It's been a while, fellow readers. I hope your kitchens have been piping with hot food or you've found some good finds outside your kitchen. My weeks have been like a lemon...the flavorful juice squeezed out leaving only the serious, pithy rind of life. jk, adding drama. :) Leisure time has been put on the back burner and pleasures such as writing about food adventures were nixed, but since we always need to eat and special occasions are laced with the need eat, the "bon appetite" lifestile still went on.
From life's little graces, I finally got time to enjoy the pleasure of writing so it'll be a whole months worth of the best highlight all at once...in 2 parts. Blog buffet! It is titled March Madness in honor of the college basketball craze going on this month.
The food adventures for March Madness include:
Part 1
-authentic Italian eats in Brooklyn New York
-Korean log cabin food, food on the ski slopes
Part 2
-a secret recipe from the Cheesecake Factory
-A shellfish tower
- and mouth watering eats from the Jersey shore
AL DI LA - BROOKLYN NEW YORK
So let's start with a good eat outside our kitchen! Kee and I have been celebrating every monthly anniversary since we first started dating. March was the big 2 years so we went to a restaurant in Park Slope Brooklyn where we also celebrated our one year. We celebrated 2 years a few days early because we were going skiing with our friends that weekend. So this time we went to Al Di La, an authentic Italian restaurant with a twist.
The atmosphere looked like what I feel a poem would look like if it could physically be seen. The objects starting from chandalier, artwork, brick walls, wooden table,s an occasional bright colored, fragile looking object each gave off a little secret as curious eyes peruse over them. The only way to fully appreciate the restaurant is to give it unhurried time to unwrap itself properly. The service was good and the food was interesting to say the least. There were different courses as they eat in Italy; Antipasto, Pirmo and Secundi. We had a dessert at the end and a dessert after the dessert by the kindess of our waiter.
We started off with a savory oxtail and polenta dish for our antipasto. It was our first time trying polenta and we put together words to describe what we were eating. It's a cross between mashed potatoes and grits. It's rich in texture and flavor and the oxtail was extremely tender. Our Primo course was beet ravioli! Yes, beets! It had pureed beet inside and when it was served, it looked nice and simple, but when it's cut into, a burst of red appeared! The insides are slightly sweet and soft from the beet while the outside had a light chewy texture. For the Secundi, we ordered braised rabbit that was also extremely tender and had a slight gamey taste. This was both our first times eating rabbit and I felt guilty eating this because I used to have 2 rabbits; a white one named Dior and a black one named Gucci. I only felt that during the time our secundi was on our table because by the time we had finished, our dessert came out.
Ricotta Fritters! Cheese for dessert?? When it came out, they were round cakes with crispy outsides, lightly dusted with powdered sugar and came with a warm chocolate dip. It was a light ricotta flavor and it was soft and hot on the inside and contrasted nicely to the light crispy outside. We ate it with forks so we could dip it into the ramekin of hot chocolate. We gave our forks a little more push than we needed into the chocolate, trying to get more of that gooey goodness; covering the bottom, welling to the top and if the ramekin was deep enough, we might have ventured to cover the whole thing! The grace to our health was the depth of the ramekin. Kee called the ramekin a "ceramikin" on accident, but it's actually a smart fusing of the word ceramic and ramekin. We have adopted "CERAMIKIN" into our vocabulary.
"Please pass the ceramikin, please."
My husband told the waiter that it was our two year so they brought us a little extra dessert with a candle... in a ceramikin to add a residual laugh :)
Now to the slopes!
Dont' do dope. Hit the slopes!
Good eatin' from the slopes in Elk Mountain Pennsylvania! Our small group went skiing/snowboarding on a day when supposedly the snow was powdery and great for boarding sports, but I wouldnt' know what the difference between the good and bad snow was. It was my first time skiing so after hours of learning how to steer myself on the contraptions strapped to my feet and multiple falls, a rest was welcome. My friends and I were starving! What is a quick, simple meal for the mountains? You got it! The sweet and savory deliciousness sandwiched between two buns....peanut butter and jelly!
PB&J and Friends
Jacob stuffed 2 sandwiches in 1 sandwich bag. Ecofriendly, but rough times for the sandwich.
Foodie Question:
If I finish my sandwich and I'm still hungry, what should I do to get more?
If you're fast enough and finish before the rest, you may be able to yoink some off other people for more extended ski-time fun.
So after the energy gauge needle went from Full to Empty and we were sore and tired from the day, our bodies needed some good comforting and pampering. Bring on the Hot and Hearty food! Before we got to cooking, there was a pot of pippin' hot homemade chili waiting for the group on the stove as we dusted off the snow from our boots and made our way into the warmth of our cabin. (No picture because we were all to busy making "shpppp shppp" sounds and warming up to the hot chili) So once we defrosted, the group got in touch with our Korean heritage and had log cabin food... Korean style. Kumbaya! What does log cabin food the Korean way look like?
10lbs of thickly sliced samgyup sal (pork belly meat), Boodae Jiggae and some fixings!
Mmm...
Well, not this picture since it's not cooked, but as man has to be put through the fire to come out stronger, samgyup sal needs to go into the fire to come out delicious. Since the men volunteered to cook it on the grill we achieved two-fold purpose! They fired it up for the samgyupsal outside while the ladies put together a huge pot of boodae jiggae inside the cabin. Samgyup sal is pretty self explainatory. It's none other than supreme goodness, but boodae jiggae has a little history.
This use to be a dish of poor people in Korea. They put all their leftovers into the pot, boil it and eat it. Meats, vegetables and whatever they had went into the pot and marked as a Korean dish by kimchi. We didn't have a definite recipe but started slicing hot dogs, spam, samgyupsal, onions, green peppers and when it was almost done, we added tofu, ramen noodles and green onions. We added spices and sauces to get the taste. From a previous ski trip, I remembered we added some of the ramen seasoning into it to add more flavor and we did that too. We "shhpp shhpp-ed" until it tasted right and when the guys were done with the samgyupsal on the grill, it was time to eat our hot and hearty, log cabin Korean food!
We ate the boodae jiggae and samgyupside with sangchoo, over-sized keneep (perilla leaves), ssam jang (savory bean paste), vinegared green onions and kimchi until we were stuffed! Koreans aren't at the peak of their elegance when eating things like this, but when your tastebuds know the taste of eating like this....who cares!? These people sure didn't and neither did I.
We were all stuffed, but we all had room for dessert! Jenny and Brian are the Rice Krispies Dynamic Duo and they made their specialty of homemade rice krispy treats. When they were done making it, it was plopped onto parchment paper and the group ate off the whole warm mass of rice krispies..warm! until it was gone!
So how did we feel after? Picture 1 or 2?
Both! We were happy while stuffing our faces with hot and hearty food and when we all stopped eating, we felt a little dismayed because we couldn't move, but we worked it off with some rigorous finger-pointing during Mafia.
The notes section has a limit on pictures per entries, but pictures are important when describing food adventures! So on to Part 2! :)
