap. Freeze or refrigerate until solid.
Meanwhile grill your choice of meat, serve a pat of the solid butter on top of the meat.
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